Russia Against Napoleon

by Dominic Lieven

  Meanwhile, thanks to Napoleon, matters were looking much brighter for the allies on the diplomatic front too. His intransigence undermined Metternich’s strategy and reminded the Austrians how dangerous it would be to rely on Napoleon and isolate themselves from their allies. As Metternich knew, even the British military representative at allied headquarters was becoming very impatient with Schwarzenberg’s delaying tactics. Since Castlereagh’s arrival at headquarters an informal political understanding had developed between him and Metternich. But both men realized that there were limits beyond which Britain could not go in its desire to accommodate Vienna. British public opinion would distrust any peace with Napoleon. So too would the government.5

  While Castlereagh was negotiating at allied headquarters, the Russian ambassador in London, Christoph Lieven, was speaking to the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, and the Prince Regent. Both men opposed signing a peace with Napoleon. The Prince Regent’s views precisely mirrored Alexander’s, as Lieven reported:

  It would be to betray the desires of Providence…not to establish on unshakeable foundations a peace which had already cost so much blood…never had the world seen so powerful means united to achieve this. But these means were unique and the moral and physical forces of the allies could never be reconstituted to this level at any future time. Now was the time to ensure the well-being of Europe for centuries – while any peace made with Napoleon, however advantageous its conditions, could never give the human race anything other than a shorter or longer truce. The history of his entire life provided one example after another of bad faith, atrocity and ambition; and the blood of all Europe would only have flowed for a very doubtful respite if peace depended on treaties signed with this everlasting source of disturbance.6

  Castlereagh could sign a treaty with Napoleon so long as this secured Belgium and was accompanied by formidable barriers against renewed French aggression, and so long as there appeared to be no other force available in France with which to make peace. Under no circumstances, however, could he accept France’s ‘natural frontiers’. Even Austrian hints about such terms would drive Castlereagh into Alexander’s arms. By the end of February, therefore, Metternich had every reason to seek a compromise. So too, however, did the Russian emperor. His political isolation from his allies in early February, coupled with Napoleon’s military victories, showed the dangers of intransigence. As a result, on 1 March 1814 the four allied great powers signed the Treaty of Chaumont, pledging themselves only to accept a peace based on France’s historic borders, an independent and extended Netherlands, and a German confederation of sovereign states dominated by Austria and Prussia. At least as important, the treaty was also a military alliance between the four powers, designed to last for twenty years after the peace was signed and to uphold this peace by joint military action if France attempted to breach its terms. The Treaty of Chaumont could not determine whether the allies would make peace with Napoleon or some alternative French regime. All the allied leaders knew that to a great extent this would have to depend on the French themselves. Nevertheless the treaty was in both real and moral terms a big boost to allied unity.7

  Ultimately, however, it was military operations that were most likely to determine Napoleon’s fate. Only total defeat could persuade him to accept, even temporarily, the 1792 frontiers. Equally, the emperor’s defeat was the likeliest catalyst for a revolt of the French elites against his rule. In the second half of February defeat once again seemed far away. Schwarzenberg’s army was in full retreat. Initially the plan was to summon Blücher to march south to join with the main army and offer battle but by the time the Army of Silesia arrived in the vicinity on 21 February Schwarzenberg had changed his mind. The commander-in-chief insisted on detaching most of his Austrian troops southwards to block what he considered to be a growing threat to his communications from Marshal Augereau’s army in Lyons. This gave him an excellent reason – his critics used the word ‘excuse’ – to continue his retreat southwards and avoid a battle. Blücher was outraged and Alexander seriously considered removing himself and the Russian corps from the main army and joining up with Blücher.

  In the end a compromise was hammered out in a conference of the allied leaders at Bar-sur-Aube on 25 February. Schwarzenberg would continue his retreat as far as Langres if necessary, where he would be joined by the newly arriving Austrian reserves. If Napoleon was still pursuing him he would turn at Langres and fight a defensive battle. Meanwhile Blücher was to march northwards and, it was hoped, draw Napoleon off Schwarzenberg’s back by threatening Paris. If, as was expected, Napoleon turned round and pursued Blücher, Schwarzenberg was to resume the offensive. Bülow and Winzengerode’s Army Corps of Bernadotte’s former Army of the North had in the meantime marched from the frontiers of Holland towards Paris and were now approaching Soissons on the river Aisne. They would come under Blücher’s command, as would the newly formed Saxon corps of the German federal forces, whose job it would be to hold the Low Countries. Even without the Saxons, Blücher’s combined army would total over 100,000 men, which by now was considerably more than Napoleon’s entire force. Alexander’s instructions to the Prussian field-marshal reflected both his awareness that only Blücher had the confident aggression necessary for victory and his great fear that a repetition of Blücher’s earlier carelessness might wreck the allied cause. They concluded with the words, ‘as soon as you have coordinated the movements of your various corps we wish you to commence your offensive, which promises the happiest results so long as it is based on prudence’.8 Blücher set off northwards immediately. Unlike during his earlier offensive towards Paris, on this occasion the Russian cavalry was deployed to guard all the roads from the south. By 2 March it was clear from their reports that Napoleon was pursuing the Army of Silesia with a large force. The first objective of Blücher’s manoeuvre had thus been achieved. The next task was to unite with Winzengerode and Bülow, who were currently surrounding Soissons, which was important because its bridge offered a secure passage over the river Aisne. Vladimir Löwenstern was sent into the town as an emissary by the allied commanders. He used all his gambler’s tricks of bluff, aggression and charm to persuade the French commandant to surrender Soissons on 2 March.

  Napoleon was furious, ordered the commandant to be shot, and claimed that if the city had not surrendered he would have pinned Blücher with his back to the Aisne and destroyed his army. Most Prussian historians angrily deny this and claim that the Army of Silesia could have crossed the Aisne elsewhere. On the other hand, some of General von Bülow’s supporters were only too happy to argue that their hero had rescued Blücher from a tight spot. Inevitably they neglected to mention that the chief agent of this rescue was not a Prussian but Löwenstern. To an even greater extent than normal in 1813–14, the Russian role is neglected and what actually happened is obscured amidst a cacophony of French and German nationalism and machismo. Probably the Prussian historians are right and Blücher would have escaped Napoleon’s clutches, but some at least of the allied force would have needed to cross the river over the Army of Silesia’s Russian pontoon bridges, never an easy task with Napoleon in the offing and made no easier by the Aisne’s flooding banks.9

  The French army crossed the river Aisne at Berry-au-Bac to the east of Soissons on 5 March. Napoleon intended to advance on Laon; he was under the illusion that the allies were retreating and that all he would meet would be more or less determined rearguards. Blücher decided to pounce on the French as they advanced towards Corbeny and Laon. He deployed Winzengerode’s 16,300 infantry under the command of Mikhail Vorontsov on a plateau just to the west of the Laon road near the village of Craonne. Correctly, he believed that the emperor could never push on to Laon with this force on his flank and would need to concentrate first on defeating Vorontsov. Fabian von der Osten-Sacken’s Army Corps was deployed some kilometres behind Vorontsov on the plateau to support him in case of need. While Vorontsov’s Russians were pinning down Napoleon and occupying his attention, Bl
ücher intended to march 10,000 cavalry under Winzengerode and the whole of Lieutenant-General von Kleist’s Prussian Army Corps around the French northern flank and into their rear. Meanwhile Bülow would shield Laon and Blücher’s communications with the Low Countries, while part of Alexandre de Langeron’s force would remain behind to hold Soissons.

  There were problems with Blücher’s plan. Langeron’s and Bülow’s men would take no part in the battle and were therefore to some extent wasted. The terrain over which Winzengerode and Kleist were supposed to make their flank march was not properly reconnoitred and turned out to be very difficult. Rocks, hills, streams and broken ground caused great delays even to the cavalry, let alone the guns. A better general than Winzengerode might well have overcome these difficulties but with him in command the whole flank movement crawled along and finally had to be abandoned.

  As a result, in the battle of Craonne on 7 March Vorontsov fought alone for most of the day against an ever-increasing proportion of Napoleon’s army. Fortunately his position was very strong. The height held by the Russians became famous in the First World War as the Chemin des Dames. It stretched about 17 kilometres from east to west and was narrow, in some cases being only a few hundred metres wide. The Russians could therefore hold their line in depth while the steep sides of the plateau made it very difficult for the French to outflank their position. Vorontsov deployed his artillery skilfully and he put the 14th Jaegers into the stout farm buildings at Heurtebise in front of his main line in order to blunt and delay the French attack. This was a crack regiment, with its ranks full of elite sharpshooters from the former combined grenadier battalions of Winzengerode’s Army Corps, which had been disbanded just before the campaign began. For once it was the Russians who enjoyed the advantage of fighting from behind stout walls and the 14th Jaegers put up a formidable performance on 7 March.10

  The battle began shortly after ten o’clock in the morning of 7 March when Marshal Ney’s corps, 14,000 strong, advanced against the left of the Russian line. Ney attacked prematurely before other infantry divisions were on hand to support his advance. His young conscripts fought with great courage but they were advancing over difficult ground in the face of many well-sited Russian batteries. Not surprisingly, their repeated attacks failed. When General Boyer’s excellent division of units withdrawn from Spain arrived on the scene Napoleon threw it into the fray immediately. It fought its way past the farm of Heurtebise and up onto the plateau, allowing four French batteries to climb the slopes and deploy in its support. Vorontsov, however, launched a counterattack which threw both Boyer and Ney back off the plateau. Not until the early afternoon, when Charpentier’s infantry and a number of cavalry brigades joined the attack, was the Russian position in serious danger.

  At this point orders came from Blücher for Vorontsov to retire and for the whole army to retreat northwards and concentrate at Laon. The orders were sensible. Once the flank attack had come to nothing it made no sense to expose Vorontsov and Sacken to a battle against the whole French army. Inevitably this was not how matters seemed to Vorontsov in the midst of the fray. His men had fought with great courage to pin down Napoleon. Now their sacrifice appeared to be in vain. A warrior’s pride made it very difficult for him to retreat from a battle in which thus far victory had been on his side. In any case, at least in the short run it was easier to hold one’s ground than to retreat in orderly fashion in the face of a numerically superior enemy who would be emboldened by the sight of his enemy withdrawing.

  Only after repeated orders from Sacken did Vorontsov begin his withdrawal. He remained calm throughout, as did his men, and the French cavalry had no success in their efforts to break into the Russian infantry squares or capture their guns. At the narrow defile near the village of Cerny, Vorontsov halted his retreat to give time for Ilarion Vasilchikov’s cavalry to arrive. When Sacken received Blücher’s orders to retreat he had got his infantry away immediately but he sent Vasilchikov forward to cover Vorontsov’s regiments as they made their way across the more open plateau west of Cerny. Together Vasilchikov and Vorontsov kept the pursuing French at a respectful distance, particularly after they had combined to ambush one enemy detachment which pursued them too incautiously. Towards the western end of the plateau it once again narrowed and the French were forced to bunch together in close columns to continue their advance. At these points the very competent commander of Sacken’s artillery, Major-General Aleksei Nikitin, had deployed a number of batteries and their concentrated fire stopped the pursuit and inflicted heavy casualties, before the Russian guns slipped away unscathed under the protection of Vasilchikov’s cavalry.11

  Since Britain had no troops in the allied army, Lord Burghersh – its military representative at headquarters – was a relatively impartial observer. He called the Russian performance at Craonne ‘the best fought action during the campaign’. Vorontsov, Vasilchikov and their troops had certainly shown great skill, discipline and courage. The performance of Vorontsov’s infantry was particularly striking because few of his regiments had seen serious combat since the spring of 1813 and for many of his men this was their first experience of battle. The French subsequently claimed victory because Blücher’s plan had failed and because they held the battlefield at the end of the day. In this narrow sense they were indeed victorious, just as they had been ‘victorious’ in these terms in every Russian rearguard action during their advance to Moscow in 1812. But the Russians left behind no guns and very few prisoners. Clausewitz sums up the battle of Craonne by saying that ‘the Russians defended themselves at Craonne so successfully that the main goal, to reach Laon undisturbed, was achieved…this was accomplished by exceptionally brave soldiers, a very self-possessed commander and an excellent position’.12

  The Russians lost 5,000 men. The earliest full French account puts their own casualties at 8,000 and since they were very disinclined indeed to overstate their losses this figure may be accurate. Subsequently, however, French historians chipped away at the numbers and Henri Houssaye wrote that ‘the Russians lost 5,000, the French 5,400’. A contemporary French expert tweaked the figures still further, claiming that the allies lost 5,500 men and Napoleon only 5,000. Presumably this was in order to stake an additional claim to victory. In the same spirit 29,000 Frenchmen are said to have faced 50,000 allies, which may be true if one counts every soldier within a day’s march of the battle but completely distorts what actually happened on the battlefield on 7 March. In reality all of this juggling of statistics is irrelevant, though it does help to illustrate the historian’s difficulties in getting at the truth. Even if in fact the Russians and the French had lost the same number of men at Craonne, the basic point was that Napoleon could no longer afford this kind of attrition.13

  Napoleon followed up Blücher to Laon and on 9 March attacked the Russo-Prussian forces there. Once again he believed that he was likely to face only a rearguard and drastically underestimated the size of the allied army. In fact Blücher had concentrated all his corps near Laon, almost 100,000 men, and outnumbered the French by more than two to one. In addition, Napoleon’s army was divided in two, with the emperor advancing up the road from Soissons and Marmont up the road from Rheims. Communication between the two wings was very difficult because of the Russian light cavalry and the swampy terrain. Not at all surprisingly, Napoleon’s attack on 9 March failed. After darkness set in that evening the Prussians themselves surprised and routed Marmont in one of the most successful night attacks of the war. Napoleon’s army was now at the allies’ mercy. He was saved by Blücher’s breakdown, which paralysed the Army of Silesia. The immense strains of the previous two months had ruined the health of the 72-year-old field-marshal. After Prussia’s defeat in 1806–7 Blücher had suffered a breakdown, a side effect of which was alarming hallucinations about giving birth to an elephant. Now staff officers who came to him for orders found him in another world and unable to respond to their enquiries. Any light on his eyes caused him great suffering.14

&nbs
p; The next few days revealed the fragility of the coalition armies’ command structure and just how much the Army of Silesia had depended on Blücher’s drive, courage and charisma. In principle the army’s senior full general was Alexandre de Langeron but there was no chance of Yorck or Bülow obeying him. Langeron himself dreaded the idea of having to take over command and argued that Gneisenau should do so, as Blücher’s chief of staff and the man best informed of the commander-in-chief’s intentions. Neither Yorck nor Bülow much respected Gneisenau, however, and in addition he was junior to both of them. Yorck chose this moment to act the prima donna and resign his command, only returning to duty after Blücher scrawled an appeal to him which was supported by the pleas of Prince William of Prussia, one of Yorck’s brigade commanders and the king’s brother. Deprived of Blücher’s strength and inspiration, Gneisenau lost confidence and courage. He fell prey to one of his congenital failings, the belief that Prussia was being betrayed by her allies. The result was that for more than a week after the battle of Laon the Army of Silesia spread out in search of food but played no useful role in the war.15

  The inactivity of the Army of Silesia allowed Napoleon to escape, rest and then pounce on the 12,000-strong detachment led by Emmanuel de Saint-Priest, Bagration’s chief of staff back in 1812, which had taken Rheims on 12 March. Although Napoleon had suffered at least 6,000 casualties at Laon, reinforcements arrived from Paris, bringing his army back up to 40,000 men. This was more than sufficient to defeat Saint-Priest, particularly since Napoleon caught the allies by surprise. To some extent this was Saint-Priest’s fault for not taking proper precautions but it was hard to predict that Blücher’s army would stand still, lose all track of Napoleon and fail to provide any warning as to his movements. Part of Saint-Priest’s force was made up of Prussian Landwehr, who had dispersed in search of food and put up little resistance when the French attacked on 13 March. Saint-Priest’s Russian regiments from his own Eighth Corps were made of sterner stuff, however, and put up a stiff fight, despite the fact that their general himself was severely wounded and out of action from the beginning of the battle.