“From Feldmarschall Count von Bennigsen, Generalleutnant. Orders in respect of a possible flank attack.” He handed over a package and stepped back smartly.
Von Hohenlau grimaced as he sliced it open. Bennigsen was overall commander of the coalition forces-but he was a Russian and at the head of an army far superior in numbers to what remained of the Prussians.
“Is he still at Heilsberg?” he asked.
“He fears Davout and Soult will prove troublesome but he’s brought Labanoff across his rear. Yes, sir, he’s still there.”
“Humph.” Von Hohenlau extracted the papers and scanned them quickly. A dark frown appeared and he read again, more slowly.
“Do you know what this contains?”
As staff intermediary between the two allied commanders, there were few secrets Gursten didn’t know. “The Feldmarschall has many concerns, sir, and-”
“He demands I extend my right until it reaches the sea.”
“To prevent the French turning your flank, sir.”
Scharnhorst leaned forward and murmured something to von Hohenlau, who said, “He’s aware that Bonaparte lurks beyond. Who would not be happier were I to lengthen my lines? The devil has an unemployed regiment of cavalry to play with, and if I were to be stretched thin in the manoeuvre it could all be up with us.”
“I’m sure he knows, sir, but is persuaded that Bonaparte must be checked in his advance until Oberst Tolstoi’s reinforcements arrive.”
“Very well. It shall be done.”
Slapping down the orders, he looked up. “Herr Gursten, you’ve done your part-you should get your belly filled and rest while you can.”
He grunted peevishly and nodded to his chief of staff. “So, Gerhard, shall we get up the plans? We’ve no time to lose.”
Gursten was effectively dismissed. He threw off a smart salute, wheeled about and marched away.
In the fields a massed line of fusiliers was drilling, the red-faced feldwebel screaming orders at raw recruits, stumbling landwehr from the nearby war-torn and devastated countryside. Gursten tried not to show his despair at the level to which the proud but heavily mauled army had sunk and made his way to the mess-tent.
The field-kitchens were at work and the odour of boiled mutton triggered sharp pangs of hunger. He had left Bennigsen’s lines early that morning and eaten only biscuits and raisins on the way.
“Hey, now, the prodigal returns!” It was Engelhardt, his friend since those far-off days of peace.
“And sharp set-but naught that can’t be remedied with a libation of the right sort, Willy.”
“Ho, the kellner!” Engelhardt called imperiously to the mess-man. “A pair of schnapps-from the red bottle, mind.”
After the man had brought glasses of the golden liquid, they toasted each other, then Engelhardt leaned forward. “Now, Klaus, you can tell me. How goes it in the centre? Will the Russkies stand?”
Gursten hesitated, considering his response.
Prussia had a proud history and, since Frederick the Great’s profound modernising of state and military, it had looked to itself as pre-eminent on the continent-until the ferocity of, first, the French Revolution, then the genius of Napoleon Bonaparte had transformed the scene.
Staying cautiously neutral, the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III had secured peace for his realm, but when the battle of Trafalgar had confined Bonaparte to a European cage the emperor had been compelled to look east for new conquests. The Austrians and the Holy Roman Empire stood in his way and Bonaparte did not hesitate, striking into its heart. Yet instead of joining with their fellow Germans against the erupting force, the king had decided on a retreat into neutrality.
Gursten knew Friedrich had blundered but with the absolute autocracy of the Hohenzollern court it would be madness for him to say so, especially to his friend, a loyal and unquestioning officer of the traditional kind.
The result of the king’s action was decisive. After the spectacular defeat at Austerlitz, despite the entry of Russia to aid the Austrians, a collapse of the coalition against Bonaparte became inevitable.
During an uneasy peace a general rearrangement of borders and alignments followed, but it was clear that with the Confederation of the Rhine, Bonaparte was intent on destabilising the centuries-old patchwork of kingdoms and principalities. Friedrich had reconsidered his neutrality and blundered again into disaster.
With confidence born of an unbroken tradition of Prussian military discipline and success, he had declared war on the French empire, his well-trained armies outnumbering Bonaparte’s rag-tag allies and auxiliaries, but it was a fatal misjudgement. Impatient for glory, he did not wait for the distant Russians to join and two giants faced each other on the battlefield.
Bonaparte moved on them efficiently. In the twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt he succeeded in encircling and comprehensively obliterating his opponent in a victory so complete it effectively removed Prussia as a player from the world stage.
Within nineteen days of those opening scenes, Emperor Napoleon was riding into Berlin a conqueror. Two members of the Prussian royal family had been mortally wounded on the battlefield and the rest were in headlong flight, with the pitiful remnants of the army. Only the approach of winter and the need to consolidate his triumph kept Bonaparte from continuing.
The Russian Army, marching heroically through the mud and snow, reached the frontier in Poland and dug winter quarters opposite the French lines in preparation for the spring. Surviving Prussian generals had pulled together something of an army but it was a shadow of what it had been and joined the Russians very much as the lesser partner, von Hohenlau agreeing to serve under their commander, Bennigsen.
It couldn’t last: even in the freezing hell of a Polish winter manoeuvres turned into aggressive thrusts and the two armies became locked together in a bitter struggle on the plains of the Vistula around a little village called Eylau.
Gursten shuddered at the memory-it had been only a few months ago and he recalled it as yesterday. A titanic ebb and flow of hundreds of thousands over treacherous terrain in the cruel bitterness of howling snowstorms. Forced marches and last stands against merciless artillery as stolid Russian peasant soldiers came on against the unbending will of Bonaparte in a conflict that lasted agonising days.
It stopped Bonaparte in a bloody stalemate but at what cost? Never again did he want to see the ghastliness of frozen corpses and piteous wounded strewn over the wreckage of battle, some piled together, others littering the landscape in every direction. In the fields around Eylau alone no less than fifty thousand casualties lay in an appalling scene of slaughter.
Then Bennigsen, suspecting a trap, had retreated and yielded to Bonaparte. Since then it had been a steady falling back.
Bennigsen had taken the centre of the line, with von Hohenlau and the Prussians on his right, the Austrians tying down Massena on his left, and as spring turned to summer they had contested every mile, every yard as they fell back towards Konigsberg.
There, the royal family and government in exile had set up on the last piece of unconquered Prussia and that was the situation now: a straggling line across East Prussia with vast armies manoeuvring and clashing in savage encounters, half starved and desperate.
Somewhere out there as they supped, not far beyond the enemy lines, Bonaparte held state in his forward imperial headquarters, controlling his marshals and their divisions like chess pieces. Victor, Soult and Davout, Murat and Ney, young sons of the revolution, determined on glory and fame at any cost.
Gursten pulled himself together and told his friend, “Bennigsen stands-he must. He’s too many enemies at court to show cowardice.”
That much was safe to say. Tsar Alexander was too ambitious by half: if it were in his interest to turn his coat he would, and with it take all the military resources of Russia.