Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace

by Dominic Lieven

  With his cup already overflowing, just after Vandamme had been dispatched to Teplitz the emperor received news of Blücher’s victory at the river Katzbach. Even his normally restrained entourage burst into resounding cheers. Riding back to Teplitz, Alexander overtook carts carrying the Russian wounded. ‘The emperor rode up to them, thanked them, asked them how he could help them, and called them his comrades in arms.’ To do him justice, if he had never quite shared his men’s hunger or their bivouacs, he had frequently risked his life on the battlefield and he had carried mental burdens of which few of them could conceive. To his dying day Alexander talked frequently of the two days of battle near Kulm. In time he was to witness other victories and triumphs, ‘but the battle of Kulm remained always his favourite memory’.84

  Rewards poured down on the heads of generals and even soldiers, with the partial exception of the brave men of Eugen’s and Helfreich’s divisions, whose enormous services and sacrifices were cast into the shade by the attention given to the Guards. Barclay de Tolly was awarded the Grand Cross of St George, the soldier’s ultimate accolade, granted to only thirteen military leaders in the whole history of the Russian Empire.85 Barclay richly deserved this award for everything he had done for the army as both war minister and commander-in-chief. Never did he deserve it less than in August 1813, however, when his performance was often mediocre. In this respect Barclay was rather typical of the allied leadership during the Dresden campaign.

  Undoubtedly the allies had been extremely lucky. There can have been few victories in history won by such a chaotic and inefficient command structure. Not merely could the campaign have ended in disaster, in all logic it ought to have done so once the retreat from Dresden began. The allies owed much to luck, though also to the courage and endurance of their troops, especially of the Russians on the first day of the battle of Kulm. Some of the allied generals had performed well. Kleist had shown real courage in advancing into Vandamme’s rear. Ermolov displayed inspiring leadership on the first day at Kulm, and Colloredo did well on the second. Above all, Eugen of Württemberg stands out as the allied general who contributed most to making victory possible.

  But Napoleon and his generals had also made a big contribution. In Vandamme’s case this had less to do with his performance at Kulm than in the three days before the battle, when he had allowed the Russians to hold his far larger corps at bay and to sneak back to Bohemia under his nose. Saint-Cyr was also to blame for losing touch with Kleist’s corps and thereby allowing it to intervene in the battle of Kulm. Above all, however, the disaster was Napoleon’s fault. He had explicitly ordered Vandamme to advance into Bohemia and equally explicitly had ordered the Young Guard to remain on the Teplitz highway right back at Pirna. These two commands were the key reasons for Vandamme’s destruction. More important than the loss of a single corps was the fact that in the three days after the battle of Dresden Napoleon had it within his power to destroy the main allied army and end the war. Not merely did he fail to grasp this opportunity but he made a big contribution to turning possible total victory into a very serious defeat.

  As usual, Napoleon remained calm in the face of defeat. Kulm was not the only blow. At the same time news came in of MacDonald’s rout at the river Katzbach on 26 August and of the defeat of Marshal Oudinot’s advance on Berlin at Gross Beeren by Bernadotte’s Army of the North on 23 August.

  Bernadotte’s army was made up of three ‘national’ contingents: Swedes, Russians and Prussians. Of these the Swedes were the smallest and the Prussians the largest. In the middle were Winzengerode’s Russian Army Corps of 32,000 men and 120 guns. Histories of the Army of the North’s 1813 campaign are always dominated by the Prussian perspective. Not only were the Prussians the largest contingent but it was also they who played much the biggest role in the two battles which defeated Napoleon’s attempts to seize Berlin: at Gross Beeren on 23 August and at Dennewitz on 6 September. The commander of Winzengerode’s infantry was Count Mikhail Vorontsov, an outstanding general who distinguished himself on many occasions in 1812–14. The only time in which he and his troops had no chance to show their quality was, however, during the autumn 1813 campaign. By contrast, the role of the Prussian forces in the battles to defend their capital understandably became part of Prusso-German mythology.

  So too did the ferocious conflicts between Bernadotte and his Prussian subordinates. The senior Prussian officer in Bernadotte’s army was Friedrich Wilhelm von Bülow.

  Bülow was an easier subordinate to deal with than Yorck, but that was not saying much. He was a clever, honest and well-educated man and a very competent general: he was also blunt, outspoken, self-confident and possessed of a violent temper. Bülow had little time for Frenchmen and none at all for the voluble Gascon renegade who had somehow clambered next to the Swedish throne and who, in Bülow’s view, seemed certain to sell out the Swedes, the allies and anyone else who got in the way of his ambition. It did not help relations that after the rout at Jena-Auerstadt in 1806 Bülow’s detachment had in fact surrendered to Bernadotte’s corps. According to one neutral historian, the Prussian general never forgot this humiliation.86

  Bülow and Bernadotte had different views on how best to fight the war. Left to his own devices Bernadotte would have staged a fighting retreat towards his bases on the Baltic coast in the event of an advance by Napoleon, which he was convinced would soon materialize. He was cautious, nervous and very much in awe of Napoleon’s genius. Bülow, far more confident and aggressive, was not just determined to defend Berlin but wanted to attack the French forces threatening the city and keep them as far from the capital as possible. As often happened in the allied armies in 1812–14 differences of opinion on strategy were quickly interpreted in political terms and seen as betrayal of the common cause. The events in Hamburg in the spring had confirmed Prussian suspicions that Bernadotte was not committed to the liberation of Germany and might even be constrained by his own dreams of replacing Napoleon on the throne of France. The commander-in-chief’s caution in the autumn campaign was soon interpreted in this light.87

  Some Russians shared this dim view of Bernadotte. On 3 September Alexander’s representative at Blücher’s headquarters wrote to Petr Volkonsky to protest at Bernadotte’s inactivity. As always, such letters to Volkonsky were really for the attention of Alexander: Volkonsky was merely a filter. Baron Tuyll wrote that ‘the crown prince of Sweden has not taken one step forward in nine days, that is to say since 23 August, though according to the overall plan of operations this was the moment to undertake a vigorous offensive’.88

  The emperor’s chief representative at Bernadotte’s headquarters was Charles-André Pozzo di Borgo. Alexander’s instructions to Pozzo were to make sure that Bernadotte used his army to serve the common cause and not purely Swedish interests, let alone any hopes Bernadotte might have about his future role in French politics. So long as the latter were simply Bernadotte’s happy daydreams they could be indulged, as must also be Sweden’s legitimate claim to Norway after the war. But Pozzo was warned to be very much on his guard against Bernadotte and to ally himself with Sir Charles Stewart, the British representative at the crown prince’s headquarters. Alexander told Pozzo that in this instance Russian and British interests were identical: they were to ensure that Bernadotte used all the troops entrusted to him in the common cause and did not either paralyse them or misuse them for purely Swedish and secondary operations. Pozzo was the perfect man for this commission. By 1812 Alexander had gathered into his entourage a considerable gang of what one might describe as dyed-in-the-wool foreign anti-Bonapartists. The Baron vom Stein was the most famous of these men and Winzengerode was also a charter-member of the group. The anti-Bonapartist credentials of Pozzo di Borgo were soundest of all: of Corsican descent, he had been an enemy of Napoleon in French and Corsican politics since 1793. Pozzo was just the right bloodhound to set on that veteran of French revolutionary politics, the former republican, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte. Not surprisingly, both Sir Ch
arles Stewart and Baron vom Stein thought highly of Pozzo.89

  The Russian troops in Bernadotte’s army seem on the contrary to have liked the crown prince and the feeling was mutual. With fine tact Bernadotte was much inclined to tell the Prussians and Swedes that they should model themselves on their splendid Russian comrades-in-arms. His headquarters were always guarded by Russian troops, whom he treated indulgently, making sure they were well fed and got their vodka. He tried hard to ensure that all his soldiers were quartered whenever possible in houses, making them bivouac only when strictly necessary. The Russian soldiers appreciated his attentiveness and rather took to Bernadotte’s Gascon flamboyance and eccentricity. Bernadotte was also polite and popular in the circle of his Russian senior officers. Vladimir Löwenstern wrote in his memoirs that Bernadotte conducted a model campaign in the autumn of 1813 despite the difficulties of his position in front of Berlin. As to Aleksandr Chernyshev, who commanded the Russian ‘flying detachments’, and Mikhail Vorontsov, they seem to have reserved their bile for Winzengerode, whom they correctly saw as a third-rate general, much inferior to themselves.90

  Winzengerode himself reported to Alexander that Bernadotte’s headquarters’ staff were slow-moving. Like virtually all observers, he complained that the crown prince ‘acts with great caution’ after the battle of Gross Beeren and had failed to exploit the allied victory. On the whole, however, Winzengerode seems to have enjoyed good relations with Bernadotte. Like his commander-in-chief, Winzengerode was not at all anxious to advance boldly into Napoleon’s lair. In addition, he had his own axe to grind as regards the Prussians, above all because of their failure to supply his troops adequately, as they were supposed to do according to the Russo-Prussian convention. Winzengerode’s complaints on this score began in July and continued throughout the campaign. In one of his earliest letters, for example, he complained that not only his own corps but even Russian batteries lent to the Prussians to make up for their shortage of artillery were going unfed.91

  Faced by Prussian failure to supply their troops adequately, the Russians resorted to their usual ploy of squeezing the Poles. In the first week of August Barclay de Tolly had ordered another large requisition in Poland, designed to tap the current harvest and above all to feed the Russian corps in the Army of Silesia. The levy included huge amounts of flour for the soldiers and oats for the Russian horses, and 295,000 litres of vodka. The Prussian government appealed to Barclay to use some of this food to lessen the burden on the Berlin region of feeding Winzengerode’s troops and their horses. One week after Barclay issued his orders for the new requisition, part of the levy was diverted to Winzengerode. This included more than 500,000 kilograms of groats for the men’s porridge, 87,000 litres of vodka and 524,000 kilograms of meat.92

  Immediately the armistice had ended on 10 August Winzengerode ordered raiding and scouting parties to move out around the western flank of Oudinot’s army and into its rear. Rumours that Napoleon himself was moving up towards Oudinot’s headquarters even persuaded the Russian commander that he might seize the French emperor. Löwenstern was given a detachment of Cossacks and the task of bagging Napoleon. Moving southwards before swinging into Oudinot’s rear, Löwenstern’s Cossacks promptly pillaged a juicy manor house they encountered en route. Löwenstern records that he gave the men one hundred lashes each and degraded an NCO but he could not get most of the plunder back because his Cossacks were much too experienced in hiding it away. Löwenstern’s scouts quickly discovered that Napoleon was far away in Silesia. Much closer was Oudinot’s weakly guarded treasury, on which Löwenstern pounced with glee. The Russian colonel was something of a pirate by nature. In Petersburg before the war he won and more often lost vast sums at cards. During the war he combined great courage and boldness in action with the seduction of women all the way from Vilna to Paris. Even so, he was in his way a rather honourable pirate. Although he records that prisoners of war were a big nuisance for a raiding party, he always took them along with him and he despised Figner for murdering his French captives.

  Oudinot’s treasury contained the equivalent of 2.4 million paper rubles in coin. Löwenstern insists in his memoirs that by Russian military convention the treasure was his, since he had captured it sword in hand. Getting it home safely was quite a challenge. Judging by Löwenstern’s memoirs, evading the French was less of a problem than beating off ‘allies’ anxious to share his spoils. The first threat was his own Cossacks. Russian military convention may (or may not) have made Löwenstern the rightful owner of his spoil but Cossack convention was more democratic. The Cossacks were the descendants of full-time plunderers who traditionally divided up their booty equally, with a special bonus for their commander. No one had quite got round to codifying how this tradition might be modified when in the service of the emperor. To avoid misunderstandings, Löwenstern gave each Cossack 100 silver francs and promised them the same again when they got the booty back to Berlin. His next success was to outwit and evade the neighbouring raiding party of Cossacks under Colonel Prendel, who felt an urgent need to help protect Löwenstern’s loot from the awful possibility of recapture by the French.

  Having got back to Berlin Löwenstern then faced the most dangerous enemy of all in the person of the city’s fierce military governor, General L’Estocq. At a time when Prussia was desperate for cash, L’Estocq saw no reason to allow piracy to succeed untaxed and under his nose. There followed a strange hide-and-seek across Berlin as the governor tried to discover Löwenstern’s carts and their contents. By the time he found them Löwenstern had his loot safely hidden. He then paid off a number of possible threats to his haul. In his memoirs he adds that old acquaintances popped up from all sides and ‘it was a real joy to me to be useful to my friends’. Prince Serge Volkonsky, Winzengerode’s duty general, was very much an old friend. He records that Löwenstern’s haul of foreign coin was so enormous that it depressed the exchange rate of the Prussian taler in the entire Berlin region. Judging by Löwenstern’s memoirs, business also increased dramatically among the best whorehouses and champagne-sellers in the Prussian capital.93

  Meanwhile Napoleon was making the first of his two attempts to take Berlin, led in this case by Marshal Oudinot. Napoleon’s obsession with capturing Berlin was fortunate for the allies. Had he simply masked Bernadotte’s army he could have transferred substantial forces elsewhere. Bernadotte is most unlikely to have gone over to a bold offensive. He would instead have sat down to besiege Wittenberg, since he was determined to hold a fortified crossing over the Elbe before moving across the river and exposing himself to a sudden counter-thrust from his former boss. Not merely did Napoleon order first Oudinot and then Ney to march on Berlin but he also gave them too few soldiers of too low quality to perform their assigned task. He did this partly because he despised the Prussian infantry and discounted its potential on the battlefield.

  Oudinot bungled his advance and was defeated at Gross Beeren on 23 August by Bülow’s corps. On 27 August, the day the allied retreat from Dresden began, a strong division under General Girard, advancing from Wittenberg to support Oudinot, was annihilated at Hagelberg. The Russians were not involved at Gross Beeren, with the important exception of Russian batteries permanently attached to Bülow’s corps to make up for the Prussians’ own shortage of artillery. Winzengerode’s corps stood at the right of the allied line covering Berlin, whereas Oudinot attempted to break through on the left. The battle was over before the Russians had time to intervene. The French commander advanced in such a manner that his columns were widely separated and unable to support each other. Therefore the two Prussian corps of Bülow and Tauenzien were more than adequate to defeat him without Russian help. At Hagelberg, however, Chernyshev threw the enemy into confusion by charging with his Cossacks unexpectedly into their rear in the middle of the battle and made a big contribution to their disintegration.94

  The second French advance on Berlin was led by Marshal Ney. It was defeated at the battle of Dennewitz on 6 September. O
nce again the French advanced against the allied left, which was manned by Bülow and Tauenzien’s Prussians. On this occasion, as at Gross Beeren, Winzengerode’s corps was deployed on the allied right and only part of its cavalry and artillery participated in the battle. Even they became involved only in its final stages. No one could blame the Russians for this. Their deployment and movements were subject to Bernadotte’s orders. But the crown prince’s actions have ever since been subject to severe criticism, especially of course from historians of a Prusso-German nationalist persuasion. On the other hand, Bernadotte has also had numerous defenders, including probably the best historian of the campaign, the Prussian general staff colonel and military historian, Rudolph von Friederich.95

  Bernadotte’s enemies argue that he moved too slowly to the Prussians’ aid, left the dirty work to them, and then took credit for himself, the Swedes and the Russians. His supporters claim on the contrary that he had no alternative but to deploy on a broad front to cover the various possible lines of advance on Berlin, and that once he discovered that Ney was moving against Bülow he came to the Prussians’ aid with all possible speed. They stress the big contribution made by the Russian cavalry and artillery in the final stage of the battle. They also argue that even if Bülow had been forced to fall back at that time, by then the exhausted enemy army would merely have advanced into the jaws of the Russians and Swedes.

  No one denies that the Prussian troops fought with great courage for many hours. Bülow himself directed his men with skill, calm and good timing. The Landwehr regiments performed far better than the militia units in Kleist’s corps at the battle of Kulm one week before. Also unarguable is the fact that if Prussian courage and grit to a great extent won the battle of Dennewitz, the French commanders did much to lose it. Though in principle the Prussians should have been heavily outnumbered, in practice Ney never succeeded in getting all three of his corps into action on the battlefield. The story was a rather familiar one. Ney was present on the northern half of the battlefield. He became wholly absorbed in the struggle going on around him and lost his sense of the overall situation, summoning the whole of Oudinot’s corps to his own assistance and thereby exposing Reynier’s Saxon corps on his southern wing to defeat. Oudinot, deeply insulted at being removed from overall command, was happy to contribute to his successor’s defeat by dumb obedience to stupid orders. Bülow took advantage of Oudinot’s march northwards to launch a counter-attack against Reynier’s Saxons. Shortly afterwards the Russian cavalry and horse artillery drove into Reynier’s open left flank, turning defeat into rout. Ivan Liprandi wrote that the concentrated fire they brought down on the wavering Saxons was the most professional performance by the Russian artillery which he witnessed in the course of the entire war.96