Russia Against Napoleon (71 page)

The French infantry which attempted to storm Gossa included Maison’s division of Lauriston’s Fifth Corps. Both Russian sources and General Griois, who commanded some of Drouot’s batteries just behind Gossa, say that Oudinot’s two Young Guard divisions also took part in the battle in the village. The initial allied ‘garrison’ of Gossa was made up of some of Eugen’s battalions and three battalions of Pirch’s Prussian brigade: both had been hotly engaged for hours and were very under strength. The St Petersburg and Tauride Grenadier regiments joined the defence of the village, as did the Guards Jaegers. Attack and counterattack followed each other in a struggle for Gossa, which lasted for three hours. According to the Russians, each time the French were driven out, a fresh wave of enemy infantry forced their way back into the village. In the end the issue was decided by the Russian 2nd Guards Infantry Division, who stormed into the village from the south-west in battalion columns without firing a shot. Fighting literally under the eyes of the emperor, the Guards displayed exceptional courage. More than half the officers of the Finland Guards Regiment were killed or wounded. The commander of the regiment, Major-General Maksim Kryzhanovsky, was wounded four times before he allowed himself to be carried off the battlefield.
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For once, however, it was not an officer but a private soldier who earned most fame in the battle for Gossa. Leontii Korennoi was a grenadier in the Third Battalion of the Finland Guards. Like most grenadiers of the Guards, he was tall and broad-shouldered. He was a veteran, who had been in the Finland Regiment since its formation, having previously served in the Kronstadt Garrison Regiment. A married man, he became known as ‘uncle’ in the Finland Guards. At Borodino he had won a military medal for his courage in the skirmishing line. Now he surpassed himself. Gossa was a village of stone houses, stout garden walls and many lanes. Amidst the ebb and flow of the action, the commander of the Third Battalion of the Finland Guards, Colonel Gervais, and some of his officers were cut off by a sudden French counter-attack. At first with a handful of comrades and then alone, Korennoi held off the French while the officers escaped over the walls back to the rest of the battalion.

To their great honour, the French not only took Korennoi prisoner but presented him to Napoleon himself, who praised his courage and ensured that he was well looked after. Since the French army was itself not short of heroes, Korennoi’s exploit must indeed have been remarkable to win such treatment. He got back to his regiment by the end of the battle, where his comrades regarded him as a figure virtually risen from the dead. Korennoi’s bust was to occupy pride of place in the barracks of the Finland Guards until 1917 and the song of the regiment (‘We remember Uncle Korennoi’) was composed in his honour.
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While Leontii Korennoi was winning fame, Pamfil Nazarov was fighting his first real battle with the Finland Guards. He recalls that the Grand Duke Constantine rode down the ranks of the regiment before they advanced against Gossa, telling the Guardsmen to load their muskets and ordering them to advance. Like many of his comrades, Pamfil was wounded in the attack before he even reached the village, in his case in the right leg above the knee. He remembers too that his overcoat was shredded by bullets. Pamfil collapsed and lost much blood. He recalls how hot his blood seemed to him. Somehow he dragged himself back the 2 kilometres to the medical point, collapsing once more on the way and constantly threatened by the cannon balls that continued to whistle by. When he got to the casualty point he found the regimental ammunition, flags, musicians and doctor. After being bandaged, he tottered to a fire by which to spend this cold and rainy night. A comrade from the regiment gave him two salted cucumbers, a big boon.

After much bleeding in the night, Pamfil re-bandaged himself and set off to the rear, carrying his haversack and using his musket as a crutch. His leg swelled up from days of walking and in the end he had to find a cart to get him to a hospital. Finally he got to a field hospital in Plauen on 28 October, where there were so many wounded that he had to be placed in a chapel. On the other hand there were also many German doctors and medical assistants present. It was now twelve days since Pamfil’s wound had been bandaged and it was infected. There followed days of agony as bandages were changed and ointment was injected directly into the wound twice daily on lint attached to a huge needle. He did not get back to his regiment until the beginning of 1814.
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Nevertheless the sacrifices of Pamfil and his comrades did achieve their goal. Gossa was held and Napoleon’s great counter-attack stopped. That evening the young officers of Ermolov’s staff put on an impromptu performance of Racine’s
Phèdre
in the ruins of Gossa. In tactical terms the first day of Leipzig was a draw. Apart from Blücher’s capture of villages north of Leipzig, the two armies occupied almost the exact positions where they had started the day. In reality, however, a draw signified an allied victory. If Napoleon was to hold Germany, he had to defeat the allies decisively on the battle’s first day. Otherwise, with more than 100,000 fresh troops close at hand, allied strength would become overwhelming. This should have been clear to Napoleon by nightfall on 16 October, though as always clarity is far easier in retrospect than on the evening of a battle. The wisest policy would have been to organize an immediate orderly retreat, getting his baggage away as quickly as possible and building additional crossings over the river Elster to avoid the very dangerous dependence on a single bridge. In fact it was not until the evening of 17 October that he made any arrangements for a retreat and even then nothing was done to ease the army’s passage out of Leipzig and over the Elster. Instead he wasted time talking to the captured General Meerveldt, whom he then sent back to Francis II, seemingly in the naive hope that the allies might negotiate and allow him to escape.

Very little action occurred on Sunday, 17 October. Neither Bernadotte nor Bennigsen was yet on the battlefield and, since Napoleon showed no sign of departing, the allied monarchs were content to let their men rest and await the arrival of reinforcements. The only significant fighting to occur that day was a brilliant charge by Ilarion Vasilchikov’s hussar division, which delighted Blücher, himself an old hussar, and resulted in the French not only losing many men and guns but also pulling right back in the north-west to the suburbs in front of the Halle Gate. From here any further retreat was unthinkable: if the Russians burst through the Halle Gate into Leipzig, the line of retreat of Napoleon himself and the entire army would be cut. Once he received news that the Army of Bohemia would not attack that day, however, Blücher was forced to postpone Sacken’s attempt to break into Leipzig from the north until 18 October.
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The last two days of the battle of Leipzig – 18 and 19 October – were in one sense an anticlimax. There were no daring movements or examples of inspired military leadership. It was often the French, fighting with skill and courage in the many stout buildings in and near Leipzig, who had the better of encounters at least in the short run. When thousands of men are losing their lives it is wrong to talk of a battle being ‘boring’, but for the military scholar, when compared to an Austerlitz or Cannae, Leipzig was indeed a ‘boring’ battle. The key point, however, is that ‘boring’ battles were exactly what the allies needed to fight. Given their army’s unmanageable size, its multi-national composition and its chaotic command structure, any attempt to do something clever or complicated was bound to end in disaster. What was required was to pin Napoleon down in a spot where his army could be subjected to the full weight of allied superiority in men and guns. This is what the allies achieved in the last two days of the battle of Leipzig. By the afternoon of 18 October they had concentrated all their troops and 1,360 guns on the battlefield.

The morning of 18 October dawned bright and sunny. That day the allies formed a huge semicircle enclosing Leipzig to the east, north and south. They attacked Napoleon all along this line. Probably the best-known events on 18 October are the defection of some Saxon regiments to the allies, but the desertion of a very few thousand men was actually of little significance in a battle fought by half a million soldiers. More important was the fact that Bernadotte’s almost 60,000-strong Army of the North only arrived on the battlefield in mid-afternoon. This in turn forced Bennigsen to spread his army more thinly and reduced the possibility of his outflanking the village of Probstheida from the east and thereby forcing its abandonment. Probstheida was the key strong-point of Napoleon’s position south of Leipzig and he hung on to it all day, thanks to the strength of its buildings and the heroism of its French defenders, to which allied accounts pay tribute. On the allied side it was the Prussians who bore the brunt of the costly attempts to take the village but even the remnants of Eugen’s corps were made to join in, despite their terrible losses on the previous day. Meanwhile three regiments of the Russian 1st Guards Division and the whole of the Prussian Guard stood by idly less than a kilometre away, despite not having fired a shot on the battle’s first day.

To an extent this was the monarchs once again protecting their Guards, but it was also simply the logic of Napoleonic-era warfare to try to preserve elite units as reserves until the moment of crisis came in a campaign or battle. Sacken had no Guards but in fact he conducted his attempts to storm through the Halle suburb in similar fashion. He committed Neverovsky’s 27th Division and Lieven’s two jaeger regiments but the three veteran infantry regiments of the 10th Division were held in reserve throughout the battle despite the tremendous casualties of the rest of Sacken’s corps as they tried to fight their way through Leipzig’s northern suburbs.

Even without the field fortifications constructed by the French, the suburbs around the Halle Gate were a formidable obstacle. Just in front of them flowed the river Pleisse, while the hamlet of Pfaffendorf with its stout buildings formed a strong advance point to blunt any attempt to break into the town. The approaches to the Halle Gate were narrow and the Russian infantry was vulnerable to flanking fire, not just from Pfaffendorf but also from the walls of the Rosenthal park to their west. The Austrian official history, by no means Russophile in sympathy, commented that ‘the Russian soldiers performed with wonderful bravery and their officers too did everything possible’.
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Colonel Petr Rakhmanov, the brave and exceptionally intelligent former editor of
Voennyi zhurnal
and the commander of one of Neverovsky’s brigades, was killed here, as was Colonel Huene, the 27th Division’s artillery commander. We last encountered Dmitrii Dushenkevich as a 15-year-old ensign during his first battle, at Krasnyi in August 1812. By October 1813 he was an aide-de-camp to Dmitrii Neverovsky. He recalls that on 18 October Neverovsky was as usual in the thick of the action, with buildings burning all around, and attack and counter-attack rapidly following each other in ferocious house-to-house fighting. Neverovsky was encouraging Rakhmanov’s troops as they attempted to storm their way towards the Halle Gate when he was hit in the left leg by a bullet. He was carried out of the battle by his Cossack escort and died a few days later. As part of the centenary celebrations in 1912, his body was taken back to Russia and reburied near the position defended by his division at Borodino.
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By the end of 18 October the Russians had suffered serious casualties but were little nearer the Halle Gate than they had been that morning. Nevertheless, contrary to some accounts, their sacrifice was by no means in vain. Dombrowski’s Polish division were the initial defenders of the Halle suburb and, as often happened when Poles encountered Russians, the fighting was particularly bitter. But as Russian pressure mounted, more and more French reinforcements were committed to defend this vital area. These included Brayer’s 8th Division, as well as twelve battalions and three batteries of the Young Guard. As Langeron noted, Sacken’s attack diverted all these men from reinforcing the defenders of Schönefeld against his attempts to capture this crucial village.
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Schönefeld was the key to Napoleon’s position in the north, just as Probstheida was in the south. It too was made up of mostly two-storey, solidly built stone houses and their gardens, with the whole village surrounded by a stout wall. To complicate the Russians’ problem further, just to the village’s south was a walled cemetery which gave excellent cover to defenders. It was also difficult to outflank Schönefeld from the north since the village lay very close to the marshy banks of the river Parthe. In addition, the attack on Schönefeld ran into the normal problems facing any army attempting to take these Saxon villages. Given sufficient numbers and courage, the attacking infantry would break into the village, albeit at the cost of heavy casualties. But they would then be subject to counter-attacks by fresh enemy troops concentrated out of fire behind the village and supported by their massed artillery. Bringing forward the attackers’ own guns through or around the village in sufficient numbers to match these enemy batteries was extremely difficult. Captain Radozhitsky attempted to do just this at Schönefeld and found his batteries smothered by overwhelming canister fire at short range. Langeron’s first two major attacks took Schönefeld and then lost it again. Only after Bernadotte deployed all his artillery and pounded the village from the south did Schönefeld finally fall at 6 p.m. Even then Langeron’s men had to hold it against fierce French counter-attacks which lasted into the night.
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The fall of Schönefeld posed the risk that the allies would advance into the rear of Napoleon’s troops south of Leipzig and cut off their retreat. In fact, however, even by the morning of 18 October Napoleon had decided to abandon Leipzig. The only issue was whether he would get most of his army and its baggage away safe and sound. Already, early on 17 October, Bertrand’s corps had been ordered down the highway beyond Lindenau in order to secure Weissenfels and Napoleon’s retreat to the west. His corps was replaced at Lindenau by troops sent by Marshal Ney. The army’s baggage train began to move back through Leipzig too. Drawing in his perimeter and using the stout Saxon buildings as strong-points, Napoleon stopped the allies from breaking into his rear or cutting off his retreat on 18 October.