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

by Dominic Lieven

  Denis Davydov was one of the first partisans, having persuaded a doubtful Kutuzov on the eve of Borodino to detach him with a small band of cavalry and Cossacks to raid enemy communications. Davydov’s success in the following weeks won him reinforcements and helped to legitimize the whole idea of partisan warfare, which was new to Russian generals. Karl von Toll in particular urged this new form of war on Kutuzov and the commander-in-chief quickly grasped its potential. Davydov captured or destroyed enemy supply columns, routed detachments sent to gather food, liberated many hundreds of Russian prisoners of war and gathered useful intelligence. He also punished traitors and collaborators, whom he describes as a very small minority. Davydov’s weapons were speed, surprise, daring and excellent local sources of information. His bands struck out of nowhere, dispersed and then regrouped secretly for further attacks.

  Davydov was not only one of the most successful of the partisans but also the most famous and romantic. A well-known poet, he was immortalized by his friend Aleksandr Pushkin thus: ‘Hussar-poet, you’ve sung of bivouacs / Of the licence of devil-may-care carousals / Of the fearful charm of battle / And of the curls of your moustache.’ Well after his death, Davydov became more famous than ever as the figure on whom Tolstoy based his character Denisov, the charming and generous hussar who loses his heart to Natasha Rostov and in whose band of partisans her brother Petia loses his life in the autumn of 1812.7

  The most notorious partisan commander was Captain Alexander Figner, who commanded an artillery battery at the battle of Borodino. The fall of Moscow left Figner lost in gloom and determined to revenge himself on the French for his country’s humiliation. The battery’s second-in-command described him as ‘good-looking, of medium height: he was a true son of the North, muscular, round-faced, pale and with light-brown hair. His big, bright eyes were full of liveliness and he had a powerful voice. Figner was eloquent, full of common sense, tireless in all his enterprises and with a fiery imagination. He despised danger, never lost his head and was totally fearless.’ Speaking German, French, Italian and a number of other foreign languages fluently, Figner was also an excellent actor. On a number of occasions he went into enemy camps in and around Moscow to gather intelligence, easily passing himself off as an officer of Napoleon’s multi-national army.8

  Like many guerrilla commanders in history, however, there was a dark side to the brilliant, cunning and ruthless Figner. In September and October 1812 even Davydov was sometimes disinclined to take prisoners, since these put an intolerable strain on small and fast-moving partisan bands.9 Alexander Figner, however, twisted even this practice. One fellow-officer recalls that ‘his favourite and most frequent amusement was first to inspire captured officers’ trust and cheerfulness by his reassuring conversation, and then suddenly to shoot them with his pistol and watch their agonies before they died. He did this well away from the army, which only heard dark rumours which it either disbelieved or forgot amidst the pressures of military operations.’ In the midst of the awful cruelties and extreme emotions of autumn 1812 senior officers were sometimes willing to turn a blind eye to the nastier side of partisan warfare. By 1813, however, with the war no longer on Russian soil, few officers still harboured any great hatred for their enemy. When Figner drowned in the river Elbe trying to escape from the French few of his fellow-officers shed any tears.10

  The many partisan units operating around Moscow overlapped with larger detachments watching the main roads leading out of the city. Some of these detachments also waged partisan war. Their main role, however, was to defend the provinces around Moscow from enemy raiding parties and to provide early warning should Napoleon make any major move out of the city. Of these detachments, the most important was commanded by Major-General Baron Ferdinand von Winzengerode, whose task it was to watch the highroad leading to Tver and thence to Petersburg. Most of Winzengerode’s troops were Cossacks and militia but some regular cavalry were cut off from Kutuzov’s army during the retreat through Moscow and escaped out of the city to the north, joining Winzengerode’s men. Of these reinforcements, the best were the excellent soldiers of the Cossack Life Guard Regiment.

  Ferdinand von Winzengerode could best be described as a full-time anti-Bonapartist. His father had been aide-de-camp to the Duke of Brunswick, of all the German dynasties the one most noted for its unwavering hatred of Napoleon. Winzengerode himself transferred on a number of occasions between the Russian and Austrian armies, depending on which service offered the better opportunity to fight the French. Logically enough, having fought with the Austrians in 1809, he moved back to the Russian army early in 1812. In 1812 he was one of a number of political refugees whom hatred of Napoleon had washed up on Russia’s shores. Had circumstances turned out just a little differently, he could easily have been serving alongside many of his compatriots in the King’s German Legion in Spain, under Wellington’s command.

  The peppery, pipe-smoking, impetuous Winzengerode was a loyal friend and patron. His excellent French cook and his penchant for whist were much appreciated by his staff. So too were his decency and fairness. In the autumn of 1812, for example, he was outraged when the steward on one of the estates of Aleksandr Balashev, the minister of police, tried to use his master’s position to evade requisitioning for the army’s needs. Winzengerode promptly slapped a double requisition on Balashev and ignored the complaints of Aleksei Arakcheev, who was up to similar tricks as regards his own estates in Novgorod. The problem, however, was that Winzengerode was a decent man but a poor general. When the French were on the point of evacuating Moscow, Winzengerode bungled an attempt to parley with them and was captured. Napoleon was initially intent on shooting him as a traitor but was dissuaded by his horrified generals. Kutuzov rightly called Winzengerode’s capture an act of barely credible carelessness. Though Alexander was overjoyed by Chernyshev’s rescue of Winzengerode, the Russian war effort would actually have benefited had Winzengerode been sitting quietly in French captivity in 1813–14 rather than commanding Russian armies.11

  The most competent of Winzengerode’s subordinates was the 31-year-old Colonel Alexander von Benckendorff. In 1812–14 Benckendorff had a ‘good war’ and this was to be the foundation for a brilliant subsequent career. The young Benckendorff started life with many advantages. His mother was the close friend of the Empress Marie, whom she accompanied to Russia as lady-in-waiting after the young Württemberg princess married the Grand Duke Paul. Juliana Benckendorff died in Marie Feodorovna’s arms in 1797, bequeathing to the empress the care of her young children. Alexander thereby became a core member of Marie’s circle. His sister Dorothea married Christoph Lieven, who was a key protégé of Empress Marie but also close to Alexander I and a source of patronage in his own right.

  The Empress Marie sent Alexander von Benckendorff to an excellent school but for a time it seemed that her investment had been in vain. The handsome, charming and pleasure-loving young man proved neither a good scholar nor a particularly virtuous officer. Like Chernyshev and Nesselrode, he served in the Russian mission in Paris in the years after Tilsit. His main achievement in Paris, however, was to fall for a famous French actress and femme fatale, a former mistress of Napoleon, whom he smuggled back to Russia with him after quitting diplomatic life under a cloud. He subsequently redeemed himself by abandoning his actress and volunteering to fight against the Turks, after which Marie paid off his debts. But it was the courage and skill he showed in 1812 which really brought him back into favour.12

  As one of Alexander I’s aides-de-camp, Benckendorff started the war by carrying out a number of important and dangerous missions to Bagration’s headquarters. Serving under Winzengerode in the autumn of 1812, he was responsible for protecting a key road and its surrounding territory from French incursions and for launching raids against the main enemy line of communications down the highway from Moscow to Smolensk. In his memoirs, Benckendorff recalls that one of his most difficult tasks was to rescue French prisoners from the clutches of the peasants, in which
he did not always succeed. Some of the cruelties perpetrated against the wretched prisoners of war made him think he was living ‘in the midst of a desolation which seemed to witness the abandonment of God and the rule on earth of the devil’. He adds, however, both that the peasants had every reason to be enraged by French behaviour and that the people showed great loyalty to their religion, their country and their emperor. In this context the orders he at one point received from a nervous Petersburg to disarm peasants and punish disorder were nonsensical, as he reported to Alexander I. Benckendorff told the emperor that he could hardly disarm men to whom he himself had given weapons. Nor could he allow to be called traitors a people ‘who were sacrificing their lives for the defence of their churches, their independence, and of their wives and their homes. Rather the word traitor fitted those who at such a sacred moment for Russia dared to tell false tales about the country’s purest and most zealous defenders.’13

  Napoleon had entered Moscow on 15 September, and left the city on 19 October. During that period the relative strength of the rival armies changed in ways that had a decisive impact on the autumn campaign. While in Moscow Napoleon was reinforced by substantial numbers of infantry, which brought his overall numbers back over 100,000 and filled most of the gaps left by Borodino. Some of these infantry units were of good quality. They included, for example, the First Guards division, which had not been present at Borodino. By definition, infantry which had marched all the way from central and western Europe to Moscow was relatively tough. The core of Napoleon’s army was his Guards. Very few of these excellent troops had seen any action since the beginning of the campaign, as Kutuzov knew.

  The Russian infantry was weaker than Napoleon’s in both numbers and quality. On 5 October Kutuzov had 63,000 officers and men in the ranks of his infantry regiments. Of these men, 15,000 were Moscow militiamen and 7,500 were new recruits. In addition, almost 11,000 men from Lobanov-Rostovsky’s new units were with Kutuzov’s army but had not yet been assigned to his regiments. These men were much better armed and trained than militia but none of them had ever been in action. The Russian commander-in-chief had good reason to avoid pitched battles with Napoleon, in which infantry always played the key role. In particular, he was right to worry about his regiments’ ability to carry out complicated manoeuvres. If he had to fight Napoleon, it would be wise to do so in a strong defensive position. The Russian army traditionally fought with a higher ratio of artillery to infantry than was the case elsewhere in Europe. Given his infantry’s rawness, Kutuzov was unlikely to break with this tradition. His army therefore set off on the autumn campaign with a vast train of 620 guns, which soon far outnumbered Napoleon’s artillery and had inevitable consequences as regards its speed, manoeuvrability and supply.14

  The situation as regards cavalry was totally reversed. Napoleon had too few horsemen and, much more importantly, far too few viable horses. Even before he left Moscow some of his cavalry were dismounted. During these six weeks Kutuzov’s regular cavalry had received just 150 recruits and no reinforcements from the militia. This made good sense since useful cavalrymen could not be trained in a hurry. But many new horses had arrived for his 10,000 regular cavalrymen, often donated by the nobility of the neighbouring provinces.15

  Above all, Kutuzov’s army was reinforced by twenty-six regiments of Don Cossacks, a total of 15,000 new irregular cavalry. The total mobilization of the Don Cossack reserves was a great success, for which the Cossack ataman, Matvei Platov, was made a count. Sometimes these new Cossack regiments are described as militia but this is misleading. Ordinary Russian militiamen in 1812 had no previous military experience. All able-bodied Cossacks had served in the army, however, and were expected to bring their own weapons as and when they were recalled to service. The twenty-six new Cossack regiments were therefore well armed, and packed with veterans. In normal circumstances such an enormous number of irregular cavalry might have been excessive but in the conditions of the autumn and winter campaign of 1812 their impact was to be devastating. Back in April 1812 Colonel Chuikevich’s memorandum had stressed the damage that Russian cavalry would do to a retreating enemy. Kutuzov was a shrewd and experienced campaigner. He knew that his cavalry would confine the enemy to the road on which they were retreating, force them to march at great speed, and deny them any chance of foraging away from their column. It took little imagination to realize what this would imply for an army marching into the Russian winter. Kutuzov therefore allowed his Cossacks, hunger, the weather and French indiscipline to do his work for him. Quite rightly, he was in no hurry to commit his infantry to battle.16

  Obviously Napoleon made a fatal mistake in dwelling almost six weeks in Moscow while his cavalry withered, reinforcements poured in to Kutuzov and winter approached. Had he rested his troops in Moscow even for a fortnight, he could still have made it safely back to Smolensk long before the first snows or the arrival of Kutuzov’s Cossack regiments from the Don. Instead he hung on, awaiting Alexander’s response to his hints about peace. Perhaps the only thing one can say in Napoleon’s defence is that most European statesmen and much of the Russian elite shared some of his doubts about Alexander’s strength of will. Inevitably, however, Napoleon’s peace feelers themselves fed Russian confidence and gave them every opportunity to encourage him to stay in Moscow while awaiting some response from Alexander. The basic point, however, was that Napoleon had failed to destroy the Russian army and had completely miscalculated the effect of Moscow’s fall on both Alexander and the Russian elites. Having made this mistake he was too stubborn to listen to wise advice, to cut his losses, and to retreat in time.

  Subsequently Kutuzov was to have a revealing discussion with a captured senior official of the French commissariat, the Viscount de Puybusque. Puybusque wrote that the Russian commander had asked him ‘through what form of blindness had he [Napoleon] failed to spot a trap which was visible to the whole world? In particular, the field-marshal was astonished at the ease with which all the ruses employed to keep him in Moscow had succeeded and at his absurd cheek (prétention) in offering peace when he no longer possessed the means to make war.’ The Russians had been only too happy to encourage the hopes of Napoleon’s envoy, General Lauriston, that Alexander would respond to Napoleon’s advances or the even sillier faith placed in the possible disloyalty of the Cossacks. ‘Of course,’ added Kutuzov, ‘we did everything possible to drag out the conversations. In politics if someone offers you an advantage, you don’t reject it.’17

  By mid-October even Napoleon acknowledged that Alexander had duped him and that he must retreat. His departure from Moscow was hastened, however, by an attack by Kutuzov’s army on Marshal Murat’s detachment, which was watching the Russian camp at Tarutino. Left to his own devices, Kutuzov is unlikely to have ordered the attack. He was happy for Napoleon to stay in Moscow for as long as possible. In addition, as he told Miloradovich, ‘we are not yet up to complicated movements and manoeuvres’. But the commander-in-chief was under pressure from Alexander to take the offensive and liberate Moscow. Kutuzov’s generals were also raring for action, with Bennigsen stressing the need to inflict a heavy blow on Napoleon before the arrival of Marshal Victor’s reinforcements from Smolensk. Above all, Russian reconnaissance showed that Marshal Murat’s corps was vulnerable. Murat was heavily outnumbered and might be crushed long before reinforcements could arrive. Especially on its eastern flank, his camp could easily be stormed by a surprise attack from the nearby forest. French outposts and patrols were slack, which made the idea of a surprise attack all the more enticing.18

  The initial plan was to attack early in the morning of 17 October. Kutuzov’s orders had to be passed to the troops through Aleksei Ermolov, as chief of staff of the now combined First and Second armies. On the evening of 16 October, however, Ermolov had gone to a fellow-general’s headquarters for dinner and was not to be found, so the attack had to be postponed. Ermolov’s memoirs are silent on this subject and this is by no means the only occasion where they ha
ve to be read with a critical eye. Conceivably Ermolov proved non-cooperative because he believed that the attack was Bennigsen’s brainchild and would not bring him any personal credit, but perhaps this is too harsh. Kutuzov was more angry about the bungling on 16 October than at any other time during the campaign.19

  The mess which occurred on the evening of 16 October reflected the confusion in the army’s structure of command. Kutuzov by now deeply distrusted his chief of staff, Levin von Bennigsen, but he could not yet get rid of him. Instead he brought Petr Konovnitsyn into his headquarters, officially as duty-general but in reality as a substitute for Bennigsen. Inevitably this caused still further enmity between Kutuzov and his chief of staff. Moreover, for all his virtues as a front-line commander, Konovnitsyn had neither the training nor the aptitude for staff work.

  By mid-October Kutuzov and Bennigsen had between them succeeded in humiliating Barclay de Tolly sufficiently to make him resign.20 Logically at this point the whole headquarters of combined First and Second armies should have been dismantled and orders passed straight down from Kutuzov to the corps commanders. Since the army’s overall structure had been decreed by the emperor, however, only he could authorize such a change. Meanwhile Ermolov resented both the fact that Konovnitsyn had been inserted into the chain of command and that his inefficiency created additional bother for himself. The army’s high command was therefore a maze of overlapping jurisdictions poisoned by personal rivalries among its senior officers. Nikolai Raevsky, the commander of Sixth Corps, wrote at the time that he kept as far as possible from headquarters since it was a viper’s nest of intrigue, envy, egoism and calumny.21

  Postponed for one day, the attack went ahead early in the morning of 18 October. The plan was for Count Vasili Orlov-Denisov’s cavalry to attack out of the forests on the right of the Russian line, crush Murat’s left flank and storm into his rear. On Orlov-Denisov’s left he would be supported by a column of two corps, commanded by General Baggohufvudt. Next to Baggohufvudt would advance another column, made up of Aleksandr Ostermann-Tolstoy’s Fourth Corps. Once these columns had attacked, the two corps commanded by Mikhail Miloradovich would move up to their support from the western (i.e. left) end of the Russian line. Behind Miloradovich stood the Guards and cuirassiers in reserve. The main problem with this plan was that it entailed all these columns marching through the forests at night in order to take up their positions for a dawn attack. In addition, in order to achieve surprise, the columns must make no noise and strike at first light. Overall responsibility for planning and executing the army’s movements lay with Karl von Toll and the quartermaster-general’s staff.22