In 1808, in the Basque hills east of Bilbao, Marshal Lefebvre disobeyed orders and attacked General Joaquín Blake's Spanish army at Zornoza. He won the field, but chased Blake out of the trap Napoleon was preparing. In 1813 Napoleon's army, retreating from its defeat at Leipzig, found Karl Philipp von Wrede's Austro-Bavarian army across its road at Hanau. On 30 October fifty guns and the Guard cavalry smashed a way through, and on 31 October the French marched on toward the Rhine while a wounded Wrede fought their rearguard.
Zornoza, 1808: a trap meant to stay unsprung
In the autumn of 1808 the French, driven back behind the Ebro by the Spanish uprising, were waiting for Napoleon and his reinforcements. On the northern coast General Joaquín Blake, a Spanish general of Irish descent commanding the Army of Galicia, retook Bilbao on 11 October and pushed east toward Durango, aiming for the high road that linked the French armies on the Ebro with France. He badly underestimated the strength gathering against him.1
Napoleon wanted Blake to stay exactly where he was. His plan was to burst through the gap between the Spanish armies and then wheel outward to surround them, and the farther Blake pushed into Biscay, the more exposed he became. So the marshals were ordered not to attack: Lefebvre, with the IV Corps, was to stand in front of Blake between Durango and Zornoza and hold him there.2
31 October: the old sergeant's battle
Lefebvre had other ideas. A sergeant in the Gardes Françaises before the Revolution, he had risen to marshal and Duke of Danzig, but he had never commanded a large battle on his own. For a week he watched Blake's army sit idle, and then he struck, excusing himself with a claim that his outposts had been attacked. He had about 21,000 men against Blake's 19,000.3
Blake's army stood in three lines in front of the village of Zornoza, today Amorebieta-Etxano, with its only six guns up front with the Vanguard Brigade. Lefebvre attacked with all three of his divisions at once. In Oman's account, Villatte's went against the Spanish right, Sebastiani's against the center and Leval's against the left. According to Oman, a dense fog hid the French until they were almost on the Spanish front line. The first line gave way and the army rallied on the heights of San Martín. Oman notes that Blake had sent his only battery to the rear, so the French cannonade went unanswered. After that bombardment, ten battalions of Sebastiani's division cut through the Spanish center. Blake ordered a retreat beyond Bilbao, and his two intact wings covered it.4
A beaten army in good heart
The fight was short and cheap. Rickard and Oman both give Spanish losses of 300 killed and wounded and about 300 prisoners, against about 200 French. Oman judged that Blake had been surprised and tactically beaten rather than defeated by force of arms. Drawing on the report of Captain Carroll, a British officer who watched the action, he adds that English eyewitnesses vouched for the steadiness and good spirit of the Spanish troops as they fell back.5
The quick retreat left about 8,000 men under General Acevedo cut off in the mountains south of Bilbao, where they had been guarding Blake's flank. On 5 November Blake turned and struck the French near Valmaseda, and Acevedo's men slipped out.6
Why Zornoza mattered
According to Oman, Napoleon heard the news at Bayonne before he rode into Spain on 4 November, and he calls it "one vexatious piece of news". In Oman's reckoning Lefebvre had pushed Blake about forty miles back, out of his most exposed position. The northern half of Napoleon's double envelopment became much harder. Marshal Victor beat Blake at Espinosa de los Monteros on 10 and 11 November, but a large part of the Spanish army got away.7
Rickard's biography of Lefebvre dates the attack to 29 October, but his battle article, Oman and the Fondation Napoléon, which names the battle after nearby Durango, all give 31 October.8
Hanau, 1813: the road home blocked
After his defeat at Leipzig in mid-October 1813, Napoleon fell back west toward the Rhine. Bavaria, long his ally, had changed sides that October by the Treaty of Ried, and Karl Philipp von Wrede, a Bavarian general who had fought for Napoleon in 1812, now led an Austro-Bavarian army toward the Main to cut the French line of retreat. Rickard and napoleon-empire.org put it at about 43,000 men, the Fondation Napoléon at about 45,000.9
Wrede misjudged what was coming. According to Rickard, he believed he faced only a flank column of perhaps 18,000 to 20,000 men. He posted most of his army north of the Kinzig with the river at its back, linked to Hanau by a single bridge at Lamboy, a deployment that Rickard, napoleon-empire.org and Marbot, who led a cavalry regiment at Hanau, all fault. When the fighting began on 30 October, Napoleon had only about 17,000 men at hand.10
Drouot's fifty guns
French infantry cleared the Lamboy forest tree by tree. Around noon, Rickard writes, Wrede heard shouts of "Vive l'empereur" and realized he was facing Napoleon himself, but fought on. Napoleon's artillery commander, General Drouot, found a forest track fit for guns. Two battalions of the Old Guard cleared the woods, and Drouot built up a battery of about fifty guns that silenced the Austro-Bavarian artillery.11
Wrede threw his cavalry at the battery. Napoleon-empire.org puts the charge at 7,000 horsemen and says it broke down under grapeshot. Marbot describes the gunners taking up their muskets and firing point-blank from behind their guns, with Drouot, sword in hand, setting the example. Then Sebastiani's cavalry and the cavalry of the Guard charged, drove off Wrede's horsemen and broke his center, which had to escape with the river behind it. According to napoleon-empire.org, the fighting died down at about six in the evening.12
Virgil under the guns
Marbot's trumpeter, the son of a professor at the college in Toulouse, loved reciting Latin. Under the spreading beeches of the forest, he recited the eclogue of Virgil that begins "Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi" ("Tityrus, lying beneath the cover of a spreading beech"). Marshal Macdonald, passing by, laughed: "There's a little fellow whose memory is not troubled by what is going on around him! This is surely the first time anyone has recited Virgil under enemy cannon fire!"13
An hour later, Marbot writes, a Bavarian ammunition wagon set alight by a French shell blew up beside them. His horse Azolan leapt at a fallen tree, fought free of its branches and carried him out of range. The trumpeter was killed.14
31 October: Napoleon marches past
During the night Wrede pulled back south of the Kinzig. At about 2 a.m. on 31 October French guns opened on Hanau, Wrede gave it up, and Bertrand's IV Corps marched in that morning. While Bertrand and Marmont covered the town and the Lamboy bridge, the rest of the army marched on toward Frankfurt. Once most of the French had gone, Wrede attacked the town and the bridges again. Rickard writes that his men retook Hanau but were thrown back at the bridges, while napoleon-empire.org calls the attempt on the town a failure. Wrede himself was badly wounded, in the lower abdomen according to napoleon-empire.org.15
Napoleon's verdict on his former subordinate was cutting. Napoleon-empire.org has him say that he could make Wrede a count but not a general, and the Fondation Napoléon quotes him in the same vein.16
Counting the cost at Hanau
The figures diverge. Rickard gives Wrede's losses as 9,250 from the first skirmishes on 28 October to 31 October, including 3,400 Austrians and 2,900 Bavarians in the battle itself. Napoleon-empire.org gives almost 5,000 killed and wounded plus almost as many prisoners, and French losses in the battle of 2,000 to 3,000. Both agree that the allies picked up about 10,000 French stragglers between 28 and 31 October.17
Hanau kept the road open. According to napoleon-empire.org, Napoleon crossed the Rhine and entered Mainz on 2 November. Marbot's regiment crossed on 2 and 3 November. But Rickard notes that the army was losing its discipline, and early in 1814 the allies carried the war into France. There, the Fondation Napoléon records, Wrede fought again at La Rothière and Bar-sur-Aube.18
Also on 31 October
In 1914, at the crisis of the First Battle of Ypres, the Germans broke through at Gheluvelt, and about 370 men of the 2nd Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment counter-attacked across open ground and restored the line. The story is told on our 19 October page.19
In 1917, in the late afternoon, the 4th and 12th Light Horse Regiments of the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade charged the Ottoman trenches at Beersheba and rode into the town, saving most of its vital wells. The Gaza to Beersheba line was turned, and Gaza fell within a week. The desert war that led there is followed from Romani on our 3 August page.20
In 1940 the Battle of Britain reached its official end: the British reckoning runs from 10 July to 31 October. Its opening is told on our 10 July page.21
Also on this day
- 1808: Battle of Zornoza. At Zornoza, Marshal Lefebvre's French corps attacked the Spanish army of General Joaquín Blake in one of the first actions of Napoleon's invasion of Spain.
- 1813: Battle of Hanau. Near Hanau in Hesse, Napoleon's army retreating after Leipzig found its road blocked by Wrede's Austro-Bavarian corps in the Sixth Coalition war.
