Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield

To the end of his days, the proud veteran used his pen to defend his beloved emperor and the soldiers of the imperial army against all criticism of their strategy and tactics, and to celebrate their chivalry and courage. Bonaparte read one of Marbot’s works in the last year of his life on St Helena. In appreciation, he added to his will a legacy of 100,000 francs for his former officer, writing: ‘I bid Colonel Marbot continue to write in defence of the glories of the French armies, and to the confusion of calumniators and apostates.’ So indeed the colonel did. On his return from exile he became once more a serving soldier, in 1829 taking command of the 8th Chasseurs. He served as aide de camp to the Duke of Orleans in the following year, and at the age of nearly sixty received yet one more wound, as a general during the Medeah expedition in Algiers. A bullet struck him in the left knee. As he was being carried to the rear, he remarked to the Duke with a smile: ‘This is your fault, sir.’ The Duke demanded: ‘How so?’ Marbot answered: ‘Did I not hear you say, before the fighting began, that if any of your staff got wounded, you could bet it would be Marbot?’ He finally retired in 1848, and died in 1854.

Few warriors in history have taken part in so many of the great battles of their age as did Marbot. Even if a stiff deduction is made from his own account for Gallic extravagance, his courage seems as remarkable as his survival. He performed fifty deeds which, in the wars of the twentieth century, would have been deemed worthy of the highest decorations. Far more astonishingly, he lived to tell the tale. His gifts as a warrior might be described as those of the blessed fool, of whom every army needs a complement in order to prevail on the battlefield, and with which Bonaparte’s armies were exceptionally well-endowed. A century later, Marshal Lyautey declared gaiety to be the most important attribute of a soldier. This Marbot possessed in bountiful measure. He was too humble a servant of the emperor to receive much space in the histories of the period, yet his memoirs render him wonderfully accessible to posterity. Without them, he would remain a mere name, a moustache and pelisse among the glittering throng of bold spirits who surrounded the tyrant of France through the years of his wars. As it is, Marbot created one of the most enchanting contemporary portraits of the life of an officer of Bonaparte. If an Anglo-Saxon cannot suppress laughter at the Frenchman’s awesome conceit, nor can most of us withhold admiration from his boundless appetite for glory. He and his kind perceived the wars which ravaged Europe through their lifetimes merely as wondrous adventures.

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