Russia Against Napoleon

The details of the military operations which followed were complicated but the essence was simple. Napoleon thrust northwards through Sézanne into the middle of Blücher’s army and defeated one isolated allied detachment after another. Since Blücher was the greatest Prussian hero of the Napoleonic Wars, some Prussian memoirists and historians had an understandable tendency to protect his reputation. They offered a number of partial excuses for his defeat. Correctly, they argued that if Schwarzenberg had pressed Napoleon’s rear then the Army of Silesia would have been in no danger. Instead, not merely did the main army crawl forward, its commander-in-chief also withdrew Wittgenstein’s Army Corps to the west, instead of leaving it as a link to Blücher. The field-marshal’s defenders also argued that if Lieutenant-General Olsufev had destroyed the key bridge across the Petit Morin stream the moment danger threatened from the south, Napoleon could never have achieved his march into the middle of Blücher’s army. Undoubtedly too, the allies had poor maps and incorrect information about local roads – as tended to be the case in fighting on foreign soil. Both Blücher and Sacken, for example, believed that the road along which Napoleon marched northwards from Sézanne was impassable for an army. Nevertheless the basic point remains that although in close proximity to the enemy, Blücher scattered his army to such an extent that it could not concentrate for battle and he could not exercise effective command. He made this mistake partly because he believed that Napoleon was on the verge of final defeat and Paris was his for the plucking.⁵⁴

On 10 February Napoleon advanced from Sézanne and overwhelmed Olsufev’s small corps at Champaubert. The emperor had just been reinforced by thousands of experienced cavalry arrived from Spain. Olsufev had a total of seventeen horsemen. A nimbler commander might have retreated in time to save his men but Olsufev was still smarting from Sacken’s criticism for not having held his ground at Brienne two weeks before. Though his junior generals begged him to fall back on Blücher, Olsufev insisted on sticking to his orders to hold his position and seems to have believed that Blücher was himself advancing from the east into the enemy rear. Napoleon claimed to have taken 6,000 prisoners, which was a remarkable achievement since Olsufev’s ‘corps’ numbered 3,690, of whom almost half escaped with their flags and many of their guns under cover of the winter night and the nearby forests. The key point, however, was that Napoleon and 30,000 men were now standing halfway between Sacken’s 15,000 troops at La Ferte and Blücher’s 14,000 near Vertus, directly on the road which connected the two wings of the Army of Silesia.⁵⁵

The safest option would have been for Sacken to retreat north of the river Marne and join up with Yorck at Château Thierry. Yorck urged this on Sacken but to no effect. Sacken’s orders from Blücher were to march back down the road which led eastwards through Champaubert to Étoges, where he was supposed to reunite with Olsufev and Blücher himself. These orders had been issued before Blücher had a clear understanding of Napoleon’s movements and were now out of date but Sacken did not know this. He set out on the evening of 10 February. He knew that Yorck had been ordered by Blücher to cross the Marne and support him but did not know that the Prussian general had queried these orders and delayed his movement. When he received his orders Sacken had no way of knowing that Napoleon was astride the road down which he was expecting to march.

Late in the morning of 11 February Sacken bumped into the enemy advance guard just west of the village of Montmirail. Soon afterwards he learned from prisoners that Napoleon himself and his main army were present. With the battle in full flow, the Russian commander then received a message from Yorck to say that the road southwards from the Marne to Montmirail was so bad that only a minority of his infantry and none of his guns could advance to the Russians’ rescue. Allied maps showed this to be a paved road whereas in reality it was a country track which the recent thaw had turned into deep mud.