Who won the Battle of Zorndorf?
Neither side won outright. On 25 August 1758 Frederick the Great's Prussians attacked William Fermor's Russian army near Zorndorf, today Sarbinowo in Poland, and after a day of slaughter both armies were still on the field. The Russians then withdrew, so Frederick claimed victory, but Fermor claimed it too.1
In August 1758 a Russian army stood on the Oder in Brandenburg and had just burned the fortress town of Küstrin. Frederick the Great raced north from Silesia to meet it. The battle he fought on 25 August in the fields around Zorndorf became one of the bloodiest of the Seven Years' War: a day of cavalry charges, artillery at close range and, when the ammunition ran out, killing with bayonets and musket butts.2
Why were the Russians in Brandenburg in 1758?
Russia fought the Seven Years' War as an ally of Austria against Prussia, and in 1757 its army had already beaten a Prussian army at Gross-Jägersdorf. In January 1758 Russian troops marched into East Prussia, which had been stripped of its garrison, and Fermor entered Königsberg without a fight. That summer he marched west through Polish territory into the Neumark, the part of Brandenburg east of the Oder, towards the heart of the Prussian state. For the wider war, see the guides to the Seven Years' War and the Third Silesian War.3
Distance was the Russian army's great problem. It was far from home and had no port on the Baltic, so its bread had to come by cart out of Poland. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, neutral but friendly, was what made a campaign this far west possible at all: the historian Denis Sdvizhkov shows how much the army depended on its supplies, and the Polish magnate Aleksander Józef Sułkowski was one of its main food suppliers.4
Fermor turned on Küstrin, where the Warta meets the Oder; Carlyle thought he hoped to take it as a base without a proper siege train. On 15 August 1758 his troops began to bombard it. The fire caught in the town, which burned to the ground, while the garrison in its stone fortifications held out. The people of the countryside who had taken refuge there with their belongings lost everything.5
How did Frederick reach the Russians?
Frederick was in Silesia when the news came. He left most of his army there and marched north with about 14,000 to 15,000 picked men, Archenholz and Carlyle say, joining the corps of General Dohna near Küstrin on 21 August. Passing through burned villages, the troops wanted revenge. When hussars brought in a handful of captured Cossacks, the king looked them over with contempt, and, in Archenholz's version, called them rabble (Carlyle renders the word as doggery).6
He did not attack across the Oder at Küstrin. Instead he made a show of crossing there, then marched downstream at night and crossed at Güstebiese, today Gozdowice, out of the Russians' sight. Fermor broke off the siege of Küstrin and turned to face him. On 24 August the Russians took up a position on the low hills between the villages of Quartschen, Zicher and Zorndorf, with the marshy Mietzel stream behind them.7
Frederick then marched right around the Russian army. Crossing the Mietzel, his columns swung in a wide arc through the woods to the east and came up behind the Russians from the south, near Zorndorf. His idea, Carlyle explains, was to strike the Russians from the side they least expected and drive them back against the Mietzel and its bogs. Carlyle writes that Frederick broke his own bridges over the Mietzel behind him; Archenholz, that the bridges which might have helped a Russian flight were burned.8
What was Fermor's position?
Fermor's army had to turn round to face the Prussians coming from the south, so the line that had faced north now faced Zorndorf. Its ground was cut by two marshy hollows, the Zabern hollow on one side and the Galgengrund, the gallows hollow, through the middle, which split the army into parts that could hardly help one another. The Russian historian Dmitry Masslowski judged the position too narrow for an army of that size.9
Western writers long described the Russians as fighting in one huge square, the formation they used against the Turks, with their baggage and reserves inside. Archenholz called it one of the worst orders of battle that could be chosen. Masslowski, who worked in the Russian military archives, disputed this: in his reading the square was formed the evening before only to shelter the light baggage, and the army met the attack in its usual two lines.10
As the Prussians came up, Cossacks set fire to Zorndorf to slow them. The smoke from the burning village drifted over the Russian lines, and by most accounts dust and smoke soon hid much of the field from the commanders on both sides.11
The morning: how Seydlitz saved the Prussian left
The battle opened in the morning with a heavy Prussian cannonade on the Russian right, which tore into the densely packed ranks. Frederick meant his left wing to make the main attack in his favored oblique order, the method that had won at Leuthen the year before, with the right held back.12
It went wrong at once. The leading Prussian infantry pushed ahead too fast and lost touch with the troops meant to support it, and a gap opened. The Russians saw it and counterattacked with infantry and cavalry, threw the Prussian left back and captured a number of its guns. For a moment the battle seemed lost.13
It was saved by the Prussian cavalry under Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz, the hero of Rossbach. He led his squadrons across the Zabern hollow, where he had had crossings prepared, and fell on the flank of the Russians as they surged forward in disorder. The Russian cavalry broke and the cuirassiers rode into the infantry of the Russian right, which fought on in isolated groups and was cut down where it stood.14
Russian accounts stress how hard those groups fought. Masslowski singles out the 1st and 3rd Grenadier regiments, which took the first shock of Seydlitz's charge, and quotes a Prussian cavalry officer who wrote that no one could withstand the Russian grenadiers. Archenholz, writing from the Prussian side, saw the same thing with less sympathy: the Russian infantry stood in thinned ranks and let themselves be killed, so that it was easier to kill them than to put them to flight.15
Behind the broken right wing order collapsed. Fugitives reached the baggage, broke open the sutlers' casks of spirits and got drunk; officers who tried to stop them were attacked by their own men. Fermor himself was absent from the decisive part of the fight, possibly wounded, and gave almost no orders until evening, Masslowski found.16
The afternoon: the second crisis
The attack on the Russian right had spent itself, but the left wing of Fermor's army, the Observation Corps under General George Browne, was still intact. Frederick now turned his right wing and center against it. Before the Prussian infantry could close, the Russian cavalry charged first, broke into the Prussian line and captured a battery.17
Several battalions of Dohna's corps gave way under the king's eyes and fled, and Frederick could not rally them. Once again Seydlitz rescued the day: with 61 squadrons now under his command he charged the Russian horse, drove it back towards the Mietzel, and opened the way for the infantry.18
What followed was a slaughter. Both armies had run short of ammunition, and men fought with bayonets, sabers, musket butts and bare hands. The Prussians had been told to give no quarter after the burning of Küstrin, and the Russians answered that they would give none either. The fighting died away only at nightfall.19
Zorndorf casualties: how many died?
Zorndorf was among the costliest battles of the Seven Years' War. The Prussians lost about a third of their army, some 11,400 men killed, wounded and missing by the figures Carlyle and Masslowski cite, while estimates of Russian losses run from about 16,000 to over 21,000. Den Store Danske, which counts the battle a Prussian victory, gives about 13,000 Prussian and 18,000 Russian losses.20
Masslowski, working from the Russian returns, found that the first lists of 29 August counted 10,886 dead and missing and 12,788 wounded, 23,674 in all, out of 44,045 men; Fermor's later report of 31 August, after many missing men had come back, put the loss at about 16,000. Archenholz gives the Russians 19,000 killed and wounded and 3,000 prisoners, and Carlyle 21,529, of whom 7,990 were killed.21
The Prussians, by the same accounts, lost 26 guns, and the Russians between 86 guns, by their own count, and 103, by the Prussian one. The losses among Russian generals were extraordinary: Masslowski counts only five of 21 generals and brigadiers unhurt, and Generals Ivan Saltykov and Chernyshev were among those taken prisoner.22
Who won the Battle of Zorndorf?
Both armies spent the night near the battlefield, and the next morning they exchanged cannon fire, but neither had the ammunition or the strength to attack again. Fermor asked for a truce of several days to bury the dead; Dohna replied that burying the dead was the victor's business. The Russians then drew off towards their baggage and Landsberg on the Warta.23
Frederick claimed the victory because the Russians left the field and his campaign had achieved its aim: the Russian advance on Berlin was stopped. Fermor claimed it too, pointing to the Prussian guns he had taken, and a Te Deum was sung for a Russian victory in Vienna before the facts became clear. Polish historians such as Grygiencza call the battle indecisive.24
Frederick knew to whom he owed the day. On the evening of the battle, pointing at Seydlitz, he is said to have told the British envoy Andrew Mitchell that without him things would have looked bad.25
How did the Russians see Zorndorf?
For the Russian army Zorndorf was the first battle against Frederick in person, and its officers came away convinced they had won. Reviewing Sdvizhkov's edition of letters written by Russian officers after the battle and captured by the Prussians, the historian Dymitr Grygiencza notes that every writer took the victory for Russia's, and that the view which caught on, from the officers to Empress Elizabeth, was that the army's real achievement was to have withstood the invincible Frederick.26
Petersburg was less pleased with Fermor. Masslowski describes a rescript of the Conference of 2 September 1758 that praised the troops' courage only drily and blamed the whole army for the disorder, and Grygiencza notes that the army's distrust of Fermor, at a time when officers of German origin were widely mistrusted, probably helped bring the appointment of the Russian Pyotr Saltykov to command in 1759. Archenholz adds that Fermor stayed with the army under his successor.27
What happened after Zorndorf?
Frederick did not pursue far. Leaving Dohna to watch the Russians, he marched to Saxony, where the Austrians threatened his brother Henry; the victory, Den Store Danske notes, freed him to turn against Austria. On 14 October the Austrians surprised his camp at Hochkirch.28
The Russians came back. In 1759, under Saltykov and together with the Austrians, they crushed Frederick at Kunersdorf, also on the Oder. For other Prussian battles of the war see Landeshut, 1760, Kolín and Prague.29
Where was the Battle of Zorndorf fought?
Zorndorf is today Sarbinowo, a village in the commune of Dębno in western Poland, a few miles north-east of Kostrzyn (Küstrin) on the Oder. The battle was fought in the fields between Sarbinowo, Gudzisz, Chwarszczany (Quartschen) and Cychry (Zicher), in what was then the Prussian Neumark. In Polish it is called the battle of Sarbinowo.30
Poles fought here too. Prince Antoni Sułkowski served as a volunteer with the Russians, and General Prince Lubomirski, a brigade commander in the Russian army, was wounded.31
The battlefield is now studied by archaeologists, who have recovered artillery projectiles and traced the Russian retreat across the marshes. In 1899 the Polish painter Wojciech Kossak, whose patron was Emperor Wilhelm II, painted the battle on a huge canvas that is now in the Potsdam Museum.32
Test what you remember in the early modern battles quiz, or read about the greatest cavalry charges in history.
