Russia Against Napoleon

by Lieven, Dominic

  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.61

  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.62

  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.63

  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.64

  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.65

  The Retreat

  In March 1812 Mikhail Barclay de Tolly was appointed to command First Army, whose headquarters were in Vilna, much the biggest city in Lithuania. Though he retained the title of minister of war, Barclay handed over the day-to-day running of the ministry to Prince Aleksei Gorchakov, who remained in Petersburg when Barclay and many of the other most able officers departed the capital for army headquarters.

  First Army was roughly 136,000 strong. This made it bigger than Prince Bagration’s Second Army (around 57,000 men) and General Tormasov’s Third Army (around 48,000) combined.1 Together these three armies guarded Russia’s western borders against invasion by Napoleon. Barclay was in no sense the supreme commander of all three forces. In fact he was junior to both Bagration and Tormasov, which mattered greatly in the acutely rank-conscious elite of imperial Russia. The only supreme commander was Alexander himself, who arrived in Vilna in April.

  The bulk of First Army was made up of the five infantry corps which by June 1812 were arrayed along the frontier of East Prussia and the northern border of the Duchy of Warsaw. Each of these corps contained two infantry divisions, which in turn were made up of three brigades. Two of these brigades were formed from regiments of the line, one from jaegers. As we have seen, a Russian infantry regiment went on campaign with its first and third battalions, which fought side-by-side. An infantry brigade usually therefore contained two regiments of four battalions. At full strength at the beginning of a war it should in principle be almost 3,000 strong. A Russian infantry division should therefore have 6,000 infantry of the line and 3,000 light infantry, though in reality sickness and the many men absent in detachments meant that no formation ever actually reached these numbers. A Russian division also usually contained three twelve-gun artillery batteries. Two of these batteries were designated as ‘light’ and most of their guns were six-pounders. The other was a heavy battery, with twelve-pounder cannon. Both heavy and light batteries included a section of howitzers, designed to shoot at high angles.

  A small number of Cossack and regular light cavalry regiments were attached to infantry corps. Most of the light cavalry, however, was formed into separate mounted formations. Confusingly, these were called ‘Reserve Cavalry Corps’ though in fact they were neither reserves nor corps. The three so-called ‘Reserve Cavalry Corps’ of First Army were each roughly 3,000 strong, and contained anything from four to six regiments of dragoons, hussars and lancers, and one battery of horse artillery. Fedor Uvarov commanded the first of these cavalry corps. The Second Cavalry Corps was commanded by Baron Friedrich von Korff and the Third by Major-General Count Peter von der Pahlen, the son and namesake of the man who had led the conspiracy which overthrew and murdered Alexander I’s father in 1801. His ancestry does not seem to have damaged greatly the career of the younger Pahlen, who was to prove himself an exceptionally able cavalry commander in 1812–14.

  First Army’s actual reserves stood behind the front line in the vicinity of Vilna. They were the Grand Duke Constantine’s Fifth Corps, made up of nineteen battalions of Guards infantry and seven battalions of Grenadiers. To them were attached the four heavy cavalry regiments of First Cuirassier Division, which included the Chevaliers Gardes and the Horse Guards. The Grand Duke Constantine also commanded five artillery batteries, though in addition three heavy batteries formed the overall army reserve.2

  With very few exceptions the men and horses of First Army were in excellent shape when the war began in June 1812. They had been well fed and well quartered for many weeks, unlike the often already hungry and exhausted men of Napoleon’s army who had been marching across Europe and finding it increasingly hard to feed themselves as they packed into their cramped quarters in the Prussian and Polish border areas. As one might have predicted, the main problems in the Russian army concerned not the soldiers and their regiments but the staffs and the high command.

  Barclay’s first chief of staff wa
s Lieutenant-General Aleksandr Lavrov. His first quartermaster-general was Major-General Semen Mukhin. Their inadequacy for senior staff positions was quickly revealed once the war began. Mukhin lasted seventeen days into the campaign, Lavrov just nine. He was succeeded by Lieutenant-General Marquis Philippe Paulucci, who was hanging around in Alexander’s suite and whom the emperor offered to Barclay on a take-him-or-leave-him basis. Paulucci had previously served in the Piedmontese, Austrian and French armies. He was one of a number of individuals scooped into Russian service as a result of Russia’s campaigns in the Adriatic and Mediterranean in 1798–1807. Paulucci described himself in a letter to Alexander as possessing a ‘lively and impetuous’ character which must not be restrained since it boiled over with zeal for the emperor’s cause. Certainly Paulucci possessed a very lively egoism and a bad habit of insinuating that anyone who disagreed with him was an idiot or a traitor. For all Paulucci’s brains and energy, Russia had quite enough generals of this temper already without needing the services of a Piedmontese enfant terrible. Barclay trusted neither Paulucci’s competence nor his loyalty and immediately sidelined him. Paulucci promptly resigned. In early July Colonel Karl von Toll became First Army’s acting quartermaster-general. Paulucci was replaced as chief of staff by Major-General Aleksei Ermolov. Now the right men were in their correct posts. Both Toll and Ermolov were formidable soldiers who would play crucial roles in the campaigns of 1812–14.3

  Though Karl von Toll’s family was ultimately of Dutch origin, it had long since settled in Estland and become part of the Baltic German minor gentry. Both Toll’s parents were Germans, and he himself remained a Lutheran all his life. In 1814 he married a Baltic German noblewoman. Although this appears to make him a thoroughgoing Balt, in reality matters were more complicated. For many years of his adolescence he attended a cadet corps in St Petersburg. The school’s director at that time was the later Field-Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, who always regarded Toll not just as a brilliant officer but also almost as an adopted son. On leaving the cadet corps Toll served all his career in the quartermaster-general’s section of the emperor’s suite, in other words the general staff. Here his great patron came to be Prince Petr Mikhailovich Volkonsky. An officer whose two key patrons were leading members of the Russian aristocracy was by definition likely to be seen as an honorary Russian. According to one contemporary, Toll was very careful to portray himself in these terms, always speaking Russian whenever possible, though this did not stop him using his position to find jobs for his German relatives. In doing this he followed the universal custom of the time, which saw such behaviour not as nepotism but as praiseworthy loyalty to family and friends – unless of course the patron happened to be a German and the job was one on which one had set one’s own hopes.

  A cynic might remark that with patrons as powerful as Kutuzov and Volkonsky Karl von Toll could hardly fail, but this would be unfair. He earned their patronage by his intelligence, efficiency and hard work, as well as by his loyalty. His main problem was his proud, impatient and passionate temperament. His temper was notorious and he found it very difficult to tolerate opposition or criticism, including from superior officers. On a number of occasions in 1812 this almost ruined his career. After a ferocious argument in August with the equally explosive Bagration, Toll was demoted, only to be rescued by the arrival of his old patron Kutuzov as commander-in-chief. Although Toll could be an infuriating colleague, let alone subordinate, he was neither petty nor vindictive. He was deeply committed to the army and to Russia’s victory over Napoleon. His outbursts of fury and impatience were usually directed not by personal ambitions and slights but against anything which he saw as impeding the efficient prosecution of the war.4

  As quartermaster-general of First Army Toll’s immediate boss was Aleksei Ermolov. An extremely courageous and inspiring front-line commander, Ermolov did not have the trained staff officer’s meticulous attention to detail and careful recording of all orders on paper. At times in 1812 this caused problems. Trained as an artillery officer, Ermolov had done brilliantly in the East Prussian campaign of 1807. Together with a number of other young artillerists – of whom Count Aleksandr Kutaisov, Prince Lev Iashvili and Ivan Sukhozhanet were the most famous – he had done much to restore the reputation of the Russian artillery after the humiliation it had suffered at Austerlitz. Subsequently, however, Ermolov contributed to deepening the factional cleavages in the artillery’s officer corps. According to his great admirer and former aide-de-camp, Paul Grabbe, Ermolov not only loathed Arakcheev and Lev Iashvili with particular virulence, but also infected everyone around him with equally black-and-white feelings, which did not benefit either the artillery’s efficient management or the careers of Ermolov’s own clients.5

  Aleksei Ermolov was not just a thoroughly skilful and professional artillerist but also an exceptionally intelligent and resolute commander. Above all, he had great charisma. His appearance helped. A big man with a huge head, wide shoulders and a mane of hair, he struck one young officer on first acquaintance as a ‘true Hercules’. First impressions were reinforced by the friendly and informal way he treated his subordinates. Ermolov was a master of the memorable phrase or action. When his mare foaled on the eve of the 1812 campaign he had the newborn animal cooked and fed to his young officers, as a warning of what they would have to put up with during the forthcoming campaign. With the possible exception of Kutuzov, no other Russian senior general so caught the imagination of younger officers at the time or of subsequent nationalist legend.6

  Ermolov owed his appeal not just to his charisma but also to his opinions. Coming from a well-off family of the provincial gentry and well educated in Moscow, he was never closely associated with Petersburg or the imperial court. He shared the conviction of most of his class that Russian soldiers were best commanded by gentlemen and that promotion from the ranks was at best an undesirable wartime necessity. In Ermolov’s day, however, Germans were far more serious rivals to Russian nobles than commoners promoted from the ranks, and Ermolov was famous and popular for his witticisms at their expense. This made him an uncomfortable bedfellow for Barclay de Tolly and a ferocious enemy of Barclay’s German aides. Two of the latter, Ludwig von Wolzogen and Vladimir von Löwenstern, wrote memoirs in which they chronicled Ermolov’s ruthless intrigues against them.7

  More importantly, Ermolov was at the heart of the opposition to Barclay’s strategy in July and August 1812. Alexander had invited the chiefs of staff of both Bagration and Barclay to write to him directly. Though initially Bagration was very suspicious of his chief of staff as a result, in fact Emmanuel de Saint-Priest’s letters to the emperor strongly supported his commander. Ermolov on the contrary used his direct line to Alexander to undermine Barclay. To do him justice, he acted in this way out of a genuine – albeit misguided – conviction, shared by almost all the senior generals, that Barclay’s strategy was endangering the army and the state.8

  Though in the short run Alexander used Ermolov and valued his military skill, it is very unlikely that he ever trusted him. On one occasion he called him ‘black as the devil but armed with as many skills’. With his charisma, his Russian patriotic credentials and his many admirers in the officer corps Ermolov was the perfect focus for gentry feeling against the court. On 30 July 1812, as indignation against Barclay reached its height, Ermolov wrote to Bagration that the army commanders would need to account for their actions not just to the emperor but also to the Russian fatherland. To a Romanov autocrat this was very dangerous language. Not coincidentally, when young Russian officers attempted to overthrow the absolute monarchy in December 1825 it was widely believed that Aleksei Ermolov was a source of inspiration and even possible future leadership.9

  A quieter presence at headquarters but also a formidable one was the First Army’s intendant-general, Georg Kankrin. Aged 38 when the war began, Kankrin was a native of the small town of Hanau in Hesse. His father had been lured to Russia, partly by the high salary offered for his skills as an expert in t
echnology and mining, and partly because his sharp tongue had ruined his prospects in Germany. After a German youth which included first-rate university studies and writing a romantic novel, young Georg Kankrin found it very difficult to adapt to life in Russia. He hibernated for a number of years, too poor to buy tobacco and forced to mend his own boots in order to save money. Eventually, his writings on military administration brought him to the attention of Barclay de Tolly and won him a key position in the war ministry’s victualling department, where he proved a great success. As a result, Barclay brought Kankrin with him when appointed to command First Army. During the next two years Kankrin overcame the immense challenge of feeding and equipping Russia’s armies as they marched first across the empire and then through Germany and France. He proved extremely efficient and hard-working, as well as honest and intelligent. On the strength of his achievement in 1812–14 he subsequently served for twenty-one years as minister of finance.10

  Between 26 April when he arrived in Vilna and 19 July when he departed for Moscow Alexander lived alongside Barclay de Tolly near First Army headquarters. A curious duumvirate ran Russian strategy and even to some extent tactics. In some ways Barclay benefited from this. He and the emperor shared the view that strategic withdrawal was essential but could not be too openly advocated for fear of undermining morale and alienating public opinion. They believed that Russians, both inside and outside the army, had become inured to easy victories over inferior opponents and were unrealistic about what it meant to face Napoleon’s immense power. Through Alexander, Barclay could exercise a degree of control over Tormasov and Bagration. Since he was positioned with First Army the emperor naturally tended to view operations from its perspective. In addition, though Alexander had no great opinion of any of his leading generals, he trusted Barclay’s strategic insight and military skill much more than he did Tormasov, let alone Bagration. Almost certainly Bagration had been the lover of Alexander’s sister, the Grand Duchess Catherine. To her the emperor wrote in 1812 that Bagration had always totally lacked any skill or indeed conception when it came to strategy.11