On 2 May 1813 Count Wittgenstein's Russian and Prussian army attacked Napoleon's army in the villages south of Lützen, in Saxony. After hours of fighting Napoleon held the field, and the next day the allies fell back toward the Elbe. On 2 May 1945 the last German troops in Berlin laid down their arms.
Battle of Lützen
2 May 1813 · 213 years ago
A new army, short of cavalry
In the spring of 1813 Napoleon was fighting Russia and Prussia in Germany. King Frederick William of Prussia had allied himself with the Tsar at Kalisch, on 28 February by Petre's date and on 1 March by Cathcart's.1
Napoleon's new army was weak in cavalry. Petre puts the force he could bring against the allies at 140,000 men, only 7,500 of them cavalry; the allies, by General von Caemmerer's count as Petre gives it, had 88,040 men, 24,140 of them cavalry and Cossacks. Baron von Odeleben, a Saxon staff officer serving with the French, blamed the lack of cavalry for slow French movements. Marshal Ney's corps was made up of young soldiers; Odeleben writes that it was made up only of young conscripts, who were perhaps then under fire for the first time in their lives.2
On 1 May, as the French pushed across the Rippach stream toward Lützen, a cannonball killed Marshal Bessières of the Imperial Guard.3
Surprise at the four villages
Count Wittgenstein, commanding the allies, believed that the French were strung out on the march from Weissenfels through Lützen to Leipzig, and planned to fall on the flank of their columns. His troops marched through the night and crossed the Elster at and near Pegau, but the crossing was slow; by Petre's reckoning the army reached the field at least four hours later than ordered.4
Around Gross Görschen, in a cluster of villages with Klein Görschen, Rahna and Kaja, lay General Souham's division of Ney's corps, without outposts.5
George Cathcart, then aide-de-camp to his father, Lord Cathcart, was on the hill above the villages when Tsar Alexander arrived there with Wittgenstein. He writes that he heard Wittgenstein "promise that he would put his Imperial Majesty in possession of the enemy's corps which he saw before him within an hour's time".6
The allied guns outfought Souham's artillery, and the Prussians took Gross Görschen. But the French held the next villages. When Prussian cavalry and guns moved round to the left, Cathcart writes, French batteries opened along the ridge, and prisoners said that the whole of Ney's corps, about 45,000 men, was in front of them and that Napoleon had slept at Lützen.7
Napoleon at Kaja
Napoleon was near Markranstädt, on the road to Leipzig, when the guns opened behind his right: at noon by Petre's account, between ten and eleven by Odeleben's. He turned his columns back and rode for Kaja.8
As the wounded came back past him, almost every one of them cheered him. Odeleben heard it. "Even those who had lost a limb, and in a few hours were to become the prey of death, paid him that homage," he writes in the English translation of 1820. "Not from one dying enthusiast alone did I hear this gratulatory exclamation, but perhaps from fifty".9
For hours the villages changed hands, with heavy slaughter on both sides. Petre counts three times that the Prussians took Klein Görschen and Rahna, and twice that they broke into Kaja itself. Sir Robert Wilson, a British officer in the thick of the fighting, wrote: "From the moment I entered, until eight o'clock at night, I do not think I was thirty minutes out of a continued storm of shot and bullets".10
Napoleon exposed himself again and again. Odeleben thought he did so more than in any later battle in Saxony, and Marshal Marmont, as Petre quotes him in English, called it "probably the day of all his career" on which Napoleon "incurred the most personal danger on the battlefield".11
On the allied side Gerhard von Scharnhorst, who had rebuilt the Prussian army, was wounded; his German biographers say in the foot. Petre writes that Blücher was wounded too, and that Yorck took over the Prussians.12
Late in the afternoon the troops of the Viceroy Eugène closed in on the allied right. Cathcart has Marmont's corps come into line on the French right at about the same time; in Petre's account Marmont had reached Starsiedel, on that flank, early in the afternoon. At about 6.30 p.m., in Petre's account, the Young Guard advanced under the fire of a battery of 80 guns that Napoleon had ordered General Drouot to form; Odeleben has Drouot ordered to collect 60, and writes that 60 to 80 guns kept firing. The villages burned into the night.13
Night stopped the battle shortly after 7 p.m., Petre writes. He and Cathcart say the Prussians still held Gross Görschen, or part of it; Odeleben writes that it was carried.14
Two hundred paces
At about 9 p.m. nine Prussian squadrons charged in the dark; Cathcart writes that Blücher led them himself. They got close to Napoleon himself. Odeleben, who was there, wrote: "I believe, if it had approached rapidly, two hundred paces nearer, he would have been taken prisoner, with all his suite".15
During the night news came that Kleist had given up Leipzig. Cathcart writes that the allied artillery reported its ammunition spent, and Wilson that the Russian ammunition was nearly gone. On 3 May the allies fell back toward the Elbe, making for Dresden and Meissen, while Ney's battered corps stayed at Lützen to recover.16
Counting the cost
The accounts differ. Cathcart put the allied loss, which fell mainly on the Prussians, at not less than 10,000 men out of action, and thought the French loss probably no smaller. Wilson gave at least 5,000 Russians and 15,000 Prussians out of action. Petre cites von Caemmerer for 11,500 allied losses, nearly 10,000 of them killed and wounded, and 22,000 French, including 800 prisoners, and Colonel Lanrezac for 18,000 French. Odeleben put the French loss "at six or eight thousand men, and double the number of wounded".17
Scharnhorst died of his wound in Prague on 28 June. Poten, in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, writes that instead of resting he had set out on 8 May to try to win Austria over to the allies; Kunisch, in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, that he died on a diplomatic mission to Vienna.18
Master of Europe?
According to Marmont, as Petre quotes him, Napoleon told Duroc that evening: "I am once more master of Europe". Petre calls that a great overestimate: Napoleon had won a battle, not the decisive victory he needed. Odeleben writes that the want of cavalry kept the French from gaining much from the allied retreat, and that the allies carried off all their wounded.19
The Prussians had been beaten but had fought hard. Petre quotes Nesselrode, writing to Vienna: "The Prussian troops have covered themselves with glory; they have become once more the Prussians of Frederick". Wilson, who blamed the slaughter of the Prussians on mismanagement, wrote that "No troops could show more impetuous courage or more ready good-will altogether".20
Napoleon beat the allies again at Bautzen on 20 and 21 May, and on 4 June the two sides agreed an armistice. The battle is also named after Gross Görschen, by Petre and by Scharnhorst's German biographers; Odeleben thought Kaja would have been a better name, since it was there that the day turned.21
Odeleben writes that on 2 May Napoleon asked eagerly about the earlier battle of Lützen and the spot where Gustavus Adolphus had fallen in 1632. That battle is told in our article on Lützen 1632, and the end of the 1813 campaign in our article on the Battle of Leipzig.22
Battle of Callao, 1866: Spain's fleet against the guns of Peru
2 May 1866 · 160 years ago
A Spanish squadron under Admiral Méndez Núñez bombarded the fortified Peruvian port of Callao in the war fought over the Chincha Islands. Spanish and Peruvian accounts disagree on the damage done, but the Spanish ships eventually sailed away.
Read the full story of Battle of Callao, 1866: Spain's fleet against the guns of Peru ›Also on this day
1863: at Chancellorsville in Virginia, Lieutenant General Stonewall Jackson marched his three divisions, nearly 30,000 men by the American Battlefield Trust's count, across the front of the Union army to turn its right flank, and late in the day his attack broke it. After dark, returning from the front, Jackson and his party were mistaken for the enemy and fired on by Confederate troops, and Jackson was badly wounded. The battle is told on our 30 April page.23
1945: the last German troops in Berlin laid down their arms, and the battle for the city was over. On the night of 8 to 9 May the surrender of all German forces was signed at Karlshorst in Berlin. Our article on the Battle of Berlin tells the story.24
