Russia Against Napoleon (62 page)

By the time the leading allied generals met at the council of war in Melnik on 17 August, there was no sign of any French advance into Bohemia: almost all of them now believed that Napoleon would probably attack Bernadotte and seek to take Berlin. Radetsky and Diebitsch, the two ablest staff officers present, both shared this view. In this case it was impossible for the main army to stand still behind the mountains and leave Bernadotte to his fate. If Napoleon was heading northwards, the allies could safely cross the mountains on a broad front with their main line of advance aiming to move via Leipzig into the enemy’s rear. The council therefore decided to invade Saxony the moment the Russian and Prussian reinforcements arrived. Wittgenstein would advance on the right up the Teplitz highway from Peterswalde via Pirna to Dresden. In the centre, Kleist’s Prussians would march from Brux through Saida to Freiberg. Behind them would come Constantine’s reserves. Meanwhile the main Austrian body would advance along the highway that led from Kommotau via Marienberg to Chemnitz and ultimately to Leipzig. Smaller Austrian forces would use the roads on either side of the highway, with Klenau’s column on the Austrian extreme left.

The allied columns crossed the border into Saxony early in the morning of Saturday, 22 August. Even before they did so, however, intelligence arriving at headquarters was increasingly suggesting that Napoleon had not headed northwards against Bernadotte after all but was on the contrary in eastern Saxony facing Blücher. If true, this suggested that an advance towards Leipzig was pointless and was heading into nothing. Meanwhile Napoleon might destroy Blücher. He might also either march westwards and overwhelm Wittgenstein or use his control over the Elbe crossing at Königstein to strike south-westwards into the allied rear in Bohemia. These worries were not imaginary. Once the allies were deep in the Erzgebirge it would take at least four days to concentrate the whole army on Wittgenstein’s flank in the event that he was attacked by Napoleon. Though the allied commanders could not know this, Napoleon had in fact written to his commander in Dresden, Marshal Saint-Cyr, that he cared nothing if the allies marched into western Saxony or cut his communications with France. What concerned him was that they should not seize the Elbe crossings and above all the huge supply base which he had built up for the autumn campaign in Dresden. Moreover Napoleon was indeed contemplating the possibility of striking via Königstein into the allied rear.
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If allied arrangements had been sufficiently flexible they would have changed their plans before their advance began and shifted its weight eastwards towards Dresden. Last-minute changes to the movements of this vast army with its very cumbersome command structure were extremely difficult, however. Therefore, as Schwarzenberg informed his wife in the evening of 20 August, ‘we want to cross the border on 22 August and then quickly swivel towards the Elbe’. This plan was no problem for the Russians since it did not change the planned line of march of Wittgenstein or the Grand Duke Constantine. Even Kleist’s Prussians did not have too far to march to get to the new area of concentration in the area of Dippoldiswalde and Dresden. For the Austrians, however, it was a completely different matter. They had the furthest to go and they would have to move across dreadful mountain paths which snaked up and down over the steep valleys of one stream after another. Already on 23 August General Wilson had encountered Klenau’s Austrians ‘drenched to the bones; most of them without shoes, many without greatcoats’. Wilson recorded that the morale of Klenau’s men, very many of them fresh recruits, seemed good but it was debatable whether it would remain that way with the rain pelting down, stomachs already empty, the Austrian commissariat wagons trailing well in the rear, and the paths dissolving into mud. It took Klenau’s men sixteen hours to cross the last 32 kilometres cross-country to the Freiberg area. To reach Dresden they still had the even worse path through the Tharandt forest to negotiate.
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The initial allied shift eastwards had far more to do with protecting Wittgenstein and Bohemia than with seizing the opportunity to capture Napoleon’s base at Dresden. By 23 August, however, intelligence revealed that Napoleon was in fact in Silesia, even further away to the east than the allies had realized. On the evening of 23 August Schwarzenberg wrote to his wife that allied headquarters would be at Dippoldiswalde by the next day and that the army would attack Dresden on the afternoon of 25 August if sufficient forces could be concentrated there in time. He then went a long way towards guaranteeing that this would not be the case by giving most of the Austrian army a rest-day on 24 August.
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The thinking behind this move was that there was less urgency than previously feared because Wittgenstein and Bohemia were not in immediate danger. No doubt too the kindly commander-in-chief listened to the howls of his Austrian generals about the miserable condition of their men. Uncertain in his own mind whether it would be possible to take Dresden on 25 August, Schwarzenberg wavered between describing the planned attack as a
coup de main
or simply a reconnaissance in force. Had Schwarzenberg been Blücher, Dresden would have been attacked on 25 August, even if half the Austrian troops had dropped out from exhaustion along the line of march. From this moment on, the Austrians enjoyed the reputation of being the slowest marchers of all the allied armies. George Cathcart, a British officer and the son of the ambassador to Russia, wrote politely of the ‘comparative tardiness of their movements’. Alexandre de Langeron put things more bluntly: ‘The Austrians are always late and it is their incurable slowness which constantly leads to their defeat.’
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The Austrian official history claims that when the moment planned for the attack came in the afternoon of 25 August not only their own troops but also Kleist’s Prussians had not yet arrived. The decision was taken to postpone the attack until the next day. But on 26 August fierce arguments raged among the allied leaders as to whether an assault on Dresden was practicable. Frederick William III was committed to an attack and so, less fervently, was Schwarzenberg if and when sufficient troops had arrived. Alexander was always dubious and by the afternoon of 26 August was opposed to the idea. He drew on the advice of both Moreau and Toll, who thought that any attack would fail.

So too even by 25 August did Dresden’s commander, Saint-Cyr. At nine in the morning of 25 August he reported to Napoleon that allied columns were approaching the city and seemingly planned an assault: ‘This attack seems to me a bit belated, given Your Majesty’s approach.’ He added that since Murat had already shown himself in the front lines and the campfires of Napoleon’s corps must be visible to the allies they could not be under any illusion about the emperor’s imminent arrival. Whether Dresden could have been stormed on 26 August is doubtful. The city’s defences had been restored and improved by Napoleon during the armistice: as he himself had discovered in the previous year at Smolensk, even out-of-date walls and improvised fortifications could greatly slow down an attacking force. Moreover, by 26 August Napoleon’s reinforcements were already flowing into the city.
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Given the speed with which his own troops moved, it is perhaps not surprising that Schwarzenberg was baffled by Napoleon’s feat in marching his three corps the 120 kilometres from Löwenberg in Silesia to the Dresden area in just three days. Though this frustrated allied plans to take Dresden, to some extent it fulfilled the purpose of the Trachenberg plan. By advancing into Napoleon’s rear and threatening his key base at Dresden the Army of Bohemia had stopped him from pursuing and overwhelming Blücher. In retrospect, too, the allies could be thankful that Napoleon had satisfied himself with marching to the rescue of Dresden rather than carrying out his initial and much more daring plan to destroy Schwarzenberg’s army.

When first he heard, on 22 August, that the allied army was concentrating towards Dresden with the likely aim of attacking the city Napoleon began to plan a devastating counter-move. So long as Saint-Cyr could hold out for a few days, Napoleon intended to march with his Guards and the corps of Marmont, Victor and Vandamme across the Elbe at Königstein into the allied rear and either destroy the enemy army before it could concentrate against him or at the least devastate its rear bases. Had Napoleon carried out this plan it is very possible that he could have ended the campaign within a fortnight with a victory on the scale of Austerlitz or Jena. He would have been across the allied line of retreat and able to pin Schwarzenberg’s army within the Erzgebirge. Moreover, the speed and daring of his move would have paralysed and totally disoriented the slow-moving and divided allied leadership. When he arrived at Stolpen on 25 August, however, Napoleon changed his mind because both his trusted aide-de-camp, General Gourgaud, and Marshal Murat reported from Dresden that the city could not hold out against the allies unless reinforced immediately by the emperor and the corps he had brought from Silesia. So Napoleon turned his men towards the Saxon capital and left the move across the Elbe at Königstein to General Vandamme alone.
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Even without Napoleon’s projected master stroke, matters looked grim for the allies by 27 August. They had finally made their attempt to storm Dresden in the late afternoon of 26 August and it had failed. By then Saint-Cyr’s garrison had been reinforced by Napoleon. The city’s defences proved just as hard to crack as Alexander, Moreau and Toll had feared. The allied leaders nevertheless decided to try again the next day, on the grounds that on 26 August less than half their army had participated in the fight. This decision was not in accordance with the Trachenberg plan, as modified by Schwarzenberg and Radetsky. Much more important, it was foolish. With Napoleon’s three corps from Silesia now inside Dresden there was no chance of storming the city. Unless they took Dresden, however, the allies could not remain in front of it for long, since they could not feed themselves off the land in the Erzgebirge and their supply trains were having a terrible time struggling forward down the mountain paths. Even more important, the position they had taken up outside the city made them very vulnerable to a counter-attack by Napoleon.

One key problem was that outside Dresden the allies were strung out along a line of almost 10 kilometres. Safe behind their fortifications, Napoleon’s troops occupied a line half as long. The city’s walls and fortifications allowed the defenders to hold off attacks made by superior allied numbers. Meanwhile Napoleon could concentrate troops to counter-attack and exploit the weaknesses of his over-extended enemy. On the far right Wittgenstein was trying to hold a weak position, 4 kilometres long, with only 15,000 men. His corps was also under fire from French batteries deployed on the other side of the Elbe. Under heavy pressure on 27 August his troops were pushed back towards the allied centre, losing their hold on the Teplitz highway which was their main chance of a safe retreat to Bohemia. When Barclay was ordered to counter-attack to regain the lost ground he refused, arguing that amidst the mud and the pelting rain he would never be able to get his artillery back onto its present high ground once he had sent it forward to support the counter-attack of his infantry. George Cathcart was present at allied headquarters that day. In his opinion Barclay’s fears were fully justified. Even the Austrian official history, often critical of Barclay, states that on this occasion he probably acted wisely.
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At the time, however, there was too much confusion at allied headquarters on the Racknitz Heights for anyone to take up the matter with Barclay. Cathcart recalled that shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon ‘a cannon shot struck Moreau (who at the moment might have been half a horse’s length in advance of the emperor) in the right leg, and going through his horse, shattered his left knee’. Moreau died a week later. Had the ball hit the emperor the consequences would have been dramatic. The Grand Duke Constantine could never have replaced his brother as the linchpin of the coalition. He totally lacked Alexander’s charisma or his diplomatic skills, and shared neither his brother’s commitment to defeating Napoleon nor his ability to generate loyalty among senior Russian generals, who in some cases had doubts about whether the war in Germany really served Russian interests. Given Constantine’s extreme shifts of mood and his own frequent outbursts against continuing the war, Europe might have witnessed dramatic changes in Russian policy reminiscent of those in the time of his father and grandfather.
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Meanwhile disaster had befallen the allied left wing, all of whose troops were Austrian. One problem here was that the allied left was cut off from the rest of the army by the steep Plauen gully. It was impossible to reinforce troops beyond the gully from the allied centre in any emergency. General Mesko, who commanded the Austrian troops on the far left, was supposed to be supported by Klenau’s 21,000 men but the latter were so delayed on the road through the Tharandt forest that they never reached the battlefield. To an extent Schwarzenberg was the victim of the fact that his army had grown to a size which was impossible to control with the technology available at the time. By the time news reached the commander-in-chief from the army’s wings it was far too late to react.

Nevertheless Schwarzenberg managed a difficult problem incompetently. It made no sense to mass so much of the allied cavalry in the centre, where much of it was unusable, and to leave Mesko’s infantry with so little protection. Moreover, for all the difficulties of getting down the road through the Tharandt forest, one suspects that a Blücher, with the smell of impending battle in his nose, would have done more to galvanize his subordinates into overcoming obstacles. He certainly would not have followed Schwarzenberg’s example in initially allowing Klenau’s men a rest-day on 26 August as they passed through the forest. The next day, with Klenau’s troops still just emerging from the forest and hours from the battlefield, Mesko’s detachment was destroyed. On 27 August the French took 15,000 Austrian prisoners. Not only were Mesko’s unfortunate men set on by overwhelming numbers of French cavalry and infantry, their muskets were unusable in the rain. Even so, more of them would have escaped if they had had better leadership from their general and their staff officers.
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