Russia Against Napoleon

Fortunately for the Russians their rearguards performed with their usual calm discipline in adversity. So too did the Prussian and Austrian troops detailed to perform this duty. The terrain on the whole favoured rearguards and impeded rapid pursuit by cavalry. Having performed brilliantly in marching from Silesia and defeating the allies, the French troops and their commanders had every right to be exhausted. Perhaps the most important point, however, was that Napoleon had taken his eye off the pursuit and retired to Dresden, where most of his attention was directed to the bad news coming not just from MacDonald in Silesia but also from Marshal Oudinot, whose advance on Berlin had been defeated at Gross Beeren. The emperor appears to have been unaware of his opportunity to destroy Schwarzenberg’s army. Perhaps this stemmed partly from the fact that he did not know the terrain of the Erzgebirge well, and in particular had no knowledge of the defiles on the Austrian side of the border. In the absence of Napoleon much of the energy and coordination went out of the pursuit.

For the allies the biggest danger was not the forces pursuing them from Dresden but Vandamme’s detachment. When the retreat began on 27 August not merely did Vandamme’s force greatly outnumber Eugen’s but he was also positioned to its south. He could have shouldered Eugen aside and marched unopposed down the highway past Peterswalde and into the Teplitz valley, reaching the defiles leading from the Erzgebirge well before most of the Russian and Prussian units could escape from the mountains. It did not require many troops to block the key defiles at Teplitz and Graupen towards which Barclay and Kleist were heading. Had this been combined by an energetic and coordinated pursuit by Napoleon then the allied army could have been cut off in the mountains and forced to surrender. In fact Napoleon settled for a lesser goal, ordering Vandamme merely to march into the Teplitz valley and seize the enormous amount of baggage and artillery which would not be able to escape. Once in the Teplitz valley Vandamme might have used his initiative, blocked the defiles and astonished Napoleon by the extent of the damage he inflicted on the allied armies. Even had he confined himself to obeying Napoleon’s orders, the loss of their artillery and supply trains would have been a crippling blow to the allies. Rebuilding the Army of Bohemia in time to renew the campaign in the autumn of 1813 would have been very difficult. Dissension between the allies, already growing fast because of the defeat at Dresden, could easily have destroyed the coalition.⁶⁷

Much therefore turned on the struggle between Vandamme and Prince Eugen on the Teplitz highway. On 26 and 27 August Eugen received two reinforcements, one welcome, the other quite the opposite. The welcome reinforcements were the 6,700 men of Major-General Baron Gregor von Rosen’s 1st Guards Infantry Division. The Preobrazhensky, Semenovsky, Izmailovsky and Jaeger regiments of the Guards, which made up this division, were the finest infantry in the Russian army, so this addition to Eugen’s force was much more valuable than mere numbers might suggest. They were accompanied by a small detachment of Guards marines, mostly used for building bridges, and by Aleksei Ermolov, now the commander of the Guards Corps.

The unwelcome reinforcement was General Count Aleksandr Ostermann-Tolstoy, who arrived from headquarters on 26 August with instructions to take over command of all the forces on the allied right near Königstein. There might perhaps be some excuse for appointing a senior general to fulfil this role. Eugen was only 25 and had never commanded an independent detachment. Ostermann-Tolstoy was the wrong man for the job, however. It seems that Alexander was simply trying to rid himself of a nuisance who was infesting his headquarters and constantly waylaying the emperor with pleas to be given something to do. When on 25 August Alexander told Ostermann to take overall command opposite Königstein he had no idea that this was soon to become a vital post. Nevertheless Alexander’s assignment of Ostermann was yet another example of how sensitivity to the feelings of senior generals was allowed to undermine the army’s structure of command.

Even at the best of times Ostermann lacked the temperament or the tactical skill to command an independent detachment. Unfortunately too, August 1813 was far from the best of times, for it was no secret that Ostermann-Tolstoy had returned from sick leave in spring 1813 in an extremely excitable and even unbalanced frame of mind. In the three days that followed his arrival at Eugen’s headquarters he was to be an enormous nuisance. The immediate source of Ostermann’s hysteria was his fear that Alexander’s precious Guards might come to grief while under his command.⁶⁸