Masters of the Battlefield

by Davis, Paul K.

  In the final days of November 1805 Napoleon showed his mastery in understanding the minds of his opponents. He had long tried to ally himself with Alexander, and so must have known the czar’s personality and weaknesses well. Aware that Olmutz could not supply the increasing number of troops there, Napoleon knew that the allies would have to move soon. First, he played into the czar’s correct assumptions that the French were hopelessly overextended. Supplies captured at Ulm, Vienna, and towns along the way were proving insufficient to maintain the army for much longer. This and the approaching winter weather affected the French troops’ morale as they continued to march deeper into enemy territory. Straggling became a major problem and those in the ranks began to despair.50 When Emperor Francis offered an armistice on the 27th, Napoleon quickly sent an envoy with his response, but primarily to gauge the temper of the enemy commanders and spread the story of dissension within the French ranks. All this enticed Alexander to push his luck. In his biography of Napoleon, Frank McLynn writes, “Pursuing his career as a great actor, the Emperor agreed to an interview with the Russian emissary Count Dolgourouki (29 November) in which he feigned confusion, uncertainty and an ill-disguised fear. So brilliantly was he toying with the enemy and so confident of his own mastery that he had actually chosen his battleground on 21 November.”51 That battleground was in front of the town of Austerlitz, some dozen miles east of Brunn.

  Napoleon’s second move was to take some of his 53,000 men from Brunn to occupy Austerlitz temporarily, and then withdraw them as if in a hurry. This would not only give the allies the town but the high ground just outside it to the west, the Pratzen Heights. Abandoning high ground to occupy a position just below it seemed the height of military stupidity, just what the eager Czar Alexander would assume. At the same time, Napoleon strengthened a hilltop just to the north of the Heights and deployed the remainder of his army behind a small stream, the Goldbach, running north-south parallel to the Heights. This would plainly illustrate his inferior numbers and further bait the allies. What his enemies didn’t realize, however, was that he had couriers riding for Vienna to order L.N. Davout to bring his corps at top speed; others rode to Bohemia with the same orders for Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte and his corps. Bernadotte’s men arrived on the afternoon of 1 December; Davout’s men marched sixty miles in seventy hours to arrive early in the morning of 2 December, the day of battle. French strength reached 73,000 men.

  In spite of his best planning, however, Napoleon was surprised that the Austro-Russian army moved as quickly as it did. Thus, some of the rapid withdrawal was not stage-managed. As the allied army came onto the battlefield from Olmutz to the northwest, they saw a steep hill alongside the road to Brunn rising some 100 feet over the surrounding area. This the French called the Santon, after a similar hill from their Egyptian campaign. Napoleon directed Marshal Lannes to construct strong defenses and site artillery here. It was key to Napoleon’s plan, and also gave the allies the impression that he was planning a defensive battle on this northern end of the Pratzen plateau. As the allies debouched onto the plain to look down on the Goldbach, they saw a handful of small settlements along the stream and some frozen ponds off to the south. Thus, the terrain features narrowed the front on which the allies would have to operate.

  The allies’ plan was to give the impression of attacking the northern position while sending roughly half their force to the south with the intention of both cutting off the lines of communication from Vienna and rolling up the French army in a wide, sweeping flanking movement. Indeed, Napoleon had deployed only minimal forces at the southern end of his line in order to convince the allies of the wisdom of their plan. Marshal Lannes was on the left, to cover the road to Brunn and deliver a supporting attack against Prince Peter Bagration. Davout was on the right, reinforced by one division from Marshal Nicholas Jean Soult’s corps, to confront the Russian main effort. Soult, located in the center, was to launch the main attack north of Pratzen, supported by Bernadotte, while Murat and the Guard were in reserve, prepared to exploit success either on the left or in the center.52

  At about 1:00 a.m. on December 2, the commanders of the various allied columns were briefed on the plan of attack by its designer, Austrian chief of staff Franz von Weyrother. The meeting proved almost useless. Weyrother had the confidence of Czar Alexander, but almost no one else. Russian officers paid him little attention as they had no respect for the Austrian army in general. Austrian officers supported the plan without questioning any of its strengths or weaknesses, as they were a minority in the overall force and needed solidarity in the face of Russian contempt. They might have done better to evaluate it, however; Weyrother’s plan was based entirely on Napoleon’s apparent weakness, and it had no contingency for any French countermoves. It was overly complicated, calling for multiple moves in the darkness across too narrow a front for proper deployment. The only officer to recognize this, grasping the big picture and wiser methods, was Kutuzov, but he was out of favor and ignored. The allies suffered from the twin concepts of fear and honor: once they decided on battle, they were deceived into accepting it on the worst possible terms by their own pride.53 To further harm the attack, the orders in German had to be translated into Russian for distribution to the seven columns involved and were not delivered to everyone before the operation was scheduled to begin.

  On the French side the divisions were placed and ready. Napoleon had dinner with his marshals on a hill called the Turlan just to the west of the Santon position. Gunfire far to the south alerted him to the earliest allied movements, about midnight. He rode out for inspection, found the probes farther south than he had anticipated, at Tellnitz, and alerted both Soult and Davout as to the likely new allied axis of advance. C. J. Legrand’s force of 6,000 would take the initial brunt of the massive allied assault; how long his troops could use the rough ground, woods, streams, and villages to slow the enemy advance would determine the success of Napoleon’s plan. Strong points existed at Tellnitz and Sokolnitz, but overall the southern section of the French line was the better part of two miles wide. Legrand was lucky to have obstacles along his front that aided in the defense: a vineyard on a reverse slope, a ditch, garden walls, and houses. Moreover, the narrow space between the Goldbach Stream and the Satchan Pond offered limited frontage to the attackers.54 Nevertheless, even if Davout’s men arrived in time to assist, the defenders would still number less than 13,000 against perhaps four times that many attacking them.

  At 7:00 the first allied units began their advance. The Goldbach valley was shrouded in fog, completely hiding the French deployment. The first contact took place at Tellnitz an hour later, and French light infantry quickly bloodied the Russians. A back-and-forth battle for the village ensued, with both sides holding it in turn as each received reinforcement. By 9:30 the Russians finally took the village for good and proceeded to cross the Goldbach. The support columns were slow to arrive, and the commanders had been ordered to advance together, forcing them to wait. The allied attack on Sokolnitz followed much the same pattern, though it started an hour later owing to the Austrian cavalry repositioning themselves from the southern to the northern end of the Heights by riding across the front of the infantry columns. Still, Davout’s men arriving on the field aided in the defense of both positions until forced back by overwhelming numbers. Thus, as the morning progressed, the Russians made fairly steady progress but the French remained well organized in their fighting withdrawal.55

  Although the low ground was still shrouded in fog, the Pratzen Heights were early open to view from Napoleon’s command post on the Zuran, a hill southeast of Kritschen. As the sun came up and burned away the last of the mists along the Heights, Napoleon could see the masses of enemy troops pouring forward.56 Turning to Marshal Soult, Napoleon asked how quickly his men could climb to Pratzen. When he was told it would take twenty minutes, Napoleon announced that they would wait another quarter of an hour. According to McLynn, “Napoleon’s military genius was never more evident. By intu
ition he knew the exact equilibrium point at which the Pratzen would be sufficiently clear of allied troops to make Soult’s task easy, but not yet so denuded that reinforcements from the heights were likely to overwhelm the hard-pressed French right.”57

  The northernmost allied column to be committed to the southern attack was the last to move, as it had the shortest distance to march. It was made up mostly of weakened Russian battalions that had marched all the way to the Inn River to join Mack at Ulm before turning around and marching all the way back to Olmutz, and then back yet again to Austerlitz. The rest of the column was made up of a mixture of Austrian regulars and reservists with little training and no experience. They had just begun their march toward Sokolnitz when Soult’s 17,000 men emerged from the mist and caught them full in their extended flank. Such an attack would test even the best-trained soldiers, so it is a testament to the Russian and Austrian troops that they managed to hold the village of Pratzen for three hours before finally being forced to abandon the battlefield.58

  Kutuzov was with the two emperors when the French emerged out of the fog. Alexander immediately lost all the bravado with which he had been commanding up to this point, while his old general reacted quickly by calling up the Russian Imperial Guard from its reserve position. The first counterattack came at 10:30; it was beaten back. The second, led by the Guard cavalry, broke through the French position, but Napoleon had his own Guards handy and they recovered the situation. To the north, Murat led the bulk of the French cavalry onto the field and engaged Bagration’s cavalry force, some 10,000 horsemen in a massive melee. Lannes’s infantry kept up the pressure, and Bagration began to withdraw eastward up the same road he had advanced down that morning. Between Lannes to the north and Soult to the south marched Bernadotte’s corps as the allied army was split in two. Bernadotte’s men pressed forward, while Soult’s men were directed to the south to strike the allied left wing from the rear, hammering them onto Davout and Legrand’s anvil. By midafternoon French artillery was pounding the enemy down the heights. The only possible route for their escape was across the frozen Satchen Pond. Hundreds fled across it, only to be drowned as French cannon fire broke the ice. From that point the retreat became a rout.59

  By 5:00 on the afternoon of 2 December it was all over. Bagration alone in the allied army had managed to withdraw in good order. The Austrians managed to regroup east of Austerlitz and withdraw into Hungary, escaping the French pursuit, which mistakenly went up the road toward Olmutz. The Russians lost some 11,000 killed and wounded, the Austrians another 4,000. The allied total for prisoners was a further 12,000. The French losses were no more than 2,000 killed and almost 7,000 wounded, with just under 600 taken prisoner.

  The following day, Emperor Francis sent a representative to Napoleon asking for an armistice and a meeting; the conference led to the Peace of Pressburg, signed just after Christmas. Alexander led the remains of his army through Poland back to Russia. McLynn records a message he sent to the French force following along behind him: “Tell your master that I am going away. Tell him that he performed miracles yesterday; that the battle has increased my admiration for him; that he is a man predestined by Heaven; that it will require a hundred years for my army to equal his.”60

  Masterful as Napoleon was on the offensive, Austerlitz showed him to be a master when he had to stand his ground. He prepared his defense during the days he had while waiting for the allies to appear. Indeed, had the allies sped their advance, they could have caught him without reinforcement and probably gained a victory. Napoleon’s use of terrain was the key to the entire battle: the low ground effectively hid his troops on the morning of the attack; the natural and man-made characteristics of the villages along the Goldbach made his right wing successful; the fortification of the Santon anchored his north flank and made it virtually impenetrable. His security was excellent, keeping his numbers and dispositions secret from his enemy, except for what he wanted them to see; at the same time, his envoys supposedly discussing peace were in fact gaining accurate views of allied numbers and plans. The stout defense of the southern Goldbach completely disrupted the enemy plans and negated their superior numbers. This, plus Lannes’s defense of the Olmotz-Brunn road, focused the allied forces on the flanks and opened their center for the French counterstroke. Napoleon’s ability to virtually direct the enemy forces into his own plans allowed him to mass his key striking force and keep it hidden until the last moment, at which point it concentrated on the weakest section of the allied position. His flexibility was shown by his placement of forces: had the allied attack in the south succeeded, Soult’s force as well as the Imperial Guard could have pivoted to face the threat. Not needing the reinforcement, Napoleon was able to pick the perfect time for Soult’s advance as well as when to commit elements of the Guard to counter Kutuzov’s commitment of the allied reserves.

  Chandler sums up the offensive-defensive nature of the victory: “A last lesson that Austerlitz teaches us is that the counterattack or tactical offensive is the true key to defense. Strategically Napoleon was undoubtedly on the defensive, but this did not dissuade him from reassuming the tactical initiative all along the battleline (once the trap was sprung), thus snatching overwhelming victory from the jaws of apparent defeat.”61

  PEACE WAS SHORT-LIVED. Although the Prussians wavered about joining the Austro-Russian coalition, they received news of Austerlitz before they acted. The impressive French showing cooled their ardor temporarily, but Napoleon’s occupation of much of Germany upset the Prussian royal family, especially Queen Louisa, who had a particular hatred of Napoleon. The French emperor also proceeded to dismantle the Holy Roman Empire and replace it with the Confederation of the Rhine, under his protection and encompassing most Germanic states, including Hanover. Napoleon had offered Hanover to Prussia in exchange for the small provinces of Cleves, Berg, and Neufchatel; additionally, Bavaria would trade Ansbach for part of Bayreuth. All these territorial changes would serve two purposes for France: they would consolidate Napoleon’s holdings in central Europe and alienate Great Britain from a potential ally.62 Indeed, Prussia took control of Hanover but the queen and the war party in Prussia continued to exert pressure on King Frederick William to ally with Russia and go to war. When the Russians reported that Napoleon was offering to return Hanover to Britain, in August the Prussian king rallied his nerve and sent an ultimatum to Napoleon, demanding he withdraw all his forces from German territory. Napoleon’s reply came in the form of an invasion.63 Long before any Russian troops could conceivably arrive to assist, French troops were into Saxony and aimed at Berlin. The Prussian army found itself stumbling into two battles, at Jena and Auerstadt in mid-October, which resulted in two stunning defeats at the hands of Napoleon (at Jena) and Davout (at Auerstadt). On the 24th Napoleon was in Berlin and his cavalry officers were sharpening their swords on the steps of the French Embassy.

  Frederick William, however, managed to retreat with some troops to the east, where he joined with advancing Russian forces in Poland. Napoleon led his army to Warsaw and spread the gospel of nationalism, which the Poles were not terribly excited to hear. Napoleon nevertheless gathered together some locally raised troops and supplies, and chased the Russo-Prussian force through Poland in the dead of winter. The two armies finally clashed at Eylau on 7 February 1807 and fought one of the era’s bloodiest battles. Aided by a strong defensive position and bitter winter weather, the Russians fought the French to a standstill. Had their commander not lost his nerve and withdrawn in the night, he might have been able to claim a victory over the hard-pressed French.64

  If Ulm, Austerlitz, and Jena and Auerstadt were the pinnacle of Napoleon’s military accomplishments, Eylau marked the beginning of his long slide toward ultimate defeat. Bloodied by the Russians and accomplishing no more than a draw, Napoleon showed himself to be beatable. Although his opponents took note, no country immediately moved to follow up on what may have been a shift of momentum. Instead, the traditional Continental powers sta
yed passive, and Napoleon redeemed his reputation with a major victory over the Russians at Friedland four months after Eylau. With the Russians chastened and a peace treaty with them in hand, Napoleon turned his attention to Italy and then to Spain, where his attempt to invade Portugal and deny the British a base of operations was provoking a Spanish popular revolt. Napoleon spent much of 1808 in Spain trying to restore order for the new king, his brother Joseph. A resurgent Austria, however, sent him back to France in early 1809 to suppress yet another challenge to his rule.