The battle of Bautzen began around i p. m. on 20 May 1813, when Marshal Oudinot’s troops, forming the right flank of Napoleon’s line, crossed the river Spree and began attacking the Russians drawn up beyond. They pushed forward for a good distance before being halted by cavalry. Meanwhile, Marshal Macdonald had constructed two trestle bridges over the river upstream under heavy enemy bombardment, and by 6 p. m. had taken Bautzen itself by storm.1
Napoleon’s battle-plan offered a very real chance of destroying the Russian and Prussian armies for good. He aimed to fix them in their existing position by a series of pinning attacks by Oudinot on their left, and Macdonald and Marmont on their centre, distracting them from the approach of Ney’s corps from the north towards their right. In case his advance was detected, Ney was to make it appear that he was simply joining the attacks on the enemy’s centre. Then, when aU was in place, he would swing back to the right and outflank them. This would force them to extend their line to counter the threat, enabling Soult’s and Bertrand’s corps to punch through their right centre. Their line broken, the Russians and Prussians would then be rolled up from the right, pursued southward, trapped against the Austrian frontier and compelled to surrender.
Underlining its importance to him, of aU Napoleon’s battles Bautzen was probably the one he prepared in most detail beforehand. Naturally, the one thing he could not foresee was the enemy’s plans, but in fact these played into his hands. Given Wittgenstein’s lack of authority, the de facto commander ofthe Russo-Prussian forces was Alexander I himself, and he proved no better a general at Bautzen than he had previously. In particular, he made the mistake of letting political considerations dictate his strategy. He was obsessed with the need to keep his lines of communication with Austria open, and was convinced that Napoleon would try to break these by
Attacking his left flank, driving his army northwards away from the Austrian border. This of course was exactly what Napoleon wanted him to think. As the battle began, the Czar’s attention was entirely focused on the threat to his left, away from his right centre and right, where Napoleon planned his knockout blow.2
The success of this blow depended on Marshal Ney’s outflanking manoeuvre. Ney was not, however, the best choice to execute such an operation. The ‘bravest of the brave’ was a superb fighting soldier, but had difficulties commanding any formation larger than a corps, and at Bautzen he was leading an almost separate army of 84,000 men. He was also extremely obstinate and hot-tempered. Ney was sufficiently aware of his deficiencies to employ the noted military theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini as his chief of staff, but did not always take his advice.3 This time his task was complicated by a series of uncharacteristically vague orders from Napoleon about the route he should take to approach the battlefield.
By 10 a. m. on 21 May, Ney was in position, facing the village of Preititz which anchored the Russo-Prussian right flank. At this point it was only lightly held, and if Ney had attacked immediately, as Jomini urged him to do, it would have been taken easily. A message from Napoleon now arrived, ordering that the assault take place at ii. It was clearly out of date, but Ney had a rare moment of hesitation, and refused to budge before the appointed time. ‘One may perhaps modify an order of the Emperor at a distance if one knows something he doesn’t, but doing so on the battlefield would be unpardonable,’ he toldJomini. As a result, the Russians and Prussians in front of him were given time to reinforce, and instead of walking into Preititz, Ney only took it at 3 p. m. after a series of costly frontal attacks. When Jomini begged him instead to bypass the village and swing into the enemy’s rear, he lost his temper. ‘I don’t know the first thing about your bloody strategy,’ he shouted, ‘all I know is to how to march to the sound of the guns!’ Alarmed staff-officers thought the two men would come to blows.4
Meanwhile, with the battle stationary in the French centre Napoleon had taken the chance to catch up on some rest. In an extraordinary demonstration of his ability to command sleep at will, he lay down on the ground in a square of the Imperial Guard and dozed off for two hours, despite enemy shells bursting close by. Then, at 2 p. m., he launched the critical assault of Soult’s and Bertrand’s corps on the enemy’s right centre. Aided by heavy fire from an advanced battery of sixty guns, they forced their way onto the heights in front of them, defended by Bliicher, and pushed him back to the village of Kreckwitz. There, BlUcher managed to hold on, largely because Ney’s failure to outflank him properly meant he did not have to overextend his line. Now it was the French who in turn came under a storm of artillery fire. Unable to break the opposing masses, they were forced to a halt.
It was only now that the Czar realized where the real danger lay, and began to send troops across the battlefield to support his right. Simultaneously the Russians and Prussians also began a limited withdrawal on their left, but Oudinot’s corps was too exhausted to exploit this. Napoleon at once brought up all his available guns and began to pound the enemy in that sector. Then, sensing that the moment of decision had come, he sent forward the Imperial Guard in a renewed attack on Kreckwitz. The veterans marched up in perfect parade order, then charged home with the bayonet, and Blucher finally began to retreat.5 Ney’s failure to cut off his rear enabled him to escape encirclement with just fifteen minutes to spare. By the time Ney’s corps finally arrived on the heights around Kreckwitz, the thousands of enemy troops Napoleon had hoped to trap there had melted away.
From 4 p. m. on the Russians and Prussians began a general withdrawal eastwards. Napoleon had certainly won the battle of Bautzen, but it was not the crushing victory he so desperately needed. The enemy was not routed, but retired in good order. Worse, the French losses in killed, wounded, and missing were severe: over 20,000, double those of their opponents. Napoleon had hoped to repeat Austerlitz, but the result was more like Borodino. Most historians lay the main blame for this on Ney, yet Napoleon was also responsible. He knew Ney’s limitations, but assigned him a crucial role in an ambitious manoeuvre that he himself had never attempted before— bringing aU his forces together not before, but during a battle. Overall, the most judicious conclusion on both Ney’s and Napoleon’s mistakes at Bautzen is that of the early twentieth-century historian F. L. Petre: ‘Napoleon, for the first time in his career, deliberately aimed at concentrating on and not short of the battlefield, and the event showed that the instruments at his disposal were not sufficiently good for his purpose.’6
The next day was no better for Napoleon. He was determined to harry the enemy forces and break up their retreat, but this proved impossible. The Russian rearguard covering the withdrawal fell back in textbook fashion, its artillery halting regularly in strong positions along the road to delay the French advance. This infuriated Napoleon, who rode to the head of his troops to hurry along the pursuit. That afternoon, just outside the village of Markersdorf, a Russian round shot narrowly missed him, ricocheted off a tree, and plunged into his staff, cutting General Kirgener in half, disembowelling Duroc, Grand Marshal of the Palace, and stopping just short of Caulaincourt and Marshal Mortier.7 Duroc was carried to a nearby farmhouse where he died a few hours later and Napoleon, distraught, broke off the action, something he had never previously done. Duroc was his closest friend, and had known him since 1793. Napoleon was paying a personal price for this campaign he had never had to pay before.
While the Russian and Prussian troops remained in good order, the same could not be said of their commanders. A week after Bautzen, Alexander relieved Wittgenstein of command of the Russian army and replaced him by Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, a cool, cautious general of Scots extraction, and a veteran of the 1812 campaign.8 Barclay was immediately faced by a clash between military and political priorities. Two lost battles, added to Wittgenstein’s poor administration, had left the army in considerable confusion. Logistically its most obvious option, which Barclay favoured, was to retire along its line of communications into Poland and reorganize. Yet retreating in this direction, away from Austria, would considerably lessen the prospect of help from that quarter. As Dominic Lieven puts it: ‘It would probably have doomed Austrian intervention, certainly in the short run and perhaps for ever.’9 Further, this withdrawal would have left Berlin exposed to a second French thrust. At a military conference on 2 June, when a Russian retreat across the Oder into Poland seemed imminent, Bliicher and Yorck threatened to march their troops north to protect their capital. The Russo-Prussian alliance seemed on the point of disintegrating.
At this crucial moment Alexander redeemed his poor generalship at Bautzen with an impressive display of statesmanship. Back on political ground, his touch was much surer and his best qualities—resilience, clearsightedness, and calm in a crisis—came to the fore. As he told Stadion, with whom he had several long conversations during these days, all his hopes were fixed on Austria, and he would do nothing that might jeopardize its support. In this mood, he firmly resisted Barclay’s proposal to withdraw into Poland.10 Nonetheless, he and his allies remained in a very difficult situation. The surrounding countryside was too poor to provide adequate supplies, and the only defensive positions from which a stand against Napoleon could be made needed considerable strengthening. What rescued them from this dilemma was not a military, but a diplomatic breakthrough.
In the days after Bautzen, Napoleon had picked up the threads of his negotations with Bubna a fortnight previously. He had gambled on a decisive victory that would make Austrian mediation unnecessary, but this had not materialized. If he were not to alienate Austria conclusively, he had to show he was serious about an armistice and a peace conference. Like the Russians and Prussians, he also had pressing military reasons for desiring a suspension of hostilities. His army was exhausted and had sustained heavy losses over the past month. Above all, he desperately needed to build up his cavalry, whose weakness had allowed the enemy to escape in good order after both Lutzen and Bautzen. Caulaincourt may have exaggerated when he claimed that this was Napoleon’s ‘real and only motive’ for seeking an armistice, but it was certainly an acute concern.11 Thus on 25 May he proposed a truce, and four days later discussions began in and around the small town of Pleiswitz, with Caulaincourt representing France, and Generals Shuvalov and Kleist Russia and Prussia respectively.
At this point Caulaincourt’s papers become a crucial source for the history of 1813, all the more so for being largely unexploited. His published memoirs, one of the most important surviving testimonies of Napoleon’s reign and which cover the period 1807 to 1815 in three thick volumes, contain a mysterious gap from the opening of the 1813 campaign to February 1814. Yet in fact Caulaincourt did leave manuscript memoirs of at least some ofthese months, from Napoleon’s return from Russia to early June 1813, which have never appeared, and remain in his family archives.12 It is unclear why the editor of the published memoirs, the distinguished historian Jean Hanoteau, chose to omit them. He may simply have thought they were too technical for the general reader. Certainly, they recount the battles and diplomacy of the campaign in sometimes numbing detail. Yet one suspects that Hanoteau, as a patriotic Frenchman, may also have suppressed them because their judgement of Napoleon is too unflattering; throughout he is portrayed as arrogant, inflexible, and unwilling to make genuine concessions for peace. A good example of this is Caulaincourt’s account of the armistice talks, which includes a telling criticism of the Emperor’s inability to negotiate:
The abuse of his gifts was natural to him, as the abuse of his strength is to a gladiator. The habit of being his own master at home and abroad had made him despise subtlety. Thus he was neither adroit nor nimble in this negotiation, the first he had ever had to conduct as equal to equal.
After Alexander I’s rejection of Napoleon’s direct overture just before Bautzen, it was clear that Austrian mediation could not be avoided. The armistice during which this would take place, however, was a purely military affair, to be agreed by the belligerents, France, Russia, and Prussia. According to Caulaincourt, his own task in securing this was made virtually impossible by Napoleon’s inflexibility and constant demands. Some of this stemmed, once again, from domestic insecurity. Napoleon was determined that two months should be allowed for the armistice and peace conference, rather than one, as the Russians and Prussians wished, since in France, ‘where everyone argues’,14 the shorter period would make it seem that his opponents were dictating terms to him. Other stipulations, however, were entirely strategic, such as his refusal to evacuate Breslau, which his forces had just captured. Napoleon’s obstinacy on these points brought the negotiations within an ace of collapse.
In this unenviable position, one of the few people Caulaincourt could turn to was Marshal Berthier, Napoleon’s chief of staff, who had written so feelingly to Schwarzenberg of the need for peace a few months before. Berthier wanted peace partly as a good in itself, but also because of the toll war was taking on him; he was just a few months short of 6o, and the rigours of the retreat from Moscow had made him dangerously ill. He was one of the few people who still dared to argue with the Emperor, and Caulaincourt paid tribute to this quality in his memoirs:
The greatest mark of [Berthier’s] devotion was his courage in telling the Emperor the truth, in daring to contradict and even resist him, if he thought he was being too severe or unjust. The anger and impatience with which [the Emperor] reacted did not deter [Berthier] from raising these matters again if necessary, and he only gave way when the resulting irritation made it clear he would be ordered to stop: only then did he obey. One could say that he never feared getting what was termed at the palace a pummelling.
At every moment between 1812 and 1814 when peace seemed a real possibility, Berthier intervened to support it. However, his clearly declining health after the Russian campaign limited his effectiveness as an advocate, and Caulaincourt recognized this: ‘Sleepless nights, excessive fatigue, and simple age had been undermining [his] faculties for two years.’16 This is reflected in the tone of Berthier’s letters at this time, which reveal a man on the edge of physical and mental breakdown. The consequences of this would ultimately be tragic.
During the armistice negotiations Caulaincourt received orders from Napoleon directly, but also via Berthier as chief of staff, and he used the marshal as a safety-valve to relieve his growing exasperation at the Emperor’s obstinacy. The crisis came on 3 June, when a credible report was received that a French force had violated the ceasefire by seizing a convoy of Prussian ammunition boats. Feeling that his integrity was at stake, Caulaincourt sent Berthier a furious letter demanding his recall:
I beg Your Highness to find a replacement for me in negotiating the armistice... I am no longer useful in these talks in which I can no longer inspire confidence. Placed as I am in such a disagreeable position while expending so much zeal and sacrifice to serve His Majesty, my self-esteem dictates that I no longer participate in matters which are compromising the honour I inherited from my father and which I wish to preserve intact.1
As it turned out, Caulaincourt did not have to carry out his threat, because the next day the Russians and Prussians backed down, accepted Napoleon’s offer of a six-week armistice, and conceded French possession of Breslau. They shrewdly calculated that they needed the truce more than Napoleon. If fighting resumed now their alliance could fall apart, whereas within two months they would be bolstered by substantial reinforcements. They were also deeply conscious of the need to win Austria to their side. By yielding to Napoleon’s peremptory demands they could draw a contrast between his intransigence and their moderation and favourably impress Francis I and Metternich. On both counts these tactics had the desired effect, making the armistice a short-term victory for Napoleon, but ultimately a defeat.1
Caulaincourt’s letter of resignation is eloquent testimony to his disagreements with his master, but there is evidence he may have taken these a step further. On 31 May, the Russian envoy Shuvalov reported to the Czar that Caulaincourt had taken him aside and revealed that several corps of the French army were currently in a weak position. Apparently he wished the Russians to attack and defeat them, since, in his own words, ‘the moment we gain a victory, we stop listening to reason’. For ‘we’, one should clearly read ‘Napoleon’. According to Shuvalov, Caulaincourt returned to this theme several times over the next few days, each time revealing further military details about his own side. Shuvalov was baffled, since Caulaincourt, if he was being sincere, was committing treason. ‘In a word’, he told Alexander, ‘to hear him one would say he wants the French army to have a sharp reverse so peace can be concluded as quickly as possible.’19
When Shuvalov’s letters were first published in 1900, they caused considerable controversy, with several historians branding Caulaincourt a traitor. Others disagreed, pointing out evidence that both Shuvalov and the Czar suspected Caulaincourt might actually have been acting on Napoleon’s orders, using false information to lure his enemies into a trap.20 On balance, however, this seems far-fetched. For whatever reason Caulaincourt was compromising his honour, which, as his resignation letter to Berthier shows, mattered a great deal to him. He may have felt that advancing the cause of peace justified this, but is unlikely to have thought the same about a dubious trick whose only effect would have been to reinforce Napoleon’s intransigence. It seems safest to conclude that Cau-laincourt’s overtures to Shuvalov should be taken at face value, and that he was indeed trying to engineer a French defeat as a way of encouraging serious negotiations. The similarity with the actions of his mentor Talleyrand in 1808 is striking, though unlike Talleyrand he never wished for, nor received, any financial reward. It is a comment on the extremes to which Napoleon pushed two of his most intelligent servants that both decided the best way to serve their country was to betray their master.
On 5 June, the armistice of Pleiswitz, imposing a ceasefire until 20 July, was formally signed. Although the document dealt only with military matters, it was understood that Austria would use this time to call the belligerents to a peace conference. Across the warring states, hopes began to rise that perhaps the years of conflict might finally come to an end. In France, from the provinces to the Paris salons, the clamour for peace became so pronounced that Napoleon heard of it in Germany. In Prague it was echoed by Schwarzenberg, busily rebuilding the Austrian army but hoping that it would never be called on to intervene. On 9 June, he wrote to Metternich: ‘We are rearming as actively as possible... but for pity’s sake make our zeal unnecessary; end with your pen what [we military men] can only complicate further.’
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