Given Napoleon’s position, the terms were acceptable; there was no mention of Holland, Belgium or Italy, which left plenty of room for manoeuvre when peace talks began in earnest. His acceptance would have prevented Austria from joining the allies in the war against him, which was important, since he continued to entertain thoughts of defeating the Russians and Prussians before then, which would, he believed, allow him to split the allies and play them off against each other. But, determined not to appear too keen, Napoleon delayed his reply accepting the terms.8
The showman was determined to keep up his act. As his birthday fell after the end of the armistice, he had ordered the festivities to be brought forward by five days to 10 August, and it was celebrated with pomp in every unit, and imperially in Dresden itself, with a parade, a ball, a banquet and fireworks. ‘One could not imagine anything under the sun more martial; everything exuded confidence, ardour, enthusiasm,’ wrote one of the actors of the Comédie-Française who had been performing in Dresden. ‘My God, what a show!’ It did not impress his generals, many of whom saw disaster looming.9
‘The great moment has arrived at last, my dearest friend,’ Metternich wrote to his wife the same day. That evening, while fireworks lit up the sky above Dresden, the Russian and Prussian negotiators had gathered at his residence in Prague. Watches were consulted with impatience, and when the chimes of midnight rang out over the sleeping city Metternich announced that the armistice was over and Austria was now a member of the alliance. He ordered a beacon to be lit which, by a chain reaction, carried the news to allied headquarters in Silesia. By morning, Russian and Prussian troops were on the march to join the Austrian army outside Prague.10
On 12 August, just as Caulaincourt and Narbonne were preparing to leave Prague, a courier arrived from Dresden with Napoleon’s instructions to accept Metternich’s terms. Caulaincourt called on Metternich without delay, but was told it was too late; Austria had issued her declaration of war. Napoleon instructed him to delay his departure in the hope of being able to obtain an interview with Alexander, who was due a couple of days later. On 18 August Maret wrote to Metternich arguing that the congress had not been given a chance, and proposing a fresh one to be convoked in some neutral city to include all the powers of Europe, great and small. But Metternich had by then ruled out peace, and Alexander had been against it all along. The tsar had gone so far as to conceal Britain’s agreement to join the negotiations, knowing it would have strengthened Austria’s case for peace and encouraged Napoleon to take the negotiations seriously – he would probably have been prepared to make concessions in such circumstances; a general peace with the participation of Britain, involving as it would not only huge economic relief but also the return of French colonies, could have been dressed up as a victory and allowed Napoleon to claim that he was making peace with honour.11
The only victory he could hope for now was on the battlefield, and that was going to be difficult to achieve. Facing him was the main allied army under Schwarzenberg, consisting of 120,000 Austrians, 70,000 Russians under Barclay de Tolly and 60,000 Prussians under General Kleist, a total of 250,000. Behind it stood Blücher’s army of Silesia, consisting of 58,000 Russians and 38,000 Prussians. In the north Bernadotte commanded an army of 150,000 Swedes, Russians and Prussians. That added up to well over half a million men, and did not include Wellington’s Anglo-Spanish army, which was approaching France’s south-western frontier. More significantly, the allies had agreed a plan which consisted in refusing battle to Napoleon and only taking on individual corps commanded by his marshals. The idea was to wear down his forces without risking defeat. His resources were diminishing, while theirs were on the increase; the vast war effort Alexander had put in motion as soon as the French had been expelled from Russia was beginning to produce spectacular results in men, equipment and, crucially, horses.12
‘I have an army as fine as any and more than 400,000 men; that will suffice to re-establish my affairs in the North,’ Napoleon boasted to Beugnot, but later in their conversation he complained that he was short of cavalry and needed more men, particularly seasoned troops. His forces were in fact greatly inferior to those of the allies. His garrisons in Germany and Poland accounted for 100,000 of his calculation, and they were beyond his reach. His best marshal, Davout, was stuck in Hamburg with a body of seasoned troops, Rapp was besieged in Danzig with over 20,000 veterans, many of them officers and NCOs, while the bulk of the 300,000 or so men at Napoleon’s immediate disposal were mostly conscripts with rudimentary training. Much the same was true of the Army of Italy which Eugène had been forming up to threaten Austria’s southern flank.13
Morale was surprisingly good among the troops as they marched out of Dresden on 16 August, boosted by the arrival of Murat, whom Napoleon had persuaded to come from Naples and take command of the cavalry. Napoleon’s plan was to drive back Blücher and then, leaving Macdonald to cover him, veer south and outflank the main allied army under Schwarzenberg, which was moving on Dresden. The first part of the operation went according to plan, but at Lowenberg on 23 August, as he was taking a hurried lunch standing up, a courier arrived with a message from Gouvion Saint-Cyr, whom he had left to hold Dresden, warning that the main allied army under Schwarzenberg was threatening the city from the south. Napoleon smashed the glass of wine he was holding against the table as he read the despatch. The fall of Dresden would have political repercussions, so he turned about and marched back, detaching a force under General Vandamme to move south into the allies’ rear while he took them on at Dresden.
He arrived outside the city on 26 August, and the next day, in pouring rain with mud up to their knees, his forces began pushing the allied forces back and eventually put them to flight. It was a fine victory; he had inflicted around 15,000 casualties, taken 24,000 prisoners, fifteen standards and a number of guns. But he failed to follow it up as he would have done in the past. He marched back to reinforce Vandamme, who was now in a position to cut off the allied retreat, but unaccountably stopped and turned back. The result was that Vandamme was himself caught in a trap and forced to capitulate at Kulm with around 10,000 men. If Napoleon had come to his assistance he would have destroyed the allied army and probably captured all three allied sovereigns and their ministers.14
Napoleon’s sluggish behaviour has been variously blamed on a bout of food poisoning and on the depressing news he received on 30 August. Oudinot, whom he had ordered to march on Berlin, had been defeated by the Prussians at Grossbeeren. ‘That’s war,’ Napoleon said to Maret that evening after hearing of the disaster of Kulm. ‘Up there in the morning, down there in the evening.’ He was increasingly prone to making fatalistic comments and quoting lines of poetry about destiny; it was as though he were giving himself up to it rather than, as in his youth, trying to forge it. News of the death of Junot, who had leapt out of a window and killed himself on 29 July, would not have helped. In his last letter he had compared his worship of Napoleon to that of ‘the savage for the sun’, but begged him to make peace. In Lannes, Duroc and now Junot, he was losing men who had served him with devotion since Toulon, nearly twenty years before.15
A curious twist of fate had brought two of his long-standing rivals out against him. Moreau had been persuaded to return from America and had joined the tsar’s headquarters, entertaining dreams of a military and perhaps political comeback. These were shattered by a French shell outside Dresden on 27 August; he died four days later. To the north, as Sweden had joined the coalition, Bernadotte was leading a combined Swedish and Prussian corps, entertaining more clearly stated dreams of succeeding Napoleon as ruler of France. To that end, he avoided coming face to face with French troops and badgered the allies to allow him to attack Denmark instead. The allies did not trust him (Blücher only ever referred to him as ‘the traitor’, and Hardenberg described him as ‘a bastard that circumstances have obliged us to legitimise’), and kept a wary eye on him.16
A couple of days after hearing of the defeats of Kulm and G
rossbeeren, Napoleon received news that Macdonald had been repulsed with heavy losses by Blücher on the river Katzbach, and not long after, that Ney had been defeated at Dennewitz on 6 September. He was breaking his own golden rule, never to divide his forces but always to concentrate them at the decisive point. And while ‘the Bravest of the Brave’, as Ney was referred to, was a fine cavalry commander with all the panache one could hope for on the field of battle, he lacked judgement and, like most of the marshals, was not up to operating on his own. It did not help that Berthier was showing signs of age and despondency, which affected his management of operations. Napoleon too hesitated and kept changing his mind, meaning to march on Berlin one moment and into Bohemia the next. With the Austro-Russian army of Schwarzenberg licking its wounds in Bohemia, he decided to take on Blücher, but the Prussian refused to give battle, and Napoleon was obliged to trudge back to Dresden; the allies had drawn him into a game of blind-man’s-buff as he lunged at one and then another.
Soon after hostilities began, the weather turned wet and cold. The roads were morasses of mud, reducing his mobility as well as the effectives of every unit with each march. Communications were impeded by shortage of cavalry and by the large numbers of cossacks roaming the country; staff officers were reluctant to carry orders and proceeded with caution when carrying out reconnaissance for fear of being captured. The persistent rain often rendered muskets useless, so the troops had to resort to the bayonet. The marches and counter-marches exhausted the men and depleted the ranks. ‘Whenever we left a bivouac in the morning, having spent the night either only partially or not at all sheltered from the rain, the wind and the cold, we almost always left behind exhausted men, undermined by fever, hunger and misery, and that was almost always so many men lost, as in our incessant marches we did not have the possibility of having them moved,’ wrote Sergeant Faucheur. Dresden was filling up with sick and wounded soldiers and the supply situation was dire. ‘Never had my duties been more difficult or my efforts less fruitful,’ recalled the man in charge, General Mathieu Dumas.17
Morale dipped, particularly among senior officers, who could see the situation growing desperate. None felt that more than Napoleon, whose exasperation was evident; he alternated between spells of lethargy and sudden bold decisions which his marshals considered too rash. He also lost his temper, calling into question their competence and their loyalty. When he accused Murat of treason (with good reason), Berthier tried to intervene, only to have Napoleon tell him to mind his own business and snap, ‘Shut up, you old fool!’18
He could no longer hold on to his exposed position at Dresden, and on 13 October decided to fall back on Leipzig, where Frederick Augustus had preceded him. Political considerations made him commit a fatal error: fearing that abandoning Dresden would make a poor impression, he left Saint-Cyr there with more than 30,000 men, thus depriving himself of a significant number of troops at a moment when the allies were gaining in strength. Reaching Leipzig two days later, he repelled an attack by Schwarzenberg, and the following day scored significant success, at one point coming close to capturing the three allied monarchs. But towards the end of the day Blücher, whom he had assumed to be far away, appeared in his rear, and he was forced to call off the attack.
By then the allies had some 220,000 men facing his 150,000 on three sides, and outgunned him with over a thousand pieces of artillery. He had lost the initiative, and admitted as much by sending an Austrian general captured the previous day, with an offer to negotiate – which was rejected out of hand. Their recent successes had buoyed the allies, and the tensions between them had been worked out by the signature on 9 September of the Treaty of Töplitz, which committed them to the common struggle. The only thing that could have saved Napoleon would have been a rapid withdrawal of all his forces in Germany and a concentration on the Rhine, but he continued to put strategy second to what were by now entirely irrelevant political considerations. The allies held off on 17 October as they prepared their concerted attack, but he did not seize the opportunity to make good his escape or even prepare for it; he did not evacuate the wounded or supplies of ammunition, or even have adequate crossings prepared over the rivers.
On 18 October, by which time they outnumbered the French by well over two to one with some 360,000 men and a vast artillery, the allies launched their attack. The French fought with determination, but the sheer numbers facing them told, and matters were not helped when the Saxon contingent in the French army suddenly turned around while advancing on the enemy and began firing on its French comrades who were coming up in support. Other German contingents also defected, sowing confusion and affecting morale. The number of men and guns on the field of battle meant that the slaughter was unprecedented. The corps commanders who could see the pointlessness of the situation were also losing heart. ‘Does that b— know what he’s doing?’ Augereau fumed to Macdonald two days later. ‘Haven’t you noticed that in the recent events and the catastrophe which followed he lost his head? The coward! He abandoned us, he sacrificed us all …’19
Napoleon really did not appear to know what he was doing. On the evening of 18 October he gave the order to withdraw, and columns of troops began a disorderly retreat through the narrow streets of Leipzig. The allies stormed the city the following morning, sowing confusion. A sergeant left guarding the single bridge over the river Elster with orders not to blow it until the rearguard had crossed panicked and lit the fuses too early, cutting off at least 12,000 men with eighty guns, and leading to the death of Poniatowski, who drowned trying to get across the river despite being severely wounded. Napoleon had been asleep in a windmill outside the city, and was woken by the explosion. Macdonald, who had managed to get across, reported the event. Napoleon seemed stunned as much as distraught, and apparently unaware of the extent to which his lack of foresight had been to blame for a debacle of monumental proportions. The losses of the Grande Armée in the fighting around Leipzig were 70,000 men and 150 guns, not counting the 20,000 German allies who had changed sides. Allied losses were 54,000.20
Before leaving Leipzig Napoleon went to the palace and offered Frederick Augustus refuge in France, but the Saxon king declined the offer, saying that he could not leave his subjects at such a time. Frederick Augustus sent officers to each of the allied monarchs, but received no response. Alexander snubbed him when he rode into Leipzig, and after some argument the unfortunate Saxon royal couple were bundled into a carriage and sent under armed escort to captivity in Berlin. Murat on the other hand was allowed to sneak off to Naples, where he had an army of around 25,000 men, magnificently uniformed but inadequately trained and led. Metternich, who may also have been influenced by fond memories of the affair with Caroline he had enjoyed in Paris a couple of years before, seems to have believed that his forces were stronger and to have been impressed by his military reputation. He thought it politic to detach him from Napoleon by offering to leave him on the Neapolitan throne.
Napoleon fell back on Erfurt, where he spent two days, in the same rooms in which he had held talks with Alexander less than five years earlier, ‘in an attitude of deep meditation’, in the words of Macdonald. He briefly thought of making a stand there, but his marshals balked at this, pointing out that the Bavarians, who had now joined the coalition, were about to cut them off from France. Listless and undecided, he had to be urged to move on by his marshals, and made for the Rhine. Aside from the Guard, which was still disciplined, most of his remaining forces were no more than a crowd marching without order; one officer was reminded of the retreat from Moscow. No effort was made to rally the troops, and many were abandoned to die by the roadside.21
At Hanau, their road was barred by 50,000 Bavarians. The Guard managed to defeat their erstwhile allies, but Napoleon barely directed the action, sheltering in a wood and seeming to those around him to have lost his nerve. Ségur, who had arrived from Paris and had not seen him for six months, was shocked by the change that had taken place in him. ‘The impression he made on me was so
strong and so painful that I still feel it today,’ he wrote more than a decade later. When Napoleon addressed the remnants of Poniatowski’s Polish corps, releasing them from their oath but begging them to stay with him, promising to fight again one day for their country’s cause, many were so moved to pity that they did.22
He crossed the Rhine on 30 October with no more than 30,000 men and some 40,000 stragglers. He spent two days at Mainz, from where he sent optimistic reports and captured standards to Paris, assuring Marie-Louise that people in Paris were ‘unnecessarily alarmed’: ‘My troops have a decisive superiority over the enemy, who will be beaten sooner than he thinks.’ To Savary, he wrote that the alarmist talk in Paris was ridiculous and made him ‘laugh’. But the situation was nothing short of catastrophic.23
His empire was crumbling. The network of control over Germany built up since 1806 unravelled. As other rulers of the Confederation of the Rhine joined the allies, Jérôme fled Kassel, ‘accompanied by his ministers of foreign affairs and war, and still surrounded by all the tattered trappings of royalty’, in the words of Beugnot, who saw him pass through Düsseldorf, escorted by ‘lifeguards whose theatrical uniforms heavy with gold were wonderfully inapposite to the situation’ and a court which ‘resembled nothing so much as a troupe of actors on tour rehearsing a play’. The 190,000 or so French troops still holding out in fortresses such as Dresden and Hamburg, not to mention points further east, were now beyond Napoleon’s reach and isolated in a hostile sea, and would capitulate one by one. Private scores were settled as his regime imploded, unruly Prussian and Russian troops bent on rapine swarmed over the area, and a typhus epidemic spread rapidly as people fled in all directions, turning military hospitals into morgues and striking down exhausted and underfed stragglers.24
The situation further south was little better. Austrian troops had invaded the Illyrian provinces, forcing the weak French garrisons to evacuate them. Eugène could do little to stem their advance, and fell back on Milan. In November he was approached on behalf of the allies by his father-in-law King Maximilian of Bavaria, who urged him to safeguard his future by changing sides, but he refused and remained loyal to Napoleon, firmly supported by his wife.25
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