Battle of Dresden

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Dresden began on the 26th of August, 1813, and within two days it had produced one of Napoleon's most tactically impressive victories. Yet it changed almost nothing. An enormous Coalition army, drawn from Russia, Prussia, and Austria, had marched on one of Saxony's most important cities. Napoleon arrived, turned the battle around, and sent them retreating. The Coalition lost tens of thousands of men. And still they did not collapse.

  What makes Dresden worth examining is not the victory itself but the strange tangle of circumstances around it. There was the flooding river that stranded an entire wing of the Coalition army and gave Murat's cavalry a catastrophic opening. There was a general's blunt negotiation with a surrounded Austrian division whose muskets could not fire in the rain. There was Napoleon's old rival Moreau, newly returned from exile in the United States, who stood beside the Tsar and was mortally wounded before the battle was over. And three days later, one of Napoleon's own corps walked into the retreating Coalition and was surrounded and destroyed.

  How did a decisive French victory become so quickly meaningless? And who were the people caught inside it, from monarchs bickering over strategy on a hilltop to a German author-composer sheltering in the city below?

• 2. The City at Stake

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  Dresden stood on the banks of the Elbe, and the Augustus Bridge, the only permanent bridge in the city at the time, made it a choke point for any army trying to move through the region. The French had not simply defended Dresden because it was a city. They had stockpiled artillery parks and supplies there, and the city served as a potential base for Napoleon's own maneuvers against the Coalition's interior lines.

  When Napoleon sent Marshal Saint-Cyr's corps to fortify Dresden on the 16th of August, the city's southern walls were in a deteriorated state. Saint-Cyr threw up hasty fortifications south of the city and used his corps to hold off Schwarzenberg's advance units under General Peter Wittgenstein long enough for reinforcements to arrive. That bought a narrow window of time. The French garrison was estimated at roughly 20,000 men under Saint-Cyr, a force that could not realistically hold a city of Dresden's size against the forces Schwarzenberg was assembling.

  Napoleon's decision to come to Dresden himself meant abandoning his pursuit of Blücher's Army of Silesia. He left Macdonald's Army of the Bober behind as an observation force and pushed his three corps in a forced march of 140 kilometers over three days, arriving in the city around 10:00 in the morning on the 26th of August. That march, and the speed of it, would prove central to everything that followed.

• 3. The Monarchs on the Hill

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  On the 25th of August, three ruling monarchs gathered on an overlook above Dresden to debate whether to attack. Alexander I of Russia, Francis I of Austria, and Frederick William III of Prussia had all come in person, and their presence was less a sign of confidence than a source of friction. Schwarzenberg, the Coalition's Generalissimo, had to manage their opinions alongside his military responsibilities.

  His private frustration was direct. He complained of being surrounded by "fools, eccentrics, projectors, intriguers, asses, babblers, and niggling critics." The Tsar and General Jean Victor Moreau, formerly a French general and by 1813 a Coalition adviser, wanted to strike at once. Schwarzenberg wanted to wait for additional troops.

  The tension between these two impulses described by historians as Schwarzenberg's tendency toward hesitation and overcaution sat at the center of why the Coalition's numerical advantages did not translate into victory. They had nearly double the cavalry of the French force, more artillery, and a larger proportion of veteran soldiers. Napoleon's ranks consisted almost exclusively of fresh conscripts. The Trachenberg Plan, the Coalition's agreed strategy, called for avoiding battle with Napoleon directly and instead targeting his subordinate commanders. But when Schwarzenberg saw Dresden's weak defenses and an opportunity, the plan bent.

• 4. The First Day's Fighting

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  From 6:00 in the morning until noon on the 26th of August, the Coalition probed Dresden's French defenses. When Napoleon arrived from the north around 10:00 that morning with the Guard Infantry, and Murat's I Cavalry Corps close behind, his presence had an immediate effect on morale among French troops from Saint-Cyr to the lowest private.

  A pause settled over the battle between noon and 3:00 in the afternoon while Coalition leaders debated whether to continue now that Napoleon had arrived. They chose to press the attack. A general bombardment began around 3:00 pm against Dresden's southern suburbs. Wittgenstein's Russians absorbed heavy losses from French artillery and were stopped on the outskirts. The Prussians under Zieten and Pirch captured Grosser Garten, and Colloredo-Mansfeld's Austrians managed to dislodge the French from a lunette. These were genuine local gains.

  Napoleon's response was coordinated and swift. He dispatched Ney and the II Young Guard Corps to the center, Mortier and the I Young Guard Corps to the left, and the I Cavalry Corps to the right. At 5:30 pm he launched his counteroffensive. By nightfall, the French had recaptured almost all of Saint-Cyr's original positions. Wittgenstein's force had been pushed back a further 2.1 kilometers. Then a torrential downpour began and lasted through the night, turning the ground to mud and swelling the streams around the city.

• 5. Murat and the Flooded River

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  The Weisseritz River, flooded from the overnight rain, became impassable at the battle site on the 27th of August. This was not a tactical decision by either side. It was weather. But it cut off the Coalition's left wing, commanded by Johann von Klenau and Ignaz Gyulai, from the Coalition's main body, and Marshal Joachim Murat moved immediately to exploit it.

  A French participant described what followed in direct terms: Murat cut off Klenau's corps, throwing himself upon it at the head of the carabineers and cuirassiers. Nearly all of Klenau's battalions were compelled to lay down their arms, and two other divisions of infantry shared their fate. Baron Joseph von Mesko de Felsö-Kubiny's division, comprising five infantry regiments, was surrounded and captured. Mesko himself was wounded in the action and retired the following year.

  Gyulai's divisions suffered heavily for a different reason. The rain had not stopped all day, and flintlock muskets became practically useless when their priming powder got wet. Many battalions could not return fire and became vulnerable to French cuirassiers and dragoons. The scene was vivid enough that one episode was recorded in detail: General de Bordesoulle found his cuirassier division facing an Austrian division formed in a defensive square. When the Austrian general refused to surrender and promised to fight with bayonets, Bordesoulle offered a counter. He said he would break the square with artillery. The Austrian general answered that the French artillery had stuck in the mud. Bordesoulle then brought up six guns to within thirty paces, their attendants standing with lit matches. Only then did the Austrian division lay down its arms.

• 6. Moreau, Hoffmann, and the City Below

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  Jean Victor Marie Moreau was one of the most celebrated French generals of the Revolutionary era, a man who had been Napoleon's rival and eventual exile. By 1813 he had only recently returned from the United States, where he had spent years after falling from Napoleon's favor. He stood near the Tsar during the Battle of Dresden, acting as a Coalition adviser, and was mortally wounded during the fighting. He died on the 2nd of September in Louny.

  Inside the city, the author and composer E. T. A. Hoffmann was present as a member of a locally based orchestra. His family had been forced to move from their house in the suburbs into the city on the 22nd of August, after the end of an armistice. During the days that followed, as bombardments continued around them, people were killed by shells directly in front of him. After the fighting ended, Hoffmann visited the battlefield. His account of what he saw was later published under the title Vision auf dem Schlachtfeld bei Dresden.

  These two figures, Moreau advising from the Coalition hilltop and Hoffmann sheltering in the city below, occupied the same event from entirely different positions. The Coalition's total losses came to somewhere between 38,000 and 40,000 men, 40 guns, and 15 colours. Austrian losses alone reached over 16,300 men and 22 guns. French casualties were around 10,000. Napoleon spent the second day of battle exposed to cold rain and was reported by his own officers to be suffering from a violent colic brought on by the conditions.

• 7. Victory That Couldn't Hold

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  On the evening of the 27th of August, the Coalition quietly withdrew south. Napoleon did not realize they had gone until the following morning. The victory was real, but the pursuit that might have turned it into something decisive never materialized. The weather, the flooded streams, and the uncommitted Russian reserves, which had formed an effective rearguard, all limited what French forces could do.

  General Vandamme had received orders on the 27th of August to advance on Pirna and bridge the Elbe there with his I Corps. He did this in a pouring rain, moving past Russian forces positioned on the heights of Zehista. What he did not account for was that he was marching into the middle of a Coalition army still in the process of withdrawing from Dresden. Three days later, at the Battle of Kulm, Vandamme was surrounded, attacked from all sides, and compelled to surrender his entire corps.

  That loss, combined with the defeats of Marshal Oudinot at Grossbeeren on the 23rd of August and Marshal MacDonald at the Battle of Katzbach on the 26th, undercut the significance of Dresden. Historian David G. Chandler wrote that the battle had fully re-established the legend of French invincibility. But Vandamme's captured corps was the answer to that legend, and it came just three days later.