Napoleon meets his match at Eylau. Image: Library of Congress

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Forget Waterloo: Napoleon’s decline was clearly signaled by his failures at the Battle of Eylau eight years earlier.

Poland, February 8, 1807. In the midst of a blizzard, Napoleon I, emperor of France, stands in the steeple of a church in the little East Prussian village of Preussisch-Eylau, commonly called Eylau, straining to see what is happening as a desperate battle rages about him. Advancing Russian troops are within a few hundred feet of capturing or killing the emperor, and what once seemed a routine battle has suddenly taken on far greater importance. N Just 10 days earlier, French armies had been some 145 miles south, standing on the frozen Vistula River, relishing their capture of Warsaw. They had marched hundreds of miles across Prussia, shattering the military might of a country the French had feared since Frederick the Great ruled there.

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In Warsaw, French diplomacy had confronted Polish nationalism, and Napoleon saw its face take the form of the beautiful countess Marie Walewska. That encounter was the beginning of a torrid love affair, and became a perhaps fateful distraction, as the Age of Napoleon was poised to either wax or wane. For more than a decade, in the face of every obstacle, Napoleon had fought wars and scrounged supplies for his troops, while simultaneously supervising the political and social transformation of his army, which was then serving Revolutionary France, and was now serving an empire.

But Russian armies had begun to move against him from the north, with an eye toward relieving Danzig, their aim to defeat his Grande Armée, even in the dead of winter. His own army tired and hungry, Napoleon faced a grim decision. “The enemy seem to be maneuvering,” Napoleon had written to François-Marie Roullet, Baron de la Bouillerie, one of his bankers. “I am raising my camps to make a countermarch.”

Now, at Eylau (modern Bagrationovsk, 20 miles south of the Russian supply center of Königsberg), a classic battle was unfolding. It would witness the greatest cavalry charge of the era, mammoth flanking movements, and some of the most desperate fighting of Napoleon’s time.

The two-day clash would not be the largest battle of the Napoleonic Wars, but it was one of the bloodiest, a huge engagement fought under the worst imaginable conditions. It was brought about by the emperor glimpsing an opportunity to drive a wedge into the Russo-Prussian alliance that had led to the so-called War of the Fourth Coalition. In doing so, Napoleon sought to keep alive Polish hopes for independence, and no doubt to please his countess mistress as well.

Measured in terms of France’s territorial control, Napoleon’s apogee would not come until 1812 when, for a fleeting moment, his empire extended from Gibraltar to Moscow. Some historians assert, however, that the tipping point came in 1809, when Napoleon made critical mistakes in the first key battle of an Austrian campaign in Aspern-Essling. Others believe his star began falling in 1808, when Napoleon led a French army into Spain but stopped short of decisively destroying his British adversaries.

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