The Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), page 37
Within days of hostilities recommencing, however, the emperor discerned an opportunity to strike at Blücher and, gathering a large force together, moved eastwards. The Army of Silesia, in keeping with the Trachenberg plan, retreated immediately, while Schwarzenberg set his forces in motion towards Dresden. Leaving Macdonald on the Bober to shadow Blücher, Napoleon promptly retraced his steps, regaining Dresden on the morning of 26 August. He arrived in the nick of time, for 170 000 Allied soldiers were already converging on the city’s southern suburbs, which were defended by a relatively meagre garrison of 20 000 men under Marshal St Cyr. Over the next few hours, thousands more Imperial troops crossed the Elbe in Napoleon’s wake and, after some vicious fighting, all of the Allies’ assaults were repulsed with heavy losses. Renewing the battle at dawn the next day, the French, despite incessant downpours and the fact that they were still outnumbered by three to two, went onto the offensive. Parts of the Allied centre held firm, but their left wing disintegrated and the right was driven back some 4 kilometres before the rot could be stopped. Napoleon seems to have captured 23 500 prisoners and 26 guns, as well as inflicting 13 000 other casualties on Schwarzenberg’s army. His own losses amounted to just 10 000 men.89
It was a triumph and the Allies knew it. During the night they went into precipitant retreat over the execrable tracks that meandered over the Erzgebirge to Bohemia. Now, however, things began to go awry for Napoleon. First, he was ‘seized with vomiting, caused by fatigue’.90 Second, news having arrived that Oudinot had been checked in an action at Grossbeeren91 and that Macdonald, mounting a needless and poorly cooordinated offensive, had been severely defeated by Blücher on the Katzbach,92 he was both concerned and distracted by developments to the north and east. As he had hurried back to Dresden to succour St Cyr, he had thought of passing most of his army over the Elbe at Königstein to emerge on Schwarzenberg’s right-rear. So hard-pressed had Dresden’s garrison appeared, however that the emperor had decided to allot just one corps, the I under General Vandamme, to this enterprise. After some initial success in molesting the fleeing Allies, Vandamme found himself in dire straits as numerically superior columns of enemy troops descended from various directions on his embattled command. Beyond reach of the rest of Napoleon’s forces, which were toiling up the muddy lanes in pursuit of Schwarzenberg’s disordered army, his units fought a confused and rambling engagement amid the woods and valleys around Kulm until, encircled, half of them were compelled to surrender. Vandamme himself was captured, together with 10 000 others and 82 guns.93
Marmont’s prophecy was being fulfilled: the setbacks at Grossbeeren, the Katzbach and Kulm cancelled out any advantage Napoleon derived from his victory at Dresden. Dispatching Ney to take control of Oudinot’s ruffled army, the emperor began making preparations for a decisive blow against Bernadotte, only to have his plans94 disrupted once more by the continuing advance of Blücher. Having reinforced Macdonald near Bautzen, Napoleon again discovered that his intended victim had retreated out of striking range, while the Army of Bohemia had begun creeping back towards Dresden.
Dashing to save St Cyr a second time, the emperor arrived in the Saxon capital on the evening of 6 September. He joined the marshal’s foremost units the next morning, but was unwilling to attack until he had more troops to hand. St Cyr recollects that Napoleon appeared more bothered about what Blücher and Bernadotte might be up to;95 and, within 24 hours, the emperor’s concerns in this regard were to be justified. News arrived that Ney’s 58 000 men had blundered into a battle at Dennewitz near Jüterbog and had been soundly beaten; 22 000 men had been killed, wounded or captured.96
Having failed to get to grips with the Allied armies, and with cossacks and other irregulars roving almost at will across his rearward communications,97 Napoleon now became increasingly concerned about the condition of his army. Those of his men whose feet had not been cut to ribbons because they lacked shoes were being exhausted by ceaseless marches and countermarches. Moreover, the resources of the corridor of land they were distributed along were by now badly depleted. ‘The army is not being fed,’ he wrote to Daru, the intendant. ‘It would be an illusion to regard matters otherwise.’98 After much of September had been spent in more fruitless manœuvres against Blücher and Schwarzenberg, Napoleon resolved to reduce the theatre of operations to more manageable proportions and to husband what resources he had left for a final confrontation. Accordingly, retaining his bridgeheads along the Elbe, he abandoned all the territory east of the river.
Simultaneously, the Allies also redeployed their forces. Bennigsen’s army having finally arrived, it was assimilated into Schwarzenberg’s, which now marched not on Dresden but on Leipzig. At the same time, Blücher, skirting the Elbe, moved northwest to unite with Bernadotte. By early October, Schwarzenberg’s forces extended from Teplitz as far west as Hof; Bernadotte’s were passing over the Elbe between Magdeburg and Wittenberg by means of pontoon bridges; and Blücher, having built a crossing and fought his way over that river at Wartenburg, was moving on Bitterfeld.
Meanwhile, there had been important developments on the diplomatic front. On 3 October Britain and Austria concluded a formal alliance, with the former undertaking to pay the latter £1 million in return for her fielding an army of at least 150 000 men; a new agreement was to be negotiated in April if the war was still in progress.99 Of more enduring significance were negotiations regarding the fate of Germany. Following a meeting at Teplitz in September, the Allied sovereigns committed themselves to dissolving the Rheinbund. However, in order to reconcile Prussia’s greed for territorial acquisitions with Metternich’s desire to preserve the German Mittelstaaten as a buffer between the West and East, they also pledged to uphold the ‘absolute independence of the intermediate states between the frontiers of the Austrian and Prussian monarchies . . . and the Rhine and the Alps’.100 On 8 October, in pursuance of this policy, Prince Henry of Reuss, commander of the Austrian forces on the Danube, and Wrede, who was at the Bavarian army’s head, concluded an agreement at Ried whereby Bavaria left the Rheinbund and undertook to devote a minimum of 36000 troops to the war against Napoleon. In return, the Kaiser granted her ‘full and entire sovereignty’ in both his own name and that of the Allies.101
In the course of the winter, comparable accords were to be struck with Württemberg, Baden, Nassau, Hesse-Darmstadt, Saxe-Coburg and Hesse-Kassel, precluding any restoration of the geopolitical structure of the old Reich. The future of at least some of the German polities which Napoleon had fostered was thus assured, even if his own was not. Of course, a truly decisive victory might still have transformed his fortunes. Yet, during the closing stages of the 1813 campaign, so much of his military strategy was subservient to political expediency that it became counterproductive. Although after Dennewitz he seems to have recognized that there was now little chance of him relieving the beleaguered fortresses on the Oder and Vistula, he persisted in clinging to the Elbe’s points d’appui even though he feared that the war was about to be carried into the Rhineland.102 While his reluctance to abandon his German glacis and allies without a fight might be understandable, his failure to extricate the substantial garrisons of Dresden103 and Hamburg at this juncture significantly diminished the likelihood of him prevailing in any climactic battle.
And one finally seemed in the offing. Leaving St Cyr in Dresden and Murat, who had 45 000 men west of the city, to contain Schwarzenberg, Napoleon strove to bring all of 150 000 troops to bear on Blücher. On arriving at Düben on the 10 October, however, he again discovered that his prey had fled, and it was not clear in which direction. In fact, Blücher had raced towards the Salle, where Bernadotte had already taken refuge. After some hesitation Napoleon resolved to abandon the offensive and join Murat, who had already come under attack and been edged back to within 10 kilometres of Leipzig.
It was here that the campaign’s climax was reached. On the 16th, as Schwarzenberg closed in from the south with approximately 150 000 troops and Blücher probed up the Elster from Halle with 54 000 more, Napoleon assembled 177 000 to confront them. Erroneously believing Bernadotte and Blücher to have united their armies and extended them so far to the southwest that they had linked up with Schwarzenberg’s left wing, he planned to commit the bulk of his forces to an all-out attack on the Army of Bohemia while the rest held a defensive perimeter around Leipzig. Having successfully rebuffed Schwarzenberg’s assaults, he commenced his counterthrust at about 11am, making appreciable headway. However, he had counted on drawing down Marmont’s VI and General Souham’s II Corps from north of Leipzig to clinch the victory and was disgruntled to find that they had become embroiled in heavy – and essentially unexpected – fighting. Denied these essential reinforcements, the offensive gradually lost its momentum, while, 14 kilometres to the north, Marmont’s units were dislodged from their positions around the settlement of Möckern and hustled along the Elster towards Leipzig.
The next day saw relatively little fighting, since both sides spent it regrouping. Before the Army of the North wheeled into line between Blücher’s and Schwarzenberg’s units, cutting the French communications, which still ran via Düben, General Reynier’s small corps arrived, increasing Napoleon’s forces by 14 000 men. However, the Allies, by contrast, brought up not only Bernadotte’s entire army but also Bennigsen’s Russian divisions, as well as several smaller detachments, raising their total regular forces to 256 000 bayonets, 60 000 sabres and 1382 guns. This gave them a numerical advantage of three to two in manpower and two to one in artillery – enough, they believed, to risk a head-on confrontation with the ‘Corsican Ogre’.
The Battle of Leipzig
Arrayed to the east of the Elster in a huge semicircle, the Allies launched six assault columns towards the French outposts at 7am on the 18th. Finally cut off from the Elbe, during the night Napoleon had started making preliminary preparations for a retreat westwards and had formed his forces into a more compact line around Leipzig.104 While Bertrand’s IV Corps carved a path through the few enemy troops beyond the Elster to secure the bridges over the Saale, the rest of the army endeavoured to keep the Allied hordes at bay. They were generally successful. Only in the north and northeast did the attackers make much headway, despite the desertion en masse of the remaining Saxon units to the enemy.105 However, with ammunition running short,106 casualties mounting and his adversaries closing in, Napoleon now had no alternative other than retreat. Roughly 30 000 men – the remnants of the VII, VIII and XI Corps – were designated as the rearguard and, at 2am on the 19th, the rest of the army commenced withdrawing over the Elster.
At 7am, the whole Allied army began a concentric assault, slowly pushing Napoleon’s covering force back through the Leipzig suburbs. The Badeners and Hessians fought with conspicuous determination to retain the Grimma Gate on the city’s eastern side, while Poniatowski’s Poles disputed every inch of its southern fringe.107 Nevertheless, by 12.30pm these and the other gallant defenders had been overwhelmed and the fugitives were streaming towards the one bridge over the Elster. This had been mined so that it might be demolished as soon as the rearmost units had escaped over it. Amid the confusion, however, a panic-stricken engineer sergeant detonated the charges lest the crossing might fall into enemy hands.108 Those men of the rearguard who were not killed by the explosion or, like Poniatowski, failed to swim across the Elster, had to surrender. Among the prisoners was Frederick, king of Saxony.
The Allied victory in the ‘Battle of the Nations’ was a costly one. They lost at least 54 000 men in killed and wounded alone. The French dead and injured appear to have amounted to 38 000, in addition to which 15 000 were captured.109 Several thousand sick were left behind in hospitals, most of whom perished from typhus. The epidemic also claimed the lives of many civilians in Leipzig and elsewhere, among them the father of the infant Richard Wagner. Similarly, Fichte was to succumb to the disease, having contracted it from his wife who had been acting as a nurse to stricken soldiers.
Some 5000 Saxons defected to the enemy at Leipzig and the remaining German troops were soon to follow suit, their states engulfed by the advancing Allied tide. Indeed, Wrede even led his Bavarians down the Main towards Frankfurt, seeking to molest the retreating French. Having posted 30 000 men with 58 guns in a bad position straddling the Mainz road at Hanau on 30 October, he was aghast to find himself confronted by Napoleon in person. The emperor took a cursory look at his former colleague’s dispositions and, muttering that he had been able to make Wrede a count but not a general, unleashed the 17 000 troops he had to hand in an attack that swept the Bavarians aside.110
With the remnants of Napoleon’s army filtering across the Rhine at Mainz, the Allies needed only to reduce the encircled French outposts to complete their victory. Those on the Vistula and Oder, clearly beyond help, capitulated before the year’s end. Resistance in the Elbe bastions, on the other hand, mostly lingered on. Davout, evincing his customary valour and skill, clung to Hamburg until the very end of the war. Magdeburg, too, remained defiant. However, Torgau, its garrison swollen by trains and their escorts which, after Napoleon’s communications had been severed on 18 October, had been unable to follow him to Leipzig, was to surrender on 10 January 1814, 19 000 of its 24 000 defenders having perished through disease. Wittenberg was also to fall three days later. St Cyr, bottled up in Dresden with 30 000 men, could and did not hold out so long. With his troops and the civilian population suffering appalling deprivations,111 after one abortive attempt to escape he agreed to capitulate on 11 November, subject to his soldiers being exchanged for Allied prisoners and returned to France. As was to occur in the cases of Danzig and Torgau, however, once the French were outside Dresden and disarmed, the Allies revoked the agreement.112 Dishonourable though this conduct was, at least St Cyr’s men were taken captive. Other French soldiers were less fortunate; one helpless company of artillerymen, for example, was butchered by the Russians to whom it had surrendered.113
While all of this was going on, the Allied field armies had descended on France’s eastern frontier. Wellington had already crossed her western border a fortnight before Leipzig and, on 12 November, some cossacks, having penetrated into Holland without encountering any serious resistance, surprised and captured Zwolle. Not far behind them were troops under Bülow and Bernadotte. The French evacuated Amsterdam on the 15th and, within days, disorder erupted in The Hague, with a small patriotic faction calling for independence under the House of Orange. The British promptly scraped a little expeditionary force together with a view to seizing the great naval base at Antwerp which, over the years, had caused them so much disquiet. Its departure was delayed by adverse winds, however, and it did not arrive until mid-December.
By that time the French had rallied and the British were to suffer defeats at both Antwerp and Bergen-op-Zoom over the next few weeks. Although afforded some help by Bülow’s Prussians, they found that Bernadotte had other fish to fry. He turned aside to tackle the Danes and, by early January, had conquered them. Norway was duly surrendered to Sweden under the Treaty of Kiel and, while Bernadotte’s conduct convinced London at least that he was no longer committed to the downfall of France, the British honoured their treaty obligations, instructing the Royal Navy to assist in the disagreeable and politically unpopular task of coercing the Norwegians into accepting Swedish suzerainty.114
Indeed, in the wake of Leipzig the diverse aims of the Allies came to the fore once again. Alexander had consistently evaded detailing what his territorial claims might be, for he anticipated that Russia and Austria would clash over Poland’s future especially and he wanted to avoid alienating Metternich until Napoleon had been dealt with. For his part, the Austrian chancellor hoped that his disastrous defeat at Leipzig would finally persuade Napoleon to make peace on the basis of France’s ‘natural frontiers’; and, although the Tsar eventually agreed to such a proposal being made, he seems to have done so in the expectation that it would be turned down, justifying his ambition to invade France and depose his arch-enemy.115
Such tensions within the coalition alarmed Britain, More had been achieved within the past year than in the preceding 20, and victory, which only months before had appeared to be decades away, was now on the horizon. But if the peace was not to be short-lived, London insisted, the alliance would have to be kept in being as a guarantee against French recidivism. The Tsar’s reluctance openly to declare his objectives was an obstacle to any such agreement and, as Metternich’s suspicions as to Russia’s intentions grew, threatened to fracture the coalition even before Napoleon could be finally defeated. Equally, Britain feared the imposition of an unsatisfactory settlement by the continental powers despite her own misgivings.
