Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [317]
Following the battle of Bautzen, the Prusso-Russian array continued to fall back, but they were again, for much the same reasons as before, careful to follow the line of the Austrian frontier. To have engineered a retreat north-eastwards in the direction of Breslau, and beyond that central Poland, would have suited the French much better, for the Allies would have been separated from Austria. Driven from their home territory, the Prussians might even have been forced to give up the fight. However, although Alexander and Frederick William were pushed to the point of collapse, the grande armée proved incapable of following up its success: without a decent force of cavalry, it could not impose its will on the Allies, while the raw conscripts who had been called up to fill the ranks were unable to endure the forced marching that would have been required of them. One last battle might yet have done the trick. King and tsar alike had been badly shaken by the resilience displayed by Napoleon; Prussia’s levies were deserting in droves; and the Russian army was in so bad a state that its new commander-in-chief, Barclay de Tolly (struck down by pneumonia, Kutuzov had died on 28 April) was arguing vehemently for a retreat to Poland. In Silesia, indeed, there were now less than 80,000 Prussians and Russians. The Napoleon of 1805 might yet have kept going and thereby won the war, but, for all his bravado, this was not the Napoleon of 1805. The campaign, it seems, had exhausted him physically, and the euphoria he had displayed in the wake of Lützen, which had been hailed as a great victory, had been replaced by a mood of deep depression. The day after the battle of Bautzen one of his closest confidants, General Duroc, had been mortally wounded observing the retreating Prussians. Much distressed, Napoleon had called a halt to the pursuit:
The emperor ordered the Guard to halt. The tents of the imperial headquarters were set up in a field on the right side of the road. Napoleon . . . spent the rest of the evening seated on a stool in front of his tent, his hands clasped and his head bent down . . . No one dared go near him: we all stood around with bowed heads.64
In this mood even Napoleon was capable of recognizing that all was not well with his army. Aside from the 40,000 battle casualties, 90,000 men had fallen sick or otherwise gone missing, and the men still in the ranks were weary and low in morale. Nor were even senior officers much more encouraging. ‘We had done enough to retrieve the honour of our arms after the terrible misfortunes of the preceding campaign,’ wrote Marshal Macdonald. ‘France and the army earnestly longed for peace.’65 Only days after Bautzen was fought, an emissary was sent to allied headquarters asking for a ceasefire. This approach was rejected - opinion in the Prussian army was deeply hostile - but on 2 June a message arrived at the headquarters of both armies from Vienna proposing a truce under whose cover Austria could offer her services as mediator. To quote Metternich, ‘The emperor left it to me to fix the moment which I thought most suitable to announce to the belligerent powers that Austria had given up her neutrality, and to invite them to recognize her armed mediation . . . Napoleon’s victories at Lützen and Bautzen were the signs which told me the hour had come . . . If Austria showed that she was not inclined to take part in the war against Napoleon, this would give the Russian monarch the excuse to . . . conclude the war.’66
With both sides now anxious for a break in the fighting, there followed the temporary suspension of hostilities known as the armistice of Pläswitz