The Battle of Eylau — Who "Won"?

It is no exaggeration to state that without the work of Col. John R. Elting, there would be no Zucker Napoleonic wargames. In particular, his work, The West Point Atlas of Napoleonic Wars, co-authored with Brigadier General Vincent J. Esposito and published in 1964—a one-of-a-kind resource—was the inspiration for Napoleon’s Last Battles, Napoleon at Bay, and more or less every other Napoleonic wargame that followed. The Atlas itself was based closely upon the Atlas to Accompany Napoleon as a General, which was prepared by the Department of Military Art and Engineering for the United States Military Academy for its course in Military History. This was in August of 1942, just as U.S. Marines were landing on Guadalcanal.

I ran afoul of Col. Elting in the pre-publication review of my book, The Habit of Victory. This book was supposed to come out from Greenhill back in the 1990s. When I first heard that he would be reviewing my work, I welcomed the opportunity to consult with a historian of his stature. But things started going downhill fast when I got the list of almost 200 points in my book that Elting didn't agree with.

It all came down to the outcome of the Battle of Eylau in February 1807—who won? The battle is usually rendered as a French squeaker, by virtue of the fact that the French held the battlefield (and that alone). The losses were practically equal (there was no pursuit). The Ruskies got away to fight another day (the Heilsberg-Friedland campaign in June, 1807).

Elting, unfortunately, insisted that Eylau was a true French Victory, and downplayed the destruction of Augereau’s VII Corps to remove support for any counter-argument. (The corps was disbanded after the battle.)

I cited Col. Marcellin Marbot's assertion that the officers of the 14th Line at Eylau suffered a total of 36 casualties out of 39 men present. Elting challenged this eyewitness account on the basis of Marbot's supposed unreliability. His bad rap came from David G. Chandler, author of the seminal Campaigns of Napoleon, who doesn't say Marbot is a liar, merely that “Marbot's tale certainly lost nothing in the telling.” Or he could have simply said, “I don't believe him.” That would be, the word of one very fine historian at his writing desk versus an eyewitness account. I continue the story in Special Study Nr. 2, which contains some of the chapters from the unpublished work.

The 14th Line at Eylau
The memoirs of Lieutenant Marbot—among the others cited above—provide the mud, howling winds, numbing cold, and pounding drums of 1807 from one man’s point of view. In a blizzard of snow and metal on the 8th of February, 1807, Marbot rode with an order to the 14th Regiment of the Line, on a hillock outside of Eylau. At the climax of the campaign—the apogee of the French storm across Europe—Marbot was wounded and watched as the 14th was destroyed in front of his eyes.

The 14e Regiment at Eylau, 7 February 1807, L. Rousselot

 

David Chandler, in the authoritative Campaigns of Napoleon, concludes that "a proportion of the regiment managed to escape—perhaps as many as half—and Marbot’s vivid story has certainly lost nothing in the telling.” For a typical regiment, losses of 50% in one day were more than sufficient to render it “destroyed,” at least temporarily, until stragglers could be collected and officers replaced. Bourdeau, in les campagnes modernes, also says that the 14th Line was "destroyed."

Marbot states that thirty-six officers of the 14th Line were buried in a mass grave near the hillock. Martinien’s Officiers Tues et Blesses, based on official records, confirms this officer-casualty figure for the 14th Line at Eylau as 39 officers wounded or killed. That is a loss of over 90% officer casualties for a regiment of two battalions!

Overall, the whole VII Corps, of which the 14th Line was a part, suffered 57% lost at Eylau. The Corps was so badly mauled that it had to be disbanded, with its remnants distributed to other formations. This was the first time such a thing had occurred in the Grande Armée. When they were ordered transferred on 4 March, 1807 to the other Corps, the 14th Line had only four companies, the 44th Line six, and the other regiments eight or ten companies.

Andolenko, in Aigles de Napoléon contre Drapeaux du Tsar, reports the actual loss of the 14th Line’s two battalions—not 50% as Chandler conjectures, but as much as 73%. Andolenko, it should be noted, does not doubt Marbot's account of his mission to the 14th Line, merely his "very fantastic" explanation of what happened to the regiment’s eagle after his loss of consciousness.