Clausewitz, page 6
3
Clausewitz at War
The 1806 Campaign
It is a sign of Philistinism when everyone does only what he is paid to do.
“My Fatherland needs war,” Clausewitz wrote Marie in September 1806, “and—plainly speaking—war alone can lead me to happy goals.” The young Captain Clausewitz, though steeped in Enlightenment rationalism, was also carried by the Romantic age. He was ambitious and a professional solider in a land that judged success in war as the highest achievement. He also realized that his best means of achieving success was by distinguishing himself in battle, and told Marie as much. “But,” he added, “I still have to make great demands on my luck!”1
Clausewitz was far from the only Prussian who thought his nation needed war. The man leading the civilian charge against the growing hegemony of Napoleon’s France was Karl vom Stein. Stein, an outspoken Prussian nobleman, became the king’s finance minister in 1804. Unafraid to clash even with his sovereign, he disapproved of Berlin’s persistent neutrality policy and criticized Prussia’s broken and backward governmental system and the mediocrities running it. He found the king too much influenced by personal advisors instead of his professional government ministers.2
Stein and others pushed the king to take a harder line against France. King Frederick William III, however, simply lacked the willingness to do this. Paralyzed by indecision, the king, writes historian Christopher Clark “combined a sharp, if reticent, intelligence with a profound lack of confidence in his own abilities.” In the 1820s Clausewitz’s take was similar, describing Frederick William as someone with “serious and firm principles,” but “too little trust in his own abilities and the abilities of others” and “too full of that cold, Nordic sense of doubt that undermines the spirit of enterprise, opposes enthusiasm, and inhibits every kind of creativity.” The king’s distrust of his advisors was driven by his “invincible tendency to doubt everything.”3
Map 3.1. The Theater of Operations of the 1806 Campaign.
To the older Clausewitz, the king’s weakness was but a small part of his government’s problems, which were exacerbated by the fact that its operation still reflected the character of Frederick the Great, a decidedly more forceful and determined ruler who had died in 1786. Frederick had decreed and the various ministers executed; they did not make policy, nor did they advise. But the state’s size had doubled in the thirty years since “Old Fritz’s” passing, and Frederick William was not his great uncle. The ministers could not freely bring matters to his attention and there was no prime minister. This produced an absence of leadership at the very top.4 The Prussia of 1806 was sleepwalking into the modern age.
Much had changed since Prussia and France made peace in 1795. Prussia adopted a policy of neutrality for the next decade, one that did not serve the kingdom well. Meanwhile, of course, Bonaparte’s star had ascended—as had France’s—as Prussia watched. When the war of the Second Coalition broke out in 1798, Prussia stood aside. Napoleon’s victories over Austria and Russia cracked the traditional Austrian domination of the German states of the dying Holy Roman Empire, and French power and diplomacy brought much of the region into Paris’s orbit during 1801–1802. Prussia relished the weakening of its ancestral Austrian foe and saw in France’s rise opportunities to expand via diplomatic means. This was not an incorrect assumption, as Napoleon’s juggling and consolidation of many of the minor German states resulted in the Prussians being rewarded with chunks of Westphalia and Thuringia.5
But there were problems with Prussia’s approach. What looked like success from Berlin’s perspective appeared as weak complicity to Europe’s other courts. The famous Austrian diplomat Clemens von Metternich found in Prussia “a conspiracy of mediocrities...united by the common terror of decisive action.... There is nobody to remind the king that his army might perhaps be utilized to greater advantage on the field of battle than on the plains of Berlin and Potsdam.” In 1803 the French turned up the heat by taking Hanover, the ancestral home of Britain’s ruling dynasty, and then still a possession of the British crown and in later negotiations even offered it to Berlin. This meant that because of the patchwork nature of Prussia’s domain, the French army now separated Berlin from its possessions on the Rhine. Napoleon took advantage of the feebleness of Prussian foreign policy, particularly after making himself emperor in 1804. Prussia’s doubts about its policy intensified, but not enough to force substantive change.6
It was the formation of the Third Coalition that finally dragged Berlin from its self-imposed slumber. In April 1805 Britain, Austria, and Russia united against Napoleon and the Russians demanded that Prussia join the alliance. Russia ratcheted up the pressure in September 1805 by demanding the right to move 100,000 troops across Prussia, and met Frederick William’s refusal with a threat to do it anyway. Prussia mobilized and concentrated men along the banks of the Vistula in the east. Then the French had the nerve to do what the Russians only threatened: in October 1805 French Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (a future king of Sweden) marched an army through the Prussian province of Ansbach in what is now south-central Germany.7
An enraged Frederick William met with Czar Alexander of Russia on November 3, 1805, and they signed the Treaty of Potsdam. The agreement was an odd one. Frederick William saw Prussia as an “armed mediator,” bridging the gap between Napoleon and his enemies to the east. At the same time, the agreement made risibly unrealistic demands on France that included the abandonment of virtually all of the French territorial gains since 1792. If France refused, Prussia would then—truly—join the coalition against it.8 In reality Prussian neutrality was now dead—which Frederick William didn’t seem to realize—yet Prussia refused to fully commit to the coalition, trying to straddle the fence between neutrality and alignment.
Napoleon responded by going to war. He struck hard against the Austrian and Russian forces, scoring one of history’s most decisive military victories at Austerlitz on December 2, 1805. Austria immediately made peace, and the Third Coalition collapsed. King Frederick William now had the misfortune of having to deal with a French ruler who had accurately taken his measure and knew he habitually vacillated. Napoleon also didn’t fear war with Prussia and believed Frederick William would do everything to avoid it. When Bonaparte thought he could bully an opponent, he did so. The situation after Austerlitz gave him this chance; he seized it with gusto.9
Before the December 1805 Battle of Austerlitz, Frederick William had dispatched to Napoleon Count Christian von Haugwitz—an advisor and sometime foreign minister—with an ultimatum. Haugwitz unexpectedly found himself presenting congratulations to Napoleon for his victory. Clausewitz thought Haugwitz “unscrupulous” and “a man without conscience,” later writing of him and Berlin’s foreign relations: “Prussian policy between the Peace of Basel [1795] and the catastrophe of 1806 is marked by weakness, timidity, thoughtlessness, and on many occasions an undignified agility, all of which are qualities deeply rooted in Haugwitz’s character.”10
Meeting in Vienna, Napoleon forced upon Haugwitz the Treaty of Schönbrunn, which essentially pulled Prussia into the French orbit. Napoleon also ordered Prussia to annex the former British possession of Hanover, which the French had seized in 1803, in an obvious attempt to drive a wedge between the two states. Clausewitz wrote later that when Haugwitz returned from this meeting he was met with disbelief. He had gone to declare war on France and returned bearing a treaty of alliance. “No one had imagined that an emissary might pursue a completely contrary policy on his own, in effect forcing the government to return to a position that it had decided, after long deliberation and not without considerable distress, to abandon.” Prussia faced a dangerous conundrum. Not annexing Hanover risked war with France; doing so risked war with Great Britain. Amazingly, Frederick William nonetheless hoped to get Britain’s approval for the acquisition as a reward for arranging a Franco-British peace.11
Napoleon and Haugwitz met again in February 1806, this time in Paris. The French demanded more from Berlin, including that Prussia close its ports to British trade as part of Napoleon’s “Continental Blockade” of Great Britain. Frederick William, unwilling to fight France, bowed. Britain went to war with Prussia on April 20, 1806.12
The press of events combined to slowly push Prussia into war with France as well. Berlin worried about continued French expansion, a fear fed by Napoleon’s effort to install one of his relatives on every throne in Europe. Napoleon also drove a reorganization of the fragmented German states, which brought the demise of the ancient Holy Roman Empire and the establishment of the “Confederation of the Rhine,” which would be under French influence. But the Prussians caught wind of an offer by France to give Hanover back to London if the British withdrew from Sicily. This fed the anti-French forces in Prussia, particularly in the court. One of the dominant figures opposing France was Queen Louise, Frederick William’s strong-willed wife (Napoleon once referred to her as “the only real man in Prussia”). She drove the king to act. The internal resistance culminated in a September 2, 1806, memo from a number of important civilian and military elites (including members of the royal family), which accused the king of being indecisive and in the thrall of pro-French advisors. The revelations of secret French negotiations for an alliance with Britain fed the flames.13
Fredrick William, Clausewitz recorded, made the decision to go to war in early August, before receiving the memo, and ordered mobilization early the same month, one of many that had occurred over the course of the previous year. The army was in the field by the end of August. The Prussian army began massing in Saxony (in southern Germany) in early September.14
A state of war still existed between France and Russia, and though Czar Alexander was skeptical of Prussia’s intentions, the two nations eventually agreed to act in concert against the French. Britain and Prussia also ironed out their issues, and London provided financial support. Thus, the Fourth Coalition was born. Unfortunately for Prussia, Frederick William proceeded to mishandle the crisis. For once, he should have acted slowly, awaiting promised Russian support, and instead sent Napoleon an ultimatum. Bonaparte was already at the Prussian border with his army when the message caught up to him at Bamberg on October 7, 1806. He marched the next day. The czar’s army was too far away to support their new allies. This meant that Prussia, the least of Europe’s “Great Powers,” faced the French Empire with only tiny Saxony by its side.15
Throughout 1806 Frederick William had looked for an opportunity to deliver a solid blow against Napoleon. Doing so would buy time for the arrival of the Russians as well as the onset of winter; both would change the strategic equation. Nothing had gone as planned. Charles, Duke of Brunswick, commanded the Prussian forces, just as he had during Clausewitz’s first campaign. Though Clausewitz—always a shrewd if sometimes harsh judge of character—later found Brunswick “intelligent, well educated, and experienced in war,” he also believed the old soldier had “no trace of boldness and could not rise proudly above adversity.” Brunswick was well connected, being Frederick the Great’s nephew and having risen under his tutelage, and was considered Prussia’s first soldier, but in Clausewitz’s view “the failure of his campaign in France in 1792 and his inconclusive campaign the following year further reduced his self-confidence.” “Much practice in the leadership of troops, experience of war, personal courage, a lively mind, calmness in the face of danger—these were qualities that, combined with his natural adroitness, would ordinarily have made him an excellent leader. However, the command of an entire army requires self-confidence and complete authority; the former he denied himself, the latter he was unable to wrest from other men.”16
At Brunswick’s headquarters in the fall of 1806 the Prussians considered three courses of action: attacking Napoleon when he crossed the Saale River (in southeastern Germany) and moved on the Prussians; harrying Napoleon’s lines of communication in the event he did not attack them; or, if the circumstances allowed, moving quickly and catching the French at Leipzig. Brunswick submitted his operational plan to the king on September 25. He had chosen the third course, intending to launch an offensive, the expectation being that the Prussians would meet parts of the French army in the upper arms of the Main River—in Saxony—not Prussia. However, the Prussians intended for the war to start on October 8, fourteen days after the delivery of their ultimatum.17
Clausewitz later branded this ultimatum foolish, arguing that it undermined any strategy of surprise. The Prussians could have marched on September 25, when Brunswick submitted his operational plan, and against French corps that were not yet moving. “But the Duke feared the war, perhaps more than the King did,” and hoped for peace when he should have pressed for action. The delay meant that there would be no surprise offensive and the Prussians missed their chance to defeat the French forces in detail by hitting the separated corps before they could unite. Moreover, Clausewitz wrote in On War, by the time the Prussians moved, Bonaparte had already begun to cross the Saale River. “In his vacillation, the Duke had fallen between two stools: he had left the area too late to intercept the enemy, and too early to fight a sound battle.”18
The Prussians soon learned that Napoleon had 180,000 troops along a thirty-eight-mile stretch of their border. Brunswick, now believing he lacked the time to mount an offensive, elected to divide his army into three forces, one under his command (six divisions), another under Prince Frederick Ludwig von Hohenlohe (five divisions), and a third force under General Rüchel (three divisions). Clausewitz was in Brunswick’s army in the corps of Friedrich Adolf von Kalckreuth, which served as the reserve, and in the division commanded by Johann Ernst von Kühnheim. Prince August, a great nephew of Frederick the Great, commanded a Grenadier battalion in the infantry brigade of August Wilhelm von Pletz. Together, Brunswick’s units were responsible for a front of more than 190 miles. “The division into two principal armies was without doubt contrary to all principles of good sense,” Clausewitz later wrote unsparingly. “Any division in command weakened it.”19 It also gave the French the opportunity to do what the Prussians had hoped to accomplish themselves: defeat the enemy in detail rather than attacking its main strength.
To Clausewitz, this decision to divide the army also further undermined the Prussian command system. Hohenlohe had no inclination to listen to Brunswick, and Clausewitz believed that giving Hohenlohe such a large force encouraged him to be even less cooperative. “The greater the force which the general second in command receives,” Clausewitz wrote of this in the 1820s, “the more he wishes to be independent, as the energy of the high command loses its strength.” This fed the inclination of the seventy-year-old Brunswick to not exercise his command, a problem exacerbated by the presence of the king and a number of his closest advisors with Brunswick’s army. All of this conspired to produce operational indecision.20
Indecision did not afflict Napoleon. Launching from camps in southern Germany, Napoleon intended to place his army between the Prussians and their capital of Berlin, and then force the Prussians into a defensive battle. Advancing through the Thüringen Forest, Napoleon would push his army into Saxony in three mutually supporting columns led by Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult on the right (50,000), Marshal Jean Bernadotte in the center (70,000), and Marshal Jean Lannes on the left (40,000). These, plus reserves and other forces, gave him 180,000 men. He believed this would enable him to hit the Prussians with double their number wherever his soldiers encountered them. Supplementing these forces were troops advancing from Holland and probing from Mainz. Napoleon saw them as protecting France from any possible Prussian invasion, but additionally hoped they might draw away Prussian troops from the crucial theater while also potentially becoming a wall against which to drive the Prussians if they dared march into the area between Mainz and Bamberg.21
Napoleon began his offensive at dawn on October 8 by rushing six corps northward through the Saxon territory of Thuringia. His ability to move quickly, combined with Prussian sloth, allowed his plan to work. Writing immediately after the campaign, Clausewitz commented on the superiority of the French system of march, deeming it “unheard of in the history of warfare.” The French could travel between 33 or 37 miles a day if needed; half of that was typical and covering 140 miles in eight days had been considered “a remarkable speed.” It wasn’t that soldiers were incapable of marching faster, but they were limited by the need to keep order and maintain the ability to fight.22
And so Clausewitz went to war for the second time. He had already endured the frustrations of recent war scares and the related mobilizations and demobilizations. Earlier in the year he had received a contract to publish a journal article, but wrote the editors in May thanking them for the opportunity and respectfully declining because he expected to soon be on the move and would not have access to his books.23
When the Prussians mobilized for the 1806 war, they did not immediately gather their troops in East Prussia or use them to strengthen their field army. Though defenders of the decision argued that it gave Prussia a reserve army, in his history of the campaign Clausewitz argued that the idea “entirely confused people’s heads,” producing one of the fundamental errors of military thinkers and the historians who study them: the muddling of the tactical and the strategic. “While tactical reserves are to be recommended,” Clausewitz insisted, holding in strategic reserve forces that are ready to go “is contrary to good sense.” His argument was that battles decided “the fate of the war.” Employing tactical reserves preceded the choice to fight in them, “while the employment of strategical reserves follows the decision.” He made a similar argument in On War.24
