booty equally, with a special bonus for their commander. No one had quite got round to codifying how this tradition might be modified when in the service of the emperor. To avoid misunderstandings, Lowenstern gave each Cossack 100 silver francs and promised them the same again when they got the booty back to Berlin. His next success was to outwit and evade the neighbouring raiding party of Cossacks under Colonel Prendel, who felt an urgent need to help protect Lowenstern’s loot from the awful possibility of recapture by the French.
Having got back to Berlin Lowenstern then faced the most dangerous enemy of all in the person of the city’s fierce military governor, General L’Estocq. At a time when Prussia was desperate for cash, L’Estocq saw no reason to allow piracy to succeed untaxed and under his nose. There followed a strange hide-and-seek across Berlin as the governor tried to discover Lowenstern’s carts and their contents. By the time he found them Lowenstern had his loot safely hidden. He then paid off a number of possible threats to his haul. In his memoirs he adds that old acquaintances popped up from all sides and ‘it was a real joy to me to be useful to my friends’. Prince Serge Volkonsky, Winzengerode’s duty general, was very much an old friend. He records that Lowenstern’s haul of foreign coin was so enormous that it depressed the exchange rate of the Prussian taler in the entire Berlin region. Judging by Lowenstern’s memoirs, business also increased dramatically among the best whorehouses and champagne- sellers in the Prussian capital.93
Meanwhile Napoleon was making the first of his two attempts to take Berlin, led in this case by Marshal Oudinot. Napoleon’s obsession with capturing Berlin was fortunate for the allies. Had he simply masked Bernadotte’s army he could have transferred substantial forces elsewhere. Bernadotte is most unlikely to have gone over to a bold offensive. He would instead have sat down to besiege Wittenberg, since he was determined to hold a fortified crossing over the Elbe before moving across the river and exposing himself to a sudden counter-thrust from his former boss. Not merely did Napoleon order first Oudinot and then Ney to march on Berlin but he also gave them too few soldiers of too low quality to perform their assigned task. He did this partly because he despised the Prussian infantry and discounted its potential on the battlefield.
Oudinot bungled his advance and was defeated at Gross Beeren on 23 August by Bulow’s corps. On 27 August, the day the allied retreat from Dresden began, a strong division under General Girard, advancing from Wittenberg to support Oudinot, was annihilated at Hagelberg. The Russians were not involved at Gross Beeren, with the important exception of Russian batteries permanently attached to Bulow’s corps to make up for the Prussians’ own shortage of artillery. Winzengerode’s corps stood at the right of the allied line covering Berlin, whereas Oudinot attempted to break through on the left. The battle was over before the Russians had time to intervene. The French commander advanced in such a manner that his columns were widely separated and unable to support each other. Therefore the two Prussian corps of Bulow and Tauenzien were more than adequate to defeat him without Russian help. At Hagelberg, however, Chernyshev threw the enemy into confusion by charging with his Cossacks unexpectedly into their rear in the middle of the battle and made a big contribution to their disintegration.94
The second French advance on Berlin was led by Marshal Ney. It was defeated at the battle of Dennewitz on 6 September. Once again the French advanced against the allied left, which was manned by Bulow and Tauenzien’s Prussians. On this occasion, as at Gross Beeren, Winzengerode’s corps was deployed on the allied right and only part of its cavalry and artillery participated in the battle. Even they became involved only in its final stages. No one could blame the Russians for this. Their deployment and movements were subject to Bernadotte’s orders. But the crown prince’s actions have ever since been subject to severe criticism, especially of course from historians of a Prusso-German nationalist persuasion. On the other hand, Bernadotte has also had numerous defenders, including probably the best historian of the campaign, the Prussian general staff colonel and military historian, Rudolph von Friederich.95
Bernadotte’s enemies argue that he moved too slowly to the Prussians’ aid, left the dirty work to them, and then took credit for himself, the Swedes and the Russians. His supporters claim on the contrary that he had no alternative but to deploy on a broad front to cover the various possible lines of advance on Berlin, and that once he discovered that Ney was moving against Bulow he came to the Prussians’ aid with all possible speed. They stress the big contribution made by the Russian cavalry and artillery in the final stage of the battle. They also argue that even if Bulow had been forced to fall back at that time, by then the exhausted enemy army would merely have advanced into the jaws of the Russians and Swedes.
No one denies that the Prussian troops fought with great courage for many hours. Bulow himself directed his men with skill, calm and good timing. The Landwehr regiments performed far better than the militia units in Kleist’s corps at the battle of Kulm one week before. Also unarguable is the fact that if Prussian courage and grit to a great extent won the battle of Dennewitz, the French commanders did much to lose it. Though in principle the Prussians should have been heavily outnumbered, in practice Ney never succeeded in getting all three of his corps into action on the battlefield. The story was a rather familiar one. Ney was present on the northern half of the battlefield. He became wholly absorbed in the struggle going on around him and lost his sense of the overall situation, summoning the whole of Oudinot’s corps to his own assistance and thereby exposing Reynier’s Saxon corps on his southern wing to defeat. Oudinot, deeply insulted at being removed from overall command, was happy to contribute to his successor’s defeat by dumb obedience to stupid orders. Bulow took advantage of Oudinot’s march northwards to launch a counter-attack against Reynier’s Saxons. Shortly afterwards the Russian cavalry and horse artillery drove into Reynier’s open left flank, turning defeat into rout. Ivan Liprandi wrote that the concentrated fire they brought down on the wavering Saxons was the most professional performance by the Russian artillery which he witnessed in the course of the entire war.96
The historian of the St Petersburg Dragoon Regiment, one of the Russian cavalry units which struck the French left towards the end of the battle, wrote that the Russian cavalry played a decisive role in rescuing the exhausted Prussian infantry, scattering the French artillery, panicking the enemy infantry into flight, and then overrunning some of their rearguards. General Kamensky, who wrote this history, complained that foreigners never recognized the Russian contribution, though in fact his analysis of the battle is not too far removed from that of Rudolph von Friederich. Serge Volkonsky was as biased a nationalist as any Prussian historian of the battle of Dennewitz. He wrote (absurdly) in his memoirs that ‘the whole honour’ of the victory belonged ‘to Bernadotte’s dispositions and to the boldness of the Russian and Swedish artillery and the attack of the Russian cavalry’. In a much lower key, the dispute has something in common with subsequent arguments about the Prussian role at Waterloo, and was an almost inevitable aspect of coalition warfare. It has to be said, however, that the Prussian army did far more hard fighting at Waterloo than the Russians at Dennewitz, as in fact the Russian official history made clear. The one point on which all Prussian and Russian sources agreed was that Bernadotte failed to pursue Ney’s fleeing army with sufficient determination, at a time when a full-blooded pursuit might well have destroyed it.97
Even without this, Ney’s army had suffered badly. The Russians reckoned that he had lost up to 18,000 men, including more than 13,000 prisoners. Since the latter were mostly scooped up during the cavalry’s pursuit of the fleeing French their number does say something about the Russian contribution to victory. Overall, in the first month of the war Napoleon had lost 100,000 men and more than 200 guns. The allies had lost barely 50 guns and not more than 85,000 soldiers. Reinforcements were flowing in to fill the allied ranks. By the time the advance on Leipzig began at the beginning of October Schwarzenberg had replaced all the Austrians lost at Dresden, and the new recruits were on the whole better trained than Mesko’s men had been in August. Russian ranks were replenished by more arriving reserves and men returning from hospitals. Above all, they were augmented by the nearly 60,000 men of Bennigsen’s Army of Poland. It is true that almost half of Bennigsen’s infantry were Count Petr Tolstoy’s militia, who were only really usable for sieges, but the rest of his infantry and all his cavalry and artillery were good troops.98
The Battle of Leipzig
The battle of Dennewitz ended the first phase of the autumn campaign. The rest of September was a hiatus. The second and decisive phase of the campaign began in early October, culminating in the battle of Leipzig. Napoleon would have liked to break the stalemate in September and impose his will on the enemy in his usual fashion. His strategic situation and, above all, his losses made this impossible, however. At the beginning of the autumn campaign Napoleon had hoped to deal the allies a knockout blow by leading his Guards and reserves northwards to strike against Berlin. Such a move was now unthinkable: the men could not be spared from the
