Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace

by Dominic Lieven

  Vorontsov put a heavy stress on the example that officers needed to set. In some regiments, he stated, one found officers who were strict and demanding in peacetime but weak and irresolute in war: ‘There is nothing worse than such officers.’ Putting on a good show at parades was useless. It was battles that mattered. Officers who won the men’s trust in peacetime by decent behaviour would be able to turn that respect to good effect on the battlefield. Leadership was everything. No officer who caused even a whiff of doubt about his courage had ever been tolerated in the Narva regiment. When the regiment was advancing the company commanders must march in front of their men to show an example. But an officer must combine courage with calm and good judgement. When the enemy fled in the face of the regiment’s attack – which was to be expected because ‘Russians always were and always will be much more courageous’ – the officers must keep their heads and rally their men. Only a detachment from the third rank should be sent off in pursuit. When commanding skirmishers the officer must try to conceal his men if the terrain permitted but he himself must move ceaselessly up and down the skirmish line to encourage his soldiers and keep an eye out for unexpected danger.

  Under artillery fire the regiment must stand upright. Any ducking was quickly noticed by the enemy and boosted their confidence. If there was better cover in the immediate neighbourhood then it was permitted to move there but the regiment must not retreat under any circumstances. Before a battle began every soldier should have two reserve flints and sixty cartridges, all in proper repair. No unwounded soldier should accompany wounded comrades to the casualty station in the rear. If the regiment was attacking an enemy under cover in a village or broken ground the key to success was to charge in with the bayonet, since the defenders would have all the advantages in a fire-fight. When firing at the enemy the men must take careful aim and remember what they had been taught about judging ranges and not shooting over the heads of their target. In 1806–7 regiments had sometimes been thrown into disorder by panicky cries that the enemy was attacking their flank or rear. Any repetition of such behaviour must be punished severely. Officers seeing enemy attempts to outflank the regiment must report this calmly to the colonel and must remember that a well-trained unit like the Narva regiment would have no difficulty redeploying to its flank or rear. Finally, the officers must encourage their men by noting their exploits, bringing them to the colonel’s attention and recommending them for promotion, where appropriate even promotion to officer rank. ‘The officer corps always gains by taking in a truly brave man, from whatever background he comes.’24

  Another outstanding commander was Dmitrii Neverovsky, who was appointed to the crack Pavlovsky Grenadier Regiment in November 1807. Neverovsky was the kind of general that the Russian army loved. His background was typical of the officer corps. His father owned thirty male serfs and was a middle-ranking provincial official elected by his fellow nobles. With no less than fourteen children to care for, life at home was spartan. Though Neverovsky came from Poltava in present-day Ukraine, in the world of 1812 he was regarded (realistically in his case) as a Russian. Like many inhabitants of Ukraine, he was a fine horseman. He was actually rather better educated than the average product of the provincial nobility, having Latin and mathematics as well as being able to read and write in Russian. Possibly this was because he was befriended by a local grandee, Count Petr Zavadovsky, who liked Neverovsky’s father, took the son into his own home, and helped him in the first stages of his career. Nevertheless the young Neverovsky enjoyed the tough, free, adventurous youth of a provincial nobleman. His loud voice, upright bearing and confidence inspired respect in his leadership. So did his size. At almost two metres tall he topped most of his grenadiers.

  Above all Neverovsky was honest, direct, generous and hospitable. He was also very courageous. These were the legendary qualities of a Russian regiment’s commander. Neverovsky kept a close eye on his soldiers’ food and health. When he took over the regiment he found a high level of desertion in two of the companies. Like many other senior officers he believed that if Russian soldiers deserted it almost certainly meant that their officers were incompetent, cruel or corrupt. Both company commanders were quickly forced out of the regiment. Meanwhile he set up a regimental school to train NCOs and teach them to read and write. Above all, he put a heavy stress on training the men in marksmanship, personally overseeing the upkeep of muskets and participating in shooting practice alongside his men.25

  If good shooting was important for infantry of the line such as the Pavlovskys, it was even more so for the light infantry (in Russia called jaegers), whose job it was to skirmish and to pick off enemy officers and artillerymen with accurate fire. Here, however, one needs to be a little cautious. The history of light infantry in the Napoleonic era has acquired a certain degree of mythology and ideological colouring. Given the nature of the weapons available at the time, it was still in most cases only close-order massed formations of infantry that could deliver the firepower and shock which brought victory on the Napoleonic battlefield. Nor was every chasseur a freedom-loving citizen-in-arms. Light infantry had existed before the French and American revolutionary armies. In 1812–14 perhaps the best light infantry in Europe were the hard-bitten, professional soldiers of Wellington’s Light Division, who were about as far removed from being citizens-in-arms as it is possible to imagine.26

  General George Cathcart had served with the Russian army and was well placed to make international comparisons. His comments on the Russian army’s jaegers are balanced and realistic. Cathcart believed that where light infantry were concerned,

  individual intelligence is the main requisite; and the French are, without question, by nature the most intelligent light infantry in the world…The Russians, like the British, are better troops of position than any of the other nations; but it is difficult to excel in all things, and their steadiness in the ranks, which after all is the great object to be desired, as well as their previous domestic habits, render them naturally less apt for light infantry purposes than more volatile nations: yet in both services particular corps, duly practiced in this particular branch, have proved themselves capable of being made by training equal to any men that could be opposed to them.27

  Russian jaeger regiments had existed since the Seven Years War. By 1786 there were almost 30,000 jaegers in the Russian army. Mikhail Kutuzov commanded jaeger regiments and actually wrote the general rules for jaeger service. The 1789 regulations for training jaegers stressed the need for marksmanship, mobility, craftiness and skilful use of terrain for concealment. The jaeger must, for example, learn how to reload lying on his back and to fire from behind obstacles and folds in the ground. He must trick his enemy by pretending to be dead or by putting out his shako as a target. The jaegers became associated with Grigorii Potemkin and Russia’s wars against the Ottomans. Potemkin introduced comfortable, practical uniforms to suit the climate and the nature of operations on the southern steppe and in the Balkans. The jaeger regulations told the men not to waste time polishing their muskets.

  None of this endeared the jaegers to Paul I, who reduced the number of light infantry by two-thirds. Though one needs to be wary about Russian nationalist historiography’s attacks on German pedantry, in this case the Russian historians were right to believe that Paul’s obsession with complicated drill on the parade ground damaged the Russian army in general and its jaegers in particular. George Cathcart was undoubtedly also correct in believing that serfdom was not the perfect background for a light infantryman. Nor was the discipline to which the new recruit was subjected in order to turn the peasant into a soldier. After 1807 the need to expand and re-train the jaegers was widely recognized at the top of the army. Both Mikhail Barclay de Tolly and Petr Bagration, for example, had been commanders of jaeger regiments. Some senior officers found it hard to believe that Russian peasants could make good light infantry, however. This could easily serve as an excuse for their own failure to train the men intelligently. As Gneisenau noted
in the spring of 1812, the training of Russia’s jaegers was often much too rigid, complicated and formalistic.28

  Nevertheless one should not exaggerate the failings of Russia’s jaeger regiments. On the whole the jaegers performed well in the rearguard actions during the retreat to Moscow and at Borodino. The key point was that by 1812 the Russian army had over fifty jaeger regiments, which in principle meant well over 100,000 men. Differences in quality between regiments were inevitable. Fourteen line infantry regiments were redesignated as light infantry in October 1810 and one would expect them initially to be poor skirmishers since all sources agree that in the Russian army true jaeger units were much better at operating independently than the infantry of the line. On the other hand, those jaeger regiments which had fought in Finland, in the Caucasus or against the Ottomans in 1807–12 were likely to be best.29

  On active service there were plenty of targets and no constraints on the use of live ammunition. The historian of the 2nd Jaegers writes that the campaign in Finland’s forests was excellent training for light infantry in marksmanship, use of terrain and small-scale warfare. General Langeron recalls that the 12th and 22nd Jaegers were among the best marksmen in his corps, since they had years of experience fighting Circassian sharpshooters in the Caucasus. According to the historian of the 10th Jaegers the same was true of the Ottoman campaigns, during which the regiment was sometimes required to cover more than 130 kilometres in five days as it fought a ‘small war’ of skirmishes and ambushes in the foothills of the Balkans. Ottoman raiding parties often had better guns and were better marksmen than the Russian jaegers, at least until the latter learned from experience.30

  The difference in quality between Russian jaeger regiments in 1812 was often evident to their enemies. The first Russian skirmishers encountered by the Saxon army after invading Russia were the inexperienced troops of General Oertel’s corps. A Saxon officer recorded that ‘the Russian army was not yet that which it became in 1813…they did not understand how to skirmish in open order’. Some weeks later the Saxons got a great shock when they first encountered the veteran jaegers of the Army of the Danube, fresh from many campaigns in the Balkans. These men were ‘the excellent Russian jaegers of Sacken’s corps. They were as skilled in their movements as they were accurate in their shooting, and they did us great harm with their much superior firearms which were effective at twice our range.’31

  How to train and use light infantry was one of the themes debated in the Military Journal (Voennyi zhurnal), published for the first time in 1810–12 under the editorship of the highly intelligent Colonel P. A. Rakhmanov. The Journal was designed to encourage officers to think about their profession. Some of its articles were translations from foreign ‘classics’. They introduced Russian officers to the ideas of key foreign thinkers such as Antoine de Jomini, Friedrich Wilhelm von Bülow and Henry Lloyd. Other pieces concerned military history or were anecdotes about recent Russian wars. Very many of the articles concerned the key issues of the day, however, and were written by serving officers, often anonymously. Of course the Journal could not openly debate aspects of a future war with France but it was easy to read between the lines of some of its articles on questions such as the role of fortifications and the relative advantages of offensive and defensive war. The Journal also debated issues such as the proper deployment of artillery on the battlefield, the role of general staffs, and what values and skills military education should seek to instil into the officer corps. The subscription list for the Journal was impressive. Some regimental commanders bought many copies of it for their officers. But there were also very many individual subscriptions, above all of course from what one might describe as the emerging military intelligentsia.32

  The core of this intelligentsia was the general staff, which grew in size and in quality during these years. In fact one could truthfully say that it was in 1807–12 that a real Russian general staff emerged for the first time. The need for such a staff was very evident from the debacle in 1805–7. The Russian army set off for war in 1805 guided by too few staff officers, who were poorly educated for the job. Kutuzov’s chief Russian staff officer was a fine hydrographer of German origin, who had virtually no experience of wartime operations. In all respects Major-General Gerhardt was in fact typical of Russian staff officers of the time, the best of whom were cartographers, engineers, even astronomers but very seldom soldiers in the full meaning of the word. Even the minority of staff officers who had military experience had usually only served against the Ottomans. Fighting against the Turks was no preparation for a number of key tasks of staff officers facing Napoleon in 1805–14, including picking advantageous battlefields on which Russian troops could counter the tactical mobility, concentrated artillery and skilled skirmishing of Europe’s best army.33

  The two most informed Russian staff officers in Kutuzov’s entourage were Prince Petr Mikhailovich Volkonsky and Karl von Toll. These two men learned the lessons of 1805 and were the key figures in the creation of an effective general staff in the subsequent years. Volkonsky was a small, stocky man who, as an officer of the Semenovsky Guards, had known Alexander from his adolescence. Nevertheless he stood in some awe of the monarch, to whom he was absolutely loyal and whose will he never questioned. Kindly, tactful and modest, Volkonsky was quite well educated and exceptionally hard-working. He was an efficient administrator who cut quickly to the heart of problems. His calm, patient good manners made him a useful diplomat at allied headquarters in 1813–14 when wrangling between rival egos and national perspectives threatened to get out of hand. Nobody ever claimed that Volkonsky had an outstanding brain, let alone that he was a great strategist. But he selected first-class subordinates – above all Karl von Toll and Johann von Diebitsch – and had the good sense to trust and support their judgement. Without Volkonsky’s hard work, political skills and connections the Russian general staff would have been much more weakly positioned and less effective in 1812–14. Even after all his efforts, when the war began in 1812 there were still too few staff officers and too many of those that existed were young and inexperienced.34

  On returning from Paris, where he had studied the French staff, Volkonsky struck up a good working relationship with Barclay de Tolly which endured throughout the period. In the two years that preceded Napoleon’s invasion he got the Russian general staff on its feet. Acting as Volkonsky’s assistant, Toll produced a manual to guide staff officers. It set out their key responsibilities as being all issues linked to the army’s deployment, movements and choice of battlefields. Meanwhile A. I. Khatov was running the education of an increasing number of bright young cadets who would become junior staff officers and Volkonsky himself was luring some very able officers to transfer into the general staff, of whom Diebitsch, another officer of the Semenovskys, was subsequently the most famous. Bringing into the staff a number of officers who had front-line military experience and some young Russian aristocrats helped to reduce the gap and the suspicion between the fledgling general staff and the generals commanding corps and divisions. So too did the wartime experience gained by staff officers in 1805–12.

  Nevertheless distrust remained. A key moment came in 1810 when Alexander decreed that henceforth all staff positions at headquarters should be reserved for trained general staff officers. Traditionally, commanding generals had run their headquarters through a duty general and a bevy of aides-de-camp, many of whom were relatives, friends and clients. In a manner typical of the Russian army and bureaucracy, headquarters resembled an extended family household. Now professionalism was attempting to upset and nose its way into this comfortable and traditional arrangement. Commanding generals might find the principle hard to swallow. They might also wonder whether the unknown, young and often non-Russian staff officers foisted on them were truly competent at real war, as distinct from organizing marches and drawing maps.

  In addition, one great point about the friends and clients who had traditionally manned headquarters was that they were loyal to thei
r patron. Could one be so sure of this with unknown staff officers appointed on supposedly impersonal professional grounds? In his manual for staff officers Toll had stressed loyalty to their commanding general as being of paramount importance. That did not stop Alexander from telling the chiefs of staff of both Barclay’s and Bagration’s armies to write directly to him about all matters of interest in their commands. Not at all surprisingly, it took Russian command structures some time to settle in 1812–13. The historian of the general staff suggests that if Tormasov’s Third Army did so more quickly than Barclay’s First or Bagration’s Second that was because Tormasov himself and all his key staff officers came from the old network of Field-Marshal Prince Repnin.35

  As this suggests, if in some ways the Russian army had been renewed in 1807–12, in other ways old habits and problems remained. On the whole the Russian army in June 1812 was not just bigger but also better than the one that had faced Napoleon in 1805. Over and above the specific reforms which had taken place in 1807–12, the army benefited from having far more experience of European warfare than had been the case seven years before. Nowhere was this more true than in the Guards. Paul I had begun their transformation from ornaments at the imperial court to a fighting elite but when the Guards regiments went on campaign in 1805 they had minimal experience of war. In the Preobrazhenskys, for example, no officer under the rank of colonel, no sergeant-major and very few sergeants had ever seen action.36 Blooded in 1805–7 and reinforced in subsequent years by veterans drawn from the line regiments, the Guards were now much closer to being an elite reserve fighting force whose commitment could decide the fate of a battle. Nevertheless the army’s most fundamental strengths and weaknesses remained unchanged from 1805. On the credit side stood the numbers and quality of the light cavalry, and the immense courage, discipline and endurance of the infantry. On the other side of the balance were problems in the high command. Above all this meant rivalries between the generals and the difficulty of finding a competent and authoritative supreme commander.