Russia Against Napoleon

Meanwhile disaster had befallen the allied left wing, all of whose troops were Austrian. One problem here was that the allied left was cut off from the rest of the army by the steep Plauen gully. It was impossible to reinforce troops beyond the gully from the allied centre in any emergency. General Mesko, who commanded the Austrian troops on the far left, was supposed to be supported by Klenau’s 21,000 men but the latter were so delayed on the road through the Tharandt forest that they never reached the battlefield. To an extent Schwarzenberg was the victim of the fact that his army had grown to a size which was impossible to control with the technology available at the time. By the time news reached the commander-in-chief from the army’s wings it was far too late to react.

Nevertheless Schwarzenberg managed a difficult problem incompetently. It made no sense to mass so much of the allied cavalry in the centre, where much of it was unusable, and to leave Mesko’s infantry with so little protection. Moreover, for all the difficulties of getting down the road through the Tharandt forest, one suspects that a Blücher, with the smell of impending battle in his nose, would have done more to galvanize his subordinates into overcoming obstacles. He certainly would not have followed Schwarzenberg’s example in initially allowing Klenau’s men a rest-day on 26 August as they passed through the forest. The next day, with Klenau’s troops still just emerging from the forest and hours from the battlefield, Mesko’s detachment was destroyed. On 27 August the French took 15,000 Austrian prisoners. Not only were Mesko’s unfortunate men set on by overwhelming numbers of French cavalry and infantry, their muskets were unusable in the rain. Even so, more of them would have escaped if they had had better leadership from their general and their staff officers.⁶⁰

On the afternoon of 27 August, even before he heard of the disaster which had befallen Mesko, Schwarzenberg was determined to retreat back into Bohemia. The allied attacks on the right and in the centre had failed and it was clear that it would be impossible now to capture Dresden. In that case it was pointless to expose the troops to hunger, cold and sickness by remaining outside the city in bivouacs, while Napoleon’s men were often quartered cosily inside Dresden. The weather was atrocious. Sir Robert Wilson noted in his diary: ‘Heavy rain and fierce wind. The worst English December day was never more bleak or soaking.’ In addition, however, alarming news was coming in that Vandamme had crossed the Elbe at Königstein and now posed a threat to the allied right flank and to Schwarzenberg’s communications with Bohemia.⁶¹

When Wittgenstein had marched up the Teplitz highway to Dresden he had detached Eugen of Württemberg to watch the crossing at Königstein.

Eugen was given most of his own Second Corps and Major-General Gothard von Helfreich’s 14th Division from First Corps. In all, this added up to 13,000 men and 26 guns. Eugen had only four squadrons of regular cavalry and one small Cossack regiment, but his command included almost half of Wittgenstein’s infantry. Nevertheless it was far too weak for the task Eugen now faced. Vandamme’s force included not just his own First Corps of three strong divisions but also three big infantry brigades and a cavalry division drawn from other corps. At roughly six in the morning of 26 August Eugen’s pickets informed him that the French were beginning to cross the Elbe at Königstein and that the prisoners they had taken stated that Vandamme had roughly 50,000 men in his command.

Eugen appealed urgently to Barclay and Wittgenstein for help but this would inevitably take time to arrive. For the moment the only reinforcement he received was the temporary loan of one cuirassier regiment from the Grand Duke Constantine, whose Army Corps was marching up the Teplitz highway on the morning of 26 August in order to join in the assault on Dresden. With the Empress’s Own Cuirassier Regiment came the commander of its brigade, the 23-year-old Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. One of Leopold’s sisters had married Grand Duke Constantine, another was the wife of Duke Alexander of Württemberg, Eugen’s uncle, who was currently commanding the Russian corps besieging Danzig. Like Eugen, Leopold had been made a Russian major-general while still a child. Though he had served in East Prussia in 1807, Leopold had subsequently retired from military service and only rejoined the army during the 1813 armistice. In the following weeks the young prince was to show that he was an able and courageous commander of cavalry and thereby to take his first small steps towards fame. Many years after the war he was to become famous throughout Europe as the first king of the Belgians and, incidentally, Queen Victoria’s uncle.