by Alan Palmer
† A verst is 1060 metres, slightly more than five-eighths of a mile. Twelve versts were therefore approximately equivalent to 7½ miles.
‡ Catherine’s panic was unnecessary. Her letters were not among Bagration’s papers and she concluded he had indeed burnt them after her marriage.
15
Tsar With a Mission
Vilna Again (December 1812–January 1813)
Travelling rapidly across the snows by sledge or by troika Alexander reached Vilna before daybreak on 23 December. ‘It has cost me the end of my nose to come here’, he remarked ruefully after the bitterly cold journey, but it was obvious to everyone around that he was glad to be back at headquarters.1 He embraced Kutuzov, accepted from him the ceremonial surrender of captured flags and trophies, and bestowed on him the Star and Cross in diamonds of the Order of St George, highest of all Russia’s military honours. Together sovereign and soldier shed tears of gratitude and relief. In public there was no sign of tension or mistrust between them. Whatever Alexander might say privately to his friends and ministers, he did not wish to lower Kutuzov’s standing with the rank and file in the army. They needed a wise protector to idolize if they were to continue unflinchingly to wage the winter war.
Outwardly Alexander had changed little since he was last in the city. He still enjoyed taking tea with the ladies of the Polish nobility, even though almost all of them had fathers or brothers serving Napoleon. As in the summer he could on most days attend the principal parade in the city square, according his troops the traditional greeting, ‘How are you faring, my children?’ and receiving back a reply in unison, ‘We are well, Sire, and Your Majesty?’ So familiar was his pattern of life that it seemed natural to honour his birthday on 24 December by a ball in the Episcopal Palace, and Kutuzov duly instructed his aides to organize the festivities. Alexander himself did not wish to be the centre of personal celebrations at a time of national suffering. Yet he could not prevent the ball being held, and once there he seems to have had little difficulty in helping to make it a success. He danced again with the young Countess Tiesenhausen, whom he had last partnered at Zakret that memorable night six months before. ‘You will be surprised … to find me here at a ball’, he remarked to her apologetically. ‘But what could I do? I had to please that old fellow’; and he glanced towards Kutuzov, the nominal host for the evening. It was convenient, in small matters and great, to place the responsibility on shoulders long accustomed to changes of fortune. ‘The old fellow ought to be contented’, Alexander mused. ‘The cold weather has rendered him a splendid service.’2
Yet in reality deep differences of outlook separated the Tsar and his Marshal. Alexander returned to Vilna determined to resume the role of Europe’s liberator which he had sought to play prematurely seven years previously. He was now a Tsar with a sense of mission. Even Rumiantsev, appeaser though he was by nature, caught the new spirit: ‘Heaven has chosen you to accomplish its designs’, he wrote to his master from St Petersburg, ‘revealing already your destiny, that you shall save Europe.’3 But Kutuzov was cautious. He did not for one moment doubt continuation of the war would lead to the final downfall of Napoleon, but only if the Russians were strong in men and material. According to General Wilson, who was attached to Kutuzov’s headquarters throughout the pursuit of Napoleon, the army suffered 45,000 casualties in the final four weeks before entering Vilna, and modern Soviet historians reckoned that only a third of Kutuzov’s men were fit for active military service at the close of the year.4 Kutuzov therefore wished to wait until the thousands of recruits marshalling in Russia had reached headquarters. He was not opposed to Alexander’s mission, although he was naturally less interested in the general affairs of Europe than the non-Russians who had entered the Tsar’s service; but he was convinced the army should not cross the frontier into Prussia in the depth of winter.
Alexander, however, had no intention of listening to Kutuzov. He was encouraged by the Prussian exile Stein who had already written urging him ‘to deliver the human race from the most absurd and degrading of tyrannies’, and he genuinely believed the Russians should strike while the enemy was still in confusion.5 There was good sense in this argument, for the Cossacks and the militia units were better able to give battle under winter conditions than in the spring, when climate and terrain would favour troops from western and southern Europe. The Germans at Alexander’s headquarters, both soldiers and civilians, argued that their compatriots were eager to change sides and turn against the French provided they could count on adequate Russian protection from counter-measures. Moreover, although Kutuzov was exhausted and anxious to rest both himself and his troops, Wittgenstein was still pursuing the enemy columns along the banks of the lower Niemen and had every intention of crossing into Prussia as soon as possible. Alexander warmly approved of Wittgenstein’s initiative, as indeed he had done throughout the campaign: here at least was a General after his own heart. ‘Thank Heavens everything here is going well’, Alexander wrote to Saltykov once he had assessed the situation at Vilna. ‘It is proving a little difficult to dispose of the Prince Marshal, but it is absolutely essential to do so.’6
Events played admirably into Alexander’s hands. On 30 December General Hans von Yorck, commanding the Prussian contingent in what remained of the Grand Army, concluded a military convention at Tauroggen (Taurage) with the Russian General Diebitsch, a corps commander serving under Wittgenstein.7 The actual terms of the convention were limited and precise: the Prussians would police the salient of territory around the mouth of the Niemen, southwards from Memel, and would offer no opposition to the Russian army; but the significance of this pledge of neutrality influenced events over a far larger area, for it made it virtually impossible for the French to retain any hold on East Prussia and they rapidly evacuated the city of Königsberg, though preparing to withstand a siege in Danzig rather than surrender so vital a port.
Alexander learnt of the Tauroggen Convention when one of Wittgenstein’s aides arrived in Vilna on 4 January.8 Immediately the Tsar decided to exploit the signs of weakness in the French hold on Germany. He sent the ardent Prussian patriot General von Boyen on a secret mission to King Frederick William with the offer of an offensive and defensive alliance, and he also encouraged Stein to issue an appeal to the King which urged him to break with Napoleon and call on his subjects to liberate themselves in partnership with the advancing Russians. Finally on 9 January Alexander left Vilna and prepared to carry the war into Europe. He established temporary headquarters down the Niemen at Meritz and it was from there that, three days later, he ordered his army westwards across the Niemen and into Prussia. By the Russian calendar it was the first day of the New Year, 1813; and a proclamation from Kutuzov called on Alexander’s troops ‘to liberate from oppression and misery even those nations who have taken up arms against Russia’.9
The Liberation of Prussia
For eleven weeks fortune favoured Alexander’s cause. The French hurriedly retired westwards to shorten their lines. By the beginning of February Wittgenstein, in the north, was approaching the Oder while Alexander’s headquarters were on the river Wrkra. Eugène Beauharnais, left in command by Napoleon, found it impossible to hold Poznan and by the second week in February was desperately trying to establish lines around Frankfurt-on-Oder, having retreated three hundred miles in a mere thirty days. But still the Russian advance went on: Wittgenstein sent off three small free corps to raid across Pomerania and into Mecklenburg, one of which startled all Europe by occupying Hamburg on 18 March. Meanwhile Eugène was forced to withdraw even from Berlin and fell back on Magdeburg and the central line of the Elbe. Politically this apparent collapse of the Napoleonic hold on central and eastern Germany led to a rapid strengthening of the Allies: the Prussians and the Swedes entered the war against France; and the Austrians (who had participated in the 1812 Campaign with as little enthusiasm as the Prussians) ordered their troops back to Galicia and concluded an armistice with the local Russian commanders. It seemed l
ikely that the Austrians too would join the Allies, if, that is, Metternich could not induce the rival belligerents to accept an offer of mediation.10
Alexander went forward with his army in a state bordering on religious ecstasy. More and more he turned to the eleventh chapter of the Book of Daniel with the apocalyptic vision of how the all-conquering King of the South is cast down by the King of the North. It seemed to him as if the prophecies, which had sustained him during the dark days of autumn and early winter, were now to be fulfilled: Easter this year would come with a new spiritual significance of hope for all Europe. ‘Placing myself firmly in the hands of God I submit blindly to His will’, he informed his friend Golitsyn from Radzonow, on the Wrkra. ‘My faith is sincere and warm with passion. Every day it grows firmer and I experience joys I had never known before … It is difficult to express in words the benefits I gain from reading the Scriptures, which previously I knew only superficially … All my glory I dedicate to the advancement of the reign of the Lord Jesus Christ.’11 Nor was this mysticism confined to his private correspondence. At Kalisch (Kalisz) on the borders of the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw and Prussia the Tsar concluded a convention with Frederick William: the agreement provided for a close military alliance between Russia and Prussia, stipulating the size of their respective contingents and promising Prussia territory as extensive as in 1806; but the final clauses went beyond the normal language of diplomacy to echo Alexander’s religious inspiration. ‘Let all Germany join us in our mission of liberation’, the Kalisch Treaty said. ‘The hour has come for obligations to be observed with that religious faith, that sacred inviolability which holds together the power and permanence of nations.’12 Alexander was impelled across Germany by a girded energy which was almost Calvinistic in its intensity.
Those in attendance on him found it hard to understand their sovereign’s extraordinary mood. Most of them were concerned with the simple task of translating vague aspirations into practical terms: Kutuzov, who possessed a peasant’s uncomplicated religious faith, prepared military directives with brevity and precision; while Nesselrode (who was, rather unexpectedly, a baptized member of the Church of England*) had no sympathy for Alexander’s pietism and only sought to prevent his sovereign’s obsession with mystical revelation from obscuring his immediate political objectives. There was, at times, a danger that Alexander’s confidence and enthusiasm would lead him to overreach himself, as Kutuzov foresaw. No one at Kalisch was able to restrain him once convinced he was obeying the will of the Almighty. When, in the second week of March, he travelled seventy miles westwards and joined Frederick William at Breslau (Wroclaw), Alexander’s religious obsession became even more intensive and his correspondence was filled with as many Hosannas as the antiphons of Palm Sunday.13 Frederick William and Alexander had not met since the death of Queen Louise and each was deeply affected, mourning her intensely while celebrating the triumphs of the new alliance against the old enemy.
Under normal conditions the one person who could have persuaded Alexander that the mantle of Elijah was cast uneasily on his shoulders was the Grand Duchess Catherine. But in these very months she was herself in a state of spiritual and physical collapse, which may in its turn have intensified her brother’s introspective mysticism. For the unfortunate George of Oldenburg, Catherine’s husband, had caught a fever at Tver shortly before leaving to take up the military command she had long badgered Alexander into giving him; and on 27 December he died. Catherine, a widow of twenty-four with two children, seemed at first overwhelmed with remorse, fearing that her ‘restless ambition’ had ‘lost her everything’: ‘He was perfect but God in his mercy found this was too much for mortal existence, and He was right’,14 she wrote to Alexander on the day the corps which George would have commanded crossed the Niemen into Poland. And Alexander, always psychologically attuned to his sister’s sweeps of emotion, felt deeply for her in these weeks of grief.
Fortunately, however, Catherine’s powers of resilience were considerable. By the middle of February she was consoling herself with the thought that she always looked her best in black. A month in St Petersburg renewed her zest for intrigues, and her letters to Alexander once more show a healthy appetite for alleged slights. The Tsar, troubled by the problems of controlling foreign affairs from an obscure corner of western Poland, may even have found his sister’s pleas vexatious; for on 7 March he replied to her from Kalisch with less than his customary sympathy. Patiently he informed his ‘dear sweet friend’ that he was not responsible for rulings over seniority at Court, the etiquette having been established by their father. He also took the opportunity to let her know why it was that in a previous note he had confessed to having ‘scarcely a moment’ in which to write his letters:
These last few days I have felt my head going round in circles under the burden of work that has fallen on me all at once: this alliance with the Prussians and the military rearrangements resulting from it; the arrival of General Scharnhorst and then the English ambassador; three couriers coming from Copenhagen, Stockholm and London; the arrival of the Austrian envoy, Lebzeltern, and the King of Prussia’s aide-de-camp, Wrangel; finally the capture of Berlin. All these events are taking place at the same time so that I am either tied to my desk or in conference with these gentlemen. At last here I am with pen between my fingers, writing to you; and so that you may tell what things are like, I can say that it is half an hour after midnight, and that one of these men has only just left my room after having kept me talking since eight o’clock.15
Alexander was by now looking ahead, somewhat indistinctly, to a new ordering of the European system as well as co-ordinating military plans with Scharnhorst and the leaders of the Prussian officer corps. It was difficult for Catherine to appreciate the change in her brother’s status and prestige over the past six months.
The Changing Fortunes of War (Spring 1813)
There was a grand ceremonial entry into liberated Berlin at the end of March and into Dresden on 23 April. Everywhere Alexander was greeted by cheers and by laurel wreaths, some of which he sent with suitably worded compliments to Kutuzov and his corps commanders. Nor, indeed, was all this adulation limited to the German lands. Public feeling in England and Scotland warmed to the Russians in the early months of 1813, manifesting itself both in the opening of charities for Russian relief and in less worthy enterprises, such as the publication of cheap coloured prints of ‘the brave Cossacks’ and the sale of an alleged ‘Cossack love song’. This enthusiasm naturally sought a hero, and in popular imagination Tsar Alexander became a romantic figure who had defied the odious Bonaparte and scourged him across Europe. It was left to the widely read versifier and parodist Horatio Smith – who had amended his original Christian name ‘Horace’ in the year of Trafalgar – to celebrate the triumphs of Russia in a suitable metre:
Rise children of Europe, march fearlessly forth,
The pole-star of Liberty beams from the North,
Be ‘Vengeance’ your cry, Alexander your trust,
And Tyranny’s sceptre shall crumble to dust.16
Such eloquence was heartening, at least to those who read English; but was it, perhaps, excessively optimistic? For to military experts it seemed unlikely that the Russians and their newly liberated allies on the continent would be allowed by the French to ‘march fearlessly’ much further. Napoleon was known to have given orders for the conscripts of 1813 to be summoned to the colours while he was still in Moscow; and in the second week of January he had called up conscripts for the following year as well.17 By the spring it was therefore reasonable to anticipate he could be concentrating in Germany an army half as large again in numbers as the forces of the Allies. Who, then, would be crying ‘Vengeance’?
Kutuzov foresaw this danger back in Vilna and continued to warn Alexander, even while the Russian advance seemed to be a cavalcade of victory. The crucial test came with the occupation of Berlin. Should the Allies cross the Elbe and march on Magdeburg or should they consolidate their positions and
await the expected Napoleonic counter-offensive in prepared defences? Wittgenstein was certain he could penetrate deeply into Westphalia to hamper the concentration of the new French armies but Kutuzov, still commander-in-chief, wished him to leave a small defensive force between Magdeburg and Berlin, while bringing the main body of his troops into Saxony, where it was expected that Napoleon would strike his blow. ‘We can cross the Elbe all right, but before long we shall cross it again with a bloody nose’, Kutuzov said bluntly.18 Wittgenstein, however, tried to combine both strategies. He crossed the Elbe successfully at Rosslau on 2 April and then swung southwards so as to link up with the Prussians under Blücher in Saxony, but the Russian casualties were heavy, and it was clear the enemy resistance was stiffening. By the third week in April both Wittgenstein and Blücher anticipated an attack by Napoleon personally in Saxony at any moment and were alarmed at their exposed position.
Alexander remained confident. He did not think Napoleon would attack until June and he doubted whether the new French levies would be capable of dislodging the Allies from the cities they had occupied earlier in the spring. So sure was Alexander of the general safety of the Allied positions that he welcomed the news that his sister Catherine was coming to Teplitz, at the start of May, to take the waters and he planned a family reunion there, with his elder sister Marie joining them from what he hoped would by then be liberated Weimar.19 But in the last week of April Alexander was faced by what was to him, at least, a series of unexpected crises. Kutuzov suffered a stroke and died on 28 April at Bunzlau, in Prussian Silesia: the Tsar appointed Wittgenstein to succeed him as commander-in-chief but found two senior Russian Generals, Tormassov and Miloradovich, resented the promotion of a man of German origin junior in years of service to themselves; and Alexander was thus forced to put both of their corps under his personal command, leaving Wittgenstein with a predominantly Prussian force and separated from the remaining Russian units by the totally Prussian army of Blücher.20 Such muddled dispositions invited confusion in command and ultimately disaster. It was at this point, on 30 April, that Napoleon took the initiative for the first time in six and a half months and sent the reconstituted Grand Army eastwards across the river Saale.
