Russia Against Napoleon

by Lieven, Dominic

  After fierce arguments with his allies in the second week of February 1814 Alexander was forced to give way, however. The fact that towards the end of this week news began to arrive of Blücher’s defeat by Napoleon only confirmed the dangers of Russia’s isolation. The emperor had to agree that if a restoration was to occur, then the only possible choice was the head of the royal house, Louis XVIII. More important from Alexander’s perspective, he had to accept that the negotiations at Châtillon would continue and that the allies would ratify a peace with Napoleon if he accepted the 1792 frontiers and surrendered a number of fortresses. On the other hand, the allies did also agree that if Napoleon refused the allied conditions, then they would continue the war until victory was achieved over him. Frederick William III provided some balm to Alexander’s injured feelings by refusing to join Metternich in threatening withdrawal from the war should the Russian monarch refuse to back down. The king insisted that so long as the Russians remained in the field, the royal army would fight alongside them.53

  Meanwhile near disaster had befallen Blücher. After the conference in Brienne on 2 February he marched northwards with Sacken’s and Olsufev’s 18,000 Russians. Blücher aimed to unite with the 16,500 men of Yorck’s Army Corps who were advancing just north of the river Marne towards Château Thierry and the nearly 15,000 Prussians and Russians under generals Kleist and Kaptsevich who were approaching Châlons from the east. A French corps under Marshal MacDonald was retreating in front of Yorck, and Blücher ordered Sacken to hurry forward to try to cut it off. Meanwhile he himself stopped with Olsufev’s detachment at Vertus, waiting for Kleist and Kaptsevich to arrive. MacDonald in fact evaded Sacken’s clutches but the attempt to catch him took Sacken’s troops all the way to La Ferte-sous-Jouarre, well to the west of Château Thierry on the south bank of the Marne.

  Blücher’s army was now dispersed over a distance of more than 70 kilometres, which made communications difficult and mutual support often impossible.

  The details of the military operations which followed were complicated but the essence was simple. Napoleon thrust northwards through Sézanne into the middle of Blücher’s army and defeated one isolated allied detachment after another. Since Blücher was the greatest Prussian hero of the Napoleonic Wars, some Prussian memoirists and historians had an understandable tendency to protect his reputation. They offered a number of partial excuses for his defeat. Correctly, they argued that if Schwarzenberg had pressed Napoleon’s rear then the Army of Silesia would have been in no danger. Instead, not merely did the main army crawl forward, its commander-in-chief also withdrew Wittgenstein’s Army Corps to the west, instead of leaving it as a link to Blücher. The field-marshal’s defenders also argued that if Lieutenant-General Olsufev had destroyed the key bridge across the Petit Morin stream the moment danger threatened from the south, Napoleon could never have achieved his march into the middle of Blücher’s army. Undoubtedly too, the allies had poor maps and incorrect information about local roads – as tended to be the case in fighting on foreign soil. Both Blücher and Sacken, for example, believed that the road along which Napoleon marched northwards from Sézanne was impassable for an army. Nevertheless the basic point remains that although in close proximity to the enemy, Blücher scattered his army to such an extent that it could not concentrate for battle and he could not exercise effective command. He made this mistake partly because he believed that Napoleon was on the verge of final defeat and Paris was his for the plucking.54

  On 10 February Napoleon advanced from Sézanne and overwhelmed Olsufev’s small corps at Champaubert. The emperor had just been reinforced by thousands of experienced cavalry arrived from Spain. Olsufev had a total of seventeen horsemen. A nimbler commander might have retreated in time to save his men but Olsufev was still smarting from Sacken’s criticism for not having held his ground at Brienne two weeks before. Though his junior generals begged him to fall back on Blücher, Olsufev insisted on sticking to his orders to hold his position and seems to have believed that Blücher was himself advancing from the east into the enemy rear. Napoleon claimed to have taken 6,000 prisoners, which was a remarkable achievement since Olsufev’s ‘corps’ numbered 3,690, of whom almost half escaped with their flags and many of their guns under cover of the winter night and the nearby forests. The key point, however, was that Napoleon and 30,000 men were now standing halfway between Sacken’s 15,000 troops at La Ferte and Blücher’s 14,000 near Vertus, directly on the road which connected the two wings of the Army of Silesia.55

  The safest option would have been for Sacken to retreat north of the river Marne and join up with Yorck at Château Thierry. Yorck urged this on Sacken but to no effect. Sacken’s orders from Blücher were to march back down the road which led eastwards through Champaubert to Étoges, where he was supposed to reunite with Olsufev and Blücher himself. These orders had been issued before Blücher had a clear understanding of Napoleon’s movements and were now out of date but Sacken did not know this. He set out on the evening of 10 February. He knew that Yorck had been ordered by Blücher to cross the Marne and support him but did not know that the Prussian general had queried these orders and delayed his movement. When he received his orders Sacken had no way of knowing that Napoleon was astride the road down which he was expecting to march.

  Late in the morning of 11 February Sacken bumped into the enemy advance guard just west of the village of Montmirail. Soon afterwards he learned from prisoners that Napoleon himself and his main army were present. With the battle in full flow, the Russian commander then received a message from Yorck to say that the road southwards from the Marne to Montmirail was so bad that only a minority of his infantry and none of his guns could advance to the Russians’ rescue. Allied maps showed this to be a paved road whereas in reality it was a country track which the recent thaw had turned into deep mud.

  Thanks to his infantry’s discipline and steadiness Sacken succeeded in extricating his corps with most of its baggage and artillery and retreated during the evening and the night down the awful road which led northwards to the river Marne at Château Thierry. Fires were lit every two hundred paces to guide the infantry along the way. In the drenching rain, with their muskets useless, the Russian infantry had both to march in compact masses to keep the enemy cavalry at bay and on occasion to break ranks in order to pull their artillery out of the mud. Though very outnumbered, Ilarion Vasilchikov and his splendid cavalry regiments greatly helped to protect the infantry and to drag away most of the guns. Napoleon pressed the retreating Russians hard and by the time they finally got across the Marne they had lost 5,000 men. Russian casualties would have been far higher had it not been for the courageous rearguard actions of Yorck’s Prussian infantry. Sacken was a hardbitten old campaigner and ‘politician’. The day after the battle, finally tracked down by his nervous and exhausted staff, who had lost him in the course of the retreat, he was as calm and self-assured as always. In the best traditions of coalition warfare, in his official report he blamed the defeat on the Prussians, and in particular on Yorck’s failure to obey Blücher’s orders and support him in good time.56 Having defeated Yorck and Sacken, Napoleon was preparing to march south to block Schwarzenberg when he learned to his astonishment on 13 February that Blücher was advancing down the road which led to Montmirail. Blücher had misinterpreted the retreat of the French forces watching the road and believed that Napoleon was already heading south against the main army. Instead, having reached Vauchamps by the morning of 14 February, Blücher found himself confronted by Napoleon himself and the bulk of his army, which greatly outnumbered the allied force. Like Sacken’s troops three days before, Blücher’s infantry was forced to retreat in square for many miles under heavy pressure. At least Sacken’s foot soldiers had Vasilchikov’s cavalry and Yorck’s Prussians to help them. Blücher’s 16,000 infantry on the contrary were retreating on their own, in broad daylight, through excellent cavalry country and with very few horsemen to help them. Unlike Sacken’s veterans, most of the 6,0
00 Russians in Lieutenant-General Kaptsevich’s corps were new recruits, in action for the first time. Their musketry was at times more enthusiastic than effective. One-third of the men became casualties but, as French observers recognized, it was a tribute to the great courage and discipline of the Russian and Prussian infantry that Blücher’s whole detachment was not destroyed.57 In the course of five days’ fighting Blücher’s army had lost almost one-third of its men. Napoleon was ecstatic. Already on the evening of 11 February he was writing to his brother Joseph, ‘this army of Silesia was the allies’ best army’, which was true enough. Much less truthfully, he added: ‘The enemy army of Silesia no longer exists: I have totally routed it.’ Even a week later, when there had been time to weigh the true results of the battle, he claimed in a letter to Eugène de Beauharnais to have taken more than 30,000 prisoners, which meant that ‘I have destroyed the Army of Silesia’. The reality was very different. On 18 February, the day after Napoleon wrote this letter, 8,000 men of Langeron’s Army Corps arrived to reinforce Blücher and there were many more Russian and Prussian units of the Army of Silesia, now relieved from blockading fortresses, on the march. Hundreds of prisoners of war were recaptured and many missing men returned to the ranks in the days immediately after the battle. Within a matter of days, Blücher’s army was again as strong as it had been on 10 February.58

  Ironically, in the end it was Napoleon himself who suffered most from his victories against Blücher. After the battle of La Rothière Napoleon very grudgingly granted Caulaincourt full powers to accept the allied peace conditions. On 5 February the foreign minister was told that ‘His Majesty gives you carte blanche to bring the negotiations to a happy end, to save the capital and to avoid a battle on which the last hopes of the nation would rest’. Caulaincourt was bewildered by these instructions and asked for clarification, enquiring whether he was supposed to concede all the allied demands immediately or whether he still had some time for negotiation. Before there was time to reply, Napoleon had defeated Blücher and his tone had changed completely.59

  On 17 February he revoked Caulaincourt’s full powers and instructed him to accept nothing less than the so-called Frankfurt conditions, in other words France’s natural frontiers. He justified his stance by saying that he had been prepared to accept the allied terms in order to avoid risking everything on a battle. Since he had faced that risk and taken more than 30,000 allied prisoners, the situation had changed entirely. He had smashed the Army of Silesia and now was marching to destroy Schwarzenberg’s army before it could escape across the French border. Four days later he wrote an arrogant letter to Francis II, stating that he would never settle for anything less than France’s natural frontiers. He added that even if the allies had succeeded in imposing the 1792 frontiers, such a humiliating peace could never have endured. To his brother Joseph he was even more explicit: ‘If I had accepted the historical borders I would have taken up arms again two years later, and I would have said to the nation that this was not a peace that I had signed but a forced capitulation.’ In fact the heady smell of victory made Napoleon now aspire to more even than France’s natural frontiers. To Eugène de Beauharnais he wrote that France might now be able to hold on to Italy. Napoleon’s words and actions in these days played directly into Alexander’s hands and justified everything the Russian emperor had said to his allies. It is true that to some extent the French and Russian monarchs were pursuing the same strategy of allowing military operations to determine the peace settlement. But Alexander was more realistic about the true balance of military power and the likely outcome of the campaign. Above all, he had some sense of limits and compromise, and a far more sensitive grasp of the connections between diplomacy and war.60

  None of this was yet clear to the allies in mid-February 1814, however, when their cause was at its lowest ebb. After defeating Blücher Napoleon raced south to deal with Schwarzenberg. This was the Napoleon of old whose speed and boldness stunned opponents, rather than the commander who in 1812–13 had been more inclined to rely on sheer numbers of men and weight of concentrated artillery firepower. Certainly he was far too speedy for Schwarzenberg. The main army had crawled forward along the river Seine, enjoying a number of rest-days en route to recover from its exertions. Even so, by 16 February Schwarzenberg’s army was within three to four days of Paris. Each of his four front-line Army Corps (Bianchi’s Austrians, the Württembergers, the Bavarians, Wittgenstein’s Russians) had its own road. But the four columns were a good 50 kilometres apart and a combination of mud, the river Seine and the poor condition of the side roads made lateral communication very slow, as Knesebeck had predicted. Schwarzenberg believed that this was the only way his army could move or feed itself but it made the allies very vulnerable to a concentrated enemy attack. The Russian and Austrian reserves were still south of the Seine. To make things worse, Wittgenstein became so impatient with Schwarzenberg’s slowness that he pushed forward alone and further isolated himself on the allied right flank. In particular, the 4,000 men of his advance guard, under Peter Pahlen, had been sent all the way forward to Mormant and were totally exposed, as Pahlen and Alexander himself warned.61

  Before Wittgenstein could react, Napoleon pounced on the morning of 17 February. Pahlen was a fine rearguard commander but his 4,000 men stood no chance against overwhelming odds. His cavalry escaped but almost all his infantry were killed or taken prisoner. This included, for example, 338 men of the Estland Regiment, of which only 3 officers and 69 men remained in the ranks by the evening of 17 February. The regiment had fought with great courage under Wittgenstein in 1812 and then again at Kulm and Leipzig in 1813. To do him justice, Wittgenstein took full responsibility for the debacle and completely exonerated Pahlen, but the gentlemanly behaviour of its commanding general was not much consolation for the soldiers of the Estland Regiment, who had deserved a better fate. Napoleon’s advance then bundled the whole allied army back across the Seine. Schwarzenberg’s only thought was to retreat south-westwards to safety towards Troyes and Bar-sur-Aube. This he achieved, helped in part by the fact that a sudden shift in the weather froze the ground and allowed the retreating allied columns to move off the roads and across the country.62

  Inevitably the military disasters of mid-February added to the existing tensions among the allies. Alexander and Frederick William blamed Schwarzenberg for not helping Blücher and believed – in part correctly – that he had advanced slowly for political reasons. Unpleasant rumours went round that the Austrians were deliberately preserving their own troops and ‘bleeding’ the Russians and Prussians so as to be in a stronger position when the war ended and a peace congress divided up the spoils among the allies. This was certainly unfair as regards Schwarzenberg, who was much too honourable a man to act in this way. Schwarzenberg’s own interpretation of events was that Blücher and his associates had finally come by their just deserts for taking absurd risks and ‘manoeuvring like pigs’. He wrote to Francis II on 20 February that the 6,000 men the main army had lost in the last few days were a relatively cheap proof that the advance had been a mistake from the start, as he had always predicted would be the case.63

  Meanwhile grumbling grew in the ranks as regiments marched and counter-marched over an ever more exhausted terrain, knowing in their bones that their generals lacked confidence and were at war with each other. As always, retreat and growing hunger sapped morale and discipline. General Oertel, now the army’s provost-general, was given orders to coordinate the efforts of all the commandants along the lines of communications to stamp out marauding. Trofim Evdokimov, a soldier of the Izmailovsky Guards, even tried to kill one of Alexander’s own aides-de-camp when the latter intervened to stop him plundering.64

  It was in the second week of February that problems in feeding the men and horses really began to hit hard. As Barclay wrote on 10 February, such problems were inevitable the moment the army began to halt its advance or to concentrate for battle: ‘No country would long be able to sustain the enormous mass of
the concentrated allied forces.’ Units stole supplies designated for neighbours or allies. The Russians complained bitterly that the Austrian intendancy controlled the line of communications back through Switzerland and favoured their own supply columns. As always, the horses were the hardest problem and finding hay in the middle of winter a growing nightmare for the cavalry. Foraging expeditions travelled ever further for increasingly meagre rewards. The Courland Dragoons, for example, found that ‘foraging expeditions required the sending out of virtually entire cavalry regiments and vast efforts only succeeded in collecting very insignificant quantities of food and forage’.65

  If this was unpleasantly reminiscent of the French experience around Moscow in 1812, so too was the growing resistance of the French peasantry to allied requisitioning and plunder. Even by 29 January Kankrin was reporting that ‘unless pressed very hard, the population provides nothing’. Subsequently, with Napoleon’s fortunes improving, local French authorities often became more inclined to heed his orders to resist the allies. Peasants sometimes abandoned their ruined villages to take shelter in the forests and raid allied supplies moving down the roads. Sections of Kankrin’s mobile magazine moving up from Switzerland were ambushed. Vladimir Löwenstern lost 80,000 rubles’ worth of horses and other property when a French patrol sneaked out of the nearby artillery depot and ambushed a Russian supply train resting in the village of Mons-en-Laonnois, massacring its Cossack escort. General Winzengerode wished to burn the village down in reprisal but was dissuaded. But Barclay de Tolly ordered that the ‘criminals’ who had attacked Kankrin’s supply columns ‘must be punished as an example to terrify others’, with public hangings and posters displayed throughout the neighbourhood to deter further attacks. Kankrin was an efficient, level-headed and by now very experienced head of the army’s intendancy. If even he was saying by 4 March that problems of supply were worse than at any time since the war began in 1812, things were clearly very serious.66