Thanks to the calm of General Kaptsevich and the skilful rearguard action mounted by his Tenth Corps, Langeron got all his troops safely out of Duben and retreated to the north-west, crossing the river Mulde at Jessnitz: but Napoleon’s advance cut off Sacken’s army corps from the rest of the Army of Silesia. In his subsequent report to Barclay de Tolly, Sacken recounted that his army corps had crossed the Elbe on 4 October. During the next few days his cavalry, including a Kalmyk regiment, had conducted a number of successful skirmishes with the French. Suddenly, on 9 November, ‘the corps found itself in the most dangerous situation it encountered in the course of the whole of this war’. His advance guard under Major-General Lanskoy found its path blocked by enemy forces ‘in great strength’. Meanwhile Major-General Iuzefovich’s rearguard was pressed hard by all Sebastiani’s cavalry, 6,000 infantry and eighteen guns arriving from the direction of Torgau. French troops seemed to be on all sides.
Fortunately, Sacken was never one to panic and his cavalry commanders, headed by Ilarion Vasilchikov, were very competent. They held off the French long enough for Sacken to get his infantry on the march down country lanes, through the forests towards the north of the French forces in his path. Arriving at the village of Presl at midnight, after a ten-hour march, Sacken found part of his cavalry there and Sebastiani not far away. However, the French cavalry commander allowed himself to be hoodwinked by the fact that ‘our baggage train was sent off towards Elster on the river Elbe: he assumed that our corps would march in the same direction’. In fact Sacken sent his troops in the opposite direction – in other words north-westwards in the wake of the rest of the army. Sebastiani ended by missing most of the baggage and all Sacken’s troops. For Sacken, the next stretch of his march – ‘where the main road heads from Duben to Wittenberg’ – was the most dangerous moment. His men passed down this road during the night. ‘We deployed our jaegers on both sides of this road, and we passed between them with the enemy’s bivouacs in view but the foe did not notice our movement.’14
In his memoirs Langeron comments:
A less bold general than Sacken would have retired in haste via Smiedeberg to the bridgehead at Wartenburg but Sacken was absolutely determined not to be separated from us and he was an audacious general, very skilful at marches: he passed within a mile of Napoleon during the night, outflanked him, cut between his army and its advance guards, and rejoined us by forced marches via Raguhn, where he crossed the Muuhlde. He was never brought to action and he didn’t lose so much as one soldier of his baggage train. It is hard to find a bolder or better executed manoeuvre.15
Sacken’s exploits averted immediate disaster but the situation was still dangerous. Blucher and Bernadotte had agreed that both the Army of the North and the Army of Silesia would march westwards and take up position on the other (i.e. western) side of the river Saale. United, and with the river between them and Napoleon, they could wait in security while they discovered Schwarzenberg’s whereabouts and Napoleon’s intentions. If, as Blucher predicted, the emperor headed towards Leipzig to fight the Army of Bohemia, then he and Bernadotte could march safely down the west bank of the Saale and attack Leipzig from the north. If, as Bernadotte feared, Napoleon tried to retreat across the Saale or towards Magdeburg and Marshal Davout, then the joint armies would be well placed to block him. They were also within easy reach of the Elbe crossings at Rosslau and Aken, should Napoleon attempt an attack on Berlin or on the Russo-Prussian army’s communications.
By now, however, Blucher and all the Prussian generals were deeply distrustful of Bernadotte and more convinced than ever that he was a potential traitor to the allied cause. Believing that the crown prince had promised to build a pontoon bridge for Yorck’s corps to cross the Saale at Wettin, when the Prussians got there on 11 October and found no bridge they interpreted this as an underhand trick to force them to retreat northwards along the Saale towards the Elbe crossings – in other words to defer to Bernadotte’s priorities. Instead, Blucher marched southwards to the next crossing upriver at Halle. Very fortunately for the Prussian commander, Napoleon’s cavalry reconnaissance was poor and his attention was fixed northwards towards the Elbe, in which direction he was convinced that Sacken and much of the rest of the allied army was retreating. Had he turned his gaze westwards towards the Saale, his chances of catching Yorck’s isolated corps, pinning it against the river and destroying it would have been excellent.
By 12 October both the Army of Silesia and the Army of the North were deployed on the west bank of the Saale, with their commanders trying to make sense of confusing and contradictory information. Inevitably both Blucher and Bernadotte interpreted this evidence to fit their preconceived views. To an extent their confusion is unsurprising since at this very time Napoleon was sitting in Duben unable to make up his mind whether to concentrate at Leipzig against Schwarzenberg or to strike either west across the Saale or northwards towards the Elbe. In a way it was the allied supreme commander who made up Napoleon’s mind for him. Had Schwarzenberg used his four-to-one advantage to push back Murat, the latter would have been forced to abandon Leipzig and fall back northwards on Napoleon. At that point the emperor’s only realistic option would have been to follow Bernadotte’s prediction and force his way over the Saale or move further north towards Magdeburg. Instead, Schwarzenberg’s lack of speed or resolution persuaded Napoleon in the late afternoon of 12 October that his best chance would be to concentrate on Leipzig and smash the Army of Bohemia before Blucher and Bernadotte could intervene. Before taking this decision, however, on 11 October Napoleon had sent two corps on a raid towards Dessau and Wittenberg on the Elbe.
In the atmosphere of heightened tension and uncertainty then prevailing, not only Bernadotte but also Lieutenant-General von Tauenzien, the Prussian commander north of the Elbe, interpreted this raid as proof that Napoleon was aiming to strike towards Berlin. Tauenzien’s report to Bernadotte that Napoleon himself and four full corps were moving northwards to cross the Elbe increased the crown prince’s determination to get back across the river himself in order to protect his communications and the Prussian capital. Fortunately for the allied cause, the approach of Napoleon’s corps had persuaded the allied commanders at Aken and Rosslau to dismantle the pontoon bridges across which Bernadotte was hoping to march.
Bernadotte’s army was therefore stuck south of the Elbe long enough for new information to arrive from Blucher which suggested strongly that Napoleon was headed for Leipzig. Under strong pressure not just from the Prussians but also from the Russian and British envoys (Pozzo di Borgo and Charles Stewart) at his headquarters, Bernadotte turned south again. Even now he did so in very hesitant fashion, heading not directly for Leipzig but rather towards Blucher’s rear at Halle. Even this move came to a halt on 15 October as an increasingly confused Bernadotte overreacted to reports of French columns advancing from the east and deployed his columns against this new but imaginary threat. The net result of all this confusion was that the Army of the North was too far from Leipzig to participate in the battle’s first day on 16 October.
The battlefield at Leipzig is best seen as three distinct sectors. In the north, where Blucher and Bernadotte’s men were deployed, the river Parthe flowed from east to west between the allied and Napoleonic armies. Near its banks were the villages of Mockern, Eutritzsch and Schonefeld, all of which saw ferocious fighting. So too did the area around the Halle Gate just to the north of Leipzig, where the river Parthe flows into the river Pleisse. All these places have been absorbed into the expanding city of Leipzig in the last two hundred years and virtually nothing remains of the battlefield.
The same is true for slightly different reasons of the second sector, west of Leipzig. This area is dominated by the rivers Elster and Pleisse, which flow in parallel and close together before joining near Leipzig. In 1813 this whole area was a maze of waterways, large and small. Most of the land between the waterways was swampy, and this was particularly so in October, after weeks of rain. The few villages and very few roads in this area were almost islands amidst the swamps and waterways. Nowadays all this area has been tidied up, drained and embanked. Save to a very limited extent at Dolitz, it is impossible to get any sense from today’s terrain of the enormous difficulties facing any general who tried to deploy large numbers of troops in this area in 1813.
The third sector, south and east of Leipzig, is very different. Until very recently it was also much better preserved.16 On the crucial first day of the battle fighting in this sector was confined to the area south of Leipzig along the line which stretched from Markkleeberg on the river Pleisse to Liebertwollkwitz and beyond that to the village of Seifertshain. The key feature of this area is the ridge that runs all the way from the banks of the Pleisse to Liebertwollkwitz, a distance of roughly five and a half kilometres.
George Cathcart, present at the battle, writes that Liebertwollkwitz stood
on the top of a hill which formed a regular glacis to it. A ridge ran all the way from the shoulder of the eminence of Liebertwollkwitz to the river Pleisse, passing in rear of Wachau and commanding it. This position could not fail to present itself to the eye of an experienced officer as the only one which that uninteresting country afforded for the purpose of covering Leipzig towards the south.17
The ridge at Liebertwollkwitz gave Napoleon many advantages. It provided excellent views over most of the
