Russia Against Napoleon (61 page)

For the French, the battle of the Katzbach was a defeat but not a disaster. What turned defeat into catastrophe was the pursuit which followed the battle. This was by far the most successful pursuit of a defeated enemy in 1813. On 26 August Langeron had, to put things mildly, not distinguished himself. His misunderstanding of Blücher’s intentions and disobedience of his orders could have had disastrous consequences. The heroes of the day were Yorck’s infantry, Vasilchikov and his cavalry, and Fabian von der Osten-Sacken. During the pursuit, however, it was Langeron’s corps which achieved much the most spectacular results. This did not come across in Blücher and Gneisenau’s account of the battle. It would, of course, take time for Blücher to forget Langeron’s insubordination. Moreover the Prussian leaders had good reason to try to build up the Landwehr’s self-respect and morale by glowing accounts of its merits. In a secret report, the Prussian military government of Silesia had no need to go in for propaganda, however. Rejoicing in the liberation of their province and the destruction of MacDonald’s army, their account of the pursuit of the defeated enemy ascribed the catastrophe which had overtaken the French to Langeron alone.
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This was to go too far, because Yorck and Sacken did also contribute to the French debacle. On the evening of the battle Blücher ordered both men to cross the Katzbach immediately and hasten the enemy’s flight. This was impossible. The allied troops were far too tired, the Katzbach was in full flood, and the night was pitch-black. The next day Yorck did just manage to get across the bridge and fords near Weinberg but immediately ran up against a well-organized French rearguard. There was nothing surprising in this, since three-quarters of Souham’s corps had barely been in action the previous day.

Meanwhile Sacken’s attempts to get across the fords between Schmogwitz and Liegnitz were thwarted by the flooded river banks and the depth and current of the Katzbach river, which the constant heavy rain had turned into a torrent. The Russians lost a day by having to march all the way to Liegnitz and cross the Katzbach there. All this meant that the French had time to mount a relatively orderly, albeit dangerously rapid, retreat. Many stragglers and baggage were lost but no large units were cut off or destroyed. Nevertheless casualties were high. On 29 August, with the retreat far from over, Third Corps’s roll-call revealed that 930 men were dead, 2,722 wounded and 4,009 missing. On 3 September Sacken reported to Petr Volkonsky that his army corps had captured 2 generals, 63 officers, 4,916 men and 50 guns since 25 August. By then the French had retreated right back out of Silesia and over the border into Saxony.
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Langeron’s men set off in pursuit of the French before dawn on 27 August. Their commander no doubt felt the need to redeem his poor performance on the previous day. Once again Rudzevich commanded the advance guard though he was now strengthened by regiments of Baron Korff’s cavalry corps and by the whole of Lieutenant-General Petr Kaptsevich’s Tenth Corps. Almost none of Korff’s and Kaptsevich’s men had fought on 26 August and they were therefore full of beans. By contrast the French troops were exhausted after two weeks of ceaseless marches, pouring rain, little food, and a day’s battle in which initial victory had turned suddenly into defeat and an exhausting night-time retreat. The chief of staff of Korff’s cavalry corps wrote in his memoirs that ‘it is incredible to what extent a lost battle and a few days of very bad weather depressed the morale of the French troops’. This is harsh. Even Wellington’s infantry might have gone to pieces if abandoned by their commissariat and cavalry, and forced to mount rearguard actions with muskets unusable because of the rain against a mass of well-disciplined enemy cavalry, supported by horse artillery and thousands of fresh infantry. But it is true that the exceptionally exhausting last few days played to the strengths of the tough Russian soldiers and to the weaknesses of Napoleon’s young conscripts. It is also true that although French élan was unmatchable when things were going well, in times of adversity French troops very often lacked the disciplined calm and solidity of the Russian infantry.
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On 27 August, when the Russians caught up with the French rearguards, many of the latter collapsed. Near Pilgramsdorf, the Kharkov and Kiev Dragoon regiments under General Emmanuel rode down part of the French rearguard and captured 1,200 men. Another rearguard under Colonel Morand was overtaken by the Tver Dragoon Regiment and the Seversk and Chernigov mounted jaegers, commanded by Ivan Panchulidzev, a veteran cavalry general of Georgian origin. Morand fought bravely but with their muskets unusable his infantry squares caved in to a simultaneous assault from three sides by the Russian cavalry. With the infantry rearguards collapsing and the French cavalry nowhere to be seen, the floodgates threatened to open. Cossacks swarmed around the retreating French. Langeron reported that ‘the level of losses and the disorder in the enemy ranks reminded me of their disastrous flight from Moscow to the Vistula’.
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MacDonald and his corps commanders decided that it would be fatal to try to rally their men or oppose the Russians. Their only chance was to outrun them and subsequently find a safe spot to regroup and rebuild the men’s shattered morale. This was probably realistic but it guaranteed that huge numbers of stragglers would desert or be scooped up by the Russian cavalry and Cossacks. It also meant abandoning the detached divisions of Ledru and Puthod to their fate. Ledru escaped but Puthod decided to try to link up with MacDonald’s fleeing corps. Marching north-westwards from Hirschberg, Puthod was shadowed all the way by Major-General Iusefovich’s cavalry. The Russians intercepted Puthod’s report to MacDonald which outlined his plans and his line of march. On 29 August they encircled and trapped his division near Löwenberg with its back to the river Bober, which the heavy rain had made impossible to ford. General Rudzevich waited to press his attack until Prince Shcherbatov’s Sixth Corps had arrived. Against such overwhelming odds resistance was pointless, and Puthod surrendered with more than 4,000 men and 16 guns. His division had begun the autumn campaign just two weeks before with over 8,000 men in its ranks. Very few of them escaped to serve Napoleon again.
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Not until the first week in September did the allied pursuit come to a halt. By then MacDonald’s army had been pushed right back into Saxony and had lost 35,000 men even according to French sources. The Army of Silesia had also lost heavily but very many of its missing men were exhausted Prussian militiamen who would in time return to the ranks. This was far less true of the French wounded and missing, who had been overrun by the allied advance. Napoleon could not afford such losses. Nor could he afford to have Blücher established within striking range of Dresden, the Elbe crossings and the other allied armies. The disaster which had befallen MacDonald’s army made it very unlikely that the emperor would be able to execute his plan to take his Guards and reserves north to deal with Bernadotte.

Victory hugely raised the morale and confidence of Blücher’s army and resolved many of the tensions which had existed among its commanders. Langeron’s disobedience was forgiven. Blücher’s report to Alexander on the battle of the Katzbach won for Sacken promotion to full general and the Order of St George, second class. The day after the battle Blücher told every Prussian within earshot that victory had been owed in great part to Sacken’s handling of his cavalry and artillery. The next time Sacken rode past Yorck’s corps he was greeted with volleys of cheers from the Prussian troops. All this was balm for the soul of a man who for many years had seen himself as the victim of injustice and bad luck. The battle of the Katzbach was the turning point in Sacken’s fortunes. He would die many years after the war a prince, a field-marshal and one of the most respected figures in Russia.
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However great Blücher’s victories were, in the end the fate of the campaign would rest above all on the performance of the main allied army, in other words Schwarzenberg’s Army of Bohemia. It contained many more troops than the armies of Bernadotte and Blücher combined. Only the Army of Bohemia could hope to confront and defeat Napoleon himself. Moreover, only the Army of Bohemia contained a large contingent of Austrian troops. Potentially, Austria remained the weak link in the coalition. If the main army was destroyed or seriously weakened and Bohemia was invaded, then there was a real chance that Austria would renew negotiations with Napoleon or even drop out of the war.

In June and July Schwarzenberg and Radetsky had assumed that if the Austrians joined the war Napoleon would strike first against them into Bohemia. The allies tended to share this view and in any case were anxious to calm Austrian fears in any way possible. From an early stage in joint military consultations, therefore, it was planned to send Wittgenstein and 25,000 men into Bohemia to reinforce the Austrians. As unexpected numbers of reserves and men returning from hospital flowed into the allied regiments plans became more ambitious. When Count Latour, Schwarzenberg’s representative, arrived at allied headquarters on 22 July to carry forward joint planning he was surprised to discover that the allies had hugely increased the size of the force they intended to send into Bohemia to assist the Austrians. In addition to the whole of Wittgenstein’s Army Corps, they also earmarked Lieutenant-General von Kleist’s Prussian Army Corps and the Grand Duke Constantine’s Reserve Army Corps, which included the Russian and Prussian Guards, the Russian Grenadier Corps and the three Russian cuirassier divisions. In all, 115,000 Russians and Prussians would now march from Silesia into Bohemia the moment war was renewed.

The Austrians had slightly mixed feelings about this. On the one hand this huge reinforcement, which included the best troops in the allied armies, made a great contribution to the defence of Bohemia. On the other hand enormous last-minute efforts were required to feed all these men. Worst of all, there was no way that Frederick William, let alone Alexander, would resign all control over their elite regiments and what was now unequivocally both the main allied army and the core of the allied war effort. With the Russian and Prussian divisions came the two monarchs, as distinctly unwelcome guests in Schwarzenberg’s headquarters.
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Under no circumstances was Schwarzenberg a commander who would seize the initative and impose his will on Napoleon. But in August 1813 his only initial option was to await the arrival of the Russo-Prussian reinforcements and take precautions against any attempt by Napoleon to attack them on the march or to invade Bohemia. Radetsky rather hoped that Napoleon would invade. The allies would then have the possibility of catching his troops as they sought to emerge from the narrow defiles of the Erzgebirge rather than the other way round. The Austrian quartermaster-general also had justified fears about how quickly and efficiently the commanders of the various allied columns would coordinate their operations if they were launched on an offensive through the mountains and into Saxony. Even leaving aside problems of terrain and inter-allied cooperation, the Austrian army itself had an over-centralized and unwieldy command structure. In 1809 the Austrians had adopted the French system of separate all-arms corps. The lesson they drew from the war was that their senior generals and staffs could not be relied on to make this system work. Uniquely among the four main armies in 1813, they had therefore in part reverted to a centralized army high command dealing directly with divisions and ad hoc column commanders. Radetsky had good reason to fear that this arrangement would prove defective.
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Had he understood the internal arrangements of the Russian forces his pessimism would have increased. The Russians had gone to war in 1812 with a lean and rational command structure of corps, divisions and brigades. By the autumn of 1813, however, there had been many promotions to the ranks of major- and lieutenant-general. There were now, for example, far more lieutenant-generals than there were corps, and Russian lieutenant-generals thought it beneath their status to command mere divisions. The result was the emergence of many corps which in reality were little bigger than the old divisions. These ‘corps’ were subordinated to the seven larger units into which the Field Army was divided in the autumn campaign. Though these seven units were also confusingly called corps, to avoid bewilderment I call them Army Corps. Two such Army Corps (Grand Duke Constantine and Wittgenstein) were in the Army of Bohemia; two were in the Army of Silesia (Langeron and Sacken); two were in the Army of Poland (Dokhturov and Petr Tolstoy); one was in the Army of the North (Winzengerode). To a great extent the creation of mini-corps was merely a cosmetic concession to generals’ vanity, but it did make the Russian command structure top-heavy and it complicated relations with the Prussians. A Russian corps commanded by a lieutenant-general could contain no more men than a Prussian brigade, which on occasion could be commanded by a mere colonel. Since both Russian and Prussian officers were acutely conscious of seniority and status, ‘misunderstandings’ were inevitable.
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A further cause of inefficiency was the position of Mikhail Barclay de Tolly. Having performed excellently during the armistice as commander-in-chief, Barclay now found himself de facto relieved of the supreme command and subordinated to Schwarzenberg. Apparently it took Alexander some days to summon up the courage to tell Barclay about this. To maintain his pride – perhaps indeed to retain his services – Barclay kept his official position as commander-in-chief of the Russian forces. In principle Russian corps in the armies of Silesia and the North were in operational terms subordinated to Bernadotte and Blücher, but in matters of administration and personnel to Barclay. Given the wide dispersal of these forces this was an unworkable arrangement which caused frustration on all sides.

Barclay’s power over the Russian and Prussian forces in the Army of Bohemia was more real without being more rational. It would have been more efficient had orders passed directly from Schwarzenberg to the Army Corps commanders (Constantine, Wittgenstein and Kleist), rather than being delayed and distorted by having to go through Barclay. Even Wittgenstein’s position was problematic in the first half of the autumn campaign. In principle he commanded Eugen of Württemberg’s Second Corps and the First Corps of Prince Andrei Gorchakov, the brother of the minister of war. In practice, however, Eugen’s corps was detached from the main body in August 1813 and Wittgenstein only actually controlled Gorchakov’s men. As a result, Wittgenstein too was more or less redundant on occasion: in August he and Gorchakov often merely frustrated each other by both trying to do the same job.
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