by Alan Schom
As Napoleon ordered an evaluation of the day’s battle at Jena, the results slowly came in: 5,000 French wounded and dead, compared to 10,000 Prussians. It was only later that day that he learned that 96,000 of his men had not been fighting the main part of the Prussian army after all, but only 55,000, while to the north at Auerstädt, Marshal Davout with his completely isolated III Corps of 26,000 men had faced the brunt of the duke of Brunswick’s army, nearly two-thirds larger than his own.
Davout’s corps, like Bernadotte’s, had received Napoleon’s orders at 4:00 A.M. on October 14 to abandon their northern position between Naumburg and Auerstädt and to march due south to support him at Jena. The dense fog that had been covering Jena throughout much of the day was just as thick here, and it was only at 7:00 A.M., while setting out for Jena, that Davout discovered he had Brunswick’s troops before him, when his leading cavalry came upon Prussian cavalry and artillery at Pöppel. As the fog lifted beyond Hassenhaussen, the French, still a little more than two miles east of Auerstädt, found themselves facing Brunswick’s army of 63,000 men and 230 guns. Gudin’s lead division, with Davout at its head, quickly took up a central position extending to the left, with Friant’s division to his right with the cavalry. Facing the French were Kalkreuth’s corps, four Prussian divisions, backed up by Blücher’s cavalry and infantry and, nearby, the Prussian king and the duke of Brunswick.
Sporadic fighting started immediately, but the real battle began at 9:45 A.M., when Schmettau and Wartensleben advanced with their two powerful divisions, Schmettau’s halted by a withering fire, while Wartensleben succeeded against Gudin’s overtaxed division on the French left flank. Davout, at the head of his men in the first line of fire, led two regiments of Gudin’s line to reoccupy the village of Hassenhaussen, which in turn stopped the Prussians in their tracks — at least momentarily. Having no reserves, Davout was holding out for his third division, under the able General Morand, to reach them. Messengers sent to Bernadotte, marching ahead of them to Jena, were informed that he had no intention of disobeying Napoleon’s orders and categorically refused to help Davout, whom he loathed, and his vastly outnumbered men. For the first time in a major campaign, a fellow commanding officer declined to come to the aid of a colleague who was threatened with a real disaster, if not annihilation. In the years to follow it would happen time and again with others, imperiling the Grande Armée — and France.[700]
Continuing to Jena at a lackadaisical pace, Bernadotte and his troops arrived hours later, the only corps of the army successfully to have missed two entire major battles. Napoleon castigated him first for not having come to Davout’s rescue and then for arriving deliberately late, taking five hours to cover the last eight miles. Had Bernadotte come earlier, if nothing else he could have prevented most of Hohenlohe’s army from escaping, which would thereby have avoided the necessity of the wild pursuit to the north across the whole of Prussia. Napoleon seriously considered bringing Bernadotte before a court-martial for disobedience and cowardice, no doubt recalling the time just a few years earlier when he had discovered that this same Bernadotte, as commander of the Army of the West in Brittany, had been involved in a plot to overthrow Napoleon as first consul. He should have acted then; now the emperor knew it was too late. Since Bernadotte was married to Désirée Clary, the sister of Joseph’s wife, the complications would be too great. Thus the marshal escaped punishment yet again.
Meanwhile in the heat of battle at Auerstädt, the very hard-pressed Davout, Friant, and Gudin had two pieces of good luck: the death of the Duke of Brunswick (shot through the head), and the wounding and disabling of General Schmettau. A bewildered Friedrich Wilhelm neither appointed successors to these commanders nor assumed command himself, his inaction leading to growing confusion. A third piece of luck was the arrival of Morand’s division at 11:00 A.M., taking over the French left flank and relieving Gudin, who could now consolidate the center.
Once in place, Morand went on the offensive, smashing Wartensleben’s units and putting the Prussian right flank out of action. This gave Davout the momentum needed to strike brutally ahead at a stunned Prussian army. The hapless Prussian king then compounded his errors by refusing to release Blücher’s strong reserves of fourteen battalions, five squadrons of cavalry, and three batteries of artillery. Forming a crescent, Davout’s entire front pushed hard and dislodged Kalkreuth’s entire front line, although the powerful Prussian artillery continued to take a lethal toll of the advancing French. As Friant finally turned the Prussian left flank at Pöppel, however, Friedrich Wilhelm panicked, ordering the withdrawal of his entire army.
“By 12:30, the pride of the Prussian army was streaming away to the west and north.”[701] By four o’clock, General Kalkreuth’s overwhelming numbers were in uncoordinated flight, Napoleon was successfully concluding the battle at Jena. By 4.30, with the Prussians now beyond Auerstädt, even a ruthless Davout knew when his exhausted men could do no more and called a halt.
Davout’s victory — which Napoleon himself could not surpass — was one of the most spectacular in French military history, in bravery, steadfastness, professionalism, intelligence, tactics, and destruction of the foe. Indeed, Davout’s corps of 26,000 killed outright 10,000 Prussians, wounded thousands more, and took several thousand prisoners not to mention 115 guns. As might be expected, the French suffered extremely heavy losses to achieve this, Davout’s tally coming to 7,052 men and officers killed or wounded, some units suffering 40 percent casualties. At Jena Napoleon’s casualties had been a negligible 5 percent.
For once even Napoleon was impressed, although it took some time for him to realize that he had been fighting the lesser of the two battles, while Davout with only one-quarter the forces had defeated the larger, principal Prussian force. “Marshal Davout’s corps performed wonders,” Napoleon briefly admitted. “Not only did he contain, but pushed back and then defeated...the bulk of the enemy’s troops...This marshal displayed distinguished bravery and firmness of character, the first qualities in a warrior.” But in writing home to Josephine, somehow Davout’s “distinguished bravery” and extraordinary achievement were omitted, Napoleon as usual emerging without competitors. “Mon amie,” he wrote the day after Jena, “I executed some fine maneuvers against the Prussians. I carried off a great battle yesterday.”
However, Napoleon once again failed to give Lannes and his brave corps their due in official bulletins and press announcements. As in the case of Austerlitz, apparently the great man was jealous. In any event, by now Lannes had grown to despise the Napoleon he had once genuinely admired. At one point, when Napoleon physically threatened Lannes, the latter dropped his hand to the hilt of his long sword and warned the Corsican to mind his manners.
It was only on October 15 that Napoleon finally ordered a full-scale pursuit of Hohenlohe’s army, beginning a military odyssey as strange as one might hope to find anywhere, as troops under Württemberg zigzagged hundreds of miles, some to Magdeburg, then joining Hohenlohe’s main force past Wittenberg in the direction of the Baltic. Also fleeing from Jena, the duke of Saxe-Weimar’s troops joined Blücher, sweeping past the village of Brunswick and far to the west of Magdeburg to the port of Lübeck, where they hoped to escape by sea.
Bernadotte’s fresh troops, along with Lannes, Soult, and Murat, followed by Augereau and Davout, carried out the fantastic chase after the defeated Prussian army. By October 24 they had reached the vicinity of Berlin, which Davout’s weary but glorious veterans entered the following day. Reaching Berlin himself on the twenty-seventh, Napoleon went immediately to the tomb of Frederick the Great to pay his respects to the one German warrior he most admired.
Meanwhile Lannes went on to seize Stettin on the Oder River, and IX Corps went to Glogau, while Davout was ordered to march to and seize Frankfurt an der Oder, far to the south of Stettin and due east of Berlin. The remnants of the starved and panicked Prussian army were breaking up as they fled northward, Hohenlohe surrendering with 10,000 men to Murat at Pr
enzlau, followed by the capitulation of the powerful fortress of Stettin with its garrison of a few thousand men to General Lasalle on October 29.
Of the entire Prussian army, only Blücher and the duke of Weimar, with their 22,000 men, remained an effective unit and tried to defend themselves at Lübeck while awaiting ships to ferry them to England, only to find themselves surrounded by Bernadotte’s, Soult’s, and Murat’s troops. On November 5 and 6 an exhausted Blücher and General Scharnhorst duly surrendered.
The last major Prussian stronghold, Magdeburg to the southwest of Berlin, defended by General Kleist, surrendered with 22,000 men and 600 guns to Marshal Ney on November 10. French troops then rampaged through the streets and houses just as they had at Lübeck. As for the Prussian king and his lovely Amazon queen, Louise, they managed to escape with a small force to the Baltic fortress-port of Königsberg.
Within just thirty-three days Napoleon had utterly destroyed the Prussian army, inflicting 35,000 dead and missing while seizing 100,000 prisoners and wounded and some 2,000 cannon. Of the 160,000 or so men comprising the entire Prussian army, only 35,000 had escaped the French, giving Napoleon one of the most complete victories in history — although because of the king’s escape, peace negotiations for the official surrender of Prussia were delayed for another eight months.
Chapter Twenty-Six – Point of No Return
‘Everyone has loved and hated me. Everyone has taken me up, dropped me, and then taken me up again.’
The French people were more war-weary than triumphant after the news of Jena (and Davout’s magnificent principal victory of Auerstädt was officially accorded a condescending second place of importance). But the French emperor — who had now conquered, or controlled, the whole of western Europe to the Oder River, with the gates of Poland and the east wide open to his victorious legions, had no intention of signing a peace treaty and withdrawing to France — or even to the ample confines of the Confederated States of the Rhine.
Hundreds of miles to the east, on the other side of the Vistula River, the czar was showing his displeasure by maintaining his troops in a state of full alert. Just as he had — quite unknown to the French people — turned down the extraordinarily generous peace treaty offered by Fox less than three months earlier, an insatiable Napoleon was bent on further conquest, set on destroying the Russian army that had escaped him at Austerlitz.[702] The czar was not about to be caught off guard.
The French senatorial delegation watching Napoleon’s swaggering victory parade through the Brandenburg Gate was less interested in celebrating his conquest than in pleading for common sense and moderation. It was time to lay down the blood-stained sword and exchange it for a quill of peace. Impatient with this interfering delegation, every member of which ironically he had hand-picked for office, Napoleon hastily ordered them home. Then he issued his Berlin Decrees on November 21, 1806, intended to break England by destroying its commercial lifeblood: “The British Isles are hereby declared to be in a state of blockade. All commerce and correspondence with the British Isles are forbidden.” The Continental System was now in effect, and although it initially hurt England, it hardly proved the stranglehold envisaged by Napoleon.
In fact Napoleon’s mighty new Empire leaked like Swiss cheese. Napoleon’s own family proved to be among the worst offenders, openly permitting their ports, cities, and land routes to be used for the exchange of British commerce: Louis in Holland and, later, Jérôme in Westphalia were openly to defy him, while Joseph’s Neapolitan kingdom also refused to close ports to British goods. What is more Marshal Masséna in Italy was making a private fortune by selling trading permits to accommodate British trade, and of course Lisbon was still wide open to the English. Indeed, some of Napoleon’s own officials openly flouted the Berlin Decrees. Bourrienne, for example, now minister in Hamburg, was ordered to provide cloth for fifty thousand uniforms. There was no place to get this except England. “Our troops might have perished of the cold had the Continental System, and the absurd group of utterly inexcusable decrees regarding English merchandise, been observed by us,” he said.[703] British trade was further sustained as a result of its naval victory at Trafalgar (in October 1805, which gave England undisputed mastery of the seas, especially of the extremely lucrative trade with the West Indies and India, whose annual convoys of more than a thousand merchantmen crammed with spices, tobacco, indigo, sugar, rum, tea, cocoa beans, coffee, silk, and cotton, were the backbone of the City of London.
The outraged British were quick to retaliate, and in a far more practicable manner, by issuing the Orders in Council in January 1807, placing France and all its allies in turn in a state of international blockade. Thereafter neutral countries were hurt as well, forbidden to carry food, cloth, wood, guns, metal, and other useful products for a war machine to any French or French-controlled port. Wealthy Parisians, ministers, and soldiers had to smuggle in cocoa, coffee, sugar, tea, tobacco, and the like if they were to maintain their usual creature comforts. Napoleon’s anti-British policies were thus resented more by the French than anyone else, the middle and working classes gradually being denied these products for the next seven years. And if the Tuileries never lacked them, one might ask indiscreetly how they were obtained in such large quantities while the rest of Paris did without.
Never again would Napoleon have the opportunity he had let slip by him with Fox in August 1806, nor did he want it. Peace was incompatible with his particular genius, which could thrive only in a very different environment. “Sooner or later we must encounter and defeat the Russians,” he rationalized feebly in Berlin. Russia was in England’s pay, therefore Russian armies had to be vanquished.
On November 5 Napoleon dispatched a powerful reconnaissance unit as far as Poznan, as Jérôme Bonaparte (who had given up his unsuccessful naval career for the army), Murat, Davout, Lannes, Augereau, Soult, and Bernadotte were ordered to push through eastern Pomerania and Poland. By November 28 Augereau’s III Corps, of 22,700 men and Murat’s 18,800 cavalry were coursing the banks of the Vistula, where they found General Lestocq’s 15,000 Prussians already in place facing them at Thorn on the far side of that river, supported by Bennigsen’s 62,000 men seventy miles or so to the south, near the confluence of the Vistula and Bug. Napoleon “wanted a fight. Very well, he shall have one,” Czar Alexander promised.
Eighty thousand French troops now pressed forward, with Davout given the initial objective of seizing Warsaw and sealing it off from the Russians. “I should like to give Poland her independence,” Napoleon (unconvincingly) said, “but that will not be easy. Austria, Russia, and Prussia have all had a slice of the Polish cake, and once the new conflagration begins, who knows where it will stop.” The partitioning of Poland by those three countries during the past few decades became a dominating, emotional topic in Franco-Polish circles. Napoleon’s pronouncements were sometimes evasive, sometimes brutally frank, as when he said of the Poles, “They have allowed themselves to be partitioned. Today they are no longer a nation,” the implication being not only that attempting to give them independence was not worth the effort but that it was impossible to do so, given their record in defending themselves.
Repeating his Viennese performance following the fall of Ulm, it was Marshal Murat who first entered an undefended Warsaw on November 28, with Napoleon still back in Prussia. The French emperor was not in such a hurry after the last exhausting, bloody battles, and was intent on bolstering his thinned ranks before again confronting the Russians. In theory he had some 172,000 trained infantry available and 36,000 cavalry. But the 1806 “harvest of recruits” — as his enemies were soon referring to the unpopular annual event — of 80,000 proved insufficient after the recent casualties, desertions, and the growing number of garrisons left behind to secure the long, precarious logistical route between Poland and France. Thus Napoleon now called up the next crop of 80,000 young men as well, the conscripts of 1807, many months earlier than authorized. In addition Spain, Holland, and Switzerland were forced t
o provide another 55,000 men to fight French battles of which they wanted no part.[704] Then, to pay the bill for maintaining such an enormous army on a war footing, Napoleon prodded the defeated Prussians and the allied confederated states to come up with more than seven hundred million francs, more than the entire normal French annual peacetime budget. When the more honest of the newly appointed French military governors in the Rhineland Confederation, such as General Thiébault at Fulda, protested against “the numerous, afflicting requisitions and war contributions,” in an attempt to protect the people under their authority, they were sharply rebuked by Napoleon.[705] The continued extortion of money and men from the already-much-put-upon Dutch led brother Louis to protest as well, as did King Joseph in Naples, but quite in vain.
Meanwhile Napoleon finally reached Warsaw on December 18, 1806, accompanied by Marshal Bessières and a large escort of the Imperial Guard.[706] At his warm palatial quarters, Napoleon as usual was buried in work. A priority was negotiating a foreign policy with Turkey and Persia, among others, that would force Russia into another war (as he was about to do with Turkey’s Sultan Selim III), the aim of course being to require Russia to split its army, committing and deploying large army corps along its southern frontier. He was also working closely with Berthier to secure supply and communications lines with Berlin and Paris, while preparing new campaign plans.
Nevertheless all was not work, for on the very day of his arrival a young, beautiful, mysterious Polish woman had coquettishly greeted him in his carriage, then fled into the crowd without giving her name. Enticed by this “vision,” Napoleon gave her description to General Duroc, who finally reported that she had been found. She was Countess Marie Walewska, the eighteen-year-old wife of a distinguished, septuagenarian Polish aristocrat by whom she already had one son. Delighted, even intrigued, Napoleon had her invited to an important ball about to be given in his honor. When she declined, however, he declared that he would not attend if she did not. A great brouhaha ensued, jolting the usual somber corridors of power. Senior members of the ruling aristocracy applied pressure on Count Walewski. They — he — must not offend the man who could free them of both Prussian and Russian oppressors. Countess Walcwska duly appeared, if hardly in the best of moods.
