Eylau

French Cavalry
Men & Horses
Myth & Glory
The Charge
Russian Army
The Weather
Bibliography
Photographs

The Myth and The Glory

With the above being said, such armchair prose as:

At any other season the marshy country around Eylau would have made deployment difficult, but in February 1807 the bitter East Prussian winter was at its height. Lakes, streams and swamps were all covered by thick ice, and everything lay under three feet of snow. The battlefield was a vast white landscape, on which massed cavalry might charge full out.' [Johnson pp53]

are pure nonsense, and are typical of writers who have probably never walked through a meter of snow, never mind riding 'full out' over a battlefield covered with the stuff! Other examples are all too easy to find:

'General Grouchy's dragoons charged (sic) first, to sweep the ground, and clear it of enemy cavalry', [Thiers pp429]

and,

'In marvelous fettle (sic) 80 squadrons of splendidly accoutred horsemen (sic) swept forward'. [Chandler pp543-544]

There are many more like these which I am sure the reader has been inspired by in imagining the panoply of battle; the truth however is that what we see in films, and what the war gamer can do with his uncomplaining miniature armies is very different to what takes place during a real battle. Even the most diligent and painstaking military historian normally succumbs to flowery prose, especially when writing some work that will appeal to the general reader as well as the academic: in many cases there are just causes for some elaboration, but if we wish to find the truth, then we must cut away the flowers and get down to the roots.

If the military historian can manipulate our way of thinking then how much more so the military artist? Nineteenth century battle painters, although producing some uplifting scenes of military glory did, by and large apply too much artistic license to many of their works. The splendid craftsmanship of the French military painter, Edouard Detaille will be forever associated with the Napoleonic legend, but even his meticulous brushwork covers the truth with a veneer of glorious improbabilities. The fact that he used the same composition on at least two paintings, one of the French Guard Cavalry at Eylau, and the other that of French Carabiniers during the Russian campaign of 1812, should make us wary of his historical data. In the painting of the French Grenadiers a Cheval at Eylau, Detaille shows the stalwart Grenadiers receiving Russian cannon fire in firm ranks wearing only their tunics, with their cloaks still rolled on their portmanteaus. They stand in a few centimeters of snow mounted on sweating horses while their commander, Colonel Lepic tells his troopers to hold their heads up saying that they are being assailed by cannonballs not turds. All of this is of course very heroic stuff (or is it, when the cream of the French army appear to be afraid of being killed?), but we must not forget that it aims to show the glory of French arms, and was painted not long after France had been defeated in the Franco-Prussian war and therefore needed some kind of uplifting experience. The other problem with this painting comes from the interpretation that we give to just what Lepic actually said, and indeed if it was at all possible for his men to hear him anyway with a howling wind blowing and with his back to most of them! Also it may have been that the Grenadiers were not ducking their heads to avoid Russian cannonballs, but merely lowering them from the cutting effect of the wind and snow stinging their eyeballs!

‘The Battle of Eylau’ L. Flameng

Yet another painter who puts his skills to good use in the form of artistic propaganda is L.Flameng, whom even David Chandler considers to give, 'A romantic reconstruction of Murat's famous cavalry charge' [Chandler pp246-247]. In this epic battle scene Flameng depicts Murat at the head of the French Cuirassiers, dressed in Russian Boyar type garb, wielding a riding whip and mounted on a rearing horse. We see tails, manes and horsetail plumes flapping in the wind, whereas, in fact, this whole hairy mass would have been, if not frozen stiff, at least incapable of this type of movement. Again we see the French cavalry without the protection of their winter cloaks, while their Russian adversaries, many of whom look like old age pensioners, stand in huddled amazement in their greatcoats awaiting their fate. As with Detaille we are presented with an image of French cavalry greatness; mounted on what appear to be prime racehorses, they are seen charging "full out" in a few centimeters of snow with no apparent effects from the appalling conditions under which they have spent the night, but rather as if they have just come from a full-dress parade.

‘The Charge of the Grenadiers a Cheval, Eylau 1807’. F Schommer

The work of another military artist, F. Schommer also shows the French Guard Grenadiers a Cheval charging (sic) into battle, once again they are dressed for a ride in the park, and once again they dash across a sprinkling of snow which seems to have collected more on their bearskin bonnets than on the ground. It really is a shame that we have let ourselves be hoodwinked by this type of sham battlefield reporting. The facts may not have been quite what the salons of Paris desired to put on their walls, but nevertheless the use of rhetoric, and flowing brush strokes should not sanitize the dirty, bloody truth of war.