Authors: Adam Zamoyski
Those who suffered most as a result of this state of affairs were the sick and the wounded lying in the hospitals at Vilna, Minsk, Vitebsk, Polotsk, Smolensk and, perhaps most of all, the survivors of Borodino, cooped up in the monastery of Kolotskoie and at Mozhaisk. There were thousands of French wounded, including twenty-eight generals, scattered in various buildings at Mozhaisk. The
commissaire des guerres
Bellot de Kergorre, who was in charge, claimed that no provision had been made for them. The more mobile would drag themselves into the street and beg from passersby, while he pilfered food from passing supply trains in order to feed the rest. They died of hunger and of dehydration, as there was little water nearby and he had been given no buckets or vessels of any sort. He had no dressings, no lint, no bandages, no stretchers, no beds, no candles and no nurses. He appealed to Junot, whose corps was stationed at Mozhaisk, for help, but the Westphalian soldiers were more trouble than they were worth. When his charges died, all he could do was dump them in the street outside. He also had hundreds of Russian wounded, who subsisted on the stalks of cabbages dug up in neighbouring gardens and the occasional dead horse.
However many men and horses Napoleon may have had, and whatever the quantities of food and fodder at his disposal, the manner in which these resources were being husbanded meant that he could not possibly remain in Moscow for more than a few weeks without his forces beginning to disintegrate. But rather than order a gradual evacuation of all sick and wounded westwards, he was ordering the call-up of another 140,000 men in France, 30,000 in Italy, 10,000 in Bavaria, and smaller contingents from Poland, Prussia and Lithuania,
and he begged Marie-Louise to write to her father asking him to reinforce Schwarzenberg. ‘Not only do I want to have reinforcements sent from all quarters,’ he wrote to Maret in Vilna, ‘I also want those reinforcements to be exaggerated, I want the various sovereigns sending me reinforcements to publish the fact in the papers, doubling the number they are sending.’
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What he did not take into account was that as St Petersburg was the administrative capital, housing all the institutions of state, the loss of Moscow did not in any way weaken the Russian state’s ability to function or affect the interests of its rulers, while its occupation and destruction would contribute mightily to the mobilisation of public opinion in the national cause. His bluff was therefore likely to be called.
Alexander had received Kutuzov’s note announcing a victory on 11 September, just as the Russian army was taking up position outside Moscow. In a flood of relief and gratitude he promoted Kutuzov, sending him a marshal’s baton, and awarded him a grant of 100,000 roubles. Bells were rung in all St Petersburg’s churches, and that evening the whole city was illuminated. Alexander wasted no time, and despatched Colonel Chernyshev to Kutuzov with a plan he had devised for the final destruction of the French.
The next day, the service in the church of St Alexander Nevsky on the Tsar’s name day turned into one of thanksgiving, as Kutuzov’s despatch announcing the victory was read out. Alexander walked among the cheering crowd. The capital resounded to artillery salvoes, and in the evening it was again illuminated.
The joy and the relief were unbounded. ‘Russia rejoice! Raise your head above all the powers on earth!’ wrote one inhabitant to a friend. ‘I am shaking all over from joy. I cannot sleep at night or do anything.’ The next day he was still too excited, and had to pen another letter. ‘Everyone is congratulating each other on the victory, hugging each other, kissing. It is impossible to describe the joy and exaltation on every face.’ The only long faces were those of freshly-minted
militia officers like Lieutenant Zotov, who had just proudly donned his uniform and feared he had missed the chance of proving his patriotic ardour. There was much speculation as to whether Napoleon would be brought to St Petersburg in chains or in a cage. But by the third day, the mood had inexplicably changed to one of anxiety and doubt. The streets grew silent, and people noticed that the packing up of state archives and art treasures from the Hermitage Palace was continuing.
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On 18 September a courier from Yaroslavl galloped into St Petersburg bringing Alexander a short, breathless note from Catherine, dated 15 September. ‘Moscow has been taken. There are some things that are beyond comprehension,’ she wrote. ‘Do not forget your resolution:
no peace
, and you will still conserve a hope of recovering your honour.’ Alexander wrote to Kutuzov, saying he had heard of the fall of Moscow through others, and expressing indignation at having been kept in the dark. To Arakcheev he voiced his regret at ever having been prevailed upon to appoint Kutuzov. It was not for another two days that he heard from him directly.
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On 20 September, Colonel Michaud appeared at Kamenny Island bearing a letter from the commander-in-chief as well as news of the fire, of which the Tsar still knew nothing. ‘My God, so much misfortune! What sad news you bring me, Colonel,’ Alexander exclaimed. The letter was a laconic note from Kutuzov announcing that he had abandoned Moscow. ‘I make bold, in the most humble terms, to assure you, all-merciful sovereign, that the entry of the enemy into Moscow is not the conquest of Russia,’ Kutuzov wrote, but this would have been of little comfort to his imperial master.
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‘From all this I see that Providence expects great sacrifices from us, particularly from me, and I am prepared to bow to her will,’ Alexander said to Michaud. The Colonel explained that after marching through Moscow the Russian army had disengaged from the enemy and made a flanking march around the south of the city. This had brought it to a point astride the road to Kaluga, where it could rest and repair the damage inflicted by Borodino. He assured the Tsar that
morale was good and that the whole army had only one fear – that he might open negotiations with Napoleon.
‘Go back to the army and tell our brave warriors, tell my faithful subjects everywhere you go that even when I do not have a single soldier left, I shall put myself at the head of my beloved nobility and my good peasants, I will command them myself and will use all the means of my whole empire!’ Alexander replied, going on to say that he would never sign a peace with Napoleon, and would rather end his days as a beggar in Siberia than come to terms with him. He worked himself up into a state of high excitement, finally declaring: ‘Napoleon or me, him or me – but we cannot reign together.’
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St Petersburg was by now buzzing with rumour and speculation. Some maintained that Napoleon had been killed in the great battle, others that he had seized Moscow. Those spreading alarmist talk were arrested by the police and forced to sweep the streets in an attempt to stop the rumours getting out of hand, but this did nothing to calm nerves. In the absence of specific news, people began to assume the worst.
The murmuring about treason started up again, and now the finger was being pointed at Alexander himself. His sister Catherine wrote reproaching him with not having stayed in Moscow to defend it. She told him that he was being accused of forfeiting his country’s honour, and that feeling was running high against him. ‘It is not just one class that is blaming you, but all of them in unison,’ she wrote.
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Alexander was particularly stung by the thought that people might think he lacked courage, as he would gladly have faced Napoleon at the head of his army, and had never wavered in his resolve not to negotiate with the enemy. ‘I would prefer to stop being what I am than to treat with the monster who is destroying the world,’ he wrote to Catherine in response to her note. Yet there was a whispering campaign, of which he was aware, to dethrone him in favour of his sister. And the small group of those clamouring for coming to terms with France before the whole state disintegrated was gaining ground. Many of the foreign diplomats in St Petersburg thought that a negotiated
settlement could not be deferred much longer. John Quincy Adams noted that English residents were making preparations to leave.
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‘Violent discontent swirled round the capital,’ in the words of Countess Edling. ‘The anxious and exasperated populace might rise at any moment. The nobility were loudly accusing the Emperor of all the misfortunes that had befallen the state, and one hardly dared to take his defence in public.’ It was through a hostile city that Alexander drove to church on 27 September for the customary celebration of the anniversary of his coronation, normally an occasion of joyfulness as well as pomp. He usually rode to church, but his entourage insisted he go in a closed carriage this time. ‘We drove slowly in our glazed carriages through an immense crowd, whose mournful silence and angry faces were in stark contrast to the holiday we were celebrating,’ recalled Countess Edling, who was sitting beside the Empress Elizabeth. ‘I shall never forget the moment when we ascended the steps of the church, between two walls made up by the people who did not utter one cheer. All one could hear at that moment were our steps, and I have never for a moment doubted that it would have taken no more than a spark at that moment to produce a general explosion.’
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On 29 September there was an official announcement which depicted the fall of Moscow as a minor tactical setback. It was followed up by an imperial proclamation written for Alexander by Shishkov. In tone both angry and proud, it declared that the fall of the ancient capital was the rallying call for all Russians and the turning point in the country’s fortunes. Napoleon had climbed into a grave from which he would never emerge, and the Russian nation would triumph.
To Bernadotte, Alexander wrote two days later that although Kutuzov had retreated, Borodino really had been a victory. ‘I repeat to Your Royal Highness the solemn assurance that more than ever I and the nation at the head of which I have the honour to stand, are decided to persevere and to bury ourselves under the ruins of the empire rather than to come to terms with the modern Attila.’
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A
lexander’s determination was born of fatalism and inner conviction rather than any kind of calculation. For one thing, he did not really know whether he had an army left, whatever Michaud might say. One of his aides-de-camp, Prince Sergei Grigorievich Volkonsky, who had been at Wintzingerode’s headquarters, assured him that ‘from the commander-in-chief to the last soldier, all are ready to lay down their lives in the defence of the fatherland and your Imperial Majesty’, which was encouraging, but it did not accord with what he was hearing from other quarters.
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‘The soldiers are no longer an army, but a horde of bandits, looting under the very eyes of their commanders,’ Rostopchin wrote to him from Kutuzov’s camp. ‘One cannot shoot them: how can one punish several thousand people a day?’ Alexander might have been inclined to take anything the Governor General of Moscow wrote with a pinch of salt, but he would almost certainly have had similar reports, either directly or from people who received letters from the army. ‘My heart aches at the disorders and anarchy I see in almost every unit of the army, which is heading for catastrophe,’ General Dokhturov wrote to his wife; Prince Dmitri Mikhailovich Volkonsky lamented that ‘our own marauders and cossacks are robbing and killing people’; and there were plenty of other officers who did not hide the truth or their fears. Many of them were in despair at their
army’s failure, and openly proclaimed that they were ashamed to wear the uniform.
2
The senior generals were justifying their own conduct by accusing each other of everything from incompetence to treachery. Barclay was the victim of a stream of aspersions, of which he apprised Alexander in hurt tones. Bennigsen informed anyone who would listen that Kutuzov was an imbecile and a coward who had lost the respect of the army. ‘The soldiers hate and despise him,’ echoed Rostopchin in a letter to Alexander. Bennigsen wrote to the Tsar complaining that Toll, whom he held responsible for the disaster at Borodino, had insulted him. Rostopchin warned Alexander that General Pahlen hated him and denounced Platov as a traitor who had made arrangements with the French for his future. Like a gaggle of petulant squabbling schoolchildren, they sneaked on each other to the Tsar in letters that must have made baffling as well as painful reading. Egging them on and criticising them in his regular letters was General Wilson, who mistrusted all of them. Particularly distasteful to the somewhat prudish Alexander was the stream of lewd tittle-tattle about Kutuzov’s private life. Bennigsen and Rostopchin both gleefully informed him that the old commander-in-chief had smuggled a couple of girls disguised as cossacks into his quarters, where he spent whole days attending to them while his demoralised army seethed with indignation.
Clausewitz considered it fortunate that Alexander did not join the army, as the sight of what it had come to might well have weakened his resolve. He also thought that if the Tsar had been able to contemplate at close quarters the devastation being visited on his land and the effect it was having on society, he might have agreed to negotiate with Napoleon.
3
The country was in a volatile mood, whatever the later legend of the patriotic war might suggest. Leaving aside questions of patriotism and loyalty, Napoleon’s invasion inevitably raised a number of others as to the viability of the nature and constitution of the Russian state. It had never been put to such a test, and Alexander could not be sure
that the rapidly expanded structure of the empire could take the strain.
‘Over the past twenty years I have been present at the funeral of several monarchies,’ the old royalist Joseph de Maistre wrote from St Petersburg at the beginning of October, ‘but none of them struck me as much as what I see now, for I have never seen anything so mighty totter … Everywhere I see loaded boats and carriages; I hear the language of fear, of resentment and even of ill will; I can see more than one terrible symptom.’
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