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Prussian army. He was very much the southern Frenchman, dark in complexion with black eyes and hair. He had the charm, the wit and the conversation of the Old Regime Parisian salons. He wrote tragedies and songs. Extremely absent-minded, he loved word-games, puzzles and charades. At times he would march up and down, his head down, his hands behind his back, lost in his thoughts and riddles. On the battlefield, however, he was calm and imposing and had a good eye for terrain. He had learned to speak a fluent and voluble Russian but in a weird accent that was often incomprehensible to his soldiers. Nevertheless he was well liked by the men and the admiration was mutual. One of his most endearing characteristics was his enormous admiration for the courage, decency and self-sacrifice of the ordinary Russian soldiers whom – as he always put it – he had the great honour to command. Perhaps there was in this a touch of the colonial officer, who far preferred the doughty native peasantry to the vulgar and pushy bourgeois back at home. But Langeron was also generous, even chivalrous, to his officers, quick to give praise to others and often critical about himself.

As the senior Russian officer in Blücher’s army, however, Langeron had some responsibility for good relations between the Russian and Prussian troops and their commanders. This presented problems. Langeron spoke no German and Blücher had not a word of French or Russian. Communications went through Blücher’s chief of staff, Gneisenau, in the French language. Like most Frenchmen of his day, Langeron thought Germans were rather a joke, once commenting that ‘the heaviness, the stiff formality, the slow imagination of this nation and their uncouthness do not make them agreeable to other people’. Gneisenau hated the French even more than Langeron disliked the Germans. In addition, Blücher’s chief of staff was something of a radical, who dreamed of arousing the German people to the same level of nationalist frenzy which had seized France in the Revolution. A Frenchman with similar inclinations he would have hated but understood; an émigré count fighting against his own nation was a different matter.27

The command structure of the Army of Silesia in fact had the potential for disaster. Sacken and Blücher could at least communicate in German.

In time they came to admire each other’s qualities. Their good relations were an unanticipated blessing, however, because Sacken was a sharp-tongued and short-tempered man with a poor reputation as a subordinate. Even so, in comparison with Yorck he was an angel. The Prussian corps commander thought Blücher was an idiot and the much younger Gneisenau a mere theoretician of war and a dangerous radical. The fact that he was subordinated to this pair was an obvious disgrace to merit and common sense. It was with these senior commanders that the Army of Silesia woke up on 21 August to the fact that it now faced Napoleon himself, his Guards and the core of his reserves, which had raced up to support the corps retreating before Blücher’s forces.

Blücher reacted in accordance with the Trachenberg plan. His corps retreated and refused to become engaged in a major battle. As one might by now expect, the Russians did this with cool professionalism. On the right wing, outside Bunzlau, Sacken waited calmly for the five hours that it took the corps of Ney, Marmont and Sebastiani to deploy against him. Then he left it to the disciplined skill of Lieven’s infantry and Ilarion Vasilchikov’s horsemen to mount a rearguard action that frustrated the enemy commanders and kept the French at a respectful distance. In the Belostok Regiment alone ten soldiers won military medals for their calmness, courage and skill in the rearguard action at Bunzlau on 21 August. The infantry was helped enormously by the fact that Vasilchikov was one of the ablest light cavalry commanders in Europe and his regiments were far superior in every way to the horsemen of General Sebastiani’s French Second Cavalry Corps, by whom they were opposed.28

On the other wing