Citizen Emperor (96 page)

The allied retreat from the battlefield of Lützen was poorly carried out, but, far worse, the defeat was a heavy blow to morale, already low before the battle,
¹¹⁸
and the Russians and Prussians started throwing recriminations and insults at each other.
¹¹⁹
Things were not much better on the French side. After Lützen, soldiers were just waiting for an opportunity to leave their corps, to get admitted to a hospital or get as far away from any danger as they could. One witness reports that troops were beaten for the slightest misdemeanour, and that even those who fell sick were badly treated.
¹²⁰
There were complaints too about how badly supplied the army was so that three-quarters of the time men received no meat, which obliged officers to send off marauding parties.
¹²¹
Desertion rates mounted as disgust with the army and the war increased. Thousands of soldiers presented with wounds to their hands that were more than suspect.
¹²²
In the ten days following Lützen, with the French pursuing the allies, more than 42,000 French troops deserted.
¹²³

The allies made a stand at Bautzen, about fifty kilometres east of Dresden, where, over two days on 20–21 May, Napoleon pulled off another pyrrhic victory. On the first day of battle, he enjoyed a slight numerical superiority – around 115,000 men facing 96,000 Russians and Prussians. The next day, however, another 85,000 men under Ney arrived to threaten the allied flank and rear. Under the circumstances, the allies fought remarkably well, but were forced to retreat. Once again figures vary, but the allies suffered 11,000–20,000 casualties compared to around 20,000 French, figures that hide the horror of battle. ‘The spectacle I had just witnessed’, wrote one survivor, ‘made a most painful impression on me.’
¹²⁴
Napoleon’s inability to inflict a crushing blow was in part due to Ney’s bungling of affairs.
¹²⁵
Napoleon realized that an opportunity had been missed. And yet, given the depleted state of the Russian army, if he had had the cavalry to pursue his enemy he might have crushed the Russians and brought the war to an end. Neither the Russian army, which still suffered from the interference of Alexander, nor the Prussian, which had not yet become an effective fighting machine, appeared capable of successfully concluding the war.

One of Napoleon’s closest companions in arms, Michel Duroc, was fatally wounded at Bautzen, his stomach ripped open by a cannon ball. Duroc had been with Napoleon since the beginning, in Toulon, and had followed him every step of the way, from Italy to Egypt, through Brumaire to the Tuileries. He was present at every battle, and was one of the few men in Napoleon’s entourage who addressed him with the familiar ‘tu’. If someone wanted to see Napoleon, they had to go through Duroc. ‘He loves me like a dog loves its master,’ Napoleon is reported to have once said.
¹²⁶
Duroc had, however, begun to tire of the constant campaigning and is reported to have confided to Marmont shortly before his death, perhaps foreseeing that the end was close, that Napoleon’s desire for battle was insatiable and that they would all be killed as a consequence.
¹²⁷
Now, dying, he was taken to the nearby house of a German pastor. The Guard was ordered to halt and set up camp.
¹²⁸
Napoleon spent some time sitting on a stool in front of his tent, his head down and his hands folded. His staff stood a few paces away, watching and waiting in mournful silence.
¹²⁹
Napoleon went to Duroc that evening; the conversation they supposedly had was reported in the
Moniteur
. It is entirely fabricated. Even though Napoleon was visibly upset – one witness describes Napoleon sobbing
¹³⁰
– he did not hesitate to use the deathbed scene to render a more humane portrait of himself. One account has Duroc counselling Napoleon to make peace, and then, tiring of him, saying, ‘In the name of God, go away and let me die in peace.’
¹³¹
When Napoleon returned to his own camp he paced up and down in front of his tent, reflective, sombre.

That night, thousands of fires seemed to light the plain as soldiers bivouacked and prepared what food they had; the moon rose slowly over the horizon; two neighbouring villages were ablaze; men no doubt thought about the bloody day that had just passed. Duroc died in the night.

The Allies Devise a Plan

Until the battles of Lützen and Bautzen in May 1813, it looked as though the eastern powers were going to fall into the same old patterns that had done them so much harm in previous campaigns. Napoleon was able to fend off the combined Russo-Prussian armies with a number of victories, at least up to June, while the allies were busy arguing among themselves. Despite a façade of unity, there had been intense bickering not only between allied powers but also among individual allied commanders. At the beginning of June, for example, as a result of the drubbing they had received over the preceding weeks, the Russians agreed to an armistice with France – the armistice of Pläswitz – without, however, first consulting with their allies. When the Prussians found out they were furious.
¹³²
The implication was that if Russia could sign an armistice, then it could also sign a separate peace.

On 2 June, Napoleon agreed to the armistice, under some pressure from Caulaincourt and Berthier, at first for thirty-six hours, then two days later for seven weeks (until 20 July). But he almost immediately regretted it. Napoleon’s military instincts were right; it was an enormous strategic error, the worst of the campaign, and according to the Emperor himself the ‘dumbest decision’ of his life. Moreover, he had not realized that the allies were so divided; he could easily have pushed on to the Oder.
¹³³
The armistice gave the allies time to regroup, but then it allowed Napoleon to do so too.
¹³⁴
The French army was, after all, largely made up of raw recruits who had performed extraordinarily well under the circumstances, but time was needed to gather the stragglers, continue to train them and attempt to strengthen the cavalry.
¹³⁵
Besides, the suggestion for an armistice came from Austria and Napoleon could ill afford to displease his unwilling ally at this stage. Nevertheless, at that moment he lost the initiative, and he would never again recover it.

This could have been a repeat of the Third Coalition in which a couple of decisive battles – in that instance, Ulm and Austerlitz – undermined the confidence of the commanders, including Francis and Alexander. This time, though, the allies reacted to their tactical military losses in ways they had not done previously: they did not sue for peace, they did not collapse nor fall out. They regrouped in order to fight on. The defeats were now seen for what they were, as setbacks, and not as decisive routs that risked the existence of the Russian and Austrian armies. If Austria lost the war in 1809 it was largely because Archduke Charles was not prepared to risk all for victory. This was no longer the case. Now, there was a determination to carry the war through to the end, a resolve to defeat Napoleon once and for all. It is for this reason that, on the allied side, we now start to hear stories of heroism and feats of bravery in battle that were noticeably absent from previous campaigns.

More importantly, after the battles of Lützen and Bautzen, the allies modified their tactics by deciding not to engage Napoleon, if he could at all be avoided. Instead, they engaged his subordinates where possible.
¹³⁶
This strategy, referred to as the Trachenberg Plan (sometimes as the Compact of Trachenberg, after the village in Silesia in which it was devised), was decided on at a meeting on 10–12 July 1813 between the Russians, Prussians and Swedes (Sweden entered the war on 7 July) in an atmosphere, according to the official version of the meeting, of ‘harmony, confidence and mutual satisfaction’.
¹³⁷
The atmosphere was anything but. As we shall see, huge disagreements existed among the allies. Nevertheless, the Trachenberg Plan was the eastern powers’ first attempt at formulating a common tactical doctrine and it proved to be of tremendous importance.

The architect of the plan has been hotly disputed by historians, particularly in light of its subsequent success, some suggesting that it was Major Carl Friedrich von Toll, others Feldmarschall Josef Wenceslaus Radetzky. It would appear that elements from two different plans were merged. It was, in any event, elegantly simple: wherever Napoleon appeared, the allies would not give battle. Wherever one of his commanders appeared, the allies would attack, and preferably with superior numbers. The aim was to wear down Napoleon, so that he would have to march back and forth against one allied army or another, and then to push him into a corner where they could confront him with overwhelming forces. This would happen, as we shall see, at Leipzig.
¹³⁸

‘Excessive Ambition and Greed’

On 26 June 1813, Metternich was finally able to meet with Napoleon at Dresden where he was staying at the palace of Count Marcolini, grand chamberlain of the King of Saxony. There, he presented Napoleon with the allies’ conditions for a preliminary peace.
¹³⁹
There are only two witnesses to what happened, Metternich and Napoleon, neither terribly reliable. The other accounts we have of this meeting are third hand. In a marathon nine-hour discussion, which saw the Emperor oscillate between rage, harangue and polite conversation, and which at one point saw him accuse Metternich of having accepted a bribe from England,
¹⁴⁰
Napoleon rejected the conditions, despite Metternich’s insistence that Austria needed and wanted a durable peace. The demands were: the dissolution of the Duchy of Warsaw; the restoration of Prussia to its pre-1806 borders; the return of Illyria to Austria (lost to France after the war of 1809); and the evacuation of the Hanseatic cities and the north of Germany.
¹⁴¹

The peace conditions were hardly onerous, but having occupied Dresden and Breslau, Napoleon was in a reasonably strong position and found them unacceptable. Most historians have been critical of his decision not to negotiate a settlement. The problem is, even if Napoleon had settled on the conditions presented to him, it is highly unlikely Prussia and Russia would have accepted them; they were now bent on an independent Germany, or at least one not dominated by France. Metternich portrayed Austrian mediation, and his own actions, many years later as a pretext to gain time so that Austria could gather its forces before the final assault.
¹⁴²
Those assertions should not be taken too seriously. Like any good diplomat, Metternich was more than likely playing both sides to see which would gain Austria the better deal. Austria had far more to gain by procrastinating and appearing to mediate between Napoleon and the allies than in declaring itself either for or against Napoleon.

Napoleon did not trust or believe Metternich. He believed Austria was somehow setting a trap for him. This was not quite the case, but to Metternich’s proposals he simply responded, ‘Stop lying and tell me what you really want!’
¹⁴³
He must have had an inkling that Austria was going to go over to the allies. He had been receiving reports from the French ambassador in Vienna, who depicted the mood there as decidedly hostile towards France, both among the people and, especially, in the army.
¹⁴⁴
And yet Napoleon does not appear to have taken heed, writing to General Lebrun in Holland that there was nothing to worry about,
¹⁴⁵
deluded by what he considered to be the solidity of a marriage alliance, which his father-in-law, and Metternich, now had little time for. Francis was acting as a head of state, not as a doting father, even if he took a good deal of persuading to go over to the allies. The very day after the meeting with Metternich, on 27 June 1813, Austria signed the Treaty of Reichenbach by which it agreed to join the coalition if Napoleon rejected the peace terms offered (above). If France failed to accept peace by 20 July, Metternich warned Napoleon that Austria would join the allies. Metternich, both wary of Napoleon’s strategic genius and concerned about what a victorious Russia would mean for Europe, nevertheless kept on trying to come to some sort of arrangement with Napoleon over the coming weeks.
¹⁴⁶

The Reichenbach proposals put to Napoleon were meaningless.
¹⁴⁷
The allies were asking Napoleon to withdraw behind the Rhine as the basis for future negotiations, but there was no guarantee that future negotiations would take place. In other words, nothing was said about what Russia and Prussia would do if Napoleon accepted their demands. It is obvious that, given Napoleon’s personal identification with the Confederation of the Rhine, any withdrawal from Germany at this stage was impossible. Not only would it be an admission of weakness, but it would also be giving away an enormous strategic advantage by abandoning his German allies, territories the allies would subsequently be able to exploit fully. His response to Austrian peace overtures was almost provocative. He declared ‘inalienable’ all the territories that France had annexed up to then; this included most of Italy, all of Belgium and Holland, much of western and northern Germany, most of Dalmatia. He constantly boasted of his power and his victories. No one, not even his minister of police, Savary, was allowed to speak to him of France’s own need and desire for peace.
¹⁴⁸