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But according to Yermolov, there would have been no truly national dimension to the war and no way of harnessing the peasants to the Tsar’s cause had it not been for the clumsy and increasingly undisciplined behaviour of the French.
²³
They did bed down and stable their horses in churches – mainly because these were the only suitable buildings in small towns and villages. They were also undoubtedly rough with the natives. Peasants who brought their produce to sell in Moscow were beaten up and robbed. The more and more widespread depredations of the Grande Armée’s foraging parties, often conducted without any regard for the livelihood, let alone the feelings, of the Russians, forced them to take up arms in order to survive. It was a question of self-preservation.

The peasants began to lay ambushes for foraging parties or lull them into a false sense of security and then overpower them. They acquired arms and were able to take on small units. They vented their rage on their captives in acts of barely believable savagery, mutilating them, burying them alive or roasting them over fires. ‘Approaching a village in order to get some supplies,’ Lieutenant Uxküll noted in his diary, ‘I saw a French prisoner sold to the peasants for twenty roubles; they baptised him with boiling tar and impaled him alive on a piece of pointed iron.’ The French and their allies responded in kind, encouraging a degenerating spiral of horror. ‘People became worse than wild animals and killed each other with incredible cruelty,’ noted A.N. Muraviov.
²⁴

There were exceptions, at every level of society. Édouard Déchy,
the thirteen-year-old son of a doctor in Davout’s corps, had been brought along by his father since, his mother being dead, there was no one to care for him at home. His father was put in charge of one of the hospitals in Smolensk after the action at Valutina Gora. A local Russian landowner, a countess, seeing the child all alone, begged his father to let her take him off to the country, and the boy spent an idyllic few months being pampered and playing with the Countess’s children. In the city of Orel, a Russian woman took pity on some French prisoners who had been brought there and, taking them into her house, ruined herself clothing, feeding and tending to their wounds; when her means ran out she wandered the city begging for money to feed them.
²⁵

Such acts of charity were by no means restricted to the educated classes. A peasant recalled how his entire village had taken refuge in the forest, along with their cattle and all the food they could carry. One day they were discovered by a couple of Frenchmen, so they tried to kill them, but one got away. Expecting a punitive expedition, they sent one of their number to alert some Russian troops stationed nearby, who duly set an ambush. A couple of hundred French troops came and demanded food, threatening to take it if they were not obeyed, whereupon the hidden Russians attacked and the French were quickly disarmed. ‘But as they were all begging for bread,’ explained the peasant, ‘we felt sorry for them, we cooked some potatoes and brought them bread, and even some beef, and we could see how hungry they were, how they all threw themselves on the food we had given them, and with what eagerness they started to eat it. Some of the Frenchmen were trying to say something with tears in their eyes, evidently thanking us in their language, and we said to them: go on, eat, cheers, we have plenty of bread.’
²⁶

The unaccountability of the peasants was a source of debate and anxiety, as to involve them in the war was, to some extent, to empower them: it was the first time in Russian history that a Tsar had been obliged to appeal to the serfs to defend him and his state. And nobody could be sure how they might use this implicit power.

First attempts to engage the peasants in the war had mixed results. A detachment of Prince Eugène’s Army of Italy came across a band armed with pikes, scythes and axes, under the command of their squire. He led them bravely towards the Italians, only to find that all his serfs deserted him and fled. When the selection for the militia began, many wounded themselves in order to avoid being drafted. And not all of those who did end up in the militia displayed quite the right spirit. Nikolai Andreev, a lieutenant in the 50th Jaeger Regiment of Neverovsky’s division, noticed that at Borodino the militiamen responsible for carrying the wounded back to the dressing stations relieved the officers of all their valuables as they did so.
²⁷

Yet the example of Spain, where the
guerrilla
was causing such damage to the French, was an alluring one. A Spanish ‘national catechism’ was translated and published, and many believed that the military value of the peasantry, as distinct from those drafted into the militia, should be harnessed to the national cause. ‘But a national war is too much of a novelty for us,’ lamented the populist Fyodor Glinka. ‘It seems that they are still afraid of unbinding hands.’
²⁸
Ultimately, it was left to circumstance.

Soon after the beginning of the war, Denis Davidov, an officer of Hussars in the Second Army, wrote to Bagration suggesting that if he were given a small independent command he could carry out effective partisan operations against the French. It was not until the beginning of September, just before Borodino, that he was given his command, of fifty Hussars and eighty cossacks. He began to operate in the French rear, but was put out to find himself being shot at by Russian peasants, who regarded all soldiers with equal hatred. After wasting time and energy trying to convince them that he was on their side, he exchanged his regimentals for a peasant smock, let his beard grow, and replaced the cross of the order of St Anne on his breast with a small icon of St Nicholas. This permitted him to approach villages without being shot at, and he could then begin to convince the inhabitants to make common cause with him. He scored a few successes against French foraging parties and isolated units, and began to
involve the local villagers in his actions. By 24 September his detachment had swelled to some three thousand horsemen, as peasants and Russian stragglers or escaped prisoners joined him, and by the end of October he could muster large numbers of local peasants, many armed with muskets taken from the French, for specific operations.

After the fall of Moscow, Kutuzov sanctioned the formation of more such ‘flying detachments’ whose object was to prey on the French lines of communication and supply. He detached General Wintzingerode with 3200 men to operate along the Tver road, and General Dorokhov with two thousand to harry French traffic along the Smolensk road from bases around Vereia. He had also formed smaller detachments under Seslavin, Figner, Lanskoy and others. Some of these units did gather peasant recruits to their side, but mostly they only made use of the intelligence and help provided by the population, occasionally arming them and using them for prisoner or supply escort duty.

Davidov was held up as a hero by Pushkin and admired by Walter Scott, who had a portrait of him in his study, before being immortalised by Tolstoy in the guise of Denisov in
War and Peace
. His exploits and those of other ‘partisan’ units have been greatly exaggerated by legend, and the claims made on their behalf are often absurd. One Soviet historian assures us that a detachment of a hundred Russians attacked a village defended by two cavalry squadrons and two companies of infantry. They allegedly killed 124 Frenchmen and took a futher 101 prisoner, at a cost of two wounded men and six horses wounded or killed. A child can work out that in the space of time it would take to kill 124 men a substantial number of Russians must have been killed and wounded – unless, that is, the French surrendered after a couple of shots and were then butchered. Sergei Volkonsky, who commanded one of the partisan units, admitted that most of the heroic stories were nonsense. The whole point of this kind of warfare was that it had to be cautious and low-risk. The trick was to avoid a fight and capture the French detachment while it slept. The reality was not as glorious as the legend either. Figner was
a cold-blooded murderer. Sergei Lanskoy was, according to General Langeron, a rapist and a brigand.

There were also a number of what one might term guerrilla bands operating along the fringes of the territory held by the French. But it is difficult to disentangle truth from fiction, as the idea of patriotic peasants was alluring to slavophiles and communists alike. It cannot be supported or challenged by documentary evidence, precious little of which ever existed. All one can do is repeat what has been written by Russian historians, and take it with a pinch of salt.

Yermolai Chetvertakov, a Russian dragoon who had been taken prisoner near Gzhatsk but managed to escape, teamed up with a local peasant and together they began ambushing and killing individual French soldiers. They were joined by others, and the band snowballed. Numbers were never constant, as they might be joined by up to several thousand volunteers from the locality if there was a tempting convoy to attack and plunder, but most of these would then go home. Fyodor Potapov, alias ‘Samus’, a Hussar who had been wounded in a skirmish with the French, had taken refuge in the woods, where some peasants gave him shelter. He enlisted their support and similarly built up a band of partisans. Stepan Eremenko, an infantry private who was wounded and left behind outside Smolensk, followed a similar course.

There were also a number of peasants who formed guerrilla bands, and a couple of women have gone down in history as defenders of Holy Russia. In the village of Sokolovo in the province of Smolensk a peasant woman by the name of Praskovia defended her virtue, or possibly her livestock, so effectively that she allegedly sent six Frenchmen to their deaths with her pitchfork. She was outdone by Vasilisa Kozhina, who supposedly despatched dozens with her scythe.

There must have been countless instances of peasants confronting and killing enemy soldiers or civilian camp-followers, particularly in the latter stages of the campaign. But modern Russian historians are generally agreed that there was no
guerrilla
that could bear any comparison with the Spanish model, and that the contribution
of the peasants was largely confined to opportunistic pillage and murder.
²⁹

Opportunistic or not, the instincts animating the peasants, and Russian society as a whole, were such as to rally them to the cause of the empire, and this would become ever more apparent as the fortunes of war deserted the French. Despite the foot-dragging, a total of 420,000 men were drafted into the militia, of whom 280,000 managed to take part in the fighting. A total of a hundred million roubles was donated to the cause by all classes – a sum equivalent to the entire military budget for that year.
³⁰
And at no stage did the machinery of administration cease to function outside the area controlled by the enemy. Towns such as Kaluga, which were too close to the war zone for comfort, were efficiently evacuated of their institutions, schools, hospitals, archives and so on, which were soon functioning again at a safer distance.

Alexander was not to know any of this. He was unwell, suffering from painful rashes on his leg, and he was sick of the wavering sycophancy of his court, so he had withdrawn into the isolation of Kamenny Island. His only source of comfort was his inner conviction that he was but an instrument of God’s will, acting out a higher purpose. This had outgrown the mere defence and liberation of Russia, and among those whom he now saw with the greatest pleasure were the little group of people working under his wing on the liberation of Germany and indeed the whole Continent. He had formed them into a German Committee under the presidency of George of Oldenburg. This was organising a German Legion under Colonel Arentshild and conducting a propaganda campaign throughout Germany, orchestrated by Stein and his secretary the poet Ernst Moritz Arndt. Alexander’s manifestoes were translated and circulated throughout Germany, enhancing his position as the champion of all those opposed to Napoleonic rule. The idea was to prepare a fifth column which would rise at the appropriate moment. When this moment would come depended on the performance of the Russian troops.
‘The fate of the armies will decide that of Germany,’ Stein declared before the battle of Borodino.
³¹

There is a hackneyed story that, seeing his friend Aleksandr Nikolaevich Galitzine so serene, Alexander had questioned him about the source of his inner peace, to which the Prince is supposed to have answered that it came from reading the Bible, and that a few days later the Prince’s wife lent the Tsar her copy, marked at various passages. In fact, Alexander had been reading the Bible for some time, and using it to find scriptural reinforcement of a sense of his own destiny which had already matured. He had also immersed himself in mysticism, and a detailed memorandum on the origins of mystic literature which he sent to his sister Catherine at this time reveals surprising familiarity with it.
³²

It was fortunate for Russia that Alexander found the inner strength to resist the temptation to act at this critical moment. ‘If fate has condemned your empire to fall, you must perish with it and fight among your faithful subjects, who have decided to die under your eyes on the field of honour, on which you yourself should win or perish with them,’ Rostopchin urged.
³³
The idea of assuming command of his army once more and sallying forth to a fight to the death with Napoleon held strong appeal for Alexander. Had he done so, he would have been beaten and Napoleon would have regained the initiative. As it was, the somnolent Kutuzov was the perfect man for the moment, as time was working for the Russians and against the French.

After leaving Moscow to the French, Kutuzov had marched out in a south-easterly direction. He then veered right and began a flanking march around the city which eventually brought him to a point due south of it at Krasnaia Pakhra. It was a risky move, particularly in view of the state of the army.