Frederick William, let alone Alexander, would resign all control over their elite regiments and what was now unequivocally both the main allied army and the core of the allied war effort. With the Russian and Prussian divisions came the two monarchs, as distinctly unwelcome guests in Schwarzenberg’s headquarters.48
Under no circumstances was Schwarzenberg a commander who would seize the initative and impose his will on Napoleon. But in August 1813 his only initial option was to await the arrival of the Russo-Prussian reinforcements and take precautions against any attempt by Napoleon to attack them on the march or to invade Bohemia. Radetsky rather hoped that Napoleon would invade. The allies would then have the possibility of catching his troops as they sought to emerge from the narrow defiles of the Erzgebirge rather than the other way round. The Austrian quartermaster-general also had justified fears about how quickly and efficiently the commanders of the various allied columns would coordinate their operations if they were launched on an offensive through the mountains and into Saxony. Even leaving aside problems of terrain and inter-allied cooperation, the Austrian army itself had an over-centralized and unwieldy command structure. In 1809 the Austrians had adopted the French system of separate all-arms corps. The lesson they drew from the war was that their senior generals and staffs could not be relied on to make this system work. Uniquely among the four main armies in 1813, they had therefore in part reverted to a centralized army high command dealing directly with divisions and ad hoc column commanders. Radetsky had good reason to fear that this arrangement would prove defective.49
Had he understood the internal arrangements of the Russian forces his pessimism would have increased. The Russians had gone to war in 1812 with a lean and rational command structure of corps, divisions and brigades. By the autumn of 1813, however, there had been many promotions to the ranks of major- and lieutenant-general. There were now, for example, far more lieutenant-generals than there were corps, and Russian lieutenant-generals thought it beneath their status to command mere divisions. The result was the emergence of many corps which in reality were little bigger than the old divisions. These ‘corps’ were subordinated to the seven larger units into which the Field Army was divided in the autumn campaign. Though these seven units were also confusingly called corps, to avoid bewilderment I call them Army Corps. Two such Army Corps (Grand Duke Constantine and Wittgenstein) were in the Army of Bohemia; two were in the Army of Silesia (Langeron and Sacken); two were in the Army of Poland (Dokhturov and Petr Tolstoy); one was in the Army of the North (Winzengerode). To a great extent the creation of mini-corps was merely a cosmetic concession to generals’ vanity, but it did make the Russian command structure top-heavy and it complicated relations with the Prussians. A Russian corps commanded by a lieutenant- general could contain no more men than a Prussian brigade, which on occasion could be commanded by a mere colonel. Since both Russian and Prussian officers were acutely conscious of seniority and status, ‘misunderstandings’ were inevitable.50
A further cause of inefficiency was the position of Mikhail Barclay de Tolly. Having performed excellently during the armistice as commander-in-chief, Barclay now found himself de facto relieved of the supreme command and subordinated to Schwarzenberg. Apparently it took Alexander some days to summon up the courage to tell Barclay about this. To maintain his pride – perhaps indeed to retain his services – Barclay kept his official position as commander-in-chief of the Russian forces. In principle Russian corps in the armies of Silesia and the North were in operational terms subordinated to Bernadotte and Blucher, but in matters of administration and personnel to Barclay. Given the wide dispersal of these forces this was an unworkable arrangement which caused frustration on all sides.
Barclay’s power over the Russian and Prussian forces in the Army of Bohemia was more real without being more rational. It would have been more efficient had orders passed directly from Schwarzenberg to the Army Corps commanders (Constantine, Wittgenstein and Kleist), rather than being delayed and distorted by having to go through Barclay. Even Wittgenstein’s position was problematic in the first half of the autumn campaign. In principle he commanded Eugen of Wurttemberg’s Second Corps and the First Corps of Prince Andrei Gorchakov, the brother of the minister of war. In practice, however, Eugen’s corps was detached from the main body in August 1813 and Wittgenstein only actually controlled Gorchakov’s men. As a result, Wittgenstein too was more or less redundant on occasion: in August he and Gorchakov often merely frustrated each other by both trying to do the same job.51
By the time the leading allied generals met at the council of war in Melnik on 17 August, there was no sign of any French advance into Bohemia: almost all of them now believed that Napoleon would probably attack Bernadotte and seek to take Berlin. Radetsky and Diebitsch, the two ablest staff officers present, both shared this view. In this case it was impossible for the main army to stand still behind the mountains and leave Bernadotte to his fate. If Napoleon was heading northwards, the allies could safely cross the mountains on a broad front with their main line of advance aiming to move via Leipzig into the enemy’s rear. The council therefore decided to invade Saxony the moment the Russian and Prussian reinforcements arrived. Wittgenstein would advance on the right up the Teplitz highway from Peterswalde via Pirna to Dresden. In the centre, Kleist’s Prussians would march from Brux through Saida to Freiberg. Behind them would come Constantine’s reserves. Meanwhile the main Austrian body would advance along the highway that led from Kommotau via Marienberg to Chemnitz and ultimately to Leipzig. Smaller Austrian forces would use the roads on either side of the highway, with Klenau’s column on the Austrian extreme left.
The allied columns crossed the border into Saxony early in the morning of Saturday, 22 August. Even before they did so, however, intelligence arriving at headquarters was increasingly suggesting that Napoleon had not headed northwards against Bernadotte after all but was on the contrary in eastern Saxony facing Blucher. If true, this suggested that an advance towards Leipzig was pointless and was heading into nothing. Meanwhile Napoleon might destroy Blucher. He might also either march westwards and overwhelm Wittgenstein or use his control over the Elbe crossing at Konigstein to strike south-westwards into the allied rear in Bohemia. These worries were not imaginary. Once the allies were deep in the Erzgebirge it would take at least four days to concentrate the whole army on Wittgenstein’s flank in the event that he was attacked by Napoleon. Though the allied commanders could not know this, Napoleon had in fact written to his commander in Dresden, Marshal Saint-Cyr, that he cared nothing if the allies marched into western Saxony or cut his communications with France. What concerned him was that they should not seize the Elbe crossings and above all the huge supply base which he had built up for the autumn campaign in Dresden. Moreover Napoleon was indeed contemplating the possibility of striking via Konigstein into the allied rear.52
If allied arrangements had been sufficiently flexible they would have changed their plans before their advance began and shifted its weight eastwards towards Dresden. Last-minute changes to the movements of this vast army with its very cumbersome command structure were extremely difficult, however. Therefore, as Schwarzenberg informed his wife in the evening of 20 August, ‘we want to cross the border on 22 August and then quickly swivel towards the Elbe’. This plan was no problem for the Russians since it did not change the planned line of march of Wittgenstein or the Grand Duke Constantine. Even Kleist’s Prussians did not have too far to march to get to the new area of concentration in the area of Dippoldiswalde and Dresden. For the Austrians, however, it was a completely different matter. They had the furthest to go and they would have to move across dreadful mountain paths which snaked up and down over the steep valleys of one stream after another. Already on 23 August General Wilson had encountered Klenau’s Austrians ‘drenched to the bones; most of them without shoes, many without greatcoats’. Wilson recorded that the morale of Klenau’s men, very many of them fresh recruits, seemed good but it was debatable whether it would remain that way with the rain pelting down, stomachs already empty, the Austrian commissariat wagons trailing well in the rear, and the paths dissolving into mud. It took Klenau’s men sixteen hours to cross the last 32 kilometres cross-country to the Freiberg area. To reach Dresden they still had the even worse path through the Tharandt forest to negotiate.53
The initial allied shift eastwards had far more to do with protecting Wittgenstein and Bohemia than with seizing the opportunity to capture Napoleon’s base at Dresden. By 23 August, however, intelligence revealed that Napoleon was in fact in Silesia, even further away to the east than the allies had realized. On the evening of 23 August Schwarzenberg wrote to his wife that allied headquarters would be at Dippoldiswalde by the next day and that the army would attack Dresden on the afternoon of 25 August if sufficient forces could be concentrated there in time. He then went a long way towards guaranteeing that this would not be the case by giving most of the Austrian army a rest-day on 24 August.54
The thinking behind this move was that there was less urgency than previously feared because Wittgenstein and Bohemia were not in immediate danger. No doubt too the kindly commander-in-chief listened to the howls of his Austrian generals about the miserable condition of their men. Uncertain in his own mind whether it would be
