Karl Mack von Leiberich
Karl Mack surrendered an army of some twenty-seven thousand men at Ulm without a battle, and gave the word capitulation a face. He was the son of a Bavarian schoolmaster who enlisted as a cavalry trooper and rose on merit through the staff, which in the Austrian army of the period was rare and resented. He had a genuine reputation as a planner. He served with distinction against the Turks, drew up the plan for the Flanders campaign of 1793, and was sought after by allied governments as a military adviser. He was lent to Naples in 1798, lost its army to the French in weeks, and was taken prisoner; he escaped from Paris in disguise in 1800, which should have ended his career and did not. In 1805 he was given effective command of the Austrian army in Germany and advanced into Bavaria to hold the line of the Iller, expecting the French through the Black Forest and Russian support that was still weeks away - partly because Austria and Russia were using different calendars. Napoleon marched two hundred thousand men in a wide arc from the Rhine to the Danube and came in behind him. The corps system made it possible: seven self-contained armies on separate roads, converging on contact. He surrendered on 20 October 1805, six weeks before Austerlitz, having fought almost nothing. He was court-martialled, stripped of his rank and sentenced to twenty years in a fortress. He served two, was released in 1808, and was rehabilitated in 1819 by the emperor whose army he had lost.
- Lived: 1752 CE – 1828 CE
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: military
