Strategy (16 page)

The Russian plan therefore was to fall back, to the chagrin of many senior officers whose instincts were offensive. By trading space for time, they would gain strength. As the French advanced away from their supply lines, the Russians would get closer to theirs. Since Napoleon's system depended on big battles and rapid victories, the Russians would retreat, raid enemy communications with their much superior light cavalry, and wear down Napoleon's forces. “We must avoid big battles until we have fallen right back to our supply lines.”
¹³

The Russians knew what they needed to do, but they had no actual plan of retreat. That depended on when and how Napoleon made his first move. When it came, the retreat had a degree of improvisation, but it was managed better than Napoleon's advance. The emperor was prepared for an early battle but not for a long advance into unforgiving terrain in the face of inclement weather. As Napoleon chased the Russians in search of a battle, he exhausted his men and particularly his horses. Only as he got close to Moscow could he be confident that he would at last get his battle. Despite his tired and depleted force, Napoleon stuck with his original plan on the assumption that the Russians would not give up Moscow without a fight.

Facing him in charge of the Russian forces was General Mikhail Kutuzov, a shrewd officer with a good understanding of the attitudes of ordinary soldiers and the Russian people, as well as considerable experience in war. But Kutuzov was now 65, physically and mentally slower than before, and surrounded by flatterers. When the battle came, his deployments and command arrangements were haphazard: he delegated his powers of command to subordinate generals to act as they saw fit in the circumstances. His passivity left the impression that he had no idea what was going on or what to do next.

Yet the revelation at Borodino was how much Napoleon was off form and off maxim. The advance into Russia had been unexpectedly challenging and costly in men and materiel. By the time of the battle, the Grand Armée had already lost a third of its original 450,000 men—without a proper fight. Although much is made of the terrible impact of the Russian winter on the retreat from Moscow, the initial and critical damage was done by the Russian summer. The Russians enjoyed a notional numerical advantage at the time of the battle, although this evaporated when some 31,000 Russian militiamen without much by way of weapons or training were subtracted, leaving around 130,000 French facing 125,000 Russians.
¹⁴
The emperor himself had put
on fat, having enjoyed the good life to excess, and had lost the energy of his earlier years. On the day of the battle he was also unwell, suffering from fever and a painful inability to urinate. He barely seemed in charge.

Napoleon's subordinate generals conducted the battle almost independently of each other and without the cohesion he would once have imposed. Instead of his forces being committed against one particular line of attack, there were a series of uncoordinated probes against the Russian positions. Although his superior firepower blasted holes in the Russian defenses, the enemy fought doggedly and did not surrender—much to Napoleon's consternation. When breakthroughs were possible he dithered, bothered by practicalities when bold maneuvers were proposed to him. With little left of his army to spare at a critical moment, he held back the Imperial Guard out of concern that he would have little left for his next battle.

In past battles he had been an evident presence, riding around to make his own assessments of the situation at the front and to enthuse his troops. On this day, he was absent. A French officer observing the emperor's indecision in the face of contradictory reports about Russian strength, described Napoleon's “suffering and dejected face, his features sunk, and a dull look; giving his orders languishingly, in the midst of these dreadful warlike noises, to which he seemed completely a stranger.” Mikaberidze adds that Napoleon was “unrecognizable and his lethargy may have been the most decisive factor in the battle, as he rejected proposals that could have delivered victory.”
¹⁵

The emperor took comfort in the fact that at the end of the day he occupied the battlefield and had inflicted greater harm on the enemy than his own forces had suffered. But the Russian army was not annihilated, and those that were not killed or wounded largely escaped. Napoleon had expected to take many prisoners, but the actual haul was small. He now lacked the capacity to finish the Russians off in another battle. A large country with a large population could absorb the losses.

Kutuzov managed to withdraw his forces in an orderly fashion. His one important, absolutely critical, decision was to encourage Napoleon to enter Moscow instead of chasing his army in order to inflict what might have been a decisive defeat. This had not been his original intent. Prior to Borodino, he had resisted the idea that Moscow was just another town that might have to be sacrificed for the greater good of saving the Russian empire. Now Kutuzov acknowledged that he could not save both Moscow and the army and that if the army was lost, then Moscow would go anyway. “Napoleon,” he observed, “is like a torrent which we are still too weak to stem. Moscow is the sponge which will suck him in.” Napoleon allowed himself to be sucked in. As the city was being occupied, fires began and ultimately destroyed two-thirds of it.
Napoleon expected the Tsar to sue for peace. Soon he realized that with the Russians unwilling to either fight another battle or negotiate a settlement, he was stranded, unable to sustain his forces through hunger and cold. He had no choice but to return to France. The journey home was bitter and crippling. When the Russians eventually advanced, the Tsar was able to realize the ultimate goal of his own strategy, which was to revive the anti-Napoleon coalition in Europe.

After this debacle and a first exile, Napoleon made one further attempt at glory, which came to grief at Waterloo in 1815. This master of war had been defeated and those writing the textbooks were left to ponder not only the sources of his original success but the causes of his ultimate failure. For present during the Russian campaign, though playing minor roles, were the two greatest nineteenth-century theorists of war: Carl von Clausewitz and Baron Antoine Henri de Jomini.

[W]ar is not an exercise of the will directed at inanimate matter, as
is the case with the mechanical arts, or at matter which is animate but
passive and yielding, as is the case with the human mind and emotions in
the fine arts. In war, the will is directed at an animate object that reacts
.

—Clausewitz,
On War

C
ARL VON
C
LAUSEWITZ
, born 1780, learned his military craft in the Prussian army as it failed to resist Napoleon's mass army. Dismayed at Prussia's craven subordination to victorious France, Clausewitz joined the Russian army (hence his appearance at Borodino) before returning to the Prussian army for the campaign that culminated at Waterloo and the final defeat of Bonaparte. Along with the bulk of the European officer class, he had been mesmerized by Napoleon. In 1812, he saw at close quarters the great man's fallibility: his loss of the killer instinct at the critical moment, the limits to his genius. Clausewitz wrote a full account of the campaign, though his own role—and his account—was hampered by his lack of Russian. He did help organize the Convention of Tauroggen, whereby the Prussian contingent that had been obliged to march with Napoleon came to the Russian side.

Clausewitz did not think Borodino a classic of strategy. In the whole battle he found “not a single trace of an art or superior intelligence,” the result coming “less from a carefully considered decision than from indecision and
circumstance.” His initial, and not unreasonable, conclusion was that the “vastness” of Russia made it impossible “to cover and occupy strategically.” A “large country of European civilization” could not “be conquered without the help of internal discord.”
¹
Later he was harsher on Napoleon for not chasing the Russian army and described Borodino as a battle that was “never completely fought out.”
²
Both judgments had important implications: the first that the degree of popular support for the state made a difference when dealing with external threats; the second that a victory that did not leave the enemy fatally wounded was of limited value.

Clausewitz's military reputation in Prussia was modest, and when he was sent to direct the war school it was in an administrative capacity. He did not teach, but he did have the time to collect his thoughts about this remarkable and transformational period of warfare and pull them together for a master-work,
On War
.

War's tendency toward the absolute both thrilled and appalled the younger Clausewitz. The more mature Clausewitz appreciated the reasons why wars in practice still fell short of the absolute and that, post-Napoleon just as pre-Napoleon, they might be fought for more modest ends than the survival of states. It was this that led to his determination to engage in a major revision of his whole text, a project that was only partly completed when he died. According to one interpretation, this moment of truth came upon Clausewitz gradually; by another view, 1827 was more of a crisis as he realized that his theory of war failed to account sufficiently for the various forms in which it had actually occurred.
³
He was still in the process of revising
On War
when he was struck down by cholera in 1832. His widow did the best she could with the book's posthumous publication, but the final version inevitably left commentators guessing about what might have been found had he lived to complete the work to his satisfaction.

While Clausewitz was seeking to advise the Russians in 1812, Jomini was on the French side. In the retreat from Moscow, he lost his papers at a river crossing as the remnants of the French army were harassed by Russian partisans. Although Clausewitz is now considered to be the greater of the two and Jomini is rarely read, it was Jomini who for most of the nineteenth century was taken to be the foremost interpreter of the Napoleonic method. Napoleon was said to have remarked that Jomini betrayed the innermost secrets of his strategy. Jomini certainly claimed, based on his observations of
the master, to have discerned basic principles of warfare. This earned him the “dubious title of founder of modern strategy.”
⁴

Jomini was born in Switzerland in 1779. Though he started work as a banker in Paris, he joined the French army in 1797 and came under the patronage of then General and eventually Marshal Michel Ney. Jomini wrote a treatise on the campaigns of Frederick the Great in 1803. This work contained those core beliefs which sustained him until his death in 1869 at the age of 90. He held staff positions for both Napoleon and Ney, but was a difficult egotist and a serial resigner. By 1813 he had risen to become Ney's chief of staff, but after he was denied promotion to
general de division
he offered his services to Russia, where he became a full general. His core ideas were published in his
Art of War
(always a popular title), which was first published in 1830 and then in a revised form in 1838.
⁵
His book has been described as “the greatest military textbook of the nineteenth century.”
⁶
By elucidating the enduring principles of strategy, Jomini sought to “make instruction easier, operational judgment sounder, and mistakes less frequent.”
The Art of War
was published widely. This meant that opposing armies might well have been following the same precepts, and so the advice would become self-neutralizing, unless one side dared to seek advantage by breaking Jomini's rules.

To Jomini, strategy was the sphere of activity between the political, where decisions were made about who to fight, and the tactical, which was the sphere of actual combat. By saying that strategy was the art of making war upon the map, he was interested in how the theater of operations as a whole was conceived by the commander and the moves against the enemy formulated, while taking advantage of the spatial awareness made possible by modern cartography. “Strategy decides where to act; logistics brings the troops to this point; grand tactics decides the manner of execution and the employment of the troops.”
⁷

Politics and tactics were governed by different principles, and Jomini had surprisingly little to say about either. According to John Shy, the only aspect of war that “truly interested him concerned the supreme commander, the Frederick or Napoleon who played the great bloody game, who by sheer intellect and will dominated the men who served him and used them to defeat his enemies.” Jomini's armies appeared as “faceless masses, armed and fed in mysterious ways.” Their commanders would show their greatness by massing force against weaker enemy forces at some decisive point.
⁸
Both Frederick the Great and Napoleon had demonstrated the importance of following this core principle, though it was by no means straightforward in application. Focusing on one point to the exclusion of others, and leaving your own flanks vulnerable, required a degree of boldness and an ability to
weigh risks. Ways had to be found to mass the army for the attack and to identify the main point against which to direct the attack.

Jomini failed to test the historical cases which did not conform to his precepts. He also assumed that military units of equivalent size were essentially equal in how they were armed, trained, disciplined, supplied, and motivated. Strategy was therefore important because only the quality of the commanders and their decisions really made a difference. This was why he could conceive of it as following timeless principles, which required him to assert during his long life that major material shifts, such as the use of railways, were matters of detail. If the principles really were timeless, why was Napoleon such a revelation? Jomini's answer was that the growing maturity in military thought meant that the principles were properly appreciated.
⁹
He was not the last to use this argument.