Marshal Ney.

 

It was said of Napoleon's Grande Armee, that every soldier carried a Field Marshals baton in is knapsack.

Marshal Michel Ney was the son of a cooper from the Saar, who had married one of Marie Antoinette's chambermaids. Many of Napoleon's marshals were of working-class origin and had risen through the ranks. Ney was to gain a reputation for being insanely brave. Napoleon said of Ney that he "was good for a command of ten thousand men, but beyond that he was out of his depth."

Napoleon felt that Ney had betrayed him at Fontainebleau in April 1814. He told Gourgaud that "Ney got no more than he deserved. I regret him because he was inestimable on a field of battle, but was too hot-headed and too stupid to succeed in anything but a fight."

The Prussians and Bourbons wanted to execute Napoleon but he always seems to have been treated leniently, having been exiled first to Elba and then to St. Helena by the British and the Duke of Wellington. The Duke seems to have regarded Napoleon as a military genius but also thought him a Corsican upstart. Napoleon called Wellington a Sepoy General because he'd served in India. In his will, Napoleon left a bequest of 100,000 francs to Cantillon, Wellington's would-be assassin, who he said, "had as much right to kill that oligarch as the latter had to send me to die on the rock of St. Helena."