by Alan Palmer
Alexander’s Generals were, however, less sanguine. Two of them had indeed good reason to remember Weyrother from Suvorov’s last campaign. For in September 1799, when the old Marshal was nearly encircled by the French in the Swiss Alps, Colonel Weyrother, a geographical specialist on the Austrian staff, had shown Suvorov on a map a route from Altdorf to Schwyz.8 When the Russians had fought their way across the St Gothard Pass and reached the town of Altdorf, they found a precipitous wall of mountain where the Colonel had so confidently drawn his pen. Among the officers who took to the narrow Alpine tracks on that occasion was Prince Bagration; now, in 1805, he commanded Kutuzov’s cavalry and was a hero of the retreat along the Danube valley. And General Mikhail Miloradovich, who fought with the Aspheron Regiment under Suvorov in the Alps, still had the regiment under his command in Moravia six years later. Neither Bagration nor Miloradovich felt much faith in the expert geographer who had so impressed the two Emperors; both were men of high standing among their brother officers.
Peace Parleys
One at least of Kutuzov’s predictions was soon shown to be correct. On 20 November Napoleon entered Brünn (Brno), principal city and provincial capital of Moravia, and there he was content to remain for a week, resting and re-organizing his forces. While French patrols scouted the rolling plain to the east and south of Brünn, the Russians and Austrians stayed inactive around Olmütz, a fortress town forty miles north-east of Brünn and nestling beneath forested foothills of the Carpathians and a southern outcrop of the Sudeten Mountains, known as the Jeseniky Range. The small town was appallingly overcrowded and distribution of food was chaotic. Had it not been for the cold weather, disease must have spread rapidly from the inadequate sewers, and Kutuzov wisely insisted on the bulk of the Russian army remaining in bivouacs outside the ramparts. The Emperor Francis took up residence in the episcopal palace while Alexander and his retinue occupied the citadel, where the wells were thought to be purer than in the town. Even so, soon after leaving Olmütz for the battle zone, Alexander was struck down by a bad fever and was forced to spend the last days of the month in bed; but before the illness attacked him he had already carried out tours of inspection and presided over long sessions around the conference table.
The most important of these conferences was held on 24 November.9 On that occasion it was finally decided the Allied armies should launch a counter-offensive at the earliest opportunity, the immediate objective being to cut off Napoleon in Brünn and thus facilitate the recovery of Vienna. All the reports in the following three days seemed favourable: patrols in the Moravian countryside indicated that the French were withdrawing advance-posts from commanding positions along the road to Vienna from Olmütz, as if Napoleon wished to remain close to the shelter of Brünn itself. There seemed to be confusion in the Grand Army: why otherwise should so great a commander have ordered his men to evacuate the high land west of the Kaunitz family estates at Austerlitz? Anyone could see that the Pratzen Plateau, as it was called, formed a pivotal point in any attack to the east: could it be that the Emperor of the French was worried, that he feared for the long and slender supply line back to his bases? Hopefully Alexander ordered his carriage to drive him twenty miles south to the small town of Wischau (Vyskov) where he was close enough to the enemy to perceive any further signs that Napoleon knew he was a beaten man.
They were not long in coming. On two occasions during the retreat down the Danube there had been parleying between the French and Bagration’s rearguard, and each time a temporary truce had been agreed. Napoleon had viewed these activities with disfavour, but now he decided to turn them to his own advantage. A hint of an armistice, if conveyed by an experienced messenger who kept his eyes open, would have the double merit of lulling the Allies into a false sense of security and of gathering information about their strength and probable intentions. From Brünn on 25 November Napoleon accordingly despatched a letter to Alexander assuring him of his good wishes and the hope of finding an occasion to give proof of his goodwill; and one of his most trusted aides-de-camp duly set out for the Russian advance-posts to seek an audience with the Tsar.10
Napoleon’s choice of emissary showed a sound contempt for past quarrels. He selected General Savary, who as chief of gendarmerie in 1803–4 had played a sinister part in the kidnapping and condemnation of the Duc d’Enghien. Now, twenty months later, Savary was courteously received in Wischau and entrusted by the Tsar with an answer to Napoleon’s letter. The reply was pleasantly phrased; it spoke of Alexander’s sole ‘desire to see the peace of Europe re-established with fairness and on a just basis’; and it contained an assurance of the Tsar’s wish ‘to oblige you personally’; but, with childish pedantry, it was addressed to Napoleon as ‘Head of the French Government’ rather than as Emperor, an insult which momentarily exasperated its recipient.11 Yet Napoleon was curious about this extraordinary young man who was risking the armies of two empires on these remote plains of central Europe; and he sent Savary back to the Russian lines with an invitation to Alexander for a personal interview on the following day at any time which was convenient to him. Napoleon had already selected the region where he hoped the Allies would give him battle but he did not want an engagement until he had been reinforced by the arrival of Marshal Davout and the Third Corps from Vienna; and he hoped a meeting with Alexander would at least postpone action for another twenty-four hours. Nor was he being entirely insincere in proposing such a meeting: for, with Vienna in his hands and the Austrian lands split in two by the Grand Army, there were no material gains awaiting him. If the Allies would accept peace on his terms, so much the better. The humiliation of Mack’s army at Ulm had been a necessity: there was no need to destroy the Russians and the rump of the Austrians in Moravia. While despatching outriders to hustle up Davout, Napoleon left Brünn and turned eastwards along the Olmütz road to await, with an open mind, the outcome of Savary’s second mission.12
By the time Savary returned to the Russian outposts, the Allied army was already moving ponderously forward and Bagration delayed him all night, on thin excuses, before sending him under escort to Wischau. There he was received, early in the morning of 29 November, by Dolgoruky who conveyed Napoleon’s invitation to the Tsar. A meeting between the two Emperors was, in fact, out of the question because Alexander was unwell; but he, too, would willingly have spared his men the ordeal of battle provided the enemy accepted peace on Russia’s terms. He therefore ordered Dolgoruky to accompany Savary back to the French lines and sound out Napoleon.
Dolgoruky was left under guard in a French bivouac while Savary rode ahead and reported to Napoleon. By now the Emperor was impatient and he wasted few words on Savary before mounting his horse and galloping off for his interview with Dolgoruky. Both men subsequently gave accounts of the meeting, and it was clearly not the happiest of encounters.13 This is hardly surprising, for Dolgoruky was convinced that the French were afraid of the military might facing them and he chose to gratify his egotism by a show of flamboyant arrogance which left Napoleon’s judgement seared with rage. To Dolgoruky, Napoleon appeared as ‘a little figure, remarkably dirty and ill-dressed’ (and he had, indeed, found no opportunity to change his shirt for four days); while Napoleon described the Russian envoy as ‘an impertinent young puppy … who spoke to me as he would have done to a boyar he wished to send to Siberia’. Dolgoruky made no effort to conceal his assumption that fear of defeat was prompting Napoleon to put out peace feelers, and he appears to have offered Napoleon the choice of immediate withdrawal from the Austrian lands and the Italian peninsula or of a renewed war which would only end when the French retired behind the frontiers of 1789. To threaten Napoleon with the loss of Belgium and Savoy when he was encamped at the head of an unbeaten army less than forty miles from Hungary and eighty miles from historic Poland showed either astonishing confusion over strategic geography or a strange assessment of the realities of power. But, whichever the fault, it made little difference to Napoleon. As Savary had already told him, Alexan
der was clearly surrounded by rogues: if the Russians could do no better than entrust negotiations to ‘this perfumed booby Dolgoruky’, then nothing would be gained by prolonging the meeting. Savary conducted the Russian to Bagration’s forward posts and Napoleon rode back to the village of Bellowitz where he set up his field headquarters five miles east of Brünn.
The Battle of Austerlitz (2 December 1805)
There was little daylight in Moravia during the early days of December. Hence final plans for the clash between the two armies were drawn across maps lit by candles while, outside, camp fires of wood and straw protected chilled limbs from the frozen ground. The wintry weather made the prospect of a bloody encounter seem even grimmer. Although a slight thaw had left the marshy banks of the stream across the plain muddy and slippery, there was still a deceptively thin film of ice on the lakes and ponds nestling at the edge of the plateau. And when, on 1 December, the Tsar emerged from his quarters in Wischau in the misty half-light and mounted his chestnut mare, the escort moved off slowly down the treacherous roads. Even so, once his horse stumbled and he was thrown from the saddle, though he got away with a shaking and some bruises. After two days confined to bed, Alexander looked pale and unsure of himself; but in the early afternoon he was well enough to ride over to the village of Krzenowitz with the Emperor Francis and his personal aides. There Alexander decided to spend the night, sleeping in the largest house in the village, with giant guardsmen from the Semeonovsky Regiment patrolling the solitary track. His physician, James Wylie, remained within easy call in case the fever returned.14 Kutuzov and his staff were a mile and a half away, housed in the slightly smaller village of Birnbaum; and five to six miles to the west Napoleon and his Marshals were gathered in a third cluster of abandoned homes, the hamlet known as Schlapanitz. The chateau of Austerlitz, which was to give its name to the forthcoming battle, was three miles to the rear of Russian headquarters and that night offered shelter to some members of the Austrian aristocracy who had hunted over these meadows in happier days.
Soon after six in the evening – though it was by then a dark and misty night – Weyrother rode into Birnbaum to go over the final details of the battle plan with the Russian leaders.15 Not all were there: the Tsar himself was at dinner and had been joined by his brother, Constantine, who was to command the Reserve on the following day; and Prince Bagration, having little taste for a lesson on tactics from a man he despised and distrusted, excused himself on the pretext of keeping watch for enemy movements. Kutuzov was, of course, present, silent and half-asleep, and most of the other Russian commanders were content to follow his example. Langeron, the émigré from Provence, remained alert and has left his record of Weyrother’s briefing: ‘He read his dispositions to us’, he wrote, ‘in a tone of uplift and an air of pride which proclaimed his certainty of his own merit and our unworthiness. He was like an usher in a high school reading a lesson to the young pupils. Perhaps we were indeed pupils; but he was by no means a good teacher.’16 Yet it was the lesson their Tsar had approved, and none of Weyrother’s class had the courage to criticize the basic curriculum.
Essentially Weyrother’s plan was sound – provided that Napoleon did exactly what he was expected to do. The main Allied force would move southwards across the Pratzen Plateau to the village of Telnitz, where only a thin line of French outposts protected the crossing of a stream known as the Goldbach. Meanwhile, to the north of the battlefield, Bagration would engage the French near the Brünn-Olmütz road, where it was assumed Napoleon most feared a determined attack. Once across the Goldbach, the Allied columns would wheel to the right, encircling the principal French force as it resisted Bagration. The French would then retire towards Brünn and be destroyed by cavalry on their right flank as they fled for safety.
Langeron claims that when Weyrother finished the three-hour exposition, he asked what would happen should Napoleon forestall the Allied move by an attack across the Pratzen Plateau; and he maintains that Weyrother dismissed the point with a shrug of the shoulders as an irrelevant excursion into the hypothetical.17 But the other Generals resigned themselves to accepting a plan devised by the man to whom Alexander had given his confidence. Weyrother had spent the day in the saddle reconnoitring the region and he delivered his briefing with meticulous attention to detail. It was far too late to modify the operational orders; and Kutuzov, for one, believed that the prime need at the moment was a sound night’s sleep. Shortly after midnight the conference abruptly broke up. Only Weyrother and Dolgoruky held high hopes for what would happen when daylight came.
That night there was little sleep for officers or men in either of the opposing armies. Around one o’clock someone in the French camp noticed that the temperature was six below freezing (Centigrade). Outside, hundreds of camp-fires formed parallel avenues of light across the rolling meadows between the villages. There was a crisp breeze and, down to the south, mist drifted over the ponds and swamps beyond Telnitz but elsewhere a good moon picked out the gentle slope running down from the Pratzen Plateau to the Goldbach stream. The stillness of the night magnified every sound, so that the exchange of shots between an Austrian patrol and a Franco-Italian outpost four miles from the centre of the armies was loud enough to put Napoleon on the alert and disturb Dolgoruky, at Russian headquarters across the valley.
The Battle of Austerlitz
An hour later the breeze had dropped and thickening mist blotted out the moonlight, playing weird tricks on strained eyes watching for movements in the opposing line. Even Napoleon was anxious, especially for his weak position around Telnitz, and he rode out to some of the more distant bivouacs, once narrowly missing an encounter with a Cossack patrol. At one point, he dismounted and, while walking towards sentries of one of the French infantry regiments, caught his foot in a tree root and stumbled. Immediately, there was a commotion among the French infantrymen, who rushed forward with torches and shouts of Vive l’Empereur. Someone remembered it was the anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation and the cry was taken up by other troops in the French line. So great was the noise and excitement, especially among the men of the Guard, that the alarm was sounded, three miles to the east, in the village of Krzenowitz, where Dolgoruky awoke Alexander and one of the Austrian aides hurried off to get the Emperor Francis into his uniform.18 No one troubled to ride to Birnbaum and awaken Kutuzov. Before either sovereign could mount into the saddle, Bagration had come across from the right wing of the Allied army, and urged everyone to snatch a few more hours’ sleep: it was only the French steeling themselves for battle with a show of loyalty at three in the morning.
At half-past six, strictly according to Weyrother’s plan, the first infantry – Austrians attached to Buxhöwden’s largely Russian army corps – attacked the Franco-Italian outposts before Telnitz. Nearly five miles away Alexander and his aides-de-camp were in the saddle waiting for news. By now, with the slight rise in temperature which preceded dawn, there was a grey fog everywhere; and, for more than an hour, the little group of men at Krzenowitz saw nothing of the battle apart from the constant passage of cavalry and guns moving to the south, spectral columns in the mist. Confused reports seeped through: progress against Telnitz was slow, but by eight o’clock it was clear the Allies had established themselves across the Goldbach, even though Prince Johann von Liechtenstein had mistaken his objective in the fog and sent his Hussars forward to the wrong village. Slowly, surrounded by a guard from the Semeonovsky Regiment, Alexander and his retinue, with the Emperor Francis in attendance, began to ride up the slope to the village of Pratzen. Suddenly, beginning in the east behind the Russian positions, the sun broke through and the fog dispersed. It rolled back as if it were a drop-curtain revealing to the French as it ascended an almost deserted stage, for by now most of the Allied units had moved off to the south, intent on encircling Napoleon’s army. At the same time, the mist continued to shroud the principal French positions. Perhaps for as long as half an hour, Alexander and those around him remained unaware how dangerously exp
osed they were to an enemy attack.
Russian survivors, looking back on the battle of Austerlitz once the campaign was over, found memory playing tricks when they sought to distinguish the events of the following five hours.19 On the eastern edge of the plateau, between Pratzen village and the approaches to Austerlitz itself, dramatic episodes followed each other with such disconcerting speed that we are left with a record of isolated incidents, scenes sharply defined as in a Shakespearean chronicle and with all the dramatist’s imprecision over the passage of time. No one is certain, for example, when precisely Alexander rebuked Kutuzov for his inactivity. It cannot, however, have been long after eight o’clock, as the exchange of words themselves show. Why, asked Alexander was Kutuzov retaining General Miloradovich’s division beside him in front of Krzenowitz rather than riding with them across the Pratzen Plateau? ‘I am waiting, Sire’, replied Kutuzov patiently, ‘since not all the columns have yet formed up.’ But it was not a good enough explanation for Alexander, who exclaimed haughtily, ‘Come now, Mikhail Ilarionovich, we are not on the parade-ground where a march-past does not begin until all the troops are assembled.’ ‘Exactly, Sire,’ responded Kutuzov. ‘It is because we are not on parade that I am waiting. But if you wish me to go forward …’20 And thus the whole column moved across the Plateau, with the Marshal slowly following Miloradovich. Kutuzov was still worried over what orders Napoleon would give when he saw the main Russo-Austrian force wheeling round his right flank. But, since the Tsar would not permit his commander-in-chief to wait longer, the Marshal set out for Pratzen with Alexander watching, erect and motionless astride his chestnut mare.
