Prince Schwarzenberg’s operational plan for the battle seemed guaranteed, however, to ensure that Napoleon need not worry about defeat. The commander-in-chief could not be blamed for the fact that neither Bernadotte nor Bennigsen would reach the battlefield on 16 October. Bernadotte’s hesitations have already been explained and Bennigsen’s Army of Poland was advancing from Dresden as quickly as possible. Schwarzenberg was to blame, however, for planning to deploy Blücher’s troops and most of the Army of Bohemia west of Leipzig, where the terrain ensured that most of them would never get to grips with the enemy. The core of the Austrian army was supposed to advance over the Pleisse at Connewitz and Dölitz. Subsequently it would roll up the right flank of Napoleon’s line east of the river and cut off its retreat to Leipzig. This made no sense. Getting across the Pleisse would at best be very costly and time-consuming. Even if ultimately sheer numbers prevailed and some Austrian units got across the river, they would be advancing very close to Napoleon’s reserves and would have no chance of exploiting their initial success.
Truly bizarre, however, was Schwarzenberg’s plan to deploy the Grand Duke Constantine’s reserve corps, containing the Russian and Prussian Guards, on the west bank of the Elster to support the Austrian attack. On top of this he aimed to use both Blücher’s army and General Gyulai’s Austrian ‘corps’ to attack Lindenau, on terrain which made the deployment of tens of thousands of troops inconceivable. Had Schwarzenberg’s initial plan been executed, 54,000 troops would have been funnelled into the attack on Connewitz, 75,000 would have tried to reach Lindenau, and a mere 72,000 would have been left to oppose the bulk of Napoleon’s army east of the river.19
This plan was so obviously mistaken that all Alexander’s senior advisers protested and the emperor himself was mobilized to take on Schwarzenberg. Alexander was usually very tactful with the commander-in-chief and Schwarzenberg was a model of polite deference towards the monarch. On this occasion, however, the Austrian defended his plan stubbornly and there was a row. The upshot was that Blücher’s line of advance was directed back to the east bank of the Elster: he was to march on Leipzig down the main road from Halle. The Grand Duke Constantine’s reserve corps was also brought back to the east bank, though the Guards were only moved to Rotha, right by a bridge over the Pleisse and still 10 kilometres behind the front-line Russian divisions. But no amount of argument could shift Schwarzenberg from his basic idea of using the Austrian army on the west bank of the Elster.20
On this matter the commander-in-chief deferred to his chief of staff, General von Langenau, a Saxon officer who had transferred into the Austrian service only in 1813. Austrian sources admit that too much credence was given to Langenau’s superior knowledge of the local terrain as a native of the area. Rather lamely, they suggest that only the heavy recent rains had made the ground west of the Elster truly impassable. They also claim that French cavalry had stopped Schwarzenberg from conducting a thorough personal reconnaissance of the area. One recent author has even suggested that Langenau may have been a traitor to the allied cause, though there is no evidence for this. Perhaps the likeliest explanation is that Langenau was better at planning battles from maps than from any eye for actual terrain. On a map, his plan to thrust over the Elster into Napoleon’s flank and rear had a certain plausibility. If successful it would give the chief glory for victory to the Austrian forces in general and Langenau in particular. Possibly one need look no further for explanations for the bizarre deployment of the allied forces at Leipzig.21
One reason why Schwarzenberg liked the plan was that he had never initially intended to bring on a great battle at Leipzig. His aim throughout the October campaign had been to block Napoleon’s retreat to the west and force the emperor to attack the allied forces standing in his path. Though not totally implausible as a strategic concept, his efforts to translate this idea into tactical deployments around Leipzig were a disaster. There was in any case a very basic problem with the Austrian plan. Napoleon had not concentrated his forces in Leipzig in order to retreat westwards. He was intending to smash the Army of Bohemia and win the campaign.
Napoleon took it for granted that the bulk of the enemy army would be deployed in the only sensible place, in other words east of the rivers Elster and Pleisse. His plan was to turn the allies’ right flank east of Liebertwollkwitz, smash through their centre and drive Schwarzenberg’s army into the Pleisse. Even without Bernadotte and Bennigsen the allies had 205,000 troops available on 16 October against Napoleon’s 190,000. But Schwarzenberg’s plan, even after modifications to appease Alexander, meant that on the key southern front 138,000 French troops would face 100,000 allies, of which Constantine’s 24,000 reserves could not arrive on the battlefield for a number of hours. Of course the allies would outnumber Napoleon in other sectors but the terrain would make it impossible to use this superiority. On the first day at Leipzig Schwarzenberg therefore gave Napoleon a completely unnecessary chance to snatch victory against the odds and against the previous flow of the autumn campaign.22
On 16 October Blücher’s army advanced on Leipzig from the north. Langeron took the village of Euteritzsch and Yorck’s corps finally stormed Möckern after a ferocious struggle which lasted until the evening. The main point, however, was that Blücher had succeeded in pinning down two large French corps in the north, including Marmont’s men, on whom Napoleon was depending for his attack on Schwarzenberg. Blücher’s achievement at Leipzig was similar to his impact on the battle of Waterloo. By arriving on the battlefield much earlier than Napoleon had predicted, he diverted a key part of the strategic reserve on which the emperor was counting to decide the battle on its main front.
West of Leipzig, the advance on Lindenau of Gyulai’s Austrian troops forced Napoleon to send the whole of Bertrand’s Fourth Corps across the rivers to secure the village, and with it his line of retreat to the west. Further south, all the Austrian attempts to cross the river Pleisse near Connewitz and Dölitz got nowhere, to Schwarzenberg’s increasing frustration. By late morning he was prepared to give way to Alexander’s pleas and agree that Langenau’s plan had failed. He therefore ordered the Austrian reserves to cross the Pleisse to help beat off Napoleon’s attack. By now the allied situation east of the Pleisse was increasingly dire. The key question was whether the Austrian reserves would arrive in time to shore up the allied line.
Eugen of Württemberg’s Second Russian Corps was deployed near the centre of the allied line east of the Pleisse, in front of the village of Gossa. In his memoirs Eugen wrote that from Gossa on 15 October Napoleon could be seen on the heights near Wachau inspecting his troops and handing out medals. Eugen and his officers expected themselves to be attacked the next day but ‘we could not understand why Schwarzenberg decided on a general attack for the 16th when on the following day we would have been strengthened by 130,000 men of the Army of the North, the Army of Poland, and Count Colloredo’s corps’. It seems that the allied high command wished to pin down Napoleon and feared that he would otherwise attack Blücher and Bernadotte, and perhaps even slip away to the north.23 To avoid this, the allied forces east of the Pleisse were ordered to attack in four columns from early in the morning of 16 October. On the left Kleist’s Prussian corps and Helfreich’s 14th Russian division would advance on Markkleeberg. To Kleist’s right Eugen’s Second Corps would attack Wachau, supported by Klux’s Prussian brigade. The third column was commanded by Lieutenant-General Prince Andrei Gorchakov. It comprised Gorchakov’s First Corps and Pirch’s Prussian brigade. Gorchakov would attack Liebertwollkwitz from the south-west while the fourth column, made up of General Klenau’s Austrians, would advance on the village from the south-east.
The night of 15/16 October was cold and very windy. Trees were uprooted and roofs damaged. The next morning Klenau’s troops arrived late for the assault. Gorchakov had to wait for them with his regiments already deployed for the attack and under artillery fire. Kleist and Eugen advanced on time, however, moving forward on this still stormy Octob
er morning before it was fully light. By 9.30 Kleist had taken Markkleeberg and Eugen had moved into Wachau. The initial French response was mild, partly because they had not expected the allies to attack. Things soon changed, however: French infantry counter-attacked at both Wachau and Markkleeberg, and ferocious artillery fire began to pour down from the massed batteries on the ridge onto the Russian and Prussian troops. The latter nevertheless pushed forward their attacks with great courage. The French artillery colonel, Jean-Nicolas Noel, who was stationed at Wachau, recalled that the Russians and Prussians ‘attacked with a determination which I had never before seen in our adversaries’.24
Casualties mounted quickly on both sides but especially among Eugen’s Russians on the bare slopes east of Wachau. Already by eleven o’clock most of Eugen’s artillery had been knocked out. There was nowhere to find cover and the French cavalry deployed east of Wachau were an additional threat to any infantry who broke formation. Rudolph von Friederich, the Prussian general staff historian, comments that ‘it took all the tenacity and contempt for death of the Russian soldiers and all the heroic courage of Duke Eugen to stand one’s ground in such a position’. By the end of the day two-thirds of Eugen’s men were casualties. All his regimental commanders were killed or wounded. Eugen wrote in his memoirs that his troops had been similarly smothered in artillery fire for a time at Borodino but on the first day at Leipzig their ordeal ‘lasted for much longer’.25
The heroism of Eugen’s infantry was all the more impressive because his regiments had suffered very heavy casualties at Kulm only a few weeks before. The Murom and Reval regiments, for example, lost many men first in 1812, and then at both Kulm and Leipzig as part of Prince Ivan Shakhovskoy’s Third Infantry Division. Officers and NCOs had needed to be drafted into the regiments from other units after Kulm to fill the gaps left by its killed and wounded veterans. Nevertheless many regimental old-timers remained in the ranks during the battle of Leipzig, including most of the Reval Regiment’s sergeant-majors. An unusual number of illiterate but veteran senior sergeants had in fact been promoted to sergeant-major in the Reval Regiment in 1813. They included sergeant-majors Aleksei Fedorov, Mikhail Lashbin and Mina Afanasev, who between them had seventy years’ service in the regiment. Lashbin was a state peasant from Tobolsk in Siberia and Afanasev a serf from Smolensk, but Fedorov was actually a Chuvash, one of the small, pagan peoples of the Volga region, though his family had become Christians. All three men held military medals, as did seven of the ten sergeant-majors in all. No other regiment whose records I have seen could equal this.26
Among the officers of the Murom Regiment who fought at Leipzig were lieutenants Ilia Shatov and Ivan Dmitrev. Both men had entered the Murom Regiment as privates more than twenty years before, had risen to sergeant-major and had then been commissioned in 1812. Both had fought with the regiment in East Prussia in 1807 but Shatov had even served in its ranks in Switzerland in 1799. The senior officer of the Murom Regiment to survive the battle of Leipzig was Petr Kladishchev, from a run-of-the-mill noble family of Riazan province, who became a colonel aged only 29. Kladishchev had joined the Murom Regiment at the age of 16 and never left it. He was decorated for courage in East Prussia in 1807, as well as at Vitebsk in 1812 and Bautzen in 1813. He was one of many young officers whose record of courage and leadership brought rapid wartime promotion. These men were much less visible than spectacular cases such as generals Chernyshev and Diebitsch. Nevertheless they made a crucial contribution to the army’s performance.27
All morning and through the early afternoon of 16 October Eugen’s regiments held their ground and preserved the allied line under the French bombardment. The French artillery commanders themselves subsequently paid tribute to the steadfast courage of the Russian infantry, who closed their ranks and held their positions in the face of terrifying losses. By late morning the battle had become a race. If Napoleon could concentrate his forces and attack before the allied reserves arrived, Eugen and Kleist’s thinning infantry battalions would not be able to stop him from breaking through the allied line and crushing the Army of Bohemia against the banks of the Pleisse.
Alexander, Barclay and Diebitsch were acutely aware of this danger. The moment he arrived on the battlefield and could see the two armies’ deployment amidst the October gloom, Alexander sent orders for the Guards to advance at speed from Rötha. From the time they received their orders it would take them three hours to reach the battlefield. Nikolai Raevsky’s Grenadier Corps was closer but his two divisions on their own would never suffice to shore up the whole allied line. Meanwhile, even after they had been released by Schwarzenberg shortly before midday, the Austrian reserves had to march south down the west bank of the Pleisse to the fords near Crobern, get themselves across the swollen river, and then turn northwards to come to the aid of Kleist’s corps at Markkleeberg. For the Austrian infantry, this was a four-hour march. It was very fortunate that Alexander’s insistence on bringing his Guards over to the east bank of the Pleisse meant that at this moment of supreme crisis they would not be competing with the Austrians for river crossings.28
Also luckily for the allies, Napoleon took longer than he had anticipated to organize and launch his counter-attack. He was waiting for Marmont but the latter was forced to stop while on the march southwards and race back to block Blücher at Möckern. Above all, Napoleon would not move until Marshal MacDonald’s whole corps had come up on his left and had advanced against the Austrians towards Seifertshain. Only when MacDonald’s threat in the east had developed would the emperor throw in his main forces against Kleist and Eugen. It was almost midday before MacDonald was in position and ready to attack. Though he then drove back Klenau’s Austrians all the way to Seifertshain, at this point Austrian resistance stiffened and MacDonald’s attack stalled. The sudden arrival to his east of thousands of Cossacks commanded by Matvei Platov distracted MacDonald’s attention and also contributed to slowing his advance. Platov drew off Sebastiani’s cavalry corps which was operating on MacDonald’s eastern flank and without Sebastiani MacDonald lacked the means to outflank Klenau or the numbers to smash through the Austrian position at Seifertshain.
By the early afternoon Napoleon’s attention had shifted westwards, towards Kleist’s and Eugen’s shrinking battalions. Against them he launched his Guards, most of his cavalry, Drouot’s artillery reserve, and all the remaining infantry at his disposal.
By 3 p.m. Kleist’s brigades were fighting desperately to hold Markkleeberg and had been forced out of Auenhain, with French cavalry in pursuit. The 2nd Russian Grenadier Division came up behind Auenhain but could not stop the French advance. Fortunately for the allies, the six excellent regiments of Count Nostitz’s cuirassier corps arrived in the nick of time, scattered the French cavalry and restored the situation. Nostitz’s regiments were the first of the Austrian reserves to arrive from the west bank of the Pleisse but they were followed by more cavalry and then by Bianchi and Weissenwolf’s infantry divisions. Count Weissenwolf’s Grenadier battalions were among the best infantry in the Austrian army. Once they were on the scene Napoleon’s chance of breaking through Kleist’s position had disappeared. On the contrary, by the time evening approached and the battle ceased Weissenwolf’s Grenadiers had recaptured Auenhain and it was Napoleon who was having to commit even part of his Old Guard to stop the Austrians advancing from Markkleeberg.29
While Kleist’s Prussians and Russians were fighting for their lives at Markkleeberg and Auenhain during the afternoon of 16 October an even fiercer battle was raging to their right around the village of Gossa. This was the centre of the allied line east of the river Pleisse and behind Gossa the allied monarchs and their staffs were positioned on a small hill. The infantry leading the French advance came from Lauriston’s Fifth Corps and Marshal Oudinot’s Young Guard. Down the hill in their support came much of the French artillery reserve, including all the Guards artillery, commanded by General Drouot, who had good claim to be the finest artillery commander in Europe.
This was classic Napoleonic tactics. Having attacked the enemy flanks, the emperor was now deploying massive mobile firepower to smash through its weakened centre. The only visible infantry in front of Gossa was Eugen’s shredded battalions, whose ranks had become even thinner after the prince had been forced to redeploy one of his second-line brigades to the left to counter the growing threat from the direction of Auenhain. General Diebitsch’s account of the battle speaks of ‘a storm of concentrated artillery fire never previously encountered in war’ now descending on Eugen’s battalions. Spotting the weakness of the allied infantry Murat launched his cavalry to sweep through the allied centre and overrun the artillery defending the village of Gossa and the approaches to the hill from which the allied monarchs, now joined by Schwarzenberg, were directing the battle. Perhaps the most important and certainly the most famous episode in the first day at Leipzig was the result.30
Sorting out what happened in a cavalry attack is even more difficult than imposing some kind of order on battles in general. Amidst the excitement, the dust and the speed with which events unfold, participants are seldom reliable witnesses. Because Murat’s cavalry attack on 16 October was in many ways the high point of the day, putting the allied sovereigns and the very centre of the allied position at risk, it also aroused a competition as to who was responsible for the repulse of Murat’s horsemen. The best eyewitness account of the action in any language is provided by George Cathcart. He was a professional cavalry officer and, standing near the monarchs on the hill behind Gossa, he had an excellent view of events without himself being involved in the mêlée. Equally important, Cathcart was relatively neutral, since there were no British troops involved.
Russia Against Napoleon Page 58
