NAPOLEON'S INVASION OF RUSSIA IN 1812 - PART THREE
NAPOLEON’S INVASION OF RUSSIA IN 1812 – PART THREE
In 1809 England, the only power still at war with France, formed the Fifth Coalition, with Austria returning to the fray. Although war in Spain went on, in the Wagram campaign in July 1809 Austria was once again defeated by France and the Fifth Coalition came to an end. As far as Russia was concerned she possessed huge quantities of raw materials but having little manufacturing capability still desperately needed trade with Britain. Henceforth that would have to be conducted clandestinely. Anglo Russian trade was only slightly less after 1807 than it was before it, as gradually more and more Russian ports were opened to British ships, albeit many of them flying the flag of the neutral United States of America. In the summer of 1811 alone 150 British ships under various flags docked in Russian ports, in the Black Sea, in the Baltic and even as far north as Archangel and as far east as Vladivostok. None of this could be entirely hidden from Napoleon, who became increasingly irritated at this flagrant breaching of his Continental System.
Meanwhile Tsar Alexander, who had fled the field of Austerlitz and had once been terrified of Napoleon, had been following the progress of the British in Spain, and was much less impressed by the French than he had been. Allied to this was a wholesale reform of the Russian army by the Baltic German Minister of War, General Prince Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly, fifty-one years old and an enormously experienced and successful military commander. Absorbing the lessons of the defeats of Austerlitz and Friedland he doubled the number of combatant troops to 211,000 with further increases planned, and included 25,000 of the elite and much feared Cossacks, eventually to be doubled. He put the logistics and supply system on a professional footing, improved the training of officers and formed the Russian forces into two field armies with himself as Commander in Chief and also commander of the First Army with the Second Army commanded by the forty-seven year old Georgian, General Prince Peter Bagration, one of the few senior officer who had performed well at Austerlitz. Behind all this loomed the presence of the most famous of all the Russian generals, Field Marshal Alexander Suvorov. He was considered at sixty-seven to be too old for a field command but nevertheless wielded enormous influence.
Napoleon’s ambassador to St Petersburg, General Armand-Augustin-Louis, Marquis de Caulaincourt, was one of the few genuine aristocrats who had escaped the attentions of the Committee of Public safety in the early days of the revolution. He got on well with the tsar, made repeated protests about the circumventing of the embargo on trade with Britain, which increased when the tsar began to tax French imports. In reply to a hint from Caulaincourt that his master might reinforce protests by force, the tsar replied that while Russia would take no risks, she had plenty of space and a well organised army. Eventually, in 1811, his patience exhausted, Napoleon recalled his ambassador, supposedly ‘on health grounds’ but in reality because he feared Caulaincourt was getting too close to the tsar, one aristocrat to another.
Mere irritation, exasperation even, is not a good reason for going to war, and if that archetypal master of diplomacy Talleyrand had still been in Napoleon’s employ he would have cautioned against the Russian adventure. Talleyrand, who believed in a negotiated peace to consolidate the gains of the revolution, had resigned as foreign minister in 1807 but had kept open his channels to the tsar and to the Emperor of Austria. Now there was no one in Napoleon’s court who would argue against him, and he was to make the critical error that would eventually result in his downfall: a determination to punish Russia and bring her to heel once and for all. Had Napoleon simply turned a blind eye to Russia’s evasion of the Continental System the tsar might well have maintained the alliance with France, or at least declared neutrality. With the rest of Europe firmly under French control Napoleon could have concentrated on eliminating the last land-based threat, that of Wellington’s Anglo-Portuguese army in Spain. But instead of reinforcing the French army in Spain, Napoleon had perforce to withdraw some of its best units to partake in his next gamble.
Sometime in late 1811 Napoleon determined to invade Russia. To do so he assembled the largest army ever seen in European history to that time. Of over 670,000 men it contained troops from all over the French empire and conquered lands with only 250,000 of them French. Of the rest 120,000 were Germans from Bavaria, Saxony, Westphalia, Württemberg, Baden, Bergen and Hesse. Another 20,000 were Prussians. There were 108,000 Poles, 48,000 Spanish, 37,000 Italians from various client states, 34,000 Austrians, 14,000 Dutch, 10,000 Flemish and Walloon from what is now Belgium, 9,000 Swiss, 6,000 from minor Mediterranean states, 4,000 Croats and 2,000 Portuguese. Huge it undoubtedly was, but it had its weaknesses. The Prussians were markedly unenthusiastic about fighting for France when they had so recently been fighting against her, as were the Austrians, while the Spanish were nervous as to what might happen if the Peninsula War resulted in a British victory and the restoration of Ferdinand VII, which looked increasingly likely. In Saxony, hitherto the most steadfast of Napoleon’s German allies, the king was having second thoughts as to where his loyalty should lie. The Portuguese troops, who had been sent off to the Baltic after the first French invasion of their homeland would have much rather been fighting with Wellington than with Napoleon. Even the native Frenchmen were not of the quality that had won Austerlitz: years of war and the constant drain of 40,000 men a year to Spain had diluted the overall competence of the army. Time too was against them. Napoleon calculated that his objective should be the religious capital, Moscow, rather than the political capital St Petersburg, and Moscow was 800 miles from France’s Polish client state. Ideally then the advance should start in early spring, so as to reach their objective before winter. Napoleon knew that the barrenness of the Russian interior would prevent the army from living off the land, so a huge logistical effort produced 25,000 horse and mule drawn vehicles. Even this would not be enough to carry the feed for the 200,000 horses that would accompany the army, of which 80,000 were in the two cavalry corps commanded by Murat. The horses would have to be able to obtain forage along the way, which meant waiting for the new grass to grow.
Besides Murat’s cavalry the French Grande Armée was divided into three corps, commanded by Marshals Oudinot, Davout and Ney. Joachim Murat, forty-five in 1812, was the son of an innkeeper in Guyenne. Originally intended for the church and educated in a Lazarist seminary in Cahors, he ran away and joined the army in 1787. Ever of republican sympathies he was a sergeant in the National Guard by the time of the revolution and was soon commissioned. A captain in 1793 he was promoted major in the same year on transfer to a newly raised cavalry regiment. He first met Napoleon when it was his cavalry regiment that sequestered the artillery guns of the Paris National Guard with which Napoleon then inflicted his ‘whiff of grapeshot’ for which he, Murat, was promoted to colonel. He turned out to be a natural leader of cavalry and fought with Napoleon in Italy and in Egypt. Promoted to general de brigade (brigadier) in 1796 he returned from Egypt with Napoleon and was promoted to general de division (major general), in time for the coup that made Napoleon First Consul. With Napoleon as emperor, Murat became a marshal in 1804. He was probably the best cavalry commander that the French army possessed at that time.
Nicolas Charles Oudinot, forty-five in 1812, was the son of a brewer from Bar le Duc in Lorraine. He enlisted as a private in the Bourbon army and by the time of the revolution was a sergeant. With the removal of so many officers the prospects for competent NCOs were excellent and shortly after the outbreak Oudinot was elected a lieutenant colonel of volunteers. By 1794 he was a brigadier and in 1799 a major general, receiving his marshal’s baton in 1809.
Ney was another of common origins, the son of a barrel maker in Sarrelouis on the French German border. He too enlisted as a private and by the revolution was the equivalent of a sergeant major. Commissioned almost at once he became a brigadier in 1796, a major general in 1799 and a marshal in 1804.
Forty-two in 1812 Louis Nicolas Davout was an exception in that he was of noble birth and a lieutenant in the Bourbon army when the revolution came. Whether from genuine conviction or with an eye to the main chance, he supported the principles of the revolution and survived. In 1792 he commanded a battalion as a major, promoted to brigadier the same year and then sacked on account of his nobility. His rustication did not last long: the army needed competent leaders, and Davout was soon back, promoted to major general in 1799 on the fall of the Directorate, and was on the original list of marshals in 1804.
French marshals were the corps and army commanders of the Napoleonic forces. Napoleon created twenty-six of them. Of these eleven had been non-commissioned officers (NCOs) in the Bourbon army, seven had been, as was Napoleon, junior officers of that army, seven had no military experience until joining volunteer units during the revolution and only one, Kellerman, had been a senior officer under the Bourbons. Here was one of the critical weaknesses of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic armies: every army needs captains and it needs sergeants. You cannot run an army without them. In very broad outline officers decide policy and sergeants carry it out. They are both indispensable, but they are not interchangeable. Their method of selection, their training and their mind set is quite different and each would have difficulty in doing the other’s job. This meant that in general French senior officers were men of tremendous courage, careless of their own lives (and often of everyone else’s too), but they were not military managers, very few had any form of staff training or experience of managing a campaign rather than simply fighting in it.