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but ‘we could not understand why Schwarzenberg decided on a general attack for the 16th when on the following day we would have been strengthened by 130,000 men of the Army of the North, the Army of Poland, and Count Colloredo’s corps’. It seems that the allied high command wished to pin down Napoleon and feared that he would otherwise attack Blücher and Bernadotte, and perhaps even slip away to the north.23 To avoid this, the allied forces east of the Pleisse were ordered to attack in four columns from early in the morning of 16 October. On the left Kleist’s Prussian corps and Helfreich’s 14th Russian division would advance on Markkleeberg. To Kleist’s right Eugen’s Second Corps would attack Wachau, supported by Klux’s Prussian brigade. The third column was commanded by Lieutenant-General Prince Andrei Gorchakov. It comprised Gorchakov’s First Corps and Pirch’s Prussian brigade. Gorchakov would attack Liebertwollkwitz from the south-west while the fourth column, made up of General Klenau’s Austrians, would advance on the village from the south-east.

The night of 15/16 October was cold and very windy. Trees were uprooted and roofs damaged. The next morning Klenau’s troops arrived late for the assault. Gorchakov had to wait for them with his regiments already deployed for the attack and under artillery fire. Kleist and Eugen advanced on time, however, moving forward on this still stormy October morning before it was fully light. By 9.30 Kleist had taken Markkleeberg and Eugen had moved into Wachau. The initial French response was mild, partly because they had not expected the allies to attack. Things soon changed, however: French infantry counter-attacked at both Wachau and Markkleeberg, and ferocious artillery fire began to pour down from the massed batteries on the ridge onto the Russian and Prussian troops. The latter nevertheless pushed forward their attacks with great courage. The French artillery colonel, Jean-Nicolas Noel, who was stationed at Wachau, recalled that the Russians and Prussians ‘attacked with a determination which I had never before seen in our adversaries’.24

Casualties mounted quickly on both sides but especially among Eugen’s Russians on the bare slopes east of Wachau. Already by eleven o’clock most of Eugen’s artillery had been knocked out. There was nowhere to find cover and the French cavalry deployed east of Wachau were an additional threat to any infantry who broke formation. Rudolph von Friederich, the Prussian general staff historian, comments that ‘it took all the tenacity and contempt for death of the Russian soldiers and all the heroic courage of Duke Eugen to stand one’s ground in such a position’. By the end of the day two-thirds of Eugen’s men were casualties. All his regimental commanders were killed or wounded. Eugen wrote in his memoirs that his troops had been similarly smothered in artillery fire for a time at Borodino but on the first day at Leipzig their ordeal ‘lasted for much longer’.25

The heroism of Eugen’s infantry was all the more impressive because his regiments had suffered very heavy casualties at Kulm only a few weeks before. The Murom and Reval regiments, for example, lost many men first in 1812, and then at both Kulm and Leipzig as part of Prince Ivan Shakhovskoy’s Third Infantry Division. Officers and NCOs had needed to be drafted into the regiments from other units after Kulm to fill the gaps left by its killed and wounded veterans. Nevertheless many regimental old-timers remained in the ranks during the battle of Leipzig, including most of the Reval Regiment’s sergeant-majors. An unusual number of illiterate but veteran senior sergeants had in fact been promoted to sergeant-major in the Reval Regiment in 1813. They included sergeant-majors Aleksei Fedorov, Mikhail Lashbin and Mina Afanasev, who between them had seventy years’ service in the regiment. Lashbin was a state peasant from Tobolsk in Siberia and Afanasev a serf from Smolensk, but Fedorov was actually a Chuvash, one of the small, pagan peoples of the Volga region, though his family had become Christians.