Citizen Emperor (97 page)

And yet Napoleon’s situation was becoming more precarious. On 1 July, while in Dresden, he received news of the rout of the French army in Spain. On 21 June, reinforced by troops from Britain, Wellington was able to outmanoeuvre and defeat Jourdan at Vitoria. (Just as Beethoven once dedicated a symphony to Napoleon, he now dedicated one to Wellington – the ‘Battle Symphony’, often called ‘Wellington’s Victory’.) To be fair to those generals fighting in Spain, Napoleon had deprived them of some of their best troops, desperately needed to reinforce the newly conscripted armies destined for Germany. He ordered Joseph to hand over the command of the army to Marshal Suchet and to go into retirement behind the Ebro – that is, to hold the north-east of the Peninsula.
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Even that proved impossible.

We can pass over the details of the farce that was the Congress at Prague, the negotiations that took place while the armistice was in operation. No one took the Congress seriously and nothing of any importance came of it. Prussia and Russia sent diplomats of the second order, respectively, Alexander von Humboldt, who was pro-war, and Count Jean Anstett, a relatively unknown French émigré who hated Napoleon. Humboldt whiled away the time working on a translation of Aeschylus’
Agamemnon
; Metternich spent most of his time pining for a woman with whom he was having an affair, Wilhelmina von Sagan, but who took little interest in him, distracted as she was by another lover. Metternich’s letters to her remind one of Bonaparte’s letters to Josephine during the first Italian campaign.
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Caulaincourt arrived three weeks late without full powers, with instructions to stall the negotiations for as long as he could, and had informal talks with Metternich.
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Napoleon was using the Congress to seek a tactical advantage, hoping to prolong the armistice indefinitely, possibly to drive a wedge between the allies.
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It is obvious, however, that neither Alexander nor Frederick William wanted peace. When, for example, the British representative at Prague, Lord Cathcart, received instructions from the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, to the effect that Britain would be prepared to accept Austrian mediation, Alexander asked him not to inform Metternich. He was worried that peace could be brokered, in which case he would no longer be able to present himself as the saviour of Europe.
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Napoleon, on the other hand, was working under the mistaken impression that Austria was bluffing and would not declare war against France. He was intent on trying to outmanoeuvre the allies diplomatically rather than come to some kind of accommodation. It was a foolish thing to risk under the circumstances. When he realized it was a mistake to dither and not accept the conditions the allies were demanding, it was already too late. He sent off a courier at the last minute instructing Caulaincourt to make peace at any price, but the courier did not arrive until two days after the expiry of the armistice.

At the stroke of midnight on the evening of 10 August, Metternich declared to the company gathered at his palace that Austria was at war with France. When Austria’s declaration of war was received by Napoleon he wrote to Marie-Louise that her father had ‘wanted war out of ambition and disproportionate greed’.
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This was a bit rich coming from a man who was accused of the same thing by every statesman in Europe. We do not know what Marie-Louise thought about this or whether she was shaken by it. The French people, on the other hand, were kept in the dark. No mention of the declaration of war reached the newspapers, nor was an official announcement made. Napoleon now found against him the largest allied coalition that France had ever had to face. For the first time since the beginning of the revolutionary wars in 1792, not only were all the great powers united against France, but they also had a minimum programme of conditions from which they could negotiate a general peace. This did not automatically ensure an allied victory, or guarantee allied unity, but it made success more likely than at any stage in the last twenty years.

22

The Deliverance of Europe

‘A Weak, Rotten, Poorly Designed Structure’

The face-off was still roughly equal at this stage but the advantage was swinging towards the allies.
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On the one side, Napoleon still controlled about 420,000 troops in central Europe (two-thirds of whom were French), 1,284 cannon and about 40,000 cavalry. In addition, another 250,000 troops were tied up in fortresses along the Elbe and in Poland, in northern Italy and in Bavaria. On the other side, now that Austria had entered the war, the allies had about 550,000 troops divided into several armies: 110,000 in the Army of the North, commanded by Bernadotte around the Berlin region; 110,000 in the Army of Silesia commanded by the Prussian general Gebhard von Blücher; an Army of Bohemia made up of Austro-Russian troops about 230,000 strong under the Austrian Field Marshal, Prince Karl Philip von Schwarzenberg, and Barclay. Another 60,000 Russian troops under Bennigsen were in Poland and 30,000 Austrian troops were about to enter Bavaria. The allies had a cavalry of about 60,000 men and 1,380 guns. There were, however, another 350,000 troops in reserve that could be called upon if necessary. The allies, in other words, now had one great advantage – depth of resources. While Napoleon was scraping the barrel to re-establish a respectable army, and could not easily replace the men he lost, the allies were constantly replenishing their ranks and their supplies. That factor was to decide the fate of Napoleon and his Empire.

Austria was the key to Napoleon’s defeat. It provided most of the troops, and as a result was consequently able to manoeuvre two key figures into important positions and thereby (largely) shape the campaign to come. They were Schwarzenberg, who became allied commander-in-chief, and his exceptional chief of staff, Feldmarschall Count Radetzky, perhaps two of the most underrated and forgotten personalities in the allied effort to defeat Napoleon. Schwarzenberg was a diplomat capable of harmonizing the conflicting interests of the three eastern European sovereigns (in this respect, he has been likened to General Eisenhower).
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While Schwarzenberg imposed a semblance of unity on the allied powers, Radetzky dealt with the strategic dispositions.
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They both had their jobs cut out for them. The Austrian army had never been immune to political interference and this was the case in 1813. Now, however, Schwarzenberg had not only to contend with the meddling of his own Emperor, Francis I, but also with interference from Alexander I and Frederick William III, all of whom seemed more prepared to listen to their own courtiers and armchair generals than to the advice of the supreme commander in the field.
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Politics and military affairs were so closely intertwined that it was difficult to distinguish between them. The biggest problem facing Schwarzenberg was Alexander who, at times and in Metternich’s words, could be ‘silly’; he not only challenged Schwarzenberg’s position when he arrived in Prague in August 1813, convinced that he should be in overall charge, but he often issued orders on the battlefield and maintained a correspondence with the Prussian general, Blücher, without the supreme commander’s knowledge.
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Alexander reserved the right to maintain command over the Russian contingents in one of the armies (the Bohemian) and over the reserve troops.
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Apart from that problem, Russian commanders who received orders that they did not agree with would simply ignore them and issue their own orders.
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Nor did the nominal command of the armies by Schwarzenberg overcome the bickering that took place between commanders in the field, not only within individual armies, but also between commanders of different nationalities. Blücher’s chief of staff, August Neidhardt von Gneisenau, who once wrote that Napoleon could be defeated only by ‘war, war and more war’, constantly challenged Radetzky’s plans.
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Frederick William III had enormous difficulty reining in some of his more radical officers like Gneisenau, Blücher, who continually disobeyed orders and never saw eye to eye with Gneisenau, and Karl Wilhelm Georg von Grolman, who had led a corps of volunteers against the French in Spain. Alexander’s insistence on appointing Peter Wittgenstein to replace Kutuzov, who died suddenly after a brief illness in April 1813,
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led to a refusal on the part of some Russian army commanders, notably Generals Mikhail Miloradovich and Alexander Tormasov, to follow their new commander-in-chief. Alexander consequently split the army into two, one part under his direct orders and a smaller part under Wittgenstein’s.
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When Wittgenstein resigned after the battles of Lützen and Bautzen in May he was replaced by Barclay, who immediately fell out with Blücher. While Metternich, Frederick William and Alexander eventually attempted to come to some sort of political arrangement with Napoleon, the Prussian military were steeped in and largely motivated by fantasies of revenge that took on the form of a crusade. At Blücher’s headquarters, for example, one could find the presence of mystical demagogues and publicists like Ernst Moritz Arndt, Joseph Görres and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, for whom this was the final battle in the struggle against the Antichrist.
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The British diplomats at allied headquarters in Germany, Lord Aberdeen, Lord Cathcart and Sir Charles Stewart, did not get on with their Austrian counterparts let alone with each other. Metternich’s assistant during these months, Friedrich von Gentz, described the coalition as ‘a weak, rotten, poorly designed structure in which hardly two pieces fitted together’.
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Aberdeen noted on his arrival at allied headquarters in September 1813 that the three allied armies were ‘full of mutual discontent and recriminations’.
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Dresden

When Napoleon received news that Blücher was advancing west from Silesia and that a new Russian army under Bennigsen was also advancing towards Silesia, he decided to try and smash Blücher before the arrival of the Russian army. He would have been able to do this on any other occasion, but Blücher, one of the most volatile of the allied commanders who had to fight his own personal demons of depression, venereal disease and alcoholism, was nevertheless disciplined enough to keep to the Trachenberg Plan and avoid contact with Napoleon. At the same time, Schwarzenberg came up through Bohemia, much faster than Napoleon imagined he could, to threaten Dresden where Napoleon had left a corps of about 20,000 men under Gouvion Saint-Cyr. Since Dresden was being threatened, Napoleon decided to break off with Blücher. His initial plan was to march behind the enemy and either destroy it from the rear or at least destroy its supply base. It was a sound plan that, had he been able to carry it through, would have virtually put an end to the allies’ war effort in Germany.
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The assumption was that Gouvion Saint-Cyr could hold out in Dresden for a few days while Napoleon carried out the manoeuvre. However, on 25 August, as Napoleon arrived at Stolpen, some twenty-six kilometres to the east, he was told by Gourgaud and Murat that Saint-Cyr could not possibly hold out unless he was immediately reinforced by Napoleon. Gourgaud and Murat were wrong. Napoleon’s first mistake was to listen to them. The second mistake he made was to hole up inside Dresden, rather than staying in the field to attack the allies in the rear.

Napoleon’s appearance before Dresden threw the eastern European monarchs into a panic.
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He again set up headquarters at the Marcolini Palace and even had the actors from the Théâtre-Français come to Dresden so that he could construct a little court around himself. The battle of Dresden pitched about 170,000 allied troops against 120,000 French troops. Some of these, raw conscripts, had marched 190 kilometres in four days – a remarkable feat by any standards – to be on site for the battle, which took place in appalling conditions over two days (26–27 August). We can pass over the details of the battle. It rained so hard that ‘no one could make use of their weapons, it was impossible to fire a single shot, as the rain fell without interruption’.
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The rain turned the countryside into a morass, making it difficult to manoeuvre.

After two days of fighting, Napoleon managed to put the allied army to flight. He was aided in this by Alexander, his own worst enemy, who insisted on getting involved in the battle, ordering troops about without any reference to allied command, wreaking havoc and confusion. It was, nevertheless, a remarkable victory for Napoleon that showed he was still capable of great feats. The French lacked cavalry and were outnumbered. Despite that, for the loss of about 10,000 men (killed and wounded), Napoleon managed to inflict severe casualties on the allies: between 27,000 and 40,000 killed and wounded with another 20,000 (mostly Austrian) troops taken prisoner. The battle could have seen the war brought to an end when the three emperors were almost captured by French troops who had come within metres of their observation post. Schwarzenberg was obliged personally to help fend off the French, sword in hand. On another occasion, General Moreau, who had returned from exile in America to join the Tsar’s army as an adviser, was struck in the leg by a cannon ball that went right through the horse, and shattered his other leg. Both legs were amputated and he died a week later. What spooked the allied leaders was that Moreau was only half a horse’s length in front of Alexander when he was struck. If Alexander had been hit, the throne would have gone to his brother, Grand Duke Constantine, who did not share Alexander’s commitment to defeat Napoleon and who may very well have decided on a dramatic change in policy.
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Upon such incidents can hinge the fate of empires.