The Russian conscript was already regarded as ‘the finest soldier in the world’, wrote Langeron. ‘He combines all the qualities which go to make a good soldier and hero. He is as abstemious as the Spaniard, as enduring as a Bohemian, as full of national pride as an Englishman and as susceptible to impulse and inspiration as French, Walloons, or Hungarians.’6 Frederick the Great was impressed and terrified by Russian courage and endurance during the Seven Years War and coined a word to describe their maniacal ursine savagery – ‘les oursomanes’.7 Potemkin served in the cavalry, which had earned its own reputation for bloody bravery, especially since it fought beside Russia’s ferocious irregular light cavalry, the Cossacks.
The Russian army was unique in Europe because, until the American and French Revolutions, armies drilled and fought for kings but not for ideas or nations. Most armies were made up of many nationalities – mercenaries, unwilling recruits and riffraff – who served a flag, not a country. But the Russian army was filled with Russian peasants who were recruited in mass levées from the roughly seven million souls available. This was seen as the reason for their almost mindless bravery.8
The officers, either Russian landowners addicted to gambling and debauch, or German, or later, French soldiers of fortune, were notoriously cruel: General Mikhail Kamensky, an extreme example, actually bit his soldiers. But they were also extraordinarily brave.9 The characteristics of their peasant chair du cannon – brutality, discipline, self-sufficiency, endurance, patriotism and stoicism in the face of appalling suffering – made the Russian army a formidable fighting force. ‘The Turks are tumbling like ninepins,’ went the Russian saying; ‘but, through the grace of God, our men stand firm, though headless.’10
Some contemporaries believed that war in the eighteenth century was become less bloody. Certainly, the dynasties of Europe, Habsburgs and Bourbons, at least pretended to fight according to the rules of aristocratic etiquette. But, for the Russians, wars against the Turks were different. After the centuries in which the Moslem Tartars, and then Turks, had threatened Orthodox Russia, the Russian peasant regarded this as a crusade. Havoc – the medieval giving of no quarter – was the order of battle.
* * *
—
Potemkin had only just arrived in Bar when the phoney war, giving both the unprepared Turks and Russians time to amass their forces, ended abruptly. On 16 June 1769, some 12,000 Tartar horsemen, under the command of the Crimean Khan, the Sultan’s ally, who were raiding the Russian Ukraine, crossed the Dniester and attacked Potemkin’s camp. Even then, the Tartars, armed with lassos and bows and arrows, were a vision from another age but they were the only Turkish forces ready for war. The Tartar Khan, Kirim Giray, a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, was an aggressive and fearless cavalry commander. He was accompanied by Baron de Tott, a French officer seconded to Istanbul to improve the Turkish forces. He has left his account of this medieval expedition – the last of its kind. Five hundred years after Genghis Khan, the Crimean Tartars, the descendants of those Mongol hordes, were still Europe’s finest horsemen. As they swept out of the Crimea through the Ukraine and towards the Russian troops still stationed in southern Poland, they must have looked and sounded as terrifying as their Mongol ancestors. Yet, like most of the irregular cavalry, they were undisciplined and usually too distracted by booty to be much strategic use. But the raid bought the Turks time to build up their armies, which were said to be 600,000 strong.
In his first battle, Potemkin engaged these wild Tartar and Turkish horsemen and repulsed them. He acquitted himself well, for ‘Chamberlain Potemkin’ appears in the list of those who distinguished themselves. This was the beginning of Potemkin’s run of success. On 19 June, he fought again in the Battle of Kamenets and took part in further skirmishing, helping General Golitsyn take Kamenets.11 In St Petersburg Catherine celebrated these minor engagements with a ‘Te Deum’ on Sunday, 19 July, but the vacillating Golitsyn faltered before Khotin. Furious and impatient, in August the Empress recalled him. There are hints that Potemkin, via the Orlovs, played some part in the intrigue that dispensed with Golitsyn.12 But, if he was laughably slow, Golitsyn was at least lucky. He was opposed by a Grand Vizier, Mehmed Emin, who was happier reading Islamic poetry than slicing off heads. So Catherine was embarrassed when, before her orders had arrived at the front, Golitsyn pulled himself together and crossed the Dniester.
Major-General Potemkin and his cavalry was now in action virtually every day: he distinguished himself again on 30 June and repulsed Turkish attacks on 2 and 6 July. When Golitsyn finally recrossed the Dniester, Potemkin served at the taking of Khotin. He fought heroically with his cavalry on 14 August at the Battle of Prashkovsky and then helped defeat the Moldavanzi-Pasha on the 29th. ‘I am immediately recommending the courage and skill shown in battle by Major-General Potemkin,’ wrote Golitsyn, ‘because until that time our cavalry has never acted with such discipline and courage as it did under the command of the Major-General.’13 Potemkin was becoming a war hero.
This praise must have been welcome to Catherine back in the capital. It was far from welcome at the Sublime Porte, where Sultan Mustafa III recalled his Grand Vizier: Emin-Pasha may have lost his mind at the front but, in Ottoman tradition, he lost his head as soon as he got home. These victories were too late for Golitsyn, however, who was consoled with a field-marshal’s baton. The Foreign Minister’s brother, General Peter Ivanovich Panin, assumed command of the Bender army, so that, in September, the First Army was taken over by Peter Rumiantsev. Thus began the command of one of the most glorious generals in the history of Russia, who became Potemkin’s patron – and then his rival.
* * *
—
The new commander could not have been more different from the twenty-nine-year-old Major-General on his staff. Yet Potemkin respected him immensely. Aged forty-three, Rumiantsev was a tall, thin, fastidious soldier with a biting dry wit – and he was Countess Bruce’s brother. Like his hero Frederick the Great, he ‘loved and respected no one in the world’, but was ‘the most brilliant of all Russian generals, endowed with outstanding gifts’.14 Again like his hero, Rumiantsev was a severe disciplinarian yet a wonderful conversationalist. ‘I’ve passed days with him tête-à-tête,’ enthused Langeron, ‘and never felt a moment’s boredom.’15 He amassed a fortune and lived in ‘ancient feudal magnificence’, always displaying the most refined manners of a seigneur. This is unsurprising since he was a living specimen of Petrine history: he was probably Peter the Great’s natural son.*1
The general had learned his craft fighting Prussia in the Seven Years War, during which even Frederick admired his skill. Catherine appreciated his talent but never quite trusted him and appointed him President of the Little Russian College, a position worthy of his status, but safely distant from Court. He remained unimpressed by Catherine, liked the Russian army’s Prussianized uniforms and wigs, believed in Prussian military discipline – and worked to improve on the Prussian tactics of the Seven Years War. He tended to prefer Germans to Russians.16
Rumiantsev was a father to his soldiers but a general to his sons. When one visited him after finishing his studies, he asked, ‘Who are you?’, ‘Your son, replied the boy. ‘Yes, how pleasant. You have grown,’ snapped the general. The son asked if he could find a position there and if he could stay. ‘Certainly,’ said his father, ‘you must surely know some officer or other in the camp who can help you out.’17
Potemkin was always keen to have things both ways – access to the commander and the chance to find glory in the field; chamberlain at Court, general at the front. He wrote to Rumiantsev about ‘the two things on which my service is founded…devotion to my Sovereign and desire for approval from my highly respected commander’.18 Rumiantsev appreciated his intelligence but also must have known of his acquaintance with the Empress. His demands were granted. As the war entered its second year, Catherine was frustrated by the slowness of Russian success. War in the ei
ghteenth century was seasonal: in the Russian winter, armies hibernated like hedgehogs. Battle with the main Ottoman armies – and the fall of Bender – had to wait for the spring.
* * *
—
As soon as it was possible, Rumiantsev reassembled his army in several manoeuvrable corps and advanced down the Dniester. Even in freezing January, Potemkin, now sent by Rumiantsev to serve with the corps of General Schtofel’n, was involved in skirmishes, driving off the attacks of Abdul-Pasha. On 4 February, Potemkin helped capture Jurja in a series of daring cavalry raids, defeating 12,000 enemy troops, capturing two cannons and a handful of banners. It was still bitterly cold but he ‘did not spare himself’.19 At the end of the month, when Rumiantsev’s report was read out at the Council before the Empress, he mentioned ‘the fervent feats of Major-General Potemkin’, who ‘asked me to send him to the corps of Lieutenant-General von Schtofel’n where, as soon as was possible, he distinguished himself both by his courage and by martial skill.’20 The commander recommended Potemkin should be decorated and he received his first medal, the Order of St Anna.
As the Russians marched south after the Turkish army, Potemkin, according to Rumiantsev’s later report, ‘protected the left bank with the troops entrusted to him and repulsed the enemy attacks against him’. On 17 June, the main army forded the Pruth to attack the 22,000 Turks and 50,000 Tartars encamped on the other bank. Meanwhile Major-General Potemkin and the reserves crossed the river three miles downstream and ambushed the Turkish rear. The camp disintegrated; the Turks fled.21
Just three days later, Rumiantsev advanced towards a Turkish army of 80,000, comfortably encamped where the River Larga joined the Pruth, while they awaited the arrival of the Grand Vizier and his main army.22
* * *
—
Forming up into their squares, on 7 July 1770, Rumiantsev, Potemkin and the Russians stormed the Turkish camp, braced for the wild Turkish charges. This was Potemkin’s first glimpse of an Ottoman army. It was an immense and impressive, noisy vision of silken tents and rickety carts, green banners and swishing horsetails (those Ottoman symbols of power) – sprawling, messy, alive with women and camp-followers and exotic uniforms, as much like a bazaar as an army. The Ottoman Empire was not yet the giant and flabby weakling it was to become in the next century. It was still capable of raising huge forces from its distant pashaliks, from the plains of Mesopotamia and the hills of Anatolia to the Barbary ports and the Balkans: all sent their cannon-fodder when the Sultan raised the banner of the Prophet.
‘The Turks, who pass for blockheads in the art of war, carry it out with a kind of method,’ explained the Prince de Ligne later. The method was to amass teeming armies roughly in a pyramidal formation and then throw them upon the Russians forces in waves of charging cavalry and whooping infantry. Their Janissaries had once formed the most feared infantry in Europe. They were gradually degenerating into a rich and arrogant Praetorian Guard more interested in their trading posts and palace coups than fighting, but they were still proud of their prowess and Islamic fervour: they wore bonnets of red and gold with white shirts, billowing pantaloons and yellow boots and bore scimitars, javelins, muskets.
The best of the Ottoman cavalry were the Tartars and the Spahis, the feudal Turkish horsemen, who leaped on and off their horses to fire their muskets. They wore breastplates embedded with jewels or just bright waistcoats with pantaloons, often leaving their arms bare while bearing curved and engraved sabres, daggers, lances and gem-encrusted pistols. They were so indisciplined that they fought only when they were ready and often mutinied: it was quite common for Janissaries to steal horses and gallop off the battlefield, strike their officers or sell the army’s food for private profit. The mass of the Ottoman armies were unpaid irregulars recruited by Anatolian feudal lords, who were expected to live by plunder. Despite the efforts of French advisers like Baron de Tott, their artillery was way behind that of the Russians and their muskets were outdated. If their marksmanship was admirable, their firing rate was slow.
They wasted much energy in obsolete display. When all was ready, this martial rabble of hundreds of thousands worked themselves up into a fever of religious outrage fuelled with drops of opium.23 ‘They advance’, Potemkin later reminisced to the Comte de Ségur, ‘like an overflowing torrent.’ He claimed their pyramidal formation was arranged in order of decreasing courage – the ‘bravest warriors, intoxicated with opium’, headed its apex while its base was formed of ‘nothing but’ cowards. The charge, recalled Ligne, was accompanied by ‘frightful howlings, the cries of Allah Allah’. It took a disciplined infantryman to hold his ground. Any captured Russian was instantly beheaded with a cry of ‘Neboisse!’ or ‘Be not afraid!’ – and the heads brandished on the end of pikes. Their religious fever ‘increased in proportion to the danger’.
The Russians solved the problem of the momentum of the Turkish charge by using the square, which could withstand any shrieking onslaught. The Turk was both the ‘most dangerous, and most contemptible, enemy in the world’, wrote Ligne later, ‘dangerous, if they are suffered to attack; contemptible, if we are beforehand with them’. The Spahis or Tartars, ‘humming around us like wasps’, could envelop the Russian squares, ‘curveting, leaping, caracoling, displaying their horsemanship and performing their riding-house croups’ until they exhausted themselves. Then Rumiantsev’s squares, drilled with Prussian precision, protected by their Cossacks and Hussars, and linked together by Jaegers, light, sharpshooting infantry, advanced. Once broken, the Turks either fled like rabbits or fought to the death. ‘Dreadful slaughter’, said Potemkin, was the usual result. ‘The instinct of the Turks renders them dextrous and capable of all kinds of warlike employments…but they never go beyond the first idea, they are incapable of a second. When their moment of good sense…is over, they partake of the madman or the child.’24
* * *
—
This was what happened when Rumiantsev’s squares stormed the Turkish camp at the Battle of Larga, shrugging off the Turkish charges with stoical endurance and blasts of artillery. Seventy-two thousand Turks and Tartars were forced to evacuate their fortifications and flee. Potemkin, attached to Prince Nikolai Repnin’s corps, commanded the advance guard that attacked the camp of the Crimean Khan and was, according to Rumiantsev, ‘among the first to attack and capture its fortification’. Potemkin was again decorated, this time with the Order of St George, Third Class: he wrote to thank the Empress.25
The new Grand Vizier now advanced with the main Turkish army to prevent the union of the two Russian armies of Rumiantsev and Panin. He crossed the Danube and marched up the Pruth to meet the fleeing troops from the Battle of Larga. On 21 July 1770, only slightly to the south of Larga, Rumiantsev marched his 25,000 troops towards the 150,000 men of the Grand Vizier’s massed Turkish army, which had camped behind triple fortifications near Lake Kagul. Despite the numerical inequality, he decided to attack. Using the lessons and confidence provided by Larga, he formed five squares facing the main Turkish positions. Potemkin and his cavalry defended the army’s transport against ‘the attacks of numerous Tartar hordes and prevented them from…attacking the army’s rear’. As he gave Potemkin this duty, Rumiantsev is supposed to have told him: ‘Grigory Alexandrovich, bring us our provisions, balanced on the top of your sabre.’26
The Turks, who had learned nothing from Larga, were completely surprised, fought savagely for the whole day but were finally routed in scenes of desperate carnage, leaving 138 guns, 2,000 prisoners, and 20,000 dead on the field. Rumiantsev brilliantly exploited his victory by pushing down towards the lower Danube: on 26 July Potemkin helped Repnin take the fortress of Izmail, then that of Kilia on 10 August. General Panin stormed Bender on 16 September, and Rumiantsev finally closed his campaign with the taking of Brailov on 10 November.27 There was one more magnificent piece of news.
Catherine had sent the Russian Baltic Fleet, proud creation o
f Peter the Great, across the North Sea, through the English Channel and the Straits of Gibraltar all the way to hit the Turkish rear in the eastern Mediterranean. Its admiral was Count Alexei Orlov, who had never been to sea, but its real lights were two Scottish officers, John Elphinstone and Samuel Greig. Despite Peter the Great’s brave attempts to inspire sea-legs in Russian ploughmen, only the Livonians or Estonians took to the ocean. There were few Russian officers and most of them were lamentable. When Elphinstone grumbled, Catherine replied: ‘The ignorance of the Russians is due to youth; that of the Turks to decrepitude.’28 England helped the Russian expedition: London did not yet regard the Turk as a natural ally or the ‘Bear’ as a natural enemy. The ‘Eastern Question’ had not yet been asked. On the contrary, France was England’s enemy, Turkey a French ally. By the time the leaky Russian fleet reached England, 800 sailors were ill. These seasick Russian peasants must have been an incongruously pathetic sight as they re-rigged, watered and recovered in Hull and Portsmouth.
Catherine the Great & Potemkin Page 14
