by Alan Schom
“The aim of all my moves will be to concentrate an army of 400,000 men at a single point,” Napoleon instructed Davout. As for the choice of invasion routes, he did not have much latitude, given the dense forests, numerous river crossings, large marshes and swamps — including the Pripet Marshes to the east of Warsaw, some two hundred miles long and one hundred miles wide — and the lack of roads, good or bad. The three principal routes included the northernmost one at Kovno on the Niemen; Grodno, also on the Niemen but nearly one hundred miles farther south; and finally at Brest-Litovsk, just east of Warsaw.
The Kovno Road led to Vilna, where the czar purportedly was assembling a major force; then to Vitebsk, Smolensk, and Borodino and on to Moscow. The Grodno route to the south passed through Minsk before rejoining the Vitebsk route. From Brest-Litovsk, Napoleon could travel well to the south of the Pripet Marshes to Kiev in the Ukraine, an enormous swing to the south before regaining the route to Moscow. The czar’s general headquarters’ best estimation was that, given the inordinate distances he would have to travel just to reach Russian territory, Bonaparte would take the shortest, most direct route, via Kovno and Vilna, so that is where the main Russian army of 27,000 men under Barclay lay in wait. The rest of the Russian army was dispersed over some 250 miles, from Rossitent in the north to Grodno in the south. This army included five regular army corps, Archduke Constantine’s Imperial Guard, and three cavalry corps. To the south and east of Warsaw stood General Bagration’s Second Army of 48,000 men. Since Bagration was a difficult man who could not tolerate Barclay, this separation was perhaps not such a bad idea. The only other immediate Russian force was General Tormassov’s Third Army of 43,000 to the south of the Pripet Marshes near Lutsk.
After crossing the Niemen on June 24, Napoleon had been followed to the north by Macdonald’s X Corps. To the south Davout’s I Corps, Oudinot’s II, and Ney’s III drove past Kovno with St.-Cyr’s VI Corps and Prince Eugène’s IV Corps to their south, as Jérôme’s VIII Corps theoretically pushed up from Warsaw. As usual, Murat’s cavalry was leading the drive, now east of Kovno, and had been the first to reach Vilna on the twenty-eighth.
If Napoleon had originally hoped to draw Bagration’s Second Army to the Vistula in pursuit of Jérôme’s and Eugène’s armies as they drove north, so as to permit him meanwhile to attack and envelop the principal Russian force under Barclay before those forces could join under one command, he was to be disappointed. Not only were the czar’s commanders proving contrary by withdrawing before the oncoming French, but two of Russia’s three great natural factors were already playing major roles, disrupting Napoleon’s overall strategy: time and distance.
It took time to march men into position, weary men who had already marched many hundreds of miles, and to coordinate schedules. Both Eugène and Jérôme in particular were well behind schedule and not in their designated positions when ordered. The problem was aggravated by the yawning distances that seemed uncharted on even the best of maps, which Napoleon in any case never bothered with. It was utter folly to launch such a massive campaign in a vast region where it was well known that food, supplies, and fodder would be at a minimum, and roads of any sort few and far between. It was Egypt all over again, and Napoleon had learned nothing then or since. For a campaign of such overwhelming numbers, Napoleon needed good roads, and many of them — at least one per corps — not to mention efficient logistical support for supplies of food, water, and fodder for each corps. This simply did not exist. Instead Napoleon was forcing his eleven army corps, exclusive of the guard and large cavalry and their enormous supply and baggage trains and hundreds of pieces of artillery, to keep to just a couple of principal routes. He had been here before and should have known better. Consequently, few corps commanders could adhere to Bonaparte’s orders, which, moreover, sometimes went astray or at best were delayed by the vast distances and the general confusion.
The third great natural force in Russia, weather, added the final ingredient to the by-now all-encompassing chaos: First there were spells of wilting, almost subtropical heat, as columns of hundreds of thousands of men under heavy kit, and three hundred thousand horses, kicked up miles-long dust clouds, literally choking man and beast alike, followed by sudden torrential, monsoonlike rains that persisted for days on end, turning hard, deeply rutted roads into axle-deep quagmires. Sunny days would then follow, baking solid the ruts, hindering the advance of 32,000 horse- and ox-drawn vehicles, impeding the arrival of all munitions and supplies. But whether deep dry ruts or vats of sucking mud hundreds of miles long, all resulted in broken legs of men and horses, not to mention cracked and broken axles and wheels. From the moment the French crossed the Niemen, there were ceaseless bottlenecks of enormous proportions on every route. Repair crews, thousands of men, called up from the sappers and even frontline troops, worked all day, all night, only to see the situation deteriorate daily. The hard-slogging infantry, with their heavy field packs, abject, practically on the verge of starvation, far from home, and demoralized even before the first shot was fired, began throwing away their heavy flour supply and even cartridges. Napoleon simply did not understand the limits of human beings — nor for that matter did he understand the demands of elementary logistics.
Worst of all were the difficulties involved in moving and giving top priority to Napoleon’s “daughters,” as he referred to his beloved artillery. Even the smaller six-pounders weighed 2,010 pounds, each with cannon and limbers, while the formidable twelve-pounders, Napoleon’s favorites, each weighed 3,440 pounds. Furthermore it took eight horses to haul each six-pounder — when not bogged down in mud — and a dozen horses to pull the twelve-pounders. Once the artillery pieces were bogged down in knee-deep mud, hundreds of troops and additional animals had to be brought in to help extricate them. The loss of horses alone was calamitous from the very start; most of the 150,000 or so farm horses stolen from German and later Polish farms were the first to go. They could work hard for a few days or even a few weeks, but never having traveled more than two or three miles from their farms, they were quickly broken by the insufficient food, lack of rest, and especially the unrelenting distances. Then there was the endemic problem of colic, as ravenous beasts were given damp thatch from cottage roofs, or green corn or grain, to eat. Their bellies and intestines distended, literally bursting open, tens of thousands of the bewildered beasts dying in agony along the army’s path, adding to the logistical nightmare that Napoleon in his haste and blind determination had failed to consider. The stench was stifling in the overwhelming heat, and the sight demoralizing to the troops as they passed by the maggot-infested beasts. If these were the conditions in midsummer, what would winter bring?
Thus when Napoleon ordered Jérôme’s corps here, or Eugène’s there, or Victor’s or Macdonald’s or Ney’s anywhere, it was not simply a case of moving men from point A to point B on a neat map in general headquarters. Morale collapsed even among the high-spirited Young Guard, and the usual 20 percent desertion rate soon left entire divisions so weakened as to be of little use, until they could be artificially reinforced by the fragments of other units. The food supply trains in theory accompanied them, but frequently were late. Men foraged and killed and ransacked every farm and village they passed, the situation aggravated by the lack of clean water. Dysentery and typhus were epidemic. Chief of Staff Berthier, a brutal, angry man when thwarted, was beside himself by the time Napoleon reached Vilna on the twenty-eighth. Every commander in the French army, Berthier among them, had argued vehemently against this campaign and thought crossing the Niemen madness if not suicide. Napoleon overruled them all in the superiority of his intellect and greater personal vision. Forward! he ordered. And anxiously, wearily they trudged on, although the first battle had yet to take place.
One of the first grave psychological setbacks for Napoleon came not from the Russians but from his younger brother, King Jérôme of Westphalia. “Tell him that it would be impossible to maneuver in a more incompetent manner than he has
just done,” Napoleon instructed Berthier. Jérôme had failed to follow orders as usual, neglected to deploy his men properly, and in general was not adhering to the established campaign “plan” and schedule. Jérôme in fact was still only at Grodno as late as July 3, when he should have been harassing General Bagration’s army far to the south, pinning them down. Tell him, Napoleon continued, that “he has caused my initial maneuvers to fail, thereby permitting the best opportunity of the war to escape me, all as a result of his singular inability to understand the first thing about how to wage war!” And yet Napoleon should have known this from previous experience. Jérôme was furious, but instead of taking it out on his big brother, he did the next best thing. He got into a furious quarrel with the very tough Marshal Davout, who quickly, roughly squelched that young upstart, Bonaparte or no. If Louis Davout would not suffer that sort of insult from Napoleon, he certainly wouldn’t take it from the pampered Jérôme. A week later, on July 14, a sulking Jérôme abandoned his entire Westphaliam army and decamped for the west and the comforts of Kassel, leaving Davout temporarily in command of that additional corps until it could be handed over to the hardly reliable General Junot. As for the Russians, despite Davout’s very hard push, Bagration’s army had escaped, thanks to Jérôme’s incompetence.
Even as Davout continued to pursue Bagration’s Second Army toward Orsha, Napoleon was concentrating on pursuing Barclay de Tolly’s First Army as it effectively retired to the powerful defenses of Driss and Dünaburg on the Dvina. Leaving Murat’s cavalry along with Ney and Oudinot’s infantry before these fortresses, Napoleon moved the main part of the French army to the north to isolate Barclay from the rest of the Russian army and its own life of communications, in other words, an end-run attempt to outflank and attack him from the rear, the “manoeuvre sur les derrières” as he called it. This second attempt to bring to battle and to defeat the principal Russian force had to work, Napoleon felt. Meanwhile, far to the south, St.-Cyr’s VI Corps, Eugène’s IV Corps, the VIII Corps, and Davout’s large I Corps were driving in a sweeping line, Davout still intent on cutting off Bagration. From the west Jérôme’s former corps was pressing Bagration from the west, and by July 24 they and Davout were closing in on Bagration before the Dnieper. Meanwhile, to the north that same day, Murat’s cavalry, Ney, Eugène, and the Imperial Guard were forcing Barclay farther up to Vitebsk.
Davout had finally caught up with part of Bagration’s army at Mohilev on July 23 and did inflict a few thousand casualties, yet most of that Russian force managed to escape intact, shortly to join with the main force after all. Although Napoleon had anticipated taking Barclay’s army at Polotsk, it was in fact on the Dvina before Vitebsk on July 27 that the French army finally trapped the elusive Barclay. But when on the twenty-eighth Napoleon had finally entered Vitebsk, great was his disappointment in finding another deserted city: Barclay’s troops having withdrawn eastward during the night. “The Emperor was completely lost in thought, often in a foul mood, to the point of not addressing anyone round him in a civil manner, a rare enough event in itself,” Caulaincourt recalled:
He was dismayed by the departure of the inhabitants of the city and by the flight of the troops into the countryside. This system of retreat perhaps finally opened his eyes to the eventual consequences that such a war as this could have on us, a strategy that was daily drawing us farther and farther from France. But then with the slightest hope in our favor again he cast aside such practical considerations and their consequences, his hope once again unrealistically rekindled [for a fast victory].
Time and again the Emperor repeated that the Russians whom everyone had claimed to be so numerous, in fact had no more than 150,000 men...[He] added that he was sure that we [Caulaincourt and the other French generals opposing Napoleon’s campaign] had deceived him personally about everything, down to the problems of the Russian climate, insisting that winter here was like that in France, except that it just lasted longer. These accusations against us were repeated on every occasion. I reiterated to the Emperor, quite in vain as it turned out, that I had not been exaggerating in the least, and that as his most faithful servant I had revealed the full truth about everything. But I failed to make him change his mind.
Nor was Chief of Staff Bcrthier spared the results of Napoleon’s frustrations. He was “heaped with wild abuse for his frank advice, as a reward for his constant hard work and devotion” to his chief. Bonaparte complained that much of the work of Berthier’s general staff — several hundred of them — was badly done, “no one planned ahead.” Yet Napoleon refused to trust anyone, not even Berthier, to make the smallest decision or give the simplest order without his own stamp of approval. As Caulaincourt painfully witnessed: “The Emperor’s irritation with him [Berthier] reached such a point that he now often told him that he was good for nothing and ought to leave the army and return to [his estate of] Grosbois and the arms of his Visconti.” Many of the army administrative services were indeed run badly, but given the extraordinary situation, they could justifiably blame Napoleon, who had led them into a country where they were unable to obtain even basic supplies. “Everyone was miserable and eventually it took all the Emperor’s will and insistence to maintain some sort of control over the situation.” Even before the first major battle took place at Smolensk, French morale was disastrous at every level, everyone angry, openly opposing the system, the campaign, and their own colleagues. It boded very badly indeed for the future.
Napoleon, invariably in a foul mood now, continued to attack everyone around him. When General Junot, the new commander of Jérôme’s corps, advanced apathetically with his troops, Napoleon immediately turned on him. It was Junot’s fault that the Russians had escaped. He would be responsible for Napoleon losing this campaign. Then he blamed the Poles for being unreliable. And why didn’t Andréossy prevent the treaty between Russia and the Turks? It was all his fault that tens of thousands of fresh Russian troops were now freed for service against the French. Nor did Napoleon spare his brother-in-law Bernadotte, whom he accused of joining forces with the Russians. On and on he criticized everyone, clearly on the verge of a mental breakdown, but never did he himself admit to a single mistake.
And all this was compounded by the czar’s continued silence over peace proposals Napoleon had finally submitted to dispatch to him. “Alexander can see perfectly well how incompetent his generals are, and that as a result he is losing his country!” What was the matter with the man? Napoleon angrily demanded. Was he blind? Caulaincourt wondered just how long things could continue like this, with Napoleon in control, before all collapsed around their heads.
The reason for this prolonged, bitter outburst was the fact that the Russians had fled a second confrontation as a result of their successful evacuation of Vitebsk. The next opportunity for a big decisive battle was at Smolensk, eighty miles away. Schwarzenberg’s Austrian Corps and Reynier’s VII did manage to contain General Tormassov’s Third Army of the West near Brest-Litovsk, however, ending that immediate threat to the French flank, while Oudinot’s II Corps, aided by St.-Cyr’s VI (Bavarian) Corps had managed to inflict a minor if temporary victory over Wittgenstein at Polotsk back on July 18. Unfortunately Napoleon paid a heavy price, as Oudinot was wounded and put temporarily out of action, though St.-Cyr was rewarded with a marshal’s baton for his contribution.
Now, on July 28 at Vitebsk, Bonaparte had to reshape his campaign plans as a result of Barclay’s escape, matched by Bagration’s escape from Davout at Mohilev back on the twenty-third. What he had dreaded most was taking place: Barclay’s and Bagration’s armies had by now joined forces many miles to the east, at Smolensk. Napoleon’s line of communications with the rear all the way back to Dresden was at the breaking point, with tens of thousands of dead horses marking the milestones between Danzig and Russia, and a straggling line of supplies stretching literally back to the Rhine. Worst of all was the loss of perhaps 100,000 troops through massive desertion, illness, poor and irregular rations, and u
nrelenting fatigue. By August 4 Napoleon’s immediate force was reduced to no more than 185,000 men, while Barclay and Bagration had some 125,000 effective troops at their command. Napoleon’s huge numerical superiority was quickly dwindling in the Russian vastness.
