Russia Against Napoleon

The last two days of the battle of Leipzig – 18 and 19 October – were in one sense an anticlimax. There were no daring movements or examples of inspired military leadership. It was often the French, fighting with skill and courage in the many stout buildings in and near Leipzig, who had the better of encounters at least in the short run. When thousands of men are losing their lives it is wrong to talk of a battle being ‘boring’, but for the military scholar, when compared to an Austerlitz or Cannae, Leipzig was indeed a ‘boring’ battle. The key point, however, is that ‘boring’ battles were exactly what the allies needed to fight. Given their army’s unmanageable size, its multi-national composition and its chaotic command structure, any attempt to do something clever or complicated was bound to end in disaster. What was required was to pin Napoleon down in a spot where his army could be subjected to the full weight of allied superiority in men and guns. This is what the allies achieved in the last two days of the battle of Leipzig. By the afternoon of 18 October they had concentrated all their troops and 1,360 guns on the battlefield.

The morning of 18 October dawned bright and sunny. That day the allies formed a huge semicircle enclosing Leipzig to the east, north and south. They attacked Napoleon all along this line. Probably the best-known events on 18 October are the defection of some Saxon regiments to the allies, but the desertion of a very few thousand men was actually of little significance in a battle fought by half a million soldiers. More important was the fact that Bernadotte’s almost 60,000-strong Army of the North only arrived on the battlefield in mid-afternoon. This in turn forced Bennigsen to spread his army more thinly and reduced the possibility of his outflanking the village of Probstheida from the east and thereby forcing its abandonment. Probstheida was the key strong-point of Napoleon’s position south of Leipzig and he hung on to it all day, thanks to the strength of its buildings and the heroism of its French defenders, to which allied accounts pay tribute. On the allied side it was the Prussians who bore the brunt of the costly attempts to take the village but even the remnants of Eugen’s corps were made to join in, despite their terrible losses on the previous day. Meanwhile three regiments of the Russian 1st Guards Division and the whole of the Prussian Guard stood by idly less than a kilometre away, despite not having fired a shot on the battle’s first day.

To an extent this was the monarchs once again protecting their Guards, but it was also simply the logic of Napoleonic-era warfare to try to preserve elite units as reserves until the moment of crisis came in a campaign or battle. Sacken had no Guards but in fact he conducted his attempts to storm through the Halle suburb in similar fashion. He committed Neverovsky’s 27th Division and Lieven’s two jaeger regiments but the three veteran infantry regiments of the 10th Division were held in reserve throughout the battle despite the tremendous casualties of the rest of Sacken’s corps as they tried to fight their way through Leipzig’s northern suburbs.

Even without the field fortifications constructed by the French, the suburbs around the Halle Gate were a formidable obstacle. Just in front of them flowed the river Pleisse, while the hamlet of Pfaffendorf with its stout buildings formed a strong advance point to blunt any attempt to break into the town. The approaches to the Halle Gate were narrow and the Russian infantry was vulnerable to flanking fire, not just from Pfaffendorf but also from the walls of the Rosenthal park to their west. The Austrian official history, by no means Russophile in sympathy, commented that ‘the Russian soldiers performed with wonderful bravery and their officers too did everything possible’.⁴¹

Colonel Petr Rakhmanov, the brave and exceptionally intelligent former editor of Voennyi zhurnal and the commander of one of Neverovsky’s brigades, was killed here, as was Colonel Huene, the 27th Division’s artillery commander. We last encountered Dmitrii Dushenkevich as a 15-year-old ensign during his first battle, at Krasnyi in August 1812. By October 1813 he was an aide-de-camp to Dmitrii Neverovsky. He recalls that on 18 October Neverovsky was as usual in the thick of the action, with buildings burning all around, and attack and counter-attack rapidly following each other in ferocious house-to-house fighting. Neverovsky was encouraging Rakhmanov’s troops as they attempted to storm their way towards the Halle Gate when he was hit in the left leg by a bullet. He was carried out of the battle by his Cossack escort and died a few days later. As part of the centenary celebrations in 1912, his body was taken back to Russia and reburied near the position defended by his division at Borodino.⁴²