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to act in unison. In practice neither Bernadotte nor Blücher could give orders to the other army commander: they had to agree on strategy. Given Blücher’s boldness and Bernadotte’s caution this was bound to be difficult. Blücher’s aim was to link up with Schwarzenberg near Leipzig, pulling Bernadotte along with him, and thereby uniting the three allied armies for a decisive battle against Napoleon. In principle Bernadotte did not object to this strategy. If Napoleon advanced on Leipzig to do battle with Schwarzenberg then Bernadotte was fully willing to move forward into his rear, as the Trachenberg plan demanded. Quite reasonably, however, Bernadotte feared that if he and Blücher marched on Leipzig before the Army of Bohemia arrived in the neighbourhood they would expose themselves to being attacked by the whole of Napoleon’s forces. At the very least they needed to be clear about Schwarzenberg’s whereabouts and Napoleon’s movements before undertaking so risky a move. In addition, Bernadotte believed that Napoleon might well rely on Schwarzenberg’s slowness and himself march northwards to destroy the other two allied armies before the Army of Bohemia could intervene. In this prediction Bernadotte was entirely correct and his caution was fully justified.

When the Leipzig campaign began Napoleon was in Dresden. Initially he found it hard to get a grasp of the allied movements, partly because of his lack of good cavalry but also because he could not easily believe that Blücher would be bold enough to cross the Elbe with his entire army, advancing into Napoleon’s lair and abandoning his bases and supplies in Silesia. The emperor only marched out of Dresden on 7 September, heading for Meissen and Wurzen, which he reached on the following day. This was the logical route either if he was going to move towards Leipzig against Schwarzenberg or if he wanted to strike northwards against Blücher. Only once he reached Wurzen would he have to show his hand by either continuing westwards to Leipzig or marching north-eastwards down the east bank of the river Mulde towards Düben.

Meanwhile, however, Napoleon had made what was probably his greatest mistake of the campaign. Initially he had ordered Saint-Cyr to abandon Dresden and join the main body with his corps. Saint-Cyr had already withdrawn his outposts in the Erzgebirge when the emperor changed his mind and told him to remain in Dresden to defend the city. By now Dresden’s supplies had been eaten up and its usefulness as a base was almost gone. Since the city was not properly fortified it was also much less valuable than the other crossing-points over the Elbe at Torgau, Wittenberg and Magdeburg. In any case the allied invasion of western Saxony gave Napoleon his best and last chance to win the 1813 campaign and save his position in Germany. He needed to concentrate all his forces for the decisive battle. In the event Bennigsen was able to use Count Tolstoy’s corps of militia, almost useless on a battlefield, to blockade Saint-Cyr in Dresden while taking the great majority of his regular troops to join the allied army in time for the battle of Leipzig. In November 1813 Saint-Cyr’s hungry garrison of Dresden, totally isolated after Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig, was to surrender: 35,000 men who could well have turned the battle of Leipzig in Napoleon’s favour went into captivity, having made almost no contribution to his cause in the crucial month of October.12

On 9 September Blücher and Langeron were at Düben, with Langeron’s corps quartered in and around the village enjoying a rest. Early in the afternoon the alarm was sounded. Napoleon was moving on Düben from Wurzen in great strength, with his advance guard already dangerously close. In his memoirs Langeron wrote that he and Blücher could easily have been captured. Clearly his cavalry’s reconnaissance had failed badly. Probably this owed something to the detachment of Cossack regiments from Blücher’s army to join Platov’s raiding parties near Leipzig. It was also true that the forests in the neighbourhood impeded intelligence-gathering.