Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace

by Alan Palmer

  Shishkov was prepared to place responsibility for the loss of Vilna on Barclay as commander of the First Army. Others, less closely associated with the Tsar, did not hesitate to blame Alexander himself; for it was he, they argued, who had always wished to resist Napoleon from the entrenchments of Drissa.39 Already, in the first week of the campaign, his prestige was falling with the reverses of his troops, just as his sister had warned him in her letters. An Emperor of All the Russias was not expected to put himself at the head of regiments in retreat. If he could not lead them to victory, his place was in the capital not in the field. But it was anyone’s guess how Alexander was to be convinced of this.

  From Vilna to Drissa

  Napoleon entered Vilna on the afternoon of Sunday, 28 June, during a heavy thunderstorm. He knew an emissary from the Tsar had arrived at Davout’s headquarters on Friday morning and Alexander’s letter was forwarded to him even before he left Kovno. But he had no desire to see Balashov until he was certain of his hold on Vilna and he therefore asked Davout to keep the Russian at his headquarters until the city was firmly in French hands. In fact, it was only on the following Wednesday evening that Napoleon consented to receive Balashov, the meeting taking place in the same room from which Alexander had sent his emissary to find the French five days previously.40 Napoleon was worried, partly because of the strain the weather was imposing on his troops and also because the Poles and Lithuanians had not welcomed their liberation so warmly as he had anticipated. He could not hide from Balashov how ill at ease he felt, and much of his conversation consisted of alternate cheap jibes and boasting at Alexander’s expense. This nervous uncertainty is reflected in the letter which he handed Balashov to take back to the Tsar. At great length Napoleon tried to justify his policy, roundly blaming Russia for ending the Tilsit alliance and charging Alexander personally with ‘a lack of perseverance, trustfulness and (if I may say so) sincerity’. Yet in the final paragraph, Napoleon abruptly changed his tone. He was convinced the Russians planned only to offer token resistance and he therefore wished to give Alexander every opportunity to make peace swifty, as after Friedland. Why, asked Napoleon, should not the two Emperors ‘maintain direct communication’ with each other during the campaign so that they would be able to exchange prisoners and decide in due course on a means of ending the conflict? Alexander should not regard the invasion of his empire as evidence of Napoleon’s personal hostility. ‘My private feelings towards you remain unaffected by these events’, Napoleon wrote, ‘and, should fortune again favour my arms, you will find me, as at Tilsit and Erfurt, full of friendship and esteem for your good and great qualities, and anxious only to prove it.’41

  No other document shows quite so clearly Napoleon’s total failure to understand either Alexander’s character or the true nature of Tsardom. There could never be a second Tilsit so long as Alexander lived. Any sign of weakness now would imperil his throne, as he knew well enough. Moreover, he was not prepared to mock the pledges he had made when the invasion began by entering into any communications with the enemy. Caulaincourt, who was with Napoleon at Vilna, warned him not to minimize Alexander’s tenacity of purpose, but his advice was wasted.42 Napoleon, having twice met Alexander, believed he could read his mind better than the ex-ambassador. It was only when the summer weeks began to succeed each other with no sign of the Russians offering a decisive battle or a gesture of peace that Napoleon wondered if he had miscalculated the temper of his opponent; and even then he assumed it would never stand up to the loss of Moscow.

  Certainly in this first fortnight of July Alexander was not an impressive national leader. No one was quite clear from one day to the next where the Tsar or his army commanders were establishing their headquarters. Between his departure from Vilna early on 26 June and his arrival at Drissa twelve days later Alexander was in no position to govern his empire effectively or to exercise decisive control over movements of the army he was nominally leading. He fell back on the river Dvina, halting briefly at the recognized staging posts – Svencionys, Vidzy and Zamosne. It was simple enough for him to send couriers with orders to Saltykov in St Petersburg or to Bagration’s Second Army in Byelo-Russia, but he could not receive reports or despatches until he actually reached Drissa.43 Fortunately the thunderstorms which slowed down Alexander’s own movements hampered the French cavalry even more, for had Napoleon been able to exploit his capture of Vilna the relative isolation of the Tsar would have proved a considerable embarrassment. Russia was too vast and cumbersome to be ruled by a peripatetic prince any longer.

  Alexander was geographically close enough both to Barclay and to the garrison commanders of Riga and Mitau to follow what was happening in the northern battle zone. But he could make no sense of the reports he found in Drissa from Bagration. Both the Tsar and his minister (Barclay) had assumed Bagration would fall back through Minsk and eventually establish contact with the First Army south of Drissa and west of Vitebsk. Bagration’s reports indicated that he was proposing to march not north-eastwards but south-eastwards, through Bobruisk rather than Minsk. Alexander was angry at this apparent change in plan and sent a courier off to Bagration with a letter of stern rebuke as soon as he arrived at Drissa.44 In reality, Bagration was striving desperately to avoid being cut off by Davout’s corps (which entered Minsk on the very day the Tsar was dictating his letter of censure). Naturally, Bagration in his turn was incensed at the tone of Alexander’s message. He assumed the reprimand had originated with Barclay de Tolly, whose position as minister he coveted and whom he had long ago come to regard as a personal enemy. In fact, Barclay did not arrive at Drissa until two days later. If anyone other than the Tsar himself inspired the letter, it would have been Arakcheev, whom Alexander had appointed ‘Secretary to the Emperor for Military Affairs’ on the eve of the invasion;45 but Bagration had come to regard Arakcheev as a personal friend, and it was against the minister that his wrath was turned. ‘I am not to blame for anything’, Bagration wrote in a private note to Arakcheev. ‘First they stretch me like a bow-string while the enemy breaks into our lines without firing a shot. Then we begin to retreat – nobody knows why … I cannot by myself defend the whole of Russia. The First Army should advance on Vilna at once without fail. What is there to fear? … I implore you to advance … It ill suits Russians to run … One feels ashamed.’46

  The feud between Bagration and Barclay was only one of the conflicting currents of ill-feeling at headquarters. Since Bagration was still more than a hundred and sixty miles away, it was by no means the most serious cause of tension. Alexander was well-satisfied with Drissa and with the general course of events, apart from his disgust with the unfortunate Bagration. Four days after reaching Drissa, the Tsar sent an almost complacent letter to Admiral Chichagov, who had taken over command of the army in Moldavia from Kutuzov: ‘We are now on 30 June’ (12 July), Alexander wrote, ‘and the enemy here has neither forced us to give a general battle nor cut off from us a single detachment of troops.’47 But nobody else at Drissa shared the Tsar’s confidence and contentment. Barclay was alarmed at the inadequate defences thrown up around the small town and all his old suspicion of General Pfuehl rapidly came to the surface. On one side of the entrenched camp there were, as yet, no fortifications whatsoever. To remain in Drissa was to risk encirclement and annihilation, Barclay argued; and although almost every other senior officer was involved in petty intrigues against the minister, for once they all agreed with him over this one question. By the middle of the month Alexander, too, had decided against Pfuehl and his whole plan.48

  Rather surprisingly, the Tsar remained in Drissa for more than a week. There are two reasons for his protracted stay, military and political: before abandoning a camp equidistant from the main routes to both St Petersburg and Moscow, it was essential to discover which city was the more likely objective for the Grand Army’s advance; and it was also desirable to complete outstanding business of government before once more setting out in the long caravan of command across the Russian
countryside. Political questions were multiplying. At Drissa Alexander could take stock of the final terms agreed with the Sultan for ending the Russo-Turkish war at the end of May, and he was also able to consider the possibility of transforming the old enmity between Russians and Turks into a new alliance against the French.49† Then, too, there was a wealth of correspondence on Anglo-Russian relations for, although there had been exchanges between the British and Russian ministers in Sweden, technically the two Empires remained at war until a formal treaty was signed on 18 July.50 Though still distrusting the British because of naval questions, Alexander needed to reach an understanding with London, if only to secure a subsidy. It was, in fact, from Drissa on 14 July that the Tsar wrote for the first time to the Prince Regent, expressing in his letter hopes for future co-operation and acknowledging the assistance of the British Minister in Constantinople (the young Stratford Canning) in negotiating peace with the Turks.51

  Meanwhile hurried military conferences were held to improvise a new defensive strategy.52 Barclay proposed to send an army corps under General Wittgenstein northwards to Pskov, where it would guard the road to St Petersburg while the remainder of the First Army would turn southeastwards down the river Dvina to Vitebsk. There it would be due north of the ‘Big One’, the highway which Catherine the Great had ordered to be constructed from Minsk through Smolensk to Moscow. The Tsar approved this plan, even though it meant that Barclay would have no more than 75,000 men to place in the path of the French if Napoleon made his main thrust towards Moscow (as now seemed certain). Fresh orders were sent to Bagration: he was to turn northwards and establish contact with Barclay at Vitebsk, where it was assumed the minister intended to give battle to Napoleon.

  Throughout 15 July preparations were in hand for resuming the retreat. But the Tsar’s personal entourage were seized by a particular worry, hardly new to them but made acute by the rejection of the Pfuehl plan, to which Alexander had so markedly given his patronage in past weeks. To those who best knew the Tsar, it was clear that his understanding of military problems was far more limited than he could ever accept. His presence in the field was an embarrassment and a burden for his army commanders, and it was all too easy for unscrupulous careerists to use him as a means for their own advancement, filling his mind with prejudices against Barclay and others in authority. On the other hand, in St Petersburg he could keep control of foreign affairs effectively in his hand while inspiring confidence in his subjects. Before leaving Drissa Admiral Shishkov had decided that, for the good of Russia, it was essential for Alexander to be persuaded back to his capital.53

  Shishkov voiced his fears to Balashov, who agreed with him, and to Arakcheev, who was at first more hesitant, suspecting yet another political intrigue from which he could not see what he was himself to gain. But Shishkov and Balashov convinced him of the need to get the Tsar away from headquarters. Shishkov drafted a letter which the three men signed. Arakcheev then left it among the Tsar’s papers of which, as personal Military Secretary, he was in charge. The letter was worded with tact: it explained how, since Alexander’s crown was assumed by right and not by usurpation (as Napoleon’s had been), the proper place for the sovereign of All the Russias was in the capital city of the Empire rather than in a military camp where he could concern himself with only one aspect of the struggle against the invader.54 It powerfully reinforced the pleas from Catherine Pavlovna to her brother, urging him not to take command in the field; and, according to General von Loewenstern (one of the émigré Prussians in the Tsar’s service), the letter coincided with Alexander’s own belief that if he left headquarters, his departure would rally the ambitious officers around the commander-in-chief and thereby lessen the political intrigue so damaging to any army in the field.55 But there is no evidence that Alexander had made up his mind to return to the capital before setting out from Drissa.

  The First Army began to stream southwards from Drissa early on the morning of 16 July. Alexander rode in an open carriage, with an escort of the Semeonovsky Guards.56 The roads were bad, the heat stifling and the whole Oriental caravan of pack-horses, droskys, britzas, powder-waggons, carts and cannon clogged the route between the forests, forcing marching regiments to wait for hours by the roadside as the paraphernalia of war trundled by. The Tsar’s carriage was, of course, given priority and the halted foot-sloggers caught a sight of their sovereign and cheered as the racing wheels cut their way through the dusty tracks. By late afternoon Alexander’s carriage had covered forty miles and reached Polotsk, still sixty miles short of Vitebsk.

  When Alexander arrived in Polotsk he seemed at first inscrutably silent. Shortly after he stepped from his carriage he turned to Arakcheev and remarked brusquely, ‘I have read your paper’.57 If he looked pensive, it is hardly surprising. What ought he to do? Should he continue the journey to Vitebsk or was his presence with the army an embarrassment and a liability? He had always wished to serve at the head of his troops like his patron saint, Alexander Nevsky, and the Hellenistic conqueror whose name he proudly bore. Twice already he had set out for war only to return frustrated to his capital, burdened by the memory of Austerlitz and by the promise of a Peace which he found his subjects despised. If he did as Shishkov, Balashov and Arakcheev now proposed, there was a risk he would be blamed for deserting his troops. To a man of his sensitivities it needed more courage to accept the duty of turning his horses towards Moscow or Petersburg than to stay with the army in the field. But it was unlikely his critics would understand this inner conflict of loyalty.

  That evening he had a horse saddled and rode out to Barclay’s headquarters a couple of miles away. General Loewenstern describes the scene: ‘He [Alexander] found him about to dine in a stable, for such was Barclay’s modest and unconcerned manner that the external trappings of a lodging mattered nothing to him provided only it was near the army and its camp. After an hour’s visit, the Tsar left Barclay, embraced him tenderly … shook his hand warmly and said, “Goodbye, General, goodbye once more, au revoir. I commend my army to your keeping. Always remember it is the only one I have.’”58

  Back in Polotsk, Shishkov heard from Alexander’s chamberlain that orders had been given to make the Tsar’s carriages ready for a journey to Moscow. ‘My joy was indescribable’, Shishkov said later, ‘and the warmest prayer poured from my lips to the Bestower of all blessings, the Heavenly Creator.’59 Next morning Alexander, with all his retinue of foreign military experts and his personal staff, left Polotsk and headed towards the upper Dnieper and the long road to the old capital. Five months were to elapse before Alexander again took command of his army in the field: in retrospect, it was to seem far longer.

  * In normal times of peace Vilna had a population officially reckoned at 56,300 people but this figure was considerably swollen in the spring of 1812 because of the concentration of armies along the frontier. St Petersburg had 335,600 inhabitants in 1811 and Moscow 270,200. The only European capitals with more inhabitants than St Petersburg were London (1,009,546 according to the 1811 Census) and Paris (slightly over half a million).

  Despite the regularity and delicacy of his features and the bright freshness of his complexion, his physical beauty was at first sight less impressive than the air of kind benevolence which won all hearts and instantly inspired confidence. His tall, noble and majestic figure, often stooping graciously like the pose of an ancient statue, was already threatening to become stout, but he was perfectly formed. His eyes, alert and expressive, were blue and he was a little short-sighted. His nose was straight and well shaped with a small agreeable mouth. The rounded contours of his face resembled those of his august mother, as also did his profile. His forehead was slightly bald, giving to his whole countenance an open and serene expression, and his hair – which was a golden blond in colour – was carefully groomed as on the heads of classical cameos or medallions so that it seemed made to receive a triple crown of laurel, myrtle or olive.6

  † The Treaty of Bucharest of 28 May 1812 was in many respec
ts disappointing for the Russians after their military successes on the lower Danube in 1809 and 1811. It ceded Bessarabia to the Tsar but left the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia under Turkish control (although with limited autonomy). There was never much likelihood of the Turks assisting the Russians against the French in Dalmatia and the nebulous Balkan schemes of Alexander and Chichagov were shelved before the end of July. But peace with Turkey freed an army of 60,000 men for operations against Napoleon that autumn.

  14

  The Razor-Edge of Fate

  Alexander in Moscow (July 1812)

  The abandonment of Vilna to Napoleon and the loss of Minsk to Davout led to a rapid fall in morale both at St Petersburg and Moscow. To many people it seemed ominous that, four weeks after the invasion, no bulletin had brought news of a major battle. Inevitably the self-important were busy disseminating defeatist talk in the salons of the capital: ‘Rumours of disasters both to Prince Bagration’s army and to the Emperor himself are circulating in whispers, but without any mention of particulars’, John Quincy Adams noted in his journal on 22 July.1 In Moscow Governor-General Rostopchin was not prepared to tolerate such sophisticated waywardness of temperament. He plastered the walls of the city with optimistic broadsheets and crude caricatures of Napoleon in an effort to harden the faint hearts around him, while he also threatened with exile to Siberia those whose patriotic faith remained unfashionably lukewarm. Even so there was at first widespread alarm when, on the morning of Thursday 23 July, the Muscovites learnt that the Tsar and an impressive array of dignitaries had arrived at Perhouskaya, a mere twenty miles to the east. If Alexander had left the army, it was felt he must either have been defeated already or have perceived he was facing so great a disaster that he wished to escape before the final blow fell. It needed all Rostopchin’s gifts of showmanship to calm the people of the old capital and convince them that, in this crisis hour for Russia, their sovereign turned naturally to Holy Moscow for strength and inspiration.2