in 1812 to resist the foreign invader, had been promised they could go home once the fatherland had been liberated. Only junior officers, avid for glory and promotion, wanted to take the war into Germany. As far as the rest were concerned, Poland was enough of a prize.19
That was precisely what Caulaincourt had been instructed to offer the Tsar. But he had reached the allied outposts on 18 May, two days before the battle, and had been told that Alexander would not receive him. It might have been otherwise if he had arrived four days later. By then the Russians were staring disaster in the face; one more push, or even a vigorous pursuit by the French, and, to quote Stewart, ‘the military power of Russia might have been crushed for a generation’, a judgement confirmed by the Russian General Langeron.20
If Napoleon had continued his advance, the Russians would have been forced to fall back into Poland while the Prussian forces would have had to retreat northwards. The allied army would have split into two forces, easy to defeat separately. Although the French lines of communication would have been extended by such an advance, this would have been more than made up for by the reinforcements Napoleon would have found on the spot in the shape of the garrisons he had left in a string of fortresses from Danzig to Zamość. More to the point, morale in the Russian army would probably have been tipped over the edge and the first flare of a pan-German revolt would have been doused. As it was, the numbers of volunteers coming forward to fight for the liberation of Germany had been disappointing outside East Prussia and Brandenburg.21
But Napoleon was worried by the state of his own forces. ‘The magnificent spirit that had always inspired our battalions was destroyed,’ wrote the commander of the 2nd Tirailleurs of the Guard. ‘Ambition had replaced emulation. The army was now commanded by officers who may have been brave to the point of temerity, but who lacked experience and instruction. The soldiers only looked for opportunities to leave their units, to get into hospitals, to keep out of danger.’ The marches and counter-marches of the past weeks had not only exhausted the troops, they also gave the impression that their commander was not as sure of his actions as before. Shortage of cavalry restricted reconnaissance and pursuit alike. Paucity of not only cavalry horses but also draught animals meant that the quarter-mastership could not deliver adequate victuals or supplies. To add to the misery, the spring of 1813 was unusually cold and wet. Desertion was rife, particularly in the contingents contributed by Napoleon’s German allies, in which whole units would go over to the enemy at night. ‘What a war!’ Marshal Augereau complained. ‘It will do for all of us!’22
At a more personal level, Napoleon had been deeply saddened by the death, during the opening shots of the Battle of Lützen, of Marshal Bessières, one of his most loyal and capable commanders. He had been profoundly shaken three weeks later when Marshal Duroc, his sincere friend as well as one of his most trusted collaborators, was hit by a cannonball at Bautzen. Napoleon was at his bedside when Duroc breathed his last.
Instead of pursuing the allies, Napoleon decided to call a halt and wait for reinforcements, so he sent a messenger to allied headquarters with the offer of an armistice of seven weeks. The offer was readily accepted and the armistice concluded at Plesswitz on 4 June.
Napoleon had made a fatal strategic error. The armistice ‘saved us and condemned him’, as one Russian general put it. Not only did Napoleon save the allies from almost certain defeat, he threw away the initiative, which he would never regain.23
Metternich had received a report of Caulaincourt’s mission to Russian headquarters not long before he heard of the allied defeat at Bautzen. The first opened up the terrifying possibility that Napoleon and Alexander might strike a deal over his head, while the second raised the equally alarming one that the allied armies would withdraw into Poland and Prussia respectively, leaving Austria militarily defenceless and at Napoleon’s mercy.
The time was fast approaching when Metternich would have to commit Austria to one side or the other, and he was not ready. Schwarzenberg was massing all available Austrian forces at Prague, but would not be ready to take the field before the second week in August at the earliest. Only diplomacy could buy Metternich that time, and when a courier from Dresden brought news of Bautzen at 4 p.m. on the afternoon on 29 May, he sprang into action.
He drove over to the palace of Laxenburg to see the Emperor Francis. He persuaded him to leave Vienna and take up residence at some point midway between Alexander’s headquarters and Napoleon’s, in order to underline his intention of assuming an autonomous role. The only suitable residence in the area was Wallenstein’s former stronghold, the gloomy old castle at Gitschin (Jicin). The move was prepared with the utmost secrecy, but the French ambassador Narbonne got wind of it through his spies at the imperial stables and rushed to Metternich for an explanation. Metternich fobbed him off with evasive answers. The anxious Narbonne immediately set off for Dresden to warn Napoleon, but Metternich had pre-empted him. He had already sent off two couriers, one to Bubna in Dresden instructing him to renew the offer to Napoleon of Austria’s good offices as mediator in reaching a peace settlement, the other to allied headquarters announcing that Francis had left Vienna in order to be closer to his army.
This in itself was hardly likely to convince Alexander of Austria’s good faith. He needled Stadion and Lebzeltern about her true intentions, and pointed to signs of her treachery. He was furious when he heard that Austria had allowed Poniatowski’s Polish corps, which had been isolated in Kraków, to march through Austrian territory in order to rejoin Napoleon’s main forces in Saxony. His suspicions were further aroused when news reached him of Bubna’s mission to Dresden.1
On 1 June, as they were making their way to Gitschin, Francis and Metternich encountered Nesselrode coming the other way. He had been sent by an exasperated Alexander with instructions to pin the Emperor of Austria down to committing himself, on which point he stressed ‘that I need a categorical decision, in writing’. The last thing Francis was prepared to do at this stage was to commit himself in writing, but he did give Nesselrode a strong verbal assurance of his intent to join the allies if a satisfactory peace settlement could not be wrenched from Napoleon.2
In the circumstances, the armistice of Plesswitz, which came into effect on 4 June, the day after Francis and Metternich reached Gitschin, was a godsend. ‘The first great step has been taken, my dearest friend,’ Metternich wrote to his wife on 6 June, making out that the signature of the armistice was somehow the consequence of his own deft diplomacy. In a letter to his daughter written two days later, he complained of the strain of being the prime mover, on whom the eighty million inhabitants of the Continent depended for their salvation. Full of his sense of mission, he set about manipulating events.3
His first move was to provide himself with a stage on which he would be able to direct the actors as he wished. One of his reasons for choosing Gitschin was that it lay not far from Ratiborzitz (Ratiboric), the estate of Wilhelmina de Biron, Princess of Sagan. She was one of the four daughters of the late Duke of Courland. Originally an autonomous prince under the suzerainty of Poland, he had foreseen the extinction of that kingdom and of his principality with it, and had purchased substantial estates as insurance for the future. One of these was the principality of Sagan (Zagan) in Silesia, which he had left Wilhelmina on his death in 1800. He had also left her the estate of Ratiborzitz, with a simple but luxurious country house set in the grounds of the ancient castle. As this was conveniently close to Gitschin and to the allied headquarters at Reichenbach (Dzierzoniów), which had already attracted her mother the Duchess of Courland, Metternich suggested that she take up residence there. She could not resist the call to be near the epicentre of events; and, like so many ladies in Europe