Authors: Mary McGrigor
Two weeks later Frederick William returned to a joyous welcome in his own capital of Berlin. Following this, in the last week of April, and again with much celebration, Dresden was liberated from the French.
But by now resistance was strengthening. Napoleon had amassed a large number of conscripts to reinforce the army decimated during the long retreat. Kutuzov warned Alexander of the danger of an imminent counter-attack, but, on 10 April, the old general who had served him so loyally collapsed and died of a stroke. Alexander then appointed Wittgenstein, who had first routed the French near Moscow, to replace him, but many Russian senior staff resented this, on account both of his advancement over men older than he and his German birth.
Meanwhile, only two days after the general’s death, on 2 May Napoleon mounted the attack that Kutuzov had foreseen, near the town of Lützen in Saxony, about forty miles south-west of Leipzig and eighty from Dresden. He was actually looking at the battlefield when the sound of cannon fire caught his ear. Immediately assessing the situation, he ordered Marshal Ney to act as a decoy by heading towards the town while he with his main army of about 110,000 men launched a massive assault on the allied army’s flank. It might have been a total disaster on the scale of Austerlitz. But the French troops were exhausted and did not have the cavalry to pursue the combined force of Prussians and Russians, which, under Blücher and Wittgenstein, were forced to retire.
Both sides suffered terrible casualties in what was strategically a victory for the French. This time, unlike at Borodino, where the enemy had been entrenched on the battlefield, the wounded could not be carried to safety before the order came to cease fire. Wylie, as director of the medical services, could not under the circumstances be blamed for this.
On 10 May the Russian army re-crossed the Elbe. The King of Saxony submitted to Napoleon and the French again took Dresden, where Alexander and Frederick William had been welcomed so ecstatically only two weeks before.
Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, was the first to initiate a peace. But it was Napoleon himself who sent Prince Caulaincourt, his former ambassador to St Petersburg and personal friend of the tsar, to arrange an armistice with Russian diplomats. The terms being at last agreed, a truce was signed on 2 June.
A fortnight later Alexander, who now knew of Wellington’s victories in Spain, joined Metternich in Austria to discuss terms of what was hopefully envisaged as a lasting peace. At what became known as the Reichenbach Convention, it was decreed that Napoleon must agree to abandon not only all claims to the territories he had annexed belonging formerly to Prussia and Austria, but also to the dissolution of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Most importantly, should he fail to agree to these terms, Austria would join with the allies to fight against him until all of Europe was free.
Metternich went straight from Reichenbach to Dresden, where Napoleon reacted with predictable fury to the suggestions that were laid before him. He did, however, eventually agree to send a representative to a peace conference in Prague, but refused to give any firm commitment to meet the allies’ demands. Emperor Francis, unwilling as he was to fight Napoleon, his son-in-law, conceded to Metternich’s decision that only a combined advance against France itself could bring an end to the war. Napoleon continued to ignore suggestions of any form of compromise, and on 8 August the truce, after only two months, ended in a resumption of war.
On 12 August 1813 the Austrians joined Russia, Britain, Prussia and Sweden in a new coalition against the French. On the 26th the combined armies stormed Dresden, headquarters of Napoleon, but were driven back with heavy losses. The next day Barclay de Tolly refused to order a counter-attack on ground that had become a quagmire due to pouring rain. Confusion resulted at headquarters, and Alexander missed death by inches as the French made a sudden and unexpected attack.
With Alexander was Lord Cathcart, the British ambassador to Russia, talking to General Moreau (another who, like Count Bernadotte, had deserted Napoleon to join the allies) when a cannon ball went straight through the body of Moreau’s horse, breaking both of its rider’s legs. General Wilson, who was also present, heard him cry out as his horse collapsed. ‘
C’est passé avec moi! Mon affaire est faite
.’
Alexander, seeing this happen, and oblivious to the efforts of his aides who begged him to retire to safety, immediately ordered that Moreau should be carried to the nearest village where he knew that Wylie was operating on soldiers already taken wounded from the field.
As the French general was brought to him on a stretcher, ashen-faced with shock and loss of blood, Wylie knew on the instant, as he saw bones protruding through skin, that there was only one thing he could possibly do to try to save his life. Death from infection or gangrene was inevitable should the shattered limbs remain. There was little chance that the general would survive the operation but, seeing no alternative, Wylie was forced to take action. Therefore without anaesthetic, and with soldiers holding the patient down, Wylie carried out a double amputation of Moreau’s legs. Amazingly the general survived the operation but, despite Wylie’s constant attention, the slim chances of recovery, which to him had been so obvious at first sight, faded as, weakened by fever and delirium, he died after five days.
General Wilson, recording this incident, also praised the remarkable bravery of the Cossacks. He was there when a Cossack, struck by a cannon ball, arrived after a ride of twenty miles at Wylie’s field hospital. Horrified, he watched as Wylie, again without anaesthetic, amputated the arm from the shoulder joint in the space of a mere four minutes. Afterwards the man spoke lucidly and next morning, having drunk some tea, he walked about the room before being driven home in a cart without springs for a distance of fourteen miles.
From what Wilson writes it is evident that Wylie, now in his early fifties, was much respected, not only in his own profession but throughout the army as well. Wilson himself, despite his seniority, came in for a tongue-lashing when an accident in a
drosky
resulted in deep cuts on his legs. Wylie ordered him to stay in bed but Wilson disobeyed him, hobbling about on duty the next day. Inevitably his legs and ankles swelled up, whereupon Wylie gave the general such a dressing-down that, as he himself confessed, he ‘remained indoors and wrote despatches until he gave me permission to go out’.
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Wylie himself had now become prosperous to an extent that even a few years previously would have been beyond his wildest dreams. He who had earned 400 roubles as a regimental surgeon could also see now by his income how much he was appreciated. Apart from his salary, he received the village near Minsk that was named after him – Vileiskoye – as a life estate. Following the publication of
The Pharmacopoeia
, by supreme order, he had been awarded a lump-sum payment of 20,000 roubles which he had deposited with the St Petersburg Post Office. Confident now of his future, he also received the annual pension of 1,875 roubles for his participation in the Battle of Borodino.
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The penniless young émigré from Kincardine was now a man of substance in the country that, increasingly, he regarded as his own.
The fate of Europe hung in the balance but in August 1813, Napoleon, brilliant strategist as he was, missed his chance. Immediately after his victory at Dresden, when he could have annihilated the allied army, he allowed it instead to retreat into Bohemia. On 29–30
August the combined allied army defeated a smaller French force at Kulm in northern Bavaria. A French legend contends that General Dominique Vandamme, when taken prisoner, accused by Tsar Alexander of being a brigand and a plunderer, retorted that he was neither, but ‘my contemporaries and history will not reproach me for having my hands soaked in the blood of my father’.
This cruel jibe, if true, did not seem to lessen Alexander’s delight in the victory when he is said to have ridden from the field with jubilation shining on his face. Seeing a party of wounded soldiers being carried to a field hospital in a cart, he thanked them, asked how he could help them, and called them his comrades in arms.
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Subsequently, in the Battle of Leipzig, fought between 16 and 19 October, Alexander, by forcing the Austrian commander-in-chief Schwarzenberg to change the deployment, largely decided the issue. Known as the Battle of Nations, because of its size and the sheer numbers of troops that took part, an allied force of 400,000 with an estimated 400 cannons opposed a French army numbering only 200,000, with about half the number of guns.
On 16 October the Austrians attacked first from the south but were repulsed. Then the Prussian Marshal Blücher, approaching the city from the north, was held off by the French Marshal Marmont’s strong defence. At this point Alexander insisted that the Russian reserves be immediately moved up. Two days later a massive combined force of the Swedish army under both Count Bernadotte (formerly one of Napoleon’s marshals, but now, since 1810, after a stormy relationship with the emperor, heir to the Swedish throne) and General Bennigsen, totalling 350,00 men, moved like a deadly colossus against the city walls. The French fought gallantly but eventually were overcome by sheer weight of numbers and relentless murderous gunfire. Napoleon ordered a withdrawal through the city but the single bridge across the River Weisse Elster was prematurely mined. At least 20,000 men of the French army found themselves trapped. Many tried to swim to avoid being taken prisoner, the wounded Marshal Ponia-towski being among those who drowned in the swift freezing water.
The conquest of Leipzig resulted in appalling casualties on both sides, 36,000 men being left either sick or wounded in the town. One resident wrote that ‘the city had been transformed into one vast hospital, 56 edifices being devoted to that purpose alone.’
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Wylie’s team of surgeons was stretched to the limit, struggling to perform amputations in the requisitioned houses where lack of sanitation was one of the main reasons for the many recorded deaths.
Despite the dreadful loss of life, however, the battle of Leipzig was none the less a triumph for the allied force. Alexander, writing to his friend Prince Alexei Golitsyn on 21 October, told him:
‘Almighty God has granted us a mighty victory over the renowned Napoleon after a four-day battle under the walls of Leipzig.’
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The French had now withdrawn from Germany. On 5 November the tsar reached Frankfurt, travelling in his coach with the horses being changed frequently in accordance with his usual frantic speed. He remained there, conferring with the Austrian Foreign Minister, Prince Clement von Metternich, while the main allied army crossed the Rhine.
The Russian army stayed beside the Rhine for a period of seven weeks. During that time it was brought up to strength largely through men from the hospitals becoming well enough to rejoin their regiments. James Wylie, as director of the medical services, must receive most of the credit for an amazing feat of organization. Buildings had been requisitioned for use as hospitals along a line of march stretching for nearly 1,500 miles. Even more amazing was the fact that even during the many spells of appalling weather endured along the way, supplies of food and medicines had in most cases been maintained to the point where survival in the hospitals had surpassed the expectations of most of the military command.
It is nonetheless fair to say that, whatever Wylie’s achievement, the biggest factor in maintaining the supply lines was that of the intendant-general George Kankrin, a man as efficient as Wylie himself.
Kankrin had risen to power through ability rather than high birth. Coming from Hanau, in Hesse, he did have a university education, but then lived in great poverty until his writing on military administration was noticed by Barclay de Tolly. First appointed to a position in the army’s victualling department, he had soon shown his aptitude for figures and administration to the point where the feeding and equipment of the army, in its long march across Europe, raised him high in the tsar’s estimation. His reward was to be given the position of Minister of Finance, which he held for the next twenty-one years.
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Kankrin’s co-operation with Wylie is further revealed by the knowledge that it was on his instigation that the magazine carts, used to bring up ammunition, were converted into the makeshift ambulances which conveyed the wounded from the battlefield, in which way many lives were saved.
On 1 February 1814, at La Rothière, the allies won their first victory on French soil. Alexander, impatient as ever, wanted to move towards Paris, but negotiations were prolonged by the arrival of the British Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh.
The war, however, was far from over. Napoleon, having retrieved thousands of troops from Spain, shortly defeated Blücher’s army in battles lasting over five days.
On 21 March, as Napoleon confronted the whole of the combined army commanded by Schwartzenberg, he knew he had no option but to retreat. He then made what proved to be the fatal decision of abandoning the defence of his capital to attack the enemy’s lines of communication on the Rhine.
At Vitry, on 24 March, Alexander, having summoned Frederick William and the leading generals to a council of war, insisted that the march towards Paris should begin on the following day.
The French attacked again at La Fère-Champenoise, where Alexander, hoping to avoid further casualties, sent an officer with a flag of truce in the hope that they would surrender. But the man was killed as he approached the lines. Alexander, still determined not to waste life unnecessarily, then put himself at the head of his chevalier guards and dashed into the compact mass of French troops, who scattered in every direction without a shot being fired. The French general in command, who surrendered his sword to Alexander in the square, was astonished to learn that it was the tsar himself who, at great personal risk, had led the cavalry charge to prevent a massacre.