1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow

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* (#ulink_184aeb7f-279a-5c4e-afe5-03776c371459) While many assumed that Napoleon’s creation of the Grand Duchy owed much to his infatuation at the time with his mistress Maria Walewska, now many in Russia suspected Alexander’s mistress Maria Antonovna Naryshkina, also a Pole, of exercising a similar influence.

* (#ulink_3147cb10-8f1a-56e1-aa94-117318456131) It is true that some teachers at Russian universities did use German or Latin.

† (#ulink_3e7aaaa4-07a9-560e-84c8-179a7385ca28) According to some sources, almost certainly apocryphal, even Captain Bonaparte applied for a post in the Russian army in 1795.

‡ (#ulink_7f4be9d2-09de-5c19-a43f-a5a80bab3ffd) Martinists were followers of the illuminist philosopher and mystic Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, whose obscure writings had a surprisingly wide influence.

* (#ulink_5da57a94-30f4-54cd-8be1-51f404cb08e7) In February a similar plan was submitted by General Bennigsen, while Generals Bagration, Württemberg, d’Allonville and Saint Priest also contributed theirs.

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On the evening of 25 March 1811, as he was scouring the night sky from his makeshift observatory in Viviers, Honoré Flaugergues discovered a comet in the now defunct constellation of Argo Navis. He saw it again the following day and began to track its progress. The comet was low in the south and was moving northward and brightening. On 11 April it was spotted by Jean Louis Pons in Marseille, and on 12 May by William J. Burchell in Cape Town. The comet soon became visible to the naked eye, and by the late autumn it lit up the night sky from Lisbon to Moscow. People gazed up at it, some with interest, many more with a sense of foreboding.

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This seemed to increase the further east one went in Europe. ‘As they contemplated the brilliant comet of 1811,’ recalled a parish priest there, ‘the people of Lithuania prepared themselves for some extraordinary event.’ Another inhabitant of the province never forgot how everyone got up from dinner and went out to gaze on the comet and then talk of ‘famine, fire, war and bloodshed’. In Russia, many linked the comet to a plague of fires which swept the land that summer and autumn, and a blind terror gripped them as they looked on it. ‘I remember fixing a long look on it on an autumn moonless night, and I was struck with childlike fear,’ wrote the son of a Russian landowner. ‘Its long, bright tail, which seemed to wave with the movement of the wind and to leap from time to time, filled me with such horror, that in the days that followed I did not look up at the sky at night, until the comet had disappeared.’

In St Petersburg, Tsar Alexander himself became fascinated by the phenomenon, and discussed it with John Quincy Adams, then American ambassador at his court. He claimed to be interested only in the scientific aspects of the comet, and made fun of all those superstitious souls who saw in it a harbinger of catastrophe and war.

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But he was either being disingenuous or he was deluding himself, for the machinery of war had already clanged into gear, and its wheels were by now turning with such momentum that it would have taken a complete climbdown on the part of Napoleon or himself to stop them. Observing events from Vienna, Metternich was in no doubt that ‘the supreme struggle’ between the ancien régime and what he termed Napoleon’s revolutionary designs was now imminent. ‘Whether he triumphs or succumbs, in either case the situation in Europe will never be the same again,’ he wrote to his imperial master on 28 December 1811. ‘This terrible moment has unfortunately been brought on us by the unpardonable conduct of Russia.’

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‘I am far from having lost hope of a peaceful settlement,’ Napoleon wrote to his brother Jérôme on 27 January 1812. ‘But as they have adopted towards me the unfortunate procedure of negotiating at the head of a strong and numerous army, my honour demands that I too negotiate at the head of a strong and numerous army. I do not wish to open the hostilities, but I wish to put myself in a position to repulse them.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He therefore needed to field an army vast enough to intimidate Alexander or, failing that, to force him into submission with a rapid and shattering blow. There was an element of haste involved, as he had to count with the possibility of a Russian first strike at any moment. Fortunately, he was not starting from scratch.

Following the treaty of Tilsit, a body of French troops remained in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw while the local forces were being organised, along with garrisons in key fortresses in Prussia such as Danzig, Glogau, Stettin and Küstrin. After the 1809 war with Austria, Napoleon left further garrisons at Düsseldorf, Hanau, Fulda, Hanover, Magdeburg, Bayreuth, Salzburg and Ratisbon. In May 1810 he strengthened all the forces on German soil and organised them into the Armée d’Allemagne, under Marshal Davout. In the autumn of 1810, following the Russian troop build-up along the border of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Napoleon reinforced this further. He also began moving units stationed in France closer to Germany, concentrating his artillery parks at Strasbourg, Metz, Wesel and La Fère, and withdrawing selected units from Spain.

In the spring of 1811, fearing a Russian invasion of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Napoleon ordered the Poles to mobilise 50,000 men. He had already ordered his stepson Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, to place the Army of Italy on a war footing. Now he instructed his brother Jérôme and other allied monarchs to mobilise the armies of Westphalia, Württemberg, Bavaria, Baden and the lesser German states. He meant to put together a force of half a million men with which to confront Russia. He began calling up men in France on a massive scale, and gendarmes combed the countryside for the tens of thousands of deserters who regularly sneaked away from the colours and went to ground. They would be rounded up and fed back into the army, along with the new recruits.

The French army was organised in divisions, which were usually made up of four regiments. A regiment of foot normally consisted of about 3800 men, with a hundred officers. It had up to five battalions, one of which was always at the depot, and these battalions consisted of six companies each, of which one would be a company of grenadiers, one of voltigeurs (skirmishers) and four of fusiliers. A company was supposed to number 140 men, including two drummer boys, and was commanded by one captain, one lieutenant, one sub-lieutenant, a sergeant major and a dozen other sergeants and corporals. To accommodate the new influx, Napoleon added a fifth and then a sixth battalion to existing regiments. The recruits were spread through the old battalions as well as the new ones, which were fortified with a sprinkling of veterans.

Napoleon attended personally to every detail. His correspondence in these matters reveals a staggering degree of familiarity with every brigade, regiment and battalion, where they were stationed, where they were due to move to, who commanded them, how many reinforcements they needed, where these could be drawn from, and how soon they could be made available. No detail was too insignificant for him. He attended to lettering on standards and badges, to the quality and calibre of arms and equipment, to numbers of horses and types of supply wagon required. To deal with the many rivers he would need to negotiate, he formed a bridging train equipped with pontoon boats and other necessaries at Danzig.

Curiously enough, the one thing he paid no attention to, now or at any stage in his military career, was the army’s basic weaponry. The artillery still used the Gribeauval gun and gun carriage, designed fifty years before, while the footsoldier’s weapon was a muzzle-loading flintlock musket of a design that had remained virtually unchanged for a hundred years. It was an extremely primitive instrument. To load it, a soldier would take a cartridge, consisting of a paper cylinder containing a measure of powder and a lead ball. He would bite off the end of the cartridge, keeping the ball in his mouth, sprinkle a little of the powder in the priming pan, and close the flap; he would then pour the remainder of the powder down the barrel, spit the ball in after it, screw up the paper into a wad, and ram the whole lot down to the bottom of the barrel with his ramrod. A trained soldier could reload and be ready to fire in one and a half minutes.

The musket was notoriously inaccurate even at short range and had a number of faults which could be dangerous. The black powder in the cartridges fouled the inside of the barrel, so that after a dozen or so shots it became increasingly difficult to ram anything down it, while the progress of the bullet being fired was also slowed. The powder in the pan might ignite, producing the usual plume of smoke, but the charge in the barrel might not go off – the proverbial ‘flash in the pan’. In the din of battle, the soldier might not register that his charge had not gone off, and set about loading up with another cartridge. If the first one then went off, the barrel was likely to explode in his face. But that was considered just another of the hazards of war. Footsoldiers were expendable, and there were always plenty more where they came from.

The relentless build-up of forces continued through the autumn and winter of 1811 and into the spring of 1812. The twenty-year-old son of a wine-grower in Burgundy presented himself at seven o’clock on the morning of 3 January 1812 at the Préfecture in Lyon, and a couple of days later he was in the barracks of the 17th Light Infantry at Strasbourg. ‘The very morning after our arrival, we were uniformed and armed, and, without giving us time to breathe, the corporals set about inculcating in us the principles of our new trade,’ he remembered. ‘They were in a hurry …’

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Raising the troops was only part of the task: the men had to be fed, clothed and armed. On campaign, the French soldier was supposed to receive a daily ration of: 550 grams of biscuit, either thirty grams of rice or sixty grams of dried vegetables, 240 grams of meat or two hundred grams of salt beef and lard, some salt, a quarter of a litre of wine, a sixth of a litre of brandy and, in hot weather, a shot of vinegar. By January 1812 Napoleon had amassed fifty-day supplies of biscuit, flour, salted meat and dried vegetables for 400,000 men and forage for 50,000 horses at Danzig. This was on top of the million rations stored at Stettin and Küstrin.

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The enterprise also required the provision of hundreds of thousands of items of clothing, of boots of various kinds, and of small arms. It entailed the purchase of tens of thousands of horses for the cavalry, which had to be trained to carry a heavily armed rider and respond to his intentions as he wielded his sword, lance or carbine. They also had to be habituated to the roar of cannon and the clash of arms, by being led and then ridden, again and again, towards lines of men shouting, banging cooking pots and letting off guns in their direction, and to be rewarded each time with a carrot.

Napoleon prepared massive supplies of ammunition, setting up depots at Magdeburg, Danzig, Küstrin, Glogau and Stettin. By May 1812 he would have amassed 761,801 rounds of ammunition for his field artillery – over a thousand rounds per gun for some calibres of the more than eight hundred cannon he was putting into the field. This did not include the siege train of heavy guns which he had built up there so as to be able to reduce enemy fortresses. Such figures do not compare at all badly with the preparations made by a highly industrialised imperial Germany a hundred years later.

As he was expecting Russia to launch her attack at any moment, his first preoccupation was to secure the line of the Vistula and strengthen the garrisons of the fortresses at Modlin, Torun and Zamosc. This would allow his main forces to concentrate in the first couple of months of 1812. He hoped to have over 400,000 men in the area of northern Germany and Poland by the middle of March, which would allow him to deal with any Russian strike, even if it were accompanied by outbreaks of German national insurrection.

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The situation in Germany had been growing increasingly tense for some time, and patriots watched the preparations for war on both sides with mounting excitement. The Russian embassy in Vienna was orchestrating agitation throughout Germany. Colonel Chernyshev was recruiting disaffected Prussian officers and working on a plan to found a German Legion in Russia which, in the event of war, would enlist all prisoners of German nationality taken from Napoleon. He was also investigating the possibility of creating a fifth column of sympathisers all over Germany who would be ready to rise up when a Russian army marched in.

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Reports from French military commanders and diplomatic agents in Germany were full of stories of plots by secret societies, and warned Napoleon that the hardships imposed by the Continental System were driving people to desperation. In the autumn of 1811 Prussia appeared to be on the brink of revolt, with the King and his pro-French cabinet barely able to control the nationalists. The Prussian army was surreptitiously mobilising its reserves. In Westphalia, Jérôme was growing nervous. ‘The ferment has reached the highest degree, and the wildest hopes are fostered and cherished with enthusiasm,’ he reported to Napoleon on 5 December 1811. ‘People are quoting the example of Spain, and if it comes to war, all the lands lying between the Rhine and the Oder will be embraced by a vast and active insurrection.’ Napoleon did not believe the Germans had the stomach for popular insurrection and thought the secret societies ridiculous. But he instructed Davout to be ready to march on Berlin at a moment’s notice in order to disarm the Prussian army.

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The army Napoleon was assembling would be the largest the world had ever seen.

(#ulink_a0679274-8f30-58e7-8b63-33a1adf89f5e) It included soldiers from almost every nation of Europe. Its main body was made up of Frenchmen, Belgians, Dutchmen, Italians and Swiss from the areas incorporated into the Empire. This was supplemented by contingents from every vassal or allied state. The presence of such a wide variety of nationalities inevitably raised questions of cohesion, quite apart from motivation or loyalty. But with the exception of the Polish and the Austrian corps, all the contingents were commanded by French generals. And most were imbued with French military culture, and fortified by the reputation of French arms. ‘The belief that they were invincible made them invincible, just as the belief that they were sure to be beaten in the end paralysed the enemy’s spirits and efforts,’ in the words of Karl von Funck, a German officer attached to the French imperial staff.

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‘Three-quarters of the nations which were about to take part in the struggle had interests diametrically opposed to those which had decided the opening of hostilities,’ wrote Lieutenant Count von Wedel, a German serving in the 9th Polish Lancers. ‘There were many who in their heart of hearts wished the Russians success, and yet at the moment of danger, all fought as though they had been defending their own homes.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The urge to emulate was strong, and there was the magic presence of Napoleon.

‘Anyone who was not alive in the time of Napoleon cannot imagine the extent of the moral ascendancy he exerted over the minds of his contemporaries,’ wrote a Russian officer, adding that every soldier, whatever side he was on, instinctively conjured a sense of limitless power at the very mention of his name. Wedel agreed. ‘Whatever their personal feelings towards the Emperor may have been, there was nobody who did not see in him the greatest and most able of all generals, and who did not experience a feeling of confidence in his talents and the value of his judgement … The aura of his greatness subjugated me as well, and, giving way to enthusiasm and admiration, I, like the others, shouted "Vive l’Empereur!"’

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The largest non-French contingent were the Poles, who numbered some 95,000. Many of them had been fighting under French colours since the late 1790s and were enthusiastic allies. In 1807 Napoleon created an élite regiment of Polish Chevau-Légers in the Imperial Guard as a token of how much he valued his Polish troops. In the same year the Grand Duchy of Warsaw began recruiting its own army, and raised the Legion of the Vistula, an auxiliary corps which was to fight for the French. These troops had distinguished themselves in various theatres, and had no difficulty in operating alongside the French. The only problem was that Napoleon’s insistence on the Grand Duchy raising more troops than such a small state could support, either in human or economic terms, meant that the barrel had been scraped. Men who were physically unfit had been drafted, uniforms had been skimped on, training was inadequate, and nobody was paid after June 1812. But at least their loyalty to the cause and devotion to Napoleon were never in question.

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The next largest contingent were the Italians, grouped in the Army of Italy, commanded by Prince Eugène, and the Neapolitan army of Joachim Murat. The Army of Italy was a fine force of 45,000 – 25,000 Italians organised on French lines, highly disciplined, with a strong esprit de corps, particularly in units such as the Royal Guard, and 20,000 Frenchmen, many of them from Savoy and Provence, stationed in Italy. It was also one of the more motivated contingents, inspired by national pride. As he looked at all the nationalities making up the Grande Armée, one young Italian officer’s mind drifted to the days of ancient Rome, whose legions were equally made up of disparate elements, and he felt a great sense of pride at being part of it.

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The same could not be said for the Neapolitan contingent. This was a largely worthless force, poorly trained and undermined by the existence of numerous rival secret societies. Whenever the troops were moved out of barracks they deserted in large numbers and formed bands of brigands who would terrorise the surrounding countryside.

Most of the German troops in the Grande Armée were of high quality. The 24,000 Bavarians were Napoleon’s most reliable allies, having fought under his banner several times. The smaller Badenese forces, organised along French lines, had taken part in the campaign of 1805 against Austria and Russia, so they fitted relatively well into the composite army. The 20,000-strong Saxon contingent was disciplined and also marched quite comfortably in the ranks of the Grande Armée, to which it brought some of the best cavalry.

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The 17,000 men of the Westphalian contingent did not, according to Captain Johann von Borcke from Cassel, contain many Napoleonic enthusiasts. The Principal Minister of Westphalia reported that the men were loyal, but hated the idea of being sent far away more than they feared being killed. ‘An active resistance on their part seems impossible to me,’ he wrote to Maret in January 1812, ‘but the weight of their inertia could, in the first stages, cause trouble, mainly through large-scale desertion.’