As he was nearing Jena, at three o’clock in the afternoon a spurring messenger brought in a situation report from the hitherto silent Lannes, written the same morning from the north of the town. He reported that between 12,000 and 15,000 enemy troops were in position to the north of Jena, and that local information suggested that 20,000 to 25,000 more were still between Jena and Weimar. Patrols were being sent out to confirm whether this was indeed the case. The message ended: “I desire to know whether it is the intention of Your Majesty that I should advance my corps toward Weimar. I dare not; assume the responsibility of ordering such a move in case Your Majesty may have some other destination for me.”
The distant crackling of musketry could already be heard as Napoleon assimilated this news. It now appeared certain that the enemy were preparing to attack Lannes in force either on the evening of the 13th or on the morrow. From the saddle the Emperor dictated the day’s third set of orders; the newly revealed position of the enemy’s main force, perhaps 50,000 strong, between Weimar and Erfurt, made an immediate battle imperative—even though this would now take place two days ahead of the original schedule. In the light of the new situation, Davout was to maneuver to the westward from Naumburg that same evening “so as to fall on the enemy’s left” if he heard the sound of firing from the south. Bernadotte was to continue toward Dornburg with instructions also to move immediately over the Saale to Lannes’ aid if he were attacked. In the event of no cannon fire being heard, both these corps were to await the morrow’s orders before moving over the Saale. Murat’s cavalry was to press forward its march to Dornburg, but both Soult and Ney were now to put both their full corps in motion for a rapid march to Jena; Lefebvre, with the infantry of the Guard, was to rejoin the Emperor at Lannes’ headquarters beyond Jena without delay.
The Emperor rode through Jena and joined Marshal Lannes at his advanced headquarters on the towering Landgrafenberg about four o’clock. He learned that the Vth Corps had reached Jena early that morning under cover of a dense fog, experiencing little difficulty in occupying the town. Without delay, Suchet’s division had then crossed the Saale and climbed up the Landgrafenberg beyond where contact was made with Tauenzien’s advance guard. The French had driven these forward elements back to the villages of Lutzeroda and Closwitz, and although Lannes currently estimated that the enemy totaled more than 40,000 to his front, he was determined to retain his foothold west of the Saale. Napoleon confirmed his subordinate’s estimate of the situation, and, believing that he was faced by the main Prussian army (erroneously as it was later proved), he ordered that the remainder of the Vth Corps and the Guard should move up from Jena to strengthen the Landgrafenberg bridgehead as soon as dusk would conceal the move. Convinced that the enemy was determined to fight on the plateau beyond, Napoleon calculated that his present strength of 25,000 men (Vth Corps and the Guard) should prove sufficient to cling onto the advanced position until the next day. By ten in the morning of the 14th, the VIIth Corps (16,500) and St. Hilaire’s division (9,000) would be on the scene to raise his strength to 50,500; by noon, the rest of Soult’s corps (18,000) and Ney (15,000) and the heavy reserve cavalry (7,000) should have arrived from Roda to bring the Grande Armée to a total of 90,500 men, while by four in the afternoon there was no reason why the 1st Corps (20,000) and the IIIrd Corps (27,000) together with the 8,000 horsemen of Murat’s light cavalry should not be within striking distance of the battlefield from the north. Thus within the space of 24 hours, Napoleon was in a position to concentrate 145,500 men at a decisive point; no better evidence of the excellence of the flexible coordination of the bataillon carré system is required.
Nevertheless, this reinforcement capability did not solve the immediate problem of what would happen if the Prussians attacked in force on the evening of the 13th, and Napoleon’s decision to remain on the Landgrafenberg with the river at his back represented a calculated risk, especially as he believed that the mass of Brunswick’s army lay ahead of him. Even though only the Prussian right wing were in fact facing the Landgrafenberg, the peril to the French position had been real enough. Indeed, as Suchet’s division moved onto the hill that morning, Hohenlohe had been on the point of ordering an attack when Massenbach was summoned to Prussian headquarters to receive the orders for the proposed retreat over the River Unstrutt towards Leipzig. When he returned, he found Hohenlohe’s troops ready to advance, but persuaded his unwilling superior that any attack on Lannes would be a violation of the new plan as the Prussian right wing now had definite orders to play a purely defensive role in covering the move of the rest, and so the attack was canceled, and the troops returned to their bivouacs. This was very fortunate for Napoleon, for had the Prussian right seized the Landgrafenberg in force on the 13th, the prospects for a successful and decisive action the following day would have been far more remote.
It was imperative that the French should make Windknollen (the highest peak of the Landgrafenberg) as secure as possible, but this could not be done without placing artillery batteries on the commanding crest. This posed a considerable problem, for only one narrow track led up to it from Jena, and very soon a massive traffic blockage of more than a hundred vehicles had developed at the foot of the hill. With customary Napoleonic energy the problem was tackled as soon as dusk had fallen. The work was at first supervised by the Emperor in person, lantern in hand. According to Baron Marbot at that time a young officer on Augereau’s staff: “He sent at once for 4,000 pioneering tools from the wagons of the engineers and artillery, and ordered that every battalion should work in turn for an hour at widening and leveling the path, and that as each finished its task it should go and form up silently on the Landgrafenberg while another took its place. They were lighted at their work by torches, but this illumination was hidden from the enemy eyes by the blaze of Jena beyond.”27 The work continued for the greater part of the night, and by dawn no less than 25,000 men had reached the summit together with 42 pieces of artillery.
After seeing the first vehicle up the track, Napoleon moved up to the summit and ordered his tent to be pitched in the center of a square formed by 4,000 men of the Imperial Guard. According to Coignet, the Grenadiers had made the most of their journey through the streets of Jena to replenish their liquour resources: “Each man had three bottles, two in his bearskin cap and one in his pocket, besides plenty of pints in his gullet.”28 After observing the myriad enemy campfires on the plain beyond, Napoleon settled down a little after ten o’clock to dictate his orders for the morrow by the light of his own bivouac fire. As he probably saw it, the battle would comprise two distinct phases, possibly lasting over two days. The first task would be to secure undisputed control of this present bridgehead and expand it onto the plateau in order to make possible the deployment of the main force of the Grande Armée (that is to say, the Vth, VIth, VIIth, IVth Corps, the cavalry reserve and the Guard) on the west bank of the River Saale. To do this, Lannes was to attack at 6:00
A.M. on the 14th and secure a line running from the village of Lutzeroda to Closwitz. The timing of the subsequent enlargement of the area so gained would be dependent on the actual arrival hour of the converging corps of Augereau, Ney and Soult.
By midnight on the 13th, the troops that were already available were as follows: Lannes’ Vth Corps and the Guard were already on the Landgrafenberg; Augereau’s VIIth Corps was in a neighboring valley to the south, fast approaching from Kahla; Marshal Soult’s corps cavalry and leading division (St. Hilaire) had already passed through Jena; the advance guard of Marshal Ney was in the outskirts of the town, the rest of VIth Corps being echeloned back along the road to Roda together with the heavy cavalry, while the remainder of the IVth Corps was on the road from Gera. If and when these various units were ready for action, they would be assigned the following roles: Ney was to support and exploit Lannes’ initial gains in the center; Augereau was to advance to the left up the valley of the River Mühlbach and along the southern slopes of the Mühtal Height so as to turn Tauenzien�
��s right flank; Soult was to move from the vicinity of Zwaten towards the village of Rodingen, clearing the forest of Closwitz en route, in order to turn the Prussian army’s left. The Guard and Murat’s cavalry reserve would form the reserve on the Landgrafenberg.29 Aided by these converging forces, even if circumstances dictated that they should be committed to battle piecemeal, Napoleon felt confident that he would be able to crush or force back Tauenzien and secure the necessary space for maneuver required by the second phase of his plan.
With the plateau secure, the problem would be to defeat and if possible destroy the Prussian army as a whole. Napoleon was still convinced that he faced almost all of Brunswick’s army, and that consequently the second part of his scheme could be decisive. Even if the Prussians stole a march and made their main attack toward Kosen, 1st and IIIrd Corps would be strong enough to pin down the enemy until Napoleon could move against their rear through Jena. If circumstances permitted, it appears that Napoleon would have preferred to postpone the decisive phase of the battle until the 15th, but that would largely depend on the foe’s reactions (towards Jena, or alternatively, Kosen) and the movements of the 1st and IIIrd Corps. It was Napoleon’s intention that both Davout and Bernadotte (with Murat’s cavalry moving through Dornburg) should move over the Saale toward the town of Apolda and then appear on the flank and rear of the discomfited Prussians, already hotly engaged by the rest of the army from the direction of Jena. Whether these two corps moved in conjunction or by separate routes would depend on the precise location of Bernadotte’s command on the night of the 13th-14th. Now Bernadotte had been ordered at 3:00
P.M. to move south from the Naumburg area to Dornburg (where a crossing of the Saale was just practicable), thus completing the French line along the Saale, linking the two wings of the Grande Armée, but Napoleon had no exact knowledge as to whether this order had been obeyed or not. Consequently, in his orders to Davout instructing him to move from Naumburg to Apolda, written at 10:00
P.M. on the 13th, the following sentence was included: “If the Duke of Ponte Corvo [i.e., Bernadotte] is still with you, you can march together. The Emperor hopes, however, that he will be in the position which he has assigned to him at Dornburg.”30 Bernadotte was to claim on the morrow that the slight ambiguity of the last sentence justified his questionable actions, which almost carried him to a courtmartial and the firing squad.
Of course, in making this plan Napoleon was laboring under a serious misapprehension. The basic assumption that he would be able to deal with each part of the Prussian army in turn was fallacious, for late at night on the 13th, the larger part of Brunswick’s army—some 60,000 men—was marching hard along the road from Umpferstadt toward Auerstadt, that is to say, away from the Jena area. Indeed, the advance guard of this force—Schmettau’s division—had almost reached Auerstadt when Napoleon was dictating his orders to Berthier. In other words, unknown to Napoleon the enemy had divided his force into two armies, and both were likely to be in contact with different parts of the French army early on the 14th. Davout was soon aware of large-scale enemy activity to his front, and reported it to the Emperor’s headquarters during the early hours, but this does not seem to have shaken Napoleon’s belief that his own force would fight the main body of the Prussian army to the north of Jena; he was equally convinced that Davout would not experience any great difficulty in reaching Apolda. In fact, of course, the fires that Napoleon could see were only those of Hohenlohe’s command, namely General Holtzendorf’s 5,000 men camped toward Dornburg, Tauenzien’s 8,000 in the Closwitz-Lutzeroda area, and the remainder, about 25,000 men, encamped to the south and west of Vierzehnheiligen. The last component of the Prussian forces in the vicinity was Rüchel’s command (about 15,000 troops), still in the vicinity of Weimar to the west. If Napoleon was seriously mistaken about the foe’s positions and intentions, so was Prince Hohenlohe. He had no suspicion that he was faced by the mass of the Grande Arrné’e, believing that the French troops on the Landgrafenberg only comprised a flank guard—together with those at Naumburg—covering the continued advance of the main army northward toward Leipzig and Dresden. Both commanders, in fact, were to be substantially surprised by what the 14th held in store.
The Vth Corps was under the command of Marshal Lannes from October 5, Lefebvre reverting to his post in the Imperial Guard.
42
JENA—AUERSTADT
As on the morning of Austerlitz some ten months earlier, the battlefield was at first shrouded in a dense fog that considerably hampered the Emperor’s final reconnaissance and delayed some of the preparatory moves. Nevertheless, by dawn some 46,000 troops and 70 guns were massed in position on the Landgrafenberg and in the neighboring valleys ready to advance into action. “The term ‘massed’ was never more correct,” recounts Marbot, “for the breasts of the men of each regiment were practically touching the backs of those in front of them, but the troops were so well disciplined that in spite of the darkness and the packing of more than 40,000 men onto that narrow platform, there was not the least disorder, and although the enemy were only half a cannon shot off, they perceived nothing.”31 Though they did not know it at the time, they were facing about 38,000 Prussians armed with 120 cannon, but the French were far more concentrated than their opponents, their commanders were in every way superior and the morale of the men was incomparably higher. Following his established custom, Napoleon made a point of visiting as many of his leading units as possible to inform them of the situation they would probably have to face, and this served to place a keen edge on the men’s courage and determination. The situation within the Prussian lines, where many of the units had not yet fully recovered their nerve after the alarms and panics of two days earlier, was very different. Several fusilier battalions in the center were as much as 50 per cent below full establishment through straggling and desertion; all were hungry and miserable.
The famous battle of Jena falls into four well-defined stages. The first comprises the period between six and ten in the morning, during which Lannes, Soult and Augereau were concerned with driving off Tauenzien’s advance guard and enlarging the bridgehead on the west bank of the Saale to accommodate the anticipated reinforcements now making for Jena at full speed. The initial attack was launched by Lannes’ two divisions, Suchet on the right and Gazan on the left, supported by 28 cannon. As the advancing columns came into contact with Tauenzien’s battalions a fierce but confused soldiers’ battle developed in the midst of the fog. The artillery engaged at almost point-blank range, but notwithstanding heavy losses, Suchet was soon in possession of Closwitz, his light infantry routing all who attempted to stay their advance. Gazan fared less fortunately in the direction of Cospeda; his leading troops were repulsed, but the Prussian counterattack was in its turn decimated and sent on its way by heavy and well directed artillery fire. Although affairs were not going too badly for him, a confused Tauenzien ordered the immediate evacuation of both forward villages and also of Lutzeroda, leaving only strong forces of skirmishers in the local woodland, and fell back on his Saxon reserves near the village of Vierzehnheiligen. The French were pressing hard on his heels, but their élan was beginning to flag a trifle when Tauenzien launched the 5,000 men he had succeeded in rallying in a violent counterattack. This was notably successful; the French reeled back in confusion—only one squadron standing its ground—and within a short time found themselves split into two halves, one party to the northeast of Vierzehnheiligen at Krippendorf, the rest finding shelter in the woods of Isserstadt to the south. Fortunately for the French, the Prussians neglected to press their advantage, but almost immediately halted, turned about and marched off for Kleinromstadt still further to the west. This surprising action is partly explained by the progress of the French forces operating on Lannes’ flanks. Soult’s leading division on the right debouched from Lobstadt and forced its way through Zwaten into the woods beyond. There he came into violent contact with some troops of General Holtzendorff, in the process of moving up from t
he vicinity of Dornburg. Far away on the opposite flank, meantime, Augereau’s second division moved steadily up the valley of the Mühlbach or Mühltal onto the Flomhberg beyond. This was the natural line of approach from Jena toward Weimar, and fearing that at least his southern flank was in imminent danger of being turned and feeling anxious about the scale of his casualties, Tauenzien fell back toward Hohenlohe’s main force.
Thus before ten o’clock, Napoleon’s leading formations were in possession of the area of ground needed for deployment of the Grande Armée, thanks largely to the enemy’s unnecessary withdrawals. The first part of Napoleon’s grand design had been safely accomplished, and he consequently ordered a pause in the center and on the left in order to allow new formations to come up into line.
On the French right, however, Soult was deeply involved with the 5,000 men of Holtzendorff, and if a temporary cessation of activity took place on the other sectors the same can not be said of this area of the field. Shortly after 10:00
A.M. the Prussian skirmishers attacked St. Hilaire’s division while the bulk of their force formed up in echeloned line, with cavalry and 22 guns on the flank, ready for a major effort. Fortunately for St. Hilaire, his command was entirely concealed behind a reverse slope near Rodigen, and before Holtzendorff knew what was afoot he found the French troops pouring out of dead ground against his left flank. A short time later the Prussians found themselves retiring back over the stream near Nerkwitz. The early stages of this movement were well covered by the Prussian cavalry until Soult’s horsemen, breaking through the light infantry and uhlans, fell upon one of the columns and virtually destroyed it. Four hundred prisoners, six guns and two colors were the spoils of this action.
The Campaigns of Napoleon Page 60