Russia Against Napoleon

The night of 15/16 October was cold and very windy. Trees were uprooted and roofs damaged. The next morning Klenau’s troops arrived late for the assault. Gorchakov had to wait for them with his regiments already deployed for the attack and under artillery fire. Kleist and Eugen advanced on time, however, moving forward on this still stormy October morning before it was fully light. By 9.30 Kleist had taken Markkleeberg and Eugen had moved into Wachau. The initial French response was mild, partly because they had not expected the allies to attack. Things soon changed, however: French infantry counter-attacked at both Wachau and Markkleeberg, and ferocious artillery fire began to pour down from the massed batteries on the ridge onto the Russian and Prussian troops. The latter nevertheless pushed forward their attacks with great courage. The French artillery colonel, Jean-Nicolas Noel, who was stationed at Wachau, recalled that the Russians and Prussians ‘attacked with a determination which I had never before seen in our adversaries’.²⁴

Casualties mounted quickly on both sides but especially among Eugen’s Russians on the bare slopes east of Wachau. Already by eleven o’clock most of Eugen’s artillery had been knocked out. There was nowhere to find cover and the French cavalry deployed east of Wachau were an additional threat to any infantry who broke formation. Rudolph von Friederich, the Prussian general staff historian, comments that ‘it took all the tenacity and contempt for death of the Russian soldiers and all the heroic courage of Duke Eugen to stand one’s ground in such a position’. By the end of the day two-thirds of Eugen’s men were casualties. All his regimental commanders were killed or wounded. Eugen wrote in his memoirs that his troops had been similarly smothered in artillery fire for a time at Borodino but on the first day at Leipzig their ordeal ‘lasted for much longer’.²⁵

The heroism of Eugen’s infantry was all the more impressive because his regiments had suffered very heavy casualties at Kulm only a few weeks before. The Murom and Reval regiments, for example, lost many men first in 1812, and then at both Kulm and Leipzig as part of Prince Ivan Shakhovskoy’s Third Infantry Division. Officers and NCOs had needed to be drafted into the regiments from other units after Kulm to fill the gaps left by its killed and wounded veterans. Nevertheless many regimental old-timers remained in the ranks during the battle of Leipzig, including most of the Reval Regiment’s sergeant-majors. An unusual number of illiterate but veteran senior sergeants had in fact been promoted to sergeant-major in the Reval Regiment in 1813. They included sergeant-majors Aleksei Fedorov, Mikhail Lashbin and Mina Afanasev, who between them had seventy years’ service in the regiment. Lashbin was a state peasant from Tobolsk in Siberia and Afanasev a serf from Smolensk, but Fedorov was actually a Chuvash, one of the small, pagan peoples of the Volga region, though his family had become Christians. All three men held military medals, as did seven of the ten sergeant-majors in all. No other regiment whose records I have seen could equal this.²⁶

Among the officers of the Murom Regiment who fought at Leipzig were lieutenants Ilia Shatov and Ivan Dmitrev. Both men had entered the Murom Regiment as privates more than twenty years before, had risen to sergeant-major and had then been commissioned in 1812. Both had fought with the regiment in East Prussia in 1807 but Shatov had even served in its ranks in Switzerland in 1799. The senior officer of the Murom Regiment to survive the battle of Leipzig was Petr Kladishchev, from a run-of-the-mill noble family of Riazan province, who became a colonel aged only 29. Kladishchev had joined the Murom Regiment at the age of 16 and never left it. He was decorated for courage in East Prussia in 1807, as well as at Vitebsk in 1812 and Bautzen in 1813. He was one of many young officers whose record of courage and leadership brought rapid wartime promotion. These men were much less visible than spectacular cases such as generals Chernyshev and Diebitsch. Nevertheless they made a crucial contribution to the army’s performance.²⁷

All morning and through the early afternoon of 16 October Eugen’s regiments held their ground and preserved the allied line under the French bombardment. The French artillery commanders themselves subsequently paid tribute to the steadfast courage of the Russian infantry, who closed their ranks and held their positions in the face of terrifying losses. By late morning the battle had become a race. If Napoleon could concentrate his forces and attack before the allied reserves arrived, Eugen and Kleist’s thinning infantry battalions would not be able to stop him from breaking through the allied line and crushing the Army of Bohemia against the banks of the Pleisse.