STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 103
Napoleon’s Use of the Cavalry Reserve
12. Napoleon’s Use of the Cavalry Reserve (11)
But looking to the Ulm campaign, a most typical development of the Napoleonic strategy, we find that in the great turning movement which ended in the capture of Mack and the main body of the Austrians, the extreme flanking columns, those which had farthest to march and were to intercept the one route, that by Memmingen and the Tyrol, over which Mack had a reasonable chance of escape, were formed by the army corps of Soult and Davoust, without any great body of horse in support. The cavalry reserve under Murat was with the Emperor himself, employed in the operations immediately round Ulm. Mack, it may be remarked, did not as a matter of fact try this one safe bolt-hole, but ran into the midst of Napoleon’s own forces, and the extreme turning columns had little or nothing to do, Soult and Davoust being un-molested in their march to place themselves across the roads to the south of Ulm. The cavalry were most usefully employed, however, after the fighting round Ulm (combats of Elchingen, etc.) in pursuing the scattered fractions of Mack’s army which tried to escape by the long and perilous route to the north-east. But no one could have foreseen that Mack, when warned too late and striving to escape, would endeavour to get off by the least eligible and most dangerous line of retreat, instead of by the best one, where Soult was marching to cut him off with no certain prospect of being able to do so.
Similarly in the Jena campaign of 1806 we find that in the original disposition of forces the extreme French right, the column which would naturally strike in between the Prussian army and Berlin, when Brunswick found out his desperate position and began his necessary retreat, consisted of the army corps of Ney and Soult. The great mass of cavalry was with Murat in the centre, covering the advance of the Emperor’s own main body, not assisting the flank movement. In the end, when the Prussians tried to retreat north instead of east, the column which actually intercepted their main body and brought it to a stand by the hard-fought defensive battle at Auerstadt, was a single army corps, that of Davoust, with no horsemen with it save the three regiments of its own corps cavalry. Davoust narrowly failed to be beaten, precisely because he had hardly any horsemen at all to oppose to the 10,000 mounted men of Brunswick. Meanwhile Murat’s cavalry was smashing up the smaller half of the Prussian army under the Emperor’s own eye, in the battle of Jena, where Napoleon had such a superiority over the force opposed to him that victory was never for a moment doubtful. The French must have won, even if the greater part of Murat’s squadrons had been elsewhere. But after the battle the Cavalry Reserve was most admirably employed in the pursuit of the broken Prussian army, which was even more completely successful than the hunt after the escaping fractions of Mack’s host in the preceding year.
Much the same division of the arms may be remarked in the two successive attempts which the Emperor made to outflank and cut off the Russian army during his advance on Moscow. In the first of these, the operations between Vilna and Vitepsk, the turning column was composed of the corps of Davoust. In the second, that between Vitepsk and Smolensk, it was that of Junot which formed the extreme flanking force, and was intended to cut off Bagration and Barclay from their line of retreat along the Moscow road. During both these marches the main cavalry force, more than 20,000 men under Murat, was battering away at the rearguard of the retreating Russian army, rather than endeavouring to get ahead of it and intercept its line of communications.
In the campaign which followed the Russian disaster, the Emperor was never again in the position to dispose of such vast bodies of cavalry as he had owned in 1805, 1807, 1809 or 1812, but we may nevertheless notice that even if his cavalry was rather inefficient, he still preferred to retain it with his main body rather than to use it for the great circular sweeps which were still his usual method of operations. In the crucial battle of the first campaign of 1813, that of Bautzen, where the failure to surround the inferior army of the allies was complete, the great turning column under Ney, which was to cut in upon the rear of the Russians and Prussians, was nearly 100,000 strong, three full army corps, but there were only 6,000 cavalry in all with it.
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