Russia Against Napoleon

by Dominic Lieven

  Numerous defeats bred pessimism and aversion to risk among some Austrians, above all in Francis II, on whom in the last resort all decisions on war and peace depended. Suspicion of Russia ran deep, with traditional fears of Russian power and unpredictability exacerbated by the fact that the Austrians had intercepted part of Alexander’s correspondence with Prince Adam Czartoryski, his chief confidant on Polish affairs, and were aware of the gist of his plans for Poland. Russian and Prussian appeals to German nationalism, on occasion calling for the overthrow of princes who supported Napoleon, infuriated the Austrians, partly for fear of chaos and partly because they alienated the Confederation of the Rhine monarchs whom Vienna was trying to woo. Baron vom Stein, Alexander’s chief adviser on German affairs, was a particular Austrian bugbear.

  From March 1813, however, Alexander increasingly bowed to Austrian wishes in this matter, stopping inflammatory proclamations by his generals and conceding to Austria the lead in all matters to do with Bavaria, Württemberg and southern Germany. Most importantly, the great majority of the Austrian political and military elite deeply resented the manner in which Napoleon had reduced Austria to the status of a second-rate power, annexing her territory and removing her influence from Germany and Italy. Given a good opportunity to reverse this process and restore a genuine European balance of power, most members of the Austrian elite would take it, by peaceful means if possible but running the risks inherent in war if necessary. The Austrian foreign minister, Count Clemens von Metternich, shared this mainstream viewpoint.29

  In January 1813 Metternich’s immediate priority was to free Austria from the French alliance and take up the role of neutral mediator without provoking Napoleon more than necessary in doing so. One aspect of this policy was to remove Schwarzenberg’s corps from the Grande Armée and get it back safely over the Austrian border. Another was to work out peace terms on the basis of which Austria could mediate. Austria’s goal was a European system in which Russia and France balanced each other, with Austria and Prussia restored to their previous strength and able to guarantee the independence of Germany. The Austrians also deeply wanted and needed a long and stable peace.30 To have any chance of success in its mediation, Metternich realized that Austria would need to rebuild its army so that it could threaten decisive intervention in the war. The problem here was that military expenditure had been cut savagely after the defeat of 1809 and the state bankruptcy of 1811. Many infantry battalions were mere skeletons; horses and equipment were in very short supply; most of the arms works had been closed. The finance ministry conducted a stubborn rearguard action on military expenditure in 1813, with money being disbursed very slowly even after budgets had been agreed. In addition, arms and uniforms workshops could not be re-created overnight and no sane manufacturer would give the Austrian government credit. Metternich also miscalculated how much time he had at his disposal. In early February he was convinced that Napoleon could not possibly have a large army in the field before the end of June. On 30 May he confessed his astonishment at ‘the incredible speed with which Napoleon had re-created an army’. For all his great diplomatic skill, the speed and violence of Napoleonic warfare was alien to Metternich and could easily upset all his calculations. As with Prussia in 1805, Austria in 1813 dragged out negotiations with both warring camps before finally committing itself to the allies. Prussian policy had then been totally confounded by the disaster at Austerlitz. The same came near to happening to the Austrians in May 1813.31

  Amidst all the tensions and uncertainties of Russo-Austrian relations in the spring and summer of 1813 it helped enormously that Nesselrode was in frequent and secret correspondence with Friedrich von Gentz, one of the leading intellectuals of the counter-revolution in Vienna and Metternich’s closest confidant. Gentz was exceptionally well informed about Metternich’s own thinking and about the opinions and conflicts within Austrian ruling circles. Nesselrode had known Gentz for years and rightly trusted his deep commitment to the allied cause. Gentz could put in a good word for the allies in Metternich’s ear. More importantly, he could explain to Nesselrode the severe constraints within which the foreign minister was operating, shackled as he was not just by the caution of Francis II and some of his advisers, but also by the deep and genuine difficulties facing Austrian rearmament.32

  In comparison to the tortuous diplomacy conducted by Metternich in the first half of 1813, the movements of Schwarzenberg’s observation corps are relatively easy to follow. In January 1813 Schwarzenberg’s men stood directly in the path of a Russian advance through Warsaw and central Poland. As was the case with Yorck’s corps at the other end of Napoleon’s line, the 25,000 relatively fresh Austrian troops would have been a major obstacle to Kutuzov’s overstretched army had it chosen to bar his way. But the Austrians had no interest in defending the Duchy of Warsaw and actually welcomed the Russian advance towards central Europe as a means of weakening and balancing Napoleon’s power. They also had no wish to see their best troops sacrificed in battles with the Russian forces.

  Ignoring French orders to cover Warsaw and retreat westwards, Schwarzenberg, on his government’s instructions, concluded a secret agreement with the Russians to retreat south-westwards towards Cracow and Austrian Galicia. An elaborate charade was maintained with the Russians so that Vienna could claim that its troops’ retreat had been necessitated by enemy outflanking movements. The only major force which now remained to cover central Poland was General Reynier’s Saxon corps. This was overtaken and heavily defeated by Kutuzov’s advance guard at Kalicz on 13 February 1813. The result of the Austrian retreat to the southwest was that by the end of February the whole of the Duchy of Warsaw had fallen into Russian hands with the exception of a handful of French fortresses and a small strip of land around Cracow.33

  In the first week of March, with Berlin and all Prussia liberated, and with Miloradovich’s and Wintzengerode’s corps of Kutuzov’s army positioned on the Polish border with Prussian Silesia, the first phase of the spring 1813 campaign was over. For the remainder of the month most of the Russian army was in quarters, resting after the winter campaign and attempting to feed itself and its horses, and to get its uniforms, muskets and equipment into some kind of order. Kutuzov issued detailed instructions to commanding officers about how to utilize this rest-period and they did their best to comply. While quartered near Kalicz, for example, the Lithuania (Litovsky) Guards Regiment trained every morning. All its muskets were repaired by skilled private craftsmen under the eagle eyes of the regiment’s NCOs. Its battered wagons were also repaired. A fifteen-day supply of flour was baked into bread and biscuit against future emergencies. The regiment could not replenish its ammunition because the ammunition parks were still stuck along the army’s line of communication, but each company built a Russian bath-house for itself. Material arrived for new uniforms and tailors’ shops were immediately set up to turn this into uniforms.34

  Although the Lithuania Guards Regiment enjoyed a rest in these weeks it received almost no reinforcements. This was true of almost all units in Kutuzov’s and Wittgenstein’s armies. The new reserve forces which had formed in Russia over the winter had been summoned to the front but they would not arrive until late May at the earliest. A handful of men dribbled back to the ranks from hospital or detached duties but they merely filled the gaps left by men falling out through sickness or dispatched from the regiments on essential tasks. At Kalicz, the Lithuania Guards had 38 officers and 810 men in the ranks but the Guards were usually far stronger than the bulk of the army. The Kexholm Regiment, for example, was down to just 408 men in mid-March.35

  As was typical of Osten-Sacken’s corps operating in southwest Poland, the Iaroslavl Regiment of Johann Lieven’s 10th Infantry Division was much stronger than most of the units in Kutuzov’s army. Even it, however, in mid-March had 5 officers and 170 men in hospital, and 14 officers and 129 men on detached duties. The latter included guarding the regimental baggage, helping the formation of reserves, escorting prisoners of war
, collecting uniforms and equipment from the rear, and supervising the collection and dispatch of convalescents from hospitals. These detachments always required a disproportionate number of officers and were the inevitable consequence of a year’s campaigning which had now resulted in lines of communication stretching back for hundreds of kilometres. But they meant that when the campaign’s second phase began in April and the Russian forces advanced to meet Napoleon’s main army they would do so in a thoroughly reduced, even in some cases skeletal, condition.36

  While much of the Russian army was resting in March 1813 its light forces were gaining new laurels. Among their new exploits was a brilliant little victory near Lüneburg on 2 April where Chernyshev’s and Dornberg’s Russian ‘flying columns’ united to annihilate a French division under General Morand.

  The most spectacular exploit of the light forces in March and April was, however, Tettenborn’s seizure of Hamburg and Lübeck, amidst a popular insurrection against the French. In this region, whose prosperity depended on overseas trade, the Continental System and Napoleon’s empire were deeply hated. The arrival of Tettenborn’s cavalry and Cossacks was greeted with ecstasy by the population. Already on 31 January Tettenborn had written to Alexander to say that French rule was detested in northwest Germany and ‘I am firmly convinced that we could quickly create a huge army there’. Now his predictions appeared to be coming true and his reports to Wittgenstein bubbled over with excitement and enthusiasm. On 21 March, for example, he reported that he expected to be able to form a large infantry force from local volunteers. Two days later he added that the formation of volunteer units was progressing ‘with astonishing success’.37

  In time unpleasant realities began to undermine the enthusiasm of this German patriot. The good burghers of Hamburg were not, as he had hoped, the German equivalents of the Spanish population of Saragossa, willing to see their houses destroyed over their heads and to fight in the ruins against French attempts to take their city. After initial enthusiasm, volunteering fell away sharply. Greatly outnumbered in Saxony by Napoleon, allied headquarters could spare no regular Russian or Prussian forces to support Tettenborn. The last hope of saving Hamburg from Marshal Davout’s counter-offensive rested with Bernadotte’s Swedish corps, whose first units began to disembark in Stralsund from 18 March. When Bernadotte refused to come to Hamburg’s rescue, however, the city’s cause was lost and Tettenborn evacuated his great prize on 30 May.

  The circumstances in which Hamburg fell were the first act in the ‘Black Legend’ created by German nationalists against Bernadotte. Many further acts followed in 1813. It was whispered against him that he had no intention of fighting the French seriously since he wished to win their sympathy and replace Napoleon on France’s throne. More realistically, Bernadotte was accused of caring nothing for the allied cause and of preserving his Swedish troops for the only war that mattered to him, which was the conquest of Norway from the Danes. The latter accusation had some force and Bernadotte, who infuriated both French and German nationalists, traditionally had a very bad press. But even one of his greatest critics, Sir Charles Stewart, who was the British envoy to Prussia, wrote in his memoirs that Bernadotte was correct not to commit Swedish forces to Hamburg.38

  Bernadotte himself explained his actions to Alexander’s envoys, generals Peter van Suchtelen and Charles-André Pozzo di Borgo. He stated that half of his troops and much of his baggage had not arrived due to contrary winds when the appeal from Hamburg came. His outnumbered men would have faced Davout to their front with hostile Danish forces in their rear. Acknowledging the seriousness of Hamburg’s loss, Bernadotte argued that

  despite all the misfortunes which this loss can bring, the defeat of the Swedish army would be a thousand times worse, and Hamburg would in that event be occupied for certain and the Danes would reunite with the French. Instead of this, I am concentrating my forces, I am organizing my troops and am receiving reinforcements from Sweden every day – and thereby I am making the French feel my presence and will stop them crossing the Elbe unless they do this in too great force.39

  Though a big disappointment to German patriots, the Hamburg operation actually remained a great success from the point of view of allied headquarters. At the cost of a relative handful of Cossacks and cavalry, Napoleon’s best marshal, Davout, and roughly 40,000 French troops were occupied in what was a strategic backwater at a time when their presence on the Saxon battlefields could have made a decisive difference. In addition, the chaos encouraged in north-western Germany by Tettenborn, Chernyshev and other ‘partisan’ leaders totally disrupted the horse-fairs which traditionally occurred in the region at this time. For the French this was a serious matter. The biggest headache faced by Napoleon as he strove to re-create the Grande Armée was the shortage of cavalry; 175,000 horses had been lost in Russia and this proved to be a more serious matter than the lost manpower. In 1813 ‘France was so poor in horses’ (according to a nineteenth-century French expert) that even requisitioning private horses for the cavalry and other emergency measures ‘could only provide 29,000 horses and even they were not in a state to enter military service immediately’. The Polish and north-east German studs were lost to Napoleon, and efforts to buy from the Austrians were rejected. The wrecking of the horse-fairs in north-western Germany was an additional blow, which further delayed the mounting and training of the French cavalry. Many thousands of French cavalrymen remained without horses in the spring 1813 campaign, and lack of cavalry very seriously undermined Napoleon’s operations.40

  Apart from the cavalry, however, Napoleon’s efforts rapidly to rebuild his armies in the winter of 1812–13 were a triumphant success. The nature of this new Grande Armée is sometimes misunderstood. Contrary to legend, it was in reality by no means just a mélange of the 25,000 men who had crawled back across the Neman in December 1812 and a horde of ‘Marie Louises’, in other words young conscripts from the classes of 1813 and 1814. Even as early as January 1813 some fresh troops were available to reinforce Eugène’s remnant of the old Grande Armée: above all, these were the 27,000 men of Grenier and Lagrange’s divisions, which had never been committed to the Russian campaign. In addition, we have already encountered the French garrisons in Prussia which frightened Frederick William III in the winter of 1812–13.

  Armies on campaign usually leave behind some sort of cadre in depots or along the lines of communication, from which their regiments can if necessary be reconstituted. For example, Napoleon’s Guards in theory numbered 56,000 men on the eve of the 1812 campaign. The Guards units which entered Russia nominally comprised 38,000 men and had 27,000 actually present in the ranks when they crossed the Neman. The Young Guard regiments which invaded Russia were almost wiped out but two Young Guard battalions had remained in Paris in 1812, and two more in Germany. Around them and the four full Young Guard regiments in Spain a formidable new force could be created.41

  Within France there were the reserve battalions of the regiments serving in Spain and in the farther-flung areas of the empire. In his study of the Grande Armée in 1813, Camille Rousset mentions them but gives no figure for the men they sent to it. The Prussian general staff history of the campaign reckons perhaps 10,000. French and Prussian sources also differ as to how many men were withdrawn from Spain. The smallest figure is 20,000 but all sources agree that the men from Spain were the elite of the troops deployed there. On top of this there were 12,000 good soldiers of the naval artillery stationed in France’s ports and now incorporated into the new Grande Armée. Even the first wave of recruits, the 75,000 so-called cohorts, had already been under arms for nine months by the beginning of 1813. It was around this relatively large cadre that the true ‘Marie Louises’ were formed. These young men usually lacked neither courage nor loyalty: their great problem was endurance when faced by the gruelling demands of Napoleonic campaigning. Nevertheless, as it concentrated near the river Main Napoleon’s new army was an impressive force. Initially, its more than 200,000 men faced barely 110,
000 allied soldiers. If the Russians and Prussians had considerably more veterans, the French had Napoleon to even this balance.42

  While Napoleon was mobilizing and concentrating his new armies Kutuzov was at headquarters in Kalicz, contemplating competing strategic options. Immediately after the signing of the Russo-Prussian alliance on 28 February Lieutenant-General Gerhard von Scharnhorst arrived at Russian headquarters in Kalicz to coordinate planning for the forthcoming campaign. There was no doubt, however, either that Russia was the senior partner in the alliance or that Kutuzov, field-marshal and commander-in-chief, would have the decisive say in strategy. Both at the time and subsequently Kutuzov was criticized from two diametrically opposed points of view.

  One school of thought argued that the allied forces ought to have advanced decisively across Germany in March and early April 1813. Some of the Prussian generals and some later German historians took the lead here but Wittgenstein was also anxious to pursue Viceroy Eugène over the Elbe. Both those like Wittgenstein, who wished to attack Eugène at Magdeburg, and those who wanted to strike further south to disrupt Napoleon’s planned offensive, believed this would allow the allies to mobilize powerful support from the German peoples and perhaps German princes. The opposite school of thought, almost exclusively Russian, sometimes blamed Kutuzov for having advanced so far from his base in Russia, and opposed any plan to cross the Elbe into the Saxon heartland until Russian reinforcements arrived.43