Battle of Teugen–Hausen

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Teugen-Hausen began, on the 19th of April 1809, not with a planned assault but with a collision. French troops blundered into an Austrian column marching through the forests of Lower Bavaria, and within hours, tens of thousands of soldiers were fighting for two wooded ridges somewhere between the villages of Teugn and Hausen. At the center of it all was Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout, whose corps faced possible annihilation. How did one of Napoleon's finest marshals find himself cornered between a river and a hostile army many times his strength? And how did a chance encounter in the woods become the opening move of a campaign that would end in a decisive French victory?

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• 2. Austria's Calculated Gamble

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  On the 8th of February 1809, the Austrian Empire made its decision for war. Foreign Minister Johann Philipp Stadion, the diplomat Klemens von Metternich, and Empress Maria Ludovika formed the war party, pointing to France's disaster at the Battle of Bailén in Spain the previous year as proof that Napoleon was not invincible.

  Archduke Charles, appointed generalissimo after the humiliation of the War of the Third Coalition in 1805, spent three years rebuilding the army. He expanded the regular soldier rolls to 340,000 men and raised a large Landwehr militia force of 240,000. He upgraded the artillery, adopted the corps structure, and revised the infantry drillbook to incorporate French-style tactical methods. Historian David G. Chandler wrote that Charles was "the very best man available to Austria" to command the army.

  Serious gaps remained. Austrian staffwork was weak, the Landwehr organization was poorly executed, and the non-German nationalities provided unreliable troops. The Habsburgs feared arming the population for fear of insurrection, so only 15,000 of the best Landwehr formations joined the field army. In Hungary, nobles and people alike showed little enthusiasm and contributed as little as possible.

  Charles organized his 206,906-strong main army, the Hauptarmee, into six army corps and two reserve corps. He kept two corps in Bohemia and placed the rest along the Danube for the main thrust against Napoleon, while sending 50,000 troops to Italy under Archduke John and 40,000 to Galicia under Archduke Ferdinand.

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• 3. Berthier's Blunder

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  Napoleon did not expect Austria to act before the 15th of April. From Paris, he sent orders to Marshal Louis-Alexandre Berthier to form the Army of Germany from French and allied units on the Danube front. The instructions were straightforward: concentrate at Regensburg if the Austrians invaded after the 15th, or fall back to Donauwörth if they struck earlier.

  The plan fell apart in transit. An order Napoleon sent on the 10th of April did not arrive until the 16th. A second order, meant to elaborate on the first, reached Berthier late on the 13th, before the first order ever arrived. Berthier was a gifted chief of staff but, as an independent army commander, he was out of his element. Confronting instructions that arrived out of sequence, he misread them and ordered a forward concentration at Regensburg.

  This mistake placed Davout's corps at the far end of a dangerously exposed position. The right wing of the Grande Armée was 120 kilometers away, with only a thin line of Bavarians holding the center. On the 16th of April, the Austrians forced a crossing of the Isar at Landshut. Napoleon reached the front early the next morning, took command from the rattled Berthier, and quickly ordered a new concentration near Ingolstadt. He recalled Davout's corps from Regensburg, but time was running short.

  By the 18th of April, Napoleon realized that 80,000 Austrians were threatening Davout. He ordered Marshal André Masséna toward Landshut to threaten Charles' rear, directed General Oudinot to support the Bavarians, and sent Général Dominique Vandamme's Württemberg corps east from Ingolstadt. The pressure on Davout was real, and Archduke Charles knew it.

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• 4. Three Columns, One Trap

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  Archduke Charles issued his orders at 5:00 AM on the 19th of April, from his headquarters in Rohr in Niederbayern. By a stroke of luck, he had obtained a copy of Davout's own marching orders for the day. His plan sent 65,000 soldiers in three columns to destroy the French III Corps.

  The right column, under Johann Liechtenstein with the heavy cavalry of the I Reserve-Armeekorps, moved north on the main road toward Regensburg. The center column, under Feldmarschall-Leutnant Franz Seraph of Rosenberg-Orsini with the IV Armeekorps, aimed toward the hamlet of Dünzling. The left column, under Feldmarschall-Leutnant Prince Friedrich Franz Xaver of Hohenzollern-Hechingen, was directed via Bachel, Hausen, Teugn, and Bad Abbach to cut Davout's escape route at the Saal defile, where the Feking stream met the Danube.

  Hohenzollern's mission was already compromised before the fighting began. Charles had ordered him to detach troops to link his corps with the V Armeekorps to the south. Hohenzollern complied, sending General-Major Thierry's brigade on this assignment. Then he compounded the error by detaching a second force of roughly 1,000 men under General-Major Pfanzelter to maintain contact between the corps and Thierry. After these detachments, only 18,000 of his troops remained for the main mission.

  Davout's own dispositions gave him some cushion. He sent his wagons along the river road and posted flank protection along two paths. He also sent one battalion on a night march to secure the Saal defile before the Austrians could reach it. Colonel Louis Coutard's 65th Line Infantry Regiment, roughly 2,000 strong, remained to defend Regensburg.

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• 5. The Fight for Two Ridges

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  Sometime after 9:00 AM, the advance elements of Général de Division Louis Vincent Le Blond de Saint-Hilaire's 4th Division stumbled into Hohenzollern's column near Hausen. Feldmarschall-Leutnant Vukassovich reacted quickly, deploying two battalions of light infantry and pushing the French out of the village.

  To buy time for Saint-Hilaire's division to shake out from march column into battle formation, Davout threw his 3rd Line Infantry Regiment forward in a full skirmish deployment. Roughly 2,000 men of the 3rd Line charged uphill against around 6,000 Austrian soldiers and 12 cannon. The attack failed to break the Austrian line but gained the minutes Saint-Hilaire needed. The 57th Line Infantry Regiment, known as "the Terrible," organized the next assault. The 57th's charge carried the first ridge before stalling at a second ridge defended by entrenched Austrians.

  Both sides fed in reinforcements. Hohenzollern launched a frontal attack on the 57th while sending half of General-Major Alois Liechtenstein's brigade through the woods to envelop the French left. Davout's chief of staff, Général de Division Jean Dominique Compans, moved the 72nd Line Infantry to cut off the flanking move. The French caught the Austrians as they were deploying from column into line and drove them back into the trees.

  A hussar regiment swept out of the woods at the 57th Line's exposed flank. The left battalion of the 57th formed square and repelled the horsemen. Alois Liechtenstein then led the Würzburg Infantry Regiment No. 23 in a charge against one French flank. This time the Austrians succeeded in pushing the French off the first ridge, though Liechtenstein himself fell badly wounded. Davout personally rode forward to rally Saint-Hilaire's exhausted troops.

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• 6. Artillery and the Turning Point

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  Davout's artillery arrived around 3:00 PM, delayed by a staff error. Its appearance changed the calculus on the ridges. An artillery colonel scouted the woods on the Austrian right flank and identified a position from which his guns could fire along the Austrian line. He reported the find to Saint-Hilaire, and the two improvised a new attack.

  Saint-Hilaire sent his infantry forward in a frontal assault while a horse artillery battery slipped unnoticed through the trees into position. When Friant's 2nd Division began to appear against the Austrian right flank, the French unmasked the hidden battery and opened an enfilade fire. The shocked Austrians rapidly gave ground.

  General-Major Josef Bieber arrived with the last of Feldmarschall-Leutnant Saint-Julien's brigades and launched a counterattack that halted the French pursuit, though Moritz Liechtenstein was wounded in the effort. At 5:00 PM, a violent thunderstorm swept the area and ended the fighting.

  Casualty figures vary by source. Historian James R. Arnold reports that the Austrians admitted 527 killed, 2,470 wounded, and 466 captured, for a total of 3,463. Francis Loraine Petre gives Austrian losses as 3,846 and French losses, including the day's other engagements, as 4,376. Austrian general officers suffered unusually high casualties, which historians noted as evidence of the front-line leadership that Archduke Charles had long sought to encourage. Lusignan sustained a head wound severe enough to force his permanent retirement from military service.

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• 7. What the Victory Opened

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  Archduke Charles received an unfavorable report of the battle from Hohenzollern and ordered a retreat that night. The withdrawal conceded the field to Davout and, more importantly, cleared the path for the French III Corps to rejoin the main French army.

  At 10:00 PM on the 19th, Marshal Lefebvre sent Napoleon word that he could see Davout's campfires burning near Teugn. To the emperor, that signal meant one thing: the III Corps had escaped the trap. The Battle of Abensberg was fought the following day.

  Elsewhere on that same April 19th, the day had produced a cluster of smaller engagements. Near Arnhofen, Bavarian light cavalry mauled Thierry's four attached dragoon squadrons, with Bavarian forces claiming one cannon and 400 Austrian prisoners. At Regensburg, Coutard's 65th Line held Stadt-am-Hof through an all-day fight, though ammunition ran so low that a resupply convoy Davout attempted to send was captured by Austrian cavalry the following morning. At Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm, General Oudinot fell on a small Austrian detachment with an infantry division and Pierre Colbert's cavalry brigade, routing the Austrians and taking 200 prisoners.

  The four-day campaign that began on April 19th culminated in the French victory at the Battle of Eckmühl. Napoleon later named the engagement of the 19th the "Battle of Thann." Historian Francis Loraine Petre noted that "the 'battle of Hausen-Teugen' would have been more appropriate," given that Herrnwahlthann, the village Napoleon had in mind, lay two kilometers southwest of Haugen.

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