Russia Against Napoleon (22 page)

Chuikevich’s analysis was close to the ideas expressed earlier by Aleksandr Chernyshev. He argued that Napoleon’s whole system of war depended on big battles and rapid victories. For the Russians, the key to victory was ‘to plan and pursue a war exactly contrary to what the enemy wants’. They must retreat, raid enemy communications with their much superior light cavalry, and wear down Napoleon’s forces. ‘We must avoid big battles until we have fallen right back on our supply bases.’ In previous wars, when frustrated, Napoleon had made serious mistakes but his enemies had not exploited them. Russia must not miss this opportunity. Its cavalry could prove lethal in pursuit of a beaten foe. Determination not to negotiate and to continue the war until victory was vital but so too was caution; Fabius, the Roman general whose refusal of battle had so frustrated Hannibal, must be their guide. So too must Wellington’s policy of strategic withdrawal in the Peninsula. ‘However contrary this strategy based on caution is to the spirit of the Russian people, we must remember that we have no formed reserve units behind our front-line forces and the complete destruction of the First and Second armies could have fateful consequences for the Fatherland. The loss of a few provinces must not frighten us because the state’s survival depends on the survival of its army.’ Chuikevich also advocated a number of ways in which Europe might be incited to rise up in Napoleon’s rear. Though unrealistic, they do serve as a useful reminder that for him, Barclay and Alexander the 1812 campaign in Russia was merely the first act in a longer war designed to destroy Napoleon’s domination of Europe.
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Chuikevich’s memorandum did not go into details. It said nothing specific about where Napoleon’s advance might be stopped. Unlike Pfühl, Chuikevich was a practical soldier who understood the uncertainties of warfare. But no one who read the memorandum could be confident that Napoleon’s advance would be halted within the western borderlands. The danger that the war would spread into the Russian heartland was obvious. In reality Barclay and Alexander had always understood this possibility. Any Russian leader knew how Charles XII had marched deep into the empire’s interior and had been destroyed by Peter the Great. The parallels were clear enough. On the very eve of Napoleon’s invasion, Count Rostopchin wrote to Alexander that ‘if unfortunate circumstances forced us to decide on retreat in the face of a victorious enemy, even in that case the Russian emperor will be menacing in Moscow, terrifying in Kazan and invincible in Tobolsk’. While recovering from his wounds in 1807 Barclay himself apparently spoke at length of the need to defeat Napoleon by drawing him into the depths of Russia and inflicting on him a new Poltava. Before 1812 Alexander and his sister Catherine spoke privately about the possibility of Napoleon taking both Moscow and Petersburg in the event of a war. Early in 1812 the emperor made quiet arrangements to evacuate his mistress and child to the Volga if the need arose.
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All this was a long way from concrete plans to lure Napoleon into the Russian interior or prepare for his destruction there. In reality no such plans or preparations existed. This was sensible. Barclay’s brother was a colonel on the general staff: he wrote in 1811 that it was pointless to make plans for military operations beyond the first stages of any war, so great were the uncertainties involved in any campaign. This was doubly the case in 1812 since Russia’s defensive strategy had left the initiative in Napoleon’s hands. If Napoleon crossed the Dvina he might head for Moscow. On the other hand, he could make for Petersburg or even shift the main thrust of the war southwards towards Ukraine, as his Polish advisers were urging. More likely, he could end his campaign with the conquest of Belorussia and devote his energies to restoring the Polish kingdom and organizing a supply base for a campaign into the Russian heartland in 1813. Before the war began Napoleon told Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, that this was what he intended to do and at least one senior Russian general staff officer believed that if Napoleon had stuck to this idea the consequences for Russia would have been disastrous.
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For the Russian leadership, how their own subjects would respond to the French invasion was a matter of immense importance and uncertainty. Above all, this meant the Poles, not least because they dominated the region which Russian strategy intended to surrender to the invaders. There was considerable debate among Russian generals and statesmen before the war began about how the Poles would respond to a French invasion. It was felt that many of the great landowners preferred Russian rule because they disliked the abolition of serfdom in the Duchy of Warsaw and feared further radical measures. As to the region’s peasants, they might indulge in anarchic assaults on property and order but the Russian leadership was confident that they neither understood nor cared about nationalist or Jacobin ideas. The big danger was the mass of the Polish gentry. Most Russian generals agreed that, if Napoleon invaded Russia and proclaimed Poland’s restoration, the great majority of educated Poles in Lithuania and Belorussia would support him, partly out of nationalist enthusiasm and partly because they believed that he would win. Of course this reinforced the generals’ unwillingness to withdraw from the borderlands, not least for fear that Napoleon would turn them into a fruitful base for subsequent operations against the Russian heartland. Alexander and Barclay could not deny this possibility. But they believed that Napoleon’s overwhelming numbers left them no alternative to their strategy. They knew that restoring the Polish kingdom could not be done overnight. They banked on Napoleon’s temperament, as well as on the nature of his regime and military system, making a strategy of sustained patience unlikely.
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As regards the emperor’s Russian subjects, much the most important ‘constituency’ was the army itself. For any army, maintaining discipline and morale during a long retreat is extremely difficult. The Prussian army disintegrated after Jena-Auerstadt and the French were little better during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 and from Leipzig in the autumn of 1813. British discipline collapsed during Sir John Moore’s retreat to Corunna in 1808 and again during the retreat from Burgos back into Portugal in 1812. As one historian of the Peninsular War comments, ‘retreats were not the British army’s forte’. Though the Russian army was famous for its discipline, a retreat not just across the whole of Belorussia and Lithuania but also deep into Russia itself was bound to test morale and order within the regiments to the limit. In stressing the impact of retreat on his troops’ morale just before the war Prince Bagration had his own axe to grind because the very idea of retreating in the face of an enemy was anathema to him. Nevertheless, his fears were by no means groundless.
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It is a truism among military historians that armies can only fight wars in line with their ‘military doctrine’, which is elaborated in the pre-war years. In the early nineteenth century formalized military doctrine in the modern sense existed nowhere. This would have to wait for staff colleges and the whole paraphernalia of modern military education and training. In an informal sense, however, the Russian army did have a ‘doctrine’ in 1812 and it was wholly committed to offensive strategy and tactics. From his first moments in his regiment the young officer was encouraged to be daring, fearless, confident and aggressive. Every lieutenant was expected to believe that one Russian was worth five Frenchmen. Male pride was at stake in the ‘game’ to capture trophies such as flags and drive the enemy off the battlefield. Many Russian generals in 1812 had this mentality too. To retreat before the enemy was almost as shocking as failing to defend one’s honour in a duel when challenged. In addition, in the previous century the army had experienced only victory. Its great triumphs over Frederick II and the Ottomans had been won on the offensive and on enemy soil. The greatest eighteenth-century Russian generals, Aleksandr Suvorov and Petr Rumiantsev, stressed speed, aggression, surprise and shock. An army bred on such ideas and traditions was bound to mutter if forced to retreat hundreds of kilometres deep into Russian territory on the basis of calculations about logistics and numbers made by ‘German’ staff officers.
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It was also hard to predict how the Russian civilian population would respond if Napoleon entered the Great Russian provinces. After all, the army of a great power was supposed to protect the property of its compatriots, not retreat for hundreds of kilometres without a battle and open the country’s core to devastation. Above all, the elites had to worry about how their serfs would react to Napoleon, particularly if he issued promises of emancipation. In pre-war military documents there is very little on this subject. One interesting (though unique) war ministry document did raise the spectre of Russian peasant disturbances, arguing that the experience of the Pugachev rebellion showed that house serfs and peasants working in factories were the least reliable elements.
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Inevitably such fears grew as Napoleon approached the Russian borders in July 1812. The private secretary to Alexander’s wife Empress Elizabeth, Nikolai Longinov, wrote in July that ‘although I am convinced that our people would not accept the gift of freedom from such a monster, it is impossible not to worry’. In December 1812, with the danger passed, John Quincy Adams wrote that among the Petersburg elite there was great relief that ‘the peasants had not shown the least disposition to avail themselves of the occasion to obtain their freedom…. I see this is what most touches the feelings of all the Russians with whom I have conversed on the subject. This was the point on which their fears were the greatest, and upon which they are most delighted to see the danger past.’ The influence of such fears on pre-war planning or wartime operations must not be exaggerated, however. Petersburg’s salons might shiver at the word ‘Pugachev’ but fears of peasant insurrection barely figure in the correspondence of Alexander, Barclay or Kutuzov.
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At the beginning of April 1812, as they struggled to prepare their armies to oppose the invasion, Russia’s generals had more pressing concerns than serf rebellion. At this time Barclay was still hoping to mount a pre-emptive attack into the Duchy of Warsaw and East Prussia, though he realized that by now this could only be a quick and limited spoiling action. He awaited with impatience the emperor’s arrival at headquarters and permission to start the attack. In fact, however, Alexander was delayed and permission never came. The emperor had always preferred to await the attack and to adopt a defensive strategy. His determination to follow that line was confirmed by news of the Franco-Austrian alliance. If a Russian army advanced into the Duchy of Warsaw, Austria might well be impelled by this treaty to mobilize all its military forces and could push forward from Galicia into the rear of the advancing Russian armies.
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With all chances of a pre-emptive strike gone and the Austrian army also now to be reckoned with, the Russians were forced to redeploy their troops quickly. As Petr Mikhailovich Volkonsky wrote on 11 May, currently more than 800 kilometres separated the headquarters of Barclay’s right-hand corps at Schawel and Bagration’s headquarters at Lutsk. The armies were deployed for an advance into the Duchy of Warsaw. Above all, they were well placed to feed themselves off the countryside. But they were very poorly deployed to resist invasion. Volkonsky admitted that a pre-emptive strike had been the best option but it was no longer possible even in military terms because Napoleon had now gathered his stores into fortresses and 220,000 enemy troops were already deploying along the border. A new, ‘Third’, army was set up under Aleksandr Tormasov to guard the approaches to Ukraine. Bagration would detach part of Second Army to reinforce Tormasov and would bring the rest of his command northwards to link up with Barclay. Volkonsky reckoned that it would take fifteen days’ uninterrupted marching for Bagration’s men to reach their new positions. Even then First and Second armies would still hold a front of not much less than 200 kilometres.
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By 6 June Bagration’s army, now really no more than the size of a big corps, was deployed around Pruzhany. The Russians were evacuating cash, food, transport and archives from the border region. They were also trying to ‘evacuate’ local Polish officials who would be of service to the enemy. Having reached Pruzhany, Bagration was soon ordered to move still further northwards, since Russian intelligence now correctly believed that Napoleon’s main thrust would be further north than previously thought, from East Prussia and through the centre of First Army’s deployment in the direction of Vilna. This order was dispatched on 18 June, only six days before Napoleon crossed the border.
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Bagration was becoming distinctly unhappy. His army was drawing further and further away from Tormasov’s men. He wrote to Barclay that Volhynia (i.e. western Ukraine) was a juicy target for the French since it contained great reserves of food and horses, and its Polish nobles were certain to collaborate with Napoleon if given the chance. With Second and Third armies now beyond the range of mutual support, the road into Ukraine’s richest provinces was opening up. Meanwhile, in an effort to draw closer to First Army, his much reduced force was strung out over a front of more than 100 kilometres. Nor was it possible to execute his orders to destroy or drag away all local food supplies. Most local carts had been requisitioned by the army and if he drove all the local horses and cattle to the rear they would eat out the meadows on which his own army’s horses depended.
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In all these complaints there was, without doubt, an element of foot-dragging. Bagration loathed the idea of retreating without a fight and appealed to Alexander on 18 June to be allowed to mount a pre-emptive strike. In a fiery letter he set out all the disadvantages of a retreat. To do Bagration justice, his understanding of realities was not helped by the fact that Alexander had not passed on Russian intelligence’s estimates about the size of Napoleon’s forces. Nor had Bagration any clear overall picture of Napoleon’s deployment on the other side of the border. Before he could receive a response from the emperor Napoleon had crossed the border on 24 June and the war had begun.
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