B009YBU18W EBOK (19 page)

Much of the training in the Russian army was directed at good performance on the parade ground rather than on the battlefield. The men were drilled mercilessly and marched about in formation until they learnt to operate as a mass, and taught to rely on the bayonet rather than musketry. In battle, obedience was considered to be a key factor. A special instruction addressed to infantry officers stipulated that on the eve of an engagement they must give their men a talk, reminding them of their duty and that they would be severely punished for any signs of cowardice. Even trying to dodge a cannonball while the unit was standing to was to be punished by caning. If a soldier or non-commissioned officer showed cowardice in the field, he should be executed on the spot. The same went for one who created confusion, by, for instance, shouting ‘We’re cut off!’, as he was to be considered a traitor.
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All these factors conspired to generate solidarity, resilience and the ability to put up with almost any conditions. But they did not breed intelligence or initiative.

The chasm dividing officers from the other ranks was unbridgeable, and there was no possibility of promotion. The officers were drawn exclusively from the nobility. They were supposed to serve their apprenticeship in the ranks, but usually did this in cadet formations or officer schools, and kept contact with their troops down to a minimum. This was not a problem, since many could not sustain
a conversation in Russian. But they did personally cane them for minor faults.

The pay of junior officers in the Russian army was lower than anywhere else in Europe. And as promotion to senior ranks was almost entirely dependent on influence at court, junior officers from the minor nobility were sentenced to a life of poverty and obscurity. As a result, such a career only attracted those of meagre talents. The operations of 1805–1807 had shown up grave faults in the command structure of the Russian army, lack of cooperation between units and arms, and other weaknesses, mainly to do with the low calibre and poor training of the officers. But all attempts at addressing these problems were vitiated by the rapid expansion of the armed forces over the next few years, which created a shortage of officers, with the result that in 1808 the length of training was actually cut.

Alexander did everything he could to prepare the army for its next showdown with Napoleon. He created a Ministry of the Armed Forces with the aim of making the army more effective, and lavished money on it. Military spending rose from twenty-six million roubles out of a total budget of eighty-two million at Alexander’s accession to seventy million out of a budget of 114 million by 1814. He raised the draft, which took four men out of five hundred souls in 1805, to five out of five hundred, yielding 100 to 120,000 men each year, which meant that he conscripted more than 500,000 men between 1806 and 1811. In the course of that year 60,000 retired but capable soldiers were brought back into service. The total number under arms in Russia’s land forces increased from 487,000 in 1807 to 590,000 in 1812, and in March of that year an extra draft of two men per five hundred souls yielded another 65 to 70,000 men. By September 1812 the total number of men under arms in the land forces would reach 904,000.
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In 1803 Alexander had charged General Arakcheev with modernising the artillery. His reforms did not yield fruit in time for the war of 1805, but by the end of the decade it was probably the most professional in Europe. Arakcheev got rid of small-calibre guns, and
equipped it with six- and twelve-pounder field guns, and ten- and twenty-pounder ‘
licornes
’, a kind of howitzer. He fitted these guns with the most sophisticated and accurate sights, and made sure that the gunners knew how to use them to best advantage.

The latest reform to see the light of day, in January 1812, was an ordinance for the command of large armies in the field. This laid out clearly who was responsible at every level of command, and gave the commander-in-chief almost unlimited powers in time of war. It also prescribed the channels through which all information should flow up from the furthest outpost to the commander-in-chief and how orders should be transmitted down from him to the company commander. Unfortunately, it was to be almost universally disregarded in the forthcoming campaign, with lamentable results.

The Russian forces in Lithuania were divided into two armies. The First, the stronger of the two, under General Barclay de Tolly, was deployed along the river Niemen in a slight arc almost a hundred kilometres long in advance of Vilna, a position from which it could either move out to attack or mount a defence. The Second Army, under General Bagration, was concentrated like a strike force, ready either to support the advance of the First Army by outflanking any enemy defence, or to ram the exposed flank of any force that attacked the First Army before Vilna. A Third Army, under General Tormasov, guarded the frontier to the south of the Pripet marshes. Exact figures for the strength of these forces are impossible to establish: the conflicting calculations of Russian historians put the total land forces as low as 356,000 and as high as 716,000, with as few as 180,000 and as many as 251,000 effectives in the front line. Most recent studies have been more consistent, but there is some confusion as a result of Russian historians’ habit of breaking down effectives into ‘front-line’ figures and totals, which include all the support services. The myth of the Russians being vastly outnumbered during this campaign has stemmed from the juxtaposition of Russian ‘front-line’ figures with French totals. The strength of the First Army was 127,800 frontline and 159,800 in total, that of the Second 52,000 and 62,000 respectively, and of the Third 45,800 and 58,200, making up a force of 225,000 front-line and 280,000 in total positioned along the frontier, supported by just over nine hundred guns.

This force was backed up by two reserve corps, Ertel’s of 55,000/ 65,000, and Meller Zakomelsky’s of 31,000/47,000, bringing the total of the Russian forces facing Napoleon to 392,000. Behind them a second wave of units was being formed. As soon as Alexander’s diplomatic demarches had secured peace with Sweden and Turkey, another 28,500/37,200 troops from Finland and 54,500/70,000 from Moldavia would be brought into play. The armies at the front were well supplied and supported for an offensive by a series of magazines at Vilna, Shvienchiany, Grodno and elsewhere, and a second line stretching behind that from Riga in the north to Kaluga in the south.
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It is difficult to gauge what Alexander intended by coming to Vilna, as he gave no indication that he meant to take command. His armies had been massing in the region for the past eighteen months, and were poised along the frontier in readiness to attack. The Tsar’s arrival at advance headquarters would, in the circumstances, suggest that the decision had been taken to launch the attack, since there could be no conceivable point in His Imperial Majesty coming all that way just to review them. In the event, Alexander’s presence helped to confuse what was already a highly confused situation.

The man ostensibly in command was the fifty-one-year-old Minister of War, General Mikhail Barclay de Tolly. He was an intelligent, sensible and competent man of strong character and independent judgement, who had shown his mettle in the field against Swedes, Poles, Turks and Frenchmen, being seriously wounded at Eylau. He was undoubtedly very brave and steady under fire. Alexander liked him and had promoted him over the heads of others, arousing their jealousy. He was reserved and stoical rather than affable, which did nothing to increase his popularity among his peers. As he could not count on their cordial cooperation, he was wont to look to everything himself. And although he had done more than any other to ease the
lot of the common soldier, he was not the kind of commander who inspires devotion in the rank and file.
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While Barclay had been appointed commander of the First Army, he had not been nominated commander-in-chief. This may have been because Alexander felt this to be unnecessary since he was also Minister of War, or it may have been because he intended to command himself, or did not want to offend others vying for the post.

Ostensibly, Alexander took no part in military affairs beyond inspecting fortifications and attending parades. But he did interfere in day-to-day business. And his presence at headquarters ineluctably diminished Barclay’s already fragile authority, as it gave huge scope for insubordination – and there was no lack of those who hated Barclay and resented the idea of serving under him.

Foremost amongst these was General Prince Piotr Ivanovich Bagration, commanding the Second Army. Bagration was a dashing battlefield general, recklessly brave, with a volcanic temper, a warm heart, and all the fiery bravado necessary to make him worshipped by his officers and men. Although younger than Barclay, he had been a general for longer and therefore felt he had a right to overall command. In the absence of any document stipulating that he must take his orders from Barclay, Bagration took the view that his command was an independent one. Alexander’s arrival at headquarters provided him with an excuse to send all his reports to the Tsar, as supreme commander, bypassing Barclay entirely.

Bagration’s position was a strong one. He was extremely popular with his fellow generals and had a great following at court. And, having been for a time Grand Duchess Catherine’s lover, he also had a slight ascendancy over Alexander, who did not like him but could not be seen to put him down.

Matters were made no easier by the Tsar’s younger brother Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich, who commanded the Imperial Guard, an unbalanced blusterer whose only real pleasure in life derived from making troops parade before him. For him, the parade was a kind of ballet – perfect precision in the choreography and meticulous
attention to dress were assured by the generous distribution of savage punishments for being a few inches out of line or missing a button. Between parades, Constantine could be counted on to support anyone who criticised Barclay or failed to carry out one of his orders.

This state of affairs opened the door for a comeback by General Levin Bennigsen. A Hanoverian by birth, this old professional soldier had taken service in Russia more than fifty years before. A competent commander, if a little fussy and ponderous, he had risen slowly but surely, and assured his survival in Alexander’s good graces by being one of those who had murdered his father. He had ended his military career on a less than satisfactory note, leading the Russian army to defeat at Friedland. He was now sixty-seven years old. He had retired, and was living on his estate of Zakrent, which happened to be a few kilometres outside Vilna. Ever since Friedland he had longed for a chance to redeem his reputation, and felt it was he, not Barclay, who should be given overall command. Upon his arrival in Vilna, Alexander summoned Bennigsen and asked him to return to service in an unspecified capacity in his personal entourage.

This was already alarmingly large. Alexander was surrounded by a swarm of unofficial advisers, including his brother-in-law Prince George of Oldenburg, his uncle Prince Alexander of Württemberg, the Swedish adventurer Gustav Mauritz Armfeld, the French émigré Jean Protais Anstett, and a host of others. This was partly the result of Alexander’s longer-term views and ambitions. ‘Napoleon means to complete the enslavement of Europe, and to do so he has to strike Russia down,’ he wrote to Baron vom Stein, inviting him to come and help plan the crusade for its liberation. ‘Every friend of virtue, every human being who is animated by the sentiment of independence and love of humanity is interested in the success of this struggle.’
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Since Alexander also needed to carry on exercising political power, he had instructed his most important ministers to follow him to headquarters. He was soon joined in Vilna by Admiral Shishkov, who was slightly baffled to find himself, the effective Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, stuck out at military headquarters. General
Arakcheev, head of the Council of State’s Military Committee and Secretary to the Emperor for Military Affairs, was also in attendance. Chancellor Rumiantsev suffered a mild stroke on his way to Vilna, but this did not stop him joining the Tsar, though Alexander henceforth conducted his diplomatic business through his Secretary for Foreign Affairs Karl von Nesselrode.

The presence of so many different hierarchies of power had undesirable repercussions in the army at every level, and exacerbated a problem, created by the dearth of native officer material, which was to bring forth torrents of bad blood and bedevil the conduct of the campaign: the presence of large numbers of foreigners.

There were literally hundreds of French officers serving in the Russian army, most of them émigré aristocrats who had fled the revolution. They occupied a variety of posts, including some of the highest, with the Marquis de Traversay Admiral-in-Chief of the Russian Fleet, the Comte de Langeron and the Marquis Charles Lambert in command of army corps and General de Saint-Priest as chief of staff to the Second Army. There were also Italians, Swiss, Swedes, Poles and others: Barclay came of a family of Baltic barons who traced their ancestry to the Barclays of Towie in Scotland; Bagration’s origins were Georgian. But those who caused the greatest problem were the Germans, and particularly the Prussians.