Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (65 page)

The outcome was now decided. Realizing that no hope remained of averting disaster, Napoleon ordered that the retreat of his forces begin under cover of darkness in the small hours of the morning. By eleven o’clock on the morning of 19 October, the French Emperor himself had left the city and was making his way back to the Rhine. A rearguard of 30,000 men stayed back to hold the city and cover the retreat. Yet the battle was still far from over, for the defenders, four of whom on average were manning each metre of the inner perimeter, had no intention of yielding without a fight. The allies pressed in along a wide arc from the north-west to the south of the city. As Bülow and his corps approached its eastern defences, they saw that the forward positions had been abandoned and hundreds of wagons overturned to impede their advance. There was a pause while a path was cleared using artillery fire. Entering the built-up area before the main wall, the vanguard of Bülow’s corps was caught in intense fire from French marksmen on the roofs and upper
floors of the buildings on both sides of the narrow street. One thousand of his Prussians were lost within the first few minutes of the fighting. Artillery was virtually useless, since the men were locked in hand-to-hand combat with defending troops as they fought their way from street corner to street corner. Charging into a side street, a battalion of 400 East Prussian Landwehr were cut off and mauled by the defenders; only half of them escaped with their lives. The fighting was especially desperate at the Grimma Gate, where retreating French defenders found themselves locked out of the city – the Badenese troops manning the gate from within had received instructions to allow no one to pass. The stranded Frenchmen were massacred by the approaching Prussians, many of whom were Landwehr men attached to Bülow’s vanguard.

33. Johann Lorenz Rugendas
, The Battle of Leipzig,
16–19 October 1813; fighting before the Grimma Gate

By noon, the city had been breached in the east and the north and was on the point of collapse. For the defenders, no option remained but to flee westwards across the Elster bridge in the footsteps of the Grand Army. Napoleon had ordered that the bridge be mined, held until the retreat, and blown up after the last defenders had left the city. But the hapless corporal who had been charged with this task panicked when
he saw Cossacks approaching and detonated the charges while the bridge was still choked with French soldiers and horses escaping the approaching allies. A thunderous explosion shook the entire city, destroying the only route of retreat and sending a macabre shower of human and equine body parts raining down into the waters of the fast-flowing river and on to the streets and housetops of the western perimeter. Trapped, the remaining defenders either drowned trying to cross the river, were cornered and killed, or gave themselves up.

The battle of Leipzig was over. It had cost Napoleon 73,000 men, of whom 30,000 had been taken prisoner and 5,000 had deserted. The allies had lost 54,000 men, of whom 16,033 were Prussians. During three days of fighting, an average of over 30,000 men had been killed or wounded each day. The epic struggle for control of the city did not end the war against Napoleon, but it did bring to a close his dominion in Germany. The road to the Rhine and to France itself now lay open.

The significance of these events for Prussia’s re-emergence from the humiliation imposed at Tilsit in 1807 can scarcely be overstated. The Prussians played a crucial role in the campaign of 1813. Indeed, they were consistently the most active and aggressive element within the composite allied command. Although Bülow, as a corps commander within the Northern Army, was nominally subordinate to the cautious Bernadotte, he disregarded orders from his superior at several key points during the campaign to seek decisive engagements with French forces. Bülow’s successful defence of Berlin, which changed the course of the war, was launched without support from Bernadotte. During the Northern Army’s approach to Leipzig, it was Bülow who forced the pace. The impulsive Blücher likewise disregarded an order from the joint allied command to withdraw into Bohemia in September, choosing instead to march down the Elbe – had he complied with the command, it would have been impossible for the allies to concentrate their forces against Napoleon at the critical moment. A string of largely Prussian victories – at Dennewitz, Gross Beeren, on the Katzbach, Hagelberg and Kulm – helped to reverse the setback suffered by Schwarzenberg at Dresden and reinforced Prussia’s claim to parity with Austria.
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The same pattern can be observed during the campaign of the following year. In February 1814, as the allies approached the borders of France, Schwarzenberg and Metternich argued that it was now time to sue for peace with a weakened Napoleon, who could safely be left on
his throne. Once again, it was Blücher who pressed urgently for a continuation of the war, while Grolman persuaded the Prussian king and the Russian tsar to allow Blücher and Bülow to consolidate their forces and launch an independent offensive.
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Whereas the Austrian command approached the struggle with Napoleon in the spirit of an eighteenth-century cabinet war, in which the purpose of military victories is to secure acceptable peace terms, the Prussian war-makers aimed at a more ambitious objective: the destruction of Napoleon’s forces and of his capacity for making war. This was the outlook that would later be distilled in Clausewitz’s
On War
.

In the decisive Flemish battles of 1815, too, the Prussian contribution was crucial. On 16 June, when the French launched the first major attack of the 1815 summer campaign at Ligny, it was the Prussians who did most of the fighting and took the heaviest losses. After receiving a battering at Ligny, where Wellington failed, for reasons that are still in dispute, to reinforce an exposed Prussian position, the Prussians regrouped with astonishing speed and concentrated around Wavre. From here they set out early on 18 June to link up with Wellington’s forces at Waterloo. Marching through uneven ground still boggy from recent rain, the advance units of the Prussian 4th Army under Count Bülow reached the battlefield in the mid-afternoon and immediately charged the French right flank at Plancenoit, fighting bitterly for control of the village. Some hours later, at around 7.00 p.m., General Zieten’s 1st Army corps arrived to reinforce Wellington’s left flank. This was a crucial moment for the outcome of the battle. La Haye Sainte, a fortified farm close to the British lines, had fallen to the French an hour before, clearing the way for a potentially decisive strike against Wellington’s battered centre. Napoleon seemed on the verge of victory. It was the arrival of Zieten’s corps that allowed Wellington to transfer desperately needed forces to the most vulnerable parts of his line. Napoleon, conversely, had been forced to deploy men from his own centre to retake Plancenoit, where the Prussians threatened to open up the French rear. The Old Guard did briefly succeed in retaking Plancenoit, but between 8.00 and 8.30 p.m., after desperate house-to-house fighting, it fell once again to the Prussians, who now controlled the key to the French rear. Seeing the helter-skelter flight of French troops from Plancenoit, Wellington seized the moment and ordered a general advance. The French forces broke at last and fled.
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In the brief time at their disposal, the military reformers had done much to improve the performance of the Prussian army that had so signally failed in 1806. Particularly striking was the improvement in the quality of command. This was due in part to the excellence of a cohort of outstanding generals – Blücher, Yorck, Kleist, Bülow – who had emerged from the débâcle of 1806–7 with their reputations unscathed. The reformed command system was flexible enough to allow corps commanders a degree of autonomy on the battlefield. Lieutenant-General Zieten, for example, had been ordered by Blücher’s headquarters to reinforce the Prussian 4th Army corps at Plancenoit; only at the last moment did he resolve to disregard this instruction and support Wellington’s left flank, an act of insubordination that may have saved the battle for the allies.
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Even more significant was the integration of staff officers into the command structure. For the first time in the history of the Prussian army, responsible staff officers shadowed all senior commanders. Gneisenau was assigned to Blücher and the two formed an inspirational team, each recognizing the particular talents of the other. When Blücher was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Oxford after the war, he commented with characteristic diffidence: ‘Well, if I am to become a doctor, you must at least make Gneisenau an apothecary, for we two belong always together.’
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Not all such partnerships were as harmonious as this one, but throughout the Prussian armed forces, the new arrangements created a more responsive and cohesive fighting force.

It would be mistaken, however, to infer that the Prussian army of 1813–15 was a radically new instrument of war. The impact of the post-1807 reforms was rapidly diluted during 1813 and 1814 by casualties among veterans and a massive influx of recruits unschooled in the new methods. Little was done to heighten firepower through the technological improvement of weaponry, partly because the reformers tended – as one would expect – to focus above all on men, communication and motivation. The new Landwehr had been devised to provide the regular army with a highly motivated auxiliary force. However, while individual Landwehr units played an important supporting role in a number of engagements, their combat record was mixed and the Landwehr failed to fulfil the high expectations of its architects. The arrangements for training were still rudimentary, so that many Landwehr men lacked all but the most basic skills when they went to war.
The great majority were ignorant of the new regulations of 1812, which, in the spirit of the military reforms, emphasized skirmishing and marksmanship skills.
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The Prussian military infrastructure also proved incapable of coping with the rapid proliferation of Landwehr units. As late as summer 1815, many of the men lacked coats, shoes and even trousers.
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Uniforms and equipment were locally financed and often of inferior quality. There were correspondingly wide variations in fighting quality. Whereas the Landwehr of the Northern Army fought as effectively as the regular army units beside it, those attached to Blücher’s Silesian Army proved unreliable under fire.
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The military reformers aimed above all to harness the war effort to the patriotic enthusiasm of the Prussian population. In this, too, they were only partly successful. Not all subjects of the Prussian Crown were equally moved by patriotic appeals. In parts of Silesia and West Prussia, the raising of Landwehr regiments prompted many to flee across the border into Russian-controlled Poland. Many merchants, landowners and innkeepers clung to the old system of exemptions and begged the authorities to overlook their sons or presented medical certificates of dubious authenticity suggesting that these were too sickly to serve. Patriotism was not only regionally, but also socially uneven. Educated males – high-school pupils, university students and men with academic qualifications – were over-represented in the volunteer contingents. They constituted 2 per cent of the population, but 12 per cent of volunteers. Even more remarkable are the figures for artisans, who accounted for 7 per cent of the population as a whole but 41 per cent of volunteers. Conversely, the peasants who made up nearly three-quarters of the kingdom’s population supplied only 18 per cent of the volunteers, and most of these were either landless day-labourers or free farmers from outside the East-Elbian agrarian heartland of the Prussian state. The social constituency for patriotic activism had expanded greatly since the days of the Seven Years War, but it remained a predominantly urban phenomenon.
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Within these limitations, the Prussian public responded on an unprecedented scale to the government’s call for help. The ‘gold for iron’ fund-raising campaign brought in 6.5 million thalers in donations and there was a flood of Prussian volunteers for the Landwehr and the free corps units of the volunteer riflemen. For the first time, young men from the Jewish communities, now legally eligible for military service and eager
to demonstrate their patriotic gratitude for emancipation, flocked to join the colours, either in free corps or Landwehr units. There was a Jewish fund-raising campaign, in the course of which rabbis donated Kaddish cups and Torah-roll ornaments for the war effort.
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It was a mark of the modernity and inclusiveness of this war that women played a prominent role in supporting the state through organized charitable activity. For the first time in its history the dynasty expressly enlisted the support of its female subjects: the ‘Appeal to the Women of the Prussian State’, signed by twelve women of the Prussian royal family and published in March 1813, announced the foundation of a Women’s Association for the Good of the Fatherland and urged ‘noble-minded wives and daughters of all ranks’ to assist in the war effort by donating jewellery, cash, raw materials and labour. Between 1813 and 1815, some 600 women’s associations were created for these purposes. Here too, Jewish women were a conspicuous sub-group. Rahel Levin organized a circle of wealthy women friends to coordinate an ambitious fund-raising campaign and travelled to Prague in the summer of 1813 to oversee the creation of a medical mission dedicated to the care of the Prussian wounded. ‘I am in touch with our commissariat and our staff surgeon,’ she wrote to her friend and future husband Karl Varnhagen. ‘I have a great deal of lint, bandages, rags, stockings, shirts; arrange for meals in several districts of the city; attend personally to thirty or forty fusiliers and soldiers every day; discuss and inspect everything.’
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