Battle of Eylau
The Battle of Eylau ended with a French marshal riding across a field of bloodstained snow and frozen corpses, muttering four words: "Quel massacre! Et sans résultat!" That was Marshal Ney, and those words translate as "What a massacre! And without result!" They cut to the heart of everything that happened near the East Prussian town of Preussisch Eylau in early February 1807.
For years, Napoleon Bonaparte had seemed unstoppable. He had crushed Austria and Russia together at Austerlitz on the 2nd of December 1805. He had shattered the armies of Prussia at Jena-Auerstedt on the 14th of October 1806 and then hunted the scattered survivors across half of Europe. The Grande Armee had rolled east almost unopposed. But at Eylau, something went wrong, badly and visibly wrong.
What unfolded over two freezing days in 1807 was the first serious check to Napoleon's forces. The myth of his invincibility, which had grown battle by battle, was shaken for the first time. This is the story of how a snowstorm, a daring cavalry charge, a late-arriving Prussian corps, and a desperate night-time retreat turned what might have been a decisive French victory into something far harder to explain.
Field Marshal Count Mikhail Kamensky was sixty-eight years old and described as frail when he commanded the Russian forces at the opening of the 1807 campaign. He refused to risk a major engagement and kept retreating, which left the Grande Armee free to enter Poland almost unopposed. That changed at the Wkra River, where the French seized a crossing on the 23rd of December at the Battle of Czarnowo, and the two armies clashed again on the 26th of December at the Battles of Pultusk and Golynin. After those fierce engagements, Napoleon's exhausted troops settled into winter quarters in Poland to recuperate.
In January 1807, the new Russian commander, General Levin August von Bennigsen, attempted to catch the French off guard. He shifted the bulk of his army north from Nowogrod to East Prussia, incorporating a Prussian corps on his right flank. His forces first ran into elements of Marshal Michel Ney's VI Corps, which had disobeyed orders and advanced far north of its assigned winter cantonments. After pushing Ney's troops aside, Bennigsen's army bore down on the isolated French I Corps under Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who managed to pull back to the southwest after tough fighting at the Battle of Mohrungen.
Napoleon saw an opportunity in the apparent Russian advance. He ordered Bernadotte to keep retreating while directing the rest of the Grande Armee to strike northward, hoping to envelop the Russian left flank and cut off any retreat to the east. A band of Cossacks then captured a messenger carrying Napoleon's plans to Bernadotte and forwarded the information to General Pyotr Bagration. Bernadotte never received the message and remained unaware. Bennigsen, now forewarned, immediately ordered a retreat east to Jonkowo to avoid the trap.
Marshal Soult's IV Corps and Marshal Murat's cavalry were the first French formations to reach the plateau before Eylau, arriving at about 14:00 on the 7th. The Russian rearguard, commanded by Bagration himself, held positions on the plateau roughly a mile in front of the town. The French assaulted and were repulsed. Bagration's assignment was simply to buy time for Bennigsen's heavy artillery to pass through Eylau and reach the main Russian position.
By afternoon, French reinforcements including Marshal Augereau's corps and the Imperial Guard had swelled the force before Eylau to roughly 45,000 soldiers. Under that pressure, Bagration conducted an orderly withdrawal. The rearguard in the town itself was then led by Barclay de Tolly, who oversaw the continued defense as the fighting pushed into the streets of Eylau.
Historians disagree on whether what followed was ordered or spontaneous. Napoleon later claimed that he had authorized the advance into the town to pin the Russians and to give his men some shelter against the freezing cold. Other surviving evidence suggests the advance was an undisciplined skirmish that Marshals Soult and Murat should have suppressed but did not. Captain Marbot recorded that Napoleon had told Augereau he disliked night fighting and wanted to wait for morning, when Davout's Corps could arrive on the right wing and Ney's on the left.
Whatever its origin, the fight for the town escalated into a large and bitterly contested engagement that continued well after dark. Both sides suffered around 4,000 casualties. Barclay de Tolly was shot in the arm and forced to leave the battlefield. French Brigadier General Pierre-Charles Lochet was shot and killed. At 22:00, Bennigsen ordered the Russians to pull back from the town, later claiming he did so deliberately to lure the French into attacking his centre the next day. Despite holding the town, most French troops spent the night in the open air, without food, just as the Russians did.
Bennigsen began the second day with 67,000 Russian troops and 400 guns already assembled. Napoleon had only 49,000 troops and 300 guns on the field. The Russians could expect the arrival of Von L'Estocq's detachment of 9,000 Prussians; the French were waiting on Davout's depleted III Corps, now only 15,000 strong, and Ney's 14,000-strong VI Corps, which was shadowing the Prussians. Bernadotte's I Corps was too far away to participate.
Heavy snowstorms continued through the morning. The two armies occupied parallel ridges. When Bennigsen ordered his artillery to open fire, fearing the French had detected that he had shortened his right wing, the French replied and an artillery duel began, with the French holding the advantage because of their more dispersed positions.
To pin the Russians in place and allow Davout's flanking attack to land, Napoleon ordered a frontal assault on the Russian centre and left. Augereau's VII Corps would strike on the left; Saint-Hilaire's Division of Soult's IV Corps would push on the right. Augereau was gravely ill and had to be helped onto his horse. As soon as the French columns marched forward, a blizzard descended. All sense of direction was lost. Augereau's corps followed the slope of the land and veered left, away from Saint-Hilaire. Blinded by the snow, they struck the Russian line at the junction of its right and centre and came directly under fire from their own artillery and then the point-blank blast of a massive 70-gun Russian centre battery.
Historian Francis Petre recorded Augereau's official tally at 929 killed and 4,271 wounded, a total of 5,200 casualties. One regiment, the 14th Ligne, refused to retreat and fought to the last man. Its eagle was carried off the field by Captain Marbot. The position the regiment had held would be marked afterward by a square of corpses. Bennigsen exploited the disaster immediately, throwing cavalry at Saint-Hilaire's now-isolated division and pushing reserve infantry into the shattered French centre. Napoleon himself, using the church tower in Eylau as a command post, came close to being captured before members of his personal staff held off the attacking Russians long enough for battalions of the Guard to reach the scene.
With his centre on the verge of collapse and the last major unbloodied force available to him, Napoleon ordered Marshal Murat to launch his entire cavalry reserve, 11,000 riders, directly at the Russian army. What followed was one of the largest cavalry charges of the Napoleonic era.
Murat's squadrons swept through the Russian infantry around Eylau and then split into two groups. Grouchy's dragoons drove into the flank of Russian cavalry attacking Saint-Hilaire's division and scattered them. Murat then personally led the dragoons against Russian cavalry in the centre; joined by d'Hautpoult's cuirassier division, they drove the Russian horsemen back onto their own infantry. Fresh Russian cavalry forced Murat and the dragoons to retire, but d'Hautpoult's cuirassiers burst through every obstacle. They rode through the Russian gun line, cut down or drove off the gunners, broke through the first line of Russian infantry, and then forced their way through the second line before the charge finally exhausted itself some 2,500 yards into the Russian position.
A second wave consisting of the Guard cavalry and Grouchy's dragoons then struck the Russians as they tried to reform. Murat's force lost between 1,000 and 1,500 well-trained troopers in total. What the charge had accomplished was buying enough time for Davout to deploy his corps in strength on the Russian left. The source notes one reason for the charge's reach: for the first time, Murat's men were mounted on the finest cavalry horses in Europe, freshly requisitioned after the conquest of Prussia.
Napoleon declined to follow up the charge by committing the Guard. He judged it wiser to hold that reserve, knowing that 9,000 Prussians under L'Estocq and his chief of staff, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, had not yet appeared.
Davout's corps, roughly 15,000 strong, drove hard into the Russian left through the afternoon. By 15:30, the Russian left was in full retreat and Bennigsen's army seemed on the edge of collapse. For several crucial hours, Bennigsen could not even be found. He had ridden in person to L'Estocq to urge the Prussian general to hasten his march to the battlefield.
L'Estocq's 9,000-man Prussian force had already lost a third of its strength to Ney's pursuit. The remaining 6,000 men passed completely behind the Russian position, moving from the right wing to the left wing, and collected Russian stragglers along the way. At 16:00, L'Estocq counterattacked against Davout's exposed right flank. The Russian troops facing Davout simultaneously launched a fresh assault, and the accurate fire of 36 guns under Aleksey Petrovich Yermolov added further weight to the pressure. Over the next three hours, Davout was halted and pushed back to a line running from the village of Kutschitten toward the village of Anklappen. Davout personally rallied his troops and formed a battery on the heights of Klein Sausgarten, whose fire drove the Prussians back into the woods.
On the far side of the battlefield, Ney had not been recalled until 08:00 that morning. Heavy snow had muffled the sound of cannon fire, leaving him unaware of the battle until a messenger reached him around 10:30. Delayed further by L'Estocq's rearguard, the leading division of Ney's corps did not arrive until around 19:00 and immediately attacked the Russian right and rear. Bitter fighting continued until 22:00. Bennigsen, after a contentious council of war in which several generals argued for fighting a third day, decided at 23:00 to withdraw. Covered by the Cossacks, the Russians quietly left the field. The exhausted French did not notice until 03:00.
Estimates of the losses at Eylau vary so widely that certainty is impossible. Russian casualties were placed at between 15,000 and 20,000 killed or wounded, plus around 3,000 men captured along with 23 cannon and 16 colors. Bennigsen himself put his dead at up to 9,000. For the French, estimates range from a relatively conservative 10,000-15,000 up to 25,000-30,000; German historian Horst Schulz calculated a total of 29,643 French casualties: 4,893 killed, 23,598 wounded, and 1,152 missing.
Napoleon held the battlefield, which was nothing more than bloodstained snow and frozen corpses. He had not destroyed Bennigsen's army. After the battle he sent General Bertrand to the King of Prussia to offer a separate peace that would have restored Prussian borders completely. Prussia, preferring to maintain its alliance with Russia, quickly rejected the offer.
The war dragged on until the decisive French victory at the Battle of Friedland in June 1807, which forced Tsar Alexander I to the negotiating table. The two emperors met personally, and both sides signed the Treaties of Tilsit. The final terms were far harsher on Prussia than Napoleon's earlier peace offer had been, and resulted in Prussia losing almost half of its territory.
On the field in the immediate aftermath, the surgeon-in-chief of the Grand Army, Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey, served the wounded with soup made from the flesh of young horses and a preparation described as boeuf a la mode. Larrey found the results encouraging enough that he later promoted the consumption of horse meat in France more broadly. Antoine-Jean Gros painted Napoleon on the Battlefield of Eylau in Paris in 1808, and the battle later found its way into Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and into novels by both Eric Ambler and Honore de Balzac.
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Common questions
What was the Battle of Eylau and why was it significant?
The Battle of Eylau, fought in February 1807 near the East Prussian town of Preussisch Eylau, was a bloody and strategically inconclusive clash between Napoleon's Grande Armee and the Imperial Russian Army under General Levin August von Bennigsen. It was the first serious check to the Grande Armee and badly shook the myth of Napoleon's invincibility. Both sides suffered enormous casualties without either achieving a decisive result.
Who were the commanders at the Battle of Eylau?
Napoleon commanded the French Grande Armee. The Russian forces were led by General Levin August von Bennigsen. Key subordinate commanders included Marshals Murat, Davout, Soult, Augereau, and Ney on the French side, and Generals Bagration and Barclay de Tolly on the Russian side. A Prussian corps under Von L'Estocq, whose chief of staff was Gerhard von Scharnhorst, arrived late in the battle and played a decisive role.
How many casualties were there at the Battle of Eylau?
Casualty figures vary widely among historians. Russian losses were estimated at between 15,000 and 20,000 killed or wounded, plus around 3,000 captured. French losses ranged from 10,000-15,000 in lower estimates to 25,000-30,000 in higher ones; German historian Horst Schulz calculated 29,643 French casualties total, including 4,893 killed. Bennigsen himself estimated his own dead at up to 9,000.
What was Murat's cavalry charge at the Battle of Eylau?
With the French centre on the verge of collapse, Napoleon ordered Marshal Murat to launch all 11,000 riders of his cavalry reserve at the Russian army. The charge swept through Russian infantry, broke through two lines of infantry, and rode through the Russian gun line before exhausting itself some 2,500 yards into the Russian position. Murat lost between 1,000 and 1,500 troopers but bought enough time for Davout's corps to deploy in strength on the Russian left.
What role did the snowstorm play in the Battle of Eylau?
A blizzard descended just as Augereau's VII Corps advanced to attack the Russian centre on the second day of fighting. The corps lost all sense of direction, veered off course, and struck the Russian line at the wrong point, coming under fire from their own artillery and then point-blank fire from a massive 70-gun Russian battery. Augereau's official casualty count from the attack was 5,200 men. Heavy snow also delayed Ney's arrival, as it muffled cannon fire and left him unaware of the battle until a messenger reached him.
What happened after the Battle of Eylau ended?
Bennigsen decided at 23:00 to withdraw, leaving Napoleon in possession of a battlefield covered with dead and wounded. Napoleon offered Prussia a separate peace through General Bertrand, but Prussia rejected it to maintain its alliance with Russia. Hostilities continued until the French victory at the Battle of Friedland in June 1807 forced Tsar Alexander I to negotiate, and both sides signed the Treaties of Tilsit, which stripped Prussia of almost half its territory.
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