Authors: Adam Zamoyski
According to some sources, on entering the rooms which had been prepared for him in Vitebsk, Napoleon took off his sword and, throwing it on the table covered with maps, exclaimed: ‘I am stopping here; I want to take stock, rally and rest my army, and to organise Poland; the campaign of 1812 is over! The campaign of 1813 will accomplish the rest!’ Whether the scene was quite as theatrical as this is questionable, but the gist of what he said is not. He told Narbonne that he would not repeat the mistake of Charles XII by venturing deeper into Russian lands. ‘We must settle down here this year, so as to finish the war next spring.’ And to Murat he is reported to have said that ‘the war against Russia will be a three-year war’.
38
Napoleon had taken his quarters in the residence of the Governor of Vitebsk, the Tsar’s uncle Prince Alexander of Württemberg, and there he installed his travelling office, with his
portefeuille
and boxes containing papers as well as a couple of long mahogany cases with his travelling library. Presumably alarmed at the thought of the
longueurs
that lay ahead, he wrote to his librarian in Paris asking him to send ‘a selection of amusing books’ and novels or memoirs that made for easy reading. The weather was extremely hot, with temperatures of 35°C (95°F) at night recorded by his secretary Baron Fain, and while his troops cooled themselves by bathing in the river Dvina, he sweated as he worked at tidying up the army. He gave orders for a new route of communication and supply to be opened via Orsha to Minsk, instructed General Dumas to start building up a sizable magazine and to construct bread ovens, and he set up a local administration. He bought and demolished a block of houses in front of his quarters in order to create a square on which he could review his troops, and held regular parades, knowing this to be good for the soldiers’ morale. He was aware that they were grumbling about the supply situation, so he used one of these parades, on 6 August, to vent his anger publicly at the
commissaires
and those in charge of the medical service. Shouting
loud enough for the soldiers to hear, he reproved them for failing to comprehend ‘the sanctity of their mission’, sacked the chief apothecary and threatened the doctors that he would send them all back to treat the whores of the Palais-Royal. It was pure theatre, but the soldiers cheered their Emperor who cared so much for them.
39
Napoleon issued confident-sounding and mendacious Bulletins, wrote to Maret instructing him to publicise non-existent successes, and blustered in front of the men; but in the privacy of his own quarters he was irritable and often in a bad mood, shouting at people and insulting them in a way he rarely did. He made contradictory statements and appeared at a loss as to what to do next.
His instinct was to pursue the Russians and force them to fight. He had nearly managed it at Vitebsk, and felt sure they would make a stand in defence of Smolensk, a larger city of some moral significance to them. There was no logic whatever in stopping at Vitebsk while there was still an undefeated Russian army in the field. For one thing, he would quickly starve. He had reached a more fertile area, but the country would still not be capable of feeding his army over a long period of time, while supplying it from Germany was not realistic. He could hardly go into winter quarters in July, and he was the first to see that this was not a good position, since the rivers that provided some kind of defence in summer would freeze over in winter, making it highly vulnerable.
The wider strategic situation was problematic. On Napoleon’s northern flank, Macdonald was besieging Riga and Dunaburg. Oudinot, after an inconclusive engagement against Wittgenstein at Yakubovo which both sides claimed as a victory, had fallen back to cover Polotsk, where he was reinforced by St Cyr’s 6th corps. In the south, General Reynier’s Saxons had suffered a minor defeat at the hands of Tormasov near Kobryn, but he and Schwarzenberg had then pushed Tormasov back, clearing the Russians out of Volhynia entirely.
It was high time he made a decision on whether to play the Polish card or not. He had been greeted in Vitebsk by delegations of local
Polish patriots, and had evaded their expectant questions as to his intentions by heaping abuse on Poniatowski and the alleged cowardice of the Polish troops, which, he claimed, was largely responsible for the failure to catch Bagration. ‘Your prince is nothing but a c—,’ he snapped at one Polish officer.
40
From Glubokoie he had written to Maret telling him to instruct the Polish Confederation in Warsaw to send an embassy to Turkey with the request for an alliance. ‘You realise how important this
démarche
is,’ he wrote. ‘I have always had it in mind, and cannot imagine how I forgot to instruct you accordingly.’ Poland and Turkey were united in enmity to Russia, and Turkey had never reconciled herself to the removal of her ally from the map. A firm declaration of intent by Napoleon to restore Poland might well have persuaded Turkey to resume her war with Russia.
41
Many argued that this was the moment to send Poniatowski south into Volhynia. This would have raised an insurrection in the whole of the old Polish Ukraine, which would have yielded men and horses in plenty as well as abundant supplies. More important, it would have tied down all the Russian forces in the south, under Chichagov and Tormasov, neutralising any threat they might otherwise pose to Napoleon’s flank. But a few days later, from Beshenkoviche, he wrote to Reynier leaving it up to him whether to encourage the local Poles to rise against the Russians.
42
In the event, Reynier’s Saxons behaved so badly that they aroused hostility among even the most patriotic Poles in the area. Those who had hoped that Napoleon might restore Poland were disenchanted. ‘The mask of his good intentions towards us was beginning to slip,’ in the words of Eustachy Sanguszko, one of his aides-de-camp. For his part, Napoleon told Caulaincourt that he was disappointed by the Poles, and that he was more interested in using Poland as a pawn than in restoring her independence.
43
While at Vitebsk he received news of the ratification of the treaty of Bucharest between Russia and Turkey, and details of that between Russia and Sweden signed in March. What he did not know was that
Russia had also signed a treaty of alliance with Britain on 18 July. From Berlin he was receiving intelligence that the British were planning a joint landing in Prussia with the Swedes. But he was cheered by the news of the outbreak of war between Britain and the United States of America.
‘While the Emperor meditated on new and more decisive blows, a great cooling off was taking place around him,’ according to Baron Fain. ‘Two weeks’ rest gave people time to reflect on the enormous distance at which they found themselves, and on the singular character which this war was assuming.’ He added that there was ‘anxiety and discouragement’ in the various staffs. Napoleon sensed this, and for the first time he drew a wider group of generals into his confidence, asking them what they thought should be done. Berthier, Caulaincourt, Duroc and others felt it was time to call a halt. They cited losses, provisioning difficulties and the length of the lines of communication, and expressed the fear that even a victory would cost them dear, on account of the lack of hospitals and medical resources.
44
But Napoleon clung to his original assessment. The Russians were now stronger than they had been, and were on the borders of Russia proper, so they were more likely to accept battle – and that was what he staked everything on. ‘If the enemy holds at Smolensk, as I have reason to believe he will, we shall have a decisive battle,’ he wrote to Davout. Once he had defeated them, Alexander would sue for peace, and the Russians would furnish him with all the supplies he needed. ‘He believed in a battle because he wanted one, and he believed that he would win it because that was what he needed to do,’ wrote Caulaincourt. ‘He did not for a moment doubt that Alexander would be forced by his nobility to sue for peace, because that was the whole basis of his calculations.’
45
But Napoleon remained agitated, as Narbonne’s diary shows, for he was far too intelligent not to see the truth of all the arguments against proceeding. This proverbially decisive man seemed panicked by the very fact that he could not reach a decision, and, leaping out
of his bath at two o’clock one morning, suddenly announced that they must advance at once, only to spend the next two days poring over maps and papers. ‘The very danger of our situation impels us towards Moscow,’ he said to Narbonne finally. ‘I have exhausted all the objections of the wise. The die is cast.’
46
*
All temperatures recorded during this campaign were in Réaumur. For the reader’s sake I have converted them into Celsius and Fahrenheit throughout.
‘T
he greatest regret in my life,’ Alexander’s sister Catherine later said, ‘is not having been a man in 1812!’
1
Had she been one, she might well have ended up in his place. Alexander knew that as the Russian armies fell back, allowing the French invaders to strike into the very heartlands of the empire, he would be blamed. And he could not forget what had happened to his father and grandfather. Arakcheev, Balashov and Shishkov had convinced him that he must galvanise Russia and rally it to his cause. But he could not be sure which way his subjects would swing, particularly as many of them had only become his subjects as a result of conquest.
The territory occupied by the French thus far had only been part of the Russian empire for between seventeen and fifty years, and Alexander could not expect much devotion to the cause of the Tsar and fatherland from the preponderantly Polish gentry or the mass of peasants, who had no defined sense of nationhood. Nor could he play the religious card there: in the areas acquired by Russia in 1772, the population consisted of 1,500,000 Uniates and 1,300,000 Catholics, 100,000 Jews, 60,000 Old Believers, 30,000 Tatar Muslims and three thousand Karaim Jews, as against only 80,000 Russian Orthodox. And even some of these were not reliable. Varlaam, Orthodox Archbishop of Mogilev, went so far as to swear an oath of allegiance to Napoleon, encouraging his flock to do likewise and attend services in the
Emperor’s honour. The Russian troops considered the locals to be foreign and ill-disposed to Russia, and while they maintained amicable relations with them during the eighteen months or so they had been posted there, they began plundering manors and villages as they withdrew.
2
In the event, most of the Polish nobility opted for Napoleon in principle, though the majority did so without much enthusiasm, and many adopted a wait-and-see attitude. The peasants seem to have reacted in more pragmatic ways. Some took the opportunity to rebel, or at least to refuse to carry out their labour obligations. Others apparently made a run to freedom: in 1811 the administrative regions of Mogilev, Chernigov, Babinovitse, Kopys and Mstislav contained 359,946 serfs belonging to landowners and the Church; in 1816 there were only 287,149 of them.
3
The Russian authorities were nervous of how the Jews would react, since they represented the only group in this area, apart from the Polish nobility, who could have been of use to the French in administering it. Napoleon had emancipated the Jews in every country he had marched through, and in 1807 he had called a Grand Sanhedrin or gathering to which he had invited Jews from all over the world. In the event, many Jews did make themselves useful to the French as traders, as guides, and sometimes as informers. But most remained indifferent, while a number proved surprisingly loyal to the Tsar.
4
In the Russian heartlands, which the French were now entering, there were none of these alien elements (the Jews were banned from them), but this did not make the authorities any less apprehensive. In what seems a chillingly modern kind of operation, the police in the province of Kaluga rounded up its foreign residents – Frenchmen, Germans, Swiss, Danes, Englishmen, a Dutchman, a Pole, a Spaniard, a Portuguese, a Swede and an Italian, who variously plied every trade from doctor, tailor, hatter, pastrycook, dancing master and gardener to governess and hairdresser – and packed them off away from the war zone.
5
Another potential threat were the Old Believers, a sect which had split from the Orthodox Church a century and a half earlier in protest at reforms brought in by the Tsar. They regarded Alexander, not Napoleon, as the Antichrist. But although they were ubiquitous, they were few in number and passive by nature.
Amongst Russians, first reactions to the invasion had been positive, even if some exaggerated the patriotic surge. In an unfinished novel set in 1812, Pushkin depicts Moscow society as francophile and dismissive of the rather ‘simple’ defenders of things Russian, whose patriotism ‘was limited to passionate condemnations of the use of French’, until the French invaded. From that moment, ‘social circles and drawing rooms filled with patriots: some threw the French snuff out of their snuffboxes and began to use the Russian variety; others burned French pamphlets by the dozen; others turned away from the Lafitte and took to sour cabbage soup instead’. Pushkin was certainly being a little ironical. Others were less so. ‘News that the enemy had invaded made people of every age and condition forget their private joys and sorrows,’ noted the nationalist Filip Vigel in Penza. ‘When news of the intrusion of Napoleon’s countless hordes spread through Russia, one can truly say that one feeling inspired every heart, a feeling of devotion to the Tsar and the fatherland,’ wrote Prince N.V. Galitzine, a serving officer. In Moscow, ‘old ladies would cross themselves, spit and curse Napoleon’, while young society girls imagined themselves in the roles of Amazons or nurses.
6
But such enthusiasm was by no means shared by the population as a whole.