Austerlitz: Napoleon and the Eagles of Europe (16 page)

The Emperor of Spies

‘all respect to Charles [Schulmeister] … he was
worth an army corps of 40,000 men to me.’
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The movements and actions of any spy are notoriously difficult to follow with complete accuracy. Those of Charles Schulmeister, ‘Monsieur Charles’ to Napoleon, are no different, but that he was present in Ulm and instrumental to the outcome of the campaign is indisputable.

Schulmeister left Napoleon’s Strasbourg headquarters with GD Savary on 2 October, but their movements are unclear until the two men arrive in Stuttgart six days later. On that same day Napoleon entered Donauwörth and the opening battle of the campaign brought France victory at Wertingen. Schulmeister operated a network of agents and two of these, Jean Rippmann de Kork and another man, Hammel, had already passed through Austrian lines and were feeding back information from Ulm. It therefore seems likely that Savary and Schulmeister were aware that Mack ordered the army to abandon the line of the Iller on 4 October and to reassemble on the Danube four days later. When Napoleon left Strasbourg he believed an Austrian retreat on the Inn or into Tirol as the most likely moves: he did not anticipate Mack holding a position at Ulm. To Savary and Schulmeister, Mack’s new position anchored on Ulm awakened them to the possibility that if he remained static for a few more days the French army could completely surround him. Accordingly, on 10 October, Schulmeister departed Stuttgart on a mission to confound Mack: but before he set out he arranged for couriers to carry two despatches to Ulm.

Schulmeister arrived in Ulm on 12 October and immediately traced an old friend, Hauptmann Wendt, who hailed from the same town as Schulmeister in Baden and who just happened to be Mack’s chief of intelligence. In Baden, Schulmeister had claimed to be the grandson of a displaced Hungarian nobleman and this pedigree allowed him to ingratiate himself into a wide circle
of contacts, Wendt being one of these. Having previously served on the staff of FML Klenau, Archduke Ferdinand appointed Wendt to work under Mack. Once in Ulm, Schulmeister offered his services to his friend as a spy for the Austrian army, revealing that he had gleaned much information detailing growing dissatisfaction in France with Napoleon’s rule. Lured in, Wendt introduced Schulmeister to Mack later that day. Schulmeister immediately set about disclosing all he ‘knew’, backed up by carefully prepared false papers and documents. This information appealed to Mack. Trouble in France would affect Napoleon’s plans, but at the moment it was not enough to influence his own thinking. Mack continued with his plans to break out the next morning. But Schulmeister had only just begun to spin his web.
¹

Happy to be on the move again after yet another freezing night, the bedraggled Austrian army set out on the morning of 13 October. Despite the bad weather, Werneck’s corps made excellent progress on the road high above the Danube, with his advance guard reaching the Brenz river almost 19 miles away. FML Loudon’s leading half of Riesch’s corps, some 7,000 men, marched at around 10.00am, heading for Elchingen and encountered a very different situation. From the outset the low-lying roads close to the Danube were in an appalling condition. Riesch described them as some of the worst he had ever encountered:

‘The narrow sunken roads were impractical, filled with large stones and water up to the chest of the horses, leading between a chain of hills and the Danube bank, lined mostly with thick bushes which were impenetrable for the infantry, forcing them to wade through boggy ground with water up to their thighs.’
²

As a consequence, it took Loudon’s men almost six hours to cover the 7 miles to Elchingen. Exhausted as they were after their efforts, they found themselves now in great danger, as bullets began to fall amongst them. A battalion of the 25ème Légère and two weak regiments of light cavalry had crossed to the north bank of the river earlier that afternoon, and from the village of Ober-Elchingen, opened fire on the leading elements of Loudon’s command. For a while, the French held back the startled Austrians, who had not expected to encounter any resistance. But once over the initial surprise Loudon’s infantry rolled forward, forcing the overwhelmingly outnumbered French troops to make a break for the Elchingen bridge 1,400 yards away, with their cavalry protecting the retreat. There were, in fact, two bridges: a shorter one of some 35 yards crossing a northern arm of the Danube onto a midstream island, from which a longer bridge of about 65 yards, crossed to the south bank of the river.

The endless delays on the march meant it was impossible now for Loudon to reach Gündelfingen with his main force that night, so instead he sent a few troops ahead to occupy the village. In the meantime, his men began half-
heartedly breaking up the northern end of the bridge, but had only removed a short stretch of planking when they came under fire from the French battalion now occupying the woods on the opposite bank. It was already early evening as the Austrians were forced to seek cover.

Riesch set out from Ulm with the second part of his command, roughly 8,000 men, at 2.00pm and found the road even more churned up by Loudon’s progress. Alerted by the noise of battle ahead, he moved forward as quickly as possible with a regiment of infantry and a squadron of
cuirassiers
from his advance guard: but the action at Elchingen was over by the time he arrived. With the rest of his column still struggling through the mud, Riesch approved Loudon’s decision to remain in strength at Elchingen, but he ordered four battalions and two squadrons to advance towards Leipheim in the early hours of the morning to destroy the bridge there. It was 10.00pm before the last of Riesch’s men laboured into Elchingen.

While awaiting their arrival, Riesch discussed the situation with Loudon and his advance guard commander, Mecsery. Mack’s orders clearly required the bridge at Elchingen to be destroyed that day, as well as others along the river. At Elchingen the bridge would require a great deal of work to meet the requirements of these orders. The three officers considered their situation, and taking into account the exhaustion of their men, decided to leave the completion of the task until morning. It was a fatal decision, one that jeopardized Mack’s entire plan, but such was the lack of respect for the commanding officer amongst his senior subordinates that none felt the urgency of the moment or recognised the importance of their mission. Then a message arrived from Mack, which, although presenting a further change of plans, added to their feeling of security.

New information reached Mack during the morning of 13 October. Two letters arrived in Ulm, one from a Württemberg magistrate, Baron Steinherr, in which he detailed a conversation overheard in a village between Stuttgart and Ulm. Mack considered Steinherr ‘a credible witness’ and the news his letter contained seemed to solve the great mystery that was puzzling him. Steinherr reported a conversation that told of a British invasion force landed at Boulogne and reported a popular rising against Napoleon in France. The letter also suggested that Prussia, too, was about to stir, following the French violation of her territory. The other report told of a dramatic increase in courier traffic from France, through Stuttgart, towards Napoleon’s headquarters. Following on from Schulmeister’s news of the previous day, detailing growing anti-Napoleon sentiments in the French press, the veil that hid the ‘truth’ now lifted from Mack’s eyes: or so he thought. With startling clarity the reason for the concentration of the French army south of the Danube was revealed to him. Napoleon must have abandoned his attempt on Ulm, and intent on avoiding battle, was preparing to march back to France with all speed to put down the rising and confront the British forces. But none of this was true. A trap had been
set and Mack greedily took the bait: for these were the letters Schulmeister despatched from Stuttgart before he departed for Ulm.

Reinvigorated, Mack sent for Schulmeister, and having discussed the intelligence with his newly recruited spy, instructed him to leave Ulm that evening and return to Stuttgart to verify the stories and discover the latest information. To avoid running into French patrols he was first to ride towards the north-east, advise Werneck of these latest developments, then turn back westwards to Stuttgart. Meanwhile, Mack gave full rein to his ‘Dream of the Enemy’s Retreat’ as he later called it, and issued new orders that he believed would herald the opening moves of the eventual joint advance of his army and Kutuzov’s Russians on Paris. Mack now decided to hold Ulm, cancelling the orders for Schwarzenberg’s corps to join the exodus to the north-east. However, Werneck and Jella
i
were to continue with their original orders, as was Riesch for the time being. Mack intended to redirect Riesch once he knew more details of the French movements and Werneck had secured the retreat of the reserve artillery and baggage.

That night, at Elchingen, FML Riesch received a copy of Mack’s ‘convictions’, which spelt out the commander’s new understanding of the military situation. Although many French campfires were visible from the abbey at Elchingen, in a great arc on the south bank of the Danube from Leipheim to Weißenhorn, Riesch and his commanders fully anticipated continuing their march unmolested in the morning. But even as they settled down for the night, Maréchal Ney was preparing an assault on their position.

Having caught up with Werneck’s rearguard, Schulmeister spent that night at Neenstetten, about 3 miles to the west of Nerenstetten. The next day he joined Werneck, and while updating him on the developments in Ulm, secretly compiled a detailed breakdown of Werneck’s command. Back in Ulm, Archduke Ferdinand looked on helplessly, fuming with frustration, as the army he believed was rightly his to command followed instead the constantly evolving orders of FML Mack. He expressed his helplessness and anger at Mack’s handling of the army in a letter written to Archduke Charles that evening:

‘In a whole book one could not describe our situation and the madness of Mack. Mack, at least a complete fool, has by his eternal marching to and fro, plan-changes etc. brought us to the point, where without striking a blow, we see the whole army dissolving into nothing. His majesty, the kaiser, gave him complete power and I am in the most unpleasant, I can probably say desperate, situation in the world. I must, so to speak, watch the whole army collapse before my eyes under my signature.’

In the next twenty-four hours Ferdinand’s festering contempt for Mack reached breaking point.

Napoleon’s verbal attack on Maréchal Ney, for leaving Dupont’s division exposed on the north bank of the Danube, left the commander of VI Corps boiling with anger towards Murat, who had ordered him to make the dispositions against his own judgement. Now the emperor ordered Ney to take the bridge at Elchingen and lead his men across the Danube. Nothing was going to stop him carrying out his orders, not the river, nor Riesch’s corps on the opposite bank. He returned to his headquarters at Leipheim from where he issued his orders. At 7.00am on 14 October the remains of Dupont’s division standing on the Brenz was to advance once more towards Albeck, close to the scene of their battle at Haslach-Jungingen. Loison, whose division had seen little action so far, would lead the assault across the river, while Malher’s division, blooded at Günzburg, formed the reserve. In addition to his infantry, Ney had eighteen artillery pieces and two light cavalry regiments from his own corps and Bourcier’s attached dragoon division. In all, Ney could call on around 15,000 men to storm across the Danube. By the early hours of the morning all was ready. The troops were in a high state of excitement and houses in the surrounding villages had been broken down and wood removed to provide planking, with which to repair the partly demolished bridge. A civilian observer in Elchingen recalled that the French deployed like a threatening ‘black thundercloud’ amidst the hail and storm. It was the appearance of this same ‘thundercloud’ at around 7.30am that advised Riesch of the danger materialising on his flank.