The Campaigns of Napoleon

by David G Chandler

  The main Prussian attack was further delayed to allow Wartensleben to come into line, and the consequent pause in the battle made it just possible for General Friant’s division to deploy on Gudin’s right, toward Spielberg, at about 9:30

  A.M. With this welcome reinforcement came the corps light cavalry brigade and the 12-pounder cannons of the corps artillery. These were massed in a single battery to the north of Hassenhaussen. Very soon Davout realized that the enemy’s aim was to attack his right flank in order to keep the main road to Freiburg open, and so he pulled Gudin’s division out of Hassenhaussen and redeployed it to the north of the village, less one regiment left to the south.

  Schmettau and Wartensleben at length advanced to attack at 9:45

  A.M., the Prince of Orange’s division beginning to appear behind them. The Prussian infantry met with varying fortunes. Schmettau’s men were decimated by the crossfire of both French divisions, but Wartensleben, attacking the isolated regiment to the south, soon routed it completely and reduced it to a horde of fugitives, thus creating a serious threat to Davout’s left flank. Davout lost no time in rallying the men behind Hassenhaussen, leading up in person the two regiments from Gudin’s second line to reoccupy the village. This move temporarily halted the Prussian advance, but it had needed the commitment of every last available French reserve to do so, for Morand was still three miles away to the east, and Bernadotte was turning a deliberately deaf ear to Davout’s appeals for aid.

  The Battle of Jena-Auerstadt, October 14, 1806: main phases of the Battle of Auerstack

  The Battle of Auerstadt, October 14, 1806, 10 a.m. The Prussian cavalry attacks Morand’s division. Note the French squares, and the way they are placed in mutual support. In the central mid-distance is the village of Hassenhaussen.

  Fortunately for Davout, the Prussians were—as always—slow to exploit their superiority on the southern flank. Instead of turning the position round the open flank, they wasted valuable men and time in launching four fruitless direct assaults on the village. The fact that at this juncture the Duke of Brunswick was mortally wounded—shot through both eyes as he led forward a regiment of grenadiers to the assault—and that Schmettau was also laid hors de combat largely accounts for the confusion that spread through the Prussian ranks, for Frederick William III neither appointed a new commander in chief nor assumed control himself. Even his trusted advisor, the aged Marshal Mollendorf, had been taken captive. With the loss of higher direction, the combat degenerated into a murderous free fight in which the Prussians came off by far the worst. As many as 30 Prussian squadrons were now gathered on the open French flank, but they were cramped into too narrow a space with no room to maneuver, and consequently a state of equilibrium developed along the whole front.

  Each side now received reinforcements at the same moment. At 11:00

  A.M. the Prince of Orange made a belated appearance on the Prussian side, while the French General Morand marched up from Kosen. However, the deployment of the new forces followed very different lines, for whereas the French newcomers were all directed to take post on Davout’s left, Orange split his command and sent one brigade to reinforce each flank of the Prussian line. Had he in fact intervened with his whole division on only one wing, it is very probable that this would have tipped the balance of the battle in the Prussian favor. As it was, Morand was just in time to beat off the cavalry attack south of Hassenhaussen. This task was made easier by the fact that the Prussians neglected to afford their horsemen any artillery support (a clear indication of poor overall direction), and shortly afterward the French left stretched reassuringly all the way from the village to the banks of the Saale.*

  However, it was not for long that Morand remained on the defensive; after repelling and scattering the Prussian cavalry, he forthwith advanced and engulfed Wartensleben’s command, crushed an attempted counterattack by Orange’s brigade, and thus destroyed the Prussian right. From this moment Davout’s victory was practically assured, for although the Prussian army still held in reserve 14 battalions, 5 squadrons and 3 batteries of fresh troops, King Frederick William III refused to authorize their engagement to strengthen his flank. He still firmly believed that he was facing Napoleon in person, and was too hypnotized by the prospect to be able to devise a coherent plan.

  His hesitation proved fatal for any chance of retrieving the battle with his vastly superior numbers. Davout’s three divisions bore down on the Prussian army in a menacing crescent-shaped formation, horns pushed aggressively forward. Very soon a large number of Prussian troops were trapped in a narrow gully, and a murderous close-quarters scrimmage ensued. Davout later paid tribute to his adversaries in his Journal: “We were within pistol range, and the cannonade tore gaps in their ranks which immediately closed up. Each move of the 61st Regiment was indicated on the ground by the brave men they left there.”36 The numerically stronger Prussian artillery caused heavy casualties among the French, but Morand urged his men inexorably forward over the ground between the River Ilm and the Liss Bach until he was brought to a halt by the charges of the massed Prussian cavalry. These he calmly beat off. His infantry squares proving impregnable to unsupported cavalry attack, and before long the dispirited Prussians were forced back towards Auerstadt while the French resumed their advance and occupied Rehausen.

  In the meantime, Friant on the right was engaged in a desperate battle for possession of the village of Pöppel, but eventually success again favored French arms, and 1,000 captives fell into their hands. With both his flanks either disintegrating or threatening to be turned, Frederick William was left with no choice but to order an immediate withdrawal of his whole line, hoping to rejoin Hohenlohe and Ruchel, whose forces he still believed to be intact. The final blow fell when Morand brought his divisional artillery to bear on the flank and rear of Wartensleben’s division from the Sonnenkuppe hill. By 12:30, the pride of the Prussian army was streaming away to the west and north; Blücher placed his rear guard in the path of the French in an attempt to earn his compatriots a respite, but Gudin charged frontally and both Friant and Morand worked round their respective flanks, and soon the reserve was in its turn in precipitate retreat. The pursuit continued until 4:30

  P.M., when Davout was compelled to halt his exhausted infantry on the final crest of the Eckartsberg. His three regiments of cavalry and the single battalion (which had guarded the Kosen bridge for the greater part of the day) continued the harassing of the foe with orders to drive as many as possible to the south, but they were not strong enough to inflict crushing casualties on the fleeing Prussian horde. As it was, however, Davout had already accounted for 10,000 Prussians killed and a further 3,000 taken prisoner together with 115 guns.

  The price had not been exactly light; the IIIrd Corps, especially Gudin’s division, which lost more than 40 per cent of its effective strength, had suffered heavily; in all, 258 officers and 6,794 rank and file lay dead or wounded on the field of Auerstadt. One unit which appears to have been spared from the general carnage was the 1st Artillery Battalion attached to the First Division of the IIIrd Corps. One of the gunners—Gaspard Leva by name—wrote home some time later that “our company was lucky; we lost not a single man, thank God, although our Army Corps suffered very much.”37 It had been a historic if bloodstained occasion.

  If Napoleon was only doing justice to Davout when he awarded him unstinted praise for his great achievement, the Emperor was certainly justified in venting his full wrath against the commander of the 1st Corps. Not a man of Bernadotte’s command had so much as fired a shot all day, very largely due to either sheer incompetence and lack of imagination on the part of the Duke of Ponte Corvo, or more probably to sheer professional jealousy. Bernadotte undoubtedly received his copy of Berthier’s order, sent out at 10:00

  P.M. and forwarded to him by Marshal Davout, which ordered him to move with Davout if the 1st Corps was not already at Dornburg as previously instructed. In spite of the fact that Bernadotte was still at Naumburg when he received
this order (as he freely admitted later), he chose to disregard its content—and Davout’s reitterated appeals for assistance. He insisted on implementing to the letter (but hardly the spirit) Napoleon’s earlier order moving him to Dornburg. Even this maneuver was carried out in the most slipshod fashion, and the 1st Corps took all morning to reach Dornburg (arriving there about 11:00

  A.M.), and then spent a further five hours covering the eight miles to Apolda, arriving there after the battle of Jena was over. When Napoleon demanded an explanation of this amazing conduct, Bernadotte tried to justify himself by describing the difficulties (largely imaginary) which he had encountered along the road. The Emperor replied to this in no uncertain terms on October 23: “According to a very precise order, you ought to have been at Dornburg … on the same day that Marshal Lannes was at Jena and Davout reached Naumburg. In case you had failed to execute these orders, I informed you during the night that if you were still at Naumburg when this order arrived you should march with Marshal Davout and support him. You were at Naumburg when this order arrived; it was communicated to you; this notwithstanding, you preferred to execute a false march in order to make for Dornburg, and in consequence you took no part in the battle and Marshal Davout bore the principal efforts of the enemy’s army.”38

  His misconduct almost cost the marshal his head. As Marbot described it: “The army expected to see Bernadotte severely punished.”39 At St. Helena Napoleon revealed that he actually signed an order for the marshal’s courtmartial, but had second thoughts and tore it up. Probably the fact that Bernadotte was married to Desiré Clary, who was brother Joseph’s sister-in-law—so nearly the bride of the young Bonaparte years before—caused this change of mind. Possibly he felt that Bernadotte would realize the gravity of his offense and thereby partially atone for it. According to Savary, Napoleon said: “This business is so hateful that if I send him before a courtmartial it will be the equivalent to ordering him to be shot; it is better for me not to speak to him about it, but I shall take care he shall know what I think of his behavior. I believe he has enough honor to recognize that he has performed a disgraceful action regarding which I shall not bandy words with him.”40 This leniency was proved mistaken by future events; as Crown Prince of Sweden the ambitious Bernadotte was to desert his patron and set an example in defection that many eventually copied. A typical Gascon, Bernadotte never admitted his error, but he unwittingly revealed his true motive when he said to Bourienne on November 10: “I might have felt piqued at receiving something like orders from Davout, but I did my duty.”41

  It is interesting, but useless, to conjecture what might have been the outcome of the battle of Auerstadt had Bernadotte accomplished what was expected of him by accompanying Davout over the river at Naumburg, or even had he merely sent his cavalry division to supplement the IIIrd Corps’ cavalry, which was lamentably weak and thus unable to exploit the victory fully; or indeed, if Bernadotte had reached Apolda three hours earlier in time to trap the flood of fugitives from the field of Jena. If the completeness of Napoleon’s and Davout’s joint victory was seriously affected by Bernadotte’s intransigence and jealousy, this does not detract from the scale of the joint victory. In the course of one day no less than three field armies had been almost irremediably shattered, and over 25,000 prisoners, 200 guns and 60 colors and standards had fallen into the hands of the victors. The remnants of the once-proud forces of Hohenlohe, Brunswick and Ruchel converged along their various routes to the west of Apolda—where the ensuing chaos can be imagined. It was only on the 16th that some semblance of order was restored and a retreat toward Magdeburg ordered by the timid Frederick William III who, by one of the ironies of fate, had only received Napoleon’s written reply to the original Prussian ultimatum on the field of Auerstadt itself. Napoleon could indeed claim, “The battle of Jena has wiped out the affront of Rossbach.”42

  The scale and ruthlessness of the pursuit that followed the battles of JenaAuerstadt have often been described, and it provides a classical instance of the way in which a victory can be exploited. Owing to the weariness of the troops, his uncertainty about what had happened to Davout and Bernadotte and his belief that large bodies of Prussians still remained operational in the vicinity, Napoleon delayed issuing orders for the general pursuit until 5:00

  A.M. the following morning (the 15th). Murat, of course, had already pressed the foe as far as Weimar and Bernadotte was in the general vicinity of Apolda, but little direct pressure on the fleeing foe was possible during the first twelve hours following the battle, a fact that gave the Prussian army a further brief spell of life.

  Once he had formed a reasonable idea of what had transpired at Auerstadt on the 14th and of the direction the enemy main body was following, Napoleon set the Grande Armée into rapid motion. The plan envisaged the use of a force applying direct frontal pressure while a second body pushed round the Prussian flank by way of Halle and Dessau to seize the crossing over the Elbe and sever the Prussian line of retreat toward Berlin or the River Oder. The first duty was entrusted to Murat, Soult and Ney, whose troops were comparatively fresh, but of the corps designated for the enveloping force (Bernadotte, Lannes, Davout and Augereau) three had been very heavily engaged throughout the 14th and required a period of continued rest, so initially the encirling movement had to be entrusted solely to the disgraced Prince of Ponte Corvo. At the same time, Louis and Mortier were sent orders to move forward into Hesse.

  Pressing westward, Murat reached Erfurt on the 16th, taking between 9,000 and 14,000 prisoners (authorities differ on the number), while Blücher had a narrow escape from the cavalry commanded by Klein and Lasalle. The next day, Bernadotte’s leading division (commanded by General Dupont) fell in with the Duke of Württemberg’s Prussian reserve at Halle after a rapid 17-mile march. The result of this action was the destruction of almost half the Prussian force, Württemberg losing a total of 5,000 men and 11 guns from his original 11,350 infantry, 1,675 cavalry and 38 cannon. Bernadotte put his own losses at 800 men. In this way the last undefeated component of the Prussian forces was put to flight.

  On the 18th, the Emperor reordered his lines of communication to Mainz, abandoning the old circuitous route by way of Würzburg and Forzheim and substituting a new 10-stage system running to Erfurt by way of Frankfurt, Eisenach and Gotha, a distance of 160 miles. By this time all the corps were actively engaged in the pursuit, and on the 20th, the line of the mighty Elbe was reached on a broad front.

  About this date, Frederick William III left his army and set out for the River Oder, leaving Hohenlohe with the unenviable task of gathering up the fragments of the army and refashioning them into some sort of field force at Magdeburg. Had Württemberg moved to that city and provided a nucleus for the new army instead of giving battle at Halle, Hohenlohe’s endeavors might have met with better success. Under the circumstances, however, the rapidly diminishing distance dividing the Prussians from Napoleon’s advancing forces persuaded Hohenlohe to make for Stettin on the Oder, there to rendezvous with the aid which he hoped was on its way from the Tsar. Meanwhile, Blücher’s command, including many of the heavier pieces of the Prussian artillery, was retiring along its own line through the city of Brunswick further to the west.

  While the bewildered Prussian high command was making these decisions, Napoleon was urging his marshals to cross the Elbe. First over was Davout at the town of Wittenberg. At nine in the morning an attempt by a Prussian rear party to blow up the bridge was thwarted with the aid of the local populace, and by three in the afternoon his entire corps was across the Elbe. Fifteen miles to the west, Marshal Lannes was hard at work repairing a burned bridge, and by nightfall the corps cavalry, two battalions and some light guns were safely over. Still further to the left, Bernadotte—lashed on by the Emperor’s impatience—was attempting to find boats with which to bridge the Elbe at Barby. Thus by dawn on the 22nd Napoleon had secured two bridgeheads while Soult, Ney and Murat were close to Magdeburg. Although the Prussians had for the t
ime being made good their retreat, nothing could now prevent the capture of Berlin.

  Some concern, however, was caused by the breakdown of discipline among the French troops. On the 21st, Soult had been “compelled to take rigorous measures to put a stop to the disastrous consequences of the indiscipline existing in the corps d’armée…. The orders of leaders are despised, the lives of officers are often endangered, and, as a crowning evil, the resources and food afforded by the countryside are destroyed as French troops come on the scene.”43 Stringent penalties were announced to check these misdemeanors, and these were made particularly applicable to the camp followers, the vivandières, washerwomen and the like, who clung to the army like leeches. This deplorable lack of order did not, however, reduce the rate of advance; Hohenlohe was given no opportunity of reordering his army. Berlin was now the Emperor’s immediate objective, his hope that Hohenlohe would give battle in its defense. The Grande Armée drove forward through Rothenau, Ziesar and Potsdam, leaving Ney to besiege the fortress of Magdeburg.

  Napoleon paused at Potsdam to visit the tomb of Frederick the Great, one of the few commanders for whose abilities he always professed the deepest respect. “He walked rather hurriedly at first,” records de Ségur who accompanied the Emperor on this pilgrimage, “but as he drew near the church he moderated his pace, which became slower and more measured, as he approached the remains of the great king to whom he had come to pay homage. The door of the monument was open; and he stopped at the entrance in a grave meditative attitude … He remained there nearly ten minutes, motionless and silent.”44 His admiration for his military forebear did not prevent Napoleon, however, from ordering the confiscation of Frederick’s sword, general’s sash, Ribbon of the Black Eagle, and other martial trophies, “for the consolation of those of our invalides who escaped the catastrophe of Rossbach.”45