Austerlitz: Napoleon and the Eagles of Europe (27 page)

In the Russian camp conditions were as hard. General Leitenant Alexandre-Louis Langeron, a French
émigré
officer who had served in the Russian army since 1790, arrived at Olmütz with Buxhöwden’s army. He felt that march discipline had been well-observed, but when the newcomers encountered Kutuzov’s army all that quickly changed. Kutuzov’s men were greatly disillusioned after their ceaseless marching and lack of bread. Langeron observed that the Russian soldier ‘is a big eater of bread; he needs 3 pounds a day, and he is unhappy if he does not get this amount. It counts for nothing that you replace his favourite food with meat or vegetables.’
⁷
The Austrian supply officers had not observed this important part of the Russian diet and as such the soldiers grew resentful. This led to much plundering in the villages the troops passed through and now extended to those surrounding the camp at Olschan. Langeron observed that:

‘under the pretext of seeking bread, they took money, property; the inhabitants fled their hearths and the disorder became universal. Soon it was communicated to the army of Buxhöwden … In the bivouacs of Olschan, hardly thirty men per battalion remained during the day, all the others were widespread in the villages, even to a distance of [10 miles] from the camp, and returned in the evening with bags filled with property, turnips and potatoes which formed their principal food.’
⁸

The arrival of Alexander did little to improve the situation. The Russian soldier in general is devoted to the tsar and many senior figures assumed his arrival would, as Langeron put it, ‘inspire great enthusiasm in his soldiers’. But the reality was different. The army received Alexander with ‘coldness and dull silence’. His entourage included many young and inexperienced officers who held great influence over him and were keen to impress with their enthusiasm and drive. The tsar put great faith in their words of advice, often above those offered by experienced military men. To his comments on the muted reception given to Alexander by the army, Langeron added that the Russian soldier ‘often judges men and events extremely well’.
⁹

Napoleon now needed to consider his next move. It was two months since La Grande Armée crossed the Rhine. In that time he had crushed an Austrian army at Ulm and cleared Bavaria. His progress forced the Austrians to abandon northern Italy and Tirol, and he occupied the imperial capital of Vienna as well as great tracts of Habsburg territory. His only setback had been his failure to intercept and defeat Kutuzov’s army. But now he sat precariously at the end of a long and exposed line of communications, facing an Allied army in a strong position. While the enemy increased in strength as reinforcements began to arrive, the French army required ever more detachments and garrisons to keep communications open. The longer Napoleon took to make his move, the greater the chance the Allies’ strength would increase still further. The armies of Archduke Charles and John were still at large, as was that under Archduke Ferdinand in Bohemia. After his defeat at Mariazell, Merveldt had also hastily gathered together a small force. In addition, the Russian Imperial Guard was approaching Olmütz, and another Russian column under General Leitenant Essen I could reach the area by the first week of December.

Napoleon had with him in and around Brünn the Garde Impériale, Soult’s IV Corps, Lannes’ V Corps and Murat’s Cavalry Reserve: about 52,000 men. Following his late crossing of the Danube, Bernadotte, with I Corps and Wrede’s Bavarian division, received an order from Napoleon ordering him up through Znaim to take up a position opposing Archduke Ferdinand. Marching through Budwitz and Iglau to Deutsch Brod, around 60 miles north-west of Brünn, Bernadotte took up a position just over 20 miles to the south of Czaslau, at which place Ferdinand arrived on 25 November. Davout’s III Corps was widely spread. Caffarelli’s division was now close behind the main army at Pohrlitz, 60 miles north of Vienna, while Friant’s division had moved to Vienna and Gudin’s was 40 miles to the east at Pressburg. Mortier, who remained at Krems with his corps after the mauling at Dürnstein, received the order to march to Vienna with two of his three divisions and relieve Davout. The rest of the army, the corps of Ney, Marmont and Augereau was now too far away to take an active part in any future battles in Moravia.

On the same day that Napoleon arrived at Brünn, he pushed Murat and the cavalry forward on the Olmütz road, where the leading division encountered a
large force of Russian cavalry at Rausnitz, some 3 miles north of a town called Austerlitz. From an initial clash of advance and rearguards a full scale cavalry battle quickly developed, with the mass of Allied horsemen pushing back a couple of brigades of Général de division Walther’s dragoons. But reinforced by d’Hautpoul’s division of
cuirassiers
with Murat at their head, followed by six squadrons of Garde Impériale cavalry, the French gained the upper hand and drove the Russians off. The French cavalry clearly won the day, but those young Russian officers of the tsar’s entourage who keenly sought battle took great encouragement from the taking of French prisoners and the captured eagle standard that their men brought back.

The following day Murat pushed outposts as far as Wischau and Soult’s Corps moved forward to occupy Austerlitz and a long plateau of high ground between that town and Brünn. Having now secured the area up to Wischau, a distance of about 20 miles, Napoleon rode out as far as the outposts to thoroughly inspect the lie of the land.

Showing a keen interest throughout, on the return journey he stopped on the Brünn-Olmütz road, close to an isolated steep-sided hillock adorned with a tiny chapel on the top, the Bosenitzerberg, rising up just on the north side of the road. He then turned off the road and rode southwards. He followed a stream, feeding the Goldbach, which ran southwards from the hillock, across the front of the Zuran Hill and down through a low valley, passing the villages of Jirzikowitz, Puntowitz, Kobelnitz and Sokolnitz to Telnitz: a distance of just over 7 miles. From here a vast shallow lake extended eastwards to the village of Augezd. Then, dominating the Goldbach valley and running from Augezd back to the Brünn–Olmütz road, rose the Pratzen Plateau. Napoleon led his entourage over this gently rolling feature, carefully calculating distances between highpoints before returning to the hillock by the main road. Of all the country he had traversed that day this area appealed most to him. Before he returned to Brünn, Napoleon ordered that the eastern side of the hillock be dug away to make it more difficult to assault and had eighteen captured Austrian cannon brought up and installed on the top. His aide, GD Savary, recalled that the emperor told his followers: ‘Gentlemen, examine the ground well; you will have a part to act on it.’

_____________

*
Napoleon to Murat, 16 November 1805.

Chapter 12

‘The Russians Are Coming!’

‘Soldiers, in much disarray, packed their kits
hurriedly, and with pale faces informed
the inhabitants, “The Russians are coming”.’
*

While the French army purposefully followed a single direction, at Allied headquarters dissension was rife. There were many differing opinions as to what the next step should be and bickering amongst the rival factions within the Russian command increased, as did the contempt many expressed towards the Austrians. With food supplies around Olmütz all but exhausted, matters came to a head at a council of war on 24 November.

Kutuzov advocated a retreat towards the Carpathian Mountains, opening up new sources of supply and leaving a devastated and barren land in their wake to hamper any pursuit. In addition, by deferring contact with the French, it allowed time for Bennigsen’s Russian army to draw closer, and possibly for Prussian intervention too. Other options were presented. General Sukhtelen, a senior officer of Dutch origin, advocated withdrawing into Hungary and forming a junction with Archduke Charles, while General Leitenant Langeron was in favour of a move towards Bohemia to operate with Bennigsen’s army and Archduke Ferdinand.
¹
Most experienced generals upheld the proposals to delay battle, which was indeed Napoleon’s greatest concern. In this they were supported by Adam Czartoryski, who, recognising that the presence of the tsar diluted the authority of his generals, attempted to persuade him to return to St Petersburg. He failed.

Alexander, with no military experience, was encouraged to believe he now had the perfect opportunity to cross swords with the most proven military commander in Europe and to defeat him on the field of battle. His sycophantic circle of friends, advisors and so-called experts airily dismissed Napoleon’s earlier successes in the campaign as merely a reflection of the
weakness of the Austrians. They confidently predicted that fighting the Russian army would be a much tougher experience for the French, as already shown at Dürnstein and Schöngrabern. The French pursuit, an unremitting torment since Kutuzov crossed the Inn a month earlier, had now ceased, a fact these young lions saw as confirmation that the French were overstretched. They saw no need to await the intervention of Archduke Charles or the Prussians or even the 10,000-strong corps of General Leitenant Essen I, which, although originally destined for Bennigsen’s army, now marched on Moravia and was only a week away.

The impressionable tsar, military glory beckoning, inclined towards the advice offered by these belligerent young men. The kaiser also approved – although the Russians rarely sought his opinion now – for a successful battle would bring an early end to the French occupation of Vienna. Such was the tsar’s position in Russian society that once the decision was made at the council of war on 24 November, his senior generals felt unable to oppose him.

And so Alexander enthusiastically embraced the option that offered the Allies fewest advantages and instead presented Napoleon with his best chance of victory. With the decision taken, the army began preparations for an advance to commence the following day, but almost immediately the plan encountered problems. An Austrian cavalry commander, Generalmajor Stutterheim, reported that: ‘it was necessary to take two days’ provisions; and these provisions could not arrive till the day after. When that day came, some of the generals had not sufficiently studied their dispositions; and thus, another day was lost.’
²

The Austro-Russian army finally began to edge forward from the Olschan camps at 8.00am on the morning of 27 November. Confusion and dissension marked their progress.

Langeron estimated the strength of the Allied army near Olmütz at about 69,000 men, of which some 16,000 were Austrian. He noted that while the battalions of Buxhöwden’s army numbered between 600 or 700 men each, some of those that had survived Kutuzov’s odyssey mustered only 200 or 300. He also estimated that Kutuzov and Kienmayer had lost approximately 11,000 men on their retreat from Braunau to Olmütz, in killed, wounded, sick, and captured. To this he added that Buxhöwden’s command left about 5,000 in the hospitals of Troppau and Olmütz.
³
The Austrian infantry brought from the Tabor bridge or swept up by Prince Liechtenstein as he marched north was also weak. Of the sixteen regular battalions present, half were formed by depot battalions, which, according to Stutterheim, had been ‘recruited, armed and organised about a month before’.
⁴
However, on 25 November the army received a timely boost when the Russian Imperial Guard, commanded by the tsar’s younger brother, Grand Duke Constantine, arrived at Olmütz. Despite a tortuous march of over 1,000 miles from St Petersburg, the Guards looked
ready for action, increasing the fighting strength of the army to between 76,000 and 78,000 men.

Having taken the decision to attack, the task of drawing up the plan of campaign fell to an Austrian officer, Generalmajor Weyrother. Despite the low opinion of the Austrian army held by the majority of the Russian staff, Weyrother had ingratiated himself with Buxhöwden as he escorted his army through Galicia to Olmütz. On his arrival, Kutuzov appointed him as his chief of staff, filling the vacancy left by the untimely death of FML Schmitt at Dürnstein earlier in the month. Yet as the presence of the tsar dominated military matters more and more, the long-standing distrust he felt for Kutuzov came to the fore and the general, so revered by his men, saw his control over the army diminish.

Franz, Freiherr von Weyrother, was fifty-one years old and had served in the army for thirty years. His first appointment as chief of staff came in 1796 and he took on this role again in 1799 under FML Kray before transferring, in a similar capacity, to the army of the Russian Field Marshal Alexander Suvorov operating in Switzerland. A year later he served as chief of staff to Archduke John during the Hohenlinden campaign. Stutterheim considered him ‘an officer of reputation, who did not want for talent, and who had inspired the Russians with confidence’, but who, in comparison with FML Schmitt, ‘neither possessed his calmness, his prudence, or his firmness’. Further, Stutterheim extolled his ‘great personal courage’ but felt he ‘too easily abandoned his own opinions, to adopt those of other people’.
⁵
Langeron, however, viewed Weyrother in a very different light. He considered his abilities questionable, but not his character: ‘harsh, coarse, insolent, filled with the opinion of his own merit, carrying his self-esteem to appalling excess’.
⁶
The tsar, lacking in military knowledge, now placed his complete confidence in Weyrother, a confidence not shared by all at headquarters, including Bagration and Miloradovich, who had also served under Suvorov in Switzerland: on one occasion, they had attempted to follow a route through the Swiss mountains prescribed by Weyrother, only to find that it did not exist. Nevertheless, Weyrother settled down to his task, confidently announcing there could be no more than 40,000 Frenchmen before them.