Michel Ney: Crawling Over the Dnieper Ice, Then Ordering His Own Execution

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Michel Ney was born in 1769 in Saarlouis, a French enclave in a German-speaking region, the bilingual son of a master cooper. After stints as a notary's clerk and in the mines and forges, he enlisted as a common cavalry soldier in 1787, when officers had to prove four quarterings of nobility. The Revolution opened promotion to merit, and Ney rose by leading from the front, surviving capture by the Austrians and wounds to the thigh and wrist. In 1804 Napoleon named him one of the 18 original marshals of the empire, and he became Duke of Elchingen. In Portugal, facing Wellington's scorched earth behind the Lines of Torres Vedras, he refused further orders from André Masséna and was sent home.

During the 1812 retreat from Russia he commanded the rearguard. Cut off at Krasnoi, he refused surrender, slipped away in fog and crawled across the thin ice of the Dnieper, leaving the wounded behind; Napoleon called him the bravest of the brave. In 1814 he pressed Napoleon to abdicate, then in 1815 promised Louis XVIII he would bring Napoleon back in an iron cage and instead defected with his 6,000 men. After Waterloo he was tried for treason by the Chamber of Peers and shot near the Luxembourg Gardens on December 7, 1815.

• Of roughly 3,000 men in the Dnieper escape, estimates of survivors range from 800 to 2,000.
• At Fontainebleau he told Napoleon the army would obey its generals.
• At Waterloo he sent cavalry against British squares without support, failed to spike captured guns and had five horses shot from under him.
• He rejected his lawyer's argument that Prussia's annexation of Saarlouis made him a Prussian citizen.
• Decades later, a North Carolina schoolteacher named Peter Stuart Ney claimed on his deathbed to be the marshal.