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with Yorck at Château Thierry. Yorck urged this on Sacken but to no effect. Sacken’s orders from Blücher were to march back down the road which led eastwards through Champaubert to Étoges, where he was supposed to reunite with Olsufev and Blücher himself. These orders had been issued before Blücher had a clear understanding of Napoleon’s movements and were now out of date but Sacken did not know this. He set out on the evening of 10 February. He knew that Yorck had been ordered by Blücher to cross the Marne and support him but did not know that the Prussian general had queried these orders and delayed his movement. When he received his orders Sacken had no way of knowing that Napoleon was astride the road down which he was expecting to march.

Late in the morning of 11 February Sacken bumped into the enemy advance guard just west of the village of Montmirail. Soon afterwards he learned from prisoners that Napoleon himself and his main army were present. With the battle in full flow, the Russian commander then received a message from Yorck to say that the road southwards from the Marne to Montmirail was so bad that only a minority of his infantry and none of his guns could advance to the Russians’ rescue. Allied maps showed this to be a paved road whereas in reality it was a country track which the recent thaw had turned into deep mud.

Thanks to his infantry’s discipline and steadiness Sacken succeeded in extricating his corps with most of its baggage and artillery and retreated during the evening and the night down the awful road which led northwards to the river Marne at Château Thierry. Fires were lit every two hundred paces to guide the infantry along the way. In the drenching rain, with their muskets useless, the Russian infantry had both to march in compact masses to keep the enemy cavalry at bay and on occasion to break ranks in order to pull their artillery out of the mud. Though very outnumbered, Ilarion Vasilchikov and his splendid cavalry regiments greatly helped to protect the infantry and to drag away most of the guns. Napoleon pressed the retreating Russians hard and by the time they finally got across the Marne they had lost 5,000 men. Russian casualties would have been far higher had it not been for the courageous rearguard actions of Yorck’s Prussian infantry. Sacken was a hardbitten old campaigner and ‘politician’. The day after the battle, finally tracked down by his nervous and exhausted staff, who had lost him in the course of the retreat, he was as calm and self-assured as always. In the best traditions of coalition warfare, in his official report he blamed the defeat on the Prussians, and in particular on Yorck’s failure to obey Blücher’s orders and support him in good time.56 Having defeated Yorck and Sacken, Napoleon was preparing to march south to block Schwarzenberg when he learned to his astonishment on 13 February that Blücher was advancing down the road which led to Montmirail. Blücher had misinterpreted the retreat of the French forces watching the road and believed that Napoleon was already heading south against the main army. Instead, having reached Vauchamps by the morning of 14 February, Blücher found himself confronted by Napoleon himself and the bulk of his army, which greatly outnumbered the allied force. Like Sacken’s troops three days before, Blücher’s infantry was forced to retreat in square for many miles under heavy pressure. At least Sacken’s foot soldiers had Vasilchikov’s cavalry and Yorck’s Prussians to help them. Blücher’s 16,000 infantry on the contrary were retreating on their own, in broad daylight, through excellent cavalry country and with very few horsemen to help them. Unlike Sacken’s veterans, most of the 6,000 Russians in Lieutenant-General Kaptsevich’s corps were new recruits, in action for the first time. Their musketry was at times more enthusiastic than effective. One-third of the men became casualties but, as French observers recognized, it was a tribute to the great courage and discipline of the Russian and Prussian infantry that Blücher’s whole detachment was