NAPOLEON'S INVASION OF RUSSIA IN 1812 - PART FOUR
NAPOLEON’S INVASION OF RUSSIA IN 1812 – PART FOUR
The second Polish war, as Napoleon named it, started late when the Grande Armée crossed the River Niemen on 24 June 1812. Lateness, thought Napoleon, would not matter, as he expected to win the war in three weeks by a series of lightning thrusts to envelop and destroy the Russian army. The Russian policy, however, was to delay and Barclay de Tolly instituted a scorched earth policy whereby any crops that could not be harvested and removed were burned, wells poisoned and animals driven away or butchered. This policy was increasingly unpopular with the landowners and the peasants who farmed the land, but it placed ever more of a burden on the French logistics machinery, which soon began to creak. The heat and dust of the Russian summer began to take its toll with men suffering with heat stroke exacerbated by the failure of the suppliers to get sufficient water forward to the infantry columns. Horses too were affected, particularly in areas where the grass had been burnt off and stocks of hay destroyed or removed.
The French did capture a number of towns en route with little difficulty, but always failed to trap the Russian army which, ponderous though it was, always managed to slip away after doing just enough to make the French deploy and waste time. By mid-July, when Napoleon had hoped to be on the outskirts of Moscow, the French army was still short of Smolensk, not even half-way there. With the depredations of the cavalry caused by heat and a shortage of fodder, they were unable properly to shield the infantry columns, which were subject to constant pin-prick attacks by mounted Cossacks, none lasting long enough to constitute a proper battle, but inflicting a steady drip of casualties and delay. To the rear the supply columns were subject to constant ambushing and harrying, and already the casualties amounted to around 100,000 men and many horses.
Meanwhile there were major disagreements amongst the Russian hierarchy. Barclay de Tolly insisted that only a policy of delay, scorched earth and withdrawal could preserve the Russian army for the time when the French had exhausted their supplies and had suffered a steady attrition of casualties when they could then be turned upon and beaten. His supporters were mainly officers of Baltic German origin. In the other camp were the supporters of Bagration, including the tsar, who wanted to go on the offensive and attack the French immediately. After unsuccessful attempts to cut the French off the tsar ordered Barclay de Tolly, against the latter’s advice, to defend Smolensk, with a population of around 13,000, the last major city before Moscow, and around 250 miles from it.
After avoiding Barclay’s attempts to surround and cut him off, Napoleon paused to reconstitute his army, which included the removal of his youngest brother, Prince Jerome, from command of the Westphalian contingent. Twenty-eight in 1812, Jerome’s military career had started in the Consular Guard, until Napoleon transferred him to the navy as an instant admiral. Being totally ignorant of matters naval, and disliking shipboard life, Jerome jumped ship in America, became involved with a local beauty and married her. Napoleon was furious and when the happy couple returned to France in 1805 he annulled the marriage and packed the pregnant now ex-Mrs Bonaparte back to Baltimore with a large bag of gold. If there was one word to describe Jerome it would be ‘irresponsible’ but Napoleon made him king of the German state of Westphalia in 1807, having first married him off to Princess Catharina, the daughter of King Frederick of Württemberg. It was not so much Jerome’s lack of military ability that irked his brother, but his insistence on maintaining the trappings of a king while on campaign, much more luxurious trappings than the vastly more important emperor himself. Jerome was replaced by the more reliable General Jean-Andoche Junot. Junot, forty-one in 1812, was the son of a peasant farmer from Bussy-le-Grand and on the outbreak of the revolution joined a volunteer battalion and was made a sergeant. He first met Napoleon at the siege of Toulon and became his aide-de-camp (ADC) as a lieutenant. He continued to serve under Napoleon in Italy, where he received a severe head wound which is thought to have caused the mental instability that plagued him for the rest of his life. A brigadier by the start of the Egyptian campaign, he commanded the first invasion of Portugal in 1807 before being defeated by Arthur Wellesley and returned to France in 1808. Soon a major general he returned to Spain under Massena before being recalled to Russia. Unfortunately both mental and physical deterioration had set in and soldiers remarked on his dishevelled appearance. Nevertheless, he would at least do what he was told, unlike Jerome.
Knowing from his light cavalry scouts, (those who were mounted on horses that were still fit), that the Russians intended to defend Smolensk, Napoleon saw it as, at last, an opportunity to finish the Russian army once and for all. Had he bestirred himself he might even have managed to do it, but much of the old magic had gone, and Napoleon, once known for his lighting decision-making ability, was uncharacteristically lethargic, and on 15 August, instead of surrounding Smolensk which could have been achieved, he held a massive parade for the army to celebrate his birthday. Despite starting the campaign with the largest army ever seen in Europe at that time, there were only 190,000 men available for combat, and of those only around 50,000 would be used in the coming battle, the others being deployed, as they thought, to cut off the Russian retreat and to defend against any Russian attack out of Smolensk. The reduction in available manpower was not only due to battle casualties and sickness, but by the need to garrison towns and villages captured on the way, to provide guards and escorts for supply dumps, and to defend the lines of communication back to French territory. Even so, that should have been more than sufficient to take on Barclay de Tolly’s army of 30,000 or so.
The battle began on 16 August with the capture of the outlying suburbs. Smolensk was a walled city with the River Dnieper flowing through its centre, but Napoleon expected the Russians to fight outside it, to preserve the city and especially its cathedral which held one of the Russian Orthodox church’s most holy icons, that of the Black Virgin of Smolensk. Barclay de Tolly thought otherwise and garrisoned the city itself, with only delaying forces in the suburbs. The French had no siege equipment and no scaling ladders, so the next phase began with a French artillery bombardment by eighty guns, including howitzers that could lob shells over the walls. This soon caused raging fires in the mainly wooden buildings. Around eighty percent of the town was completely destroyed along with extensive civilian casualties. Napoleon concentrated his main effort on breaching the walls, but also sent General Junot on a wide flanking march to cut off the Russian withdrawal route. Barclay de Tolly, realising that he was in danger of being encircled, ordered a retreat. All stores that could not be moved were burned and with a small covering force left behind, the Russians withdrew over the Dnieper bridges, demolishing them behind them. Eventually on August 17 Napoleon’s Polish troops managed to breach the walls and the French were in, to find their enemy gone. While exact numbers are disputed, the best guess is that each side took around 20,000 casualties, killed and wounded, but while it was technically a French victory in that they did take the city, the Russians could replace their casualties, whereas the French could not.
While Barclay de Tolly had little option but to withdraw, and militarily it was undoubtedly the correct decision, the fact that he had not acted more aggressively added impetus to the ‘Russian’ faction that objected to a foreign commander-in-chief and alleged that with his French name and foreign religion (he was a Roman Catholic) Barclay de Tolly must be in sympathy with Napoleon. In fact Barclay de Tolly was third generation Russian, all of whom had served faithfully in the Russian army. His family was Scottish before that, descendants of one of the Norman barons sent by King Henry I of England to assist King Malcolm Canmore of Scotland and then settling there in the 1100s. As so often happens perception had more force than the facts and the tsar found himself having to replace Barclay de Tolly as commander-in-chief, while still retaining him as commander of the First Army. The new commander-in-chief was Kutuzov, brought out of retirement, but sensible enough to continue Barclay de Tolly’s policy of delay, scorched earth and withdrawal.
It has been suggested that at this point Napoleon could have decided that he had achieved enough for the year and have gone into quarters in Smolensk (although many of the buildings had been burned, there were still sufficient left to house his army). That could have allowed him to stock up with enough supplies to overcome the shortages so far, to continue the advance in the following spring. That could, however, have been dangerous. Dictators of a disputed dynasty cannot afford to be away from their capital for too long, and in any case such an action would have meant loss of reputation and would have given the Russians time to prepare and to replenish. The French army carried on eastwards, to find the way to Moscow barred by the Russians, only eighty miles from the city at a place called Borodino. There Kutuzov, under pressure from the tsar, decided to fight a battle over ground which, while not ideal, did favour the defence. The holy icons were paraded around the troops and they were asked to rise to new heights of resistance to preserve Mother Russia.