The Battle of Eylau: Murat Leads the Great Charge, 1807 (NAP0021)

The battle of Eylau, 8 February 1807: Murat’s great charge

In the snowstorm, at the centre, a man in a green and gold pelisse under a white-plumed fur cap: Joachim Murat, and what he is holding in his right hand is not a sabre but a riding crop. Around him, dragoons in brass helmets with black horsehair crests, blades already up, horses sinking into the snow. This is the moment when the battle of Eylau stops being lost.

The worst day

Eylau was fought in a blizzard that reduced visibility to nothing. Augereau’s corps, sent forward blind, lost direction and emerged in front of the Russian batteries; it was destroyed in minutes. The French centre opened, the Russians came on, and for a few minutes Napoleon had no formed troops in front of him, with the enemy a few hundred metres from the cemetery he was using as a command post.

Eighty squadrons

The answer was to throw in every horseman available: some eighty squadrons, a mass that the sources put at around eleven thousand men. The charge went through the Russian lines, reformed on the far side, and came back through them a second time. It did not win the battle — Eylau ended as an appalling draw, with enormous casualties on both sides — but it stopped it becoming Napoleon’s first defeat in a pitched battle.

The riding crop

The detail is documented rather than invented: Murat habitually charged holding a crop, and that is how his own cavalrymen described him. He designed his uniforms himself, fur and embroidery included, in open defiance of every regulation — to the point that contemporary illustrators used him as a subject precisely because he was recognisable at a distance. It was vanity, and it was also a command system: in a snowstorm, a leader who can be seen is a leader who gets followed.

What they were wearing

The dragoons around him have the brass helmet with its crest, the green coat, and the long straight sword of line cavalry, made for the point rather than the edge. It is equipment designed for Germany and Poland, not for hard frost. At Eylau the French cavalry fought in the uniforms it had campaigned in that autumn, which is part of why the winter cost more than the battle did.