Prussia’s decision to join the war was dramatic indeed. Left
all but unsuccoured, the Prussians would have done best to mass their army
behind the river Elbe, but, exactly like the Austrians a year earlier, they
elected to move forward and marched south-westwards into Thuringia. Invading
Saxony in his turn, Napoleon got around their eastern flank and threatened
their communications with Berlin.
Desperate to escape the trap, the Prussians
fled north-eastwards, only to collide with the grande armée along the river
Saale. While Napoleon himself surprised a Prussian flank-guard that had been
detached to watch the Saale at Jena, the corps of Marshal Davout, which was far
out on the French right, suddenly found itself confronted with the main
Prussian column under the Duke of Brunswick near Auerstädt. Faced by
overwhelming odds, Davout pulled off one of the most extraordinary feats of the
Napoleonic Wars. Feeding his three tired divisions - they had been marching all
night - into line as they arrived, the marshal first checked the Prussian
advance, and then launched a ferocious counter-attack that caused the
increasingly demoralized enemy to disintegrate altogether. At Jena, meanwhile,
Napoleon had been having a much easier time of it. Increasingly outnumbering
the Prussians as the day went on, he first pressed the enemy back and then
crushed them altogether by means of a great turning movement that overran their
left flank and laid them open to a massed cavalry charge. A last-ditch
counter-attack by a fresh corps that had just come up from the west made little
difference and by dusk on 14 October 1806 the entire Prussian army had been beaten. ‘The
struggle was keen, the resistance desperate, above all in the villages and
copses,’ wrote one officer, ‘but once all our cavalry had arrived at the front
and was able to manoeuvre, there was nothing but disaster; the retreat became a
flight, and the rout was general.’ As at Austerlitz, the emperor seized the
moment to endear himself to his troops and refurbish the legend that he was but
one more soldier. During the night before the battle he spent much time
personally supervising the construction of a rough track that would allow the
French to get artillery up onto the summit of the plateau on which the battle
was fought before grabbing a little sleep in the midst of the imperial guard.
All this is recalled by a then private of the imperial guard named Jean-Roche
Coignet:
‘The emperor was
there, directing the engineers; he did not leave till the road was finished,
and the first piece of cannon . . . had passed in front of him . . . The
emperor placed himself in the middle of his square, and allowed [the soldiers]
to kindle two or three fires for each company . . . Twenty from each company
were sere sent off in search of provisions . . . We found everything we needed
. . . Seeing us all so happy put the emperor in a good mood. He mounted his
horse before day and went the rounds.’
In view of the great debate that was precipitated by these
events, it is worth pointing out that the Prussians were not defeated by either
lack of enthusiasm among their soldiers or the supposed inferiority of their
tactics. The defective system of military organization described above did not
help as it ensured that no Prussian troops could compete with the French on
equal terms. But what really lost Frederick William the Jena campaign was the
chaotic situation that reigned in the high command.
At best a mediocre leader,
the commander-in-chief, the Duke of Brunswick, was hampered by the presence of
Frederick William III on the one hand, and the hostility and resentment with
which he was regarded by many of his fellow generals on the other. On top of
this, though the army had recently been given a general staff, this body had
been divided into three parallel sections, whose heads - Gerhard von
Scharnhorst, Karl von Phull and Christian von Massenbach - all hated one
another. Nor had the general staff been permitted completely to supersede the
army’s Oberkriegskollegium - the body responsible for the military’s internal
administration - in the elaboration of plans of campaign. As a result the
unfortunate Brunswick was deluged with an endless variety of different schemes.
A weak individual, he then proceeded to compound his problems by eschewing
personal responsibility in favour of a series of councils of war that brought
together his leading generals and advisers. In some respects the decision to
advance was understandable: it meant that the troops could be fed by someone
other than Prussia and it was the best way of proving to Britain and Russia
that Prussia was in earnest. But the best chance of success was a swift and
smashing blow into the heart of the French positions on the river Main,
designed to take advantage of the fact that Napoleon was not expecting Prussia
to go to war, whereas Prussia’s movements were in reality slow and indecisive.
Plans were only adopted after vitriolic meetings lasting many hours, such as
the one that was held at Erfurt on 5 October, and these hardly boosted the high
command’s cohesion. ‘Scharnhorst,’ recalled the staff officer, von Muffling,
‘thanked heaven when, about midnight, the conference came to an end, as no
result could be expected from such a meeting. No one who was present at it
could deceive himself as to the issue of the war.’ And even then decisions were
on a number of occasions modified or ignored, or communicated to the army in
language so vague as to allow recalcitrant commanders to interpret them more or
less as they thought fit.
The result could not have been more catastrophic:
Brunswick’s forces did not reach a position from which they could strike at the
grande armée until the first days of October, although they could have hit the
French a full month earlier. By October it was too late, for Napoleon’s forces
were now fully mobilized and on the move. Once the campaign had properly begun,
moreover, the articulation of the Prussian forces broke down altogether. In the
chaos, supplies dried up: ‘For three whole days before the battle of Jena the
troops had . . . no bread,’ wrote Funck. ‘They had to fight on empty stomachs.’
As for the battles, they broke every principle of the military art. At Jena
Napoleon, who began the day with 46,000 men and ended it with some 50,000 more,
was initially faced by a mere 38,000 men, and it was not until they had been
shattered beyond repair that the 15,000 -strong corps of General Rüchel - a
force that had begun the day only a few miles to the west at Weimar, but had
taken many hours to march to the sound of the guns - flung itself on the
French. And at Auerstädt, the Prussians did not bring up all their
overwhelmingly superior forces - Brunswick had 50,000 men to Davout’s single
corps of 26,000 - but rather launched a series of piecemeal assaults, the timid
Frederick William proceeding to make matters far worse by insisting on keeping
back a large reserve whose use might just have turned the balance in favour of
the beleaguered Brunswick. Compare all this with the French camp. Napoleon
resolved on war around 9 September, and had his men on the move on 8 October.
From the start there was but one plan of operations - an offensive from the
headwaters of the river Main north-eastwards towards the Saxon city of Leipzig
and, ultimately, the key fortress of Magdeburg, that was designed to cut the
Prussians off from Berlin - and within six days the grande armée had advanced a
hundred miles or more. At this point Napoleon, it is true, completely misjudged
the situation and came to the conclusion that the Prussians lay somewhere to
the north of him when they were in fact on his left flank, but when the enemy’s
situation was revealed by cavalry reconnaissance such was the disposition of
the grande armée that a flurry of orders was sufficient for its corps to change
face on the march and start moving west across the river Saale. Nor was
diplomacy forgotten, the emperor dispatching a letter to Frederick William
whose honeyed words served to deepen the confusion in the king’s tortured mind:
‘Why shed so much blood? To what end? I have been your friend these six years .
. . Why let our subjects be slaughtered?’
To return to the issue of Prussia, if Jena and Auerstädt
were by no means a total disgrace, what followed was by any standards a
catastrophe. No sooner had the guns fallen silent than the victorious French
armies launched an invasion of Prussia that carried all before it. Broken into
several fragments and reduced to a state of semi-starvation, most of what
remained of the Prussian army was rounded up with hardly a fight, while many
fortresses capitulated at the first summons (in fairness, it should be remarked
that few of them were provided for a siege). Berlin fell without resistance on
24 October, and everywhere the populace remained quiet. As the governor
proclaimed, ‘The king has lost a battle. The first duty of the citizens is to
keep quiet.’ Prussia was not yet out of the war - Frederick William had escaped
to the east - while a little honour was salvaged by the gallant General
Blücher, a fiery officer who had had a horse killed under him at Auerstädt and
escaped capture only by dint of some desperate swordplay. Ordered to take
command of another division and make for East Prussia, Blücher found the way
blocked, yet unlike most of Prussia’s generals, he did not lose hope. Shelter
might yet be found in the coastal regions north of the river Elbe and with it
the possibility of linking up with the Swedish forces in Stralsund or even a
British expeditionary force. Meanwhile, a force based in this area might at
least win time for the king to reach East Prussia, rally such forces as he
could and join up with Russians. But such hopes proved short-lived. Harried all
the way by French cavalry and desperately short of food and ammunition, Blücher
got his ever-diminishing band of fugitives to Lübeck. Here, however, he was
finally cornered on 6 November by Marshal Bernadotte, and after a desperate
battle forced to surrender. As even the French recognized, it had been a good
effort, but it did nothing to alter the awe-inspiring nature of Napoleon’s
triumph. For all that, Napoleon might have done well to note the reservations
that were later expressed by one of the members of his council of state:
In France enthusiasm
was at a peak: nothing could have appeared so incredible. However, in the
middle of this most understandable atmosphere, one noted that a sentiment was
gaining strength that thereafter never ceased to grow, a sentiment that the
conqueror was far too much inclined to ignore and which yet would later do much
to explain the misfortunes of the last days of his reign. France, beyond doubt,
was proud of his victories, but she wanted to enjoy their fruits, and of these
in her eyes the first ought to have been peace. Only moderation in victory
could have achieved this result, and, generous as it is, the French character
ensured that there was a general disposition to believe that that moderation
existed. On all sides was to be found the belief that someone who had risen so
high would not be found lacking in the only quality that could assure his
conquests: with every battle that was won, with every town that was taken, the
first assumption was that this new success offered the pledge of a peace that
could not but be very close. Was that calculation reasonable? Above all, could
it be accommodated with the character that might have been imputed to a man who
for ten years had never ceased to risk the most redoubtable dangers, and had
been followed by such rare good fortune? One might well have doubted it, but it
must be said that the hope was understandable enough . . . It is so natural to
believe in that which we desire!
This desire for peace was not unknown to Napoleon, for it
was hinted at by a delegation of the senate that travelled to Berlin to
congratulate him upon his victories. Then, too, there was the Foreign Minister.
As an acute German observer who had frequent dealings with French headquarters
noted:
Talleyrand . . . desired some political rapprochement. He
regarded it as a possibility for the first time after the collapse of Prussia.
The new English ministry still seemed undecided in its policy; the nation
wanted peace . . . It was only with reluctance, therefore, that Talleyrand had
drafted the decree . . . that was designed to bar every coast to the English
[see below] . . . Talleyrand continued to buoy himself up with . . . hopes of
convincing the English Cabinet, or of inducing it to recognize by pressure of
public opinion, that many of the advantages arising out of the war might, on
conclusion of peace, be shared by England. But it was essential that Napoleon
should cease going on giving the English Cabinet a pretext, by his speeches no
less than his measures, for reconciling the nation to their policy by the
bugbear of his name. The objective on which Talleyrand staked all his efforts
and all his influence was to persuade the emperor, even against his own inclination,
to adopt an attitude of moderation.
This, to put it mildly, was the vainest of hopes. Ensconced
in Berlin amid the adulation of his generals, he had, after all, vanquished the
ghost of Frederick the Great, whose great victory at Rossbach was now avenged.
With the grande armée at the very peak of its performance, all this was
reflected in his disposition: ‘Having arrived in Berlin, Napoleon did not just
speak and act as a victor moved by self-righteous anger, but affected the
language and attitude of a sovereign who commands his subjects. Loyalty to the
prince who had fled before him was treated as rebellion, and, angered by the
defiance of certain nobles who had stayed in communication with that
unfortunate monarch, in the palace of Frederick the Great himself he cried out,
“I will bring these petty courtiers so low that they will be reduced to begging
for their bread.” His proclamations and bulletins constantly mixed insult with
menace, whilst misfortune . . . was not even respected when it came to the
person of the Queen of Prussia.’ Even before the fall of the Prussian capital,
Napoleon had taken a hard line: a personal appeal for an armistice on the part
of Frederick William was rejected out of hand, while the dispatch of a special
envoy to the emperor’s headquarters in the person of the erstwhile ambassador
to Paris, Lucchesini, succeeded only in eliciting peace terms that were grim in
the extreme. These terms were more or less those that the Prussians were forced
to accept the following year but with the added demand that they should go to
war with Russia if the latter should attack the Ottoman Empire, something that
was by now almost certain. After much agonizing, Frederick William and his
advisers screwed themselves up to accept these terms, only to discover
immediately that no terms at all were on offer any more. Once again the
Prussians were just too late.
In the wake of Jena and Auerstädt, the emperor seems to have
envisaged Prussia in the role of a satellite state that could seal his eastern frontier
against Russia, whose attitude to a continuation of the war could not yet be
predicted with any certainty. On November, however, a large Russian army
crossed the frontier into Prussian Poland. Moved by the plight of Frederick
William and Louise, for both of whom he had conceived a warm affection, and
determined that Prussia should not make a separate peace with the French,
Alexander had decided to reenter the war. Beyond the issue of Prussia,
meanwhile, was that of Germany: the abortive D’Oubril treaty had made the cost
of peace without victory very clear to the tsar, and he was in consequence
determined to put an end to the Confederation of the Rhine. Napoleon could have
peace, but the terms would in essence be those of Lunéville and Amiens. The Russian
advance, of course, in turn raised the issue of Poland. Hitherto Napoleon had
had little interest in the Polish question - indeed, it is clear that, had
Russia recognized the gains that he had made since 1803, she could have had
peace, for the emperor had no desire to wage a winter campaign in the depths of
Poland. Continued war with Russia, however, transformed matters, for now
Napoleon was free to lay claim to the mantle of hero and liberator. In the
absence of any fear of provoking Russia, a Polish state could be restored and
Poland’s manpower made available to the grande armée. As yet no concrete
assurances were given, for there were serious worries that going too far might
provoke Austria into re-entering the war, but even so Napoleon summoned a number
of Polish exiles to his presence and hinted that a serious military effort
against Russia might well buy Poland her freedom. So far as Prussia was
concerned, this meant that the terms that had been on offer were now obsolete,
for she could no longer be guaranteed her lands east of the Elbe.
Instead of a
treaty, then, all that Frederick William’s emissaries could obtain was a truce
and even then one whose price would be the evacuation of Silesia and of
Prussia’s gains from the second and third partitions of Poland. To accept this,
however, meant the certainty of peace being made over the heads of the
Hohenzollerns, and this even the badly shaken Frederick William III could not
accept. On 21 November Napoleon’s terms were rejected, leaving Prussia’s agony
to drag on. As for the emperor, he had no hesitation in picking up the gauntlet
thrown down by Alexander: on 5 November the first French troops entered Poland
(it is noticeable that a special mission was simultaneously dispatched to
Vienna to secure a declaration of Austrian neutrality). For the grande armée
the move was scarcely welcome. While cantoned in and around Berlin, the troops
had lived a life of relative ease and plenty - many memoirs, indeed, comment on
the seeming generosity with which they were treated by the local populace - but
now things were very different:
It was . . . the
beginning of a most terrible winter in a deserted country covered with woods
and with roads heavy with sand. We found no inhabitants in the deserted
villages . . . The weather was terrible: snow, rain and thaw. The sand gave way
under our feet, and the water splashed up over the sinking sand. We sank down
up to our knees. We were obliged to tie our shoes round our ankles with cord,
and when we pulled our legs out of the soft sand, our shoes would stick in the
wet mud. Sometimes we had to take hold of one leg, pull it out like a carrot,
lift it forwards, and then go back for the other, take hold of it with both our
hands, and make it take a step forwards also . . . The older men began to lose
heart; some of them committed suicide rather than face such privations any
longer.
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