Austerlitz: Napoleon and the Eagles of Europe (41 page)

As for the rest of the Allied army, except for Bagration’s command, there was still much confusion. Kutuzov, after abandoning the Pratzen Plateau with the Phanagoria and Ryazan Regiments, remained in the Littawa valley close to Hostieradek until about 3.30pm, at which point he ordered them to fall back eastwards towards the road to Hungary. The tsar reached a point close to Austerlitz, where he met Miloradovich holding on with some of his men, and Weyrother who ‘was tired out and in despair, and hastened away without making any attempt to excuse himself’.
²⁴
From here, a little before 4.00pm, the tsar sent General Wintzingerode to Bagration with orders for him to withdraw on Austerlitz and ‘maintain himself there as long as he could without exposing himself to disaster’.
²⁵
This move meant abandoning the road to Olmütz and with it the baggage train of the army. Elsewhere, the Imperial Guard and Liechtenstein’s V Column cavalry, the Russian and Austrian components operating independently, retired from their position close to Krzenowitz and fell back through Austerlitz. They left behind them a small mixed rearguard overlooking the Rausnitz stream, drawn from the Guard and Uvarov’s cavalry, all under the command of Podpolkovnik Ermolov who still retained two artillery pieces.
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These men finally fell back through Austerlitz around midnight when belated orders arrived recalling them. Their sudden appearance surprised Bagration, as he had no idea they had been out in front of his position.

Shortly after the tsar had ordered Bagration to Austerlitz, the sound of French soldiers cheering the arrival of Napoleon in their midst drifted on the wind to the tsar’s melancholy group. The generals were dismissed to return to their men and lead them towards Hungary, and the tsar began his journey in the same direction, reaching the village of Hodiegitz at about 5.00pm. At the same time Kutuzov was in Wazan, only about 3 miles to the west, but in the confusion neither party could find the other, although the tsar did learn that Kaiser Francis was making for Czeitsch on the Hungary road with the Austrian battalions of IV Column.

Having received this information, the tsar decided to head for Czeitsch too, about 16 miles south of Hodiegitz. With his carriage lost, Alexander set out on horseback with a handful of aides and attendants and covered 8 miles to the village of Urchitz before stopping for the night in a lowly peasants’ hut where he slept on a bed of straw. He suffered great intestinal pains during the night and at one point his doctor feared for his life, but he was well again by morning.
²⁷

The rest of the army, much of it in disorganised mobs, trudged on through the freezing night, through mud, rain and snow. The elated but exhausted French army did not pursue.

__________

*
30th Bulletin of La Grande Armée, 2 December 1805.

Chapter 17

‘The Fate of Empires’

‘A moment decides a battle,
an hour the result of a campaign,
a single day the fate of empires.’
*

Darkness drew a shroud across the battlefield, covering the dead and the dying who lay in their thousands, nourishing the damp, chilled Moravian soil with their blood.

It would appear that total Russian losses in killed, wounded, prisoners and missing amounted to somewhere between 21,000 and 25,000, of which some 5,600 stragglers eventually rejoined the army. The estimate of total Austrian losses varies between 3,500 and 5,900 of which, no doubt, some later found their way back to the army. So, by taking the middle ground and allowing for the return of stragglers, total Austro-Russian losses may have been in the region of 21,000 men, from which French sources state there were 9,767 Russian and 1,686 Austrian prisoners.

The French gave their total losses at about 8,800 (Soult’s three infantry divisions recorded losses of 4,239
¹
), although it is reported that Bernadotte believed the figure to be nearer 12,000.
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Therefore, when the guns finally fell silent, it is fair to believe that their deafening boom was replaced by the pitiful groans and pleas of at least 13,000 wounded men of all nations: the motionless bodies of another 5,000 remaining silent forever.

Yet it was not the level of casualties that decided the battle: in fact, there was little difference in the totals of killed and wounded on either side. The disjointed Allied command structure, reduced to fighting a series of individual unsupported battles, found itself completely outmanoeuvred by Napoleon’s coordinated attacks across a battlefield on which he knew every rise and fall of the terrain.

Although it was now dark, Napoleon slowly toured the battlefield, receiving a rapturous greeting from his men whenever he came across a detachment huddled around their fires. La Grande Armée was in high-spirits and too intoxicated on the elation of victory to sleep. Podpolkovnik Ermolov, left behind with his small Russian rearguard near the Rausnitz stream, could not fail to hear their celebrations: ‘I had to listen to music, songs, and happy shouting in the enemy’s camp. They taunted us with the Russian cry of “Ooora!”’
³

But away from these raucous celebrations Napoleon wandered amongst the piles of frigid corpses, posed in all the attitudes of death. He instructed his entourage to:

‘remain silent, so that we could hear the cries of the wounded. Whenever he heard one of these unfortunates he went to his side, dismounted, and made him drink a glass of brandy from the store which followed him everywhere … he remained extremely late on the battlefield; the squadron of his escort spent the whole night stripping the Russian corpses of their greatcoats, with which to cover the wounded.’
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All on the battlefield that night remarked on the bitter cold. Napoleon finally arrived at the Posoritz post house at about 10.00pm, where he intended to sleep. Before he settled down for the night he began to dictate a proclamation to the army, which opened with the words, ‘Soldiers, I am pleased with you.’ Then having recounted their exploits and victories and promising a return to France he ended: ‘My people will greet you with joy, and it will be enough for you to say: “I was at Austerlitz”, for them to reply: “There is a hero.”’

While Napoleon composed these words of victory the battlefield remained a lonely place of death and despair.

After a remarkable day, Major Bigarré of the 4ème Ligne was making himself comfortable in a room in the shattered village of Telnitz when shocking news arrived. The eagle standard stacked outside with the arms of his first battalion was revealed as that of 24ème Légère, and an officer of the regiment had arrived to claim it. Bigarré rushed outside to see for himself and was distraught to find it was true. The 1/4ème Ligne had lost their eagle in the attack by the Russian Horse Guards and until now had not realised that the one they held was not their own. Accompanied by his adjudant-major, Bigarré immediately rode off to the scene of their disastrous engagement almost 6 miles away, picking his way through the gloom and the bodies of the fallen. Once he located the spot he painstakingly traversed the ground in a vain attempt to locate the lost eagle. Already in a highly emotional state, Bigarré then came across:

‘a Russian Horse Guard … who, stretched out on his stomach, muttered French words of which I was to understand only these: “Princess Koniska, Petersburg, goodbye, always.” While wanting to raise him to put him on my horse, he expired in my arms, gripping me so extremely with sorrow that my adjudant-major did well to separate me from him. This handsome young man … appeared to have received a blow of lance or sabre which had passed through his body, because his uniform was dyed with blood on both sides.’
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It was now about 11.00pm and the lateness of the hour and the cold of the night persuaded Bigarré to abandon his fruitless search and the dead Russian guardsmen. He returned to Telnitz, leaving the battlefield to the dead and dying, feeling ‘inconsolable’ at the loss of the eagle and expressing a feeling of ‘death’ in his heart.

The citizens of Satschan, who earlier had watched the battle develop from the church tower, had thought themselves spared the horrors of war. But when Dokhturov’s men began to retreat in their direction at the end of the battle, panic set in. The village records tell that:

‘a strange fear twisted itself around everybody. “Save yourselves!” could be heard everywhere. We ran down the tower, women grasped their children, men grabbed the elderly, and we all fled for cover … On 4 December, the enemy had departed from Menitz and Satschan, and their citizens crawled with fear and caution toward their houses. The first things we saw were our devastated dwellings, full of stiff corpses and emaciated dying people, some of whom were trying to push their wounded insides back into their broken bodies, and unable, with a final rasp, dying right in front of our eyes.’

Other returning villagers ventured out onto the battlefield to see the desolation and destruction for themselves. One man found:

‘thousands of corpses stretched out on the ground one by one or in heaps. The expression on their faces was frightful to see. Hands, feet, dismembered bodies and trunks were scattered about. At one place a cripple stretched out his bloody hand and cried for help. Elsewhere we saw a soldier who had sunk up to his waist in mud and was half frozen.’

Yet, five days after the battle some wounded still lay unattended on the field. Capitaine Lejeune, working on a topographical survey of the area:

‘came upon a group of fourteen Russians, who when wounded had crawled close to each other for the sake of warmth. Twelve were already dead, but two still lived, their hollow cheeks, furrowed with the tears they had shed, bearing witness to the agony they had endured … I at once fetched some peasants from Sokolnitz, and made them carry the poor fellows to a place of security … One of them, who knew but one word of French, kept on repeating, “Monsieur, monsieur!”’
⁶

At about 4.00am on 3 December FML Fürst Liechtenstein, commander of Allied V Column, arrived at Napoleon’s headquarters on the orders of the kaiser to propose an interview and armistice between the emperors of Austria and France. Napoleon was not averse to the idea but delayed it until the following day: he felt there was much to gain by pursuing the defeated Allied army and cornering it before discussing peace.

First, however, Napoleon needed to find the Allied army that had disappeared into the darkness the previous evening. Bagration, commanding the rearguard of the army had pulled out of Austerlitz overnight and retreated down the road towards northern Hungary (now Slovakia) where he found Kienmayer and his ever-present cavalry covering the retreat of the army at Niskowitz, just over 3 miles south of Austerlitz. Bagration continued for about another 3 miles before halting north of Urchitz.

Napoleon’s cavalry patrols began searching at dawn on 3 December and incredibly, considering the amount of equipment the retreating Allied army abandoned on the road, could find no sign of them. Then Napoleon received a report from Murat, which stated that he had received information that the Allies had managed to cut back to the Brünn-Olmütz road during the night and were falling back on the latter town. The information was wrong, but unaware, Napoleon ordered Murat with the Cavalry Reserve and Lannes at the head of V Corps off on a wild-goose chase to the north-east. They captured much baggage but found no trace of the retreating Austro-Russian army. Only later in the morning, when Napoleon moved to Austerlitz did he learn the truth: the Allied army was retreating towards Hungary.

The emperor immediately recalled Murat and Lannes. Orders then despatched to Soult, Davout, the Garde Impériale and Reserve Grenadiers directed them toward the March river, the border with northern Hungary. Gudin’s breathless division of Davout’s III Corps, which on the day of the battle reached Nikolsburg after a marathon march from Pressburg, now found itself the closest formation to the retreating allies.

Benefiting from this respite, the Allied army gradually regrouped during the day, with all the Russian troops passing through Czeitsch and continuing towards Göding on the border. Once he heard the French were in Austerlitz, Kienmayer fell back to Saruschitz, from where he could support Bagration.
Other Allied formations that had not reached Austerlitz in time for the battle received instructions redirecting them on Göding. Merveldt, after his long cross-country journey following his defeat at Mariazell had gathered about 4,500 men about him at Lundenburg, about 14 miles south-west of Göding, while General Leitenant Essen I was at Napajedla with about 10,000 Russian troops, just over 30 miles east of Austerlitz.

At the same time, the Archdukes Charles and John were marching through Hungary with about 80,000 men and arrived at Körmond, 100 miles south of Göding on 6 December. And in Bohemia, Archduke Ferdinand stood menacingly, with some 10,000 men facing Wrede’s 6,500 Bavarians. Ferdinand attacked on the day of Austerlitz, pushing the Bavarians back, but unaware of the outcome of the main battle, the Bavarians successfully fought back the following day. On 4 December both sides looked to recover, then on 5 December Ferdinand attacked again, pushing the Bavarian force back through Iglau to Budwitz, at which point both sides learnt of the armistice and fighting ceased.

The value of the advice given by Kutuzov and others to avoid battle, fall back and draw in reinforcements is clear to see. Perhaps by the middle of December the Allies could have called on an army of around 170,000 men in Hungary. But by 3 December both Francis and Alexander, as well as the army that had been at Austerlitz, had lost the stomach for the fight, as well as over half their artillery and vast quantities of military equipment. Francis wanted peace.