The Battle of Austerlitz

2 December 1805

The Photographs (extremely slow: 695K)

text and photos by John Salmon, UK

The first thing to say about the photographs is that they were taken on a glorious summer's day. The battle started on a frosty foggy morning and the sun only managed to poke through the gloom towards the late afternoon. A certain amount of imagination is needed to fill the valleys with mist and cover the ground with frost.

For those whose only experience of a Napoleonic battlefield is Waterloo the size of the one at Austerlitz comes as a surprise. Waterloo is some four miles long by two and half deep, Austerlitz on the other hand is over five miles long and almost as wide. The numbers involved were at Austerlitz, 179,600 for both French and Austrian/Russians, while at Waterloo three armies, French, Anglo Dutch Belgium and Prussian crammed in over 262,000 men into a much smaller area. [2] It is as well to remember that the relative expanses of Austerlitz are more the norm for battles of this period.

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