Napoleon

by Andrew Roberts

  • • •

  By March 15 all the Grande Armée’s corps had reached the Elbe. That same day Napoleon ordered Louis Otto, the French ambassador in Vienna, to buy 2 million bottles of Hungarian wine at 10 sous each, to be delivered to Warsaw.81 To strengthen the invasion force, Belgian National Guard units replaced French troops in garrisons along the Atlantic coast, Princess Pauline Borghese’s bodyguard were called up, cannon were stripped from the navy and the hospitals scoured for malingerers. Reserve units were disbanded and reassembled to maximize the numbers that could go to Russia; the 10th Cohort of the Paris National Guard, for example, was soon almost entirely comprised of men with flat feet.82

  On April 8, a week after the Grande Armée had reached the Oder, Alexander issued an ultimatum ordering Napoleon immediately to evacuate his troops from Prussia, Swedish Pomerania and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and to reduce the Danzig garrison. This was to be a preliminary to a new settlement of the frontiers of Europe, under which Russia would be allowed to trade with neutrals but would negotiate compensation for Oldenburg and reduce Russian duties on French goods.83 These terms would clearly be unacceptable to Napoleon, and in any case sounded more like a propaganda bulletin than genuine bases for negotiation. On April 21 Alexander left St Petersburg for his army base at Vilnius. On the 17th Napoleon had made a peace offer to the British foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, saying that he would withdraw from the Iberian peninsula if the British did too, and that Sicily could stay Bourbon if Murat was recognized as king of Naples and Joseph as king of Spain. ‘If this fourth attempt should be unsuccessful,’ he concluded of his various peace offers since the breakdown of Amiens, ‘as those that have preceded it, France will at least have the consolation of thinking that the blood that could flow again will fall entirely on England.’84 It was cheekily opportunistic – especially the absurd provision regarding Joseph and Murat – and Castlereagh, as befitting a true disciple of Pitt, treated it with predictable contempt.

  On April 25 Napoleon sent his aide-de-camp General Comte Louis de Narbonne-Lara (who was probably the illegitimate son of Louis XV) with more realistic counter-proposals to the Tsar’s ultimatum that didn’t involve evacuations from allies’ territory. ‘These will prove to Your Majesty my desire to avoid war and my steadfastness in the sentiments of Tilsit and Erfurt,’ Napoleon wrote. ‘However, Your Majesty will allow me to assure you that, if fate makes war between us inevitable, it would not change the sentiments that Your Majesty has inspired in me and which are safe from any alteration and vicissitude.’85 Historians have tended to view cynically Napoleon’s repeated attempts to stay personally friendly with a head of state of a country he was about to ravage, yet it was part of his belief in the almost ethereal brotherhood of emperors that this should be possible. Their time at Tilsit together had clearly meant much more to him than it had to Alexander. Speaking to Pasquier in May before he left for the front, Napoleon described the coming campaign against Russia as ‘The greatest and most difficult enterprise I’ve ever attempted. But what has been begun must be carried through.’86

  • • •

  At 6 a.m. on Saturday, May 9, Napoleon left Saint-Cloud with Marie Louise and the baby King of Rome to make his way to the front. The day before he had imposed wheat taxes and swingeing food-price controls. ‘In this way he hoped to ensure that they would remain contented during his absence,’ Pasquier concluded, but it was only a short-term solution.87 As always he moved fast: the imperial family passed the Rhine on the 13th, the Elbe on the 29th and the Vistula on June 6, travelling 530 miles in seven days and averaging over 75 miles a day in a horse-drawn carriage over unmetalled, rutted roads. There was nonetheless time for meetings in Dresden with the kings of Württemberg, Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria, the first of whom had refused to send a contingent to Spain in 1810, but would against Russia; the last was still angry that Napoleon had never reimbursed him for the expenses of the war of 1805, but nonetheless sent a contingent too. Marie Louise saw her father there for the first time since her wedding; Napoleon saw him for the first time since they had met at the windmill near Austerlitz. Francis also met his grandson. The King of Rome was attended by his governess Madame de Montesquieu, whose official title, ‘Governess to the Imperial Children’, indicates that Napoleon and Marie Louise hoped for more. Indeed, Napoleon later said he would have liked another son for the Kingdom of Italy and a third to be safe.

  Metternich much later claimed that when they met in Dresden Napoleon had told him his Russian strategy. ‘Victory will go to the most patient,’ the Emperor supposedly said, according to Metternich’s unreliable and immensely self-serving memoirs. ‘I shall open the campaign by crossing the Niemen, and it will be concluded at Smolensk and Minsk. There I shall stop and fortify those two points. At Vilnius, where the main headquarters will spend next winter, I shall busy myself with organizing Lithuania . . . Perhaps I myself shall spend the most inclement months of the winter in Paris.’88 On being asked what would happen if Alexander didn’t sue for peace, Napoleon allegedly replied: ‘In that case I shall advance next year to the centre of the empire, and I shall be patient in 1813 as I have been in 1812!’ Whether Napoleon genuinely vouchsafed such secrets to a man he must have suspected didn’t want him to be victorious in Russia, and had excellent connections with the Russians, might be doubted.

  Leaving Marie Louise with her parents in Dresden when he left at dawn on May 29, Napoleon wrote later that morning that he would be back within two months. ‘All my promises to you shall be kept,’ he said, ‘thus our absence from each other will be but a short one.’89 It was to be nearly seven months before he saw her again. Going eastwards via Bautzen, Reichenbach, Hainau, Glogau, Posen, Thorn, Danzig and Königsberg, he reached the banks of the Niemen by June 23. He deliberately didn’t go to Warsaw, where, if he had proclaimed the Kingdom of Poland, he could have raised, one Russian general estimated, 200,000 men and turned the ethnically Polish provinces of Lithuania, Volhynia and Polodia against the Tsar.90 Instead he preferred not to antagonize his Prussian and Austrian allies.

  At 1 a.m. on the night of June 4, Colonel Maleszewski, one of Napoleon’s staff officers, heard the Emperor pacing up and down his room in Thorn, singing the verse from ‘Le Chant du Départ’ that includes the line ‘Tremblez, ennemis de la France.’91 On that day alone, Napoleon had written letters to Davout complaining of the marauding of Württemberger troops in Poland, to Clarke about raising a company of Elban sappers, to Marie Louise to say that he had been twelve hours in the saddle since 2 a.m., to Cambacérès that the frontier was quiet, to Eugène ordering 30,000 bushels of barley, and no fewer than twenty-four letters to Berthier about everything from a paymaster who should be punished for incompetence to a fever hospital that needed to be relocated.92 Preparing for the attack on Russia caused Napoleon to write nearly five hundred letters to Berthier between the beginning of January 1812 and the crossing of the Niemen, and another 631 to Davout, Clarke, Lacuée and Maret between them.

  On June 7 staying in Danzig with Rapp – to whom he was far more likely to speak about his strategic thinking than to Metternich – Napoleon said his plans were limited to crossing the Niemen, defeating Alexander and taking Russian Poland, which he would unite to the Grand Duchy, turn into a Polish kingdom, arm extensively and leave with 50,000 cavalry as a buffer state against Russia.93 Two days later he expanded further to Fain and others:

  While we finish with the north, I hope that Soult will maintain himself in Andalusia and that Marmont will contain Wellington on the Portuguese border. Europe will breathe only when these affairs with Russia and Spain are over. Only then can we reckon on a true peace; reviving Poland will consolidate it; Austria will take care of more of the Danube and less of Italy. Finally, exhausted England will resign herself to share the world’s trade with continental vessels. My son is young, you have to prepare him for a quiet reign.94

  These war aims – even for peace with Britain, against whom America
had declared war on June 1 – were limited and possibly even achievable, and certainly far from the lunatic hubris with which Napoleon is generally credited on the eve of his invasion of Russia. There was no word of marching to Moscow, for example (any more than there had been in his supposed heart-to-heart with Metternich). Against the French Empire’s 42.3 million inhabitants, and a further 40 million living in the ‘Grand Empire’ of satellite states, Russia’s population in 1812 was about 46 million.95 Napoleon had fought against the Russians twice before and had defeated them on both occasions. His army of over 600,000 men was over twice the size of the Russian army in the field at the time. On June 20 he specified only twelve days’ marching rations for the Imperial Guard, implying that he was hoping for a short campaign – certainly not one that would take him over 800 miles from the Niemen to Moscow.

  • • •

  On June 22 Napoleon issued his second bulletin of the campaign:

  Soldiers! The Second Polish War has commenced. The first ended at Friedland and Tilsit. At Tilsit, Russia swore an eternal alliance with France, and war with England. Today she violates her oaths . . . Does she believe us degenerate? Are we no longer the soldiers of Austerlitz? She places us between dishonour and war; the choice cannot be in doubt . . . Let us cross the Niemen! . . . The peace which we shall conclude shall put an end to the baneful influence which Russia has for fifty years exercised over the affairs of Europe.96

  Not since his hero Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC had the traversing of a river held a heavier portent than when Napoleon’s vast army started crossing the Niemen into Russia before dawn on Wednesday, June 24 1812. Since Lauriston had been sent away from Alexander’s headquarters without reply to Napoleon’s last-minute peace offer a few days before, there was no need for a formal declaration of war, any more than there had been at the outbreak of the War of Austrian Succession or the Seven Years War.

  While Napoleon was reconnoitring the river on the day of the crossing, his horse shied at a hare and threw him onto the sandy riverbank, leaving him with a bruised hip.97 ‘This is a bad omen, a Roman would recoil!’ someone exclaimed, although it is not known whether it was Napoleon himself or one of his staff who said it – but with his penchant for ancient history (and the understandable reluctance of anyone else to make that obvious point) it may well have been the Emperor himself.98 Napoleon had ordered the artillery commander-turned-engineer General Jean-Baptiste Éblé to throw three pontoon bridges over the river near a village called Poniémen, and he spent the rest of the day in his tent and in a nearby house, in Ségur’s words, ‘listlessly reclining in the midst of a breathless atmosphere and a suffocating heat, vainly courting repose’.99

  The sheer size of Napoleon’s army is hard to compute. He had over 1 million men under arms in 1812; once he subtracted garrisons, reserves, eighty-eight National Guard battalions, soldiers in the 156 depots back in France, various coastal artillery batteries and twenty-four line battalions stationed around the Empire, as well as the men in Spain, he was left with 450,000 in the first line with which to invade Russia and 165,000 mobilized in the second. A reasonably accurate total might therefore be 615,000, which was larger than the entire population of Paris at the time.100 It was certainly the largest invasion force in the history of mankind to that time, and very much a multi-national one. Poles made up the largest single foreign contingent, but it also comprised Austrians, Prussians, Westphalians, Württembergers, Saxons, Bavarians, Swiss, Dutch, Illyrians, Dalmatians, Neapolitans, Croats, Romans, Piedmontese, Florentines, Hessians, Badeners, Spaniards and Portuguese. Much has been made of the breadth of the seven coalitions that Britain brought together against France during the Napoleonic Wars, which is indeed impressive and significant, but the broadest coalition of all was this one that fought for France against Russia.101 Some 48 per cent of Napoleon’s infantry were French and 52 per cent foreign, whereas the cavalry was 64 per cent French and 36 per cent foreign.102 Even the Imperial Guard had Portuguese and Hessian cavalry units in it, and a squadron of Mamluks were attached to the Chasseurs à Cheval of the Old Guard. The problem with relying so heavily on foreigners was that many felt, as the Württemberger Jakob Walter’s journal admitted, ‘total indifference as to the outcome of the campaign’, treating French and Russians alike and certainly feeling no personal loyalty to Napoleon.103 No amount of haranguing would convert a Prussian, for example, to an ardent adherence to the French cause.

  The numbers of men involved and the distances over which they were spread forced Napoleon to adopt a different army formation from the six or seven corps he had previously used. The first line was organized into three army groups. The central one under Napoleon’s personal command had 180,000, mostly French soldiers. It included Murat with two corps of reserve cavalry, the Imperial Guard, Davout’s and Ney’s corps and Berthier’s general staff, which itself now numbered nearly 4,000. On his right was Eugène’s 4th Corps of 46,000 men with Junot as his chief-of-staff, and the 3rd Reserve Cavalry Corps, with Poniatowski’s 5th Corps even further to the south. On Napoleon’s left was Oudinot’s corps, guarding the northern flank. In total the Grande Armée had over 1,200 guns.104

  Napoleon invaded Russia with around 250,000 horses – 30,000 for the artillery, 80,000 for the cavalry and the rest pulled 25,000 vehicles of every kind – yet the supply of forage for so many horses was entirely beyond any system Napoleon or anyone else could have put into effect.105 He delayed the invasion until forage would be plentiful, but nonetheless the heat and their diet of wet grass and unripe rye killed 10,000 horses in the first week of the campaign alone.106 As horses required 20 pounds of forage per day, he had a maximum of three weeks before supplies would start to become inadequate. There were twenty-six transport battalions, eighteen of which consisted of six hundred heavy wagons drawn by six horses each, capable of transporting nearly 6,500 pounds, but the wagons were quickly found to be too heavy for Russian roads once they turned to mud, as ought to have been remembered from the First Polish Campaign.107 The men had four days’ food supply on their backs and a further twenty in the wagons following the army – enough for the very short campaign Napoleon envisaged, but if he had not comprehensively defeated the main Russian army within a month of crossing the Niemen, he would need either to withdraw or to stop and resupply. The critical moment of the campaign should therefore fall in the third week of July, if not earlier.

  But the army that was crossing the Niemen was no longer the highly mobile entity of Napoleon’s earlier campaigns, designed to catch and swiftly envelop the enemy. Napoleon’s headquarters alone required 50 wagons pulled by 650 horses.108 Murat took along a famous Parisian chef, and many officers packed their evening dress and brought their private carriages.109 Many of the phenomena of Napoleonic warfare that had been characteristic of his earlier campaigns – elderly opponents lacking energy, a nationally and linguistically diverse enemy against the homogeneous French, a vulnerable spot onto which Napoleon could latch and not let go, a capacity for significantly faster movement than the enemy, and to concentrate forces to achieve numerical advantage for just long enough to be decisive – were not present or were simply impossible in the vast reaches of European Russia. The Russian generals tended to be much younger than the generals Napoleon had faced in Italy – averaging forty-six years old against the French generals’ forty-three – and the Russian army was more homogeneous than Napoleon’s. This was to be a campaign utterly unlike any he had fought before, indeed unlike any in history.

  24

  Trapped

  ‘He didn’t want to conquer Russia, not even to re-establish Poland; he had only renounced the Russian alliance with regret. But conquering a capital, signing a peace on his terms and hermetically sealing the ports of Russia to British commerce, that was his goal.’

  Champagny’s memoirs

  ‘Rule one on page one of the book of war, is: “Do not march on Moscow.”’

  Field Marshal Viscount
Montgomery, House of Lords, May 1962

  Napoleon crossed the River Niemen at 5 a.m. on June 24, 1812, and then stationed himself on a hillock nearby as his soldiers marched past crying, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’1 He hummed the children’s song ‘Malbrough s’en va-t’en guerre’ to himself. (‘Marlborough is going to war, / who knows when he’ll be back?’)2 He wore a Polish uniform that day, and equally symbolically rode a horse named Friedland. That afternoon he went on to cross the Viliya river and entered Kovno. It took five days for the whole army to make it across the river.

  Although Russia had 650,000 men under arms in 1812, they were spread out widely across her Empire – in Moldavia, the Caucasus, central Asia, the Crimea, Siberia, Finland and elsewhere – with only around 250,000 men and guns, organized in three armies, facing Napoleon in the west. Barclay de Tolly’s First Army of the West, of 129,000 men, was widely deployed either side of Vilnius; Bagration’s Second Army of the West, of 48,000 was 100 miles to the south of Vilnius at Volkovysk; and General Alexander Tormasov’s Third Army of the West, of 43,000 was coming from much further south, freed from Danubian service by the Russo-Turkish peace. Napoleon wanted to keep these three forces separate and to defeat them piecemeal. He sent Eugène and Jérôme out on wide enveloping movements in the hope of surrounding Bagration’s Second Army before it could join Barclay’s First Army. Why he chose to give this vital task to his stepson and brother rather than to senior, experienced soldiers such as Davout, Murat or Macdonald is unclear. Jérôme had commanded the 9th Corps during the 1806–07 campaign (the army’s German contingent) but had not particularly distinguished himself. ‘The heat is overpowering,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise from the convent at Kovno where he had set up his headquarters, adding: ‘You can present the University with a collection of books and engravings. This will please it vastly and will cost you nothing. I have plenty of them.’3