Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  Napoleon was reinforced by Victor’s corps during the night. They went up to Friedrichstadt as Marmont moved to the centre, and the Old Guard crossed the Elbe to form a central reserve. Using the corps system effectively, Napoleon now had massed 155,000 men for the next day’s fighting. It poured with rain all night and there was a thick fog on the morning of August 27. As it cleared, Napoleon spotted that the Allied army was divided by the deep Weisseritz ravine, which cut off its left wing under Count Ignaz Gyulai from its right and centre.18 He decided on a major attack at 7 a.m. with almost all his cavalry and two corps of infantry. Murat, wearing a gold-embroidered cloak over his shoulders and a plume in his headdress, had sixty-eight squadrons and thirty guns of the 1st Cavalry Corps ready for the attack on Gyulai’s corps, along with thirty-six battalions and sixty-eight guns of Victor’s corps.

  By 10 a.m. the Austrians were under huge pressure despite the fact that Klenau had finally rejoined the Army of Bohemia. Victor’s corps and General Étienne de Bordessoulle’s heavy cavalry succeeded in turning their flank. At 11 a.m. Murat ordered a general assault, charging forward with the cry ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ Around Lobtau the Austrian infantry stood at bay, with good artillery support, streets barricaded and houses loopholed for muskets. Their skirmishers were driven back and through the patchy fog they saw the massive attack columns of Murat’s infantry advancing. Under heavy artillery fire, the French made for the gaps between the villages and got past them, before turning to attack them from the rear. Although the Austrians made counter-attacks, their line of retreat was relentlessly compromised.

  In the centre, the Austrians and Prussians were ready from 4 a.m., expecting to renew the fight. Marmont’s task was to fix them in place while the French wings defeated the enemy. By 8 a.m. Saint-Cyr was attacking the Prussian 12th Brigade on the Strehlen heights, forcing them back to Leubnitz, where they were joined by the Russian 5th Division. This stubborn fighting was mainly done by bayonet as the heavy rain soaked the muskets’ firing-pans despite their protective frizzens.

  By 10 a.m. Napoleon had massed a large battery on the Strehlen heights, from where it dominated the centre of the battlefield. As Saint-Cyr paused to reorganize, he was counter-attacked by Austrian infantry. He tried to push on but the sheer weight of Allied artillery fire pinned him back. Napoleon was by his side at noon and ordered him to keep up the pressure, while the Young Guard was pitched into Leubnitz to try to wrest the village from the Silesian infantry. At 1 p.m. Napoleon was opposite the Allied centre-right, in the middle of a formidable artillery exchange where he personally directed some horse artillery that largely silenced many of the Austrian guns. During this firefight Moreau had both legs smashed by a cannonball. By the early afternoon the Prussian cavalry was beginning to move away to the right. Saint-Cyr’s pressure was slowly tipping the balance.

  On Napoleon’s left flank, Ney began his attack at 7.30 a.m. As the Prussians had already been driven out of the Gross-garten, he used the garden to mask part of his advance. Napoleon arrived at 11 a.m. and encouraged the enthusiastic attack of the tirailleurs (skirmishers), although they were occasionally checked by Prussian and Russian cavalry. Despite Barclay de Tolly having no fewer than sixty-five squadrons of Russian and twenty of Prussian cavalry to hand, he didn’t commit them. In the pouring rain this was a fight of bayonet and sabre, punctuated by blasts of artillery. Schwarzenberg contemplated a major counter-attack, only to find all his units already too heavily engaged, just as Napoleon had intended.

  By 2 p.m. Napoleon was back in the centre forming a battery of thirty-two 12-pounders near Rachnitz to smash the Allied centre. At 5.30 p.m. Schwarzenberg received the news that Vandamme had crossed the Elbe at Pirna and was marching on his rear. He now had no alternative but to give up the fight altogether. (Vandamme was a reckless swashbuckler of whom Napoleon said that every army needed one, but that if there were two he would have to shoot one of them.19) By 6 p.m. the French had halted in the position occupied by the Allies that morning. Although both sides had lost around 10,000 men, Murat’s victory on the right flank had led to the capture of 13,000 Austrians, and the French captured 40 guns.20 When he was told that Schwarzenberg had been killed in the battle, Napoleon had exclaimed, ‘Schwarzenberg has purged the curse!’ He hoped his death would finally lift the shadow of the fire at his marriage celebrations in 1810. As he explained later: ‘I was delighted; not that I wished the death of the poor man, but because it took a weight off my heart.’21 Only later did he find out to his profound chagrin that the dead general was not Schwarzenberg but Moreau. ‘That rascal Bonaparte is always lucky,’ Moreau wrote to his wife just before he expired from his wounds on September 2. ‘Excuse my scrawl. I love and embrace you with all my heart.’22 It was brave of the renegade general to apologize for his handwriting while dying, but he was wrong about Napoleon’s extraordinary run of good luck.

  ‘I’ve just gained a great victory at Dresden over the Austrian, Russian and Prussian armies under the three sovereigns in person,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise. ‘I am riding off in pursuit.’23 The next day he corrected himself, saying ‘Papa François had the good sense not to come along.’ He then said Alexander and Frederick William ‘fought very well and retired in all haste’. Napoleon was harder on the Austrians. ‘The troops of Papa François have never been so bad,’ he told his Austrian-born wife. ‘They put up a wretched fight everywhere. I have taken 25,000 prisoners, thirty colours and a great many guns.’24 In fact it had been the other way around; the Allied sovereigns and generals had failed their men strategically and tactically in their positioning and lack of co-ordination, and it was only the stubborn, brave troops who had saved the two-day battle from becoming a rout.

  Riding over the battlefield in the driving rain worsened Napoleon’s cold, and he was struck with vomiting and diarrhoea after the battle. ‘You must go back and change,’ an old grognard called out to him from the ranks, after which the Emperor finally went back to Dresden for a hot bath.25 At 7 p.m. he told Cambacérès, ‘I am so tired and so preoccupied that I cannot write at length; [Maret] will do so for me. Things are going very well here.’26 He couldn’t afford to be ill for long. ‘In my position,’ he had written in a general note to his senior commanders only a week earlier, ‘any plan where I am not myself in the centre is inadmissible. Any plan which removes me to a distance establishes a regular war in which the superiority of the enemy cavalry, in numbers, and even in generals, would completely ruin me.’27 Here was an open recognition that his marshals couldn’t be expected to pull off the coups necessary to win battles against forces 70 per cent larger than theirs – indeed that most of them to his mind were barely capable of independent command.

  This judgement was largely confirmed when on August 26 – the first day of the battle of Dresden – in Prussian Silesia on the Katzbach river (present-day Kaczawa) Marshal Macdonald, with 67,000 men of the French army and the Rhine Confederation, was crushed by Blücher’s Army of Silesia.28 On St Helena Napoleon would confirm his opinion: ‘Macdonald and others like him were good when they knew where they were and under my orders; further away it was a different matter.’29 The very next day General Girard’s corps was effectively destroyed at Hagelberg on the 27th by the Prussian Landwehr, which had only recently exchanged its pikes for muskets, and some Cossacks. Girard’s stricken and much depleted force made it back to Magdeburg only with the greatest difficulty. On August 29 General Jacques Puthod’s 17th Division of 3,000 men was trapped up against the flooded River Bober at Plagwitz, fired off all their ammunition and had to surrender en masse. They lost three eagles, one of which was found in the river after the battle.30

  Hoping to hold up Schwarzenberg’s retreat into Bohemia, Napoleon ordered Vandamme to leave Peterswalde with his force of 37,000 men and to ‘penetrate into Bohemia and throw back the Prince of Württemberg’. The goal was to cut the enemy lines of communication with Tetschen, Aussig and Teplitz. But Barclay, the Prussian General Kleist and Constantine together
had twice Vandamme’s numbers and although his troops fought valiantly and exacted a heavy toll he was forced to surrender on the 30th near the hamlet of Kulm with 10,000 of his men. Napoleon had sent Murat, Saint-Cyr and Marmont to attack the Austrian rearguard at Töplitz as Vandamme bravely held up its vanguard, but they couldn’t save him. Napoleon himself was ill and unable to leave his bedroom; even on the afternoon of the 29th he could only get as far as Pirna.31 When Jean-Baptiste Corbineau arrived the next day with the disastrous news Napoleon could only say: ‘That’s war: very high in the morning and very low in the evening: from triumph to failure is only one step.’32

  By the end of August all the advantage Napoleon had gained from his victory at Dresden had been thrown away by his lieutenants. Yet there was more bad news to come. Having sent Ney off to resume the attack on Berlin to recover the situation after Oudinot’s defeat by Bernadotte, on September 6 Ney and Oudinot together were defeated by General von Bülow at the battle of Dennewitz in Brandenburg. Bavaria then declared her neutrality, which made other German states consider their position, especially once the Allies proclaimed the abolition of the Confederation of the Rhine at the end of the month.

  Napoleon spent most of September in Dresden, occasionally dashing out to engage any Allied forces that came too close, but incapable of making any large, campaign-winning strokes because of the Allies’ determination to avoid giving him battle, while continuing to concentrate on his subordinates. These were frustrating weeks for him, and his impatience and distemper would occasionally show. When General Samuel-François l’Héritier de Chézelles’ 2,000 men of the 5th Cavalry Corps were attacked by 600 Cossacks between Dresden and Torgau, he wrote to Berthier that Chézelles’ men should have fought them more aggressively even if they ‘had neither sabres nor pistols, and were armed only with broomsticks’.33

  This kind of fighting was bad for morale, and on September 27 an entire Saxon battalion deserted to Bernadotte, under whom they had fought at Wagram. In Paris Marie Louise asked for a sénatus-consulte for a levy of 280,000 conscripts, no fewer than 160,000 of them an advance on the 1815 class year, the 1814 year having already been called up. Yet there was already widespread opposition to further conscription over large areas of France.

  General Thiébault, a divisional commander in the campaign, accurately summed up the situation in the autumn of 1813:

  The arena of this gigantic struggle had increased in an alarming fashion. It was no longer the kind of ground of which advantage could be taken by some clever, secret, sudden manoeuvre, such as could be executed in a few hours, or at most in one or two days. Napoleon … could not turn the enemy’s flank as at Marengo or Jena, or even wreck an army, as at Wagram, by destroying one of its wings. Bernadotte to the north with 160,000 men, Blücher to the east with 160,000, Schwarzenberg to the south with 190,000, while presenting a threatening front, kept at such a distance as to leave no opening for one of those unforeseen and rapid movements which, deciding a campaign or a war by a single battle, had made Napoleon’s reputation. The man was annihilated by the presence of space. Again, Napoleon had never till then had more than one opposing army to deal with at one time; now he had three, and he could not attack one without exposing his flank to the others.34

  By early October Allied forces were moving across the French lines of communication at will, and there were several days when Napoleon could neither send nor receive letters. The situation worsened significantly on October 6 when Bavaria declared war against France. ‘Bavaria will not march seriously against us,’ a philosophical Emperor told Fain, ‘she will lose too much with the full triumph of Austria and the disaster of France. She knows well that the one is her natural enemy, and the other is her necessary support.’35 The next day Wellington crossed the Bidasoa river out of Spain, leading the first foreign army onto French soil since Admiral Hood had vacated Toulon twenty years earlier. With Blücher and 64,000 men crossing the Elbe, and the 200,000-strong Army of Bohemia marching towards Leipzig, Napoleon left Saint-Cyr in Dresden and headed northwards with 120,000 men, hoping to chase Blücher back over the Elbe and then return to fight Schwarzenberg, while all the time posing a credible threat to Berlin.

  By October 10 the three Allied armies under Schwarzenberg, Blücher and Bernadotte, totalling 325,000 men, were converging upon Leipzig, hoping to trap Napoleon’s much smaller army there. ‘There will inevitably be a great battle at Leipzig,’ Napoleon wrote to Ney at 5 a.m. on October 13, the same day he discovered that the Bavarian army had joined the Austrians and were now threatening the Rhine.36 Despite being greatly outnumbered (he could muster a little over 200,000 men), Napoleon decided to fight for the city which the British journalist Frederic Shoberl described the following year as ‘undoubtedly the first commercial city of Germany, and the great Exchange of the Continent’.37 He drew his men up in ranks of two rather than three, after Dr Larrey persuaded him that many of the head wounds he was seeing weren’t self-inflicted, as Napoleon had suspected, but were the result of men reloading and discharging their muskets close to the heads of comrades kneeling in the ranks in front of them. ‘One of the advantages of this new disposition’, Napoleon said, ‘will be to cause the enemy to believe that the army is one third stronger than it is in reality.’38

  On October 14, as the Imperial Guard arrived from Düben, Napoleon spent the night in the house of a M. Wester in Leipzig’s eastern suburb of Reudnitz. As usual the maréchal de logis had chalked the names of the generals who occupied each room on their doors, and a fire was immediately made up in Napoleon’s room, ‘as His Majesty was very fond of warmth’.39 The Emperor then chatted to Wester’s chief clerk.

  NAPOLEON: ‘What is your master?’

  CLERK: ‘He is in business, Sire.’

  NAPOLEON: ‘In what line?’

  CLERK: ‘He is a banker.’

  NAPOLEON: (smiling) ‘Oho! Then he is worth a plum.’

  CLERK: ‘Begging your Majesty’s pardon, indeed he is not.’

  NAPOLEON: ‘Well then, perhaps he may be worth two?’

  They discussed discount bills, interest rates, the clerk’s wages, the present (woeful) state of business, and the owner’s family. ‘During the whole conversation the Emperor was in very good humour, smiled frequently, and took a great deal of snuff,’ recalled Colonel von Odeleben.40 When he left, he paid 200 francs for the pleasure of staying there, which, as one of his aides-de-camp noted, ‘was certainly not the usual custom’.

  The next day Schwarzenberg’s 200,000 men came into contact with Murat to the south, spending the whole day in patrols and skirmishes while Blücher advanced along the Saale and Elster rivers. Riding a cream-coloured mare that day, Napoleon distributed eagles and colours to three battalions. Drums beat as each was taken from its box and unfurled, to be given to the officers. ‘In a clear solemn tone, but not very loud, which might be distinguished by the musical term mezza voce’, a spectator recalled Napoleon saying:

  ‘Soldiers of the 26th regiment of light infantry, I entrust you with the French eagle. It will be your rallying point. You swear to abandon it but with life? You swear never to suffer an insult to France. You swear to prefer death to dishonour. You swear!’ He laid particular emphasis upon this last word, pronounced in a peculiar tone, and with great energy. This was the signal at which all the officers raised their swords, and all the soldiers, filled with enthusiasm, exclaimed with common consent, in a loud voice, accompanied by the ordinary acclamations: ‘We swear!’

  This ceremony used to be attended by band music, but no longer: ‘Musicians had become scarce, since the greater part of them had been buried in the snows of Russia.’41

  Among the half-million men who fought at Leipzig in ‘The Battle of the Nations’ – the largest battle in European history up to that moment – were French, Germans (on both sides), Russians, Swedes, Italians, Poles, every nationality within the Austrian Empire and even a British rocket section.42 The battle was fought over three days, on the 16th, 18th and 19th of Octo
ber 1813. Napoleon had almost the whole of the French field army under him, comprising 203,100 men, of whom only 28,000 were cavalry, and 738 guns. Those absent were Saint-Cyr’s corps at Dresden (30,000 men), Rapp’s besieged at Danzig (36,000), Davout’s at Hamburg (40,000) and some 90,000 who were in hospital. In total by the last day of the battle the Allies had been able to bring up a total of 362,000 men and 1,456 guns, almost twice as many as the French.43 The battlefield was vast, cut in two by the Elster and Pleisse rivers, with open plains to the east and hills that provided artillery platforms and screened troops behind them.*

  Captain Adolphe de Gauville, who was wounded at Leipzig, recalled that on the dark, gloomy and rainy morning of October 16, ‘at 5 a.m. Napoleon had an armchair and a table brought to him in a field. He had a great many maps. He was giving his orders to a great number of officers and generals, who came to receive them one after the other.’44 Napoleon calculated that he could engage 138,000 men against Schwarzenberg’s force of 100,000 to the south of the city and knew he had one or at best two days to subdue him before Blücher, Bernadotte and Bennigsen arrived from the north-west, north and east respectively. (Bennigsen’s advance troops – the Cossacks – arrived on the battlefield on the first day of combat, and the main body late on the 17th, ready for action the next day. Bernadotte’s troops also arrived then.)