The Battle Tome 3 - Album

"Do you know what victories hinge on, Berthier ? On nothing : on a delays on a gust of wind, on the whims of a river ... On nothing." May 1809 : Napoléon's Grande Armée is about to cross the Danube on the enormous floating bridge erected in a single night by the French military engineers. On the other side of the river, Archduke Charles and the Austrian armies wait for them, fully determined to get revenge for the humiliation suffered at Austerlitz.
To hold until nightfall and then retreat to Lobau island. Such is the only solution devised by Napoleon to spare his army, bled dry after two days of fighting, the humiliation of total defeat. Under the cover of night, the generals will have exactly six hours, no more and no less, to get thousands of men across the river. There are those defeats which, because men survived them, resemble victories.
The Battle of Essling was the first mass slaughter of modern warfare : a thirty-hour battle with no winner or loser, that left over forty thousand bodies strewn across the wheat fields. From the sappers to the Voltigeurs, from the hussars to the army general staff, from the walls of Vienna to the banks of the rising river and the villages in flames : The Battle is much more than a historical novel or graphic novel.
It's a monumental epic.