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Dagobert Sigismund, Count Wurmser (7 May 1724 – 22 August 1797) was an Austrian field marshal during the French Revolutionary Wars. Although he fought in the Seven Years War, the War of the Bavarian Succession, and mounted several successful campaigns in the Rhineland in the initial years of the French Revolutionary Wars, he is probably most remembered for his unsuccessful operations against Napoleon Bonaparte during the 1796 campaign in Italy. Although
initially in the Army of France during the Seven
Years
War, Wurmser left France after Louis reached a peace
agreement with Britain, and joined the military of the House
of
Habsburg. He later took part in the short-lived War
of
the Bavarian Succession, also called the Kartoffelkrieg (Potato War). During the French
Revolutionary
Wars, Wurmser commanded several imperial Habsburg armies in the Rhine River valley between 1793 and 1795, and perhaps
his most conspicuous achievement was the taking of the lines
of
Lauterburg and Weissenburg in
October
1793. In 1796, Francis
II,
Holy Roman Emperor, sent
him
to northern Italy, where the Habsburg military defended Austria's
southern territories. In a series of well-fought battles with the
French army, under the command of the up and coming general Napoleon
Bonaparte, Wurmser was trapped with his army in Mantua;
after
a negotiated capitulation, Wurmser left the city with his honors
and 700 men, and marched back to Vienna. His defeat at Mantua did not
diminish the luster of his service in imperial eyes — he was granted
another appointment immediately — but he was an old man of 72 years who
had spent most of his adult life in arduous campaigning. His health
failed him shortly after his appointment and he died in 1797. Born in
either the commune of Bas Rhin, in the village of Sélestat,
or
in Strasbourg, in Alsatia,
Wurmser
first served in the French
army during the early campaigns of the Silesian
Wars as a cavalry
officer under command of Marshal Charles
de
Rohan, prince de Soubise. In
1747,
he was promoted to Captain of Cavalry. In 1750,
when his father left Alsace and became a Habsburg subject, Wurmser too
left French service and joined the House
of
Habsburg military.
He brought with him the legions he commanded from France. As part of the imperial
Austrian army, he participated in the last years of the continental
war, sometimes called the Little
War, so called, because it did not involve three of the five great
powers involved. In these engagements against the Prussians, he showed
exceptional command capabilities and a wily and courageous attitude. On 30 January 1761, Emperor
Francis
I raised
him to comital status of the Holy
Roman
Empire of the German Nation. Two years later, Archduke
Charles of Lothringen, the Statthalter of Netherlands, known as an
audacious partisan collected his volunteers — a regiment each of Infantry
and Hussars, with an artillery company — and joined Austrian service. In Spring
1778, Wurmser's 30th Hussars were posted in northern Bohemia, to cover
the Border with Saxony and Silesia. Friedrich
von Nauendorf, the son of the previous Colonel-Proprietor of the
Regiment, was a captain in a village outpost, with about 50 Hussars under his command. In early July, the Prussian General Johann
Jakob
von Wunsch (1717 – 1788),
crossed
into Bohemia near the fortified town of Náchod,
in
the opening action of the War
of
Bavarian Succession.
Nauendorf led his 50 Hussars to engage
Wunsch's considerably larger force. When they encountered Wunch's
force, he greeted them as friends; by the time the Prussians realized
the allegiance of the Hussars, Nauendorf and his small force had the
upper hand, and Wunsch withdrew. The next day Nauendorf was promoted to
major. As the war evolved over the
summer, Wurmser's Hussars covered the left flank of the main army, which was positioned in the entrenched heights above Jaroměř,
in
a triple line of redoubts extending
15 kilometers (9 mi) along the river to Königgrätz. In
October, Joseph
II,
Holy Roman Emperor, withdrew
most
of the imperial army to the Bohemian border, under threat of
intervention by Catherine
II
of Russia; Frederick
II
of Prussia did
the same. A small force of hussars and dragoons remained in Bohemia to
provide a winter cordon, designed to prevent Prussian incursions into
Bohemia. Appointed to be commander of the winter cordon, Wurmser
ordered a small assault column under command of Colonel Wilhelm Klebeck
to attack the village of Dittersbach. Klebeck led a column of
Croats into the village. During the action, 400 Prussians were killed,
another 400 made prisoner, and eight colors were captured. Following his successes
against the Prussians in 1778, Joseph awarded him the Knights Cross of
the Military Order of Maria Theresa on 21 October 1778. In
another raid, in January 1779, Wurmser advanced into the County of Glatz in five columns, two of
which, commanded by Major General Franz
Joseph,
Count Kinsky, surrounded Habelschwerdt on 17–18 January. While one
column secured the approach, the other, under the leadership of Colonel
Pallavicini, stormed the village,
captured the Prince of Hessen-Philippsthal and 700 men, three cannons
and seven colors. Wurmser himself led the third column in an assault on
the so-called Swedish blockhouse at Oberschwedeldorf; it and the village of
Habelschwerdt were set on fire by howitzers.
Major
General Ludwig,
Baron
of Terzi (1730 – 1800), who
was covering with the remaining two columns, threw back the enemy
relief and took 300 Prussian prisoners. Meanwhile, Wurmser maintained
his position at the nearby villages of Rückerts and Reinerz. His
forward patrols reached the outskirts of Glatz, and were able to cover
the Silesian borders, almost reaching Schweidnitz. Halberschwerdt and
Oberschedeldorf were both destroyed.
In
1787,
Wurmser received a promotion to General
of
Cavalry; he held a series of posts in Vienna, Bohemia and Galicia,
becoming
Commanding General at the latter in 1787 during the Austrian
War
with the Ottoman Empire. While Wurmser fought
Austria's battles in the Balkans, in France, a coalition of the clergy
and the professional and bourgeoisie class — the First and Third estates — led a call for
reform of the French government and the creation of a written
constitution. Initially, the rulers of Europe viewed the French Revolution as an
event between the French king and his subjects, and not something in
which they should interfere. In 1790, Leopold succeeded his brother
Joseph as emperor and by 1791, he considered the situation surrounding
his sister, Marie
Antoinette, and her children, with greater alarm. In August 1791,
in consultation with French émigré nobles and Frederick
William
II of Prussia, he issued the Declaration
of
Pilnitz, in which they declared the interest of the monarchs of
Europe as one with the interests of Louis and his family. They
threatened ambiguous, but quite serious, consequences if anything
should happen to the royal family. The French émigrés
continued to agitate for support of a counter-revolution. On 20 April
1792, the French
National
Convention declared
war on Austria. In the War
of
the First Coalition (1792 – 1797),
France
opposed most of the European states sharing land or water
borders with her, plus Portugal and the Ottoman Empire. From
February 1793 to January 1794, Wurmser commanded the imperial Army of
the Rhine. He
commanded the successful
storming of the Lauterburg and Weissenburg lines on 13 October 1793.
The Lines, a series of earth works on the south side of the Lauter
river, a tributary of the Rhine river in Alsace-Lorraine, offered a
major strategic defensive position for the French. Part of
France's Army of the Vosges, under general command of Jean
Victor
Moreau, manned the French position. The three battalions and six squadrons, commanded by General of Brigade Illier, held the
position with ten artillery pieces. The French defensive line ran west from Lauterbourg on the Rhine to Saarbrucken.
The
western part of this line, from Lauterbourg to Wissembourg , was
protected by the Lines of Wissembourg, a series of fortifications built
nearly a century earlier to protect Alsace from invasion along the flat
plain between the Vosges and the Rhine. The Army of the Rhine defended
the Lines, the Army of the Rhine was at Saarbrucken and the Corps of
the Vosges linked the two, with camps at Hornbach and Kettrick. On 20
August, Wurmser directed the 4th Allied Column, and Field Marshal
Kavanagh's Hessen and Austrian troops, augmented by a battalion of
Emigre troops, to assault part of the works; Kavanagh's attack
successfully ousted the French from the position; General Illier was
killed by a Hessen Jäger. An unknown number of the 3,000 French
defenders were killed or wounded; three officers and 100 men were
captured. The testing for the Weissembourg Lines continued for the next
45 days. Each skirmish, each probe, tested the French strength and
resolve. In mid-September the Prussians successfully defeated a French
assault on Pirmasens, a
small fortification to the north and east; this success encouraged
the Austrian and Prussian alliance to venture a major assault on the
French defenses.
Wurmser's
force
of 33,599 infantry and 9,635 cavalry had whittled away at the
Lines, skirmishing throughout August and September with French infantry
and cavalry, which always withdrew to the superior defensive position
behind the earthen works. While the Prussians marched around the lines,
from Pirmasens, Wurmser organized his force into seven columns, and
they assaulted the Lines in waves, beginning on 13 September. Wurmser had commanded the
Austrian contingent at the defeat at the Battle
of
Weissenburg, on 26 December 1793.
From
August
1795 to June 1796, Wurmser commanded the Army of the Upper Rhine. In 1796,
Wurmser descended into northern Italy, with 25,000 men from his old
Army of the Rhine, to unite with Beulieu's battered army of northern
Italy. The two armies met at Trent, and marched to Mantua in three
columns. Wurmser's
columns scored some initial successes. The forward column, under
command of Peter
Quasdanovich moved
toward Lake Garda, and a small reconnaissance
force under Johann
von
Klenau advanced
from the alps on the city of Brescia;
there,
they found the local French garrison unprepared. At midnight,
Klenau led two squadrons of the Wurmser 8th Hussar Regiment and
several other battalions and squadrons in an attack on the French
garrison. They captured 600 – 700 French soldiers stationed there and
three officials of the French
Directory: Jean
Lannes, Joachim
Murat, and François Étienne
de Kellermann. Quasdanovich managed to
occupy Lonato.
Wurmser
did not count on swift movement by the French. Within two days,
Klenau's force retreated in the face of Napoleon
Bonaparte and
12,000 Frenchmen; his small advance guard was quickly pushed out of
Brescia on 1 August. At the subsequent Battle of
Lonato of 2–3
August 1796, the French also forced Quasdanovich's column to withdraw
into the mountains, with heavy losses. The mopping up operations
lasted until mid August, isolated Quasdanovich's force by Lake
Garda, and freed the French to concentrate on Wurmser's main force
at Castiglione
delle
Stiviere, further south; Bonaparte's subsequent victory
against Wurmser at the Battle
of
Castiglione forced
the old commander across the Mincio
River and allowed
the French to return to the siege
of
Mantua. The
resumed siege was not without its problems. To move swiftly against
Wurmser, Napoleon had abandoned all his siege equipment, leaving it
at Mantua. When he resumed the siege, it was much less effective
without his guns. Furthermore, by early
September, many of the scattered Austrian units had rejoined Wurmser's
column. Even so, at the Battle
of
Bassano on 8
September, the Austrians were outnumbered almost two to one by the
French. As the Austrian army
retreated, Bonaparte ordered a pursuit that caused the Austrians to
abandon their artillery and baggage. Most of the third battalion of the
59th Jordis, and the first battalion of the Border Infantry Banat
were captured and these units ceased to exist after this battle. The
Austrians lost 600 killed and wounded, and 2,000 captured, plus lost 30
guns, eight colors, and 200 limbers and ammunition wagons. Wurmser's column fought its
way to besieged Mantua,
but
emerged suddenly, in an effort to escape, at the Battle of La
Favorita near
there
on 15 September. This was the second attempt to relieve the fortress;
as the Austrians withdrew from the battle, they retreated into Mantua
itself, and from 15 September until 2 February 1797, Wurmser was
trapped inside the fortress while the city was besieged. Following
the Austrian loss at the Battle
of
Rivoli, 48 kilometers (30 mi) north of Mantua, on
14–15 January 1797, when clearly there would be
no Austrian relief for Mantua, Wurmser sent one of his juniors, Johann
von Klenau, to negotiate conditions of surrender with French General Jean
Sérurier. Additional evidence
suggests that Bonaparte was present and dictated far more generous
terms than the Austrians expected. Wurmser, who Napoleon held in
high esteem, left Mantua with his men and officers, and his battle
honors, and marched back to Austrian lands. Of all
the field marshals in Habsburg service during the French Revolutionary
and Napoleonic Wars, Wurmser was recognized among the best. Some
historians attribute Austrian problems to its aging general staff,
compared to the relatively young general staff of the French Empire.
Certainly the Habsburg military was well-endowed with an experienced,
graying staff. Wurmser at 72, approaching 73 in the 1796 campaign,
Bellegarde, Peter Quasdanovich (b. 1738) was nearing 70. Despite the
graying general staff, there were also youngsters, and these
demonstrated acute military acumen: Archduke
Charles was 26
years old in the 1796 campaign and had been tutored by
Hohenlohe-Kirchberg and Wurmser; Schwarzenberg was also young, under 30; Johann
von
Klenau, at 31, was the youngest field Marshal in the Habsburg
military; and there were many others. Wurmser may have been hampered more by the Aulic
Council than by his
age; Digby Smith points out that he descended into Italy fettered with
a new and inexperienced chief of staff sent to him by the Council with
battle plans and instructions in writing. These restricted his
movements in Italy, preventing him from responding to targets of
opportunity. A knight without fear and
above reproach. Broken in health, Wurmser
died in Vienna the following summer. |