by Philip Dwyer
Dresden
When Napoleon received news that Blücher was advancing west from Silesia and that a new Russian army under Bennigsen was also advancing towards Silesia, he decided to try and smash Blücher before the arrival of the Russian army. He would have been able to do this on any other occasion, but Blücher, one of the most volatile of the allied commanders who had to fight his own personal demons of depression, venereal disease and alcoholism, was nevertheless disciplined enough to keep to the Trachenberg Plan and avoid contact with Napoleon. At the same time, Schwarzenberg came up through Bohemia, much faster than Napoleon imagined he could, to threaten Dresden where Napoleon had left a corps of about 20,000 men under Gouvion Saint-Cyr. Since Dresden was being threatened, Napoleon decided to break off with Blücher. His initial plan was to march behind the enemy and either destroy it from the rear or at least destroy its supply base. It was a sound plan that, had he been able to carry it through, would have virtually put an end to the allies’ war effort in Germany.14 The assumption was that Gouvion Saint-Cyr could hold out in Dresden for a few days while Napoleon carried out the manoeuvre. However, on 25 August, as Napoleon arrived at Stolpen, some twenty-six kilometres to the east, he was told by Gourgaud and Murat that Saint-Cyr could not possibly hold out unless he was immediately reinforced by Napoleon. Gourgaud and Murat were wrong. Napoleon’s first mistake was to listen to them. The second mistake he made was to hole up inside Dresden, rather than staying in the field to attack the allies in the rear.
Napoleon’s appearance before Dresden threw the eastern European monarchs into a panic.15 He again set up headquarters at the Marcolini Palace and even had the actors from the Théâtre-Français come to Dresden so that he could construct a little court around himself. The battle of Dresden pitched about 170,000 allied troops against 120,000 French troops. Some of these, raw conscripts, had marched 190 kilometres in four days – a remarkable feat by any standards – to be on site for the battle, which took place in appalling conditions over two days (26–27 August). We can pass over the details of the battle. It rained so hard that ‘no one could make use of their weapons, it was impossible to fire a single shot, as the rain fell without interruption’.16 The rain turned the countryside into a morass, making it difficult to manoeuvre.
After two days of fighting, Napoleon managed to put the allied army to flight. He was aided in this by Alexander, his own worst enemy, who insisted on getting involved in the battle, ordering troops about without any reference to allied command, wreaking havoc and confusion. It was, nevertheless, a remarkable victory for Napoleon that showed he was still capable of great feats. The French lacked cavalry and were outnumbered. Despite that, for the loss of about 10,000 men (killed and wounded), Napoleon managed to inflict severe casualties on the allies: between 27,000 and 40,000 killed and wounded with another 20,000 (mostly Austrian) troops taken prisoner. The battle could have seen the war brought to an end when the three emperors were almost captured by French troops who had come within metres of their observation post. Schwarzenberg was obliged personally to help fend off the French, sword in hand. On another occasion, General Moreau, who had returned from exile in America to join the Tsar’s army as an adviser, was struck in the leg by a cannon ball that went right through the horse, and shattered his other leg. Both legs were amputated and he died a week later. What spooked the allied leaders was that Moreau was only half a horse’s length in front of Alexander when he was struck. If Alexander had been hit, the throne would have gone to his brother, Grand Duke Constantine, who did not share Alexander’s commitment to defeat Napoleon and who may very well have decided on a dramatic change in policy.17 Upon such incidents can hinge the fate of empires.
Then, just as Napoleon had achieved victory, he was taken violently ill, vomiting and suffering from a severe case of diarrhoea. He was forced to go back to Dresden where he rested, and by 30 August he had recuperated enough to return. He was not in any position to pursue the retreating allies and perhaps was not aware of the difficult position in which Schwarzenberg now found himself.18 He ordered Vandamme and Gouvion Saint-Cyr to pursue the retreating enemy; they might have succeeded in inflicting serious damage on the allies, but unexpectedly Napoleon recalled Gouvion Saint-Cyr to Dresden and left Vandamme ill equipped to deal an effective blow. As it turned out, Vandamme was surrounded by a combined allied force and obliged to surrender at Kulm with two-thirds of his army, around 30,000 men (29 and 30 August).
The allied defeat was, in other words, quickly offset by a number of smaller allied victories as they reverted to the Trachenberg Plan.19 In the two-week period from the middle of August to the beginning of September 1813, the French lost 120,000–150,000 men (killed, wounded, taken prisoner, sick) along with around 200 cannon. And they had nothing to show for it. Their Russian captors, moreover, regularly massacred French prisoners.20 Napoleon’s talents as a general were effectively being stymied, the French were being outmanoeuvred for the first time, and their position in Germany considerably weakened, not strengthened, by continuing to fight. The allies on the other hand had lost around 85,000 men and fifty cannon.21 But while Napoleon could not readily replace the men he had lost, recruits were pouring into the allied ranks. Within two months of the battle of Dresden, not only had all the allied losses been replaced, but many of the recruits were better trained and better equipped than the French.
Napoleon’s communication and supply lines were also being threatened by Cossack and allied cavalry. Even when supply trains were given an escort, there was no guarantee they would get through. On 11 September, for example, a convoy with an escort of 4,000 infantry and 1,500 cavalry was attacked and defeated by an allied force west of Leipzig.22 Worse, the allies were striking deep into ‘French territory’. On the morning of 29 September, Prince Aleksandr Chernyshev attacked Jérôme’s capital, Kassel, with five Cossack regiments and six squadrons of regular cavalry. Jérôme, deeply unpopular among the local population, but also no general, decided to flee rather than fight, abandoning his capital.23 It was a spectacular raid with no apparent strategic value, but it did underline just how vulnerable and tenuous was Napoleon’s hold on Germany.
Napoleon was able to hold back the allied advance by showing up on the field wherever his presence was required. But since the allies refused to fight when he appeared, only to do so as soon as he left one field for another, his actions could do no more than delay the inevitable. On 10 October, he took up residence in a moated castle at Bad Düben on the River Mulde, about thirty-three kilometres north-east of Leipzig. It was there that he learnt of the defection of Bavaria. Metternich had reached an agreement with Bavaria through the Treaty of Ried on 8 October.24 Along with other mid-sized European states, Bavaria had been obliged to provide Napoleon with both men and money, but had always been a reluctant ally whose loyalty was questionable, despite supplying more troops than were actually required, and despite a political elite much more in tune with France than with the eastern powers.25 The stand-off at Dresden made it clear to a number of German states that Napoleon’s strategy in Germany could not work. We do not know how Napoleon reacted to this news. During the few days he was at Bad Düben he dictated almost sixty letters, but was, by all accounts, bored with waiting. A Saxon officer by the name of Major Ernst Otto von Odeleben was able to observe him during this period. He wrote that Napoleon was ‘completely at a loose end, seated on a sofa in his room, in front of a large table on which lay a sheet of white paper that he covered with big letters’.26 The Emperor’s inertia was rare enough to deserve mention. Eventually he learnt that various allied armies were converging on his positions from both the north and the south. The obvious decision would have been to strike out quickly at one or the other army, but the Trachenberg Plan put paid to that. Napoleon waited four days before acting. By that time it was too late. What should have been the battle of Castiglione all over again became the battle of Leipzig.
The Battle of the Nations
Many of the places over which th
e battle of Leipzig was fought are now obscured by the city, although some of the old road patterns remain, and the fields to the east and south-east of the city are largely still there. At the time, Leipzig, ‘redolent of commerce, prosperity, and riches’, had about 40,000 inhabitants. Two rivers ran through the city, the Pleisse and the Elster.27 Despite the Trachenberg Plan, Schwarzenberg was under intense pressure from the Tsar and certain elements within the Prussian military to attack Napoleon. The allies began with a slight numerical advantage – 200,000 troops and 900 cannon compared to 180,000 troops and 700 cannon – and basically had Napoleon pinned down in Leipzig: Blücher was to the north and Schwarzenberg to the south-east. There were, however, another 100,000 fresh allied troops making their way to Leipzig so that Napoleon would quickly lose near-parity after the first day’s battle.
During the first day’s fighting (16 October), Napoleon took the offensive and managed to inflict serious losses on the allies. The combined losses in men, probably around 60,000 killed and wounded, were the highest suffered in a single day since the beginning of the wars. The fighting stopped when night fell, and the men, exhausted, did their best to bivouac where they were. Often no food and water were provided – they had to fend for themselves – and they made fires with whatever wood they could find (broken musket stocks and wagon wheels). One Hessian soldier noted that in order to cook they had to use water from puddles, since it had rained throughout the day, in which lay the blood of men and horses.28 Napoleon had committed the bulk of his forces in the hope of breaking through before allied reinforcements arrived. In other words, he had gambled and lost. It meant that he would now have to go on the defensive.
The second day was relatively quiet. Napoleon decided to stay put and rest his troops rather than continue with an offensive, which was in any case no longer possible. The French were almost out of ammunition, and considerable reinforcements on the allied side arrived – over 100,000 in all with hundreds of cannon. Napoleon was aware of this and had already decided on a retreat. However, it appears that he wanted to give the allies a bloody nose before withdrawing in good order. As at Dresden a few weeks earlier, Leipzig offered the possibility of adopting a defensive position while inflicting a defeat on the enemy. Certainly, the odds stacked against Napoleon were far greater this time around, and he could expect no reinforcements, but he was still in a position to exploit allied weaknesses. That day, 17 October, ‘The weather was awful and cold rain fell in torrents.’29
The inaction, indeed passivity, of Napoleon on the 17th has been remarked upon by a number of historians.30 He spent the day in his tent, as though in a stupor. That afternoon he had an interview with the Austrian general Maximilian von Merfeldt (sometimes spelt Merveldt), captured the previous day, during which he outlined a peace proposal.31 In return for the French colonies captured by the British, Napoleon would withdraw from Germany, Holland, Spain and perhaps Italy. Most historians see this for what it was: an attempt to split the allies and to dissolve the coalition through peace overtures. Napoleon still controlled Italy and the Low Countries, however, and there is nothing to indicate that he seriously considered giving them up.
But by the third day of the battle, 18 October, the weather had cleared to reveal between 268,000 and 430,000 allied troops (once again, figures vary enormously), with 1,360 guns formed in a huge semi-circle around Leipzig. On the French side, between 135,000 and 190,000 men were dug in with around 700 guns. In the artillery duel that ensued, more than 95,000 cannon shot were fired on that day alone.32 Present were men from just about every nationality in Europe. The ‘Battle of Nations’ as contemporaries dubbed it – the Völkerschlacht – was at the time the largest land battle in history. Europe was not to see the likes of it again for another hundred years. Napoleon’s troops held on well for the whole day (the battle began at 7 a.m.), until two Saxon brigades, around 3,000 men, as well as about 500 Württemberg cavalry, unexpectedly defected to the allies, a defection that was probably worked out in advance with Bernadotte. The desertion of a few thousand men had no impact on the overall outcome of a battle that involved more than 470,000 troops, although it may have had a greater effect on French morale. Those in close proximity to Napoleon were able to observe ‘symptoms of discouragement on his face’, although he gave little away.33 Despite their numerical superiority, the allies could not yet claim a victory.
It was not till the early hours of the morning of 19 October that Napoleon began quietly to pull his troops back into the city, leaving campfires burning in order to fool the allies into thinking they had maintained their positions. As soon as the allies realized what was happening, they attacked. About 30,000 troops under Reynier, Poniatowski and Macdonald held off eight or nine times that number in bitter and vicious street fighting that lasted around six hours, while the rest of the imperial army crossed the only bridge over the Elster River on the road to Erfurt (all the other bridges had been blown before the commencement of the battle). The fighting was so bad in places that the Pleisse River running through Leipzig, admittedly not very wide at this point, was choked with the bodies of dead men and horses, to the point where it is said that men were able to walk across them to get to the other side.34
The bulk of the French army managed to get across by about one in the afternoon when the bridge was blown while most of the rearguard was still in the city. Napoleon was apparently taking a nap at Lindenau and was woken by the explosion. This mistake falls on a certain Colonel Montfort who, instead of staying put to oversee the demolition, had gone to Lindenau (not disgracefully fled as soon as allied troops began to appear on the other bank as some historians write) to find out which corps was supposed to be the last across.35 Montfort was unable to get back quickly enough, with the roads being jammed with troops leaving in the opposite direction. He had left a hapless corporal in charge who, coming under fire from Russian skirmishers drawing near, decided to blow the bridge – he had after all been ordered to do so when the enemy approached – despite the fact that there were still French troops on it.36 Hundreds managed to swim across, many more drowned, but some 15,000 men were captured as a result. As one recent historian of the wars has pointed out, it is wrong to lay all the blame on a hapless officer (or corporal) when the commander-in-chief did not have the foresight to build extra bridges across the Elster.37
It was this, more than any other event, that has led to the battle being depicted as an allied victory, but it was not much of one in retrospect. True, the Grande Armée lost 38,000 dead and wounded, but the allied casualties were about 50 per cent more, around 54,000 men, half of whom were Russian.38 The figures are telling. Leipzig was the biggest battle of the wars and also one of the bloodiest. Humboldt, who walked over the battlefield the next day, wrote to his sister to say that a large number of dead still lay on the field, many with their arms flung across their faces.39 It was the first time that Humboldt, a diplomat, had seen the aftermath of battle and, as with most people, it was the little things that stuck in his mind – on this occasion a dog looking for its master, and which could not be coaxed away. The British ambassador to Vienna, Lord Aberdeen, following the Austrian Emperor on campaign, similarly rode over the battlefield and was devastated by what he saw. In a letter to his sister-in-law, he remarked, ‘For three or four miles the ground is covered with bodies of men and horses, many not dead. Wretches wounded unable to crawl, crying for water amidst heaps of putrefying bodies. Their screams are heard at an immense distance and still ring in my ears.’40 The dying and the dead were eventually stripped bare by the local peasantry desperate no doubt for anything that might replace the goods and chattels the troops had taken from them. The following spring, as farmers tilled the fields for the first time since the battle, their ploughs unearthed half-decayed corpses that had been hastily buried in shallow graves during the battle.41
The allies pursued Napoleon but failed to catch up with and destroy him. A force of 43,000 men under the Bavarian General Karl von Wrede (the man responsible for ta
king Bavaria over to Napoleon’s enemies) tried to cut Napoleon off in the last days of October at Hanau, not far from Frankfurt, but he was quickly and easily brushed aside.42 The retreat was, for all that, horrendous. Hudson Lowe, the man who would soon be appointed Napoleon’s jailer, served as a liaison officer with the Prussians and was part of the pursuing Army of Silesia. ‘For an extent of nearly fifty English miles [eighty kilometres]’, he wrote, ‘from Eisenach to Fulda the carcasses of dead and dying horses, dead bodies of men who had been shot or perished through hunger, sickness or fatigue, lying on the roads or cast into the ditches, prisoners brought in by Cossacks or light troops, blown-up or destroyed ammunition and baggage wagons in such numbers as absolutely to obstruct the road, sufficiently attested the sufferings of the enemy, whilst pillaged and burning towns and villages marked at the same time the ferocity with which he had conducted himself.’43 Similarly, Lady Burghersh, who was the wife of a British military commissioner in the Austrian army, was witness to the devastation wrought by the French in retreat. One month after they had passed she reported, ‘Every bridge blown up, every village burnt or pulled down, fields completely devastated, orchards all turned up, and we traced their bivouaques all along by every horror you can conceive. None of the country people will bury them or their horses, so there they remain lying all over the fields and roads, with millions of crows feasting – we passed quantities, bones of all kinds, hats, shoes, epaulettes, a surprising quantity of rags and linen – every kind of horror.’44
Napoleon tried to hide the defeat by sending twenty enemy flags captured at Leipzig to Paris, as was customary when a victory had been won. The gesture was surrounded in great pomp and ceremony. But this was hardly likely to do either the regime or Napoleon’s reputation any good. Leipzig was for Napoleon what Blenheim was for Louis XIV during the War of the Spanish Succession, or what Stalingrad was for the German army on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, a turning point beyond which there could be no victory. No amount of propaganda could hide how widely Leipzig was seen as a personal defeat for Napoleon. It had a huge psychological impact not only on the people of France but also on the statesmen of Europe. When the Prussian reformer Baron vom Stein heard the news of Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig, he wrote to his wife, ‘The shame in which he [Napoleon] covered us has been washed away by torrents of French blood.’45 Hyperbole aside, the sentiment was common enough. Aberdeen wrote to Castlereagh to take the credit for the outcome of the battle on behalf of Englishmen everywhere and declared, ‘The deliverance of Europe appears to be at hand.’46