Russia Against Napoleon

By the time the leading allied generals met at the council of war in Melnik on 17 August, there was no sign of any French advance into Bohemia: almost all of them now believed that Napoleon would probably attack Bernadotte and seek to take Berlin. Radetsky and Diebitsch, the two ablest staff officers present, both shared this view. In this case it was impossible for the main army to stand still behind the mountains and leave Bernadotte to his fate. If Napoleon was heading northwards, the allies could safely cross the mountains on a broad front with their main line of advance aiming to move via Leipzig into the enemy’s rear. The council therefore decided to invade Saxony the moment the Russian and Prussian reinforcements arrived. Wittgenstein would advance on the right up the Teplitz highway from Peterswalde via Pirna to Dresden. In the centre, Kleist’s Prussians would march from Brux through Saida to Freiberg. Behind them would come Constantine’s reserves. Meanwhile the main Austrian body would advance along the highway that led from Kommotau via Marienberg to Chemnitz and ultimately to Leipzig. Smaller Austrian forces would use the roads on either side of the highway, with Klenau’s column on the Austrian extreme left.

The allied columns crossed the border into Saxony early in the morning of Saturday, 22 August. Even before they did so, however, intelligence arriving at headquarters was increasingly suggesting that Napoleon had not headed northwards against Bernadotte after all but was on the contrary in eastern Saxony facing Blücher. If true, this suggested that an advance towards Leipzig was pointless and was heading into nothing. Meanwhile Napoleon might destroy Blücher. He might also either march westwards and overwhelm Wittgenstein or use his control over the Elbe crossing at Königstein to strike south-westwards into the allied rear in Bohemia. These worries were not imaginary. Once the allies were deep in the Erzgebirge it would take at least four days to concentrate the whole army on Wittgenstein’s flank in the event that he was attacked by Napoleon. Though the allied commanders could not know this, Napoleon had in fact written to his commander in Dresden, Marshal Saint-Cyr, that he cared nothing if the allies marched into western Saxony or cut his communications with France. What concerned him was that they should not seize the Elbe crossings and above all the huge supply base which he had built up for the autumn campaign in Dresden. Moreover Napoleon was indeed contemplating the possibility of striking via Königstein into the allied rear.⁵²

If allied arrangements had been sufficiently flexible they would have changed their plans before their advance began and shifted its weight eastwards towards Dresden. Last-minute changes to the movements of this vast army with its very cumbersome command structure were extremely difficult, however. Therefore, as Schwarzenberg informed his wife in the evening of 20 August, ‘we want to cross the border on 22 August and then quickly swivel towards the Elbe’. This plan was no problem for the Russians since it did not change the planned line of march of Wittgenstein or the Grand Duke Constantine. Even Kleist’s Prussians did not have too far to march to get to the new area of concentration in the area of Dippoldiswalde and Dresden. For the Austrians, however, it was a completely different matter. They had the furthest to go and they would have to move across dreadful mountain paths which snaked up and down over the steep valleys of one stream after another. Already on 23 August General Wilson had encountered Klenau’s Austrians ‘drenched to the bones; most of them without shoes, many without greatcoats’. Wilson recorded that the morale of Klenau’s men, very many of them fresh recruits, seemed good but it was debatable whether it would remain that way with the rain pelting down, stomachs already empty, the Austrian commissariat wagons trailing well in the rear, and the paths dissolving into mud. It took Klenau’s men sixteen hours to cross the last 32 kilometres cross-country to the Freiberg area. To reach Dresden they still had the even worse path through the Tharandt forest to negotiate.⁵³

The initial allied shift eastwards had far more to do with protecting Wittgenstein and Bohemia than with seizing the opportunity to capture Napoleon’s base at Dresden. By 23 August, however, intelligence revealed that Napoleon was in fact in Silesia, even further away to the east than the allies had realized. On the evening of 23 August Schwarzenberg wrote to his wife that allied headquarters would be at Dippoldiswalde by the next day and that the army would attack Dresden on the afternoon of 25 August if sufficient forces could be concentrated there in time. He then went a long way towards guaranteeing that this would not be the case by giving most of the Austrian army a rest-day on 24 August.⁵⁴