Authors: Adam Zamoyski
Alexander had undoubtedly taken the right decision, as the Drissa camp would have proved a trap in which the Russian army would have been surrounded and destroyed. He nevertheless now found himself in an untenable position. His undignified flight from Vilna and the hasty withdrawal of the army posited the questions of why it
had been stationed along the border if it did not mean to defend it, and what Alexander was doing there if he was going to run at the first news of a French advance.
On hearing of the retreat, people in Moscow and St Petersburg were bewildered. Alexander’s only justification had been that he was carrying out the preordained plan of drawing the French on to the defences of Drissa. But now that plan had been abandoned, he was left without a figleaf. All he had to show for two weeks’ campaigning was the abandonment of vast tracts of his empire to the enemy, including its largest city after Moscow and St Petersburg, an army tired and reduced by about a sixth, and the loss of a large quantity of stores.
It was clearly time to heed his sister’s advice and leave the army, but he was afraid that he would be accused of deserting his troops at a critical moment. And while the memory of Austerlitz haunted him, he longed to emulate his namesake Alexander Nevsky, who had thrown the foreign invader out of Holy Russia at the head of his troops.
Fortunately for Holy Russia, Shishkov, who had come to the conclusion that the army was in peril of disintegrating, now took the matter into his own hands. He decided that whatever happened, Alexander must be persuaded to leave headquarters. He discussed the matter with Balashov, who agreed, and together they persuaded Arakcheev to back them up. Shishkov penned a memorandum in which he explained that the Tsar’s place was in his capital, not with his army, and that at this juncture his duty was to rally his people and raise more troops. The three of them signed the document, which was left on Alexander’s desk among his papers.
The Tsar made no mention of it as they all prepared to leave Drissa on the morning of 16 July. But on arrival at Polotsk that evening he turned to Arakcheev and said: ‘I have read your paper.’ A couple of hours later he mounted his horse and rode out to see Barclay, whom he found having a frugal supper in a stable. They spent an hour together, and when they emerged from the stable Alexander embraced Barclay, saying: ‘Farewell, General, once more farewell,
au revoir
. I commend my army to your keeping. Do not forget that it is the only one I have.’ He mounted his horse and rode back to Polotsk, where he gave orders for his departure for Moscow on the next day.
45
*
The cossacks were a type of light cavalry with a characteristic style of fighting based on harrying the enemy rather than engaging him. They were mostly recruited from among the indigenous ‘
kazaks
’ of the Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban.
*
The language problem could have far more serious consequences: during a skirmish at Nieshviezh a few days later, a Colonel Mukhanov was run through and killed by cossacks when he shouted an order in French to one of his officers in a mêlée.
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W
hile Alexander’s presence at headquarters had been detrimental to the operations of the Russian armies, Napoleon’s absence from the front line was disastrous for the French. He had allowed himself to get bogged down with political and administrative concerns in Vilna, where he spent two precious weeks during which he effectively lost the initiative.
Having failed to trap and defeat Bagration, he now ordered Davout to keep alongside him and diverted Prince Eugène northwards in order to prevent the Second Army from joining up with Barclay’s First. This was being hotly pursued by Murat with his cavalry corps. Such a pursuit would in normal circumstances either have forced the Russians to face the French or turned their retreat into flight, but forced marches were something the Russian army was good at. In the event, Murat’s hot pursuit only contributed to the destruction of the Grande Armée’s cavalry, with catastrophic consequences later in the campaign.
This was not entirely Murat’s fault. In putting together a corps of 40,000 cavalry, Napoleon had created the greatest forage problem in the history of warfare. By giving the corps the role of a mobile spearhead, he condemned its stock to attrition. After a long day’s march, often involving skirmishes with cossacks or other units of the Russian rearguard, the men and horses would have to bivouac out in the open,
with no shelter and often no food for the men or any kind of feed for the horses, which were lucky to get some old thatch pulled off a peasant hovel. In the morning they would be saddling and tacking up early for ‘
la Diane
’, a long stand-to while all the pickets came in and reported back, a rigmarole that could take up to a couple of hours. The long marches and the lack of rest meant that the horses suffered from saddle sores and other ailments as well as exhaustion, but these factors were aggravated by Murat himself.
Murat was one of the most colourful characters of his day. ‘He always wore grandiose or bizarre outfits deriving from the Polish and the Mussulman, combining rich cloth, striking colours, furs, embroidery, pearls and diamonds,’ wrote a contemporary. ‘His hair fell in long curls on his broad shoulders, his thick black sideburns and his sparkling eyes contributed to an ensemble which aroused astonishment and made one think of him as a charlatan.’ Determined to look his best on this campaign, Murat brought with him not only a variety of his operatic costumes but also, according to one of his officers, a whole wagonload of scents and cosmetics.
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Murat’s great virtues were his reckless bravery and his ability to inspire valour in his men. He thought nothing of standing under fire or leading charges, often disdaining to draw his bejewelled sabre and brandishing no more than a riding crop. But he had absolutely no tactical, let alone strategic, sense. He was the master of unnecessary and suicidal cavalry charges.
While he was a fine horseman, Murat showed a total lack of concern for the well-being of the beasts, which communicated itself to the generals serving under him, as a captain in the 16th Chasseurs à Cheval explained. ‘I will quote only one example among a host of similar ones,’ he wrote. ‘Sent off on picket duty with a hundred horsemen in the evening after the combat at Viasma, I was left at my post without being relieved until noon on the following day, and with strict orders not to unbridle the horses. The horses had been bridled since before six o’clock in the morning on the previous day. Having nothing for my pickets, not even water nearby, in the course of the
night I sent an officer to explain my situation to the General, asking him for some bread and above all for some oats. He replied that he was there to make us fight, not to feed us. And so our horses went for thirty hours without being watered or fed. When I came in with my pickets it was time to move on; I was given one hour to refresh my detachment, after which I had to rejoin the column at a trot. I had to leave behind a dozen men, whose horses could no longer walk.’
2
When he came across Murat’s cavalry on the march, barely three weeks into the campaign, Prince Eustachy Sanguszko, one of Napoleon’s aides-de-camp, noted that ‘the horses swayed in the wind’. Caulaincourt watched them skirmishing with the enemy rearguard at about the same time, and was shocked to see that after some of the charges the troopers were obliged to dismount and walk their horses back, and if there was a counterattack they had to abandon their mounts and save themselves by running, as they could do so faster than the exhausted creatures could carry them.
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When Murat reported that Barclay had taken up position at Drissa, a new plan began to form in Napoleon’s mind. He would make for Polotsk, thereby turning Barclay’s left wing and cutting him off not only from Bagration but also his supply lines to the east. He would then attack and push him westwards towards the sea and into the path of the advancing corps of Oudinot and Macdonald. Leaving Maret in Vilna to manage his relations with the outside world, he set off in pursuit.
The Russians had indeed exposed themselves by wasting time at Drissa, and Napoleon’s plan would undoubtedly have culminated in the destruction of the First Army had it not been for his uncharacteristic lack of decision and speed. While the Russians were discussing the merits of Phüll’s position, he himself had been procrastinating in Vilna. On the very day he finally marched out, 16 July, the last units of the Russian army were evacuating the Drissa camp.
When Napoleon learned that the Russians had abandoned Drissa he amended his plan and made for Vitebsk rather than Polotsk,
hoping to be able to outflank them there. But when he reached Beshenkoviche on 25 July he discovered that Barclay had slipped through ahead of him. Murat, leading the advance with his cavalry corps, had stumbled on his rearguard near Ostrovno. This time, the Russians stood and fought. Napoleon was delighted when he heard of this. ‘We are on the eve of great things,’ he wrote to Maret in Vilna, adding that he would soon be announcing a victory.
4
Barclay appeared to have decided to give battle before Vitebsk. He had left Count Ostermann-Tolstoy with his 4th Corps of some 12,000 men barring the road at Ostrovno, with instructions to delay the French advance and win him time to deploy his forces. With his habitual impetuousness, Murat had launched his cavalry at the Russians. General Piré’s Hussars executed a brilliant charge in which they captured a Russian battery, and Murat himself led a couple of charges which pushed the Russians back in disorder. But he could not make any real headway against them, particularly when they took up positions in a wood, as he had no infantry or artillery to support him. That evening he was reinforced by the arrival of General Delzons’ infantry division, and the Russians were pushed back once more despite putting up a determined resistance.
This first serious engagement of the campaign had been the baptism of fire for many on both sides, and Lieutenant Radozhitsky of the Russian light artillery was horrified by the carnage. ‘My heart shuddered at such a sight,’ he wrote. ‘An unpleasant feeling took hold of me. My eyes grew dim, my knees gave way.’ Some of his old soldiers had told him that the fear would go once the waiting was over and they went into action, and he did indeed find that once he was firing off his guns at the French he felt only fury.
5
The French felt an eerie sense of disappointment when they occupied Ostrovno that evening. ‘There was nobody who could pay to the courage of these soldiers the tribute of admiration which they had so richly deserved,’ wrote Raymond Faure, a doctor in the 1st Cavalry Corps. ‘There was not a table at which they could sit down and recount the exploits of the day.’
On the following morning Faure rode out onto the battlefield. ‘The sward was ploughed up and strewn with men lying in every position and mutilated in various ways. Some, all blackened, had been scorched by the explosion of a
caisson
; others, who appeared to be dead, were still breathing; as one came up to them one could hear their moans; they lay, some with their heads on the body of one of their comrades who had died a few hours before; they were in a sort of apathy, a kind of sleep of pain, from which they did not appear to wish to awake, paying no attention to the people walking around them; they asked nothing of them, probably because they knew that there was nothing to hope for.’
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The battle resumed that morning some eight kilometres to the east, as the Russians, who had been reinforced with Konovnitsin’s division and General Uvarov’s cavalry corps, fought to hold the French advance. They mounted a counterattack, sowing confusion in the French ranks, but the situation was redressed by a spectacular charge led by Murat in person. The charge was backed up by Delzons’ infantry, and the Russians were defeated. Only the timely arrival of reinforcements in the shape of General Stroganov’s division of grenadiers steadied their ranks and allowed them to retreat in good order.
Napoleon spent much of that night in the saddle, hurrying his forces forward, sensing the possibility of a battle. By midday on the following day, 27 July, he could see Barclay’s troops drawn up outside Vitebsk, behind the river Luchesa. The approaches to the river were defended by Count Pahlen’s cavalry corps, supported by infantry and cossacks, and Napoleon himself directed the operation of clearing them away, taking the opportunity to reconnoitre the Russian positions. The fighting was heavy. Many of Napoleon’s units were still coming up along the road, so he decided to put the battle off till the next morning. It was uncharacteristic of him, and it was also a grave mistake, for, as Yermolov’s aide-de-camp Lieutenant Grabbe pointed out, if he had pushed home his attack that evening, the Russians, who were also unprepared for battle, would have been routed.
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Napoleon was in the saddle until ten that night, directing the deployment of units as they arrived. Those that had already made camp were busily preparing for the next day. Days of battle were regarded as holidays, and as such demanded the finest turnout possible. The men unpacked their dress uniforms, polished the brass buckles and plaques, and pipeclayed the belts with an enthusiasm born of frustration. Everyone was looking forward to the battle, and none more so than Napoleon himself. There was no hiding his excitement as he bade Murat goodnight. ‘Tomorrow, at five o’clock. The sun of Austerlitz!’ he said, alluding to the magic moment, fixed in the memory of all those who had been there, when the sun broke through the morning mist on the day of the legendary battle.
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