disbanded just before the campaign began. For once it was the Russians who enjoyed the advantage of fighting from behind stout walls and the 14th Jaegers put up a formidable performance on 7 March.10
The battle began shortly after ten o’clock in the morning of 7 March when Marshal Ney’s corps, 14,000 strong, advanced against the left of the Russian line. Ney attacked prematurely before other infantry divisions were on hand to support his advance. His young conscripts fought with great courage but they were advancing over difficult ground in the face of many well-sited Russian batteries. Not surprisingly, their repeated attacks failed. When General Boyer’s excellent division of units withdrawn from Spain arrived on the scene Napoleon threw it into the fray immediately. It fought its way past the farm of Heurtebise and up onto the plateau, allowing four French batteries to climb the slopes and deploy in its support. Vorontsov, however, launched a counter-attack which threw both Boyer and Ney back off the plateau. Not until the early afternoon, when Charpentier’s infantry and a number of cavalry brigades joined the attack, was the Russian position in serious danger.
At this point orders came from Blucher for Vorontsov to retire and for the whole army to retreat northwards and concentrate at Laon. The orders were sensible. Once the flank attack had come to nothing it made no sense to expose Vorontsov and Sacken to a battle against the whole French army. Inevitably this was not how matters seemed to Vorontsov in the midst of the fray. His men had fought with great courage to pin down Napoleon. Now their sacrifice appeared to be in vain. A warrior’s pride made it very difficult for him to retreat from a battle in which thus far victory had been on his side. In any case, at least in the short run it was easier to hold one’s ground than to retreat in orderly fashion in the face of a numerically superior enemy who would be emboldened by the sight of his enemy withdrawing.
Only after repeated orders from Sacken did Vorontsov begin his withdrawal. He remained calm throughout, as did his men, and the French cavalry had no success in their efforts to break into the Russian infantry squares or capture their guns. At the narrow defile near the village of Cerny, Vorontsov halted his retreat to give time for Ilarion Vasilchikov’s cavalry to arrive. When Sacken received Blucher’s orders to retreat he had got his infantry away immediately but he sent Vasilchikov forward to cover Vorontsov’s regiments as they made their way across the more open plateau west of Cerny. Together Vasilchikov and Vorontsov kept the pursuing French at a respectful distance, particularly after they had combined to ambush one enemy detachment which pursued them too incautiously. Towards the western end of the plateau it once again narrowed and the French were forced to bunch together in close columns to continue their advance. At these points the very competent commander of Sacken’s artillery, Major-General Aleksei Nikitin, had deployed a number of batteries and their concentrated fire stopped the pursuit and inflicted heavy casualties, before the Russian guns slipped away unscathed under the protection of Vasilchikov’s cavalry.11
Since Britain had no troops in the allied army, Lord Burghersh – its military representative at headquarters – was a relatively impartial observer. He called the Russian performance at Craonne ‘the best fought action during the campaign’. Vorontsov, Vasilchikov and their troops had certainly shown great skill, discipline and courage. The performance of Vorontsov’s infantry was particularly striking because few of his regiments had seen serious combat since the spring of 1813 and for many of his men this was their first experience of battle. The French subsequently claimed victory because Blucher’s plan had failed and because they held the battlefield at the end of the day. In this narrow sense they were indeed victorious, just as they had been ‘victorious’ in these terms in every Russian rearguard action during their advance to Moscow in 1812. But the Russians left behind no guns and very few prisoners. Clausewitz sums up the battle of Craonne by saying that ‘the Russians defended themselves at Craonne so successfully that the main goal, to reach Laon undisturbed, was achieved…this was accomplished by exceptionally brave soldiers, a very self-possessed commander and an excellent position’.12
The Russians lost 5,000 men. The earliest full French account puts their own casualties at 8,000 and since they were very disinclined indeed to overstate their losses this figure may be accurate. Subsequently, however, French historians chipped away at the numbers and Henri Houssaye wrote that ‘the Russians lost 5,000, the French 5,400’. A contemporary French expert tweaked the figures still further, claiming that the allies lost 5,500 men and Napoleon only 5,000. Presumably this was in order to stake an additional claim to victory. In the same spirit 29,000 Frenchmen are said to have faced 50,000 allies, which may be true if one counts every soldier within a day’s march of the battle but completely distorts what actually happened on the battlefield on 7 March. In reality all of this juggling of statistics is irrelevant, though it does help to illustrate the historian’s difficulties in getting at the truth. Even if in fact the Russians and the French had lost the same number of men at Craonne, the basic point was that Napoleon could no longer afford this kind of attrition.13
Napoleon followed up Blucher to Laon and on 9 March attacked the Russo-Prussian forces there. Once again he believed that he was likely to face only a rearguard and drastically underestimated the size of the allied army. In fact Blucher had concentrated all his corps near Laon, almost 100,000 men, and outnumbered the French by more than two to one. In addition, Napoleon’s army was divided in two, with the emperor advancing up the road from Soissons and Marmont up the road from Rheims. Communication between the two wings was very difficult because of the Russian light cavalry and the swampy terrain. Not at all surprisingly, Napoleon’s attack on 9 March failed. After darkness set in that evening the Prussians themselves surprised and routed Marmont in one of the most successful night attacks of the war. Napoleon’s army was now at the allies’ mercy. He was saved by Blucher’s breakdown, which paralysed the Army of Silesia. The immense strains of the previous two months had ruined the health of the 72-year-old field-marshal. After Prussia’s defeat in 1806–7 Blucher had suffered a breakdown, a side effect of which was alarming hallucinations about giving birth to an elephant. Now staff officers who came to him for orders found him in another world and unable to respond to their enquiries. Any light on his eyes caused him great suffering.14
The next few days revealed the fragility of the coalition armies’ command structure and just how much the Army of Silesia had depended on Blucher’s drive, courage and charisma. In principle the army’s senior full general was Alexandre de Langeron but there was no chance of Yorck or Bulow obeying him. Langeron himself dreaded the idea of having to take over command and argued that Gneisenau should do so, as Blucher’s chief of staff and the man best informed of the commander-in-chief’s intentions. Neither Yorck nor Bulow much respected Gneisenau, however, and in addition he was junior to both of them. Yorck chose this moment to act the prima donna and resign his command, only returning to duty after Blucher scrawled an appeal to him which was supported by the pleas of Prince William of Prussia, one of Yorck’s brigade commanders and the king’s brother. Deprived of Blucher’s strength and inspiration, Gneisenau lost confidence and courage. He fell prey to one of his congenital failings, the belief that Prussia was being betrayed by her allies. The result was that for more than a week after the battle of Laon the Army of Silesia spread out in search of food but played no useful role in the war.15
The inactivity of the Army of Silesia allowed Napoleon to escape, rest and then pounce on the 12,000-strong detachment led by Emmanuel de Saint-Priest, Bagration’s chief of staff back in 1812, which had taken Rheims on 12 March. Although Napoleon had suffered at least 6,000 casualties at Laon, reinforcements arrived from Paris, bringing his army back up to 40,000 men. This was more than sufficient to defeat Saint-Priest, particularly since Napoleon caught the allies by surprise. To some extent this was Saint-Priest’s fault for not taking proper precautions but it was hard to predict that Blucher’s army would stand still, lose all track of Napoleon and fail to provide any warning as to his movements. Part of Saint-Priest’s force was made up of Prussian Landwehr, who had dispersed in search of food and put up little resistance when the French attacked on 13 March. Saint-Priest’s Russian regiments from his own Eighth Corps were made of sterner stuff, however, and put up a stiff fight, despite the fact that their general himself was severely wounded and out of action from the beginning of the battle.
The core of Russian resistance was the Riazan Regiment, an old unit with a fine fighting record, founded by Peter the Great in 1703. In the current war the regiment had fought at Borodino, Bautzen and Leipzig, where 35 per cent of its officers were killed or wounded and thirty-two of its men won military medals. General Saint-Priest himself was popular with his troops, of whom he took good care, for instance using a captured French treasury to buy new clothes for his soldiers in the winter of 1813–14. He had a particularly strong relationship with the Riazan Regiment, which he called ‘the Guards of the Eighth Corps’. The regiment’s inspiring commander was Colonel Ivan Skobelev, the son of a state peasant, who had served twelve years in the ranks before receiving his commission. Amidst the chaos on 13 March the Riazan Regiment’s third battalion built a breastwork in front of the main gate of Rheims and beat off French efforts to break into the city. Meanwhile, initially 2 kilometres outside the city’s walls, the regiment’s first battalion formed a square against the French cavalry and fought their way back to where their comrades of the third battalion were holding out, carrying the wounded Saint-Priest in their midst. The two battalions of the Riazan Regiment then formed the core of the Russian rearguard, commanded by Skobelev, which held up the French for long enough for most of the Eighth Corps to escape from Rheims and rally beyond the city.
