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A
Little Bit of Leipzig
an
after action report of the game held 15th June 2002
by
Peter Hunt
The
History
By
the third day of the Battle of Leipzig, on
18th October 1813
the writing was on the wall
for the French. Napoleon’s big
opportunity had been on the 16th when he had attacked the Allies
converging on the city in the hope of destroying them in detail before they
could combine their full might against him. His
main offensive that day had been to the South of the city but the Allies had
traded space for time and, although the French made some headway, the attack
was not decisive. The Austrian,
Russian, Prussian and Swedish forces had kept the pressure up in other
sectors of the battlefield and continued to reinforce until by the 18th
some 157,000 Frenchmen, Italians, Wurtemburgers, Badeners, Hessians, Poles
and Saxons faced 300,000 Allies. Even
with a hat that was worth 40,000 men Napoleon knew that the odds stacked
against him were too long and that withdrawal was inevitable. The
question was not if, but how?
 The
Battle of Leipzig on the 18th can be conveniently divided into
three sectors. In the West,
across the
Elster
River
, lay the French escape route. Here
Bertrand and Mortier, with a mixture of Italians, Wurtemburgers and the
Middle Guard held a half-hearted Austrian attack at bay. In
the North, Ney faced the always driving Blucher, and the usually laggard
Bernadotte, at the closest approaches to the city.
In
the South, Napoleon himself commanded the corps of Poniatowski, Augereau,
Victor, Macdonald, Oudinot and Lauriston, backed by the Young and Old Guard,
the Guard Cavalry and four cavalry corps. To
the South Napoleon was faced by three Austrian Corps under Lederer,
Hessen-Homberg, and Colloredo, supported by the Austrian Reserve Cavalry, a
large Prussian corps under Kleist, two Russian corps under Eugen and
Gortshakov, and the Russian/Prussian Guard under
Constantine
, supported by the Allied Guard
cavalry. These forces were under
the command of Schwarzenberg and Barclay. If
this was not enough, arriving from the East came another Austrian corps
under Klenau, a Prussian Division under Zeithen, a Russian corps under
Doctorow and Platov’s Cossacks, all under the direction of Bennigsen. It
is on this Southern sector that we shall concentrate.
 During
the morning the French were pushed slowly back, but there was little serious
fighting except between the Poles and Hessen-Homberg’s Austrians. Pushing
ahead of the Allied main body the “Kaiserlicks” took Dolitz but were
badly mauled by Poniatowski’s men when they tried to advance further and
were obliged to wait until the rest of the Allies came up.
At
2 p.m.
the battle proper began. On
the Allied left renewed attacks on Connewitz were thwarted by Poniatowski
and Augereau. In the centre
Victor, supported by Lauriston, hurled back attack after attack on
Probstheida by Barclay’s columns until eventually Schwarzenberg was
obliged to order the Russians onto the defensive in this area. On
the Allied right however, Bennigsen’s men both outnumbered and overlapped
Macdonald and, after fierce fighting the Austrians and Russians cleared
Holzhausen, Zuckelhausen and Zweinaundorf, pushing the French back at right
angles to their front from Connewitz to Probstheida.
 It
was in the North though that the battle was decided. By
3 p.m.
Bernadotte had finally brought
the Swedes into line between Blucher and Bennigsen and, heralded by a
massive bombardment, Ney was assailed on three sides. Napoleon withdrew the
Young and Old Guard from the South and counterattacked in support of Ney. Although
the Guard retook some ground the position was untenable. Ney
was wounded and was obliged to withdraw to the suburbs of
Leipzig
to shorten his line. Whilst
this withdrawal was underway the Saxon infantry crossed the lines and
deserted, to the cheers of the French cavalry who thought that they were
attacking! The odds were moving
inexorably in favour of the Allies.
Without
the Guard there was no hope of the French counterattacking in the South. Although
grim fighting at Stotteritz finally halted Bennigsen’s attack, this left
the French line in this sector in a reversed “L” shape, running from
Connewitz, turning at Probstheida, to Stotteritz. The
French had done well in the South to hold against the numerical superiority
of the Allies but their valour had been to no avail as the Allies closed in
on
Leipzig
behind them. As
night fell Napoleon drafted his orders for retreat.
The
Alternative History
 Long
Ago and Far Away, in the halcyon days of
Hong Kong
wargaming, we had staged
as a two-day bash, with a cast
of thousands, (well at least 15 players and umpires,) on huge tables at
Osborne Barracks using “In the Grand Manner” rules and every figure in
the club. Over about 16 hours of
play I doubt if we got through more than a dozen moves but we all had a
splendid time and vowed that we would do it again soon . . . well, 14 years
later here we were! For all its
“get up and go” Hong Kong is a bit like that.
This
time the game took place to mark the happy coincidence of Peter Munn from
Japan, and Ollie from
Taiwan
both being in
Hong Kong
at the same time. I
had been toying with another two-day refight of Leipzig scaled down at 1:
400 for some time, but with the people and time available even that was too
ambitious so we settled for recreating that final afternoon on the Southern
sector. The armies were scaled
down at 1: 200. This being one quarter of the scale of the rules divisions
roughly became brigades and corps became roughly divisions. Some
tweaking of the orders of battle was necessary to ensure that both sides had
the right number of major manoeuvre units and that the organization made
sense in wargames terms, rather than just be an arbitrary scaling down.
 Jeff
dusted off his megalomaniac ego to reprise the role of Napoleon again, with
direct command of the Guard and Oudinot’s troops. Under
him Andrzej was Poniatowski, (of course,) and Augereau, Dick was Macdonald
and Peter M was Lauriston. On
the Allied side Dieter was Hessen-Homberg and Kleist, Ollie was Barclay and
James was Bennigsen. Yours truly
played the dual role of umpire and Schwarzenberg, the latter not so much as
the co-ordinator of the Allied effort, but more as a restraining factor
trying to stop Dieter from getting too many of my beloved Austrians killed. For
game purposes the Allied commanders each commanded corps in their own right
whilst the French all counted as division commanders under Napoleon. This
allowed Napoleon better command control on the units within his command
span, as he could decide who got the pip dice. Outside
of Napoleon’s command radius the command advantage switched to the Allied
corps which had less, but more consistent, command. In total 516 French
figures faced 654 Allies, representing 60,000 men at game scale and a
quarter of a million at the 1: 200 scale. Units
started the game in their historical positions. The
table was ten and a half feet wide by four and a half deep. We
used a “Near Run Thing” rules with some revisions I have been working on
to allow multiple moves to contact, which considerably speeds up the action.
 The
game lasted for 11 turns, between
2 p.m.
and
5.40 p.m.
To
simulate the possible redeployment of the Guard to support Ney, Napoleon had
to dice at the beginning of turns 5, 6 and 7. On
a score of 1 or 2 the Guard would have to be withdrawn off the table, a
second dice throw would determine how much of it had to go. This
mechanism entailed that history was very likely to be repeated, but this was
not certain. There was an
outside chance that the Guard would not be committed at all, or, if it were
committed, then perhaps not all of it would have to be moved from the
Southern sector. This gave both
the French and the Allies something to think about. Victory conditions were
determined by how many of the nine villages on the table the French would
hold as night fell. The
historical total was four, (Stotteritz, being a large place, counting as
two,) which would be a draw. The
French also faced a penalty if they were unable to withdraw the required
Guard units in time.
The
initiative was with the Allies and their plan was Fredericken in nature with
basically a massive en echelon attack. Bennigsen,
supported by the Barclay’s Allied reserve cavalry, would start in the
East, Barclay would then add to the pressure in the centre whilst Kleist and
Hessen-Homberg would finally join in from the West. The
French were, historically, deployed in depth, and careful attention was paid
to having sufficient counterattack forces behind the villages. However
Napoleon’s plan was not defensive in nature. Making
the most of his initial cavalry superiority he planned spoiling attacks in
the centre and East. To get the
most mileage out of the Guard before he faced the chance of losing it, the
Young Guard were given a prominent role in holding the line between Augereau
and Macdonald and the Guard cavalry supported the attack in the East.
 All
this French aggression came as a disconcerting surprise to the Allies. In
the centre Barclay’s Russians had plenty of time to see Pajol’s troopers
coming at them but, even so, the French cavalry almost surprised one of the
Russian units, catching it disordered as it formed square. For
a while it was touch and go but the leading French units were not supported
by their colleagues and were soon seen off. However
this attack put the Russian offensive way behind schedule and this resulted
in the
village
of
Zuckelhausen
holding out much longer than
it should have. With the
Russians slowed down, Kleist’s Prussians to the West took up the attack. The
first Prussian offensive was easily beaten off but the second attack made
good headway and was only halted by Napoleon committing part of the Young
Guard and using the French reserves that had been kept behind Probstheida
awaiting the inevitable attack on that vital village. By
the time the Prussians were stopped they had bypassed Probstheida. That
village and Zuckelhausen now constituted a salient, surrounded to the West
by the Prussians; to the East by Klenau’s Austrians, who had cleared the
village
of
Holzhausen
on the extreme East of the
French line; and faced to the Front by the Russian Guard who were replacing
the line troops that had seen off Pajol’s horsemen.
 In
the
East Sebastiani
’s cavalry quickly drove off
Platov’s Cossacks, leaving Bennigsen’s forces without cavalry support
and forced back onto the defensive. Latour-Mauberg’s cavalry similarly
neutralised Zeithen’s Prussians. This
led to a sort of stalemate as Bennigsen’s infantry, supported by artillery
could make no headway against the French cavalry, but, by the same token,
the French had little chance of cracking the firm Allied front in this
sector. However, a gap of about
half a mile had opened up between the end of Zeithen’s line and the
Russians, behind and to the North of them. If
the French could exploit this, the day might still be theirs. The
French Guard cavalry went at the front of the Prussian line whilst
Sebastiani was sent around it to take it from the flank and rear.
As
Sebastiani’s cavalry groped into the space beyond Zeithen’s line they
discerned before them line upon line of Allied cavalry troopers, well
mounted, armoured and still fresh: the Allied Reserve Cavalry: Russian Guard
and Austrian Cuirassiers, had arrived in the nick of time. Instead of
wreaking havoc in the rear of the Prussian line Sebastian’s troopers were
faced with the task of putting the champagne cork back in the bottle as the
Allied heavies came straight for them. Likewise the French Guard cavalry,
who’s task of breaching the Prussian line if it was simultaneously
assailed from flank and rear too would have been hard enough, now had to do
the job alone.
 The
day had reached its crisis, and the fate of the battle, maybe of the Empire,
depended on what happened in the next few minutes. As
the French horsemen accelerated from walk to trot to gallop maybe they
thought back to the glory days, to Austerlitz
or Jena
where they had been decisive. Maybe
they thought of Eylau where their sacrifice had saved the army. Or
maybe they thought of Russia, where too much had been asked
of man and beast. This time too,
too much had been asked of them. Sebastiani’s
line cavalry were no match for the best in the Allied army and although the
Guard cavalry came bravely on the Prussian squares and batteries did not
finch and horses and men were mown down by rippling volleys of musketry and
blasts of canister. Devastated
the French cavalry withdrew.
Twenty
minutes after this charge Ney sent a desperate plea for help from the North,
(Jeff failed the third of his three throws.) Napoleon
assessed the situation and decided that only the whole of the Guard would
save the day in the North, (Jeff was unlucky with this throw too). Engaged
and somewhat mangled, the Young Guard and the Guard cavalry took a long time
to withdraw and the French situation outside
Leipzig
would be desperate before they
intervened.
 With
the French Guard gone the odds against Napoleon lengthened from 4:5 to 2:3
and the Allies piled on the pressure. In
the West Hessen-Homberg made little headway against the Poles in Connewitz
but an assault by Colloredo’s Austrians against Augereau’s front almost
succeeded, being pushed back only at the last moment by a spirited Polish
counterattack. In desperation,
and to Schwarzenberg’s considerable disgust, Hessen-Homberg sent the
unscathed Austrian line cavalry reserve unsupported against the Connewitz
position and Poniatowski quickly saw it off.
In
the centre the first attack by the Russian Guard on Probstheida was beaten
off by the confident garrison. A
massive artillery bombardment presaged the second attack and this time the
Sons of Holy Mother Russia took the village at bayonet point. Whilst
the Russians were still sorting themselves out of their disorder in the
village the last reserve French battalion counterattacked them. At
first the French made good headway, but Russian morale held and the French
too became disordered in the bloody chaos of street fighting through the
burning village. Isolated and
disorientated the French eventually gave way, leaving the Russian Guard in
sole possession of the charred ruins of the little village of Probstheida
and masters of the centre of the battlefield.
 Thus
as night fell the French held a diagonal line from Connewitz, firmly held by
Poniatowski, to Lauriston on the heights above Stotteritz. The
remnants of Macdonald’s corps were falling back in between them. Since
they were holding three villages the game was a marginal French defeat, and
this was made one level worse because of the delay in redeploying the Guard.
The conservative French strategy
would have been to fight a delaying action until the fate of the Guard was
known and then, if it remained on the field, to use it for a counterattack. Such
a strategy offered the French little hope of a victory, but a good chance of
a draw. Instead Napoleon went
for a more aggressive strategy that gave a good chance of victory if he was
lucky with the Guard.
Jeff
wasn’t lucky with the Guard and he paid the price. But
he did make a fun game of it and that was the main purpose of the day. Jeff’s
hospitality was of the very high standard we, spoiled gamers that we are,
have come to expect. One of his
home cooked hams and a turkey gave lunch a very Christmassy feel about it,
and a very, merry time was had by all the gentlemen there present.
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napoleonic wars
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