Some time after Alexander’s return from Erfurt, however, when Elizabeth learned that a suite of rooms in the Winter Palace was being prepared for some woman, she succumbed to both anger and grief. The lady’s identity has never been identified: it may have been Naryshkina or a new mistress, whom Tolstoy mentions, although he does not give her name. Whoever it was, the insult of her husband’s mistress moving into the Winter Palace was more than Elizabeth could bear. She told her sister Amelia, who was living with her, that she could not stay under the same roof with any mistress and would return to Baden forthwith.
The domestic crisis of the emperor and empress transfixed the gossipmongers of St Petersburg. For a short time, all talk of threatened war was forgotten. Amelia wrote at once to their mother, who in turn sent a letter to Elizabeth, begging her to change her decision. Alexander, suddenly aware, it would seem for the first time, how greatly Elizabeth was distressed, suddenly came to his senses as he realized that he was about to lose the one woman he really loved, despite his many infidelities. Shocked into contrition, he begged her to forgive him. The workmen departed from the Winter Palace and the royal marriage, at least on the face of it, somehow continued to survive.
Wylie worked to improve the running of the army hospitals with a speed spurred on by the knowledge that war was about to be declared. Committed as he was to this project, his task was not made easier by the fact that as personal doctor to the imperial family he was ever at the beck and call of the tsar.
Alexander’s loathing of the tyranny of serfdom was by now well known. Although some landlords were benevolent, others were quite the reverse. No one was more aware of this than Wylie, as the following incident must prove.
Told of the appalling treatment that a certain aristocratic lady, who lived some way from Moscow, was meting out to her serfs, Alexander sent Wylie, dragging him from his most important work, to examine the condition of the peasants living on her land. Directed to act as he thought best, Wylie, after an inspection, was so horrified by what he found that he sent flour, meat and wine over a distance of 200 versts33 for the relief of the starving people for which the virago who was so maltreating them was forced to pay.
Alexander’s wish to abolish serfdom was by now well known. It was also common knowledge that, in view of what was seen to be a coming time of national crisis as Napoleon threatened war, and reliant as he was on the landlords for support, his aim was unlikely to succeed.
Foremost among the tsar’s advisors on his plans to give the mass of his people at least a voice of their own was Mikhail Speransky, the man who had now become the tsar’s private secretary. Speransky, the son of a village priest, had trained originally for the priesthood, then became a civil servant and, noted for his diligence and comprehension of finance, had gradually risen to be head of the Second Department in the Ministry of Interior.
The tsar, having recognized his competence, had requested his release from this employment to become his personal assistant. In doing so he must have known that Speransky was an admirer of the new regime in France, but plainly was unaware that Napoleon planned to exploit his known influence over the tsar.
Speransky returned from Erfurt to be made both State Secretary and Assistant Minister of Justice. As such, with Alexander he planned to make sweeping government reforms. Although supreme power would remain with the tsar and a Council of State, the people would have a voice through elected representative assemblies. He also proposed that the taxation system should be based on the agricultural wealth of the country, an idea much resented by the landlords, whose money came largely from their land.
Most dramatically Alexander supported Speransky’s decision to abolish the privileges which allowed the advancement of the aristocracy in the civil service. Still more drastically, he allowed him to enforce the applicants for these positions to take a written examination.
The resulting outrage was predictable. Many of the nobility were incapable of passing a test in mathematics set in Russian, let alone in the French or Latin that were declared to be obligatory. It was claimed that Speransky, the upstart, was exploiting the tsar’s favour by instigating revolutionary measures.
Most vociferous of his critics was Alexander’s sister, the Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna, who had just married Prince George of Oldenburg. She complained bitterly to her brother that her husband’s reports as Governor-General of Tver and other provinces should pass through the normal government departments, rather than be seen and dealt with exclusively by himself.
Added to Catherine’s antagonism was that of General Arakcheev, the tsar’s instructor in the arts of war at Gatchina, a man both autocratic and brutal. Now Minister of War, he believed Speransky to be dangerously left wing.
Conflict between the members of the hierarchy in the Russian government rose to a crescendo as the country faced the threat of war. Negotiations between the emperors of France and Russia continued but relations became increasingly strained. The tension rose as resentment mounted in Russia against the Continental System, which was ruining the country’s trade. The climax came in December when Alexander learned that Napoleon, having annexed all the northern coasts of Germany, was proposing to take over Oldenburg. This direct contravention of the agreement arranged at Erfurt forced him into action. On 31 December he consented to the tariff decree, by which goods coming overland from Europe were heavily taxed, while restrictions were removed on those entering Russian ports. Trade with maritime countries, including Great Britain, the main outlet for Russian grain, hemp and flax, was thus established once more.
In St Petersburg it was now generally accepted that war with France was inevitable. The French Ambassador Caulaincourt, about to be recalled on health grounds, was told prophetically by the tsar:
Should the Emperor Napoleon make war on me, it is possible, even probable, that we shall be defeated . . . I shall not be the first to draw my sword, but I shall be the last to sheath it . . . I should sooner retire to Kamchatka than yield provinces or put my signature to a treaty in my conquered capital which was no more than a truce.34
Fanned by the impending crisis, hostility towards Speransky increased. A sharp rise in taxation, to finance the expanding army, infuriated the landlords who felt themselves penalised by the expenditure of a man whose very loyalty had been questionable for some time. So great was the outcry of his enemies that Alexander, with much reluctance, complied with their request to allow the Chief of Police to watch Speransky. Nothing could be proved against him, but, faced as he was with an impending French invasion, Alexander’s hands were tied. Convinced that even if Speransky was innocent, as he himself believed him to be, he knew that in continuing to uphold him he was placing not only his own life but also his vast empire in jeopardy. Accordingly, on the evening of 29 March, Alexander received Speransky in private audience in the Winter Palace. They talked for two hours. Then Speransky came out, obviously upset, and began pushing papers into a briefcase. Behind him the door then burst open again as Alexander, tears coursing down his cheeks, rushed to embrace him with fond farewells.
Speransky went home to find the Minister of Police waiting for him with a carriage in which he was carried off to exile in Novgorod, the great port on the River Volga.
As snow left the streets of St Petersburg in the spring of 1812, Russia faced a state of national emergency, greater than any known before.
On 20 April, in an audience with the Marquis de Lauriston, the new French ambassador, Alexander told him that while he was prepared to modify the Russian tariff to help French trade, he insisted that Napoleon should abide by his promise to evacuate Prussia. In addition he must remove his troops from Swedish Pomerania, and should Napoleon continue to advance his armies towards Russia he would consider it an act of war.
Meanwhile from St Petersburg regiments began marching for the frontier. On 21 April, Alexander himself left his capital to drive westwards to Vilna (now Vilnius), the third largest city in Russia at the time which, being only about ninety miles
from Napoleon’s newly formed Grand Duchy of Poland, lay directly before his expected advance.
Once there he was much entertained until, to return hospitality, he himself held a grand ball on the estate of General Bennigsen at Zakrêt on the outskirts of the city. There, while fountains played in the gardens beneath the light of a full moon and musicians of the Imperial Guard struck up the first notes of a mazurka, Alexander’s Chief of Police, General Balashov, arrived to tell him that Napoleon, with an army numbering 600,000 men, was already across the Niemen, only sixty-five miles away. Russia had been invaded, without declaration of war.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Borodino
As Napoleon was known to be approaching Vilna, the tsar retired north-east to Drissa, a town on a tributary of the Dnieper some 160 miles west of Moscow. From there he made the long journey due east to Moscow where he appointed General Kutuzov, hero of the war with Turkey and now a man of sixty-seven, to the supreme command of his army.
At the same time Doctor James Wylie, still at the height of his strength at forty-four, became director of the medical department of the Ministry of War. The first indication of his efficiency as an administrator, soon to be so dramatically proved, is found in descriptions of the Russian army’s withdrawal under darkness from Vitebsk at the end of July, when not a single sick man was left behind.35 Furthermore General Langeron states in his memoirs that in the retreat of 1,200 versts from the Niemen to Moscow, during which the army fought two major battles, not even one sick or wounded soldier was left to be captured by the enemy.36
In early August, as Napoleon advanced across Russia, the first major battle took place at Smolensk. The town was left burning as the Russian forces retreated towards Moscow, leaving behind scorched fields to deprive the invaders of ripening crops. Hunger and fever were by now decimating the French forces but still they advanced with the force of a tempest destroying all in its path.
On 7 September 1812 the two armies fought at Borodino, a village about seventy miles west of Moscow, and near the town of Moskva. Napoleon’s force of 130,000 men outnumbered the Russian troops, which were 120,000 strong. Kutuzov had ordered hastily built fortifications, mostly in the form of fleches, or trenches, built in the shape of arrows, on the idea of Prince Pyotr Bagration, who was in command of the Russian rearguard.
Doctor James Wylie was also prepared. Tents for field hospitals were in readiness, piled onto bullock carts, the drivers waiting for his instructions, relayed through orderlies, as to where they should be placed.
The battle began at six o’clock in the morning along a three-mile front. For six hours, until midday, the deadly thunder of cannons (the Russians had the advantage of 600 as opposed to the enemy’s 500 guns) literally shook the ground. The French gained a slight advantage but, because Napoleon refused to send in the 20,000 men of his Imperial Guard, no decisive victory was gained.
Afterwards some of those involved in the battle remembered that it had been a beautiful day. An early-morning mist had cleared and the sun shone on the meadows on both sides of the River Kolocha. As the heat increased, the air became sweet with the scent of freshly mown hay.
Wylie, however, was not aware of it, as he and his team of surgeons began a battle of their own. Stretcher followed stretcher bearing men writhing in pain. Most had limbs or torsos shattered by cannon balls, grapeshot, or the deadly splinters of grenades. The work of amputation was exhausting for even the strongest of men. Survival of patients, operated on without anaesthetic, depended greatly on the speed with which it was performed. As the work went on the doctor’s surgical aprons, however frequently changed, became saturated with blood. Canvas gave little relief from the sun so that, as the heat of the day increased, the stench within the tents became almost impossible to bear.
On the day of Borodino Wylie is known to have achieved the almost incredible feat of carrying out operations on at least 200 men. It is claimed that he made no distinction between friend and enemy, some of the wounded being French. Tolstoy pictured him in his novel War and Peace, calling him Villier, the Russian version of his name. As the mortally wounded Prince Andrey is carried to the dressing station, a doctor wearing a bloodstained apron, comes out of the tent, holding a cigar between the thumb and little finger of one of his bloodstained hands.37
Exhausted as he must have been, on the night after the battle, Wylie rode with General Platoff deep into the enemy lines. Only a man like Platoff, ‘Hetman of the Cossacks of the Don’, as Alexander named the commander of his legendary force, would have dared to have done what he did only hours after the guns had ceased to fire. But danger was an elixir to Platoff. Moreover, he knew that the mere sight of him and his men, swarthy, moustached and armed with deadly sabres, was enough stop any Frenchman from even trying to grab a rein.
Waiting until dusk was falling, with Wylie centred among them, the Cossacks rode into a field of carnage such as few of even the most hardened soldiers had ever before seen. On ground churned into mud, French soldiers, many of them wounded, their faces black with gun-smoke, thinking only of survival, were struggling to light camp fires. The guttering light showed what lay around them, dead and wounded men and horses, in a vision of hell.
The story, too grim to be forgotten even when many years had passed, was told by Wylie to his great-niece, who also affirmed that, while serving as a military surgeon throughout the Franco–Russian War, he had taken part in twenty battles and was wounded no fewer than three times. It is known that, on his own estimation, he had travelled with the army on foot or on horseback, in a carriage or on a sledge, more than 150,000 miles during the whole campaign.
The Russian losses at Borodino are claimed to have amounted to at least 44,000 men. Following the battle General Kutuzov, although not entirely defeated, resolved to adopt a strategy to conserve his remaining strength. At a conference in the village of Fili, knowing that the winter was coming and how severe it was likely to be, he laid down the policy that, as is now well known, would lure Napoleon to his doom. Under his leadership the fateful decision was reached that while with what remained of the army he would withdraw towards Moscow, he would not attempt to defend the city against Napoleon’s overwhelming strength.
The strategy, so brilliant in conception, would nonetheless prove horrendous to achieve when it is remembered that within the city itself were thousands of wounded men. This must be called Wylie’s greatest moment, for, as director of the medical department of the Ministry of War, he managed the near impossible feat of evacuating an estimated 30,000 casualties. His feat in doing so is all the more remarkable in view of the chaos that existed in the city as people tried to flee with their possessions through the crowded streets. Hundreds of horse-drawn vehicles, from carriages to the roughest farm carts, would have conveyed wounded men from the city to makeshift hospitals that had been erected beyond what was estimated to be the range of enemy guns.
Napoleon entered Moscow on 15 September to find the city on fire. Such was the destruction that, after only thirty-five days, with much sickness in his near-starving army, he gave the order to withdraw. His troops returned westward, following the way they had come, where the ravaged land and buildings gave neither food nor shelter to ill and exhausted men. From Smolensk they continued towards the frontiers of Poland and Prussia, struggling through snow as the winter set in with devastating, bone-biting cold.
The Grand Army of Napoleon, which had swept so triumphantly into Russia, returned across the wastelands of that huge country to be virtually destroyed by sickness and starvation induced by the appalling weather of those winter months.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Agony of Failure
Wylie soon returned to St Petersburg as word reached him that the tsar himself was ill. He was suffering from erysipelas, a streptococcal infection which produces painful inflammation and a deep red colouring of the skin. The disease, which affected his leg, was thought to be aggravated by the mental stress and exhaustion induced by the news of Moscow’s d
estruction, for which Alexander was thought to be much to blame.
The strength of anti-imperial feeling in St Petersburg became obvious when, on 27 September, the eleventh anniversary of his coronation fell due. As he drove through the streets with the Empress Elizabeth to attend a service of celebration in the Kazan Cathedral, there was ominous silence in the streets, the atmosphere tense with resentment. Yet these same people, who with sullen faces now lined the streets, were the ones who had so ecstatically welcomed their ‘little father’ on his return from the defeat of Austerlitz.
As the royal party entered the cathedral there was not a single cheer. ‘I happened to glance at the tsar and, seeing the agony of spirit he was undergoing, I felt my knees begin to tremble beneath me’ wrote a lady-in-waiting to the empress, remembering the humiliation that Alexander was forced to endure.
Two days later the official news reached St Petersburg that Moscow, burned and ruined, was now occupied by the French. The tsar, in a state of mental anguish, spent the next month almost entirely in the enchanting imperial villa on Kammionyi Island, lying at the mouth of the Neva in the Gulf of Finland.
Wylie, in constant attendance to the tsar, did all that was possible to help him as he wrestled with self-recrimination over the loss of life and honour to himself and his country and for the deaths of thousands of soldiers for which he was being held responsible by his subjects.
It did not help that while Alexander struggled with the demons in his mind, his sister Catherine chose that moment to harangue him, telling him in a letter that he was openly blamed. ‘You broke faith with Moscow, which awaited your coming with desperate longing . . . but I leave you to judge the state of affairs in a country whose ruler is despised.’38
Alexander answered her carefully, pointing out that he had not gone back to Moscow because of the vital importance of a meeting with the Swedish Count Bernadotte, with whom he had made an alliance only six months before. Also, by his presence, he had not wanted to undermine the authority of General Kutuzov as his commander-in-chief.
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