Russia Against Napoleon (51 page)

Count Langeron arrived at Bautzen with Barclay de Tolly’s detachment just four days before the battle. After the fall of Thorn they had marched at speed to the rescue of the main army. At the battle of Bautzen Langeron’s corps, under Barclay’s overall command, stood on the far right flank of the allied line, against which Napoleon’s decisive stroke – as it turned out – was to be directed, under the command of Marshal Ney. In his memoirs Langeron commented that the ground offered many advantages to its defenders but 25,000 men were needed to hold it; he had only 8,000. Eugen of Württemberg’s corps was on the allied left flank. Like Langeron, he recognized that the decision to stand at Bautzen had been taken above all for political reasons. In his view, ‘given how much we were outnumbered and given the very extended position we were holding we could not expect victory in the battle but just to inflict losses on the enemy and to conduct an orderly retreat protected by our numerous cavalry’.
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Fighting the leading general of the day at a two-to-one disadvantage, the danger was that they would be routed. Even another Friedland, let alone an Austerlitz, would probably have destroyed this allied coalition, as had happened to so many before it. A victory equal to Friedland was actually within Napoleon’s grasp on 21 May and would probably have occurred but for the mistakes of Marshal Ney.

Napoleon’s plan was simple and potentially devastating. On 20 May his limited attacks and feints would pin the allied main body along the whole defensive line which ran from the foothills of the Bohemian mountains on their left to the Kreckwitz heights on their right. These attacks would continue on 21 May. Given French numbers, it was easy to make these attacks very convincing and even to force the allies to commit part of their reserve to stop them. But the crucial stroke would be made on 21 May by Ney and Lauriston’s corps on Barclay’s position on the far right of the allied position near Gleina. In overwhelmingly superior numbers they would drive through Barclay and into the allied rear, cutting across the only roads which would allow the allies to make an orderly retreat eastwards to Reichenbach and Görlitz, and threatening to push the enemy in disorderly rout southwards over the Austrian frontier. This plan was fully viable and was indeed helped by Alexander’s obsession that the main threat would come on his left, with Napoleon attempting to lever the allies away from the Bohemian frontier and thereby wreck the chances of coordinating operations with the Austrians. In contrast, Wittgenstein correctly understood that the main danger would come in the north. By now Alexander had lost confidence in Wittgenstein, however, and was almost acting himself as de facto commander-in-chief. Moreover, Wittgenstein did not help matters by telling the emperor that Barclay commanded 15,000 men whereas in reality he had barely half that many.
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On 20 May the battle went according to Napoleon’s plan. Fierce fighting raged down the whole allied front as far north as the Kreckwitz heights and Alexander committed part of his reserves to drive back what he saw as the French threat on his left. Meanwhile Barclay’s men were bothered by nothing more than a few skirmishers. On the next morning battle was renewed from the Bohemian foothills to Kreckwitz, but Ney and Lauriston also entered the fray.

The battle on the far right began at about nine in the morning. Barclay quickly realized that there was no hope of stopping the overwhelming numbers with which he was faced. All he could hope to do was fight a delaying action on the heights near Gleina and protect the key lines of retreat as long as possible. Langeron commented that in particular his 28th and 32nd Jaeger regiments showed both skill and heroism that morning, holding off the French until the last minute and allowing the Russian artillery to escape after inflicting heavy casualties. Barclay himself went forward among his jaegers, inspiring them by his quiet courage in extreme danger. For all the Russians’ coolness and the temporary respite won by a counter-attack by Kleist’s Prussians, the situation became increasingly desperate as Ney’s pressure built up and part of Lauriston’s corps threatened to envelop Barclay’s right flank. When the village of Preititz finally fell to the French at three in the afternoon it would have been easy for Lauriston to move forward to cut the vital allied line of retreat down the road to Weissenburg.

Instead, providentially, Ney allowed himself to become over-excited by the ferocious struggle occurring to his right on the Kreckwitz heights, where Blücher was holding out against an attack by Soult, whose force included Bertrand’s corps and Napoleon’s Guards. Instead of pushing south-east towards the allied line of retreat, Ney not only directed his own corps south-westwards against Blücher but also ordered Lauriston to support him. Faced by these overwhelming numbers, old Blücher, still haranguing his men to fight like the Spartans at Thermopylae, was persuaded, very unwillingly and just in time, to retreat down the road which Barclay’s men were still keeping open. The Russian Guards and heavy cavalry were ordered up to cover the retreat.

The allied right and centre moved down the road to Reichenbach and Weissenburg, the left down the parallel road through Loebau to Hochkirch. This retreat was essentially a flank march across the front of much more numerous enemy forces after two days of exhausting battle. Langeron comments that ‘it was nevertheless achieved in the greatest order and without suffering the slightest loss, just like all the other retreats that this admirable Russian army made during the war, thanks to its perfect discipline, its obedience and to the innate courage of the Russian officers and soldiers’. No doubt Langeron was a biased witness but Baron von Odeleben, a Saxon officer on Napoleon’s staff, watched the Russian rearguard on 21 May and recorded that ‘the Russians retired in the greatest order’ and ‘made a retreat, which may be considered as a
chef d’œuvre
of tactics…although the lines of the allies had been, as it were, thrown on the centre, the French could not succeed, either in cutting off a part of their army, or capturing their artillery’.
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For Napoleon, the outcome of Bautzen was a great disappointment. Instead of a decisive victory he had merely pushed the allies back along their line of retreat after losing 25,000 men as against 10,850 Russian and Prussian casualties. His pursuit of the retreating allies brought him no more joy. The day after Bautzen, on 22 May, the French caught up with the Russian rearguard at Reichenbach. Its retreat was blocked by a traffic jam in the streets of the town but this did not fluster its commanders, Miloradovich and Eugen of Württemberg. Once again Odeleben was watching:

The dispositions made for the defence of the height in question confer the highest honour on the commander of the Russian rearguard. The road to Reichenbach, which comes out opposite the hill, turns where it leaves the town. The Russian general took advantage of the position until the last moment, and his troops did not withdraw until the French came up in such strong numbers that resistance became totally impossible. Directly after, he was seen defending another height between Reichenbach and Markersdorf, where he again arrested the march of the French.
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This was Eugen’s ‘retreat in echelon’ in action and the snail-like progress it imposed on the French infuriated Napoleon and inspired him to such impatient rage that he took over the command of the advance guard himself. That evening the Russian rearguard took up yet another defensive position behind the village of Markersdorf. When Napoleon pressed on through the village the first shot of the Russian artillery mortally wounded his Marshal of the Court and closest friend, Géraud Duroc. Four days later at Hainau the Prussian cavalry ambushed and routed an incautious French advance guard under General Maison. As usual, these exploits of the allied rearguards bought their comrades the time to make an orderly retreat, but in the last ten days of the spring 1813 campaign they actually achieved much more than this. What Napoleon saw of the allies was a far superior enemy cavalry and imperturbable Russian rearguards like those whom he had pursued all the way to Moscow in the previous year without achieving anything. He would have been less than human had he not shuddered at renewing the same game with the very inferior cavalry he possessed in May 1813. What the allied rearguard hid totally from him were the deep dissensions and potential confusion affecting allied headquarters at this time.

The dissension above all stemmed from the fact that the allies were facing very difficult strategic dilemmas. If Austrian intervention was indeed imminent the priority should probably be to hug the Silesian border with Bohemia and prepare to link up with the invading Habsburg forces. If Austrian help was delayed or failed altogether, however, such a move could be fatal. The Prusso-Russian army could easily find itself outflanked from the east and trapped against a neutral border by Napoleon. At a minimum, attempting to remain near the Silesian–Bohemian border would make it difficult to feed the army for any length of time and would risk its communications back to Poland from where its supplies and reinforcements were coming.

This was anathema to Barclay de Tolly, who replaced Wittgenstein as commander-in-chief on 29 May. Months of campaigning, added to Wittgenstein’s inept administration, had reduced the Russian army to a degree of confusion with corps, divisions and even regiments disordered and mutilated by detachments and special assignments. Wittgenstein did not even know where all his units were, let alone their numbers. By late May the men were also beginning to go hungry. Barclay’s solution to these problems was to retreat across the Oder into Poland in order to reorganize his army. He promised that this reorganization would be completed within six weeks. By retreating to their own supply bases the Russians’ problem of feeding the army and restoring its structure could quickly be solved. In addition, scores of thousands of reinforcements were now arriving in the theatre of operations. These included Fabian Osten-Sacken’s formidable divisions, packed with more veterans than any other corps apart from the Guards; Dmitrii Neverovsky’s excellent 27th division; Peter Pahlen’s cavalry; and tens of thousands of reserves formed in Russia over the winter of 1812–13. Thousands of men were about to return from hospital and needed a breathing space to be fitted back into their regiments.

If Barclay’s solution made good sense in narrowly Russian military terms, however, it was political dynamite. For the Prussians it would have meant abandoning Silesia and allowing Napoleon to detach a number of corps to reconquer Berlin and Brandenburg. It would probably also have doomed Austrian intervention, certainly in the short run and perhaps for ever. On 31 May, after the news of Bautzen had reached Vienna, the Hanoverian envoy wrote that

the fears of the emperor [i.e. Francis II] of a French invasion grow from day to day. Perhaps they are increased by anxiety lest the Russian emperor abandon the cause. People go as far as to fear that if the allies are pushed back to the Vistula, in a few months Bonaparte will be reinforced by the class of 1814 and will just leave an observation corps of 100,000 opposite the allies and will fall on Austria with the rest of his forces. To avoid this misfortune people are saying that Austria must move at top speed to get peace negotiations underway.

For all Metternich’s fine words about Austrian policy not being affected by military events, Stadion was terrified by the impact on Austrian behaviour of the allied army retreating into Poland and he was entirely correct to be so.
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Initially Alexander deferred to the Prussians and to the need to hug the Bohemian border and keep in close touch with the Austrians. The army was ordered to swing south, off the line of retreat to Poland, and to take up position near Schweidnitz and the old fortified position at Bunzelwitz where Frederick II had defied the Austrians in the Seven Years War. On the Prussians’ advice Alexander believed that, if necessary, the allies could fight Napoleon there on favourable ground. On arrival, however, it quickly became clear that the local authorities had done nothing to execute Frederick William’s orders to rebuild the old defences and that the only favourable ground in the neighbourhood could not be held by a force of 100,000 men. The Silesian Landwehr, which was supposed to be present in force to reinforce the army, was nowhere to be found. In addition, difficulties in feeding the troops soon became acute.
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The basic reason for this was, as already noted, that Upper Silesia depended even in peacetime for food supplies from Poland and could not suddenly accommodate the entire allied army, concentrated as it had to be with the enemy in the offing. Although Kutuzov, back in April, had begged Stein to create food magazines in eastern Saxony nothing had been done: this was just one part of Stein’s overall failure efficiently to mobilize Saxon resources while the allies occupied the kingdom. Barclay partly blamed Wittgenstein, pointedly noting in a letter to him that ‘when first taking over the supreme command of the armies and looking into the question of victualling, it became clear to me that no preparatory measures had been taken to secure food. While the troops were in the Duchy of Warsaw and Saxony earlier they were fed exclusively by requisitioning in the area where they were deployed or through which they were marching, and the requisitioning lasted only so long as they were there. Almost no reserve supplies were created anywhere in the rear for the army.’ Inevitably too, the intendant-general, Georg Kankrin, came in for criticism as the army began to go hungry. On 4 June he responded plaintively to Barclay by stating that the Prussians were providing almost nothing and on Prussian territory he could not requisition food or ‘exert any authority and no one asked me about the possibility of feeding the troops when the route to Schweidnitz was chosen’.
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With the army going hungry, and the Austrian timetable for intervention visibly receding, a Russo-Prussian conference on 2 June backed a retreat towards the river Oder. Petr Volkonsky had already ordered the army’s treasury to be escorted back to Kalicz and for preparations to be made to destroy the bridges over the Oder once the army had passed. Meanwhile the Prussian leaders were in uproar as their campaign to liberate their country reached its nadir.