Russia Against Napoleon (64 page)

The unwelcome reinforcement was General Count Aleksandr Ostermann-Tolstoy, who arrived from headquarters on 26 August with instructions to take over command of all the forces on the allied right near Königstein. There might perhaps be some excuse for appointing a senior general to fulfil this role. Eugen was only 25 and had never commanded an independent detachment. Ostermann-Tolstoy was the wrong man for the job, however. It seems that Alexander was simply trying to rid himself of a nuisance who was infesting his headquarters and constantly waylaying the emperor with pleas to be given something to do. When on 25 August Alexander told Ostermann to take overall command opposite Königstein he had no idea that this was soon to become a vital post. Nevertheless Alexander’s assignment of Ostermann was yet another example of how sensitivity to the feelings of senior generals was allowed to undermine the army’s structure of command.

Even at the best of times Ostermann lacked the temperament or the tactical skill to command an independent detachment. Unfortunately too, August 1813 was far from the best of times, for it was no secret that Ostermann-Tolstoy had returned from sick leave in spring 1813 in an extremely excitable and even unbalanced frame of mind. In the three days that followed his arrival at Eugen’s headquarters he was to be an enormous nuisance. The immediate source of Ostermann’s hysteria was his fear that Alexander’s precious Guards might come to grief while under his command.
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What made this obsession particularly dangerous was the orders Ostermann received when the army began its retreat in the evening of 27 August. These orders allowed him to abandon the Teplitz highway and retreat over the Erzgebirge if he believed that attempting to march down the highway would be too dangerous. Inevitably the very nervous Ostermann did believe this and ordered the entire force to retreat off the highway and into the mountains. Had this order been carried out disaster must have followed. His men would have been added to the traffic jam on the Dippoldiswalde road. Vandamme would have been free to march unopposed into the Teplitz valley. What saved the allied cause was Eugen’s flat refusal to obey Ostermann’s orders. Eugen had a very clear understanding of the need to stop Vandamme from getting into the valley and blocking the allied army’s escape routes from the Erzgebirge. He was backed by Ermolov, who had an excellent map of the area and had studied the local terrain and grasped its implications for military operations. The decisive voice was Eugen’s, however. As a royal prince and the emperor’s first cousin he was not easily overruled. When Eugen offered to take full responsibility for all the consequences, Ostermann caved in and plans were made to retreat down the Teplitz highway on 28 August.
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This was a difficult and dangerous undertaking. Fortunately for the allies, Vandamme had done nothing to block the road on 27 August. This enabled the Russians to get much of their baggage away safely back to Bohemia. Nevertheless, most of his force was positioned south of the allied position at Zehista. He could still occupy the highway ahead of them on 28 August. To reach semi-safety at Peterswalde, just over the Austrian border, the allies had to carry out an 18-kilometre flank march under the noses of an enemy who had double their numbers. The risk of being attacked while on the march was great. The highway itself was much better than the roads over the Erzgebirge but it was far from perfect. The allies would have to pull their guns and their ammunition carts up and down 15-degree gradients in the pouring rain and on a stony road covered in fallen pine-needles and leaves, which at times were as slippery as ice. The biggest danger of all would come at the narrow defiles near Giesshübel and Hennersdorf, which could be blocked by relatively small enemy forces, but the whole march would be full of peril.
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Eugen decided that the allies’ best chance was for his Second Corps and Helfreich’s division to make a diversionary attack towards Krieschwitz and the Kohlberg heights, in other words in the direction of Königstein. He hoped that this would draw Vandamme’s attention and his reserves northwards and allow the Guards to retreat safely through the Giesshübel and Hennersdorf defiles. The Guards would leave rearguards at both these danger-spots to cover the retreat of Eugen’s men and, if necessary, to extract them from the clutches of the pursuing French. The plan went better than anyone had a right to expect. Eugen himself led the attack on Krieschwitz, while Ermolov attacked the Kohlberg heights with a force that included some of Eugen’s regiments of the line and the Guards Jaegers. The Russians attacked with great determination. The Kohlberg heights, for example, changed hands three times before finally being stormed by the Guards Jaegers. Helfreich’s 14th Division first lost and then recaptured Cotta. The French threw in reserves in the north but they did nothing to reinforce the small detachments they had sent to ambush the Russians at the Giesshübel and Hennersdorf defiles. The Preobrazhenskys broke through without too much difficulty at Giesshübel and the Semenovskys drove Vandamme’s men off the road at Hennersdorf.

Disengaging Second Corps and Helfreich’s men from the battle in the north and getting them down the highway was bound to be very difficult, but in the main the Russians succeeded even here, though at quite heavy cost. The Estland Regiment, part of Helfreich’s division, lost 6 officers and 260 men, in other words one-third of its entire strength, in the battles on the Kohlberg and at the Giesshübel defile. Helfreich got his men back through Giesshübel safely but it took a counter-attack led by Eugen himself to disentangle one of Prince Shakhovskoy’s brigades from the pursuing French. Four of Eugen’s infantry regiments, commanded by Major-General Pyshnitsky, had been heavily engaged at Krieschwitz at the northern end of Eugen’s line and were in fact cut off on the highway but they succeeded in taking to a side lane, evaded the French, and rejoined Second Corps on the evening of 29 August, in time for the second day of the battle of Kulm.
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By the evening of 28 August the whole of Eugen and Ermolov’s force, with the exception of Pyshnitsky’s regiments, had reached Peterswalde. This was an enormous village strung out for 3 or more kilometres along the main road. Eugen’s men held the village and formed the army’s rearguard while the Guards marched back into the Teplitz valley and took up a holding position at Nollendorf, on which Eugen’s men could retreat in safety the next day. This plan was almost wrecked early in the morning of 29 August. Orders from Ostermann-Tolstoy seem to have persuaded Prince Shakhovskoy’s rearguard to hang on in front of Peterswalde much longer than Eugen intended. When they finally did begin to retreat through the village at dawn on 29 August they were caught by French units attacking not just along the highway but also infiltrating into Peterswalde down side lanes. Amidst the dense early morning mist a panic ensued in the village streets among some of Shakhovskoy’s regiments. Fortunately, enough Russian infantrymen remained steady to put up a fight in Peterswalde and delay the French pursuit. When the numerous but disorganized French units did begin to advance out of Peterswalde towards the Teplitz valley they were charged by Eugen’s cavalry, headed by Leopold of Saxe-Coburg’s cuirassiers. This bought Eugen sufficient time to restore order, reorganize a rearguard, and set off on a steady retreat to Nollendorf and the cover provided by the Guards.
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At Nollendorf Eugen found not just two regiments of Guards but also four regiments of Shakhovskoy’s division which had got out of Peterswalde by side roads and made their own way back to allied lines. In his memoirs Eugen wrote that the Guards Jaegers skirmished very skilfully and held up the French pursuit long enough for him to take up position, reorganize his corps and send the two Guards regiments and most of his own units back to Ermolov. Eugen then stood at Nollendorf for roughly ninety minutes with two of Shakhovskoy’s regiments and the Tatar Lancers as a rearguard. He himself then retreated past the small town of Kulm which gave its name to the two-day battle that followed. By midday Eugen and his rearguard had reached Ermolov’s position at the village of Priesten, 2 kilometres beyond Kulm. Here he found Ostermann-Tolstoy, Ermolov and the entire force deployed for a major battle against Vandamme.
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Ostermann-Tolstoy had not initially intended to make a stand. Late in the evening of 28 August he had written warning Francis II to leave Teplitz since the enemy was heading in that direction in very superior numbers and Ostermann was unable to stop him. The Austrian monarch decamped but before doing so he warned Frederick William, who had just arrived in the town, about Ostermann’s message. The Prussian king immediately understood the potentially catastrophic consequences if Vandamme was allowed to take control of the crucial passes out of the Erzgebirge near Teplitz, towards which both his own forces and the Russians were heading. Even Alexander himself was at risk, since he was still stuck in the mountains somewhere on the road from Altenberg. The king immediately sent first his aide-de-camp, Colonel von Natzmer, and then his chief military adviser, General von dem Knesebeck, to warn Ostermann that he must block the French advance on Teplitz at all costs. With their own emperor’s safety at stake, there could be no question of refusing Frederick William’s plea to make a stand. Ostermann and Ermolov therefore chose the next possible defensive position at Priesten, roughly 7 kilometres from Teplitz. The Guards were already deploying in this position by eight o’clock. Roughly two hours later Frederick William arrived for a long discussion with Ostermann and Ermolov. By then the sun was out and the Russian troops were enjoying their first clear, warm day for a week.

The Russian position was anchored in three villages: Straden in the north, Priesten in the centre, and Karwitz in the south. Had these been Saxon villages, with their stone farmhouses and churches, their massive barns and their stout boundary walls, the three villages would have been of great assistance to their defenders. In Bohemia at that time, however, almost all buildings were of wood with thatch or shingle roofs. Far from offering shelter to defenders the buildings burned quickly and could easily become death traps. The Eggenmühle, a sawmill behind the Russian left, and a nearby chapel – the so-called Leather Chapel – were the only buildings of even marginal use to the defenders. Even the sawmill burned down in the course of the battle, however, killing the wounded who had taken shelter there.

As to the ground on which Ostermann had more or less been forced to fight, it too was not of great use. Its main advantage was that the Russian left flank was firmly anchored in the steep foothills of the Erzgebirge and could not easily be turned. On the Russian right, the meadow stretching southwards from Priesten to Karwitz was bordered to the east by a stream, which helped the Russian cavalry keep the French at bay. But all the serious fighting on 29 August was confined to the centre and north of the Russian line, which stretched from Priesten to Straden. This was open ground, dotted with bushes, shrubbery, and the ditches which were the normal boundary-markers between the villagers’ small gardens. The Teplitz highway, which ran just south of Priesten, was slightly raised above the surrounding land and offered some cover from French artillery to the east for men in or just behind the village.
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On the far left of the allied line, Straden was held by the Guards Jaegers and the Murom Regiment. In the centre Priesten was occupied by the skirmishers of the Reval regiment and the 4th Jaegers, with the rest of both regiments just behind the village in support. Eugen expected these men to delay a French attack, not to defeat it. They were ordered to fall back to the right and left of the village. French infantry advancing out of Priesten would face the fire of two of Eugen’s batteries deployed a few hundred metres behind the village. Just behind the batteries were Shakhovskoy’s infantry. To his left were Helfreich’s battalions. The former were low on ammunition, the latter had almost none left. To a great extent they would be forced to rely on their bayonets.

On Helfreich’s left were the three Guards regiments, the Semenovskys and Izmailovskys in the first line, with the Preobrazhenskys behind and the two Guards artillery batteries deployed just in front of the columns of infantry. Initially the only cavalry on the Russian centre and left were the Guards Hussars, which Ermolov placed behind his infantry. When the battle began the Russians had only parts of four regular cavalry and one Cossack regiment to hold their right flank between Priesten and Karwitz, but this was not to matter since the French cavalry made little serious effort to challenge them and Vandamme concentrated all his infantry on Straden and Priesten with the aim of breaking through by the quickest route to Teplitz. Astride the highway were Lieutenant-Colonel Bistrom’s twelve guns of the First Guards Horse Artillery Battery. When the battle began the Russians had roughly 14,700 men to hand.

Vandamme underestimated his enemy. He was an arrogant man and he was also in a hurry. The prospect of a marshal’s baton had been dangled in front of him if his advance into Bohemia succeeded. On the previous evening he had reported to Marshal Berthier that ‘the enemy has fought in vain against our brave troops: he has been defeated on all occasions and is in a state of complete rout’. The moment his advance guard, the brigade of Prince Reuss, was ready Vandamme ordered it to attack the Russian left at Straden. The Guards Jaegers and the Murom Regiment resisted stoutly and when the Semenovskys came up in support Reuss’s men were forced to withdraw. The attack was swiftly renewed, however, when three regiments of Mouton-Duvernet’s division arrived on the scene and advanced towards the space between Straden and Priesten. Helfreich’s battalions moved up to meet them, supported by the Tobolsk and Chernigov regiments from Shakhovskoy’s division. Still further pressure built up after two o’clock when four regiments of General Philippon’s division arrived on the battlefield. One headed for Straden and the other three attacked Priesten.

Straden, by now in flames, was abandoned by the Russians, who fell back on the sawmill (Eggenmühle) and the ‘Leather Chapel’. Around these two points a ferocious hand-to-hand battle developed. Ermolov sent in two battalions of the Preobrazhenskys to support the Semenovskys, who were fighting there alongside Helfreich’s and Shakhovskoy’s men. Meanwhile Philippon’s regiments burst into Priesten but were met by murderous canister fire when they tried to break out of the village. When Philippon’s men retreated Eugen brought forward two of his batteries to the left of Priesten and directed their fire into the flank and the rear of the French troops who were fighting near the chapel and the sawmill. This forced a further French assault on the village in order to silence the batteries.