Austrian Infantry, 1813: the Army That Kept Coming Back (NAP0074)

Austrian infantry, 1813: the enemy who was always there

Six men coming forward through long grass, shouting, in white coats with red collars and cuffs. In front, an officer in a grey greatcoat with a gold sash and a drawn sabre held low. And on every shako, easy to miss, a green sprig of oak. That twig is the first thing worth explaining, and the date in the title is the second.

The oak sprig is a field sign, not decoration

The Feldzeichen was a piece of greenery pinned to the headgear so that troops could recognise each other. It sounds primitive; it was practical. Armies of the period looked confusingly alike at two hundred metres through smoke — white coats were worn by Austrians, but also by Saxons, Neapolitans and some French line units early on. Something green on the head is visible when a cockade is not.

White was a decision about money

Austria clothed its infantry in undyed wool for most of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, because not dyeing cloth is cheaper than dyeing it. The cost is that white is impossible to keep clean on campaign and shows every stain — which is why the surviving descriptions of Austrian armies in the field so often mention how grey they looked. The officer’s greatcoat here is that same practical grey, and it would eventually become the colour of the whole army.

1813 is the date that matters

After the Russian catastrophe, Austria came back into the war — and at Leipzig, in October, an Austrian army was part of the coalition that finally beat Napoleon in the field. That battle is NAP0017. These are men from the campaign in which the long argument was finally settled, and they had been having it for twenty years.

Nobody fought Napoleon for longer

1792, 1796-97, 1800, 1805, 1809, 1813-14: Austria is the only continental power that was at war with revolutionary and Napoleonic France in every one of those rounds. It lost most of them, sometimes catastrophically — and rebuilt the army each time. Persistence is not a glamorous military virtue and it is the one that decided the outcome.

And they had beaten him once, on their own

🔗 In 1809, after Archduke Charles’s reforms, an Austrian army inflicted on Napoleon his first defeat in a pitched battle — Aspern-Essling, which is NAP0051 in this same catalogue. The men in white coats are usually painted as the people who lose, because the histories are written from the French and British side. They are also the people who were still there in 1814.