Napoleon’s retreat to the Rhine was on the whole a
remarkably successful operation. On the one hand the Allies were still
sufficiently daunted by the magic of the Emperor’s reputation to conduct their
pursuit of his columns respectfully, while Schwarzenberg was not a general of
sufficient caliber to trap the French before they could find sanctuary. For his
part, Napoleon was retiring along his main set of communications towards
Frankfurt and Mainz, absorbing the supplies and munitions of his depots on the
way. On October 23 some 100,000 French troops (many of them in ragged
condition, it is true, but by no means in a state of utter dissolution) reached
Erfurt, and much new equipment was issued from its huge arsenals before the
retreat was recommenced on the 24th. The discipline of some units began to
break down, and large numbers began to maraud, but apart from nuisance-raids by
bands of Cossacks, light cavalry and partisans, the retreat was not seriously
interrupted. However, Blücher’s army was marching westward on a parallel route
to the north, Schwarzenberg’s Austrians and Russians were pressing in upon the
rear, several sharp rear-guard actions had taken place over the previous week,
and so it behoved Napoleon to continue his retreat toward the Rhine.
As the days passed, there was an inevitable increase in the
disorganization of the Grande Armée. An Allied observer noted that “the numbers
of corpses and dead horses increased every day. Thousands of soldiers, sinking
from hunger and fatigue, remained behind, unable to reach a hospital. The woods
for several miles round were full of stragglers and worn out and sick soldiers.
Guns and wagons were found everywhere.”40
Nevertheless, there was a spark of fire still left in the
defeated army, as was convincingly demonstrated in the last days of October. A
force of 43,000 Bavarians and Austrians under General Wrede, newly committed to
the Allied cause, had rushed northward from the Danube into Franconia to block
the French line of retreat. In due course this force reached Hanau, a few miles
to the east of Frankfurt-on-Main, Napoleon’s next sanctuary. Through a complete
misappreciation of the situation, Wrede came to the conclusion that the Emperor
and the main body of his army were retiring along the more northerly road to
Coblenz, and that his force would only be faced by a dispirited flank column of
20,000 men at the most. Confident of success after several days of snappy
skirmishing, the Bavarian general placed his troops in hastily selected
positions on the 30th, with the River Kinzig behind his center and his right
wing in isolation to its south with only a single bridge linking it to the main
body.
Initially Napoleon had only the 17,000 men of Macdonald’s
infantry and Sébastiani’s cavalry available to deal with this obstruction, but
the French were able to advance to close contact virtually unseen owing to the
dense forests lying to the east of Wrede’s position. The Emperor soon decided
to attack the Bavarian left with all available manpower. By midday, the woods
facing the Bavarian center had been cleared by Victor and Macdonald, and
General Drouot soon thereafter found a track through the trees towards Wrede’s
left capable of taking cannon. Within three hours, Grenadiers of the Old Guard
had cleared the approaches to the French target, and Drouot assembled 50 guns
backed by Sébastiani and the Guard cavalry. A brisk cannonade soon silenced
Wrede’s 28 cannon, and then the French horsemen swept forward against Wrede’s
cavalry guarding his left. The Bavarians gave way before the onslaught.
Attacked in flank by the wheeling French cavalry, Wrede’s center was forced to
try and cut its way out to the left, skirting the banks of the Kinzig, and
suffered a heavy toll of casualties in the process. His right wing became
hopelessly involved trying to cross the single bridge, and proved incapable of
influencing the issue of the main battle. Hundreds were drowned in the Kinzig
before Wrede was able to rally the remnants of his forces on a line running
from the Lamboi bridge to the township of Hanau. The next day the French
occupied Hanau itself with scant difficulty.
Napoleon had no intention of wasting further time with
Wrede; as the main road to Frankfurt was now reopened, the bulk of the French
continued westward without delay, leaving a rear guard to prevent Wrede from
attempting anything further. The battle and the skirmishes that preceded and
followed it cost Wrede over 9,000 men. The French losses in action were
considerably lower, but between October 28 and 31 probably as many as 10,000
stragglers fell into Allied hands.
Nevertheless, the main body of the French army reached
Frankfurt on 2nd November. Here they were virtually safe, for their rear bases
at Mainz and the mighty barrier of the Rhine lay less than 20 miles away.
However, there is no possibility of minimizing the scale of the French
disaster. Although Davout was still firmly positioned on the Lower Elbe, the
French Campaign of 1813 had ended in complete failure. Perhaps 70,000
combatants and 40,000 stragglers reached the Rhine in safety, but almost
400,000 troops had been lost. It was true that no less than 100,000 of these
still remained scattered in isolated garrisons and detachments from Danzig to
Dresden, but there was no longer the least chance of their surviving or being
saved, and one by one these outposts began to capitulate. St. Cyr and the Dresden
garrison (two corps in strength), after conducting a gallant defense, were
induced to surrender on terms on November II. General Schwarzenberg
subsequently refused to ratify the agreement, but by then St. Cyr could do
nothing but surrender unconditionally. The Allies later played the same
disreputable trick against the garrisons of Danzig and Torgau. So the Campaign
of 1813 came to its close, with Napoleon and a remnant of his army preparing to
defend the natural frontiers of France, his Empire in Germany vanished forever.
What reasons underlay this new cataclysm? Here it is
possible to summarize only the main factors involved. We have already noted how
the quality of the French forces (both horse and foot) was markedly inferior in
quality to the armies of earlier years, but this was not in itself decisive.
Far more significant were the deficiencies of the French command system. These
were partly due to Napoleon’s shortcomings, and partly to the weaknesses of his
subordinates. In the period following the breakdown of the armistice, Napoleon
was trying to coordinate the control of half a million men—a task which was
simply beyond the powers of any one man with only the aid of the rudimentary
communications systems of the day, as the experiences of 1812 should have
taught him.
As a result—again as in 1812—the marshals inevitably found
themselves bearing greater responsibilities than they were used to on distant
sectors of the front. That they practically always muffed their opportunities
was partly due to Napoleon’s failure to train up his subordinates for the
exigencies of independent command, and partly to the rapidly dwindling
enthusiasm of the marshalate. To compensate his underlings for their complete
obedience and subservience the Emperor had showered them with riches, titles
and estates; by 1813, the recipients were not wholly unnaturally becoming
desirous of enjoying these benefits in a more peaceful setting. Many of the
disappointments of 1813 can be explained in these terms.
The rank and file of the extemporized French armies achieved
wonders on at least three occasions during the long campaign, but these
successes to some extent contributed to Napoleon’s undoing for he came
increasingly to rely on his “Marie-Louises” and decrepit veterans achieving the
impossible time after time. Many of the Emperor’s strategic plans were as
cunning as of old, but he lacked the means to implement them successfully—and
he was very slow in appreciating this. His raw troops could not march and fight
incessantly without adequate supplies, and his staff could not operate
efficiently without adequate intelligence. Even the Emperor’s funds of energy,
both physical and mental, were showing signs of exhaustion; his acceptance of
the armistice after two victories is probably one sign of this. Napoleon, in
fact, was relying on an unlikely combination of miracles and errors to achieve
his total victory; miracles of performance and endurance on the part of his
men—errors of judgment and coordination on the part of his foes. Neither lived
up to his most optimistic expectations.
The Allies certainly made mistakes, and several times as we
have seen these brought them to the brink of disaster. Their command system was
extremely chaotic and poorly coordinated. Selfish national interests often
replaced the common weal during their incessant councils; personal rivalries
and jealousies dogged almost every move. Nevertheless, after the sharp lessons
of Lützen and Bautzen in the first half of the campaign, they somehow hit upon
the correct strategy for bringing Napoleon to account By employing their vast
numbers of men and cannon against the secondary sectors of the French front and
by avoiding as far as was possible a direct head-on clash with “the Ogre”
himself, they disrupted plan after plan and severely shook the balance of
French operations as a whole. There were times (as at Dresden) when they
inadvisedly reverted to their old methods and suffered predictable defeat in
consequence, but once they had driven Napoleon and his tiring lieutenants back
on Leipzig and successfully linked up their four armies (those of Silesia,
Bohemia, the North and Poland), the game was practically in their pockets.
Napoleon fought with all his old tenacity, ferocity and skill, but in the end
sheer numbers told in the Allied favor.
Napoleon, indeed, was guilty of several severe political and
military miscalculations which between them underlay his failure. He tended to
despise his opponents; this was justifiable in the case of Bernadotte, but he
completely underestimated the degree of Blücher’s hatred for him or of the
Tsar’s persistence. He never expected that his father-in-law, the Emperor of
Austria, would turn fully against him; he never appreciated how sick were the
German States of the French yoke, or how unreal were his expectations of
military support from those quarters. He left thousands of invaluable fighting
men and several of his best generals south of the Pyrenees. But worst of all,
he never realized that there was a new spirit abroad in Europe; he still
believed he was dealing with the old feudal monarchies which in fact his
earlier victories had largely swept away. France was no longer the only country
to be imbued with a genuine national inspiration or equipped with a truly
national army. France’s foes had at last learned valuable lessons from their
earlier defeats, both political and military, and were now learning how to
employ their new-found strength against a rapidly tiring opponent. In the words
of General Fuller, for Napoleon the battle of Leipzig was “a second Trafalgar,
this time on land; his initiative was gone.”
Less than three weeks after the cataclysm of Leipzig, the
Emperor Napoleon was back at St. Cloud. With that astonishing resilience he
customarily displayed in time of catastrophe, he at once immersed himself in
planning the defense of French soil. For the second year running he had
witnessed the destruction of half a million French troops and the rapid
dwindling of his Empire’s frontiers, but still he appears to have believed that
his situation and prospects were not beyond hope. Given a little time to create
new armies, he was still confident of his ability to snatch a final victory
from his converging and seemingly all-powerful opponents. “At present we are
not ready for anything,” he confided to Marmont in mid-November, “but by the
first fortnight in January we shall be in a position to achieve a great deal.”
To anybody but a supreme egotist, France’s military
situation in the last months of 1813 must have appeared hopeless. Following
their victory at Leipzig, more than 300,000 Allied troops would soon be poised
along the Rhine, while the French could muster fewer than 80,000 exhausted and
disease-ridden survivors to defend the 300-mile length of their eastern
frontiers. Perhaps 100,000 French troops still remained in Germany and Poland,
but without exception they were divided into widely separated and closely
beleaguered detachments, incapable of taking any active part in France’s
impending death struggle. In North Italy, Viceroy Eugàne was narrowly holding
his own with 50,000 men along the Adige against the 75,000 Austrians of General
Bellegarde, but he already was finding good reason for concern about the
ambivalent attitude of Napoleon’s relation, the King of Naples. Amid the Pyrenees,
the armies of Marshals Soult and Suchet (sharing 100,000 men between them) were
steadily giving ground before the advance of Lord Wellington’s Anglo-Spanish
forces (125,000 strong). Napoleon could derive little satisfaction from a study
of the true situation on any of these fronts. He also faced the prospect of
open dissent in both Holland and Belgium. The French people were also fast
reaching exhaustion point after sustaining the ceaseless drain of its dwindling
manpower, year after year, and the economic repercussions of two decades of
warfare—gravely aggravated by the effects of the Royal Navy’s relentless
blockade of France’s ports—were steadily mounting. The Marshalate was war-weary
and increasingly mutinous; the dependable Berthier was seriously ill; and the
military resources of the German satellites were no longer available to eke out
the emaciated French war effort. All in all, Napoleon faced a chilling
prospect.
Still, however, the spirit burned; his will to success
remained indomitable. The Emperor goaded the jaded ministries of Paris into a
flurry of activity. New armies must immediately be created for the defense of
la patrie. Every last resource of manpower must be tapped. Edicts were issued
calling up no less than 936,000 youthful conscripts and aged reservists during
the winter months of 1813-14. Policemen, forest rangers, customs officers were
all summoned to the tricolor, together with 150,000 conscripts of the Class of
1815. Large parts of the National Guard were embodied for active service. Every
government controlled newspaper made emotional appeals for Frenchmen to rally
for the defense of their country as in 1792. Orders were sent to the armies in
Italy and Spain, calling for sizeable drafts of experienced soldiers to lead
the embryonic citizen armies. Decrees announced a vast expansion of the Young
Guard. New taxes would be levied to finance the war effort.
Simultaneously, Napoleon launched a full-scale diplomatic
offensive, planning to free his hands of peripheral problems. In the hope of
rallying Italian support behind Eugène, the Pope was released from house arrest
in France and restored to the throne of St. Peter. To clear the southwest
frontiers of France and make the veterans of Soult and Suchet available for
action on the Rhine, the French Government offered to restore Ferdinand to the
throne of Spain in return for a permanent cessation of hostilities—and a
preliminary agreement to this effect was actually initialed by French and
Spanish plenipotentiaries on December 11 at Valençay.
Napoleon was well aware, however, that the fruition of these
desperate policies could not take place overnight. There had to be a lull, a
breathing space, most particularly on the Rhine front where France was weakest
and her foes most imposingly strong. In optimistic moments, the Emperor spoke
of his hope that the Allies would delay their attack on France’s eastern
frontier until the spring of 1814. He based this assessment on three
considerations. First, the Allied armies must necessarily be in an exhausted
condition after their exertions throughout 1813. Second, it would take them
time to incorporate the forces of their new German allies and place their
communications in order. Third, Napoleon gambled greatly on internal
dissensions within the Alliance disrupting any plans for a winter offensive. By
the spring Napoleon was confident that France’s new armies would be, in
position along the Rhine, and he even dreamed, of a great offensive by Murat
and Eugàne sweeping from Italy over the Alps to threaten Vienna—a repetition of
1796-97.
To some extent Napoleon’s calculations concerning the
possibility of a stay in the Allied offensive were soundly based. Powerful
factions within the Allied high command were advocating just such a course of
action. The Emperor of Austria had at this time no great desire to see the
total eclipse of his son-in-law, for the downfall of the French Empire would
indubitably favor the interests of the Houses of Hohenzollern and Romanov
rather than those of the Hapsburgs. Providing Austria regained her Italian
possessions, Francis was prepared to grant France her “natural
frontiers”(namely the Rhine, Alps and Pyrenees) even at the cost of Belgium.
For purely selfish reasons, Crown Prince Bernadotte of Sweden was also opposed
to a full-scale invasion of France; he apparently harbored the hope that the
French people might be induced to replace Napoleon with himself, if affairs
were properly handled and excessive direct pressure avoided. The
representatives of Great Britain were equally concerned with the balance of
power in a post-war Europe, and tended to share Austria’s view that Napoleon
might be left the “natural frontiers”—less Antwerp and the Scheldt—providing
adequate guarantees of future good conduct could be extracted.
The advocates of immediate action placed their faith in the
Tsar. Alexander was actually of two minds on the subject. Desperately though he
wished to see Russian troops occupy Paris in revenge for Moscow, it
occasionally struck him that the soldiers of Holy Russia were being called to
make heroic efforts and sustain heavy losses for the benefit of the Germanic
powers rather than of Russia herself. On balance, however, he favored action.
As for Prussia, King Frederick William III was expected to follow the Tsar’s
lead, although personally he wished to avoid any unnecessary prolongation of
the war. Among the soldiers, opinion was equally divided. Prince
Schwarzenberg—“by nature a statesman and diplomatist rather than a
general”—tended to favor his master’s view, but the Prussian leaders, led most
vociferously by Blücher, demanded the immediate and vigorous continuation of
the campaign until the final overthrow of “the Corsican Ogre.”
In early November, their forces poised along the banks of
the Rhine, the Allied leaders went into conclave at Frankfurt-on-Main to settle
their policy. So serious were the divisions of expressed opinion that on the
16th it was decided to suspend operations for the immediate future while
Napoleon was approached with a conditional offer of the “natural frontiers.”
News of this development probably convinced Napoleon that he had won his pause,
however much he might distrust the ultimate motives of the Allies. To make the
most of his opportunity, he countered by calling for a general Congress, making
no definite mention of the proposed terms. As a sop to the Tsar, the Emperor
later appointed Caulaincourt as foreign minister and chief plenipotentiary. It
is dubious whether either side was completely genuine in its offers and
suggestions at this time. The Allies threw the validity of their pacific
postures into question when Napoleon provisionally agreed to the “natural
frontiers” suggestion, on November 30; his envoys were then informed that the
Allies had withdrawn their original offer, and it was eventually communicated
that talks could now only open on the basis of the “frontiers of 1792.” This
was out of the question for Napoleon. “I think it is doubtful whether the
Allies are in good faith,” he wrote to Caulaincourt in early January, “or that
England wants peace; for myself, I certainly desire it, but it must be solid
and honorable. France without its natural frontiers, without Ostend or Antwerp,
would no longer be able to take its place among the States of Europe.”
Some time before these lines were penned, the uneasy truce
along the eastern frontiers had been shattered. Napoleon’s hopes of a lull
extending into March or April were abruptly ended on December 22 when General
Wrede crossed the Rhine and laid siege to Hunigen. Even earlier, an Austrian
division under General Bubna had begun to occupy undefended Switzerland. By the
last days of the year it was clear that the Allied masses were on the move and
that der Schlag had come.
The main reasons that decided the Allies to open a major
winter campaign were distrust of Napoleon’s long-term intentions (probably
justified) and a wish to exploit the current atmosphere of unrest in the Low
Countries. Holland had already rebelled against French domination, and it was
felt that Belgium needed only positive action by the Allies to follow suit.
The plan was complex. The Army of the North was to split
into two. One corps under General Bülow, supported by a British expedition led
by General Graham, was to occupy Holland, advance on Antwerp and in due course
sweep through Belgium into northern France. The other half, commanded by Crown
Prince Bernadotte, Winzingerode and Bennigsen, was to isolate Marshal Davout’s
sizeable detachment around Hamburg, keep up pressure against the Danes and
continue the siege of Magdeburg. Covered by these secondary operations
Blücher’s 100,000 men of the Army of Silesia would advance on the central
reaches of the Rhine, secure crossings over a wide front between Coblenz and
Mannheim, and hold Napoleon’s attention. Simultaneously, Schwarzenberg
(accompanied by a veritable galaxy of Allied monarchs) would march from Basel
to Colmar, cross the Upper Rhine, and head for the Langres Plateau. Then the
second stage of the campaign would commence. While Blücher continued to pin
Napoleon frontally, the 200,000-strong Army of Bohemia would fall upon the
French right, subsidiary columns fanning out to the south and southwest to make
contact with the Austro-Italian forces advancing on Lyons and Wellington’s army
advancing from the Pyrenees. By mid-February at the latest, close on 400,000
Allied troops might well be operating on French soil, the majority of them
converging on the ultimate objective—Paris.
