Russia Against Napoleon (76 page)

Faced with these questions, Alexander found himself without support. He believed that if Napoleon accepted the allied terms, he would simply regard the peace as a temporary truce and would start a new war at the first suitable opportunity. His military genius and his aura added tens of thousands of invisible soldiers to any army he commanded. So long as he sat on France’s throne, many of his former allies beyond France’s borders would never believe that the peace settlement was permanent. Both the British and the Prussians wanted to sign a peace with Napoleon, however, so long as he accepted France’s 1792 borders and immediately handed over a number of fortresses as a pledge of his commitment. None of the allies shared Alexander’s view that their armies should first take Paris and then gauge French opinion on the nature of the regime with which to sign peace. To them this policy seemed too unreliable. The last thing the allies wanted was to incite popular revolt, or to find themselves involved in a French civil war. But if Napoleon did fall, then in the British, Austrian and Prussian view the only alternative was the return of the Bourbons, in the person of the family’s legitimate head, Louis XVIII.
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Alexander was unenthusiastic about the restoration of the Bourbons. In part this simply reflected his low opinion of Louis XVIII, who had lived in exile in Russia for a number of years and had not impressed the emperor. Alexander was no legitimist. If anything, he had a touch of radical chic. His grandmother, Catherine II, had sought to impress Voltaire and Diderot. Alexander enjoyed winning the plaudits of Germaine de Staél, whose own preferred candidate to rule France was Marshal Bernadotte. Alexander himself briefly toyed with Bernadotte’s candidacy. This infuriated his allies and even led to murmurings that the emperor was trying to put a Russian client on the French throne.
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In fact this was not the point and Alexander contemplated a number of possible candidates, of whom the crown prince of Sweden was but one. The basic issue was Alexander’s belief that a society as sophisticated and modern as France could only be ruled by a regime which respected civil rights and allowed representative institutions. That regime must also accept part of the Revolution’s legacy if it was to survive. The emperor doubted whether the restored Bourbons would do any of these things. As always with Alexander, he was most believable when telling people what they did not want to hear. Even as late as 17 March, he told a royalist emissary, the Baron de Vitrolles, that he had considered not just Bernadotte but also Eugène de Beauharnais and the Duke of Orléans as possible rulers who, unlike Louis XVIII, would not be prisoners of memories and supporters who demanded revenge for the past. The emperor staggered Vitrolles by saying that even a wisely ordered republic might suit France best.
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Above all, Alexander wanted a stable France which would live in peace with itself and with its neighbours. Better than anyone the emperor understood the enormous difficulties of bringing a Russian army across Europe and the unique circumstances which had made this possible. It might never be possible to repeat this effort. As he said to Lord Castlereagh amidst the arguments that raged among the allies in early February, it was precisely for this reason that Russia required a peace settlement which would endure, not a mere armistice. It was on these grounds that he opposed any peace with Napoleon. But it was the same anxiety which led him to look at alternatives to the Bourbons. In fact Alexander underestimated Louis XVIII and came in time to accept with good grace the Bourbons’ restoration. But his fears were not groundless, as the overthrow of the incompetent Charles X subsequently showed.
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After fierce arguments with his allies in the second week of February 1814 Alexander was forced to give way, however. The fact that towards the end of this week news began to arrive of Blücher’s defeat by Napoleon only confirmed the dangers of Russia’s isolation. The emperor had to agree that if a restoration was to occur, then the only possible choice was the head of the royal house, Louis XVIII. More important from Alexander’s perspective, he had to accept that the negotiations at Châtillon would continue and that the allies would ratify a peace with Napoleon if he accepted the 1792 frontiers and surrendered a number of fortresses. On the other hand, the allies did also agree that if Napoleon refused the allied conditions, then they would continue the war until victory was achieved over him. Frederick William III provided some balm to Alexander’s injured feelings by refusing to join Metternich in threatening withdrawal from the war should the Russian monarch refuse to back down. The king insisted that so long as the Russians remained in the field, the royal army would fight alongside them.
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Meanwhile near disaster had befallen Blücher. After the conference in Brienne on 2 February he marched northwards with Sacken’s and Olsufev’s 18,000 Russians. Blücher aimed to unite with the 16,500 men of Yorck’s Army Corps who were advancing just north of the river Marne towards Château Thierry and the nearly 15,000 Prussians and Russians under generals Kleist and Kaptsevich who were approaching Châlons from the east. A French corps under Marshal MacDonald was retreating in front of Yorck, and Blücher ordered Sacken to hurry forward to try to cut it off. Meanwhile he himself stopped with Olsufev’s detachment at Vertus, waiting for Kleist and Kaptsevich to arrive. MacDonald in fact evaded Sacken’s clutches but the attempt to catch him took Sacken’s troops all the way to La Ferte-sous-Jouarre, well to the west of Château Thierry on the south bank of the Marne.

Blücher’s army was now dispersed over a distance of more than 70 kilometres, which made communications difficult and mutual support often impossible.

The details of the military operations which followed were complicated but the essence was simple. Napoleon thrust northwards through Sézanne into the middle of Blücher’s army and defeated one isolated allied detachment after another. Since Blücher was the greatest Prussian hero of the Napoleonic Wars, some Prussian memoirists and historians had an understandable tendency to protect his reputation. They offered a number of partial excuses for his defeat. Correctly, they argued that if Schwarzenberg had pressed Napoleon’s rear then the Army of Silesia would have been in no danger. Instead, not merely did the main army crawl forward, its commander-in-chief also withdrew Wittgenstein’s Army Corps to the west, instead of leaving it as a link to Blücher. The field-marshal’s defenders also argued that if Lieutenant-General Olsufev had destroyed the key bridge across the Petit Morin stream the moment danger threatened from the south, Napoleon could never have achieved his march into the middle of Blücher’s army. Undoubtedly too, the allies had poor maps and incorrect information about local roads – as tended to be the case in fighting on foreign soil. Both Blücher and Sacken, for example, believed that the road along which Napoleon marched northwards from Sézanne was impassable for an army. Nevertheless the basic point remains that although in close proximity to the enemy, Blücher scattered his army to such an extent that it could not concentrate for battle and he could not exercise effective command. He made this mistake partly because he believed that Napoleon was on the verge of final defeat and Paris was his for the plucking.
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On 10 February Napoleon advanced from Sézanne and overwhelmed Olsufev’s small corps at Champaubert. The emperor had just been reinforced by thousands of experienced cavalry arrived from Spain. Olsufev had a total of seventeen horsemen. A nimbler commander might have retreated in time to save his men but Olsufev was still smarting from Sacken’s criticism for not having held his ground at Brienne two weeks before. Though his junior generals begged him to fall back on Blücher, Olsufev insisted on sticking to his orders to hold his position and seems to have believed that Blücher was himself advancing from the east into the enemy rear. Napoleon claimed to have taken 6,000 prisoners, which was a remarkable achievement since Olsufev’s ‘corps’ numbered 3,690, of whom almost half escaped with their flags and many of their guns under cover of the winter night and the nearby forests. The key point, however, was that Napoleon and 30,000 men were now standing halfway between Sacken’s 15,000 troops at La Ferte and Blücher’s 14,000 near Vertus, directly on the road which connected the two wings of the Army of Silesia.
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The safest option would have been for Sacken to retreat north of the river Marne and join up with Yorck at Château Thierry. Yorck urged this on Sacken but to no effect. Sacken’s orders from Blücher were to march back down the road which led eastwards through Champaubert to Étoges, where he was supposed to reunite with Olsufev and Blücher himself. These orders had been issued before Blücher had a clear understanding of Napoleon’s movements and were now out of date but Sacken did not know this. He set out on the evening of 10 February. He knew that Yorck had been ordered by Blücher to cross the Marne and support him but did not know that the Prussian general had queried these orders and delayed his movement. When he received his orders Sacken had no way of knowing that Napoleon was astride the road down which he was expecting to march.

Late in the morning of 11 February Sacken bumped into the enemy advance guard just west of the village of Montmirail. Soon afterwards he learned from prisoners that Napoleon himself and his main army were present. With the battle in full flow, the Russian commander then received a message from Yorck to say that the road southwards from the Marne to Montmirail was so bad that only a minority of his infantry and none of his guns could advance to the Russians’ rescue. Allied maps showed this to be a paved road whereas in reality it was a country track which the recent thaw had turned into deep mud.

Thanks to his infantry’s discipline and steadiness Sacken succeeded in extricating his corps with most of its baggage and artillery and retreated during the evening and the night down the awful road which led northwards to the river Marne at Château Thierry. Fires were lit every two hundred paces to guide the infantry along the way. In the drenching rain, with their muskets useless, the Russian infantry had both to march in compact masses to keep the enemy cavalry at bay and on occasion to break ranks in order to pull their artillery out of the mud. Though very outnumbered, Ilarion Vasilchikov and his splendid cavalry regiments greatly helped to protect the infantry and to drag away most of the guns. Napoleon pressed the retreating Russians hard and by the time they finally got across the Marne they had lost 5,000 men. Russian casualties would have been far higher had it not been for the courageous rearguard actions of Yorck’s Prussian infantry. Sacken was a hardbitten old campaigner and ‘politician’. The day after the battle, finally tracked down by his nervous and exhausted staff, who had lost him in the course of the retreat, he was as calm and self-assured as always. In the best traditions of coalition warfare, in his official report he blamed the defeat on the Prussians, and in particular on Yorck’s failure to obey Blücher’s orders and support him in good time.
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Having defeated Yorck and Sacken, Napoleon was preparing to march south to block Schwarzenberg when he learned to his astonishment on 13 February that Blücher was advancing down the road which led to Montmirail. Blücher had misinterpreted the retreat of the French forces watching the road and believed that Napoleon was already heading south against the main army. Instead, having reached Vauchamps by the morning of 14 February, Blücher found himself confronted by Napoleon himself and the bulk of his army, which greatly outnumbered the allied force. Like Sacken’s troops three days before, Blücher’s infantry was forced to retreat in square for many miles under heavy pressure. At least Sacken’s foot soldiers had Vasilchikov’s cavalry and Yorck’s Prussians to help them. Blücher’s 16,000 infantry on the contrary were retreating on their own, in broad daylight, through excellent cavalry country and with very few horsemen to help them. Unlike Sacken’s veterans, most of the 6,000 Russians in Lieutenant-General Kaptsevich’s corps were new recruits, in action for the first time. Their musketry was at times more enthusiastic than effective. One-third of the men became casualties but, as French observers recognized, it was a tribute to the great courage and discipline of the Russian and Prussian infantry that Blücher’s whole detachment was not destroyed.
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In the course of five days’ fighting Blücher’s army had lost almost one-third of its men. Napoleon was ecstatic. Already on the evening of 11 February he was writing to his brother Joseph, ‘this army of Silesia was the allies’ best army’, which was true enough. Much less truthfully, he added: ‘The enemy army of Silesia no longer exists: I have totally routed it.’ Even a week later, when there had been time to weigh the true results of the battle, he claimed in a letter to Eugène de Beauharnais to have taken more than 30,000 prisoners, which meant that ‘I have destroyed the Army of Silesia’. The reality was very different. On 18 February, the day after Napoleon wrote this letter, 8,000 men of Langeron’s Army Corps arrived to reinforce Blücher and there were many more Russian and Prussian units of the Army of Silesia, now relieved from blockading fortresses, on the march. Hundreds of prisoners of war were recaptured and many missing men returned to the ranks in the days immediately after the battle. Within a matter of days, Blücher’s army was again as strong as it had been on 10 February.
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Ironically, in the end it was Napoleon himself who suffered most from his victories against Blücher. After the battle of La Rothière Napoleon very grudgingly granted Caulaincourt full powers to accept the allied peace conditions. On 5 February the foreign minister was told that ‘His Majesty gives you carte blanche to bring the negotiations to a happy end, to save the capital and to avoid a battle on which the last hopes of the nation would rest’. Caulaincourt was bewildered by these instructions and asked for clarification, enquiring whether he was supposed to concede all the allied demands immediately or whether he still had some time for negotiation. Before there was time to reply, Napoleon had defeated Blücher and his tone had changed completely.
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