But what did he presume that the allied forces in Bohemia would be doing while he overwhelmed Blücher in Silesia? Would not Dresden and his communications with France be left open to their blows? He decided to run this risk. He had 100,000 men among the Lusatian hills between Bautzen and Zittau. St. Cyr's corps was strongly posted at Pirna and the small fortress of Königstein, while his light troops watched the passes north of Teplitz and Karlsbad. If the allies sought to invade Saxony, they would, so Napoleon thought, try to force the Zittau road, which presented few natural difficulties. If they threatened Dresden by the passages further west, Vandamme would march from near Zittau to reinforce St. Cyr, or, if need be, the Emperor himself would hurry back from Silesia with his Guards. If the enemy invaded Bavaria, Napoleon wished them bon voyage: they would soon come back faster than they went; for, in that case, he would pour his columns down from Zittau towards Prague and Vienna. The thought that he might for a time be cut off from France troubled him not: "400,000 men," he said, "resting on a system of strongholds, on a river like the Elbe, are not to be turned." In truth, he thought little about the Bohemian army. If 40,000 Russians had entered Bohemia, they would not reach Prague till the 25th; so he wrote to St. Cyr On the 17th, the day when hostilities could first begin; and he evidently believed that Dresden would be safe till September. Its defence seemed assured by the skill of that master of defensive warfare, St. Cyr, by the barrier of the Erz Mountains, and still more by Austrian slowness.
Of this characteristic of theirs he cherished great hopes. Their finances were in dire disorder; and Fouché, who had just returned from a tour in the Hapsburg States, reported that the best way of striking at that Power would be "to affect its paper currency, on which all its armaments depend."[346] And truly if the transport of a great army over a mountain range had depended solely on the almost bankrupt exchequer at Vienna, Dresden would have been safe until Michaelmas; but, beside the material aid brought by the Russians and Prussians into Bohemia, England also gave her financial support. In pursuance of the secret article agreed on at Reichenbach, Cathcart now advanced £250,000 at once; and the knowledge that our financial support was given to the federative paper notes issued by the allies enabled the Court of Vienna privately to raise loans and to wage war with a vigour wholly unexpected by Napoleon.[347]
Certainly the allied Grand Army suffered from no lack of advisers. The Czar, the Emperor Francis, and the King of Prussia were there; as a compliment to Austria, the command was intrusted to Field-Marshal Schwarzenberg, a man of diplomatic ability rather than of military genius. By his side were the Russians, Wittgenstein, Barclay, and Toll, the Prussian Knesebeck, the Swiss Jomini, and, above all, Moreau.
The last-named, as we have seen, came over on the inducement of Bernadotte, and was received with great honour by the allied sovereigns. Jomini also was welcomed for his knowledge of the art of war. This great writer had long served as a French general; but the ill-treatment that he had lately suffered at Berthier's hands led him, on August 14th, to quit the French service and pass over to the allies. His account of his desertion, however, makes it clear that he had not penetrated Napoleon's designs, for the best of all reasons, because the Emperor kept them to himself to the very last moment.[348]
The second part of the campaign opens with the curious sight of immense forces, commanded by experienced leaders, acting in complete ignorance of the moves of the enemy only some fifty miles away. Leaving Bautzen on August 17th, Napoleon proceeded eastwards to Görlitz, turned off thence to Zittau, and hearing a false rumour that the Russo-Prussian force in Bohemia was only 40,000 strong, returned to Görlitz with the aim of crushing Blücher. Disputes about the armistice had given that enterprising leader the excuse for entering the neutral zone before its expiration; and he had had sharp affairs with Macdonald and Ney near Löwenberg on the River Bober. Napoleon hurried up with his Guards, eager to catch Blücher;[349] the French were now 140,000 strong, while the allies had barely 95,000 at hand. But the Prussian veteran, usually as daring as a lion, was now wily as a fox. Under cover of stiff outpost affairs, he skilfully withdrew to the south-east, hoping to lure the French into the depths of Silesia and so give time to Schwarzenberg to seize Dresden.
[Illustration: CAMPAIGN OF 1813]
But Napoleon was not to be drawn further afield. Seeing that his foes could not be forced to a pitched battle, he intrusted the command to Macdonald, and rapidly withdrew with Ney and his Guard towards Görlitz; for he now saw the possible danger to Dresden if Schwarzenberg struck home. If, however, that leader remained on the defensive, the Emperor determined to fall back on what had all along been his second plan, and make a rush through the Lusatian defiles on Prague.[350] But a despatch from St. Cyr, which reached him at Görlitz late at night on the 23rd, showed that Dresden was in serious danger from the gathering masses of the allies. This news consigned his second plan to the limbo of vain hopes. Yet, as will appear a little later, his determination to defend by taking the offensive soon took form in yet a third design for the destruction of the allies.
It is a proof of the quenchless pugnacity of his mind that he framed this plan during the fatigues of the long forced march back towards Dresden, amidst pouring rain and the discouragement of knowing that his raid into Silesia had ended merely in the fruitless wearying of his choicest troops. Accompanied by the Old Guard, the Young Guard, a division of infantry, and Latour-Maubourg's cavalry, he arrived at Stolpen, south-east of Dresden, before dawn of the 25th. Most of the battalions had traversed forty miles in little more than forty-eight hours, and that, too, after a partial engagement at Löwenberg, and despite lack of regular rations. Leaving him for a time, we turn to glance at the fortunes of the war in Brandenburg and Silesia.
Napoleon had bidden Oudinot, with his own corps and those of Reynier and Bertrand, in all about 70,000 men, to fight his way to Berlin, disperse the Landwehr and the "mad rabble" there, and, if the city resisted, set it in flames by the fire of fifty howitzers. That Marshal found that a tough resistance awaited him, although the allied commander-in-chief, Bernadotte, moved with the utmost caution, as if he were bent on justifying Napoleon's recent sneer that he would "only make a show" (piaffer). It is true that the position of the Swedish Prince, with Davoust threatening his rear, was far from safe; but he earned the dislike of the Prussians by playing the grand seigneur.[351] Meanwhile most of the defence was carried out by the Prussians, who flooded the flat marshy land, thus delaying Oudinot's advance and compelling him to divide his corps. Nevertheless, it seemed that Bernadotte was about to evacuate Berlin.
At this there was general indignation, which found vent in the retort of the Prussian General, von Bülow: "Our bones shall bleach in front of Berlin, not behind it." Seeing an opportune moment while Oudinot's other corps were as yet far off, Bülow sharply attacked Reynier's corps of Saxons at Grossbeeren, and gained a brilliant success, taking 1,700 prisoners with 26 guns, and thus compelling Oudinot's scattered array to fall back in confusion on Wittenberg (August 23rd).[352] Thither the Crown Prince cautiously followed him. Four days later, a Prussian column of Landwehr fought a desperate fight at Hagelberg with Girard's conscripts, finally rushing on them with wolf-like fury, stabbing and clubbing them, till the foss and the lanes of the town were piled high with dead and wounded. Scarce 1,700 out of Girard's 9,000 made good their flight to Magdeburg. The failures at Grossbeeren and Hagelberg reacted unfavourably on Davoust. That leader, advancing into Mecklenburg, had skirmished with Walmoden's corps of Hanoverians, British, and Hanseatics; but, hearing of the failure of the other attempts on Berlin, he fell back and confined himself mainly to a defensive which had never entered into the Emperor's designs on that side, or indeed on any side.