Russia Against Napoleon

The historian of the St Petersburg Dragoon Regiment, one of the Russian cavalry units which struck the French left towards the end of the battle, wrote that the Russian cavalry played a decisive role in rescuing the exhausted Prussian infantry, scattering the French artillery, panicking the enemy infantry into flight, and then overrunning some of their rearguards. General Kamensky, who wrote this history, complained that foreigners never recognized the Russian contribution, though in fact his analysis of the battle is not too far removed from that of Rudolph von Friederich. Serge Volkonsky was as biased a nationalist as any Prussian historian of the battle of Dennewitz. He wrote (absurdly) in his memoirs that ‘the whole honour’ of the victory belonged ‘to Bernadotte’s dispositions and to the boldness of the Russian and Swedish artillery and the attack of the Russian cavalry’. In a much lower key, the dispute has something in common with subsequent arguments about the Prussian role at Waterloo, and was an almost inevitable aspect of coalition warfare. It has to be said, however, that the Prussian army did far more hard fighting at Waterloo than the Russians at Dennewitz, as in fact the Russian official history made clear. The one point on which all Prussian and Russian sources agreed was that Bernadotte failed to pursue Ney’s fleeing army with sufficient determination, at a time when a full-blooded pursuit might well have destroyed it.⁹⁷

Even without this, Ney’s army had suffered badly. The Russians reckoned that he had lost up to 18,000 men, including more than 13,000 prisoners. Since the latter were mostly scooped up during the cavalry’s pursuit of the fleeing French their number does say something about the Russian contribution to victory. Overall, in the first month of the war Napoleon had lost 100,000 men and more than 200 guns. The allies had lost barely 50 guns and not more than 85,000 soldiers. Reinforcements were flowing in to fill the allied ranks. By the time the advance on Leipzig began at the beginning of October Schwarzenberg had replaced all the Austrians lost at Dresden, and the new recruits were on the whole better trained than Mesko’s men had been in August. Russian ranks were replenished by more arriving reserves and men returning from hospitals. Above all, they were augmented by the nearly 60,000 men of Bennigsen’s Army of Poland. It is true that almost half of Bennigsen’s infantry were Count Petr Tolstoy’s militia, who were only really usable for sieges, but the rest of his infantry and all his cavalry and artillery were good troops.⁹⁸

The Battle of Leipzig

The battle of Dennewitz ended the first phase of the autumn campaign. The rest of September was a hiatus. The second and decisive phase of the campaign began in early October, culminating in the battle of Leipzig. Napoleon would have liked to break the stalemate in September and impose his will on the enemy in his usual fashion. His strategic situation and, above all, his losses made this impossible, however. At the beginning of the autumn campaign Napoleon had hoped to deal the allies a knockout blow by leading his Guards and reserves northwards to strike against Berlin. Such a move was now unthinkable: the men could not be spared from the armies watching Blücher and Schwarzenberg. Napoleon restored MacDonald’s army to some degree of order and attempted an advance on Blücher but the latter merely withdrew and dared Napoleon to pursue him across eastern Saxony and Silesia, thereby abandoning Dresden to Schwarzenberg.

In mid-September Napoleon moved southwards down the Teplitz highway and into the Erzgebirge, with the aim of defeating the main allied army. Pursuing Schwarzenberg’s powerful army and trying to bring it to battle deep in Bohemia was unlikely to be successful, however. Schwarzenberg could find plenty of strong defensive positions. Meanwhile Napoleon’s communications would be vulnerable to swarming allied cavalry and Blücher – even perhaps Bernadotte – would be at the gates of Dresden and devastating his base in Saxony. By now, unless he decided to abandon central Germany, Napoleon’s only real option was to wait for the allies to invade Saxony and then try to exploit their mistakes.