by Alan Palmer
Within minutes, it seems, Napoleon’s answer to the Allied manoeuvre was revealed, not only to Kutuzov but to Alexander and his retinue also as they looked towards the plateau. For at eight-thirty Marshal Souk’s cavalry bore briskly down the slope beyond Pratzen and against the weakened centre of the Allied line. Soon Kutuzov was wounded in the cheek by a glancing shot and both Alexander and Francis came under fire. The two Emperors, reining in their horses, watched from a knoll as Miloradovich’s division caught the impact of the French assault. Later, Czartoryski wrote down the impressions he received as he stood beside Alexander:
I saw very distinctly the two lines of enemy cavalry execute in succession several charges … There was an outcry for the Tsar’s safety: the horses were turned and we galloped off … A large battery of Russian guns, with its commander totally distraught, was being led in the opposite direction from the field of battle. I forced him to turn back and assist the columns hard-pressed in front of us. By good fortune I was constantly meeting the Tsar as he visited in succession different firing-positions and he often sent me forward to see what was happening.21
The panic cannot have lasted long, but soon all the Allied centre was falling back to the woods and pheasantries of the Austerlitz estate. Despite his wounds, Kutuzov sought to restore some order into the retreat and sent urgent messages to Bagration, on the Brünn-Olmütz road, summoning him back so that his men might form defensive squares and check the French thrust. By half-past nine the fighting had died away between Pratzen and Austerlitz, but further to the south the main Austro-Prussian army which had taken Telnitz was hopelessly isolated. With Napoleon pouring more and more men into the breach which Soult had made, the troops around Telnitz were now themselves threatened with encirclement. ‘I saw’, says Czartoryski, ‘the wretched Weyrother wandering from place to place bravely risking his life in an effort to redeem the disaster of which he was one of the chief causes.’22 Yet, though the Allies could not win the day, all was not lost: Bagration was still holding out and Miloradovich performing feats of valour under the Tsar’s admiring eyes. Provided the weather held, there remained the possibility of a counter-attack which might at least dislodge the enemy: an inconclusive stalemate was preferable to total defeat.
For two hours the fighting continued on either flank. At eleven Kutuzov sent orders to Buxhöwden, commanding at Telnitz, to retire across the Goldbach Stream and link up with the Guard regiments around Austerlitz itself; but Kutuzov’s outrider could not get through the enemy screen and it was three in the afternoon before the Marshal’s instructions reached Buxhöwden. The crucial decision on whether or not to counter-attack had to be taken soon after midday, with no news reaching either Kutuzov or Alexander from the left flank. The weather was rapidly deteriorating: no more sunshine, only an icy wind and grey rolling clouds threatening snow. About half-past twelve, the counter-attack came.23 But by whom was it ordered? Not, it would appear, by Kutuzov nor by Alexander; and certainly not by the Austrians, for it cut almost across Johann von Liechtenstein’s cavalry as they sought to move in a crablike progression northwards to make contact with Bagration. The counter-attack was led by the commanding General of the Reserve, probably on his own initiative. For the Reserve – ten battalions and eighteen squadrons of the Russian Imperial Guard – had been entrusted to the Grand Duke Constantine. Alone of all commanders in the field, the brother of the Tsar might risk with impunity the consequences of independent action. It was the bravest and most tragic gesture of the day; and it cost the two finest regiments in the Russian army more than 500 dead and 200 prisoners.
Napoleon, who had seen little of the morning’s fighting at close hand, personally witnessed the charge of the Russian Imperial Guard – more than a thousand horsemen galloping up the slopes of the Pratzen Plateau towards the French cannon and a glinting wall of wavering bayonets. The sheer impetus of the assault inevitably broke the French line, but, as Napoleon’s reinforcements closed in on the attackers, the awful futility of the charge was made clear to observers in the two opposing camps. Constantine himself, indistinguishable from his brother officers in cavalry helmet and breastplate, charged bravely at the head of one of his squadrons and was nearly captured by Mamelukes, who seized the squadron standard. Within half an hour it was all over. The survivors regrouped around Constantine in the village of Krzenowitz, where Alexander had spent the previous night, but they were given no respite. As the snow began to fall Marshal Bernadotte sent in his weary cavalry against Krzenowitz, and by two o’clock what was left of the Imperial Guard was falling down the mile-long avenue of chestnuts and past the château of Austerlitz in search of their defeated Tsar. ‘There are many fine ladies who will weep tomorrow in Petersburg’, declared Napoleon, as he saw the slope of the Plateau strewn with the hideous aftermath of Constantine’s charge.24
The battle was over, but not yet finished. Marshal Davout’s Third Corps – for whose arrival from Vienna Napoleon had delayed engaging the enemy – had the wretched task of pursuing Buxhöwden’s men as they sought escape from the trap at Telnitz. It was not a glorious feat of arms, for many of the Russians were drowned as hot shot rained down from the French guns on the thin ice of frozen ponds across which they were seeking to make their way towards Austerlitz. Ultimately, however, it was decisive. The Russian troops were hungry, wet and cold. Though fewer perished than the Bulletins of the Grand Army were subsequently to claim, those who survived had lost their will to resist. Some 20,000 men, more than half of Buxhöwden’s corps, emerged unscathed physically from the battle, but they could no longer be described as a fighting force. By half-past four, with all daylight gone, they were tramping eastwards without any clear purpose, except the instinct to live.25 The tracks were deep in mud and slush, and sleet scudded down from a night sky in which there was no sign of moon or stars. Somewhere beyond Austerlitz were the young Tsar and the old Marshal; but nobody in the defeated army was certain where they had found refuge. At the moment it did not seem to matter very much; for at least they were away from the treacherous plains of Moravia and nearer to the Russian homeland, still almost four hundred miles distant.
Alexander Humiliated
Theoretically General Buxhöwden knew where he should find Alexander and Kutuzov. For, on the previous evening, the Marshal had privately instructed the army commanders and the Tsar’s aides-de-camp that, if Weyrother’s plan failed to put the French to flight, the Russians must fall back on the river Morava.26 The first rallying point would be a cluster of wooden huts marked on the map as the village of Hodjegitz, little more than two miles east of Austerlitz.
Around five o’clock on 2 December Alexander duly arrived at Hodjegitz, with the smallest of escorts.27 His usually flaccid face was strangely taut and tears of humiliation ran down his cheeks. There was no sign of Kutuzov, nor of any other senior commander. For, though the Marshal had foreseen the probable need to retreat, he had never anticipated a rout, in which the survivors would be spread out in jostling columns across five or six miles of rolling countryside. The surprising fact was that Alexander’s aides should have shown such sense of order as actually to find Hodjegitz. Kutuzov himself, along with Constantine, Miloradovich and what was left of the Imperial Guard, had reached the hamlet of Wazan, four miles from Hodjegitz; but the triple combination of inadequate maps, bad weather and French patrols prevented any of the commander-in-chief’s couriers from getting through to the Tsar. One of Alexander’s aides, reconnoitring around Hodjegitz, did however encounter an Austrian officer who told him that Emperor Francis was in the small town of Czeitsch, eight miles to the south. Since it was clear Alexander was still too close to Napoleon for safety, he announced to his aides in the early evening he would set out at once for Czeitsch and a conference with the Austrian Emperor.
The decision was a bad one. Alexander was forced to travel on foot or in the saddle, for his carriage had become a casualty of the battle. It was hard going and he was desperately weary and at times feverish. Soon it became clear he
could not manage the eight miles to Czeitsch.28 He collapsed in one of the villages on the way and was helped into a peasant’s hut, where he was able to rest under a makeshift quilt of straw. Fortunately James Wylie had remained with him continuously since leaving Wischau, but the position was serious. The ruler of Russia, with five or six men around him, was isolated in a remote clearing in the Moravian woodland, where there were neither comforts nor medicaments for a sick man. At three in the morning he was seized by such a violent cramp in the lower intestines that Wylie feared for his life (or so the Empress Elizabeth was told three weeks later).29 Leaving Czartoryski at Alexander’s bedside, Wylie rode on to Czeitsch and begged an Austrian officer at the headquarters of Francis to let him have some red wine to warm his patient’s stomach. The Austrian – still according to Elizabeth’s account – refused the request and Wylie was forced to bribe a servant so as to secure ‘half a bottle of poor red wine’. By the time Wylie returned to the Tsar, the attack of stomach cramp seems to have passed, for at seven in the morning Alexander was well enough to clamber back into the saddle.
Later that morning Alexander was re-united with the Emperor Francis and with Kutuzov. Although the Allies had lost between 25,000 and 30,000 men killed, wounded or captured at Austerlitz, they still possessed an army of nominally 60,000 men, with the prospect of reinforcements from Bohemia and from the army of the Archduke Charles, which had retreated from Venetia to Styria. Moreover there was the certainty of further levies arriving from Russian Poland and, above all, the hope that Prussia would honour the treaty which Alexander and Frederick William had signed in Potsdam only a month ago. Alexander certainly had no intention of suing for peace, though he had lost some of the finest horsemen in his cavalry squadrons and a hundred and thirty-three pieces of field artillery, more than half the guns with which Arakcheev had equipped the army. But to Francis and his ministers the situation seemed almost hopeless: they had little faith in Prussia’s word, especially as Haugwitz, one of the leading ‘pro-French’ counsellors in Berlin, had already arrived at Napoleon’s headquarters and been sent on to negotiate with Talleyrand in Vienna. It seemed absurd to the Austrians to continue a war in which there was no immediate prospect of ousting the invader from their capital city; the longer the campaign dragged on, the harder would be the peace terms. Francis resolved to send Prince Johann von Liechtenstein to Napoleon in Austerlitz and seek an armistice, a personal meeting and a separate peace. Hostilities between Austria and France duly ended on the following day (4 December) and it was agreed that the conditions of armistice should apply to the Russians as well, provided that they evacuated the Habsburg lands and retired across the river Bug to their own territories.30
The Russian army was already plodding back eastwards and, as soon as his conferences in Czeitsch were over, Alexander joined the homeward trek. He made good speed, up the valley of the Vah to Trencin, through the western Beskids to Teschen and then along the upper Vistula to Lublin and across the frontier to Brest. On 6 December he despatched Dolgoruky with a letter of explanation to Frederick William in Berlin: the Tsar indicated his intention of continuing the campaign until he could establish a just and lasting peace with Napoleon and he renewed an offer to support the Prussians by two army corps.31 He also informed Frederick William that he was sending Grand Duke Constantine to supplement Dolgoruky’s efforts or (as the Tsar himself more tactfully phrased it) to serve ‘as an eye-witness of all that has taken place’.32 With the Grand Army still deployed in central Europe, a resolute advance by the Prussians and the two Russian army corps might seriously embarrass Napoleon and counter some of the humiliation of Austerlitz.
But, while Alexander was hurrying back to his capital, Frederick William had taken stock of the situation. The oath sworn over Frederick’s tomb now seemed somehow a little less valid than in the emotive Gothic twilight of November. Besides, Talleyrand was treating Haugwitz with courtesy and generosity: if Prussia ceded the French those two tiresome enclaves of Ansbach and Neuchatel, Frederick William could receive the cherished prize of Hanover. Hence on 15 December, the very day on which by Alexander’s calculations the Prussians should have gone to war, Frederick William’s envoys put their signatures beside Talleyrand’s in the palace of Schönbrünn and Prussia became a beneficiary of Napoleon’s latest round of map-making.33 It was not what Dolgoruky or Constantine had anticipated and it rendered their Berlin mission pointless. The news reached Alexander as the horses hastened him across the bleak Polish plain where two army corps were ready for a war which would not now be fought. If he was surprised he did not show it: there were so many betrayals and disappointments on which he might ponder. ‘Everything I have sought to undertake has turned disastrously against me’, he remarked;34 but he spoke with resignation rather than self-pity. Full details of what had happened at Austerlitz only reached St Petersburg on Wednesday, 18 December, more than a fortnight after the battle. The capital had been so long without news that, as the Empress Elizabeth wrote to her mother, ‘everyone was trying to keep up their spirits by persuading themselves that speculation one way or the other could not be true’.35 There was, in consequence, some relief at first that neither the army, nor the Tsar himself, had been wiped out and the magnitude of the disaster was not immediately apparent. Since the Russians were still at war while the Austrians had sued for peace, it was assumed that the battle had been lost through ‘the infamous conduct of the Austrians’. Even Elizabeth, who was normally generous at heart, could write, ‘the name “Austrian” is and must be a term of abhorrence, not only to every Russian but to every being who has a soul.’36 And, as soon as she heard Alexander was coming directly to his capital, she ordered her carriage to take her to Gatchina. There she had to spend a tense day and a half with Marie Feodorovna as the two Empresses awaited the return of their husband and son, each subject to strong emotions which neither could hide from the other.
Alexander arrived at Gatchina shortly after midnight on 21 December.37 He exchanged no more than a few words with his mother and then insisted, with some of his old restlessness, on changing horses and driving through the night over the last thirty-odd miles to the Winter Palace. He talked endlessly to Elizabeth of the frustration and disappointments of the campaign. As ever when he was over-burdened with inner conflicts, he found in her the perfect listener, one who burned with anger for every slight he had sustained. Two days later she wrote, ‘What I suffered in that coach from hearing of all these indignities will never be erased from my memory.’38 The horses clattered into the great square behind the Palace at five o’clock on a Saturday morning. Alexander thought he could not face the ordeal of a public return in daylight. He would carry his sorrows silently to his room, with only guardsmen to see the heaviness of his step.
Yet he had forgotten the faith of his devoted Petersburgers.39 They heard on the Friday evening that the Tsar was expected back at any hour. It was enough for them that ‘their Angel’ had returned unscathed from the wars. Throughout the bitterly cold December night they kept a vigil in the square; and they were there in hundreds to salute his carriage as it ended the long journey home. Deeply moved he went, as soon as possible, to the Cathedral where he had knelt in prayer on that other Saturday morning, three months and an eternity before. As he tried to make his way back from the Cathedral to the Winter Palace the collective emotion of the crowd thrust it forward and he became once more a God among his subjects, as in Moscow at his coronation. ‘Everyone pressed towards him, so tightly packed that he could make no progress’, wrote Paul Stroganov’s wife afterwards, ‘They prostrated themselves, seeking to kiss his feet and hands, even his uniform; and they were delirious with joy.’40 Tears ran down Alexander’s cheeks, and he was heard to assure those around him that such a demonstration ‘so dear to his heart’ healed ‘thesuffering of his soul’.41 It could not, however, bring back the regiments lost on the Moravian plain nor mend the broken limbs of wounded captives left in French care. Those who understood events would neither forget nor f
orgive the humiliation of Austerlitz.
Anathema
Inquest on Austerlitz
‘Let us not mention Austerlitz, Mamma. There is so much to say on that inexhaustible subject that there is no point in beginning to set it down on paper.’1 So wrote Elizabeth a month after Alexander’s return; and it is easy to understand her reluctance. For by mid-January 1806 the mood of demonstrative sympathy and relief had evaporated and, at Court and in the fashionable salons, people were seeking to understand what had gone wrong.2 As more and more survivors arrived home with blurred tales of confusion and chaos it became clear the battle had been an overwhelmingly Russian disaster, not to be explained away by facile accusations of Austrian incompetence. Long and painful analyses posed awkward questions. Why was there no co-ordination between infantry, gunners and cavalry? Did the Tsar’s friends induce their sovereign to scorn the advice of his field commanders? And why, for that matter, did the Tsar rely so heavily for his counsellors on favourites of the parade-ground, unschooled in battle? It was all too easy to find answers which cast doubts on Alexander’s judgement. Small wonder if Elizabeth preferred to talk of other things.
Alexander knew very well he had failed. For two years he had willed himself to think and act as a soldier, the supreme commander of the future, leading his armies westward and imposing territorial boundaries upon a grateful continent. At Austerlitz that dream was shattered, along with many other illusions of his youth. But he could not immediately abandon either the Coalition or the policies which had carried Russia into war, and obstinacy made him at first retain the very men against whom his critics railed: Czartoryski was instructed to prepare memoranda on what might still be gained in the Mediterranean, Paul Stroganov was sent to London to reassure the British; Dolgoruky continued to hold secret talks with the Prussians; and Arakcheev, who was alleged to have been seen riding hastily eastward on the morning of the battle, was appointed head of a commission to enquire into the failure of the artillery on that decisive December day.3 Outwardly there was no change in men or measures at St Petersburg. The Tsar had little wish to make personal friends scapegoats: they knew him and his policy too well. Though he was conscious of their deep sense of loyalty so long as they remained close to the throne, he could not be certain if, in adversity, they would continue to observe the same reticent silence. There had been some moments at Olmütz and Austerlitz, perhaps even earlier, when Alexander’s conduct had fallen short of the occasion and (as one of his more responsible friends wrote in a private letter) ‘he listened only to a few giddy-headed young men.’4 Now that his own prestige in the capital was sinking rapidly, he had no desire to strengthen the hands of his critics by a public breach with advisers so recently in his confidence. Who, after all, would take their place? Better seek to live down the disaster of Austerlitz with ministers of one’s own choice than risk dependence on narrowly Russian nationalists from the Senatorial party or on the small group who hankered after a French alliance despite the humiliations of the past year.