Napoleon by Bike

This is the fifth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia — to spend some time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of President-elect Donald Trump. (This week the Trump Rackets and Extortion Ring shook $15 million in protection money loose from ABC News and sued the Des Moines Register for not kissing Trump’s pinky ring in the polling run-up to the 2024 election.)

On my last day in Vienna, I decided to ride my bicycle around the Napoleonic battlefields of Aspern-Essling and Wagram, which are on the east side of the Danube River but still close to the Vienna suburbs. In the demented age of Trump, how bad can it be to study Napoleon?

From research before leaving my hotel, I got the feeling that not much would be open in Aspern-Essling (at least on the battlefield) but that there was more to see in Wagram, which has a Napoleonic museum and various memorials, such as those in the main square of Aderklaa, a nearby village.

In all, the ride would take about three hours, and I calculated that I could have a picnic in Wagram if I was able to leave early and didn’t linger at the Lion of Aspern (a famous Napoleonic memorial).

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By the time I was heading toward Wagram, I had been to numerous Napoleonic battlefields across Europe, although not because I am obsessive about the Corsican.

In college, during my junior year abroad, I went with my father to Waterloo on a weekend in Belgium. We visited the diorama and walked up the mound, but that had not started me out as a collector of either Napoleonic literature or figurines of the Little Corporal.

After moving to Europe, however, I began reading occasional Napoleon biographies, and when my son Charles was six or seven we (he would say I) picked Napoleon as the theme of his childhood travels.

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With each of my four children, when they were small, I picked out “a theme” for us to explore together around Europe. With our oldest daughter, Helen, the theme was the Roman Empire, and toward that end we tramped to such places as the Forum in Rome, Pompeii, and Carthage.

Our second daughter, Laura, and I worked down the list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. (Alas, most of us cannot recite them all, and neither the Mall of America in Minneapolis nor Mar-a-Lago counts.)

Beginning in Olympia and ending at the Pyramids, we saw six of the seven Wonders, leaving off only the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, in those days lost in the fog of W’s war against Iraq.

Henry, our older son, and I went around World War II battlefields, notably in Belgium (Bastogne) and the Netherlands (Arnhem). At the time, he was devoted to the Band of Brothers TV series, so we ended up, as did E Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, at Hitler’s Eagle Nest (where we discovered the Führer was scared of heights).

When it came time to pick a theme for Charles, eight years younger than Helen, I went with Napoleon, as he says, “because when I was six I watched one airline movie about the emperor.”

He could well be right, but as he drew the Napoleon straw, we spent slivers of his childhood in places such as Borodino (outside Moscow), Austerlitz (near Brno in the Czech Republic), Jena (once in East Germany), and Auerstadt (down the road from Jena), where over picnics in the gloom I could be heard to say: “God is usually on the side of the big battalions…”

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With all of our themes, I never thought I would turn Helen into a classics scholar or Charles into a Napoleonic officer, but I was looking for ways to reduce the sprawl of Europe into subjects that were manageable and easier to comprehend.

For example, classical Greek history can be daunting unless you are on a quest simply to find where the Colossus of Rhodes straddled the Mandraki harbor. (In case you’re wondering, most of the Wonders are long gone, usually dragged off as plunder.)

But even now, when the children are grown, I keep up with their themes—even on my own—much the way I continue to paste stamps into their albums and pump air into their soccer balls.

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By the time I was rolling toward Aspern-Essling, I had seen much of Napoleon’s known world, including many sites from his disastrous Russian campaign (even the Berezina Crossing, which is in Belarus), northern Italy (where he made his bones, in many ways), Leipzig (his Waterloo before Waterloo), and the so-called Hundred Days east of Paris (where he tried to protect his crumbling empire in 1814 from the oncoming allies, led by the Russian czar, Alexander I).

But I had never seen Wagram, because when Charles and I biked from Dresden to Vienna (detouring into “the sunshine to Austerlitz”—it’s phrase that refers to Napoleon’s luck), we ran out of time and energy to spend another day searching for more Napoleonic markers (which in some places can be hard to find). So on this occasion, I was filling in blanks.

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Even though I was relying on GPS to find Aspern-Essling, it wasn’t the easiest ride to get across the Danube. I rode east toward Ernst-Happel Stadion, but then poked around on a sidewalks and through parking lots until I found the dedicated bike paths on the bridges across the river.

The bridge paths were easy to follow but still a labyrinth of ramps and turns, and they dumped me out in an industrial quarter on the far side, where even following GPS I felt lost in a Escher painting.

There are war memorials to the battle of Aspern-Essling, which was fought in spring 1809, but mostly the fields of battle are now part of Vienna’s extended suburbs. I found the Lion and some other markers, but the small museum was only open on Sunday mornings in summer.

About all I could do to orient myself to the fighting was open the compass on my phone and imagine (where there are now rows of townhouses) where the Austrian forces had driven Napoleon back across the Danube. (Think of Aspern as a failed amphibious landing.)

Aspern especially was the biggest defeat for Napoleon in more than ten years (since Acre in 1797). He suffered some 20,000 casualties battering into the Austrian lines. But a month later, Napoleon recrossed the Danube and won a decisive victory at Wagram, which is about five miles northwest of Aspern-Essling.

Both battles were fought in response to the Austrian rising against Napoleonic hegemony in Europe (that which he imposed with the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit), and Europe remained a Napoleonic fief until 1812, when his endless ambition drove him to attack Russia. After sacking Moscow, it was mostly all downhill for Napoleon until he reached the end at Waterloo in 1815. (I am sure Trump’s knowledge of Waterloo is confined to the ABBA song, but you know there’s one in his future.)

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Despite GPS on my handlebars, Austrian road maps in my saddle bags, and extracts from the Napoleonic battlefield atlas in my pockets, I still struggled to ride from Aspern-Essling to Wagram. I ended up on a series of agricultural lanes, some of which were clogged with mud. At one point a marker on one of my maps directed me to ride around the contours of a damp field.

Then I had the problem of riding on roads with speeding cars and trying to cross mainline rail tracks that now cut through the general area of the Wagram battlefields.

In all, a ride of about fifteen kilometers across largely empty farmland took me well over two hours. When I got the town now called Deutsch-Wagram it was not only raining but I confirmed my fear that the museum was only open on summer Sundays.

I could still bike around the surrounding fields but in order to weigh the meaning of Wagram in the context of the Napoleonic Wars, I would be on my own, largely at the mercy of the books in my library.

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I like to think that I am not a Napoleonic disciple and that his career only interests me as a way to understand early 19th century European history. But then when I begin to look through my books about Napoleon, I realize that I am something more than a casual collector.

I have atlases about his battles, books of his letters, diaries of his officers, and biographies of his major opponents. Plus whenever I visit someplace such as Waterloo or Austerlitz, I come away with postcards, more battle maps, and illustrated guides.

The problem with many books about Napoleon is that they dwell on obscure aspects of his life or battles, and often at great length. I have read Tolstoy’s War and Peace (set largely around the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino), and as much as I admire Tolstoy’s skills as a novelist, I confess I can bog down in some of his lengthy wartime descriptions. I sometimes think it is a book more about Tolstoy and less about Napoleon, reminiscent of Churchill’s World War I memoirs (about which a wag remarked: “Winston has written an enormous book all about himself and calls it The World Crisis…”).

I own Georges Lefebvre’s well-regarded two-volume history of the Napoleonic Wars, which many would consider definitive, but I struggle with prose that can be a cascade of names, places, rivers, and crossings. (Leading up to Aspern, he writes: “Meanwhile, Lefebvre, seizing Salzburg, threw Jellachich back toward the Drave and could keep a watch on the Tyrol.”)

I liked a lot of Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon and Wellington, which is a comparative study of the two generals by a best-selling British author, but often his prose can lack felicity, as when he writes: “This dichotomy, of admiring Napoleon as a soldier while despising him for everything else and particularly his moral character, was the central feature of Wellington’s public attitude towards Napoleon.”

Many of my books about Napoleon came from my father, who even had Praeger’s A Military History and Atlas of the Napoleonic Wars compiled from maps drawn at the United States Military Academy at West Point. It’s an oversized coffee table book that somehow survived my parents’ downsizings and came to me at some point.

In the frontispiece there is a Napoleon quote: “I am a fragment of rock thrown into space,” which is a touch less cynical than his well-worn: “Religious wars are basically people killing each other over who has the better imaginary friend.”

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