Battle of Craonne

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 7th of March 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte stood on the Chemin des Dames ridge with roughly 30,000 men and a problem he had not anticipated. His target was Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, whose Allied army of Russians and Prussians was retreating north toward the city of Laon. Between Napoleon and that objective stood Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov with 22,000 Russians dug into one of the most naturally defensible positions in northern France. Napoleon expected a quick fight. He did not get one. What unfolded on that narrow limestone plateau, with the Ailette River marshes on one side and steep ravines on the other, was a grinding, costly battle that cost the French more than it cost the Russians they defeated. And it raises a question that haunted Napoleon's generals long afterward: can you win a battle and still lose the campaign by winning it?

• 2. The Road to the Ridge

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  On the 22nd of February 1814, Schwarzenberg commanded nearly 150,000 Allied troops at Troyes, where he faced Napoleon with roughly half that number. Nervous about his supply lines and convinced he was outnumbered, Schwarzenberg ordered a retreat that same evening. Blücher, unwilling to simply fall back, proposed that his 53,000 soldiers separate from the main army and strike northwest toward Paris on their own. Schwarzenberg agreed, and the Prussian field marshal's independent thrust began. Napoleon responded by leaving Marshal Jacques MacDonald with 42,000 men to keep watch on Schwarzenberg, then set off after Blücher himself with only 35,000. A further 10,000 soldiers under Marshals Auguste de Marmont and Edouard Mortier were already positioned between Blücher and Paris. On the 28th of February, Marmont and Mortier stopped Blücher's advance when they defeated Friedrich von Kleist's corps at the Battle of Gue-a-Tresmes. But Blücher was not finished. The premature surrender of Soissons gave him the crossing he needed, and by the 3rd and the 4th of March his army had crossed to the north bank of the Aisne River. Napoleon now knew that Ferdinand von Wintzingerode's Russians had joined Blücher, giving the Allied commander at least 70,000 men against 48,000 French. What Napoleon did not yet know was that Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr von Bulow's Prussian corps had also joined, and that Blücher may have had as many as 110,000 troops in total. Napoleon was chasing an army far larger than the one he thought he was pursuing.

• 3. The Plateau and Its Defenders

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  The Chemin des Dames, the Ladies' Road, runs east along a continuous ridge from the Soissons-Laon road to Craonne before losing elevation near Corbeny. Its average height is 400 feet above the Aisne valley to the south. The ridge varies from 200 yards to two miles in width and narrows where ravines cut in from north and south. The slope is wooded and steeper on the north side, where the marshy Ailette River runs west before joining the Oise. On the south slope, a feature the Russian defenders welcomed and the French dreaded, certain sections were so steep that they offered French attackers what soldiers call dead ground: terrain where approaching infantry could advance out of sight of the Russian artillery. Vorontsov deployed his corps at 8:00 am on the 7th of March in three lines spaced 400 to 500 yards apart. The first line, 1.5 miles long and 1,100 yards west of Heurtebise Farm, was anchored by 14 battalions from Nikolay Vasilyevich Vuich's 24th Division. The advance force under Afanasy Ivanovich Krasovsky included two squadrons of Pavlograd Hussars. Nikolay Diomidovich Myakinin commanded the corps artillery: 12 heavy and 24 light guns in the center, 12 guns of Horse Artillery Battery Nr. 11 on the right flank, 12 more from Horse Battery Nr. 9 on the left, and a further 24 light and six heavy guns held in reserve. In total, according to one source, Vorontsov commanded roughly 16,300 infantry, 1,000 regular cavalry, 1,000 Cossacks, and 96 artillery pieces. The position was not invincible, but it was exactly the kind of place where a smaller force could make a larger one bleed.

• 4. Marshal Ney's Blunder

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  At 9:00 am the French Imperial Guard artillery opened fire from the east end of the Chemin des Dames ridge. The range was 1,500 meters, too far for either side to do serious damage. Blücher himself was with Vorontsov until 10:00 am, when he rode off to locate Wintzingerode's flanking column. Ney had been ordered to wait for Napoleon's signal before attacking. He did not wait. The French bombardment prompted him to send his troops forward without receiving the order, and without proper artillery support, which was Ney's error alone. Napoleon bore some responsibility too: he had not explained the overall battle plan to his marshal. The result was immediate and painful. The soldiers of both Meunier's division and Pierre Boyer's division were stopped in their tracks by Russian cannon fire. Boyer de Rebeval's division arrived on the field at 11:00 am and had to be diverted from the main assault to shore up the now-damaged right flank. Since Boyer de Rebeval's men were raw conscripts with only 20 days of service, their musketry and artillery were not particularly effective. The same premature attack that cost Ney his momentum cost the French the neat sequence of blows Napoleon had intended to deliver. Early in the fighting, a bullet struck Marshal Victor in the thigh and put him out of action. On the Russian side, Krasovsky was also quickly wounded. By noon, Boyer de Rebeval's men had seized the Marion Woods, but the battle was already more expensive than Napoleon had planned.

• 5. Cavalry, Grapeshot, and the Decisive Hour

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  At 1:30 pm Napoleon ordered Emmanuel de Grouchy to commit his cavalry to force the attack forward. Grouchy sent Louis Ernest Joseph Sparre's dragoon brigade into the line. Sparre's troopers drove off the Pavlograd Hussars and then swept into Parkinson's Horse Artillery Battery Nr. 9, cutting down the gunners. Both Grouchy and Sparre were wounded and the dragoons were forced to retreat. Fifteen minutes later, at 1:45 pm, Laferrière's 3rd Guard Cavalry Division charged the large Russian battery in the center. The elite horsemen got among the cannons but could not break the Russian foot soldiers behind the guns, who had formed into squares. Laferrière was badly wounded before his horsemen were driven back. Antoine Drouot had already moved two Guard artillery batteries forward at a critical moment just before this charge, halting a Russian counter-push when the 19th Jäger and Shirvan Infantry Regiments pressed toward Meunier and Boyer de Rebeval's positions. At 2:30 pm Napoleon ordered his reserve artillery brought forward and massed beside Victor's divisional guns and the Guard pieces. Under Drouot's direction, 88 guns fired grapeshot into the Russian infantry squares. Napoleon then appointed Augustin Daniel Belliard to replace the wounded Grouchy. By 3:00 pm the 2nd and 6th Jäger Regiments abandoned Ailles to Pierre Boyer's division. At 4:00 pm Vorontsov withdrew again to the hamlet of Troyan near Cerny, and Alexey Petrovich Nikitin set an ambush with 36 guns from Sacken's corps that punished the pursuing French. The Russians retired in a checkerboard of mutually-supporting squares, reaching the north bank of the Ailette at Chevregny with the corps intact. French pursuit ended between 7:00 and 8:00 pm.

• 6. Wintzingerode's Failure

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  Blücher had constructed what looked like an elegant trap. While Vorontsov pinned Napoleon on the Chemin des Dames ridge, Wintzingerode would lead 10,000 cavalry and 60 horse artillery guns east along the north bank of the Ailette, then strike Napoleon's right flank and rear. Wintzingerode's mounted force included 5,500 of his own horsemen plus all the reserve cavalry from Langeron's and Yorck's corps. The plan depended on Wintzingerode arriving at Festieux by dawn on the 7th of March. It unraveled the night before. When Wintzingerode reached Filain during the night, he found that the cavalrymen of Yorck and Langeron were already in camp with their horses unsaddled. He decided to wait for daybreak rather than press on, and he neglected to order a reconnaissance of the roads. That omission proved fatal to the plan. On the morning of the battle, Wintzingerode chose a bad route without knowing it. Kleist selected a more direct path, and at 11:00 am the two columns crossed each other at Chevregny, creating a traffic jam. Kleist finally reached Festieux at 4:00 pm, hours too late. Blücher caught up with Wintzingerode at 2:00 pm at Bruyères-et-Montbérault and understood at once that the flanking attack had no chance of success. He ordered Vorontsov and Sacken to retreat. Sacken received his orders at 3:00 pm. The failure to reconnoiter cost Blücher the opportunity to turn a French tactical victory into a catastrophe.

• 7. The Price of Victory

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  French casualties at Craonne exceeded Russian losses despite the fact that it was a French victory. One source placed French casualties between 5,400 and 8,000, while the Russians admitted losing 4,785 killed, wounded, and missing. A third account broke Russian losses down to 1,529 dead and 3,256 wounded, while giving French losses as 8,000. General-Major Lanskoy was mortally wounded. Generalmajor Sergey Nikolaevich Ushakov II of the Courland Dragoon Regiment and Colonel Parkinson of the artillery were killed. Among the units, the Pavlograd Hussars lost 22 officers killed or wounded, the 13th Jägers lost 16 officers and 400 men, and the Shirvan Infantry Regiment lost half its numbers. On the French side, the toll at command level was severe: Marshal Victor and Generals of Division Grouchy, Laferrière, and Boyer de Rebeval were all wounded, along with Generals of Brigade Bigarré and Lecapitaine. Boyer de Rebeval's division suffered losses of two out of every three men. The 14th Voltigeurs, made up of soldiers from Joseph Bonaparte's disbanded Spanish Guard, lost 32 officers and were virtually annihilated. Neither side lost a cannon or a color. Two historians described Craonne as a Pyrrhic victory: the French held the battlefield at the end of the day, but they had failed to achieve their real objective. Napoleon had hoped to sweep Vorontsov aside quickly and race to Laon before Blücher could concentrate there. Instead the battle had drawn his army toward Soissons rather than toward Laon, and the effort had consumed the tempo he needed. Three days later, at the Battle of Laon on the 9th and the 10th of March, Napoleon's army suffered a defeat, and by some accounts was fortunate not to have sustained far worse.