by Alan Palmer
Alexander treated this arrogant display of insolence with admirable restraint. Wilson describes how the Tsar went red in the face and stood in silence looking out of a window for several minutes. Then he calmly thanked Wilson for the message and told him he would consider it. It was clear to him that the officers (and no doubt the English General himself) wished to get rid of the Chancellor, Rumiantsev, and other survivors from the years of the Tilsit Peace. But Alexander had already bowed to the popular will twice in five months: once when he exiled Speransky to Nizhni Novgorod, and a second time when he appointed Kutuzov commander-in-chief. He was not prepared to give way yet again, especially since Rumiantsev’s influence on affairs since his illness at Vilna was slight and his duties as Chancellor purely formal. Alexander accordingly sent next day for Wilson and asked him to return to headquarters: he was to assure the officers of their sovereign’s resolve not to make peace so long as the French occupied any Russian territory. ‘I would sooner let my beard grow to the waist and eat potatoes in Siberia’, the Tsar declared.28 Meanwhile he declined to make any changes in his administration, and Rumiantsev remained nominally Chancellor for two more years.
Fortunately not all Alexander’s visitors in that first week of September were so importunate as General Wilson. Madame Germaine de Staël had two audiences with him and found him ‘a man of remarkable understanding and information … modest in disposition.’29* Since Mme de Staël still exercised some influence on the Prince Royal of Sweden and was about to set out for Stockholm, Alexander used all his charm and grace on his visitor. Her impressions of him must therefore be qualified by the fact that he wished to enlist her services in winning over Bernadotte, but what she says of Alexander on the eve of the great crisis of his reign is interesting and reveals something of his character:
What first struck me in him was such an expression of goodness and dignity that the two qualities appear inseparable, and in him form only one. I was also very much affected with the noble simplicity with which he entered upon the great interests of Europe, almost among the first words he addressed to me … I do not believe that in the whole extent of his empire he could find a minister better versed than himself in all that belongs to the judgment and direction of public affairs … Alexander expressed to me his regret at not being a great captain: I replied to this noble modesty, that a sovereign was much more rare than a general, and that the support of the public feelings of his people, by his example, was achieving the greatest victory, and the first of the kind which had ever been gained.30
Mme de Staël was also presented to the Empress Elizabeth, whom she describes as ‘the tutelary angel of Russia’, a rare ‘instance of concord between power and virtue’. ‘Her manners are extremely reserved’, Mme de Staël wrote, ‘but what she says is full of life.’31 Small wonder if Elizabeth’s behaviour seemed stiff and constrained. It cannot have been easy for her to exchange pleasantries with a French woman of letters at such a time. For, though Alexander might still enjoy escaping into grandiose dreams, Elizabeth’s feelings were more prosaic, nor was she so adept at pretending to a sentiment she did not genuinely experience. Not for her that elevated quest for perfectibility which carried Germaine de Staël sublimely from salon to salon across Europe. ‘An imagination such as hers can truly find much to feed itself on here at this moment’, Elizabeth reflected in a note to her mother; but she added the dry comment, ‘She is spending the winter in Sweden.’32
Elizabeth’s real thoughts were on more serious matters; for she knew that while her husband and his distinguished visitor were posturing for mutual compliments, the future of the Empire lay on the razor-edge of fate. She would not let it be believed abroad there was any weakening of will within Russia. It was difficult to get letters through to Baden but Elizabeth found a route, by way of a banking institution in Stockholm, and she kept her mother regularly informed of what was happening in Petersburg. Thus on 7 September, the day Germaine de Staël left for Sweden, Elizabeth wrote reassuringly to the Margravine:
I feel certain you are badly informed in Germany about what goes on here. Probably they have already convinced you we have fled to Siberia, while we have not in reality even left St Petersburg. We are ready for anything except negotiations. The farther Napoleon advances the less confidence he can feel in the possibility of peace. This is the unanimous view of the Emperor, of all the nation and of every class. In this respect there exists total harmony, thank God! That is something on which Napoleon never reckoned; he was wrong about that as about other matters! Every step he takes into this vast Russian land brings him closer to the abyss! We shall see how he manages to winter there!33
Prophetic words – made especially significant by their timing. For at the head of her letter, Elizabeth wrote, ‘7 September, 1812, Monday at 11 o’clock in the morning’. At that very moment, nearly five hundred miles away, the armies of Kutuzov and Napoleon were locked in battle around a village ‘at the twelfth verst from Mozhaisk’.34† His officers informed Kutuzov it was known as Borodino. Neither he, nor Alexander, had ever heard of the place.
Borodino and its Consequences
In later years Napoleon remembered the engagement west of Moscow as ‘the most terrible of all my battles’, a contest in which ‘the French showed themselves worthy of victory and the Russians of being invincible.’ At the time, however, Borodino was too tense and too close run for such a generous epigram. From six in the morning, when a hundred French cannon opened up on the left flank of the Russian defences, until four in the afternoon, when the Russians established a new line a thousand yards to the rear, the issue of the battle seemed uncertain. Indeed, at its close, both opposing commanders claimed a victory, Napoleon because his men had captured the Russian positions and Kutuzov because his army still barred the road to Moscow. Everyone was agreed on one particular only, that Borodino was a staggering shock, an artillery duel in which, for all their bravery, cavalry and infantry on both sides were no more than fodder for the cannon. The earth, people said, shook for a dozen miles around as a thousand guns thundered along the ravines. In no previous battle had there been so terrifying a volume of sound.35
That day over 30,000 soldiers of Napoleon’s Grand Army perished. Possibly as many as 43,000 Russians died, one-third of Kutuzov’s whole force. Napoleon lost ten Generals and ten Colonels, more high-ranking officers than his enemy. But among the Russians who were mortally wounded was Prince Bagration, struck by a splinter of grapeshot in the leg as he rallied the defenders within his entrenchments. Although his life lingered on for another seventeen days, the news that he had fallen spread dismay through the Russian left flank and gave the French the advantage for which they had been striving since daybreak. Yet no casualty statistics and no record of positions taken, re-taken or lost can convey the glory and horror of Borodino for both armies. When it was all over and mist and drizzle enveloped the crumpled plain, there was no elation in either camp – only weary relief mingled with apprehension that at dawn the futile folly would begin once again.
This, however, at least the troops were spared. Kutuzov dared not risk losing the rest of his men and guns by continuing the battle into a second day, as the Austrians had done, disastrously, at Wagram in 1809. Before the sun broke through, he began to pull back his troops towards Moscow, only seventy miles to the east. The retreat, originally planned by Barclay and reluctantly approved by the Tsar, was now confirmed by Kutuzov as the wisest course of action. To fall back on Moscow knowing it was unlikely there would be another chance to make a stand outside the city needed the calm courage and contempt for the opinion of others which Kutuzov had acquired from years of campaigning. It was as well for Alexander’s reputation – and, indeed, for all Russia – that the Tsar was not present at army headquarters in these vital hours of crisis for his Empire.
News of Borodino did not reach St Petersburg until Friday morning, 11 September. It had, however, been known since late on Wednesday that a battle was imminent and Kutuzov’s bulletins were awaite
d with lively confidence. The first report, sent on the Monday evening, was enthusiastically encouraging: there had been (so Elizabeth wrote to her mother) ‘a great victory’, inducing Napoleon to fall back seven miles.36 That Friday was the feast of St Alexander Nevsky, and the Tsar announced the good news from Kutuzov in the monastic cathedral dedicated to his patron saint. St Petersburg celebrated well into the night, with peals of bells from all the churches, fireworks and chains of lanterns along the banks of the Neva and every vessel at the port illuminated for the occasion. Kutuzov was awarded a princely title, a hundred thousand silver roubles, and a Marshal’s baton. At once speculation began on whether or not Napoleon was a prisoner: if so, would he be brought to the capital in an iron cage, like some captive wild beast? That, after all, was how Alexander’s grandmother had treated Pugachev, who had raised the serfs in rebellion a third of a century ago.
It was only during Saturday evening that the first doubts began to spread through the city.37 Rumour now said that Mozhaisk was in French hands. If this were true, then the invaders were heading for the low hills around Moscow. No fresh pronouncement came from the Tsar or his ministers, and elation rapidly gave place to gloom. At Court the battle of Borodino continued to be regarded as a Russian victory, one which (it was argued) would prove more costly to Napoleon as Marshal Kutuzov’s manoeuvres lengthened the French line of communications. All this was very true: but it was asking much to expect the people of the capital to follow such sophisticated strategic reasoning. They could think only of the enemy pressing nearer to Holy Moscow with every day that went by. And after Moscow, would it be their turn next? Already the art treasures of the Hermitage were being packed up, as a precaution, and among the aristocrats there was a movement eastwards to lands on the fringe of Siberia, not the best of journeys in a cold and wet September with the prospect of winter to come.
According to John Quincy Adams, rumours that the French had entered Moscow began to circulate in St Petersburg on 21 September. He added, however, that it was also being said that the Grand Army was ‘repulsed and the Emperor Napoleon mortally wounded’.38 Alexander had a clearer picture of what was happening, but kept the knowledge to himself. Since despatches from Kutuzov were ominously slow in getting through to the capital, the Tsar learnt the fate of Moscow from his sister. A letter written by Catherine in Yaroslavl late on the very day Napoleon rode into the Kremlin (15 September) reached Alexander on the morning of 18 September, more than forty-eight hours before Kutuzov’s personal aide, Colonel Michaud, arrived to explain the Marshal’s movements.39 The Tsar assured Catherine by letter and Michaud by word of his determination to fight on, but he would not permit the authorities to announce the fall of Moscow in an official bulletin. This was a mistake, for with private messages seeping through, the rumours grew more and more extravagant and morale rapidly declined. Several people were made to sweep the streets as punishment for spreading alarming tales about events in Moscow. But nobody was fooled by this heavy-handed activity, and the city sank into sullen silence.40
On Sunday, 27 September, Alexander was faced by one of the ceremonial occasions in the Court calendar, the eleventh anniversary of his coronation. This year he dared not risk riding on horseback to the Kazan Cathedral in the Nevsky Prospect. He accompanied Elizabeth in a closed carriage through streets which, to his attendants, had never seemed so ominously hostile. There was no greeting from the crowd as he descended from the carriage and climbed the granite stairway towards the huge portico through which he had passed in procession at the cathedral’s dedication, exactly twelve months before. Now everything was silent, and the footsteps of the Imperial party resounded dully from the arc of the great colonnade. ‘Never shall I forget those minutes’, wrote Roxane Stourdza, one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting. ‘We ascended the cathedral steps between two ranks of onlookers who did not give a single cheer … I happened to glance at the Tsar and, sensing the agony of spirit he was undergoing, I felt my knees begin to tremble beneath me.’41
Two days later it was, at last, officially announced that Moscow had been evacuated although, as Adams wrote in his journal, ‘it is attenuated into a circumstance of trifling importance as to the ultimate issue of the war.’ And on the following Friday the people of the capital were told that St Petersburg was ‘in no danger of being taken by the enemy’ and that they should not be alarmed by the sight of packing cases outside the Hermitage ‘and the public offices’.42 This was hardly reassuring. The one person in society who seems to have breathed confidence wherever he went was Lord Cathcart, the British ambassador, who having survived the accidental overturning of his carriage on the last stage of his journey to the capital, was convinced his mission would be a success and promptly took a three-year lease on his official residence.43 Few around him in the diplomatic corps shared his optimism: most, at the best, anticipated a negotiated settlement with the French.
Plain Speaking from a Sister
The four weeks which followed the strange scene at the Kazan Cathedral were, to a man of Alexander’s pride and sensitivity, a period of prolonged mental anguish. He spent most of the month on Kammionyi Island, and for much of the time he was physically ill with erysipelas of the leg, a condition no doubt aggravated by nervous tension. He refused to consider peace feelers from Napoleon in Moscow, and would not even answer a letter from Napoleon which disclaimed French responsibility for the burning of the city: ‘A single note from Your Majesty would have stopped my campaign, either before or after the last battle’, Napoleon wrote.44 But Alexander reiterated his pledge not to make peace so long as the enemy remained on Russian soil. ‘My people and I stand united as never before’, Alexander wrote to Bernadotte, ‘and we would rather perish under the ruins than make peace with the modern Attila’.45 And Elizabeth told her mother on 6 October, ‘I can assure you the Tsar’s resolution is unshakeable. Even should Petersburg suffer the fate of Moscow, even then he would never consider the possibility of a shameful peace.’46
Alexander, poor man, was not allowed to rest and recuperate on Kammionyi Island untroubled by his family. No accident of war had the good fortune to impede couriers hastening between the Grand Duchess Catherine in Yaroslavl and her brother; and, since the birth of her second son on 14 August, her masterly nature broke all restraint. Never, before or after, was she so markedly Catherine the Would-Be-Great. On 18 September she despatched one of her sterner letters of admonition to Alexander:
It is impossible for me to remain silent any longer despite the pain my words will cause you, dear friend. The capture of Moscow has brought the exasperation of the people to a head: discontent has reached a climax, and you yourself are far from being spared. If that is apparent to me, judge for yourself how it appears to others. You are openly blamed for the misfortunes of your Empire, for ruin general and particular, in fact for having lost your country’s honour and your own. All classes combine to accuse you. Without listing what is said about our way of making war, one of the principal counts against you is that you broke faith with Moscow, which awaited your coming with desperate longing; you look as if you betrayed it. You need have no fear of a disaster of a revolutionary kind, certainly not! But I leave you to judge the state of affairs in a country whose ruler is despised … It does not come within my duties to tell you what you should do; but you must safeguard your honour which is under attack.47
And lest the Tsar failed to hear the bark of his twenty-four-year-old sister, good George yapped obediently at her heels: ‘Hold fast to your people’s respect’, he wrote in a separate letter. ‘Think of your glorious name.’48
Alexander replied to these extraordinarily brash communications with skill and dignity on 30 September. He dealt point by point with the matters which Catherine had raised: he knew his soldiers never doubted his courage and honour under fire; if he left the army after the Drissa episode, this was in part in answer to the entreaties of Catherine and her husband; and if he had not come back to Moscow after appointing Kutuzov, the reason was bec
ause of his commitments to meet Bernadotte and because Rostopchin and Kutuzov had asked him to delay his return until ‘they were able to give me good news’. He then, at last, let Catherine know the warnings he received in April that Napoleon planned to use her in intrigues against himself, discrediting him in the eyes of his subjects and his family. ‘The signal for all these conspiracies would be given on the day when one of the two capitals should fall into the hands of the enemy’, he wrote. ‘Here in St Petersburg I become every day more convinced of the accuracy of the warnings given to me and what you say in your latest letter contributes in no small measure to prove it.’ Alexander did not specify whom he believed to be ‘the real concoctors, Napoleon’s tools’. He treated the whole affair with calm detachment: ‘That people should be unjust to someone in misfortune, that they should overwhelm him with abuse and tear his reputation to shreds is only to be expected. I have never deceived myself on that point’, he said, adding sadly, ‘Perhaps I am even bound to lose friends on whom I most counted.’ But he signed his letter, ‘Yours in heart and soul, both of you, always’, and he enclosed presents for the month-old baby.49
Catherine refused to be crushed. Though assuring her brother once more of her ‘endless devotion’, she claimed that had he come to Moscow the city would never have fallen to the French; and she told him sharply not to listen to slanderous tales by people eager to drag in Napoleon’s name to cover their own surmises.50 Why would he not send George to command an army at the Front? This, of course, was out of the question so long as both Alexander and Constantine were prepared to leave the war to the professional soldiers. Even Marie Feodorovna, so long Catherine’s champion, was annoyed. ‘I don’t know what Katya wants’, she remarked to Elizabeth, ‘she has the finest provinces in Russia and still she is not content.’51