On the morning of the 6th Napoleon tried again.

His tactics were for Massena to hold while Davout and

Oudinot made a frontal attack; the Army of Italy would be held back for the moment of breakthrough.
But Charles upset the Emperor's plans by attacking first, aiming for a double envelopment of the French:
with the anvil of his operations at Wagram, he sent his right wing to seize Aspern and cut Napoleon off
from the Danube in that sector while his left threw the French right back against the river. Two Austrian
corps accordingly attacked Massena, hoping to roll him up and seize the Danube bridges in the rear. By I
I a.m. things seemed to be going the Austrians' way: on their right they were forcing the French back to
Aspern while in the centre they were forcing the Saxons to give ground. Fearing that Massena's corps
was on the point of buckling under the onslaught, and therefore that a gap might open up enabling
Charles to use the 'centre position' against him, Napoleon ordered Massena to disengage and shift to
the left. This involved marching Massena south across the front of the enemy lines, screened by cavalry.
To take the pressure off, the Emperor ordered the cavalry reserve to charge and Davout to press his
attack with even greater vigour. MacDonald and the cavalry performed brilliantly but took heavy losses.
To some extent these were offset by the accuracy of the massed 420 French artillery on Lobau which,
finding a perfect target in Charles's would-be enveloping forces, mowed them down in droves. Next
Napoleon filled the gap vacated by Massena with massed artillery; one hundred cannon opened up on
the Austrians at close range. For a while the battle settled down to slugging, bloody attrition, with
Oudinot's men directing artillery fire on the Austrian centre at Wagram but not yet engaging it. By
midday Massena succeeded in reaching his new position and was poised for counterattack; the plan was
that he would switch flanks at the decisive moment to aid Davout. Meanwhile a titanic struggle between
Davout's corps and the Austrian left was finally resolved in favour of the French, but not before Davout's
first line was broken. Shortly after midday Napoleon saw through his spyglass that Davout's firing line
was passing the church tower at Markgrafneusiedl, the prearranged signal that Davout had turned the
Austrian left and was about to curve towards Wagram from the rear. It was time to move up the Army of
Italy under MacDonald and Eugene. Following a heavy, sixty-gun bombardment, the Emperor launched
Oudinot, Massena and the Army of Italy under MacDonald against Wagram and the enemy centre.
MacDonald deployed 30,ooo men in a gigantic hollow square, six ranks deep, with other infantry in
column on either flank and 6,ooo cavalry in the rear. Austrian cannonballs devastated the square but it
still came on. MacDonald's force finally dug in at a sandpit and under this cover reinforcements were
brought up. By now Napoleon had spotted a weakness on the Austrian left centre caused by having to
reinforce their left against Davout. He ordered Davout to strike at this hinge while Massena attacked the
enemy right. But the Austrians continued to fight like dervishes and MacDonald's attack again seemed to
be petering out when Napoleon finally broke the deadlock by committing all his reserves except two
regiments of the Old Guard. This was a crucial decision. Finally the Austrians broke and by 2 p.m. the
French were advancing confidently on both sectors. Learning that his own reinforcements would not
arrive until nightfall, shortly after 2.30 Charles was forced to order a general retreat to Bohemia;
Napoleon's forces were too exhausted to pursue him. The Austrians had been beaten but by no means
routed and withdrew in good order, leaving no guns or standards behind. This was no Austerlitz or Jena.
Having fought six hours non-stop, the French were at the limits of endurance and could not be prodded
to follow the enemy; in any case Napoleon still feared that Archduke John might arrive, in which case a
third day's fighting was likely. Wagram was Napoleon's last great victory on the battlefield but it had 421
been a close-run thing and, had Archduke John appeared at the moment the Emperor committed his last
reserves, a signal defeat would have followed. As it was, a greatly improved Austrian army had fought a
below-par French army almost to a standstill, to the point where Napoleon lacked cavalry for pursuit
operations. The Grande Armee had fired 7 I ,ooo rounds in a murderous, bludgeoning battle that
seemed to usher in a new era of slaughterous warfare and anticipated the bloodletting of the American
Civil War. French casualties were 32,ooo, Austrian 35,ooo; Napoleon, following his usual practice, toured
the battlefield to inspect the piles of dead and wounded. After further skirmishing at Zynam on Io-I I
July, the Austrians suddenly threw in the towel and asked for an armistice, which was arranged on the I
2th; Francis I at first refused to honour it but reluctantly ratified it on J7 July. A dispute between Francis I
and Archduke Charles led the latter to resign and retire into private life. A tense three months of
negotiations and bargaining ensued, with the likelihood of renewed hostilities ever-present. There were
two main reasons for this: one was Napoleon's demand for the abdication of Francis I; the other was
that Austria stalled, hoping that the military intervention of the British could save them from harsh
peace terms. The British had made some attempt to assist their ally. When Austria invaded Bavaria in
April, Britain sent a subsidy of £25o,ooo and a further £337,000 a little later; by the time of Wagram,
subsidies to Austria amounted to £I,I 8s,ooo, even as London also committed substantial sums to the
struggle in Spain. In April Admiral Gambier led a Royal Navy attack on the French Rochefort squadron.
His deputy, Admiral Thomas Cochrane used fireships to burn three French ships of the line, made three
more unfit for service and destroyed two frigates. The rest of the French squadron lay aground, waiting
to be finished off, but Gambier refused to take his battleships into the roads, to the fury of Cochrane and
other observers, including Captain Frederick Marryat. As Napoleon justly remarked: 'If Cochrane had
been supported, he would have taken every one of our ships.' But the great British enterprise of I 809
was an attack on Walcheren Island on 30 July, supposedly the opening of a second front to aid Austria.
But in attacking Walcheren in the Scheidt the British were primarily consulting their own interests and
pursuing their old obsession about Belgium: thoughts of the possible benefit to Austria came a long way
down the list. The operation was feasible only because Napoleon had sent most of his troops eastwards,
so that it was a case of Austria helping England, not vice versa. In any event, the landing on Walcheren
quickly 422 turned to debacle, though it was a protracted one, since the British did not leave the island
until 23 December, hoping the Austrians would resume hostilities. Bad weather, inadequate planning
and incompetent leadership vitiated the expedition; the British took so long to take Flushing that the
French were able to rush reinforcements to the ultimate target, Antwerp. Disease ('Walcheren fever')
finished off the enterprise: 4,000 troops died and I9,ooo were hospitalized. The British incursion at
Walcheren enabled the dauntless Bernadotte to make a temporary comeback. Put in command of the
troops at Antwerp, waiting for the British thrust that never came, Bernadotte issued an order of the day
boasting that his 'I s,ooo men' could hold the city against all comers. When this order was brought to
him, Napoleon was enraged: he pointed out that there were 6o,ooo troops at Walcheren, not I s,ooo
and that, whatever the numbers, it was simple professional incompetence for Bernadotte to reveal
them to the enemy. He sent an order relieving the contumacious Gascon of command: 'I intend no
longer to leave the command in the hands of the Prince of Ponte Corvo, who now as before is in league
with the Paris intriguers, and who is in every respect a man in whom I can no longer place confidence ...
This is the first occasion on which a general has been known to betray his position by an excess of
vanity.' Meanwhile the Austrians dragged out the peace negotiations, hoping for a great British success
or for intervention from the Czar, now widely known no longer to see eye to eye with Napoleon; the
Russians, however, warned that they were not yet ready for a rupture with France. In Poland, after an
initial victory by Archduke Ferdinand, the brilliance of Prince Poniatowski soon undid all the Austrian
gains. The one possible bright spot for Austria was the Tyrol, where heavy fighting had been in progress
since April: there had been two major campaigns and twice Napoleon's Bavarian allies had been thrown
out of the region by the Tyrolese 'liberators', most recently on I3 August. Napoleon decided that he
could not return to Paris until he had a definite peace treaty with Austria, so in the summer of I 809 he
ruled the Empire from Schonbrunn in the Austrian countryside. Here he resumed his affair with Marie
Walewska, but it was no longer the grand passion of two years earlier, as the tone of his letter of
invitation to her partly indicates: 'Marie: I have read your letter with the pleasure your memory always
inspires in me ... Yes, come to Vienna. I would like to give you further proof of the tender friendship I
feel for you.' The imperial valet Constant's diaries show Napoleon and Marie spending every afternoon
together, but Napoleon's attentions cannot have been fully engaged for, 423 when he went to Vienna in
August to consult the physician Professor Lanefranque about his indifferent health (he wrote to
Josephine on 26 August that he had not felt well in years), he conducted a brief liaison with the
nineteen-year-old Viennese Eva Kraus, who was said to have borne him a son. What is certain is that in
September his regular mistress Marie Walewska announced that she was pregnant. Once it was
demonstrated that the Emperor could indeed sire children, it was evident to all well-informed observers
that Josephine's days were numbered.