Napoleon

by Andrew Roberts

  Even had Oudinot succeeded in capturing Berlin it would not have guaranteed victory in 1813 any more than it had in 1806; had Schwarzenberg been comprehensively defeated by the combined French forces, Bernadotte could not have defended Berlin in any case. Although Napoleon knew the campaign was going to be decided in Saxony or northern Bohemia, he failed to give Oudinot more than a skeleton force to protect the Elbe from Bernadotte and defend his rear.9 Leaving Davout to counter non-existent threats from north-west Germany was also a shocking waste of the marshal who had best proved his ability in independent command.

  On August 15, his forty-fourth birthday, Napoleon left Dresden for Silesia, where he hoped to strike Blücher, who had captured Breslau. On the way he was joined at Bautzen by Murat, who was rewarded for his unexpected re-adherence to Napoleon’s cause with his old position in overall charge of the cavalry. That day Napoleon told Oudinot that Girard’s division at Magdeburg was 8,000 to 9,000 strong, which was true. The very next day he assured Macdonald it numbered 12,000.10

  • • •

  ‘It is he who wanted war,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise in reference to her father, ‘through ambition and unbounded greed. Events will decide the matter.’11 From then on he referred to Emperor Francis only as ‘ton père’ or ‘Papa François’, as when writing on August 17, ‘Deceived by Metternich, your father has sided with my enemies.’12 As regent of France and a good wife, Marie Louise was loyal to her husband and adopted country, rather than to her father and her fatherland.

  Putting their Trachenberg strategy into effect as agreed, the Allies fell back in front of Napoleon’s force while seeking out those of his principal lieutenants. Blücher was thus ready to take on Ney between the Bober river and the Katzbach on August 16, but he pulled back when Napoleon moved up with large elements of his main field army. Oudinot, whose advance on Berlin was slowed by torrential rain that all but halted his artillery, was pounced upon by Bülow’s Prussians and Count Stedingk’s Swedish corps in three separate actions from August 21 to 23 at Gross-Beeren, and defeated. He withdrew to Wittenberg rather than, as Napoleon would have preferred, Luckau. ‘It’s truly difficult to have fewer brains than the Duke of Reggio,’ Napoleon said to Berthier, after which he despatched Ney to take over Oudinot’s command.13

  By August 20 Napoleon was in Bohemia, hoping to impede Schwarzenberg’s movement towards Prague. ‘I drove out General Neipperg,’ he reported to Marie Louise that day. ‘The Russians and Prussians have entered Bohemia.’14 (Only a year later, the dashing one-eyed Austrian General Adam von Neipperg would exact a horribly personal revenge.) Hearing of a major attack on Dresden by the Army of Bohemia, Napoleon turned his army around on the 22nd and dashed back there, leaving Macdonald to watch Blücher. As he did so he wrote to Saint-Cyr: ‘If the enemy has effectively carried out a big movement towards Dresden, I consider this to be very happy news, and that will even force me within a few days to have a great battle, which will decide things for good.’15 The same day he also wrote to his grand chamberlain, the Comte de Montesquiou, expressing his dissatisfaction with his birthday festivities in Paris. ‘I was much displeased to learn that matters were so badly managed on the 15th of August that the Empress was detained for a considerable time listening to bad music,’ he wrote, ‘and that consequently the public were kept waiting two hours for the fireworks.’16

  • • •

  The battle of Dresden was fought on August 26–27, 1813. Napoleon’s intelligence service had accurately warned of the huge Allied forces converging on the city. By the 19th, Barclay de Tolly’s Russians had joined Schwarzenberg to form a vast army 237,770 strong – comprising 172,000 infantry, 43,500 cavalry, 7,200 Cossacks and 15,000 artillery, with a colossal 698 guns. This enlarged Army of Bohemia marched into Saxony on August 21 in five columns. Wittgenstein’s column of 28,000 men headed for Dresden. Since Napoleon controlled all the bridges over the Elbe, however, the French were able to march on both sides of the river.

  At Dresden itself the Old City defences, effectively a semicircle anchored at each end on the Elbe, were held by three divisions of Saint-Cyr’s corps, roughly 19,000 infantry and 5,300 cavalry. The city’s garrison of eight battalions manned the walls. Napoleon arrived at the gallop at 10 a.m. on the 26th and approved Saint-Cyr’s deployments. Despite suffering from stomach pains that induced vomiting before the battle, he fired off his instructions. Guns were placed in each of the five large redoubts outside the Old City walls and eight inside the New City. The Old City’s streets and gates were barricaded, all trees within 600 yards of the walls were cut down and a battery of thirty guns was placed on the right bank of the river to fire into Wittgenstein’s flank.17 Fortunately for those making these preparations, the slowness of General von Klenau’s Austrian column meant that the general attack had to take place the next day.

  Although Tsar Alexander, General Jean Moreau (who had left his English exile to witness the great assault on Napoleon) and General Henri de Jomini (Ney’s Swiss chief-of-staff who had defected to the Russians during the armistice) all thought Napoleon’s position too strong to attack, King Frederick William of Prussia argued that it would damage army morale not to, and insisted that the Allies gave battle. Although both sides were ready to fight from 9.30 a.m. nothing happened until mid-afternoon, when Napoleon ordered Saint-Cyr to retake a factory just outside the city walls. This minor advance was mistaken by the Allied commanders as the signal for the battle to begin, which it therefore did essentially by accident.

  Wittgenstein was in action by 4 p.m., advancing under heavy artillery fire as the Young Guard met the Russian attack. Five Jäger (elite light infantry) regiments and one of hussars attacked the Gross-garten, a formal baroque garden outside the city walls, with infantry and artillery support. The French defended the Gross-garten stubbornly, and managed to bring up a battery through the Prinz Anton Gardens to hit the enemy in the flank. Two Russian attack columns were meanwhile caught by murderous artillery fire from beyond the Elbe. By the end of the day each side held about half of the Gross-garten. (A fine view of the battlefield can be seen today from the 300-foot dome of the Frauenkirche.) Marshal Ney led a charge at Redoubt No. 5 composed of Young Guard units and men of Saint-Cyr’s corps, which forced the Austrians to feed in reserves, but even these couldn’t prevent an entire Hessian battalion from being surrounded and forced to surrender. When the first day’s fighting ended at nightfall, the Allies had lost 4,000 killed and wounded, twice as many as the French.

  Napoleon was reinforced by Victor’s corps during the night. They went up to Friedrichstadt as Marmont moved to the centre, and the Old Guard crossed the Elbe to form a central reserve. Using the corps system effectively, Napoleon now had massed 155,000 men for the next day’s fighting. It poured with rain all night and there was a thick fog on the morning of August 27. As it cleared, Napoleon spotted that the Allied army was divided by the deep Weisseritz ravine, which cut off its left wing under Count Ignaz Gyulai from its right and centre.18 He decided on a major attack at 7 a.m. with almost all his cavalry and two corps of infantry. Murat, wearing a gold-embroidered cloak over his shoulders and a plume in his headdress, had sixty-eight squadrons and thirty guns of the 1st Cavalry Corps ready for the attack on Gyulai’s corps, along with thirty-six battalions and sixty-eight guns of Victor’s corps.

  By 10 a.m. the Austrians were under huge pressure despite the fact that Klenau had finally rejoined the Army of Bohemia. Victor’s corps and General Étienne de Bordessoulle’s heavy cavalry succeeded in turning their flank. At 11 a.m. Murat ordered a general assault, charging forward with the cry ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ Around Lobtau the Austrian infantry stood at bay, with good artillery support, streets barricaded and houses loopholed for muskets. Their skirmishers were driven back and through the patchy fog they saw the massive attack columns of Murat’s infantry advancing. Under heavy artillery fire, the French made for the gaps between the villages and got past them, before
turning to attack them from the rear. Although the Austrians made counter-attacks, their line of retreat was relentlessly compromised.

  In the centre, the Austrians and Prussians were ready from 4 a.m., expecting to renew the fight. Marmont’s task was to fix them in place while the French wings defeated the enemy. By 8 a.m. Saint-Cyr was attacking the Prussian 12th Brigade on the Strehlen heights, forcing them back to Leubnitz, where they were joined by the Russian 5th Division. This stubborn fighting was mainly done by bayonet as the heavy rain soaked the muskets’ firing-pans despite their protective frizzens.

  By 10 a.m. Napoleon had massed a large battery on the Strehlen heights, from where it dominated the centre of the battlefield. As Saint-Cyr paused to reorganize, he was counter-attacked by Austrian infantry. He tried to push on but the sheer weight of Allied artillery fire pinned him back. Napoleon was by his side at noon and ordered him to keep up the pressure, while the Young Guard was pitched into Leubnitz to try to wrest the village from the Silesian infantry. At 1 p.m. Napoleon was opposite the Allied centre-right, in the middle of a formidable artillery exchange where he personally directed some horse artillery that largely silenced many of the Austrian guns. During this firefight Moreau had both legs smashed by a cannonball. By the early afternoon the Prussian cavalry was beginning to move away to the right. Saint-Cyr’s pressure was slowly tipping the balance.

  On Napoleon’s left flank, Ney began his attack at 7.30 a.m. As the Prussians had already been driven out of the Gross-garten, he used the garden to mask part of his advance. Napoleon arrived at 11 a.m. and encouraged the enthusiastic attack of the tirailleurs (skirmishers), although they were occasionally checked by Prussian and Russian cavalry. Despite Barclay de Tolly having no fewer than sixty-five squadrons of Russian and twenty of Prussian cavalry to hand, he didn’t commit them. In the pouring rain this was a fight of bayonet and sabre, punctuated by blasts of artillery. Schwarzenberg contemplated a major counter-attack, only to find all his units already too heavily engaged, just as Napoleon had intended.

  By 2 p.m. Napoleon was back in the centre forming a battery of thirty-two 12-pounders near Rachnitz to smash the Allied centre. At 5.30 p.m. Schwarzenberg received the news that Vandamme had crossed the Elbe at Pirna and was marching on his rear. He now had no alternative but to give up the fight altogether. (Vandamme was a reckless swashbuckler of whom Napoleon said that every army needed one, but that if there were two he would have to shoot one of them.19) By 6 p.m. the French had halted in the position occupied by the Allies that morning. Although both sides had lost around 10,000 men, Murat’s victory on the right flank had led to the capture of 13,000 Austrians, and the French captured 40 guns.20 When he was told that Schwarzenberg had been killed in the battle, Napoleon had exclaimed, ‘Schwarzenberg has purged the curse!’ He hoped his death would finally lift the shadow of the fire at his marriage celebrations in 1810. As he explained later: ‘I was delighted; not that I wished the death of the poor man, but because it took a weight off my heart.’21 Only later did he find out to his profound chagrin that the dead general was not Schwarzenberg but Moreau. ‘That rascal Bonaparte is always lucky,’ Moreau wrote to his wife just before he expired from his wounds on September 2. ‘Excuse my scrawl. I love and embrace you with all my heart.’22 It was brave of the renegade general to apologize for his handwriting while dying, but he was wrong about Napoleon’s extraordinary run of good luck.

  • • •

  ‘I’ve just gained a great victory at Dresden over the Austrian, Russian and Prussian armies under the three sovereigns in person,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise. ‘I am riding off in pursuit.’23 The next day he corrected himself, saying ‘Papa François had the good sense not to come along.’ He then said Alexander and Frederick William ‘fought very well and retired in all haste’. Napoleon was harder on the Austrians. ‘The troops of Papa François have never been so bad,’ he told his Austrian-born wife. ‘They put up a wretched fight everywhere. I have taken 25,000 prisoners, thirty colours and a great many guns.’24 In fact it had been the other way around; the Allied sovereigns and generals had failed their men strategically and tactically in their positioning and lack of co-ordination, and it was only the stubborn, brave troops who had saved the two-day battle from becoming a rout.

  Riding over the battlefield in the driving rain worsened Napoleon’s cold, and he was struck with vomiting and diarrhoea after the battle. ‘You must go back and change,’ an old grognard called out to him from the ranks, after which the Emperor finally went back to Dresden for a hot bath.25 At 7 p.m. he told Cambacérès, ‘I am so tired and so preoccupied that I cannot write at length; [Maret] will do so for me. Things are going very well here.’26 He couldn’t afford to be ill for long. ‘In my position,’ he had written in a general note to his senior commanders only a week earlier, ‘any plan where I am not myself in the centre is inadmissible. Any plan which removes me to a distance establishes a regular war in which the superiority of the enemy cavalry, in numbers, and even in generals, would completely ruin me.’27 Here was an open recognition that his marshals couldn’t be expected to pull off the coups necessary to win battles against forces 70 per cent larger than theirs – indeed that most of them to his mind were barely capable of independent command.

  This judgement was largely confirmed when on August 26 – the first day of the battle of Dresden – in Prussian Silesia on the Katzbach river (present-day Kaczawa) Marshal Macdonald, with 67,000 men of the French army and the Rhine Confederation, was crushed by Blücher’s Army of Silesia.28 On St Helena Napoleon would confirm his opinion: ‘Macdonald and others like him were good when they knew where they were and under my orders; further away it was a different matter.’29 The very next day General Girard’s corps was effectively destroyed at Hagelberg on the 27th by the Prussian Landwehr, which had only recently exchanged its pikes for muskets, and some Cossacks. Girard’s stricken and much depleted force made it back to Magdeburg only with the greatest difficulty. On August 29 General Jacques Puthod’s 17th Division of 3,000 men was trapped up against the flooded River Bober at Plagwitz, fired off all their ammunition and had to surrender en masse. They lost three eagles, one of which was found in the river after the battle.30

  Hoping to hold up Schwarzenberg’s retreat into Bohemia, Napoleon ordered Vandamme to leave Peterswalde with his force of 37,000 men and to ‘penetrate into Bohemia and throw back the Prince of Württemberg’. The goal was to cut the enemy lines of communication with Tetschen, Aussig and Teplitz. But Barclay, the Prussian General Kleist and Constantine together had twice Vandamme’s numbers and although his troops fought valiantly and exacted a heavy toll he was forced to surrender on the 30th near the hamlet of Kulm with 10,000 of his men. Napoleon had sent Murat, Saint-Cyr and Marmont to attack the Austrian rearguard at Töplitz as Vandamme bravely held up its vanguard, but they couldn’t save him. Napoleon himself was ill and unable to leave his bedroom; even on the afternoon of the 29th he could only get as far as Pirna.31 When Jean-Baptiste Corbineau arrived the next day with the disastrous news Napoleon could only say: ‘That’s war: very high in the morning and very low in the evening: from triumph to failure is only one step.’32

  By the end of August all the advantage Napoleon had gained from his victory at Dresden had been thrown away by his lieutenants. Yet there was more bad news to come. Having sent Ney off to resume the attack on Berlin to recover the situation after Oudinot’s defeat by Bernadotte, on September 6 Ney and Oudinot together were defeated by General von Bülow at the battle of Dennewitz in Brandenburg. Bavaria then declared her neutrality, which made other German states consider their position, especially once the Allies proclaimed the abolition of the Confederation of the Rhine at the end of the month.

  Napoleon spent most of September in Dresden, occasionally dashing out to engage any Allied forces that came too close, but incapable of making any large, campaign-winning strokes because of the Allies’ determination to avoid giving him battle, while
continuing to concentrate on his subordinates. These were frustrating weeks for him, and his impatience and distemper would occasionally show. When General Samuel-François l’Héritier de Chézelles’ 2,000 men of the 5th Cavalry Corps were attacked by 600 Cossacks between Dresden and Torgau, he wrote to Berthier that Chézelles’ men should have fought them more aggressively even if they ‘had neither sabres nor pistols, and were armed only with broomsticks’.33

  This kind of fighting was bad for morale, and on September 27 an entire Saxon battalion deserted to Bernadotte, under whom they had fought at Wagram. In Paris Marie Louise asked for a sénatus-consulte for a levy of 280,000 conscripts, no fewer than 160,000 of them an advance on the 1815 class year, the 1814 year having already been called up. Yet there was already widespread opposition to further conscription over large areas of France.

  General Thiébault, a divisional commander in the campaign, accurately summed up the situation in the autumn of 1813:

  The arena of this gigantic struggle had increased in an alarming fashion. It was no longer the kind of ground of which advantage could be taken by some clever, secret, sudden manoeuvre, such as could be executed in a few hours, or at most in one or two days. Napoleon . . . could not turn the enemy’s flank as at Marengo or Jena, or even wreck an army, as at Wagram, by destroying one of its wings. Bernadotte to the north with 160,000 men, Blücher to the east with 160,000, Schwarzenberg to the south with 190,000, while presenting a threatening front, kept at such a distance as to leave no opening for one of those unforeseen and rapid movements which, deciding a campaign or a war by a single battle, had made Napoleon’s reputation. The man was annihilated by the presence of space. Again, Napoleon had never till then had more than one opposing army to deal with at one time; now he had three, and he could not attack one without exposing his flank to the others.34