Russia Against Napoleon

When first he heard, on 22 August, that the allied army was concentrating towards Dresden with the likely aim of attacking the city Napoleon began to plan a devastating counter-move. So long as Saint-Cyr could hold out for a few days, Napoleon intended to march with his Guards and the corps of Marmont, Victor and Vandamme across the Elbe at Königstein into the allied rear and either destroy the enemy army before it could concentrate against him or at the least devastate its rear bases. Had Napoleon carried out this plan it is very possible that he could have ended the campaign within a fortnight with a victory on the scale of Austerlitz or Jena. He would have been across the allied line of retreat and able to pin Schwarzenberg’s army within the Erzgebirge. Moreover, the speed and daring of his move would have paralysed and totally disoriented the slow-moving and divided allied leadership. When he arrived at Stolpen on 25 August, however, Napoleon changed his mind because both his trusted aide-de-camp, General Gourgaud, and Marshal Murat reported from Dresden that the city could not hold out against the allies unless reinforced immediately by the emperor and the corps he had brought from Silesia. So Napoleon turned his men towards the Saxon capital and left the move across the Elbe at Königstein to General Vandamme alone.⁵⁷ Even without Napoleon’s projected master stroke, matters looked grim for the allies by 27 August. They had finally made their attempt to storm Dresden in the late afternoon of 26 August and it had failed. By then Saint-Cyr’s garrison had been reinforced by Napoleon. The city’s defences proved just as hard to crack as Alexander, Moreau and Toll had feared. The allied leaders nevertheless decided to try again the next day, on the grounds that on 26 August less than half their army had participated in the fight. This decision was not in accordance with the Trachenberg plan, as modified by Schwarzenberg and Radetsky. Much more important, it was foolish. With Napoleon’s three corps from Silesia now inside Dresden there was no chance of storming the city. Unless they took Dresden, however, the allies could not remain in front of it for long, since they could not feed themselves off the land in the Erzgebirge and their supply trains were having a terrible time struggling forward down the mountain paths. Even more important, the position they had taken up outside the city made them very vulnerable to a counter-attack by Napoleon.

One key problem was that outside Dresden the allies were strung out along a line of almost 10 kilometres. Safe behind their fortifications, Napoleon’s troops occupied a line half as long. The city’s walls and fortifications allowed the defenders to hold off attacks made by superior allied numbers. Meanwhile Napoleon could concentrate troops to counter-attack and exploit the weaknesses of his over-extended enemy. On the far right Wittgenstein was trying to hold a weak position, 4 kilometres long, with only 15,000 men. His corps was also under fire from French batteries deployed on the other side of the Elbe. Under heavy pressure on 27 August his troops were pushed back towards the allied centre, losing their hold on the Teplitz highway which was their main chance of a safe retreat to Bohemia. When Barclay was ordered to counter-attack to regain the lost ground he refused, arguing that amidst the mud and the pelting rain he would never be able to get his artillery back onto its present high ground once he had sent it forward to support the counter-attack of his infantry. George Cathcart was present at allied headquarters that day. In his opinion Barclay’s fears were fully justified. Even the Austrian official history, often critical of Barclay, states that on this occasion he probably acted wisely.⁵⁸

At the time, however, there was too much confusion at allied headquarters on the Racknitz Heights for anyone to take up the matter with Barclay. Cathcart recalled that shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon ‘a cannon shot struck Moreau (who at the moment might have been half a horse’s length in advance of the emperor) in the right leg, and going through his horse, shattered his left knee’. Moreau died a week later. Had the ball hit the emperor the consequences would have been dramatic. The Grand Duke Constantine could never have replaced his brother as the linchpin of the coalition. He totally lacked Alexander’s charisma or his diplomatic skills, and shared neither his brother’s commitment to defeating Napoleon nor his ability to generate loyalty among senior Russian generals, who in some cases had doubts about whether the war in Germany really served Russian interests. Given Constantine’s extreme shifts of mood and his own frequent outbursts against continuing the war, Europe might have witnessed dramatic changes in Russian policy reminiscent of those in the time of his father and grandfather.⁵⁹