Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (64 page)

By early March, Breslau had become the centre of operations, not only for the Prussian and Russian army commands but also for the
burgeoning volunteer movement. While Frederick William III, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Blücher met with their Russian counterparts in the royal palace to coordinate the coming campaign, crowds of volunteers converged on the Hotel Szepter only a short distance away to sign for service under Major Ludwig Adolf Wilhelm von Lützow. Lützow was a Prussian officer from Berlin who had served in Schill’s regiment of hussars and was authorized by the king in 1813 to found a free corps of voluntary riflemen. The Lützow Rifles, also known as the ‘Black Band’ for their sombre, loose-cut uniforms, eventually numbered 3,000 men. Among those most actively involved in volunteer recruitment was Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who had come to Breslau with a flock of eager gymnasts and was already something of a cult figure. ‘They goggle at him as if he were some kind of messiah,’ a young regular army soldier noted, evidently with mixed feelings.
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The young nobleman Leopold von Gerlach, who came to Breslau towards the end of February, was struck by the energy and exhilaration in the city. In the theatre of an evening, Gerlach wrote, Chancellor Hardenberg could still be seen chatting amiably with the French ambassador in order to keep up appearances. But the streets were agog with preparations for war. Soldiers could be seen exercising on the ramparts, on the ring road and before the city gates; the lanes were crowded with horses being bought and sold, the streets lined with Jews selling muskets, pistols and sabres; ‘virtually everyone, from tailors, swordsmiths, cobblers to harness makers, hatters and saddlers, is working for the war.’
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While the allied commanders laid their plans in Breslau, Napoleon too was preparing for war in Germany, building a new army from veterans and fresh untested recruits raised from the client states of the Confederation of the Rhine. Napoleon’s history, charisma and reputation were still sufficient to dissuade most of the German sovereigns from defecting; their fear of his strength was reinforced by concern at the prospect of a national uprising against France that might sweep away German thrones as well as French garrisons. Even the beleaguered King of Saxony, who had momentarily wavered, returned to the French fold in May, partly because he recognized that the allies (and especially Prussia) posed a greater threat to the integrity of his kingdom than Napoleon. The allies thus faced a long and uncertain struggle against a foe who still controlled the resources and manpower of much of German Europe.

The Wars of Liberation, as they would come to be known, opened badly for the allies. It was agreed that the Prussian army would operate under a Russian supreme command – a telling indication of Prussia’s junior status within the coalition – but it proved difficult at first to coordinate the two command structures. Having entered Saxony at the end of March, the allies were defeated at the battle of Lützen on 2 May. But Napoleon’s victory was dearly bought: while the Prussians lost 8,500 and the Russians 3,000 in dead and wounded, the figure for the French and their client states was 22,000. This pattern was repeated at the battle of Bautzen on 20–21 May, where Napoleon forced the allies to withdraw, but lost another 22,000 men, twice as many as the Russo-Prussian forces. The allies were obliged to pull back out of Saxony into Silesia, but their armies remained intact.

It was not an encouraging start. Nevertheless, the ferocity of the allied resistance gave Napoleon pause. On 4 June, he agreed a temporary armistice with Tsar Alexander and Frederick William III. Napoleon later came to regard the ceasefire of 4 June as the error that undid his dominion in Germany. This was overstating the case, but it was certainly a serious failure of judgement. The allies used the respite afforded by it not only to enlarge and re-equip their forces, but also to put their war effort on a more solid financial footing by concluding alliance and subsidy treaties with Britain at Reichenbach on 14/15 June. In addition to direct subsidies totalling 2 million pounds, of which one-third (about 3. 3 million thalers) would go to Prussia, Britain agreed to supply 5 million pounds in ‘federal paper’, a special currency underwritten by London that would be used by the allied governments for war-related costs and redeemed jointly by the three treaty partners after the end of the war.
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In a war that had already plunged Britain into historically unprecedented levels of public debt, this was the biggest subsidy deal yet.

The most urgent objective of allied policy after 4 June was to persuade Austria to join the coalition. Clemens Wenzel von Metternich, the Austrian minister responsible for foreign policy, had kept his distance from the Russo-Prussian coalition during the early months of 1813. The Austrian government already viewed Russia as a threat in the Balkans and they had no wish to see Napoleon’s control over Germany exchanged for Russian hegemony. But after the Treaty of Reichenbach was signed, followed by an alliance with Sweden on 22 July, it became clear that the future of Europe was in contention and Vienna could no
longer afford to sit on the sidelines. During the summer, Metternich attempted to mediate a European peace that would be acceptable to Napoleon, while at the same time (at Reichenbach on 27 June) agreeing conditions for joint action with the allies in the event that mediation failed. When Metternich’s efforts to broker peace foundered on Napoleon’s intransigence, Austria resolved at last to join the allied coalition. The ceasefire of 4 June was allowed to expire on 10 August 1813;on the following day Austria formally entered the coalition and declared war against France.

The balance of power now tipped sharply against France. The Austrians contributed 127,000 men to the coalition war effort. The Russians had fielded an army of 110,000 during the spring campaign and this number was steadily rising as new waves of recruits arrived. Sweden contributed a further force of 30,000 men under the command of the former French marshal, now crown prince of Sweden, Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte. Under their new conscription laws, the Prussians were able to field a massive contingent of 228,000 infantry, 31,000 cavalry and 13,000 artillerymen. At the height of the fighting, about 6 per cent of the Prussian population were in active service. Against this imposing multinational force, Napoleon could muster 442,000 troops ready for combat, many of whom were ill-trained and poorly motivated new recruits.

Napoleon concentrated his forces around Dresden, on the territory of his loyal ally the King of Saxony, in the hope that an opportunity would arise to deal a devastating blow against one or other of the allied armies. The allies, for their part, adopted a concentric strategy: a Swedish-Prussian Northern Army under the command of Bernadotte moved southwards from Brandenburg, having retaken Berlin, while Blücher commanded the Silesian Army to Napoleon’s east. Advancing from the south was the Army of Bohemia under Schwarzenberg. Closing in on Napoleon was not easy, despite the allied superiority in numbers. He enjoyed the advantage of internal lines and was still capable of mounting swift and destructive strikes. The allies suffered from the usual problem of coalition armies – relations between and within the Prussian, Swedish and Austrian commands were not harmonious and the widely dispersed forces faced the problem of tightening the ring around Napoleon without exposing themselves to a potentially devastating French attack. The third week of August brought three victories and a defeat. The Army of
Berlin, a force composed for the most part of Saxon, Franconian and other German contingents and commanded by the French General Oudinot, was beaten on 23 August in a battle near Grossbeeren as it approached the Prussian capital. A French corps of 10,000 men making its way into Brandenburg to assist Oudinot was subsequently attacked and destroyed near Hagelberg. In both these engagements, men of the Prussian Landwehr played a central role. On 26 August, Blücher’s Silesian Army inflicted heavy losses on a 67,000-strong force of French and Rhenish Confederation troops under Macdonald; nearly half of Macdonald’s army perished or was taken prisoner. But these successes were offset to some extent by a bitter engagement on the outskirts of Dresden on 26–27 August, in which Schwarzenberg’s Army of Bohemia was driven back by Napoleon with over 35,000 casualties.

Encouraged by his success at Dresden, Napoleon initially focused on finding and destroying one of the allied armies on its route of approach, trusting that his advantage of internal lines would allow him to concentrate superior forces against any one of his adversaries. He drove his men through the broad wedge of territory between the rivers Saale and Elbe in search of either Bernadotte’s Northern or Blücher’s Silesian Army, both of which he knew to be in the area. But both evaded him by moving westward across the Saale.

By this point, Napoleon was starting to run out of options. He could not withdraw from the theatre without exposing himself to damaging attacks from irregulars and Cossacks, let alone his adversaries’ armies, all of which were still intact and combat-ready. Domestic opinion in France was turning sharply against the prolongation of the conflict, and Napoleon’s resources were running low. Pressed for time, he resolved to concentrate his forces around the Saxon city of Leipzig, await the arrival of his enemies and accept battle. The city thus became the setting for the greatest single military engagement to that date in the history of continental Europe, and probably of human warfare. The battle of Leipzig has justly been called the ‘Battle of the Peoples’ (
Völkerschlacht
), for the 500,000 men who took part included Frenchmen, Germans (on both sides), Russians, Poles, Swedes, nearly every one of the subject nationalities of the Austrian Empire and even a specialist British rocket brigade that had been formed only in the previous year and was to see its first action at Leipzig.

By the night of 14 October, Napoleon had concentrated 177,000
troops in and around the city. Early on the following day, Schwarzenberg’s army, a mammoth corps numbering just over 200,000 men, made contact with French forces under Murat to the south of the city. Much of 15 October was spent in patrols and skirmishes as the two armies felt out each other’s positions. In the meanwhile, Blücher’s Silesian Army, whose exact position was unknown to Napoleon, advanced from the north-west along the rivers Saale and Elster. The following day, 16 October, was dominated by ferocious fighting across a wide sweep of land around the city as Schwarzenberg attacked from the south, Blücher from the north and a small allied corps of 19,000 men pressed through the wooded areas to the west of the city. At the end of the day, Napoleon still held much of the line in the south, but had been pushed back in the north-west, where his positions around Möckern had succumbed after a savage battle with the Prussians of the I Corps of the Silesian Army under General Yorck, now restored to office, if not to royal favour.

As night fell, the overall outcome still hung in the balance. The casualties were prodigious: the French had lost nearly 25,000 men, and the allies 30,000. Yet this augured well for the allies, for while Napoleon could deploy only 200,000 men in all, including the remaining reserves, the arrival of the Northern Army and the Polish Army under Bennigsen would bring the allied forces concentrated around Leipzig to 300,000 men. Moreover, Napoleon’s grip on his German allies was weakening. During 16 October, news reached him that an army of 30,000 Bavarians had defected to the Austrians and intended to intercept Napoleon’s lines of communication with France.
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The French Emperor considered the possibility of a retreat, but decided ultimately to delay his withdrawal until the 18th, in the hope that some fatal error by the allies might supply him with an opportunity to tip the balance. He also attempted, in his accustomed manner, to divide his enemies by offering a separate peace to Austria, but this initiative merely had the effect of persuading his adversaries that he was at the end of his resources. The following day (17 October) was quiet, save for various skirmishes, as all the armies rested in preparation for the decisive struggle and various gaps between the attacking forces were closed. Meanwhile, the streets of Leipzig filled with wounded from both sides. ‘Since last night,’ the Leipzig composer Friedrich Rochlitz noted in his diary on 17 October, ‘we have been working without pause to
bandage and house the wounded, and still there are many lying unattended to on the marketplace and in the nearby streets, so that at several places one is, quite literally, walking through blood.’
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On 18 October, the allies pushed forward towards the outskirts of Leipzig, tightening the noose around the French forces. An important role in this phase of the battle fell to the Prussian General Bülow, whose corps formed part of the Northern Army under Bernadotte. Bülow spearheaded its advance from the east across the river Parthe and bore the brunt of the fighting for the eastern approaches to the city. Once again, casualties on both sides were heavy. The allies lost a further 20,000 men; the French had remained for the most part on the defensive and lost perhaps half that number. There were also further defections, notably of 4,000 Saxons attached to Reynier’s corps, who simply marched in closed ranks to the allies. Among those who observed this remarkable act of defection was Marshal Macdonald, who saw through his telescope how the Saxons, while leading a successful advance against the allies, simply turned about and trained their weapons on the Frenchmen following behind: ‘In the most abominable and cold-blooded manner,’ he later recalled, ‘they shot down their unsuspecting fellows, with whom they had previously served in loyal comradeship of arms.’
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Desperate attempts by Marshal Ney to close the line and mount a counter-attack were repelled by the British rocket brigade, whose Congreve rockets struck terror into the advancing column.