Russia Against Napoleon (65 page)

Eugen’s exhausted battalions were all now committed and he appealed to Ermolov to release the Izmailovsky Guards to drive the French back. Ermolov refused and a ferocious argument ensued. According to Eugen’s aide-de-camp, Ermolov shouted, ‘the Prince is a German and doesn’t give a damn whether the Russian Guards survive or not: but my duty is to save at least something of his Guard for the emperor’. In this moment some of the underlying strains in the Russian high command came out, but Ermolov’s refusal was by no means just xenophobic and irrational: the Izmailovskys comprised two of the only three battalions he still held in reserve. Eugen appealed to Ostermann-Tolstoy, however, and the Izmailovskys were released. The two battalions stormed forward and drove back the French but themselves suffered very heavy casualties.
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The Prussian general staff history cannot be suspected of bias since there were no Prussian troops present on 29 August. It comments that the fighting at Priesten was among the most ferocious in the entire Napoleonic wars. Sir Robert Wilson, present on the battlefield that day, wrote that ‘the enemy could not gain an inch of ground…Never was an action more gloriously fought by the Russians – never was success more important.’ Charles Stewart, also at the battle of Kulm, wrote subsequently of the ‘reckless bravery’ and ‘dauntless conduct of His Imperial Majesty’s Guards’. Shortly after the counter-attack of the Izmailovskys, Ostermann-Tolstoy was hit by a cannon ball which tore off part of his arm. Carried to the rear, he told the stretcher party, ‘I am satisfied. This is the price I paid for the honour of commanding the Guards.’
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Not long after that the second brigade of Philippon’s division arrived on the battlefield and a final attempt was made to storm Priesten. Both Philippon’s brigades attacked the village in two big columns. The Russian batteries left of Priesten were forced to withdraw and the village was overrun. By now the Russians only had two companies of the Preobrazhenskys in reserve and matters looked desperate. The two companies counter-attacked and were joined by some of Shakhovskoy’s battalions, though the latter were exhausted by days of continuous fighting and had almost no ammunition left. Salvation came, however, from the Guards cavalry. During the battle the Guards Dragoons and the Guards Lancers had arrived from the defile at Graupen and had been deployed behind the Guards infantry. At the moment of crisis Diebitsch also arrived from Barclay to announce that large numbers of fresh infantry would shortly reach the battlefield. After a brief discussion with Eugen he rode over to the Guards Dragoons and led them forward against the French infantry who were surging forward around Priesten.

Nikolai Kovalsky was a young officer of the Guards Dragoons in 1813. He recalls how the regiment was led down narrow and sometimes precipitous paths from the mountains into the Teplitz valley by staff officers and by two local shepherds who acted as guides. Apparently, when Diebitsch rode up to the Guards Dragoons and initially ordered them to charge no one moved because no one knew who he was. Only when he opened his coat and displayed his orders and medals did he get a response. First one dragoon, then more and finally the whole regiment moved forward. Ermolov tried to stop this disorderly attack which he had not authorized but it was too late. Kovalsky records that the French cavalry panicked and fled at their approach and the infantry did the same after just one volley. The weak French response undoubtedly owed much to the fact that while the Guards Dragoons were threatening their front the Guards Lancers were driving deep into their right flank and their rear. Almost certainly it was the Lancers who did the most serious fighting because while the Dragoons’ losses were relatively modest, the Lancers lost one-third of their officers and men during the battle.
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Nevertheless the Guards cavalry’s attack was a triumphant success. By their own estimate, French losses were very heavy and Philippon’s attack was shattered. Sir Robert Wilson wrote that ‘the lancers and dragoons of the guard charged through garden-ground and ravines upon the right column, which threw down its arms and fled with the most rapid haste, but many hundreds were killed and several hundred made prisoners. The other column retired with more order but not less speed.’ Though on a smaller scale, the episode reminds one of the attack of the British heavy cavalry on d’Erlon’s infantry in the first stage of the battle of Waterloo. On that occasion, too, French infantry advancing in column and convinced that victory was in their grasp were hit unexpectedly by a mass of enemy cavalry. The Russian cavalry were much more disciplined than their British equivalents, however. With Gobrecht’s cavalry brigade deployed in the rear of the French columns they needed to be. The Russian counter-attack was not followed, in British style, by a mad pursuit into the arms of the enemy’s reserves. The order of the day of the commanding general of the Guards cavalry praised not just the courage and timing of the attack but also the ‘perfect obedience and attention to words of command and trumpet calls’ shown by the troops, and the fact that they remained ‘always ready to resume excellent formation to confront and defeat the enemy’.
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The rout of Philippon’s division ended the day’s fighting. For the Russians it had been a day of genuine glory. Roughly 14,700 Russian soldiers had kept some 30,000 French troops at bay. But glory had been very costly. No fewer than 6,000 Russians were dead or wounded. Until the very last stage of the battle all the fighting had been done by the infantry: of these 12,000 men, 5,200 were casualties, 2,800 of whom were Guardsmen and the rest from Eugen’s regiments. Among the wounded was Aleksandr Chicherin. Fixing a handkerchief to the tip of his sword so that his men could see him, Chicherin was hit in the shoulder blade while trying to lead forward his platoon of the Semenovskys. The doctors were unable to remove the bullet and he died in agony some weeks later in the Russian military hospital in Prague. On his deathbed he persuaded a rich relative to give 500 rubles to help soldiers of his regiment who had been wounded during the battle at Kulm.
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That evening the allied leaders in Teplitz decided to counter-attack the next day in order to drive Vandamme further from the defiles out of the Erzgebirge before he was reinforced by Napoleon, as all the allied generals expected him to be. The mood in Teplitz was anything but triumphant. The Dresden campaign had been a disaster and had cost huge numbers of men, especially in the Austrian regiments. Now Alexander’s Guards had also suffered terribly. During the battle for Dresden leadership and coordination in the allied high command had been woeful. Tensions were now running high between the Russians and Prussians on the one hand and the Austrians on the other. The Austrians were accused of having marched slowly, which was true, and fought badly, which was mostly unfair. But it was the case that the new recruits from Bohemia who filled up the ranks of Mesko and Klenau’s regiments were poorly clothed and trained, and had not been ready for the rigours of the campaign. On the other hand Schwarzenberg approached Francis II requesting permission to resign, justifiably exhausted and indignant at frequent Russo-Prussian disobedience to his orders. Meanwhile large numbers of Russian and Prussian troops were still stuck in the Erzgebirge and needed to be extracted and given time to recover.

One of the largest of these contingents was Lieutenant-General von Kleist’s Prussian Army Corps, which had retreated from Dresden mostly down the Old Teplitz Road through Glashütte and Fürstenwalde.

Although Saint-Cyr was supposedly pursuing the Prussians, in fact he lost touch with them after they left Glashütte. Kleist’s men began to arrive at Fürstenwalde by four o’clock in the afternoon of 29 August. Shortly before then Frederick William’s aide-de-camp, Count von Schweinitz, arrived with orders from the king for Kleist to get through the defiles into the Teplitz valley and go to the aid of Ostermann-Tolstoy. As Kleist told Schweinitz, by now it was too late in the day to do this and in any case his exhausted troops had to rest before being called on for further efforts. Schweinitz informed Kleist that the defiles out of the Erzgebirge at Teplitz and Graupen were completely choked by Russian troops and baggage. This meant that it was impossible for Kleist to get into the Teplitz valley from Fürstenwalde by marching south or south-west.

That evening another envoy, Colonel von Schöler, arrived from the monarchs with orders for Kleist to march south-eastwards via Nollendorf into Vandamme’s rear. In fact, however, by the time Schöler arrived Kleist had already reconnoitred the road to Nollendorf and had decided on this move for himself. A key figure in this decision was Kleist’s chief of staff, Lieutenant-Colonel Karl von Grolmann, who had studied Frederick the Great’s campaigns in the region and knew the terrain well. Kleist’s decision was extremely courageous. By marching on to the Teplitz highway at Nollendorf he would be between Vandamme’s corps and the reinforcements which Kleist, Vandamme himself and indeed almost every other general in the neighbourhood assumed Napoleon was sending down the highway to support the incursion into Bohemia. Kleist and Grolmann knew and weighed the risks and nevertheless committed themselves to marching via Nollendorf from first light. The allied victory at the battle of Kulm on 30 August owed much to luck and accident but, contrary to some accounts, there was nothing accidental about Kleist’s appearance in Vandamme’s rear.
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Colonel von Schöler got back to allied headquarters at 3 a.m. on 30 August, woke Diebitsch and informed him of Kleist’s intentions. For the first time the headquarters staff began to see the possibility of a resounding victory over Vandamme. At first light Diebitsch and Toll set off to reconnoitre the battlefield and plan the allied attack. By the normal standards of the Russian high command – or perhaps of human nature – Toll and Diebitsch ought to have been enemies. They were the ablest Russian staff officers of their day. Until Kutuzov’s death Toll had been the leading influence at headquarters as regards strategy and had won the confidence of Alexander. When Wittgenstein took over the command, Toll was pushed aside and Diebitsch became the key adviser on strategy to both the commander-in-chief and the emperor. He preserved this position under Barclay de Tolly. There was initially some tension between Toll and Diebitsch. Most men would have been very jealous of the latter’s success, not least because Diebitsch was eight years younger than Toll. Both men, and especially Toll, were famous for passionate temperaments, great energy and very strong wills. This could easily have made matters worse between them. Very soon, however, mutual respect won out. To the great credit of both men, they understood each other’s intelligence, resolution and absolute commitment to victory and to the army’s well-being. By the time of the autumn campaign they had become firm allies and close friends, which they remained until Diebitsch’s death in 1831.
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The two generals returned to Barclay’s headquarters convinced that the Russians must pin down Vandamme’s right and centre between Straden and Priesten, while Colloredo and Bianchi’s Austrian divisions, supported by Russian cavalry, worked their way through and around the French left flank in the south. They had spotted the weakness of Vandamme’s left, his vulnerability to an outflanking movement, and the fact that the Austrian approach could to a great extent be concealed behind the Strisowitz heights. If, as was now expected, Kleist struck into Vandamme’s rear at the same time as the Austrians were turning his flank, the possibilities of a decisive victory were clear. Without Kleist the allies outnumbered Vandamme by perhaps five to four. If the Prussians joined the battle, however, then allied superiority would be massive. Barclay, who commanded the allied forces on the battlefield, accepted Diebitsch’s and Toll’s suggestions and the counter-attack was launched in the morning of 30 August.
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For once in August 1813, things went more or less as the allied commanders had planned. It was in fact Vandamme who restarted the battle at seven o’clock by again trying to batter his way through the Russians at Straden. Overnight the First Guards Division had withdrawn into reserve, to be replaced by the Second Guards and the First Grenadier divisions. Pyshnitsky’s regiments, cut off on 28 August, had rejoined Eugen’s corps. The Russians stopped Vandamme’s attack without much trouble. Colloredo went into action at about 9.30. He quickly spotted the possibilities of outflanking the French troops facing him. Barclay agreed to Colloredo’s proposal to shift to his right and Bianchi’s division moved up to fill the gap. The threat from the south caught the French by surprise and they were unable to stop the Austrian infantry’s advance, which kept threatening to outflank them on their left. Within an hour the Austrian infantry was over the Strisowitz heights and advancing deep into Vandamme’s left flank towards Kulm and Auschine. The Austrians were well supported by Russian cavalry, which overran one big French battery and kept the French infantry in a constant state of alarm. Austrian and Russian artillery got up onto all the heights to the south of Vandamme’s position and inflicted heavy casualties on the French infantry as they tried to make a stand in Kulm and Auschine.

At this point Kleist’s corps of 25,000 infantry and 104 guns joined the fray. Amidst the confusion of battle it was initially unclear both to the French and to the allied commanders whether these new troops were the Prussians or Napoleon’s reinforcements. Colloredo, for instance, stopped his advance until the situation was clarified. Once Kleist’s artillery opened fire, however, all doubts disappeared. Vandamme’s situation was now desperate but he responded calmly and courageously. He accepted the need to sacrifice his artillery and planned to stage a fighting withdrawal in the west against the Russians and in the south against the Austrians, while breaking through to the east against the Prussian forces on the Teplitz highway. His plan partly succeeded in that much of his cavalry did break through Kleist’s corps and make its escape up the highway. This happened above all because most of Kleist’s units were Landwehr battalions filled with exhausted militiamen, very many of whom were seeing action for the first time. Trained infantry would have deployed across the road and stopped the cavalry’s advance but the Landwehr battalions panicked and scattered into the surrounding forest. Kleist’s corps did, however, rally in time to block the French infantry which were trying to retreat in their cavalry’s wake.