Russia Against Napoleon (66 page)

By two o’clock in the afternoon the battle was over. Vandamme himself was captured by the Cossacks and delivered to the allied monarchs. The Russian officer who rescued him from these Cossacks recalls that, in the mistaken belief that he was a general, Vandamme handed over his sword to him. The gesture was accompanied by a rather theatrical speech: ‘I surrender to you my sword which has served me for many years to the glory of my country.’ By the time the speech was made for the third time, when Vandamme and his sword were finally handed over to Alexander, it had lost some of its sprightliness. The monarchs treated him politely but the German civilian population was less generous, since he was notorious throughout Germany for his cruelty and extortion. Everywhere he showed himself he was greeted with jeers, insults and sometimes stones: shouts of ‘tiger’, ‘crocodile’ and ‘poisonous snake’ were interspersed with good wishes for his trip to Siberia. In fact when he got to Moscow Vandamme was well treated by the local nobility until an indignant Alexander reminded the city’s governor-general that Vandamme’s harsh and avaricious behaviour had made him detestable even to his own troops. The emperor directed that Vandamme be removed to Viatka. This was not quite Siberia but it was the nearest thing to it in European Russia.
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The allies also claimed 82 guns and more than 8,000 prisoners, including Vandamme’s chief of staff. At least as many Frenchmen were killed and wounded, and this came on top of the heavy casualties of the previous days. Vandamme’s First Corps essentially ceased to exist. Even so, in terms of sheer numbers the allies had lost more men in the Dresden campaign as a whole than Napoleon. Not only could they afford to do so, however, but their biggest losses – Mesko’s raw recruits – could quickly be replaced because the Austrian mobilization of manpower was finally cranking into top gear. Nor in any case were numbers the key point. Victory at Kulm made a huge difference to allied morale and unity. The great tensions between the allies created by defeat at Dresden were very much reduced, not least because of the fact that Kulm was in the fullest sense an allied victory. If the Russians were the heroes on 29 August, Colloredo’s Austrians and Kleist’s Prussians had made the biggest contribution to victory on the following day.

An officer in Alexander’s entourage recalled that as the emperor rode across the battlefield of Kulm after Vandamme’s surrender ‘joy shone on his face, for this was the first total defeat of the enemy in which he had participated personally’. All his life he had dreamed of military glory. Until now his dreams had been mocked. At Austerlitz his army had been routed and he himself humiliated. In 1812 his closest advisers had conspired to remove him from the army as a nuisance, and the emperor was far too intelligent and sensitive not to have seen through their arguments. All his enormous efforts thus far in 1813 had led to defeat at Lutzen, Bautzen and Dresden. Now at last there was a spectacular victory and one which was owed above all to his Guards, who were the apple of his eye.

With his cup already overflowing, just after Vandamme had been dispatched to Teplitz the emperor received news of Blücher’s victory at the river Katzbach. Even his normally restrained entourage burst into resounding cheers. Riding back to Teplitz, Alexander overtook carts carrying the Russian wounded. ‘The emperor rode up to them, thanked them, asked them how he could help them, and called them his comrades in arms.’ To do him justice, if he had never quite shared his men’s hunger or their bivouacs, he had frequently risked his life on the battlefield and he had carried mental burdens of which few of them could conceive. To his dying day Alexander talked frequently of the two days of battle near Kulm. In time he was to witness other victories and triumphs, ‘but the battle of Kulm remained always his favourite memory’.
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Rewards poured down on the heads of generals and even soldiers, with the partial exception of the brave men of Eugen’s and Helfreich’s divisions, whose enormous services and sacrifices were cast into the shade by the attention given to the Guards. Barclay de Tolly was awarded the Grand Cross of St George, the soldier’s ultimate accolade, granted to only thirteen military leaders in the whole history of the Russian Empire.
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Barclay richly deserved this award for everything he had done for the army as both war minister and commander-in-chief. Never did he deserve it less than in August 1813, however, when his performance was often mediocre. In this respect Barclay was rather typical of the allied leadership during the Dresden campaign.

Undoubtedly the allies had been extremely lucky. There can have been few victories in history won by such a chaotic and inefficient command structure. Not merely could the campaign have ended in disaster, in all logic it ought to have done so once the retreat from Dresden began. The allies owed much to luck, though also to the courage and endurance of their troops, especially of the Russians on the first day of the battle of Kulm. Some of the allied generals had performed well. Kleist had shown real courage in advancing into Vandamme’s rear. Ermolov displayed inspiring leadership on the first day at Kulm, and Colloredo did well on the second. Above all, Eugen of Württemberg stands out as the allied general who contributed most to making victory possible.

But Napoleon and his generals had also made a big contribution. In Vandamme’s case this had less to do with his performance at Kulm than in the three days before the battle, when he had allowed the Russians to hold his far larger corps at bay and to sneak back to Bohemia under his nose. Saint-Cyr was also to blame for losing touch with Kleist’s corps and thereby allowing it to intervene in the battle of Kulm. Above all, however, the disaster was Napoleon’s fault. He had explicitly ordered Vandamme to advance into Bohemia and equally explicitly had ordered the Young Guard to remain on the Teplitz highway right back at Pirna. These two commands were the key reasons for Vandamme’s destruction. More important than the loss of a single corps was the fact that in the three days after the battle of Dresden Napoleon had it within his power to destroy the main allied army and end the war. Not merely did he fail to grasp this opportunity but he made a big contribution to turning possible total victory into a very serious defeat.

As usual, Napoleon remained calm in the face of defeat. Kulm was not the only blow. At the same time news came in of MacDonald’s rout at the river Katzbach on 26 August and of the defeat of Marshal Oudinot’s advance on Berlin at Gross Beeren by Bernadotte’s Army of the North on 23 August.

Bernadotte’s army was made up of three ‘national’ contingents: Swedes, Russians and Prussians. Of these the Swedes were the smallest and the Prussians the largest. In the middle were Winzengerode’s Russian Army Corps of 32,000 men and 120 guns. Histories of the Army of the North’s 1813 campaign are always dominated by the Prussian perspective. Not only were the Prussians the largest contingent but it was also they who played much the biggest role in the two battles which defeated Napoleon’s attempts to seize Berlin: at Gross Beeren on 23 August and at Dennewitz on 6 September. The commander of Winzengerode’s infantry was Count Mikhail Vorontsov, an outstanding general who distinguished himself on many occasions in 1812–14. The only time in which he and his troops had no chance to show their quality was, however, during the autumn 1813 campaign. By contrast, the role of the Prussian forces in the battles to defend their capital understandably became part of Prusso-German mythology.

So too did the ferocious conflicts between Bernadotte and his Prussian subordinates. The senior Prussian officer in Bernadotte’s army was Friedrich Wilhelm von Bülow.

Bülow was an easier subordinate to deal with than Yorck, but that was not saying much. He was a clever, honest and well-educated man and a very competent general: he was also blunt, outspoken, self-confident and possessed of a violent temper. Bülow had little time for Frenchmen and none at all for the voluble Gascon renegade who had somehow clambered next to the Swedish throne and who, in Bülow’s view, seemed certain to sell out the Swedes, the allies and anyone else who got in the way of his ambition. It did not help relations that after the rout at Jena-Auerstadt in 1806 Bülow’s detachment had in fact surrendered to Bernadotte’s corps. According to one neutral historian, the Prussian general never forgot this humiliation.
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Bülow and Bernadotte had different views on how best to fight the war. Left to his own devices Bernadotte would have staged a fighting retreat towards his bases on the Baltic coast in the event of an advance by Napoleon, which he was convinced would soon materialize. He was cautious, nervous and very much in awe of Napoleon’s genius. Bülow, far more confident and aggressive, was not just determined to defend Berlin but wanted to attack the French forces threatening the city and keep them as far from the capital as possible. As often happened in the allied armies in 1812–14 differences of opinion on strategy were quickly interpreted in political terms and seen as betrayal of the common cause. The events in Hamburg in the spring had confirmed Prussian suspicions that Bernadotte was not committed to the liberation of Germany and might even be constrained by his own dreams of replacing Napoleon on the throne of France. The commander-in-chief’s caution in the autumn campaign was soon interpreted in this light.
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Some Russians shared this dim view of Bernadotte. On 3 September Alexander’s representative at Blücher’s headquarters wrote to Petr Volkonsky to protest at Bernadotte’s inactivity. As always, such letters to Volkonsky were really for the attention of Alexander: Volkonsky was merely a filter. Baron Tuyll wrote that ‘the crown prince of Sweden has not taken one step forward in nine days, that is to say since 23 August, though according to the overall plan of operations this was the moment to undertake a vigorous offensive’.
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The emperor’s chief representative at Bernadotte’s headquarters was Charles-André Pozzo di Borgo. Alexander’s instructions to Pozzo were to make sure that Bernadotte used his army to serve the common cause and not purely Swedish interests, let alone any hopes Bernadotte might have about his future role in French politics. So long as the latter were simply Bernadotte’s happy daydreams they could be indulged, as must also be Sweden’s legitimate claim to Norway after the war. But Pozzo was warned to be very much on his guard against Bernadotte and to ally himself with Sir Charles Stewart, the British representative at the crown prince’s headquarters. Alexander told Pozzo that in this instance Russian and British interests were identical: they were to ensure that Bernadotte used all the troops entrusted to him in the common cause and did not either paralyse them or misuse them for purely Swedish and secondary operations. Pozzo was the perfect man for this commission. By 1812 Alexander had gathered into his entourage a considerable gang of what one might describe as dyed-in-the-wool foreign anti-Bonapartists. The Baron vom Stein was the most famous of these men and Winzengerode was also a charter-member of the group. The anti-Bonapartist credentials of Pozzo di Borgo were soundest of all: of Corsican descent, he had been an enemy of Napoleon in French and Corsican politics since 1793. Pozzo was just the right bloodhound to set on that veteran of French revolutionary politics, the former republican, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte. Not surprisingly, both Sir Charles Stewart and Baron vom Stein thought highly of Pozzo.
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The Russian troops in Bernadotte’s army seem on the contrary to have liked the crown prince and the feeling was mutual. With fine tact Bernadotte was much inclined to tell the Prussians and Swedes that they should model themselves on their splendid Russian comrades-in-arms. His headquarters were always guarded by Russian troops, whom he treated indulgently, making sure they were well fed and got their vodka. He tried hard to ensure that all his soldiers were quartered whenever possible in houses, making them bivouac only when strictly necessary. The Russian soldiers appreciated his attentiveness and rather took to Bernadotte’s Gascon flamboyance and eccentricity. Bernadotte was also polite and popular in the circle of his Russian senior officers. Vladimir Löwenstern wrote in his memoirs that Bernadotte conducted a model campaign in the autumn of 1813 despite the difficulties of his position in front of Berlin. As to Aleksandr Chernyshev, who commanded the Russian ‘flying detachments’, and Mikhail Vorontsov, they seem to have reserved their bile for Winzengerode, whom they correctly saw as a third-rate general, much inferior to themselves.
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Winzengerode himself reported to Alexander that Bernadotte’s headquarters’ staff were slow-moving. Like virtually all observers, he complained that the crown prince ‘acts with great caution’ after the battle of Gross Beeren and had failed to exploit the allied victory. On the whole, however, Winzengerode seems to have enjoyed good relations with Bernadotte. Like his commander-in-chief, Winzengerode was not at all anxious to advance boldly into Napoleon’s lair. In addition, he had his own axe to grind as regards the Prussians, above all because of their failure to supply his troops adequately, as they were supposed to do according to the Russo-Prussian convention. Winzengerode’s complaints on this score began in July and continued throughout the campaign. In one of his earliest letters, for example, he complained that not only his own corps but even Russian batteries lent to the Prussians to make up for their shortage of artillery were going unfed.
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Faced by Prussian failure to supply their troops adequately, the Russians resorted to their usual ploy of squeezing the Poles. In the first week of August Barclay de Tolly had ordered another large requisition in Poland, designed to tap the current harvest and above all to feed the Russian corps in the Army of Silesia. The levy included huge amounts of flour for the soldiers and oats for the Russian horses, and 295,000 litres of vodka. The Prussian government appealed to Barclay to use some of this food to lessen the burden on the Berlin region of feeding Winzengerode’s troops and their horses. One week after Barclay issued his orders for the new requisition, part of the levy was diverted to Winzengerode. This included more than 500,000 kilograms of groats for the men’s porridge, 87,000 litres of vodka and 524,000 kilograms of meat.
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