Baltic Mission

by Richard Woodman

  The intrigues of the Russian court will never be known, but there are several contenders for the role of, at least, accomplice. The Vorontzoff family have been closely connected with the secret, even cited as providing the spy. Leaked information may also have come from Bennigsen, and the British Foreign Office is said to have papers alleging his part in a plot to kill Alexander.

  The most intriguingly ‘useful’ fact is the existence of a letter quoted by Dr Holland Rose, dated 26 June from Memel, from an anonymous officer in the Russian service.

  The speed with which the intelligence arrived in London could have been achieved by land or sea. It was a hot summer, ‘the labourers fainting in the fields’, with little wind and an anti-cyclone over the North Sea. My preference for the frigate Antigone is obvious, but lent credence by Richard Deacon’s remark in his History of the British Secret Service that much information was gathered by cruisers of the Royal Navy. Government secrecy, of course, ensured that Antigone’s log book cannot now be found in the Public Record Office!

  Much of the credibility of the story rests on the exact nature of the ‘raft’. Lariboissière’s engineers certainly had a hand in its adaptation and there are hints of the employment of local labourers. The anonymous Russian officer, quoted by Holland Rose, calls the thing a pont volant, suggesting the use of an existing ‘flying bridge’ such as are believed to have been used for moving cattle across the lower reaches of the river. It is this supposition I have favoured in view of the period of concealment and the details claimed by the Mackenzie family.

  The free movement of strangers among the military is affirmed by Savary, Duke of Rovigo: ‘this meeting attracted visitors to Tilsit from a hundred leagues round.’ The opening exchange between Napoleon and Alexander is too widely quoted to tamper with. For, as Napoleon’s secretary Bourienne points out, the meeting at Tilsit was ‘one of the culminating points of modern history . . . the waters of the Nieman reflected the image of Napoleon at the height of his glory’. Who that reflected image concealed in the water below is here revealed as the mysterious ‘Ostroff’.

  Wilson’s presence at Eylau, the seizure by Gustavus of the Tsar’s subsidy and the loss of the arms shipment are all verifiable and the Danes have not yet forgiven us the seizure of their fleet in 1807. Morality has never been a conspicuous feature of war, and, as Fortescue says, ‘it was Denmark’s misfortune to lie between the hammer and the anvil’ while, on Britain’s part, ‘the law of self-preservation [was] cogent’. Even as the British struck, Marshal Bernadotte received Napoleon’s orders to invade Denmark. Finally, Fouché, Napoleon’s Chief of Police, says in his memoirs, ‘The success of the attack on Copenhagen was the first thing that deranged the secret article of the Treaty of Tilsit, by virtue of which the fleet of Denmark was to be put at the disposal of France . . . I had never seen Napoleon in such a transport of rage.’

  The circumstances under which Edward Drinkwater found himself in Russia are more fully explained in The Bomb Vessel.