Once again, the Prussians found themselves in danger of being ground under the wheels of great-power politics. Frederick William and his advisers – Hardenberg foremost among them – displayed the usual timidity and caution. The rearmament process that had been launched in the early summer was impossible to hide from the French. In August 1811, Napoleon demanded an explanation. Dissatisfied with Hardenberg’s answer, he issued an ultimatum warning that if rearmament activity did not cease forthwith, the French ambassador would be withdrawn from Berlin and replaced by Marshal Davout at the head of his army. This announcement was greeted with consternation in Berlin. Gneisenau objected that to comply with such outright bullying would be political suicide, but Frederick William overruled him and orders went out that the recruitment drive and fortification works were to be stopped. There were also loud protests from the commanding officer of the Kolberg fortress, General Blücher, who would later play a key role in the campaigns against France. When Blücher urged that the king resist the French orders and remove himself from Berlin, he was recalled from his command and replaced by Tauentzien, a general acceptable to Napoleon.
The final humiliation came in the form of the offensive alliance treaty imposed by Napoleon on 24 February 1812. The Prussians undertook to quarter and supply the Grand Army as it tramped eastwards through Prussia on its way to invade Russia, to open all their munitions stores and fortresses to the French command and to provide Napoleon with an auxiliary corps of 12,000 men. This ‘agreement’ was extorted from Berlin in a manner that recalled the treaty negotiations of the Thirty Years War. Napoleon began by offering Krusemarck, the Prussian ambassador at the imperial headquarters, the choice of having the Grand Army enter Prussia as a friend or as a foe. In desperation, the ambassador provisionally accepted all conditions and forwarded the document to Berlin for ratification. But the French delayed the departure of the courier bearing the text, so that by the time it reached Frederick William a French army corps was already approaching the Prussian capital.
Prussia was now a mere instrument of Napoleon’s military strategy, on a par with the German satellite states of the Rhenish Confederation. For those patriotic reformers who had striven so hard to prepare Prussia for the coming struggle with Napoleon, this was the ultimate disappointment. A group of prominent senior officials resigned from office in disgust. These included the sometime chief of police in Berlin, Justus Gruner, who made his way to Prague, where he joined a network of patriots dedicated to overthrowing the French through insurrection and sabotage (he was arrested by the Austrian government – also allied with France – in August). Scharnhorst, the driving engine behind the military reforms, went into ‘inner exile’, disappearing entirely from public life. Three of the most talented military innovators, Boyen, Gneisenau and Clausewitz, broke ranks with their colleagues and entered the service of the Tsar in the belief that only Russia now possessed the potential to break Napoleon’s power. Here they were able to reconnect with Stein, who, having spent a period in Austrian exile, joined the imperial Russian headquarters in June 1812 at the express invitation of Tsar Alexander.
From March onward, the men of the Grand Army tramped through the Neumark, Pomerania, West and East Prussia, making their way eastwards to their assembly points. By June 1812, some 300,000 men – French, Germans, Italians, Dutch, Walloons and others – were gathered in East Prussia. It soon became clear that the provincial administration was in no position to coordinate the provisioning of this vast mass of troops. The previous year’s harvest had been poor and grain supplies were quickly depleted. Hans Jakob von Auerswald, provincial president of West and East Prussia, reported in April that the farm animals in East and West Prussia were dying of hunger, the roads were strewn with dead horses, and there was no seed corn left. The provincial government’s provisioning apparatus soon broke down under the pressure, and individual commanders simply ordered their troops to carry out independent requisitioning. It was said that those who still owned draft animals ploughed and sowed at night, so as not to see their last horse or ox carted off. Others hid their horses in the forest, though the French soon got wise to this practice and began combing the woods for concealed animals. Under these conditions, discipline rapidly broke down and there were numerous reports of excesses by the troops, especially extortion, plundering and beatings. One report from a senior official spoke of devastation ‘even worse than in the Thirty Years War’. When no horses were to be had, the French commanders forced peasants into the harness. The average East Prussian farmer, Auerswald reported in August, found it impossible to understand how he could be so mistreated by the allies of his king; indeed it was said the French behaved themselves worse as ‘friends’ in 1812 than they had as enemies in 1807. In the Lithuanian areas on the eastern margins of the province, the summer brought famine and the inevitable rise in deaths among children.23 In the memorable words of the Hanoverian diplomat Ludwig Ompteda, the French had left the inhabitants of Prussia with ‘nothing but eyes to weep with in their misery’.24
Throughout the Prussian lands, the mood gradually shifted from resentment to a simmering hatred of the Napoleonic forces. Vague early rumours of French setbacks in Russia were greeted with excitement and heartfelt schadenfreude. The first sketchy reports of the burning of Moscow (razed by the Russians to deny Napoleon winter quarters) arrived in the eastern provinces of Prussia at the beginning of October. There was particular interest in reports of the appalling damage done to the Grand Army by irregular forces of Cossacks and armed peasant partisans. On 12 November, when the newspapers reported the withdrawal of the Grand Army from Moscow, rumour gave way to near-certainty. The French diplomat Lecaro, stationed in Berlin, was shocked at the intensity of public emotion: in three and a half years of living in the city, he wrote, he had never seen its inhabitants display ‘such intense hatred and such open rage’. Emboldened by the recent news, the Prussian people ‘no longer concealed its desire to join with the Russians in exterminating everything that belongs to the French system’.25 On 14 December, the 29th Bulletin of the Grand Army put an end to any further doubts about the outcome of the Russian campaign. Issued in the Emperor’s name, the bulletin blamed the catastrophe on bad weather and the incompetence and treachery of others, announced that Napoleon had left his men in Russia and was hastening west towards Paris, and closed with a remarkably brutal expression of imperial self-centredness: ‘The Emperor’s health has never been better.’ In Prussia, this news triggered further incidents of unrest. In Neustadt, West Prussia, local inhabitants fought with Neapolitan troops guarding a transport of Russian prisoners of war. There were spontaneous attacks on French military personnel, especially in taverns, where patriotic passions were inflamed by the consumption of alcohol.
But no rumour and no printed report could bring home the meaning of Napoleon’s catastrophe as forcefully as the sight of the remnants of the once-invincible Grand Army limping westwards out of Russia.
The noblest figures had been bent and shrunken by frost and hunger, they were covered with blue bruises and white frost-sores. Whole limbs were frozen off and rotting [… ] they gave off a pestilential stench. [… ] Their clothing consisted of rags, straw mats, old women’s clothing, sheepskins, or whatever else they could lay hands on. None had proper headgear; instead they bound their heads with old cloth or pieces of shirt; instead of shoes and leggings, their feet were wrapped with straw, fur or rags.26
The slow-burning malice of the peasantry now ignited into acts of revenge as the rural population took matters into their own hands. ‘The lowest classes of the people,’ District President Theodor von Schön reported from Gumbinnen, ‘and especially the peasants, permit themselves in their fanaticism the most horrific mistreatment of these unhappy wretches [… ] in the villages and on the country roads, they vent all their rage against them [… ] All obedience to the officials has ceased.’27 There were reports of attacks on stragglers by armed troops of peasants.
During the month of December 1812, the Pr
ussian government, like those of the other German client states, remained committed to the French alliance. On 15 December, when Napoleon requested that the Prussians expand their military contingent, the government in Berlin meekly complied. As the year drew to an end, however, Frederick William came under increasing pressure to renege on the alliance of 24 February and join in Russia’s struggle against Napoleon. Of three memoranda submitted to him by senior officials on Christmas day 1812, two (from Knesebeck and Schöler) urged him to seize the opportunity furnished by the collapse of the Russian campaign and turn against France. The third, from privy councillor Albrecht, was more circumspect and warned the king not to underestimate Napoleon’s remaining potential.28 Only when Austria’s strength was fully engaged in the common cause should Prussia risk open aggression against the French forces.
Stolid, pessimistic and cautious as ever, the king was drawn to the third option. In an aide-mémoire written three days later, Frederick William set out his own views on Prussian foreign policy over the coming months. Its central theme was ‘live and let live’; Austria should be entrusted with the mediation of a general European peace. Napoleon must be obliged to come to an understanding with Tsar Alexander on the basis of mutual respect, after which he would be permitted to retire unmolested into France and to hold on to his annexed German lands on the left bank of the Rhine. Only if he refused to be content with this arrangement would Prussia go to war, and then only at Austria’s side. The king imagined that this might occur, if at all, in April of the coming year.29
TURNING POINT
By the time Frederick William penned these lines, events were already overtaking him. On 20 December 1812, the first advance parties of Russian troops crossed the border into East Prussia. Under the terms of the alliance with France, it now fell to the Prussian General Yorck, who had managed to extricate 14,000 of his men alive from the Russian campaign, to block the further progress of the Russians and thereby cover the retreat of what remained of the Grand Army. Yorck found himself bombarded with messages from both the French and the Russian commands. Marshal Alexandre Macdonald sent orders that he clear the way for his retreat and guard the French flank against Russian attack. From the Russian commander General Diebitsch there were entreaties to abandon Macdonald and let the Russians pass unhindered. On 25 December, Yorck and Diebitsch met and it was agreed that one of the Prussians attached to the Russian headquarters should be empowered to conduct further negotiations. The man entrusted with this task was none other than the reformer, patriot and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who had left the Prussian service earlier that year.
During a difficult discussion on the evening of 29 December, Clausewitz explained to Yorck that the Russians were close by and massed in very large numbers. Any attempt to reunite with Macdonald, whose small corps had come unstuck from the Prussian contingent, would be pointless. Impressed by the cogency of Clausewitz’s arguments and the sincerity of his conviction, Yorck finally agreed: ‘Yes. You have me. Tell General Diebitsch that we shall talk early tomorrow at Poscherun Mill [near the Lithuanian town of Tauroggen, forty kilometres east of the Prussian border] and that I have now firmly decided to separate from the French and their cause.’30 The meeting was fixed for the next morning (30 December) at eight o’clock. Under the terms of the agreement drawn up there, known as the Convention of Tauroggen, Yorck undertook to neutralize his corps for a period of two months and allow the Russians to pass unhindered into Prussian territory.
32. Anon., Johann David Ludwig Count Yorck
It was a momentous decision. Yorck had no authorization whatsoever to countermand his government’s policy in this way.31 His defection was not merely disobedient; it was treasonable. This weighed very heavily with a man who was by background and nature a royalist and a conservative. Yorck attempted to justify his action in a remarkable letter he wrote to Frederick William on 3 January 1813:
Your Majesty knows me as a calm, cool-headed man who does not mix in politics. As long as everything went in the accustomed way, the loyal servant was bound to follow circumstances – that was his duty. But the circumstances have now brought about a new situation and duty likewise demands that this situation, which will never occur again, be exploited. I am speaking here the words of a loyal old servant; these words are almost universally the words of the Nation; a declaration from Your Majesty will breathe life and enthusiasm back into everything and we will fight like true old Prussians and the throne of Your Majesty will stand rock-solid and unshakeable for the future. [… ] I now anxiously await an advisement from Your Majesty as to whether I should now advance against the true enemy, or whether political conditions demand that Your Majesty condemn me. I await both outcomes in a spirit of loyal dedication and I swear to Your Majesty that I shall meet the bullets as calmly at the place of execution as on the field of battle.32
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this letter was the fact that it made – notwithstanding the superficial rhetoric of personal loyalty – so few concessions to the monarch’s standpoint. Instead, Yorck offered Frederick William the choice of confirming his action or condemning him to death for his disobedience. Moreover, the reference to the ‘true enemy’, as opposed to the enemy projected by Berlin’s foreign policy, made it clear that Yorck had arrogated to himself one of the constitutive attributes of sovereignty, namely the right to determine who is friend and who is foe. To make matters worse, Yorck justified this act of usurpation through an implicit appeal to the ultimate authority of the hard-pressed Prussian ‘nation’.
These were surprisingly radical words from a man who had initially kept his distance from the military reformers. In 1808–9, Yorck had been a bitter opponent of armed insurrection, on the grounds that it posed too grave a threat to the political and social order. But as the pressure for action grew, he had begun to look less coldly on the populist designs of the patriots. The more he thought over the idea of a popular uprising, he told Scharnhorst in the summer of 1811, the more ‘absolutely necessary’ it seemed to be. In a memorandum submitted to the king at the end of January 1812, he set out a plan to use tightly focused insurrections in West Prussia to tie down French divisions and undercut the momentum of the main advance.33 It is hard to imagine a better illustration of the potency of the ideas that animated the reformers than this belated conversion of a hard-boiled conservative to the cause of the nation.
By the end of the first week of February 1813, the entire province of East Prussia had slipped beyond the direct control of the Berlin government. Stein, who entered the province as a functionary of the Russian administration, saw himself as empowered to exercise direct authority in the liberated areas, and he did so with his accustomed tactlessness. Various trade restrictions associated with the Napoleonic system of continental tariffs were lifted without local consultation, and the Prussian financial administration was obliged, despite bitter protests, to accept Russian paper money at a fixed rate of exchange. Flaunting his sovereign status as ‘Plenipotentiary of the Russian Emperor’, Stein even convened the East Prussian Estates in order to deliberate on arrangements for the coming war against France. ‘Intelligence, honour, love of the fatherland, and revenge,’ he told Yorck in a letter of early February, ‘demand that we lose no time, that we call up a people’swar [… ] to break the chains of the insolent oppressor and wash away the dishonour we have suffered with the blood of his wicked bands.’34 Stein wanted Yorck to open the first meeting of the Estates with a rousing speech, but Yorck was uncomfortable with any role that would make him appear to be the agent of Russian interests. However, he did agree to attend a session if the Estates themselves formally invited him.
On 5 February, the ‘representatives of the nation’, as they were widely called at the time, congregated in the meeting hall of the House of the Provincial Estates in Königsberg. At their head sat the president, to his right seven members of the Estates Committee, flanked by the deputies of the provincial nobility, the free peasants and the cities. Almost immediat
ely, it was agreed that a delegation should be sent to invite Yorck to present his proposals to the assembly. The deputies were surely aware of the boldness of this step: by the beginning of February it was universally known that Yorck had been dismissed from office, that his arrest had been ordered and that he was out of favour with the king. The scope of the insurrection unfolding in East Prussia now widened to the point where it encompassed the political class of the province.
Yorck appeared only briefly before the assembly, urging that a committee be formed to oversee further preparations for war and closing with a characteristically pithy declaration: ‘I hope to fight the French wherever I find them. I count on everyone’s support; if their strength outweighs ours, we will know how to die with honour.’ These words were greeted with thunderous cheers and applause, but Yorck raised his hand to silence the hall, saying: ‘There is no call for that on a battlefield!’ He then turned and left. On the same evening, a committee met in Yorck’s apartment to agree the calling up of a provincial militia (Landwehr) of 20,000 men with 10,000 reserves. The exemptions allowed under the old cantonal system were abolished; all adult males up to forty-five years of age, excluding only school teachers and clergymen, were declared eligible to be called up, regardless of their social status or religion – the latter stipulation implied that Jews, for the first time, would be liable for conscription. The aim was to fill the troop quotas from volunteers in the first instance and only if this proved inadequate, to proceed to conscription by ballot. The ideal of the nation at arms rising against its foe had at last been realized. In the process, the authority of the monarchical state was almost totally displaced by the Estates, who now reactivated their traditional calling as organs of provincial governance.35
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