Exposition

The years 2013–2014 mark the bicentenary of the Wars of Liberation, which culminated in the defeat and abdication of the Emperor Napoleon. Surprisingly, they constitute a relatively obscure period in Napoleonic historiography and even Napoleonic history, which seems, all too often in the textbooks, to jump from disaster in Russia to defeat at Waterloo. This is especially true of works by historians who seem to know no German or Russian and whose much praised and well-advertised histories include no references to Russian or German sources.Footnote ² Indeed, I can think of at least one historian who has apparently spent a lifetime writing on Napoleon but who seems to have no idea why he was defeated. Among Anglo-Saxon writers only Gordon Craig ever truly examined the campaigns of the Wars of Liberation in terms of coalition warfare;Footnote ³ even recent German and Austrian historiography shows little interest in the campaigns themselves, despite the very lively disputes they gave rise to in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Yet Napoleon dominated Europe militarily from 1797 till 1813. Even during his Russian campaign, he was not defeated in any major battle and indeed, until 1813, had only been defeated once by the Austrian Archduke Charles in 1809 at Aspern, a defeat he made up for almost immediately by victory at Wagram (where in fact the Austrians again performed extremely well).Footnote ⁴ Then, almost immediately after his retreat from Russia, Napoleon assembled an army of 400,000 and controlled Europe from the Channel to the Elbe. When the Russians and Prussians challenged him in May 1813 at Lützen and Bautzen, Napoleon defeated them again, leaving the Russians ready to retreat into Poland to recuperate and abandon their Prussian allies. Scharnhorst, the Prussian military reformer, was fatally wounded at Lützen, where in the words of one leading military historian,Footnote ⁵ “the enemy collapsed [and] Napoleon once again demonstrated his ability to pin superior numbers, reinforce the decisive point and counter-attack.” After Bautzen, despite a superiority in cavalry of three to one and a superiority in artillery of two to one, the allies had to relinquish the defensive line of the Oder as well as Breslau. At first no official Prussian bulletin was released after the battle; eventually it was announced that the battle had been “broken off” with no figure given for Prussian losses.Footnote ⁶ If he had had sufficient cavalry (he had lost hundreds of thousands of horses in Russia), Napoleon would surely have routed his enemies.Footnote ⁷ Only Austrian mediation between the allies and with Napoleon saved the day. The Russian army remained in Germany, close to the Austrian border, while Napoleon agreed to an armistice. Yet, in less than a year, Napoleon had been defeated, had abdicated as emperor, and was on his way to Elba. So how did this happen? Most books do not really explain it.

Germans, however, have their own, peculiar explanation: The German people rose up under Prussian leadership and defeated the tyrant. As Johann Gustav Droysen put it in his seminal lectures on the “era of the wars of liberation”:Footnote ⁸ “for the first time in centuries, the German Volk, together and with a deep sense of unity, struggled and won.” Whatever their part—and it shall be examined presently—the Wars of Liberation certainly mark a key moment in history for Germans and in the history of the development of their national self-consciousness. In the words of Helmut Berding:

Prussians, in particular, claim the wars for themselves. Wilhelm Capelle, for example, the editor of the 1940 edition of Blücher's Letters, wrote in his foreword: “Prussia's struggle is unique in all history. She was then a state of 4.5 million inhabitants against the Napoleonic world empire with its enormous resources, against Napoleon himself, one of the greatest commanders, the greatest man of will, of all time. Blücher and Gneisenau are the heroes, who next to Scharnhorst and Stein, as men of action, serve before all others as the liberators of Germany from the yoke of the Corsican.”Footnote ¹⁰ According to the Prussian legend, their great hero, Stein, a key reformer who had fled to Russia from Prussia in 1808 to avoid arrest by Napoleon, pushed Tsar Alexander I into continuing the war against Napoleon in Germany; then King Frederick William III and General Yorck arranged for Prussia to desert Napoleon, first by the Convention of Tauroggen at the end of 1812 and then by the Treaty of Kallisch of February 1813. Then, when Frederick William appealed to his subjects to help him, the students, or the educated youth of the country in particular, flooded recruiting stations to back their king and his reforming ministers, who had progressively rebuilt Prussia after the humiliations of 1806–1807 and who now intended to unite and reform the whole of Germany. Thereafter, with all this popular support, the great Prussian military heroes, Blücher and Gneisenau, led Germany to victory over the French tyrant. The roles of Austria and Russia in the wars are somehow forgotten—along with such facts that almost two-thirds of Blücher's army was Russian. Already in October 1913 when the centenary of the battle of Leipzig (“the battle of the nations” after all) was commemorated, Conrad von Hötzendorf, the chief of the Austrian General Staff who had been invited to Leipzig for the celebrations, noted that Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Swedish guests had been “assigned the role of mere spectators.” He added:

Recent historiography, it must be conceded, has quietly demolished the Prussian myth: Stein had nothing to do with Alexander's decision to pursue the war into Germany;Footnote ¹² Frederick William III was against the Convention of Tauroggen that may even have been forced on Yorck by pressure from his troops.Footnote ¹³ The king only agreed to the Treaty of Kalisch after negotiations over Poland and the restoration of Prussian territory had been agreed with Russia.Footnote ¹⁴ Ideally, he would have preferred to remain neutral. It is now crystal clear that there were huge differences between the Prussian reformers concerning both the future of reform and the future of Germany; indeed, they were deeply divided.Footnote ¹⁵ Many may have hoped that the reforms would serve simply to strengthen the Prussian bureaucracy, not democratize Prussia or help unify Germany.Footnote ¹⁶ In the end, it has been argued, the true beneficiaries of free trade and agrarian reforms were the nobles.Footnote ¹⁷ Frederick William himself distrusted almost all the reformers—including the military leaders. In any case, in the words of John Sheehan, the idea that the Prussian reformers were the leaders of German modernization is also a myth:

As for the volunteers of 1813, it turns out that they were not the students and educated youth—who made up about only 10 percent of Landwehr units—but were overwhelmingly (80–90 percent) peasants, along with day laborers and lowly civil servants.Footnote ¹⁹ In the words of one modern historian: “The motives behind this mass movement were not related to democracy, constitutionalism or nationalism but rather reflected patriotic and dynastic considerations. As well as a great deal of francophobia.”Footnote ²⁰ It is interesting to note in this context that whereas future German liberals and democrats stuck to the myth of students and bourgeois youth as forming the corps of a popular uprising supposedly fixated on constitutional reform, conservatives and Marxists never cherished such illusions. Bismarck saw discussion of support for constitutional reforms as beside the point “as if the popular movement in 1813 must be ascribed to other reasons and another motive must be needed than the humiliation offered by foreigners in our country.”Footnote ²¹

In his view, the peasants and others had merely acted out of duty and loyally obeyed the summons of their king. Frederick Engels arrived at the same conclusion, although he expressed it in different terms:

So, in his view, too, most volunteers fought from traditional dynastic motives.

With regard to the rest of Germany, let us quote Wegert (cited above) once again: “There was only a limited popular involvement outside Prussia, in which the youth were involved directly in only a minimum way.”Footnote ²³ Indeed, most non-Prussian volunteers gained little fighting experience in France at all. The Grand Duke Ludwig of Hesse Darmstadt formed a free corps in late December 1813, and at the end of March 1814, 700 men were sent to Lyon. However, Napoleon's sudden capitulation on 16 April deprived them of the opportunity to fight so that after a brief stay in France the corps returned home. The whole episode lasted a mere hundred days. While in France, however, they were housed in poor quarters in poor parts of the country and were glad to return to “good old Germany,” although hardly as German nationalists.Footnote ²⁴

By 1812, it is true that most South Germans were weary of Napoleon and his wars.Footnote ²⁵ The considerable losses of German troops conscripted for the 1812 Russian campaign and Napoleon's demands for their replacement in 1813 then intensified opposition to the French. Prussian propaganda now also circulated in the south, but only one private pamphlet has been discovered there that backed the nationalist cause and, significantly, it “accused the Prussian king of betraying the Reich and ‘the German cause’ in 1795 [when he concluded the Peace of Basle, by which Prussia remained neutral till 1806],” a widely shared view. Hence, “even as Prussia presented itself as the inspiration and leader of the Wars of Liberation, longer memories of Prussian self-interest lingered among southern Germans.” In southwest Germany and particularly in the old territories of Anterior Austria that had been given to Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria by Napoleon, “resurgent enthusiasm for Austria, far more common than any vaguely formed notion of national unity, resounded.” People looked forward to their restoration as Austrian subjects and to the restoration of the Reich under an Austrian Emperor. Catholic leaders now also strengthened their opposition to the “godless heathen” of France, but again supported the Habsburgs rather than the Hohenzollerns. The King of Bavaria, Maximilian I Josef, meanwhile, after his defection from Napoleon, issued a nationalist manifesto to his people in emulation of Frederick William III. His subjects were to support the independence of the German nation albeit only “in the states … of which … it consists.” However, by Prussian standards, nationalist rhetoric in the South German states was minimal, and hateful tirades against France were “the exception, not the norm.” Loyalties in Bavaria remained anchored to the Wittelsbach dynasty and the local military hero was General von Wrede, the Bavarian military commander, not Blücher. Volunteers had to be paid to enlist to fight the French and even then “most Bavarians shed their uniforms and headed home when allied armies crossed the Rhine and invaded France.” Before that happened, conscription in South Germany soared, “yet more men than ever tried to dodge it.” Applications for exemptions stacked up. In Baden recruits laid low and attempted “to defer for months their call-up assignment by shuttling back and forth between different towns.” In Westphalia desertions reached a peak in 1813 and did not decline till the war ended in 1815. So the idea that German nationalism prevailed in either North or South Germany is highly questionable.

The military significance of the Prussian and other volunteers has also been questioned by historians. One Austrian historian wrote: “the Prussian Landwehr lacked the arms and training to be used independently as field troops, so that during Blücher's retreats in August they nearly all scattered. In linen suits, without coats and knapsacks, for the most part barefoot, part of them armed only with pikes, they can hardly be counted as part of the field army at the start of the campaign. The Landsturm cannot even be considered a military formation.”Footnote ²⁶ Yet even Treitschke (of whom, more later) was aware of the limits of the volunteers' contribution and of the lack of nationalist feeling in the South:

On the view of the South Germans regarding the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, he concluded:

So, the Germans were hardly united in 1813–1814, which was not at all surprising. Prussia for most of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period had remained neutral, leaving Austria to do the fighting. Until 1813 almost all other German states remained allies of Napoleon. It can be no surprise, therefore, that the main enemy for Saxons remained their traditional one, Prussia, and that the main enemy for Bavarians remained their traditional one, Austria.Footnote ²⁹ Altogether, therefore, the old myth of the Wars of Liberation as an episode of German national, political, and class solidarity can be totally discarded.

The role of Prussia as the main protagonist of the war, however, also needs to be questioned, but before examining the Wars of Liberation in terms of the campaigns involved, two general points have to be made. First, we should not forget the absolutely fundamental role of Napoleon. He wanted to be emperor of the world,Footnote ³⁰ saw himself as a new Alexander, and believed basically that he was militarily invincible. And, until 1813, Aspern apart, as already noted, he had been. The result of Napoleon's belief in his own invincibility was that he would never make peace or even negotiate honorably on the question. He had no intention of ever surrendering territory, making compromises, or coming to terms. He would rather die, as he told Metternich at Dresden on 26 June 1813, than relinquish a handful of soil. Thus, reasonable offers by the Allies of a compromise peace were always rejected. Napoleon, moreover, felt that he would never be accepted by the French as a legitimate ruler in peacetime and that only victory in battle could continue to lend him legitimacy. Other sovereigns could return home to their thrones and palaces defeated, but not him. Defeat in war would mean the loss of his own throne and those of his family. Metternich, when ambassador in Paris came to the opposite conclusion, namely that the French were war-weary and would be grateful to Napoleon if he made peace. However, Napoleon stuck to his own view.Footnote ³¹ The allies, therefore, had to grind down the emperor of the French until he was eventually deserted by his own marshals; the allies themselves, however, never entirely lost the suspicion that Napoleon might be right; that he might indeed win the final battle. Until halfway through the 1814 campaign, therefore, they were more than willing to negotiate. Indeed, after Blücher's defeats in mid February they wanted a cease-fire.

The second point that must be remembered is that, despite German and Prussian claims that they won the wars, it is crystal clear that without the Russians and Austrians they could never have done so. Napoleon was defeated by a Coalition (traditionally referred to as the Fourth Coalition, although recently some historians appear to have adopted a different numerical system). The troops of all nations fought heroically together—particularly at Leipzig—“the battle of the nations”—and although Blücher's Silesian Army played an often splendid part, it hardly won the war by itself. In any case, it was almost two-thirds Russian in composition,Footnote ³² and it certainly did not provide the Coalition with its war plan as both Treitschke and Meinecke boastfully asserted.Footnote ³³ It is important to remember these two general points before taking stock of the Wars themselves.

Perhaps there is one other general point to take into consideration. Why is it that only the campaigns of 1813–1814 are held to be the “Wars of Liberation”? Napoleon may have been forced to abdicate in 1814, but the military events leading up to that event surely included the uprisings in Spain and Russia, the Russian campaign, and the Peninsular War. Austrians might also well ask why the War of 1809, which saw perhaps a greater and more genuinely spontaneous response from Germans than the campaigns of 1813, should be excluded from the term. Indeed, the very phrase, “The Wars of Liberation,” was surely designed to promote Prussia's propaganda that it alone defeated Napoleon. Till 1813, in other words, the rest of Europe failed to defeat the tyrant. In 1813, the Prussians did so. “The Wars of Liberation” were used therefore to obliterate the memory of Prussia's previous neutrality, the abandonment of Austria in 1805 and 1809, and the humiliating defeats of 1806–1807—and, of course, to give Prussia an historic claim to unite and lead Germany.

Austria, on the other hand, never seemed interested in military glory despite the fine records of Montecuccoli, Eugene of Savoy, Daun, Lacy, Laudon, the Archduke Charles, Schwarzenberg, and Radetzky. The latter indeed wrote a memorandum on 1 December 1809 complaining that because Austria always assumed peace to be the norm, war always came as a surprise and never ever found the country prepared.Footnote ³⁴ However, Austria had prepared for war in 1809, when Metternich as ambassador in Paris had even bribed Talleyrand to give him Napoleon's war plans. In the event, despite this, and despite Aspern, the Archduke Charles, who himself had voted against declaring war, proved unable to achieve victory.Footnote ³⁵

Nonetheless, when the Archduke crossed the Inn in 1809Footnote ³⁶ at the head of the Austrian army, popular enthusiasm had never been greater, despite (perhaps because of) defeat in 1805 and the events of 1806–1807. His proclamation to the Austrian army began with the words, “the freedom of Europe has taken refuge under your banners” and like Gentz's Summons to the German People, which ended with the words, “Our cause is Germany's! Under Austria Germany was happy and independent. Germans! Accept the help we offer you! Cooperate in our salvation!” His words found an echo among the German intellectual elite. Von Kleist wrote: “Any German commits treason who does not obey the call of Francis the Second, the old Emperor of the Germans, or who dares to resist him by word or deed.” Ernst Moritz Arndt proclaimed: “The House of Habsburg should rule, for we want a German ruler!” Stein himself, calling the emperor the Protector of Germany (Napoleon's official title!), exclaimed: “All who love the good and the noble, should assemble under the Austrian flags.” Blücher went into a rage at Prussia's neutrality while Gneisenau lamented the “poor nation which is going under on account of your princes,” princes whom Arndt denounced as criminals on account of “their dirty provincialism, cowardly fear of the present and patriotic indifference.”

However, rebellion was triggered off spontaneously here and there. Major von Schill left Berlin on 28 April for the war with his regiment of hussars but was defeated on 31 May by the troops subordinated to the French at Stralsund. In Hessen colonel von Dörnberg rebelled, in Franconia the Prussian Major von Nostitz founded a Frankish-Austrian Legion, while Duke Frederick William of Brunswick attacked Saxony from Bohemia, drove its king, a member of the Confederation of the Rhine, out of Dresden, and waged a small war in Thuringia along with the Austrians under Kielmayer. In Hessian Marburg Colonel Emerich rebelled, and in the small territories of the Hoch-und Deutschmeister, in Mergentheim, which Napoleon had awarded to Württemberg, the good farmers rose up and could only be put down with great cruelty. In the old Austrian anterior lands from Freiburg to the Bodensee, the old spirit of loyalty prevailed, while the lake farmers in the former Landgraf of Nellenburg, around Stockach were forced to atone for their uprising of 7 July 1809 with harsh punishments. Most spectacular of all, of course, were the uprisings in Tirol and Vorarlberg against Napoleon's Bavarian allies. Andreas Hofer, in fact, led at least three uprisings in the Tirol before his final defeat. Prussian historians, including Treitschke, later falsely accused Francis I of abandoning the Tirolese (in fact, he imposed a condition in the peace treaty with Napoleon that obliged Bavaria to concede an amnesty to the rebels—all that was surely possible after his own military defeat.) No Austrian historian, on the other hand, ever accused Frederick William III of accepting with indifference the fate of the survivors of Schill's free corps, eleven of whose officers were shot on 11 September in Wesel, while 557 men were made galley slaves.

The Austrians in 1809, it should be pointed out, also made use of a Landwehr. This was not something suddenly invented in 1813 by the Prussians as seems to be commonly believed. In the words of Gunther E. Rothenberg, “The Landwehr was part of the great effort made by Austria in 1809 … It was a considerable effort and for the first time in history words like ‘fatherland’ and ‘liberty’ were used to animate the spirits of the army. The troops fought exceedingly well … though some 50 Landwehr battalions were brought back to service in 1813, they served as fillers.”Footnote ³⁷

Research shows that the Landwehr was established by an imperial patent of 9 June 1808. Francis I appealed to “love of fatherland” as all former soldiers and all men between the ages of 18 and 45 in Bohemia, Moravia, and Austria were called to the colors. Austria mustered 594,210 men of whom 25 percent were Landwehr troops. Field troops amounted to 283,400 men. According to this research, though, enthusiasm for the Landwehr affected groups of people never affected before: “It was primarily the educated men of the noble and middle classes, who belonged to these groups.”Footnote ³⁸ A huge propaganda effort, driven by the press, academics, clerics, writers, poets, and foreigners—some of whom have already been quoted—was aimed at them. Given the famous indifference of people like Goethe and Hegel to events in 1813, it might appear, therefore, that what was supposed to have happened in Germany in 1813 on account of Prussia, more closely approached reality in 1809 on account of Austria!

Historians of Germany, of course, still steeped anachronistically in the Prussian tradition, usually fail to credit Austria for its efforts in 1809, efforts that are usually written off as just another Austrian military failure. In fact, little attempt is made at all in textbooks of the period 1789–1815 to understand Austrian history during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Most students, as a result, have no idea of the persistence of the Austrian effort or of the shabby record of Prussia. Nor do they realize that the reason Austria was able continually to resist the French, whatever the erstwhile outcomes, was its basic strength. The very wise words of Charles Ingrao should be borne in mind in this respect:

Austria's army, according to Ingrao, using figures tabulated by P. M. G. Dickson, comprised of about 315,000 front-line troops, 75,000 Grenzer, and 20,000 artillery, engineer, and other special units. Its peacetime strength in 1791 of 300,000 was considerably higher than the peacetime establishments of Prussia (195,000), Russia (224,000), and France (182,000).Footnote ⁴⁰

All of this must be borne in mind when considering the history of the Wars of Liberation, for as far as German or Prussian historians are concerned, Austria deserves no credit for victory over France in the campaigns of 1813–1814. Meinecke in his account of The Age of German Liberation, 1795–1815 wrote “Austria's joining the coalition … certainly brought about a highly desirable accretion of military strength, but her presence also caused a measure of political paralysis, which affected the conduct of operations.”Footnote ⁴¹ In this, he was taking his lead from Treitschke's now well-established interpretation:

The truth was very different. Austria's participation provided the numerical superiority, which was a fundamental if not the decisive factor in defeating Napoleon. Metternich, of course, dominated the diplomacy that both kept the coalition together diplomatically and persuaded Napoleon's German allies to defect. Radetzky supplied the plan of campaign that finished off Napoleon in less than nine months after a military dominance of Europe that had lasted fifteen years. Schwarzenberg held the coalition together militarily before winning the crucial battle against him after the Prussians, who had been boasting that they alone would end the military career of the Emperor of the French, allowed him to escape (see below).

The allied army of the Fourth Coalition received as its commander in chief Prince Karl zu Schwarzenberg, an outstanding cavalry commander and able diplomat whose charm and tact kept the quarreling armies and generals together. Schwarzenberg knew Napoleon very well. He had served as Austrian ambassador to France and had led the Austrian auxiliary corps in Russia in 1812, which had had, despite later accusations of inactivity, a good fighting record there, having fought five large and fifty small battles and having marched 2,800 kilometers. It lost over half its strength with 6,300 dead and 11,000 wounded.Footnote ⁴³ Metternich, of course, at the end of the Russian campaign refused to allow it to follow the Prussian example and to make an alliance with the Russians.

It was during the period of the ceasefire—from 4 June till 17 August—that Metternich shifted Austrian policy from mediation to armed mediation and thence to armed intervention and military opposition. It was also during this period that the Austrian chief of the general staff, General Count Radetzky, put a new Austrian army together from raw recruits and as Allied chief of staff arranged a campaign plan that expelled Napoleon from Germany and France in less than nine months. Prussian historiography would later complain that Austria acted slowly—this despite the fact that Napoleon had dominated Europe militarily since 1797, during most of which period Prussia had been benevolently neutral toward France! There is insufficient space to provide much information on Radetzky's previous career. Suffice it to say that he lived for the offensive and had built up such a reputation internationally during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that Rudolf von Friedrich, head of the historical section of the Prussian General Staff, could write in the first of his three-volume official military history of the Wars of Liberation in 1913, that by 1813 Radetzky had become “a decisive leader who possessed a military experience like perhaps no other general of his time, including the French,” a description that almost made him the equal of Napoleon himself.Footnote ⁴⁴

Radetzky had arranged for the 30,000 Austrian auxiliary corps in Russia to be replaced within the 150,000 maximum set for the Austrian army laid down by Napoleon after its defeat in 1809. He had also applied unusual methods to build up the Austrian army secretly to almost 300,000 men once Metternich's diplomacy had extracted Austria from its French alliance. Some 200,000 were concentrated in Bohemia, the Army of Inner Austria mustered 37,000, and there were another 37,000 troops along the Danube. There was also the Landwehr (13,000 men) and an army in Italy. By the end of August, Austria had 479,000 troops under arms with 289,000 combatants. Previously, the finance minister, Count Wallis, had stated that Austria would not have the resources to fight a war for thirty years. That maxim, plus Napoleon's 150,000 limit, had forced Radetzky to improvise the “cadre system”—retaining officers and NCOs to train a mass army if and when more men could be conscripted later. That day had now arrived but hundreds of thousands of new recruits needed to be trained very quickly. Metternich's achievement in getting Napoleon to extend the armistice date to 17 August was a godsend.Footnote ⁴⁵

Once war broke out, the Allies had 800,000 men against Napoleon's 600,000, which in combat terms meant 570,000 against 410,000.Footnote ⁴⁶ Metternich used Austrian numerical superiority to win the crucial military posts for the empire. He said, “The most important thing is to use the more precise language in military dispositions and against everyone to uphold the maxim that we for our part use to Tsar Alexander and which consists of this: that that power which puts 300,000 men into the field, is the leading one, and that all the others are mere auxiliaries.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Was victory, then, merely a matter of numbers? Tim Blanning, following Gunther Rothenberg, has suggested this.Footnote ⁴⁸ Yet the truth was far more complicated. In the first place, it is very difficult to know how many troops each army had at any given time. Many experienced contemporary observers refused to believe official figures. Lord Cathcart, for example, one of the official British commissioners to the allied armies, wrote that Austria never at any time contributed more than 50,000 troops to the field!Footnote ⁴⁹ Müffling, the quartermaster general of Blücher's Silesian Army, told Radetzky that the Russian official figures were exaggerated and that only the Russian commander and his chief of staff knew the real ones.Footnote ⁵⁰ Von Friedrich in his description of the various fighting corps regularly points to deficiencies in numbers (lack of complete regiments, battalions, companies, and squadrons).Footnote ⁵¹ Secondly, allied military organization now copied Napoleon's—army corps, field armies, and huge artillery duels. Thirdly, intelligence was sorely lacking. At crucial points nobody knew where the enemy was,Footnote ⁵² especially Napoleon before Leipzig; indeed, armies often had no idea where their allies were (Blücher's army, for example, deliberately—and almost fatally—cut its communications with Schwarzenberg at key points in France) (see below). Fourthly, while armies fought, diplomats still hoped to reach a settlement with Napoleon, whose record as a military genius still frightened the allied heads of state—hence the Frankfurt proposals, the Congress of Châtillon, and the attempted cease-fire after Blücher's defeats in mid February 1814. Fifthly, there were terrible rivalries in the military camps. The Prussian military leaders were distrusted as political radicals by their king, Frederick William III. The tsar wanted to be commander in chief himself, despite his poor military judgment—something that Metternich simply would not contemplate. The Silesian Army also wanted to win the war by itself, while the Russians and Prussians accused the Austrians of moving too slowly and not really striving for victory (see below). Schwarzenberg, therefore, had difficulty in enforcing his orders, particularly on the Russian commanders and particularly at the start of the campaign. He told his wife that he was “surrounded by the feeble-minded, all sorts of fools, eccentric schemers, intriguers, asses, babblers, criticasters; in short vermin in countless numbers gnaw at me and torment me to the marrow of my bones.” The only reason why he stayed in the job was that “the objective is so solemn, so holy, and the position is such, that I believe anyone else in my place could only achieve less.”Footnote ⁵³ Still, he almost resigned, telling Francis I:

At one point even Metternich wrote to Stadion, the previous Austrian foreign minister, in despair, “You have absolutely no idea what we are made to suffer at supreme headquarters. I cannot bear it any longer and the Emperor is already ill. They are all mad and belong in the mad-house. We are always being represented as wanting to sell out the Monarchy as if we had no greater wish than to be defeated and dishonoured, as if Austria revered foreign slavery, in short as if we were idiots. I believe, however, that we alone are sane.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Part of the insanity was that traveling in the allied camp were the three allied sovereigns—Francis I of Austria, Alexander I of Russia, and Frederick William III of Prussia—each with a whole cohort of personal military advisers. These sovereigns, moreover, were all absolute monarchs, and it took all Schwarzenberg's charm to keep them in line. Regular military councils had to be summoned to agree upon strategy between them and out of seventeen, Schwarzenberg got his way in nine and had to claw back his authority with Metternich's help after the others.Footnote ⁵⁶ Agreeing on military strategy, therefore, could be difficult. Yet the operations plan drawn up by Radetzky still managed to push Napoleon from Dresden to Paris within nine months after fifteen years of military dominance.

Before looking at that plan, let me say a few words about Metternich, whose diplomacy has been thoroughly investigated and who was clearly the diplomatic leader of the coalition. It was he who stopped the Russians and Prussians from falling apart after Bautzen. It was he who extracted Austria from the French alliance until Austria was able to offer armed mediation with Napoleon's permission. It was he who got the armistice extended, giving Radetzky vital extra time to train the Austrian army. It was he who kept open the possibility of peace with Napoleon, having no desire to replace French with Russian dominance. And it was he who strung along the Prussians, allowing Hardenberg in particular to believe that Austria would eventually agree to some sort of federation in Germany that would incorporate Austro-Prussian dualism, while in the meantime signing treaties with Napoleon's defecting South German allies, Bavaria at their head, ceding them complete independence. Hardenberg believed that complete independence referred only to complete independence from Napoleon. In the end, it became clear that Austria had no interest in a federal union or in taking territories on the Upper Rhine; in fact, Metternich abandoned Austria's previous Schwabian territories (Vorderösterreich—Freiburg im Breisgau, etc.) to Baden, Bavaria, and Württemberg, severing the connection with western Germany, while recovering those territories from Bavaria (Tirol, Vorarlberg, and the Innviertel), which secured Austria's link to northern Italy. During 1813, unlike the other powers, Austria always had to keep an eye on regaining leadership in Italy.Footnote ⁵⁷

Metternich also disposed of any nationalist threat from Baron von Stein and the German patriots who, with Russian help, at the start of 1813 had put the newly emancipated territories of East Prussia and Mecklenburg under a German Central Administrative Committee. No more territories, of course, were available to share this fate till after the allied victory at Leipzig. However, Metternich, who by now had already negotiated Bavaria's independence, further frustrated the plans of Stein by making his committee responsible, not for managing conquered territory, but for supplying food and munitions to the allied armies. In short, it was deprived of a political role. Thereafter, as is well known, Metternich used Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, who arrived on the scene just before the invasion of France, to frustrate Tsar Alexander's plans to make Bernadotte king of France or to give the French some form of self-determination. He also combined with Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna to stop Prussia gaining the whole of Saxony.Footnote ⁵⁸

Treitschke records Metternich's actions with a mixture of admiration and contempt. Here he is on Metternich's views of a German constitution: “Why after all should we have a federal constitution which would only make bad blood? How much simpler would it be if we were to content ourselves with an extensive system of treaties and alliances, which would pledge the sovereign German states to mutual help in case of war!”Footnote ⁵⁹ On Metternich's treatment of Hardenberg:

On the Treaty of Ried with Bavaria: “in this way it was decided that Austria was to hold in her own hands the arrangement for the future of Germany.”Footnote ⁶¹ On Stein's Central Administrative Committee, which in fact was emasculated by decree on 21 October 1813 after the battle of Leipzig: “As soon as Austria had joined the Alliance Metternich demanded that the suspect authority should be completely transformed, insisting that it was to be nothing more than a military victualling office.”Footnote ⁶² Altogether, Treitschke concludes, “By the Austrian minister's adroitness, almost all the diplomatists were soon brought over to his way of thinking. All the English statesmen, Castlereagh and Stewart, Cathcart and Aberdeen, admired Metternich's wise moderation.”Footnote ⁶³ Treitschke's greatest contempt, indeed, is reserved for Castlereagh. Describing events at the Congress of Vienna, he wrote, “A study of Castlereagh's letters forces us to ask whether the noble lord really knew where the kingdom of Saxony was…. Castlereagh threw himself into the Polish negotiations with all the ardent zeal of his stupidity.”Footnote ⁶⁴

But back to Metternich. The fact that Treitschke was not at all wrong concerning Metternich's influence is best corroborated perhaps by quoting a letter of the young Lady Burghersh, later the Countess of Westmorland, wife of the new British commissioner to the Austrian army, who traveled with the monarchs from October 1813 across Germany and France and who dined with them every evening. She was an acute political observer and in February 1814 wrote to her sister from France: “How can you ask who is Prince Metternich? I thought everybody knew the fame of so great a person, who is, and has been for years, the mainspring of all that passes on the Continent. He is the Emperor of Austria's prime minister, and reckoned to be the best and deepest diplomat going. He is wonderfully clever and manages all the emperors, kings and ministers, turning them around his little finger and they are all afraid of him … He is uncommonly agreeable and good-looking.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Now back to the wars. If their course was dominated diplomatically by Metternich, they were strategically shaped by the military genius of Radetzky whose operations plan decided the nature of the campaigns of 1813 and 1814 and allowed the heroic efforts of the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians together to be crowned with victory. Prussian historians, however, claim that Gneisenau was the brains behind the defeat of Napoleon. Thus, Treitschke writes: “It was from the Silesian army that proceeded all the great resolves of the alliance and Gneisenau said with perfect justice that posterity would be astonished when it came to learn the secret history of this war.”Footnote ⁶⁶ That secret, according to Treitschke was that “the old hero's [i.e., Blücher's] plan of campaign had actually proceeded from the head of Gneisenau.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Meinecke, in his history of the age of German liberation wrote: “Essentially it was Gneisenau's strategy that led to the unprecedented result.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Hajo Holborn also calls the “strategic decision” at Leipzig the result of “Gneisenau's plan.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Radetzky, who, quite falsely according to Treitschke was anti-Prussian, “had but little influence.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Curiously, however, the dying Scharnhorst had agreed to Radetzky's plans when he had outlined them to him in Prague in 1813,Footnote ⁷¹ and Gneisenau always deferred to Radetzky's superior talents, writing on one occasion: “You, dear Excellency, know the art of war better than I do … To Your Excellency's more enlightened views and greater experience of war, therefore, I submit these ideas of mine. If, however, a man such as yourself, general, should oppose my ideas on grounds arising from a higher view of things, I should abandon mine.”Footnote ⁷² In fact, Blücher, Gneisenau, and Müffling got on very well with Schwarzenberg and Radetzky (who had been an admirer of Scharnhorst and always referred to him as “the great Scharnhorst”—causing the Austrian secret police, again quite falsely, to fear that Radetzky was a radical German nationalist!).Footnote ⁷³ It was Frederick William III and Alexander I who caused trouble for the Austrians. Still, Treitschke held that no one ever listened to Radetzky, that his plan was mad, and that Austria added nothing to the Coalition.

So what was Radetzky's Plan? It is sometimes confused with the Trachenberg Plan drawn up by the Russian, Prussian, and Swedish rulers and their staffs at Trachenberg Castle in Silesia on 12 July 1813. This called for one of the three allied armies—the Silesian one, led by Blücher—to withdraw if challenged by Napoleon. Otherwise, the three armies were to advance into Germany and unite to defeat the common enemy at the enemy's camp. The Austrians were not present during the strategic discussions at Trachenberg, although Count Stadion had met with the allied leaders there before the formal talks began.Footnote ⁷⁴ In any case, the plan adopted by the allies—and everyone was quickly made aware of it—was not the Trachenberg Plan but the Radetzky Plan. (Barclay de Tolly, the Russian commander on 10 August made clear to Blücher, for example, that “according to both the Trachenberg Plan as well as the Operation Plan later drawn up by the imperial Austrian Court, a combined royal Prussian and imperial Russian army will enter Bohemia.”Footnote ⁷⁵ So all those concerned at the time were well aware of the differences.) What happened seems to have been this. Radetzky drew up his own version of an operations plan a week or so before the Trachenberg meeting and submitted it to Schwarzenberg on 7 July. It was then submitted to Francis I on 12 July and the emperor approved it. Meanwhile, the protocols of the Trachenberg discussions (“the Trachenberg Plan”Footnote ⁷⁶) had arrived at Austrian headquarters and were seen by Radetzky who “found no reason nonetheless to change his mind.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Hence Radetzky's plan, “changed in inessential points only,” was approved by Schwarzenberg and Francis and sent three days later to the Allies at Reichenbach. The man who brought it, Colonel Latour of the Austrian General Staff, was instructed to take the plan to Alexander I and to go into detail on a few points. Alexander and the Prussians accepted the Radetzky Plan “without debate.”Footnote ⁷⁸ According to von Friedrich, whose account of allied planning is the better of the only two serious accounts that exist: “Given their [the allies] political dependency on Austria, it was deemed expedient not to put military obstacles in her path. Perhaps the key thing now was a quick adhesion of Austria to the Alliance which they did not want to delay with disagreements.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Von Friedrich, however, is at pains to stress the differences between the two plans and to stress that everyone who mattered knew about them although no documents regarding negotiations over Radetzky's plan ever came to light in Vienna's or any other archives. This is what led von Friedrich to conclude that negotiations were carried out verbally and quickly (in fact “without debate”). Gustav Roloff, the other authority on the planning process, makes precisely the same point.Footnote ⁸⁰ The key difference between the plans was that under Radetzky's all three armies were to refuse battle with Napoleon and to retreat if he attacked. Meanwhile, the armies of his corps commanders were fair game, as were his supply lines. If Napoleon did succeed in finding one of the three allied armies, then the other two were to come to its aid by attacking the French on their flanks and rear. All of this was in keeping with the advice ironically of Napoleon's former marshal, Moreau, who by 1813 was serving as an adviser to Alexander I. According to Moreau: “Expect a defeat whenever the Emperor attacks in person. Attack and fight his lieutenants whenever you can. Once they are beaten, assemble all your forces against Napoleon and give him no respite.”Footnote ⁸¹ The allies expected Napoleon to attack them first, but when this did not happen, the plan was to attack him on the Saxon Plain from Bohemia and eventually to encircle him, force him into a final battle, and defeat him—as happened at Leipzig in mid October. Radetzky in his notes on the 1813 and 1814 campaigns written soon after the end of the wars, described how in July 1813 he had worked this out in discussions with the Russian General Toll.Footnote ⁸² The allied armies were to enter the Saxon plain “and after hopefully winning a battle,” were “immediately to head for the Upper Rhine, cross over the same, so as to be able to pursue operations with the left-wing in front of Paris.” He added: “General Toll, who initially intended a planned advance towards the Middle Rhine, agreed to Radetzky's proposal, as soon as the operations were more closely examined, which demonstrated the advantage of approaching this via Belfort and Langres”Footnote ⁸³—which was almost exactly what happened.

ClausewitzFootnote ⁸⁴ and subsequent Prussian commentators, including von Friedrich and Treitschke, condemned Radetzky's plan despite its huge success. Rather than forcing Napoleon to wear out his army maneuvering between the three allied ones, the Prussians wanted a quick decisive battle making use of their superior forces. Decisive encounters, of course, had never worked in the past against Napoleon, yet this criticism still echoes in the general textbooks, where the allied advance is always described as slow (yes, slow!) on account of Austrian lethargy and lack of will. Treitschke called Radetzky's plan “lamentable,” “mean-spirited and antediluvian.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Von Friedrich damned it as defensive and a return to eighteenth-century warfare. Like Clausewitz, he claimed that such a strategy of attrition meant that the lessons of Napoleonic warfare had been lost on the allied leaders, who should have looked for Napoleon's weak spot and won a “battle of annihilation.”Footnote ⁸⁶ He wrote:

And von Friedrich thought it inferior to the Trachenberg one and out-of-date in its strategic concepts. Yet at the end of his very full chapter on war planning, he was forced to concede: “The question how it was possible that such a system of military leadership could lead to a stunning outcome against a master of the art of war, will, therefore, have to be the subject of a later, thorough examination.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The truth was that, despite all the Prussian bluster, Radetzky's plan cleared Napoleon out of Germany and France in less than nine months. And Blücher, as will be seen, suffered severely, when he attempted to ignore it.

The 1813 and 1814 campaigns were turbulent ones. Almost all the leading generals—including Schwarzenberg and Radetzky—were wounded and the three monarchs themselves, not to mention Napoleon, Blücher, and Gneisenau, were almost captured by the enemy at key points. Battles were bloody—especially at Leipzig on 16–19 October, which saw 361,000 allied troops face 202,000 French. The French lost 60,000 men; the allies, 54,000.Footnote ⁸⁹ But Radetzky's plan had worked, and Carl von Plotho, then Germany's leading contemporary military historian, who very quickly wrote a best-selling three-volume history of the campaigns, believed that it would be a model for all future coalition armies.Footnote ⁹⁰

On the other hand, there had been great difficulties in executing Radetzky's strategy. Alexander I of Russia, for example, wanted to be allied commander in chief, and his Russian commanders, especially at the beginning of the campaigns (for example, at the battle for Dresden) did not always obey Schwarzenberg's orders (see below). Sir Robert Wilson, a key British military officer and commissioner, wrote of the tsar in August 1813: “I never saw a man more anxious to obtain [the supreme command] nor did I ever see disappointment more strongly expressed than when it was not offered to him.”Footnote ⁹¹ Then on 22 October 1813, after Leipzig, Wilson reported that Alexander I had again demanded to be made commander in chief, although “this Metternich peremptorily told him could never be.”Footnote ⁹² The details were as follows: “He (Alexander I) indeed proposed himself as General-in-chief yesterday but professing not to understand the métier sufficiently he said he would have a council to direct him. Metternich frankly told him that he never would obtain the consent of Austria; that he had declared himself moreover unqualified, and that a council on the field of battle was a project that would never be productive of any other result than misfortune and disgrace.”Footnote ⁹³ Alexander surrounded himself with a council of military advisers anyway, some of them French, some of them foreigners like Napoleon's former associates Marshal Moreau and Baron Jomini, later famous for his military commentaries on the wars. Moreau was killed by a cannon ball at Dresden, only feet away from the tsar; Jomini, according to Müffling, gave such poor advice at Dresden that he was never listened to again; the battle itself was marked by the refusal of the Russian commanders to follow Schwarzenberg's orders.

Alexander I himself, it should be remembered, had caused military defeat at Austerlitz by insisting on starting the battle before the arrival of reinforcements. During the Moscow campaign, his generals had arranged for him to be in St. Petersburg. His record during the spring campaign had been unhelpful, and it would be equally unhelpful during the Wars of Liberation. First, he tried to get the Main Army to retreat from Switzerland in January 1814 after it had entered that country en route to France. Yet, given the need for Austria to secure its Italian flank and the recent military aid given by the Swiss to Napoleon, it would not really have been wise to leave Switzerland as an unreliable actor in the allied rear. Fortunately, Metternich was able to come to a diplomatic agreement with the Swiss that overcame Alexander's posturing.Footnote ⁹⁴ By February, irritated by the diplomacy around the Châtillon congress, the tsar was threatening—with the apparent support of Gneisenau—to leave the Main Army, meet up with Blücher, and march on Paris himself. Francis I of Austria was forced to explain to him: “While Your Majesty is on the march to Blücher, you will be of no use either here or there and will risk being met en route by the enemy and being destroyed by superior force.”Footnote ⁹⁵ So he stayed put. When news arrived that Blücher had been defeated by Napoleon three times running in mid February, Alexander then demanded a cease-fire with Napoleon.Footnote ⁹⁶ Shortly after that he threw a tantrum when Metternich and Castlereagh opposed his scheme to put Bernadotte (a former French marshal who had always hesitated to fight the French in Germany and who would not invade France itself in January 1814) on the throne of France (Alexander hated the Bourbons). An incensed Metternich now threatened to stop the war: “It has never entered our mind,” he declared, “to sacrifice a single man to put Bernadotte on the throne of France. Do you think I am mad?”Footnote ⁹⁷ When Castlereagh asked who would support Bernadotte, the tsar accused him of misrepresenting the policy of the British government.Footnote ⁹⁸ Metternich and Castlereagh were also astonished by Alexander's suggestion that perhaps a French assembly could choose a ruler. (Suppose they chose a Jacobin?) In their view, only the Bourbons could replace the Corsican. Alexander's final blunder, before Metternich and Francis I could reach a reconquered Paris, was to agree to make Napoleon ruler of Elba, just off the coast of France. This provided an excellent base for his return in 1815.

The Prussians constituted a different kind of problem, despite attempts by Treitschke and German historiography to make them the true heroes of the campaigns. Blücher was an old war-horse who despised the French and always wanted to attack them. He was also quite mad and at times thought he was pregnant with an elephant or that his head was made of stone. He was only semiliterate and had little understanding of maps. He lost his temper easily and was very reliant on his chief of staff, Gneisenau, and quartermaster general, Müffling, to keep his army together. His army was two-thirds Russian and his corps commanders all hated each other. Yet Blücher had a truly excellent war and was even to end up as co-victor at Waterloo with Wellington in 1815.Footnote ⁹⁹ When first told of the Radetzky Plan by the Russian military commanders, he blatantly refused to contemplate retreat.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Yet, when attacked by Napoleon at the start of the 1813 campaign, he retreated all the way back to where he had started and thereafter, for the most part, did indeed follow the plan. When he did not—as in France in February 1814—he suffered greatly. He played the key part at Leipzig and although he believed that he could have pursued and captured Napoleon afterwards, his orders were changed by the allied sovereigns, while his army, in any case, according to Müffling, had no desire to chase the French.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Gneisenau and Blücher wanted to cross the Rhine immediately after Leipzig. So, too, did Radetzky and Schwarzenberg. Yet Francis I and Frederick William III opposed the move. While Radetzky managed to persuade Francis to change his mind, the Prussian army leaders and their king fell out. One, admittedly indirect, reason for this was the success of the Radetzky Plan.

During the autumn campaign of 1813 in Germany, the battle of Dresden aside, Napoleon had had very few successes. For the most part, he had marched hither and thither trying to find Blücher or Bernadotte's armies without success. Either they withdrew or his intelligence let him down. Radetzky, for his part, was well pleased. As early as 4 September he wrote: “The Emperor Napoleon has been prevented from using or totally developing his talents as a commander and his military forces against any of the three main armies. He has lost a whole army corps … The excellence of the operations plan, despite several hard experiences, has been proved by its execution.”Footnote ¹⁰² On 14 September, Radetzky again approved of keeping the three allied armies apart. Together, he wrote, they would form “a helpless colossus” or “an army of Xerxes.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Given the huge success of the plan with the victory at Leipzig, the same principles were drawn up again for the operations plan in France, although now there would be only two main armies (the Bohemian or Main Army and the Silesian Army, since Bernadotte would not cross the Rhine and Bülow, his brilliant corps commander was operating in the Netherlands). Its key points ran:

Before the plan could be implemented, however, the Rhine had to be crossed. However, Frederick William, clearly so impressed by what had already been achieved, did not see the point of pressing on and never forgave Gneisenau for agreeing to do so. Thus, on 16 November 1816, Gneisenau wrote to Clausewitz (then Bülow's chief of staff) quoting the king on a Rhine crossing: “That was never the aim. So why should people now have this crazy idea for the first time? What business is it of ours what happens on the other side? Why should we entertain the laughable idea of marching on Paris?”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For the king of Prussia, the War of Liberation was already at an end and presumably Napoleon could keep his throne. Frederick William's biographer has written that the very prospect of invading France made the king shudder: “We risk spoiling everything and losing the best fruits that crowned the beautiful success of our previous efforts.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Such talk depressed the Prussian crown prince and Prussia's generals turned to the tsar for leadership.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Schwarzenberg grew to despise Frederick William—“the king is a rough, course, unfeeling fellow who is to me as loathsome as the poor, brave Prussians are pleasant and estimable.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Radetzky thought that Frederick William's attitude was caused by Prussia's previous disasters (he had been present as crown prince of Prussia at Valmy in 1792 when Prussia last invaded France and as monarch had suffered the humiliations of 1806–1807), so that the Prussian king now “simply opposed everything” when any decision had to be taken.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

When the war was taken to France and Blücher was attacked by Napoleon at Brienne and La Rothière at the turn of January and February 1814, the king arrived to rebuke the Prussian commander with the sneer: “So the French Emperor made you a very unpleasant visit!” According to Gneisenau, Blücher was astonished and did not know how to reply. He thought that he had got the better of Napoleon.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Later in the campaign, Gneisenau's own relations with the king would so deteriorate that he informed Hardenberg, the Prussian chancellor, that he wished at the end of the wars to withdraw from military service altogether because he could no longer work with Frederick William. However, because he still needed money to support his family, he wanted to be considered for the post of postmaster general!Footnote ¹¹¹ (Treitschke's assertion that the Russian generals all worshipped Frederick William is probably nonsense.Footnote ¹¹² Although he supported Alexander's claim to be supreme commander, nobody seemed to like him. Whether his knowledge of Russian mattered, it is difficult to know.)

After the battle of Brienne, an allied war council agreed that the two allied armies should separate. The main one (100,000 men) should proceed along the Seine, while Blücher and his Silesian Army should follow the Marne. However, it was “laid down as a principle not to let Napoleon out of sight. If he attacked one army, the other should mount a quick operation against Paris and each should avoid an encounter with a larger army.”Footnote ¹¹³ The principles of the Radetzky Plan still applied in France.

But Napoleon was lost sight of by the Silesian Army, which, out of hubris, thought it could ignore the Main Army and just march on Paris, even with 40,000 men. It even broke off communications with Schwarzenberg, leading Radetzky to write that he “remained uninformed of the intentions of the Silesian Army.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Gneisenau writing to Clausewitz, confessed: “I was asked to abandon communications with the Grand Army. I gave into this request.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Napoleon, on the other hand, knew of the whereabouts of Blücher's corps and defeated them one after the other at Champaubert, Montmirail, and Vauchamps in mid February. The Silesian Army lost 15,000 men, and news of its defeats created panic among the allied sovereigns who asked Napoleon, albeit in vain, for a cease-fire. (He had, after all, called his agreement to the cease-fire of 4 June 1813 “the dumbest decision of my life.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Still, for a moment he pretended to consider negotiating another.) Instead, Napoleon simply toughened his peace terms for the Châtillon Congress, which was still in session.

According to Treitschke, Blücher's army was defeated only because Schwarzenberg “after slow marches and repeated rests, moved southward on the left bank of the Seine, so that a huge gap was left between his forces and Blücher's army.” Indeed, he writes that just before the defeats by Napoleon, “a secret order of the Emperor Francis,” an order that was “tantamount to treachery” commanded Schwarzenberg to stand still, to preserve the “wavering peace negotiations.” Gneisenau's confession was not mentioned. However, the passage contains a footnote that reads “no such order was issued.” Presumably, Treitschke discovered the truth at the last minute and could not change his manuscript.Footnote ¹¹⁷

If Schwarzenberg did move more slowly than the “Silesian zealots” (Treitschke's termFootnote ¹¹⁸), he had very good reasons:Footnote ¹¹⁹ Firstly, the three monarchs were traveling with his headquarters, and he could not risk their lives or capture; secondly, unlike Blücher, he had no protective army on his left flank, although according to allied intelligence, Marshal Augerau was collecting an army in the South of France and was about to head north to attack the allies. This threat was taken so seriously that an army of the South was created out of Schwarzenberg's own army, put under the command of the prince of Hessen-Homburg, given half of Schwarzenberg's troops, and sent to Dijon. The imperial guards and reserves, thirdly, were all with Schwarzenberg, and these could only be risked in extreme necessity. Fourthly, food supplies were dwindling amid increasing local peasant resistance at a time when no reserves could be sent from Germany or Austria; while, finally, as Müffling himself complained, it was proving impossible to garner any intelligence from the French locals concerning Napoleon's own whereabouts. In any case, Blücher's mistakes were his own.

After his defeats it was thought that the two armies might reunite, although Blücher sent word that he was too far away. He had restored his numbers to 55,000, and it was arranged for troops from Bülow and Bernadotte's forces in the Netherlands to reinforce him and bring his numbers over 100,000. Gneisenau could then boast: “I have no doubt we can dethrone Napoleon … We alone can put an end to this war.”Footnote ¹²⁰ The final battle would be “neither bloody or dangerous.” Indeed, by mid March 1814, this seemed eminently possible. However, when Napoleon attacked Blücher at Craonne on 7 March, the French emperor escaped relatively unscathed, the Prussians putting the blame on a Russian cavalry commander.Footnote ¹²¹ Then, when Blücher retreated to a strong, prepared position at Laon for the decisive encounter two days later on 9 March, things again went wrong. Blücher's nerves gave way and he had to retire to bed. He also acquired an eye infection and partial loss of sight. Müffling, his quartermaster general, also had a nervous collapse and was also in and out of bed. So responsibility for the battle fell to Gneisenau, Prussia's supposed military genius, who, after interrogating a French prisoner, who lied to him and exaggerated the strength of Napoleon's forces, also lost his nerve. In fact, he issued orders to his troops not to pursue the retreating Napoleon, informing an astonished Müffling: “The disposition you have planned is too bold and might bring us to destruction. All the four corps who have been sent out must be recalled immediately.”Footnote ¹²² General Yorck submitted his resignation. General Sacken asked: “Why have they altered the disposition which would have enabled us to give Napoleon his death blow?”Footnote ¹²³ The Silesian Army was out of action for a week afterwards, and its record was covered up by German historians. Usually the battle is described as a resounding victory for Blücher, who wrote the same himself.Footnote ¹²⁴ The point is, however, that Napoleon was allowed to escape and continue the campaign. Treitschke, realizing this, wrote: “The field marshal [Blücher] was ill, exhausted in body and mind by the terrible experiences of these weeks. Since he was no longer in command, hatred and strife filled the headquarters staff.”Footnote ¹²⁵ However, “in this dissension Gneisenau was merely strengthened in the prudent considerations which had dominated him during recent days; after so many sacrifices he would not take over the responsibility for a new and sanguinary struggle. It was his patriotic anxiety for Prussia's future which was responsible for this one great failure of his life as a commander.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Treitschke's humanity, of course, is totally partisan and entirely unconvincing.

It was now the task of the Main Army under Schwarzenberg to finish off Napoleon, and the decisive battle took place at Arcis-sur-Aube on 18 March. Having already defeated Marshals Oudinet and Macdonald at Bar-sur-Aube and La Fère Champenoise and having reached Troyes, Schwarzenberg sent Francis I and Metternich to Dijon to ensure their safety. He now prepared to meet Napoleon, who apparently was under the impression that the Austrians were retreating. Yet at Arcis-sur-Aube, having witnessed a series of attacks by Bavarians, Austrians, and the Russian reserves, the emperor of the French soon realized his mistake and attempted to commit suicide. His life was saved once by General Girardin, who deflected a lance charge. Then his horse fell under him, leaving the emperor to resort to pistols. He later recalled: “I did all I could to meet a glorious end. I continuously exposed myself, bullets rained all around me, my clothes were full of them, yet not one touched me. I was condemned to live.”Footnote ¹²⁷ He and Ney left the battlefield with about 12,000 men.

Napoleon now planned to distract the allies by marching along the Marne to the French eastern frontier. The allies, having intercepted his correspondence, merely made a pretence of following him. In fact, their whole army now made for Paris, which was taken after one bloody encounter en route on 25 March and a bloody defense of the city itself by Marshals Marmont and Mercier on 30 March. Napoleon meanwhile returned to Fontainebleu, but his marshals refused to continue the struggle and he was forced to abdicate. While Francis I and Metternich returned from Dijon, Alexander I presented himself as the Agamemnon of the Coalition and gave Napoleon Elba. Yet the wars had been won more in spite of him than because of him. The armies of all three powers had distinguished themselves, but the Austrian contribution has been forgotten. Metternich's diplomatic genius has perhaps been recognized, but Radetzky's Plan and Schwarzenberg's dogged leadership have been excised from historical memory. Gneisenau was to be chosen by German historians as the hero of the campaigns, but to give the man his due, just as he had acknowledged Radetzky's superiority as a general, he also paid tribute to Schwarzenberg's qualities as a commander, writing to him in June 1814:

Napoleon's escape from Elba and the Waterloo campaign, however—not to mention Prussia's and Germany's viciously mendacious historiography—would efface Schwarzenberg's reputation from history more or less forever. It is time for his, Radetzky's, and the Austrian record in general to be restored.