The War of Wars (116 page)

‘It rests with Your Majesty to give the world peace.’

‘My honour first, and then peace. You cannot know what passes through a soldier’s mind. A man like me does not count the lives of a
million of men. I have offered you Illyria for your neutrality, does that suit you? Your neutrality is all I ask for.’

‘Ah, sire, we cannot remain neutral any longer; we must be for you, or against you.’

‘If it costs me my throne, I will bury the world under its ruins!’

Metternich remarked that he wished the doors and windows of his palace could be thrown open so that Europe could hear Napoleon’s words.

Raising the subject of Russia, Napoleon, according to Metternich, reflected that 300,000 men already had been lost in Russia of which only a tenth were French. Napoleon then taunted him with having being bought like Judas. In fact Austria had recently been subsidized by the British to the tune of £3.6 million, while Prussia had been paid £2 million. ‘Sir, you are a lost man,’ was Metternich’s angry parting shot.

Napoleon’s display of braggadocio might have proved fatal but for the fact that Metternich before the meeting had already resolved to join his enemies. Napoleon probably understood this from his demeanour, which may have accounted for his own aggressiveness. The terms Metternich offered Napoleon at Dresden were little short of humiliating: the return of all former Austrian possessions in Italy, the dissolution of the Confederacy of the Rhine, the restoration of the Prussian dominions and the handover of Poland to the Russians. These terms were designed to be unacceptable, and it was no surprise that Napoleon, with two recent victories under his belt, refused to accept them.

Napoleon’s hand was weakened by news of Wellington’s great victory at Vitoria. New talks were arranged with Austria at which Caulaincourt represented Napoleon. He begged Napoleon to authorize him to make significant concessions; in particular to give up the Confederation of the Rhine, which might have appeased both Austria and Prussia. Napoleon heatedly argued that this was France’s buffer state on the Rhine. Metternich even seemed disposed to abandon his Italian demands. Napoleon remained obdurate.

On 11 April Austria declared war. This was the final turning point: if Napoleon had made concessions, sought to divide his enemies, shown flexibility, he might yet have survived. He was now faced not just with
a war in Spain which was approaching his own frontiers but the combined might of the three great military powers of mainland Europe, Russia, Austria and Prussia, and a minor one, Sweden, as well as the unremitting hostility of Britain. His ruthlessly conscripted raw army of 680,000 men would face nearly 200,000 Russians, 120,000 Austrians, 160,000 Prussians and 40,000 Swedes; along with other allies, this amounted to 800,000 men. On the face of it this still seemed acceptable odds. Napoleon had overcome larger odds before.

In addition, Napoleon’s army was concentrated while others were dispersed into four great forces: the Army of the North, consisting of Swedes and Russians garrisoned in Berlin was under Bernadotte, a deeply flawed commander; the Army of Prussia, which was in fact commanded by the Russians, under General Bennigsen; the Army of Silesia under Blücher; and the biggest force, the 250,000-strong Army of Bohemia under the supreme commander, the Austrian Prince Schwarzenberg, an indifferent general, nominated for his aristocratic connections and loyalty to Metternich. Of the four allied commandeers, only Blücher was outstanding.

Napoleon had every reason to be confident of victory through employing his usual tactic of divide and rule, rapid marches and manoeuvres, and encircling and defeating his enemies one by one. The campaign that followed has been portrayed as an inevitable defeat for a ruler mortally wounded by both the Peninsular and Russian campaigns. It was nothing of the kind: a series of convincing French victories followed by a policy of magnanimity towards his enemies would have saved the campaign and restored Europe to what it had been in 1811. It was not to be.

Napoleon’s first mistake was to disperse his forces in the face of the various opposing armies: his biggest army of some 250,000 men in seven corps was based at Dresden, while Oudinot was despatched with 100,000 men to Hamburg to threaten Bohemia and Bernadotte. Davout was given control of 35,000 to defend the lower Elbe. Ney was given command of 85,000 men – a third of the biggest army – but was directly responsible to Napoleon. By a common consent Oudinot was an inferior general to the experienced Davout: and Ney, in spite of his heroic generalship of a small force during the Russian campaign, lacked the intelligence and tactical ability to command a large army. Napoleon believed he could orchestrate all three men himself. His army thus suffered from the presence of two inadequate operational commanders combined with over-centralization, although it was deployed over a wide geographic area.

War was declared on 11 April 1813. Napoleon’s strategy was to attack boldly, trying to envelop each allied army in turn; the allies’ counter-strategy, elaborated by Schwarzenberg was defensive but in the event inspired – the Trachenburg Plan. When an allied army was attacked, it must withdraw and liaise with the other armies to fight the French: it was like a more defensive and cumbersome version of Napoleon’s own earlier tactics of bringing armies together in force at the last minute. Yet because the allied armies were comprised of different nations under rival commanders, and were also interfered with by three militarily inexperienced sovereigns, it seemed impossible that they should succeed. What turned the tables was a combination of
Napoleon’s own blunders and overconfidence, and a commander of genius, that fierce old man, Gebhard von Blücher.

Blücher was already seventy, a huge age in those days. Having fought in a minor capacity in the Seven Years War, he was by far the oldest veteran of the major allied commanders who took the field against Napoleon. He had been born of a minor noble family, not unlike Napoleon’s, in 1742 in a small town on the Baltic adjacent to the Russian border. He was so poor a student that he could barely read or write. He served in the Prussian army as a typical officer of the time, with little to do in small garrisons except drink and frequent local prostitutes. In his early thirties he offended Frederick the Great and was effectively dismissed, not being readmitted to the army until the monarch died, only becoming a colonel at the late age of forty-eight. He seemed destined for obscurity. Serving in the Netherlands when war broke out with revolutionary France, he soon distinguished himself with extraordinarily bold engagements. In 1795, however, Prussia made peace with France and Blücher was plunged back into provincial obscurity as governor of the small Rhine town of Münster.

After the outbreak of war again eleven years later Blücher served with distinction at Auerstadt at the already advanced age of sixty-three. He was captured by the French and actually exchanged pleasantries with Napoleon, who failed to see any serious threat from the gruff, pipe-smoking old man with his walrus moustaches and appearance of an old rogue. A British officer described him as ‘an uncouth old man who was spitting over a bridge when I saw him’.

From 1806 until war was renewed again in 1813, Blücher was out of action. He suffered serious alcoholic symptoms, including delirium tremens and paranoid delusions; he raved about his head being made of stone and feared that he was pregnant with an elephant. However he helped to train the Prussian troops in secret. He was recalled by the King of Prussia to command the Russo-Prussian Army of Silesia largely because of his reputation for bravery.

His surgeon noted that he never entertained any idea of being shot dead: ‘If he had not felt certain of it, he would have lost his head as many others, for every man in a greater or less degree, previous to a
battle and when going into it, has an instinctive dread in his bosom; and he who knows how [best to] overcome it is the bravest after all. He always knew at the proper moment how to work upon the soldiers’ feelings, and only a few comforting words were necessary, and at once toil, hunger and thirst, and all the hardships of war were forgotten.’ He was beloved by his troops who called him ‘Marshal Vorwarts’ for the most frequent command he gave.

He depended on the intellectual skills of his chief of staff Gneisenau who had been responsible for most of the innovations in Prussian tactics, including giving greater initiative to subordinates and setting up a general staff to formulate decisions collectively, in marked contrast to Napoleon’s methods. The combination of dashing commander and calculating support officer was to become the model for the Prussian army of William I and William II, as also initially with Hitler. Gneisenau, of modest social origins, was a brilliant student and at fifty-two was eighteen years younger than Blücher. He was a prickly, difficult man who treated those of lesser intelligence badly. This combination of brain and brawn was to prove remarkably effective.

Blücher started the war by breaking the armistice with Napoleon in south-eastern Germany. What followed was an extraordinary game of chess in which Napoleon (the ‘queen’) buttressed by two lesser castles, limited in movement, thrust forward where the Confederation of the Rhine juts into southern Prussia and northern Austria. Facing him were the other ‘queen’, Schwarzenburg’s Army of Bohemia, the main allied army in the south, and his two castles and a bishop, the Army of Silesia facing Napoleon’s front, and the Armies of Poland and the North further north. Another comparison was that of a great bull charging into a ring with assorted bullfighters around him waving their capes to tire him and seeking to avoid a full charge which would inevitably prove fatal.

Napoleon’s predicament was not all that dissimilar to the one that he had just faced in Russia. He sought to take the offensive and secure a decisive victory; but his divided enemies were committed to retreating when he tried to engage them and then to blocking his line of communication. The first to charge forward had been Blücher; and Napoleon moved to meet him on 21 August. Blucher immediately
withdrew, remarking about his seemingly cowardly tactic that he was ‘very happy to have played a trick on the great man. He ought to be furious at not having been able to make me accept battle.’ Meanwhile the Russians had sent 40,000 troops to Blücher’s aid.

Napoleon charged aside to intercept them, and Blücher attacked the French left under General MacDonald at Katsbach on 26 August, which he comprehensively destroyed, taking 18,000 prisoners and a hundred guns. Napoleon reversed direction to attack Blücher, only to find his adversary retreating for the second time. From the south Schwarzenberg’s huge Army of Bohemia was marching on Dresden to cut off his supply lines. Napoleon veered away from Blücher again to strike at Schwarzenberg’s supply lines, only to learn that Dresden, with its vital artillery and supplies, was in no position to hold out against the approaching army from the south.

At this stage Napoleon seems to have lost his nerve. Instead of circling Schwarzenberg’s army in a great flanking attack, which he would surely have won, he left a small force to harass it and spectacularly counter-marched back to Dresden nearly a hundred miles away in just seventy-two hours. He arrived in time to save the city. Nevertheless Schwarzenberg decided to press on with his advance, which could have proved fatal to the allied cause.

The exhausted 120,000 French troops and the equally exhausted Emperor, now suffering from fever, drove the 150,000-strong allied force out of the city, inflicting some 40,000 casualties to 12,000 French ones on 26 and 27 August. The allied army was forced to retreat south, where it was vulnerable to attack from the smaller French flanking corps. But it had narrowly escaped – arousing the contempt of the Tsar, who urged it to fight on.

To the north Oudinot had been defeated and forced back along the road to Berlin. Napoleon nominated Ney to take over his command. The fiery general plunged forward towards Berlin, but was attacked by a superior Prussian force under General von Bülow at Dennewitz some sixty miles south of the capital on 6 September. Ney displayed his usual bravery, leading his men from the front, married to his usual tactical ineptitude, decisively losing the battle and being forced to retreat before Bernadotte’s large army arrived towards the end of the battle.

After these French setbacks, the southern German states were one by one defecting to the allies. Bavaria joined at the beginning of October, leaving only Saxony as a French supporter. Blücher’s army surged forward across the Elbe at Wittenberge, while Bernadotte followed reluctantly behind: to the south the Army of Poland joined up with Schwarzenberg’s main force. Napoleon tried to intercept Blücher, but the wily old Prussian general slipped away to the south-west. By that time the Emperor had marched his army back to the city of Leipzig from Dresden, which was too exposed.

To all appearances Leipzig presented a superb defensive position: to the south there was excellent defensive hilly terrain; to the north lay open country, but Napoleon did not expect an attack from that quarter – a fatal mistake. In an effort to strengthen further the defences of the city, Napoleon blew up all but one bridge westward across the Elster; he never expected to have to use it.

Napoleon had never been a defensive general, and his inadequacies in this field were all too apparent: for his strong position was in fact a trap. Four allied armies were closing in on him simultaneously – Blücher through his relentless marching swerving around the top of the city to the north-west, Bernadotte from the north, Bennigsen to the east and the biggest army, that of Schwarzenberg, to the south.

Facing this encirclement on three sides, Napoleon had drawn up his forces in an inner circle – Marmont, his best remaining commander and Ney in the north facing Blücher, the Imperial Guard and MacDonald in the east and Victor, Murat, Poniatowski, Augereau and Lauriston in the south. Altogether there were 190,000 French troops facing 335,000 allied troops. Napoleon had been hoist by his own petard: his enemies had coalesced against him in much superior force, just as he had done against them so often in the past.