terrain to the south and east. It offered a perfect firing line for a massive concentration of artillery. Behind its slope troops could be brought up out of the enemy’s sight. For an enemy seeking to attack the ridge, Cathcart’s use of the word ‘glacis’ to describe the terrain was deadly accurate. In particular the slope from Gossa in the south up to the ridge between Liebertwollkwitz and Wachau is a bare and open killing ground with no cover whatsoever.
As one of the best historians of the battle notes, ‘the terrain very much favoured Napoleon’s objectives’. In the south he had a splendid defensive position, which also had good potential as a springboard for a counter- offensive which could burst unexpectedly from behind the ridge at Liebertwollkwitz and strike allied forces who were pinned down by massed artillery fire from the heights above them. The terrain west of the city, beyond the Pleisse, made any attack from that direction immensely difficult. A relatively small defending force could block the few narrow approaches to the city and keep vastly superior numbers of enemy troops at bay almost indefinitely. Moreover the whole area east of the Pleisse was dotted with villages, whose houses were usually sizeable, built of stone and surrounded by stout garden walls. As one approached the city, the denser and more stoutly built the houses became, with the old gates and walls of Leipzig and its suburbs still providing its defenders with welcome cover.
Against this, the disadvantage of Napoleon’s position was that the area east of the Pleisse did allow a huge army to deploy fully. If the allies were given the opportunity to bring their whole superiority in numbers and firepower to bear, then the emperor would be hard pressed to keep them at bay. If forced to retreat, his entire army would need to retire through the narrow streets of Leipzig, across the city’s only bridge over the river Elster, and down the long causeway through Lindenau which led westwards to safety, and ultimately to the Rhine. If the allies took Lindenau catastrophe threatened, but the village and its approaches were so easily defensible that only gross carelessness would allow this to happen. Even without this, however, getting a huge army, its wounded and its baggage away through Leipzig and Lindenau was bound to be tricky, especially after a lost battle.18
Prince Schwarzenberg’s operational plan for the battle seemed guaranteed, however, to ensure that Napoleon need not worry about defeat. The commander-in-chief could not be blamed for the fact that neither Bernadotte nor Bennigsen would reach the battlefield on 16 October. Bernadotte’s hesitations have already been explained and Bennigsen’s Army of Poland was advancing from Dresden as quickly as possible. Schwarzenberg was to blame, however, for planning to deploy Blucher’s troops and most of the Army of Bohemia west of Leipzig, where the terrain ensured that most of them would never get to grips with the enemy. The core of the Austrian army was supposed to advance over the Pleisse at Connewitz and Dolitz. Subsequently it would roll up the right flank of Napoleon’s line east of the river and cut off its retreat to Leipzig. This made no sense. Getting across the Pleisse would at best be very costly and time-consuming. Even if ultimately sheer numbers prevailed and some Austrian units got across the river, they would be advancing very close to Napoleon’s reserves and would have no chance of exploiting their initial success.
Truly bizarre, however, was Schwarzenberg’s plan to deploy the Grand Duke Constantine’s reserve corps, containing the Russian and Prussian Guards, on the west bank of the Elster to support the Austrian attack. On top of this he aimed to use both Blucher’s army and General Gyulai’s Austrian ‘corps’ to attack Lindenau, on terrain which made the deployment of tens of thousands of troops inconceivable. Had Schwarzenberg’s initial plan been executed, 54,000 troops would have been funnelled into the attack on Connewitz, 75,000 would have tried to reach Lindenau, and a mere 72,000 would have been left to oppose the bulk of Napoleon’s army east of the river.19
This plan was so obviously mistaken that all Alexander’s senior advisers protested and the emperor himself was mobilized to take on Schwarzenberg. Alexander was usually very tactful with the commander-in-chief and Schwarzenberg was a model of polite deference towards the monarch. On this occasion, however, the Austrian defended his plan stubbornly and there was a row. The upshot was that Blucher’s line of advance was directed back to the east bank of the Elster: he was to march on Leipzig down the main road from Halle. The Grand Duke Constantine’s reserve corps was also brought back to the east bank, though the Guards were only moved to Rotha, right by a bridge over the Pleisse and still 10 kilometres behind the front-line Russian divisions. But no amount of argument could shift Schwarzenberg from his basic idea of using the Austrian army on the west bank of the Elster.20
On this matter the commander-in-chief deferred to his chief of staff, General von Langenau, a Saxon officer who had transferred into the Austrian service only in 1813. Austrian sources admit that too much credence was given to Langenau’s superior knowledge of the local terrain as a native of the area. Rather lamely, they suggest that only the heavy recent rains had made the ground west of the Elster truly impassable. They also claim that French cavalry had stopped Schwarzenberg from conducting a thorough personal reconnaissance of the area. One recent author has even suggested that Langenau may have been a traitor to the allied cause, though there is no evidence for this. Perhaps the likeliest explanation is that Langenau was better at planning battles from maps than from any eye for actual terrain. On a map, his plan to thrust over the Elster into Napoleon’s flank and rear had a certain plausibility. If successful it would give the chief glory for victory to the Austrian forces in general and Langenau in particular. Possibly one need look no further for explanations for the bizarre deployment of the allied forces at Leipzig.21
One reason why Schwarzenberg liked the plan was that he had never initially intended to bring on a great battle at Leipzig. His aim throughout the October campaign had been to block Napoleon’s retreat to the west and force the emperor to attack the allied forces standing in his path. Though not totally implausible as a strategic concept, his efforts to translate this idea into tactical deployments around Leipzig were a disaster. There was in any case a very basic problem with the Austrian plan. Napoleon had not concentrated his forces in Leipzig in order to retreat westwards. He was intending to smash the Army of Bohemia and win the campaign.
Napoleon took it for granted that the bulk of the enemy army would be deployed in the only sensible place, in other words east of the rivers Elster and Pleisse. His plan was to turn the allies’ right flank east of Liebertwollkwitz, smash through their centre and drive Schwarzenberg’s army into the Pleisse. Even without Bernadotte and Bennigsen the allies had 205,000 troops available on 16 October against Napoleon’s 190,000. But Schwarzenberg’s plan, even after modifications to appease Alexander, meant that on the key southern front 138,000 French troops would face 100,000 allies, of which Constantine’s 24,000 reserves could not arrive on the battlefield for a number of hours. Of course the allies would outnumber Napoleon in other sectors but the terrain would make it impossible to use this superiority. On the first day at Leipzig Schwarzenberg therefore gave Napoleon a completely unnecessary chance to snatch victory against the odds and against the previous flow of the autumn campaign.22
On 16 October Blucher’s army advanced on Leipzig from the north. Langeron took the village of Euteritzsch and Yorck’s corps finally stormed Mockern after a ferocious struggle which lasted until the evening. The main point, however, was that Blucher had succeeded in pinning down two large French corps in the north, including Marmont’s men, on whom Napoleon was depending for his attack on Schwarzenberg. Blucher’s achievement at Leipzig was similar to his impact on the battle of Waterloo. By arriving on the battlefield much earlier than Napoleon had predicted, he diverted a key part of the strategic reserve on which the emperor was counting to decide the battle on its main front.
West of Leipzig, the advance on Lindenau of Gyulai’s Austrian troops forced Napoleon to send the whole of Bertrand’s Fourth Corps across the rivers to secure the village, and with it his line of retreat to the west. Further south, all the Austrian attempts to cross the river Pleisse near Connewitz and Dolitz got nowhere, to Schwarzenberg’s increasing frustration. By late morning he was prepared to give way to Alexander’s pleas and agree that Langenau’s plan had failed. He therefore ordered the Austrian reserves to cross the Pleisse to help beat off Napoleon’s attack. By now the allied situation east of the Pleisse was increasingly dire. The key question was whether the Austrian reserves would arrive in time to shore up the allied line.
Eugen of Wurttemberg’s Second Russian Corps was deployed near the centre of the allied line east of the Pleisse, in front of the village of Gossa. In his memoirs Eugen wrote that from Gossa on 15 October Napoleon could be seen on the heights near Wachau inspecting his troops and handing out medals. Eugen and his officers expected themselves to be attacked the next day but ‘we could not understand why Schwarzenberg decided on a general attack for the 16th when on the following day we would have been strengthened by 130,000 men of the Army of the North, the Army of Poland, and Count Colloredo’s corps’. It seems that the allied high command wished to pin down Napoleon and feared that he would otherwise attack Blucher and Bernadotte, and perhaps even slip away to the north.23 To avoid this, the allied forces east of the Pleisse were ordered to attack in four columns
