French infractions of the armistice terms and invaded the neutral zone between the opposing armies in Silesia on 13 August. This move made sense. In a province exhausted by the presence of two big armies in June and July 1813 the neutral zone around Breslau stood out because its harvest had barely yet been tapped. This was a prize worth cornering for oneself and denying to the enemy.
More important, Blucher’s move seized the initiative and forced Napoleon to respond to allied movements rather than himself dictating events. The advance of the Army of Silesia, for example, diverted Napoleon’s attention from Barclay’s columns of Russian and Prussian troops, which at this time were marching south-westwards to join Schwarzenberg’s army in Bohemia. Had the French attacked these columns while they were strung out on the march the consequences could have been serious. In addition, by seizing the initiative Blucher caught the French forces opposite him by surprise and pushed them right back out of the neutral zone and all the way over the river Bober. Blucher advanced with Sacken’s Army Corps of 18,000 Russian troops on his right, Yorck’s 38,000 Prussians in the centre and Langeron’s 40,000 Russians on his left.
Count Alexandre de Langeron, the senior Russian officer in Blucher’s army, was one of the many French emigres in Russian service. His first experience of battle had been in the American War of Independence. He had joined the Russian army besieging the Ottoman fortress of Izmail in 1790, partly out of a sense of adventure but also, so it was whispered, to escape the consequences of a duel with a bishop. Langeron won the respect of the Russians by the courage and enterprise he showed during the siege and he remained in Russian service for the rest of his life. The first time Langeron saw Paris in many years was when his troops stormed the heights of Montmartre outside the city’s gates in March 1814. He worked his way up the army’s ranks, fighting mostly against the Turks but also at Austerlitz, where his less than brilliant performance excited Alexander’s anger and almost cost him his career. Subsequently Langeron had regained favour through his performance against the Turks, but few people doubted that the count was a competent rather than a brilliant general.26
Langeron cut something of a strange figure in Blucher’s Russo-
Prussian army. He was very much the southern Frenchman, dark in complexion with black eyes and hair. He had the charm, the wit and the conversation of the Old Regime Parisian salons. He wrote tragedies and songs. Extremely absent-minded, he loved word-games, puzzles and charades. At times he would march up and down, his head down, his hands behind his back, lost in his thoughts and riddles. On the battlefield, however, he was calm and imposing and had a good eye for terrain. He had learned to speak a fluent and voluble Russian but in a weird accent that was often incomprehensible to his soldiers. Nevertheless he was well liked by the men and the admiration was mutual. One of his most endearing characteristics was his enormous admiration for the courage, decency and self-sacrifice of the ordinary Russian soldiers whom – as he always put it – he had the great honour to command. Perhaps there was in this a touch of the colonial officer, who far preferred the doughty native peasantry to the vulgar and pushy bourgeois back at home. But Langeron was also generous, even chivalrous, to his officers, quick to give praise to others and often critical about himself.
As the senior Russian officer in Blucher’s army, however, Langeron had some responsibility for good relations between the Russian and Prussian troops and their commanders. This presented problems. Langeron spoke no German and Blucher had not a word of French or Russian. Communications went through Blucher’s chief of staff, Gneisenau, in the French language. Like most Frenchmen of his day, Langeron thought Germans were rather a joke, once commenting that ‘the heaviness, the stiff formality, the slow imagination of this nation and their uncouthness do not make them agreeable to other people’. Gneisenau hated the French even more than Langeron disliked the Germans. In addition, Blucher’s chief of staff was something of a radical, who dreamed of arousing the German people to the same level of nationalist frenzy which had seized France in the Revolution. A Frenchman with similar inclinations he would have hated but understood; an emigre count fighting against his own nation was a different matter.27
The command structure of the Army of Silesia in fact had the potential for disaster. Sacken and Blucher could at least communicate in German.
In time they came to admire each other’s qualities. Their good relations were an unanticipated blessing, however, because Sacken was a sharp-tongued and short-tempered man with a poor reputation as a subordinate. Even so, in comparison with Yorck he was an angel. The Prussian corps commander thought Blucher was an idiot and the much younger Gneisenau a mere theoretician of war and a dangerous radical. The fact that he was subordinated to this pair was an obvious disgrace to merit and common sense. It was with these senior commanders that the Army of Silesia woke up on 21 August to the fact that it now faced Napoleon himself, his Guards and the core of his reserves, which had raced up to support the corps retreating before Blucher’s forces.
Blucher reacted in accordance with the Trachenberg plan. His corps retreated and refused to become engaged in a major battle. As one might by now expect, the Russians did this with cool professionalism. On the right wing, outside Bunzlau, Sacken waited calmly for the five hours that it took the corps of Ney, Marmont and Sebastiani to deploy against him. Then he left it to the disciplined skill of Lieven’s infantry and Ilarion Vasilchikov’s horsemen to mount a rearguard action that frustrated the enemy commanders and kept the French at a respectful distance. In the Belostok Regiment alone ten soldiers won military medals for their calmness, courage and skill in the rearguard action at Bunzlau on 21 August. The infantry was helped enormously by the fact that Vasilchikov was one of the ablest light cavalry commanders in Europe and his regiments were far superior in every way to the horsemen of General Sebastiani’s French Second Cavalry Corps, by whom they were opposed.28
On the other wing of Blucher’s army Langeron’s rearguard also performed well under heavy pressure. Its cavalry was ably commanded by General Georgii Emmanuel, the son of a Serbian colonist in southern Russia. The overall commander of the rearguard was Aleksandr Rudzevich, a Crimean Tatar who had been baptized into the Orthodox Church at the age of 12. In principle, Rudzevich, a trained staff officer, was Langeron’s chief of staff. In fact, however, Langeron used his quartermaster-general, Colonel Paul Neidhardt, in this role and employed Rudzevich as his troubleshooter wherever the going was toughest. He wrote in his memoirs that Rudzevich, unique in his combination of staff training and long combat experience in the Caucasus, was much the ablest general in his Army Corps. For once, Blucher and Gneisenau agreed wholeheartedly with Langeron’s opinion. Gneisenau wrote to the Prussian chancellor, Hardenberg, that on 21 August Rudzevich’s rearguard risked being cut off by very superior enemy forces. Many generals would have lost their balance and judgement in so dangerous a position but Rudzevich had reacted with intelligence, calm and courage, pushing the French back and getting his men across the river Bober under their noses.29
How the Prussian troops, and above all the Landwehr, would cope with mounting a rearguard action against Napoleon was more uncertain. In fact the Prussians fought with courage and discipline in the four-day retreat back from the river Bober to behind the river Katzbach, where Blucher’s advance had commenced only eight days before. The Army of Silesia’s marches and counter-marches exhausted the troops, however, and in particular the Prussian militia. The 6th Silesian Landwehr Regiment, for example, was 2,000 strong when Blucher’s advance began; eight days later it had melted down to just 700 men. Above all, this was due to the speed of the army’s advance and subsequent retreat. In addition, it took time for Blucher’s staff to get into their stride: the Army of Silesia had after all only come together on the very eve of the campaign. In the retreat from the Bober to the Katzbach columns sometimes crossed or got entangled in baggage trains. Night marches were a particular source of exhaustion to Yorck’s corps.
Given the personalities involved, it was inevitable that tempers would explode. After a furious argument with Blucher, Yorck sent in his resignation to Frederick William III, noting that ‘it may be that my limited abilities do not enable me to understand the brilliant conceptions by which General Blucher is guided’.30 Blucher’s worst problems were with Langeron. Though personalities played a part, a more basic issue was their main cause. When the Trachenberg plan was originally devised, of the three allied groupings the only one explicitly urged to caution was the Army of Silesia. This was because at that time it seemed that this army would be only 50,000 strong. By the beginning of the campaign its numbers had actually doubled but Blucher’s instructions from the monarchs still urged him to avoid major battles. Blucher promptly responded that, if these were his orders, then the allies needed to find an alternative commander more suited to caution. Barclay and Diebitsch replied, no doubt in the monarchs’ name, that of course no one could stop the commander of 100,000 men from seizing whatever opportunities presented themselves. On this assurance Blucher accepted the command.31
Langeron was informed of Blucher’s initial instructions but not of the manner in which they had been changed by Barclay and Diebitsch. It is possible that this was an oversight amidst the frantic last-minute preparations to move Barclay’s force into Bohemia. It is also possible that it was a deliberate ploy by Alexander to use Langeron to
