been wrecked by the premature allied attack at Austerlitz. He commented to Wittgenstein that everyone was warning him of the possible present-day parallels and that maybe on this occasion it was better to postpone the decision for as long as possible.48
Meanwhile Kutuzov and his army’s main body remained in Kalicz, much to the Prussians’ annoyance. The field-marshal saw no reason to disturb his men’s rest. Having occupied Saxony he had no wish to advance further and his intelligence reports in March rightly concluded that Napoleon was not yet ready to attack him. On 2 April Frederick William arrived in Kalicz and inspected the Russian troops. The Guards, all in new uniforms, looked splendid but the king was dismayed by the small size of the Russian forces. The Prussians were beginning to realize how much the past year’s campaigning had cost the Russians and how very great an effort Prussia would need to make for victory. Five days after the parade Alexander, Kutuzov and the Guards at last set off for Saxony.
En route, Captain Zhirkevich’s battery of the Russian Guards artillery experienced another rather different inspection by Frederick William while passing through Liegnitz. The news that the king was in the city and wished to greet the Russian troops only reached Zhirkevich at very short notice. The Russian commander’s preparations were then thrown into total confusion when the modest Frederick William suddenly emerged onto the insignificant steps of the first small house they passed on entering the city. A volley of commands more or less got the column into some variant of parade order in the narrow street but the excitement also stirred up the menagerie of ducks, geese and hens stacked on top of the gun caissons, who added their own cacophony to the military music. Behind the gun carriages and caissons followed a herd of sheep, calves and cows. They added to the confusion not just by their cries but also by attempting to array themselves into their own version of parade order too. Zhirkevich’s embarrassment was increased by the fact that these animals had all been ‘acquired’ from the king’s own province of Silesia, but Frederick William just smiled and told the Russian commander that it was good to see the troops looking so well and cheerful. The king could be morose, cold and ungracious but at heart he was a decent and well-meaning man. He also spoke and read Russian, albeit imperfectly, and he liked the Russians. It was lucky for Zhirkevich that his men’s antics had been performed before Frederick William rather than Alexander or the Grand Duke Constantine. The latter would have taken a very dim view of the Guards’ informality when on parade before an allied sovereign.49
For the Russian troops the march across Silesia and Saxony was something of a picnic. The weather was superb and, especially in Silesia, the Russian soldiers were greeted everywhere as allies and liberators. Though usually treated correctly by the Poles, the latter were seldom fully trusted by Russian officers. Much of Poland was poor at the best of times, and not improved by the passage of armies in 1812–13. By contrast, Silesia was rich and Saxony even richer. The Russian officers marvelled at the wealth, houses and lifestyles of Saxon peasant farmers. The blonde and buxom German young women were a joy to behold, though German ‘vodka’ seemed miserably thin and weak. Meanwhile, as they approached the Elbe, they could see on their left the romantic wooded slopes of the mountains dividing Saxony from Habsburg Bohemia.50
On 24 April Alexander and the Russian Guards entered Dresden, where they were to spend the Russian Easter. For the overwhelming majority of the Russian soldiers, both in Dresden and elsewhere in Saxony, the Easter services were a moving and uplifting experience. Serge Volkonsky, Prince Repnin-Volkonsky’s brother and Petr Mikhailovich Volkonsky’s brother-in-law, was an excellently educated, French-speaking officer of the Chevaliers Gardes. Nevertheless he recalls how the priests emerged from the church to greet the massed regiments with the Easter cry, ‘Christ is risen’, ‘the prayer…dear to the heart of all Christians and for us Russians all the more strongly felt because our prayers are both religious and national. On account of both sentiments, for all the Russians present this was a moment of exaltation.’ The time for prayers and picnics was drawing to a close, however. The same day that Alexander entered Dresden, Napoleon moved his headquarters forward from Mainz to Erfurt in preparation for his advance into Saxony.51
Meanwhile illness had forced Kutuzov to drop out en route to Dresden. The old field-marshal died in Bunzlau on 28 April. Kutuzov’s death had no impact on allied strategy, which remained committed to stopping Napoleon’s advance through Saxony. Alexander appointed Wittgenstein to be the new commander-in-chief. In many ways he was the most suitable candidate. No other general had won so many victories in 1812 and his reputation had been enhanced by the victorious campaign to liberate Prussia in 1813. Wittgenstein spoke German and French and could therefore communicate easily with Russia’s allies. In addition, his concern for the defence of Berlin and the Prussian heartland endeared him to the Prussians and enabled him to empathize with their worries. One problem with Wittgenstein’s appointment was that he was junior to Miloradovich, Tormasov and Barclay. The latter was still absent from the main army at the siege of Thorn but the other two full generals were deeply insulted. Tormasov departed for Russia and was no great loss. Miloradovich remained and was assuaged by daily messages of support and benevolence from Alexander.
None of this would have mattered too much had Wittgenstein chalked up a victory over Napoleon. Failure at the battle of Lutzen brought out the knives. Already prone to intervene in military operations, Alexander became even more inclined to do so as criticisms mounted of the new commander-in-chief. Unfortunately, these criticisms were often justified. Wittgenstein was out of his depth as commander-in-chief. Brave, bold, generous and even chivalrous, Wittgenstein was an inspirational corps commander but he could not master the much more complex requirements of army headquarters where authority could not always be exercised in face-to-face manner and painstaking administration and staff work were required to keep a large force operational. According to Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky, Wittgenstein’s headquarters was chaotic, with little discipline or even elementary military security being exercised over the many hangers-on who came to infest it.52
In the last days of April, as Napoleon advanced from Erfurt towards Leipzig, the allies deployed just to the south of his line of march near the town of Lutzen. Either they must try to ambush Napoleon or they must retreat rapidly so that he could not reach Dresden before them and cut off their retreat over the Elbe. The choice was not difficult since to retreat without a battle when first encountering Napoleon would damage the troops’ morale and the allies’ prestige in Germany and Austria. A surprise attack which caught the enemy on the march might defeat him, or at the very least slow down his advance.
The allied plan was devised by Diebitsch. He aimed to catch part of the enemy army while it was strung out on the march and to destroy it before the rest of Napoleon’s corps could come to its aid. The consensus is that the plan was good but its execution very flawed. This is not surprising. Wittgenstein brought with him his own staff. Almost all top positions at headquarters changed on the eve of the battle. To take but one example: Ermolov was replaced as chief of artillery by Prince Iashvili, who had previously headed the artillery of Wittgenstein’s corps. Ermolov was already in some disfavour because of his failure to bring up the artillery parks with ammunition supplies at sufficient speed, but the sudden transfer of responsibility to Iashvili resulted in the new artillery chief not knowing the whereabouts even of all the ammunition that was to hand. Further confusion occurred because this was the first time that large Russian and Prussian forces had fought side-by-side.
Diebitsch’s plan included columns moving at night to take up positions for attack by 6 a.m. on 2 May. Predictably, confusion occurred, columns bumped into each other and even the first allied line was not deployed until five hours later. Matters were not helped by the fact that the plans often arrived very late and were detailed but not always precise. To some extent the delay may even have worked in the allies’ favour, however. During the five hours that elapsed, Napoleon and the bulk of his army was marching away from the battlefield and towards Leipzig, convinced that no battle would occur that day. In addition, had the battle of Lutzen commenced at dawn, Napoleon would have had a full summer’s day to concentrate all his forces on the battlefield, with possibly dire results for the outnumbered allies.
The allies’ initial target was Ney’s isolated corps deployed near the villages of Grossgorschen and Starsiedel. It helped Wittgenstein that Ney had dispersed the five divisions of his corps and failed to take proper precautions. The initial attack by Blucher’s Prussians took the enemy by surprise. The allied high command found itself equally surprised, however, by the fact that Marmont’s corps was positioned in support of Ney and by the nature of the ground over which the battle was fought. This suggests that, despite their superiority in cavalry, allied reconnaissance was less than perfect. George Cathcart, the son of the British ambassador to Russia, was with Wittgenstein’s headquarters. He commented that because of the undulating, cultivated terrain it was impossible to see from allied headquarters what lay beyond the first high ground where the enemy was positioned. The initial Prussian attack on Grossgorschen succeeded ‘but Grossgorschen is only one of a cluster of nearly contiguous villages, interspersed with tanks, mill ponds, gardens etc., which furnished strong holding ground’. The villages on the battlefield were of ‘stone houses with narrow, cobbled lanes and stone-walled gardens’.53
For the first time the allied troops encountered a fundamental difference between Saxon and Russian
