Metternich much later claimed that when they met in Dresden Napoleon had told him his Russian strategy. ‘Victory will go to the most patient,’ the Emperor supposedly said, according to Metternich’s unreliable and immensely self-serving memoirs. ‘I shall open the campaign by crossing the Niemen, and it will be concluded at Smolensk and Minsk. There I shall stop and fortify those two points. At Vilnius, where the main headquarters will spend next winter, I shall busy myself with organizing Lithuania … Perhaps I myself shall spend the most inclement months of the winter in Paris.’88 On being asked what would happen if Alexander didn’t sue for peace, Napoleon allegedly replied: ‘In that case I shall advance next year to the centre of the empire, and I shall be patient in 1813 as I have been in 1812!’ Whether Napoleon genuinely vouchsafed such secrets to a man he must have suspected didn’t want him to be victorious in Russia, and had excellent connections with the Russians, might be doubted.
Leaving Marie Louise with her parents in Dresden when he departed at dawn on May 29, Napoleon wrote later that morning that he would be back within two months. ‘All my promises to you shall be kept,’ he said, ‘thus our absence from each other will be but a short one.’89 It was to be nearly seven months before he saw her again. Going eastwards via Bautzen, Reichenbach, Hainau, Glogau, Posen, Thorn, Danzig and Königsberg, he reached the banks of the Niemen by June 23. He deliberately didn’t go to Warsaw, where, if he had proclaimed the Kingdom of Poland, he could have raised, one Russian general estimated, 200,000 men and turned the ethnically Polish provinces of Lithuania, Volhynia and Polodia against the Tsar.90 Instead he preferred not to antagonize his Prussian and Austrian allies.
At 1 a.m. on the night of June 4, Colonel Maleszewski, one of Napoleon’s staff officers, heard the Emperor pacing up and down his room in Thorn, singing the verse from ‘Le Chant du Départ’ that includes the line ‘Tremblez, ennemis de la France.’91 On that day alone, Napoleon had written letters to Davout complaining of the marauding of Württemberger troops in Poland, to Clarke about raising a company of Elban sappers, to Marie Louise to say that he had been twelve hours in the saddle since 2 a.m., to Cambacérès that the frontier was quiet, to Eugène ordering 30,000 bushels of barley, and no fewer than twenty-four letters to Berthier about everything from a paymaster who should be punished for incompetence to a fever hospital that needed to be relocated.92 Preparing for the attack on Russia caused Napoleon to write nearly five hundred letters to Berthier between the beginning of January 1812 and the crossing of the Niemen, and another 631 to Davout, Clarke, Lacuée and Maret between them.
On June 7 staying in Danzig with Rapp – to whom he was far more likely to speak about his strategic thinking than to Metternich – Napoleon said his plans were limited to crossing the Niemen, defeating Alexander and taking Russian Poland, which he would unite to the Duchy of Warsaw, turn into a Polish kingdom, arm extensively and leave with 50,000 cavalry as a buffer state against Russia.93 Two days later he expanded further to Fain and others:
While we finish with the north, I hope that Soult will maintain himself in Andalusia and that Marmont will contain Wellington on the Portuguese border. Europe will breathe only when these affairs with Russia and Spain are over. Only then can we reckon on a true peace; reviving Poland will consolidate it; Austria will take care of more of the Danube and less of Italy. Finally, exhausted England will resign herself to share the world’s trade with continental vessels. My son is young, you have to prepare him for a quiet reign.94
These war aims – even for peace with Britain, against whom America had declared war on June 1 – were limited and possibly even achievable, and certainly far from the lunatic hubris with which Napoleon is generally credited on the eve of his invasion of Russia. There was no word of marching to Moscow, for example (any more than there had been in his supposed heart-to-heart with Metternich). Against the French Empire’s 42.3 million inhabitants, and a further 40 million living in the ‘Grand Empire’ of satellite states, Russia’s population in 1812 was about 46 million.95 Napoleon had fought against the Russians twice before and had defeated them on both occasions. His army of over 600,000 men was over twice the size of the Russian army in the field at the time. On June 20 he specified only twelve days’ marching rations for the Imperial Guard, implying that he was hoping for a short campaign – certainly not one that would take him over 800 miles from the Niemen to Moscow.
On June 22 Napoleon issued his second bulletin of the campaign:
Soldiers! The Second Polish War has commenced. The first ended at Friedland and Tilsit. At Tilsit, Russia swore an eternal alliance with France, and war with England. Today she violates her oaths … Does she believe us degenerate? Are we no longer the soldiers of Austerlitz? She places us between dishonour and war; the choice cannot be in doubt … Let us cross the Niemen! … The peace which we shall conclude shall put an end to the baneful influence which Russia has for fifty years exercised over the affairs of Europe.96
Not since his hero Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC had the traversing of a river held a heavier portent than when Napoleon’s vast army started crossing the Niemen into Russia before dawn on Wednesday, June 24 1812. Since Lauriston had been sent away from Alexander’s headquarters without reply to Napoleon’s last-minute peace offer a few days before, there was no need for a formal declaration of war, any more than there had been at the outbreak of the War of Austrian Succession or the Seven Years War.
While Napoleon was reconnoitring the river on the day of the crossing, his horse shied at a hare and threw him onto the sandy riverbank, leaving him with a bruised hip.97 ‘This is a bad omen, a Roman would recoil!’ someone exclaimed, although it is not known whether it was Napoleon himself or one of his staff who said it – but with his penchant for ancient history (and the understandable reluctance of anyone else to make that obvious point) it may well have been the Emperor himself.98 Napoleon had ordered the artillery commander-turned-engineer General Jean-Baptiste Éblé to throw three pontoon bridges over the river near a village called Poniémen, and he spent the rest of the day in his tent and in a nearby house, in Ségur’s words, ‘listlessly reclining in the midst of a breathless atmosphere and a suffocating heat, vainly courting repose’.99
The sheer size of Napoleon’s army is hard to compute. He had over 1 million men under arms in 1812; once he subtracted garrisons, reserves, eighty-eight National Guard battalions, soldiers in the 156 depots back in France, various coastal artillery batteries and twenty-four line battalions stationed around the Empire, as well as the men in Spain, he was left with 450,000 in the first line with which to invade Russia and 165,000 mobilized in the second. A reasonably accurate total might therefore be 615,000, which was larger than the entire population of Paris at the time.100 It was certainly the largest invasion force in the history of mankind to that time, and very much a multi-national one. Poles made up the largest single foreign contingent, but it also comprised Austrians, Prussians, Westphalians, Württembergers, Saxons, Bavarians, Swiss, Dutch, Illyrians, Dalmatians, Neapolitans, Croats, Romans, Piedmontese, Florentines, Hessians, Badeners, Spaniards and Portuguese. Much has been made of the breadth of the seven coalitions that Britain brought together against France during the Napoleonic Wars, which is indeed impressive and significant, but the broadest coalition of all was this one that fought for France against Russia.101 Some 48 per cent of Napoleon’s infantry were French and 52 per cent foreign, whereas the cavalry was 64 per cent French and 36 per cent foreign.102 Even the Imperial Guard had Portuguese and Hessian cavalry units in it, and a squadron of Mamluks were attached to the Chasseurs à Cheval of the Old Guard. The problem with relying so heavily on foreigners was that many felt, as the Württemberger Jakob Walter’s journal admitted, ‘total indifference as to the outcome of the campaign’, treating French and Russians alike and certainly feeling no personal loyalty to Napoleon.103 No amount of haranguing would convert a Prussian, for example, to an ardent adherence to the French cause.
The num
bers of men involved and the distances over which they were spread forced Napoleon to adopt a different army formation from the six or seven corps he had previously used. The first line was organized into three army groups. The central one under Napoleon’s personal command had 180,000, mostly French, soldiers. It included Murat with two corps of reserve cavalry, the Imperial Guard, Davout’s and Ney’s corps and Berthier’s general staff, which itself now numbered nearly 4,000. On his right was Eugène’s 4th Corps of 46,000 men with Junot as his chief-of-staff, and the 3rd Reserve Cavalry Corps, with Poniatowski’s 5th Corps even further to the south. On Napoleon’s left was Oudinot’s corps, guarding the northern flank. In total the Grande Armée had over 1,200 guns.104
Napoleon invaded Russia with around 250,000 horses – 30,000 for the artillery, 80,000 for the cavalry and the rest pulled 25,000 vehicles of every kind – yet the supply of forage for so many horses was entirely beyond any system Napoleon or anyone else could have put into effect.105 He delayed the invasion until forage would be plentiful, but nonetheless the heat and their diet of wet grass and unripe rye killed 10,000 horses in the first week of the campaign alone.106 As horses required 20 pounds of forage per day, he had a maximum of three weeks before supplies would start to become inadequate. There were twenty-six transport battalions, eighteen of which consisted of six hundred heavy wagons drawn by six horses each, capable of transporting nearly 6,500 pounds, but the wagons were quickly found to be too heavy for Russian roads once they turned to mud, as ought to have been remembered from the First Polish Campaign.107 The men had four days’ food supply on their backs and a further twenty in the wagons following the army – enough for the very short campaign Napoleon envisaged, but if he had not comprehensively defeated the main Russian army within a month of crossing the Niemen, he would need either to withdraw or to stop and resupply. The critical moment of the campaign should therefore fall in the third week of July, if not earlier.
But the army that was crossing the Niemen was no longer the highly mobile entity of Napoleon’s earlier campaigns, designed to catch and swiftly envelop the enemy. Napoleon’s headquarters alone required 50 wagons pulled by 650 horses.108 Murat took along a famous Parisian chef, and many officers packed their evening dress and brought their private carriages.109 Many of the phenomena of Napoleonic warfare that had been characteristic of his earlier campaigns – elderly opponents lacking energy, a nationally and linguistically diverse enemy against the homogeneous French, a vulnerable spot onto which Napoleon could latch and not let go, a capacity for significantly faster movement than the enemy, and to concentrate forces to achieve numerical advantage for just long enough to be decisive – were not present or were simply impossible in the vast reaches of European Russia. The Russian generals tended to be much younger than the generals Napoleon had faced in Italy – averaging forty-six years old against the French generals’ forty-three – and the Russian army was more homogeneous than Napoleon’s. This was to be a campaign utterly unlike any he had fought before, indeed unlike any in history.
24
Trapped
‘He didn’t want to conquer Russia, not even to re-establish Poland; he had only renounced the Russian alliance with regret. But conquering a capital, signing a peace on his terms and hermetically sealing the ports of Russia to British commerce, that was his goal.’
Champagny’s memoirs
‘Rule one on page one of the book of war, is: “Do not march on Moscow.” ’
Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, House of Lords, May 1962
Napoleon crossed the River Niemen at 5 a.m. on June 24, 1812, and then stationed himself on a hillock nearby as his soldiers marched past crying, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’1 He hummed the children’s song ‘Malbrough s’en va-t’en guerre’ to himself. (‘Marlborough is going to war, / who knows when he’ll be back?’)2 He wore a Polish uniform that day, and equally symbolically rode a horse named Friedland. That afternoon he went on to cross the Viliya river and entered Kovno. It took five days for the whole army to make it across the river.
Although Russia had 650,000 men under arms in 1812, they were spread out widely across her Empire – in Moldavia, the Caucasus, central Asia, the Crimea, Siberia, Finland and elsewhere – with only around 250,000 men and guns, organized in three armies, facing Napoleon in the west. Barclay de Tolly’s First Army of the West, of 129,000 men, was widely deployed either side of Vilnius; Bagration’s Second Army of the West, of 48,000 was 100 miles to the south of Vilnius at Volkovysk; and General Alexander Tormasov’s Third Army of the West, of 43,000 was coming from much further south, freed from Danubian service by the Russo-Turkish peace. Napoleon wanted to keep these three forces separate and to defeat them piecemeal. He sent Eugène and Jérôme out on wide enveloping movements in the hope of surrounding Bagration’s Second Army before it could join Barclay’s First Army. Why he chose to give this vital task to his stepson and brother rather than to senior, experienced soldiers such as Davout, Murat or Macdonald is unclear. Jérôme had commanded the 9th Corps during the 1806–07 campaign (the army’s German contingent) but had not particularly distinguished himself. ‘The heat is overpowering,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise from the convent at Kovno where he had set up his headquarters, adding: ‘You can present the University with a collection of books and engravings. This will please it vastly and will cost you nothing. I have plenty of them.’3
Opinion in the Russian high command was split between the aristocratic generals who supported Bagration’s counter-offensive strategy and the ‘foreigners’ (often Baltic Germans) who supported Barclay de Tolly’s strategy of withdrawal, essentially that of Bennigsen in 1807 except across a far wider area. By the time Napoleon crossed the Niemen the latter had won, partly because the sheer size of the Grande Armée made a counter-offensive unthinkable. Having a smaller army would therefore paradoxically have helped Napoleon by tempting the Russians into the early battle he logistically needed to fight, and would also have allowed him (because of its lesser supply needs) more time to fight it. Had Alexander appointed the Russian-born Bagration as war minister and commander of the First Army of the West instead of Barclay – an appointment that would have been popular in the Russian officer corps – Napoleon might have destroyed the Russian army at, or even before, Vilnius. Instead he picked the less flamboyant, more incisive Barclay and stuck by Barclay’s plan to lure the Grande Armée deep into Russian territory, stretching its supply lines away from the huge military depots in Mainz, Danzig, Königsberg and elsewhere.
Napoleon entered Vilnius, the capital of Polish Lithuania, on June 28 and turned it into a massive supply centre, the Russians having removed or burned all theirs before they left. He told Marie Louise that he had chosen for his headquarters ‘a rather fine mansion where the Emperor Alexander was living a few days ago, very far from thinking at the time that I was so soon to enter here’.4 Half an hour before Napoleon made his entry into the city, he ordered a Polish artillery officer on his staff, Count Roman Soltyk, to fetch Jan Śniadecki, the renowned astronomer, mathematician and physicist, and rector of Vilnius University, to talk to him there. When Śniadecki insisted on putting on silk stockings before leaving his house, Soltyk expostulated: ‘Rector, it doesn’t matter. The Emperor attaches no importance to exterior things which only impress the common people … Let’s be off.’5
‘Our entry into the city was triumphal,’ wrote another Polish officer. ‘The streets … were full of people, all the windows were garnished with ladies who displayed the wildest enthusiasm.’6 Napoleon showed characteristic sensitivity to public opinion by having himself preceded and followed by Polish units in the procession. He set up a provisional government for the Lithuanian Poles there, and Lithuania was ceremonially reunited with Poland in a ceremony at Vilnius cathedral. At Grodno French troops were met by processions with icons, candles and choirs blessing them for the ‘liberation’ from Russian rule.* A Te Deum was sung in Minsk, where General Grouchy handed around the collection plate, but once t
he rural population heard that the French troops were requisitioning food, as they always did on campaign, they herded their livestock into the forests. ‘The Frenchman came to remove our fetters,’ said the Polish peasants in western Russia that summer, ‘but he took our boots too.’7
‘I love your nation,’ Napoleon told the representatives of the Polish nation at Vilnius. ‘For the last sixteen years I have seen your soldiers at my side in the battles in Italy and Spain.’ He offered Poland ‘my esteem and protection’. With Schwarzenberg protecting his southern flank, however, he needed to add: ‘I’ve guaranteed to Austria the integrity of her states, and I cannot authorize anything that will tend to trouble her in the peaceful possession of what remains to her of her Polish provinces.’8 He was having to perform a delicate balancing act.
He stayed ten days in Vilnius to allow much of the army to rest, regroup and allow that part of the right wing of the army that was under the untried and untested Jérôme – comprising two of Davout’s divisions, Schwarzenberg’s Austrians, Poniatowski’s Poles and Reynier’s Saxons, 80,000 men in all – to advance towards the lower Berezina river and try to pincer Bagration’s army. The vanguards moved on and on June 29 the broiling heat broke in a great hailstorm and deluge of rain, after which Sergeant Jean-Roch Coignet of the Imperial Guard noted that ‘in the cavalry camp nearby, the ground was covered with horses which had died of cold’, including three of his own.9 The rain also made the ground boggy and roads muddy, causing supply problems and slowing down the vanguards in pursuit of the Russians. In some marshes and swamps men waded up to their chins.10
Napoleon the Great Page 71