The Second Longest Day

AUSTERLITZ by Claude Manceron. 318 pages. Norton. $5.95.

In August 1805, eight months after he had unceremoniously crowned himself Emperor of the French, Napoleon was up to his coronet in complications. His invasion of England, announced 18 months earlier, had bogged down on the beaches near Boulogne. His fleet floundered useless, bottled up by the British at Ferrol. His treasury lay empty, and all across Europe his prestige was ebbing. On Aug. 13, Talleyrand brought word that Austria and Russia were hastening to mount a massive attack on France.

Napoleon made his decision and went to work. In six blazing, uninterrupted hours that left his secretary's hand a stiffened lump, he dictated to the last detail the plan of a campaign that took 150,000 men from the Channel to the Danube in what many historians consider the greatest military march of modern times. Though this book is burdened by a poor English translation, French Novelist-Historian Claude Manceron succeeds in providing a meticulously documented account of the 1805 campaign. And his hour-by-hour reconstruction of Austerlitz, Napoleon's most brilliant military success, presents a compelling, page-by-page study as well of the man who was an incomparable military genius.

Wrung Necks. Napoleon was a maniac for detail, and one of the first of the Organization Men. He demanded and got a running record of every regiment, including a summary of its encounters, its numerical strength, the roll of its injured and sick and the number of its annual recruitment. He commanded an elaborate network of spies who informed him minutely of the strength and movements of his adversaries. He centralized authority absolutely in himself, and his precise, ingeniously correlated orders of march gained a maneuverability for his army that was far in excess of that enjoyed by any other contemporary fighting force. For the Austerlitz campaign, he invented and applied a set of rules involving foraging, billeting, and shifting from order of march to order of battle that exemplified his methods almost perfectly.

One of his methods was "to wring the neck of each of his adversaries separately." Before the Russians could join their allies in Austria, Napoleon rushed across Germany to meet the Austrians alone at Ulm and attacked from the rear. Ulm fell, and Austria surrendered 60,000 soldiers, the main body of its army, to Napoleon. At this point, the Russians lumbered up. Napoleon chased them down the Danube, captured Vienna and carted off 100,000 muskets, 2,000 artillery pieces and a virtually inexhaustible supply of ammunition, while the Russians and a few thousand leftover Austrians escaped northward to Olmuetz to wait for reinforcements.

Shattered Wings. Like an angry eagle whose prey has eluded his first pounce, Napoleon instantly set out to lure the enemy back into striking range. Literally trailing a broken right wing, he drew up his army near Austerlitz. Thanks to the deceptive disposition of his forces, the Allies imagined that they outnumbered him two to one. They hurled the full force of their armies against the vulnerable French right. Napoleon smashed back violently at the unguarded Allied flank, shattered its center, broke through, circled both halves for the kill. He made his only major tactical mistake when he diverted troops to fight the bitterly resisting Allied left and allowed most of the Allied right to escape. The results of the campaign were all that Napoleon could have wanted. He had shaped the Grand Army into an incomparable machine for conquest. He had established his imperial prestige unquestionably before the world. He had crippled the ambitions of the fatuous Czar Alexander. He had reduced the haughty Holy Roman Emperor Francis II to the role of a satrap of France. And he had unknowingly avenged himself on his old English enemy, William Pitt, who literally died after he got the news of Austerlitz.

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