1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow

In recent years he had made more and more references to the will of God in his letters and utterances, and he had been increasingly guided by the wish to make himself a worthy and righteous instrument of that will. ‘I have at least the consolation of having done everything that is compatible with honour to avoid this struggle,’ he had written to Catherine in February. ‘Now it is only a question of preparing for it with courage and faith in God; this faith is stronger than ever in me, and I submit with resignation to His will.’

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Nesselrode was still advising Alexander to negotiate rather than provoke a war, but Alexander seems to have ruled out negotiations entirely as an option, and he was in no mood to talk when Narbonne arrived in Vilna on 18 May.

(#litres_trial_promo) He received him and read the letter he had brought, but told him that as Napoleon had ranged the whole of Europe against Russia it was evident his intentions were hostile, and that there was therefore no point in negotiating. He reiterated that he would only consider doing so if Napoleon withdrew his troops beyond the Rhine.

‘What does the Emperor want?’ he asked Narbonne rhetorically. ‘To subject me to his interests, to force me to measures which ruin my people, and, because I refuse, he intends to make war on me, in the belief that after two or three battles and the occupation of a few provinces, perhaps even a capital, I will be obliged to ask for a peace whose conditions he will dictate. He is deluding himself!’ Then, taking a large map of his dominions, he spread it on the table and continued: ‘My dear Count, I am convinced that Napoleon is the greatest general in Europe, that his armies are the most battle-hardened, his lieutenants the bravest and the most experienced; but space is a barrier. If, after a few defeats, I retreat, sweeping along the population, if I leave it to time, to the wilderness, to the climate to defend me, I may yet have the last word over the most formidable army of modern times.’

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Although most people at Russian headquarters assumed that the only purpose of Narbonne’s mission was to spy out their dispositions and rouse local patriots to stage an uprising, Alexander invited him to attend a parade on the following day, and to dine with him afterwards. But the next day Narbonne was informed by one of Alexander’s aides-de-camp that a carriage generously provisioned for the journey back to Dresden would be waiting at his door that evening.

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* (#ulink_6473c1bb-06d0-5835-b6ef-b6e49ae9cc3f) One verst = 1060 metres, approximately five-eighths of a mile.

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Narbonne’s post-chaise, almost white from a thick coating of dust, rolled into the courtyard of the Royal Palace in Dresden on the afternoon of 26 May. He was shown upstairs and promptly summoned into the imperial presence. He gave a full account of his conversations with Alexander, laying stress on the Tsar’s determination and on his parting words. ‘Tell the Emperor that I will not be the aggressor,’ Alexander had told him. ‘He can cross the Niemen; but never will I sign a peace dictated on Russian territory.’

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It is difficult to know what Alexander expected Napoleon to make of this message. He had stipulated that he would not enter into any talks unless Napoleon evacuated all his troops from the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and Prussia, while he was himself poised with his army on the borders of those states. Napoleon had only two options: to disband his huge army and go home, exposing himself to attack as he did so, and leaving the whole of Poland and Germany open to invasion; or he could invade himself. He could only have taken Alexander’s message as a taunt, ‘a sullen challenge’ as the British historian William Hazlitt put it.

(#litres_trial_promo) But he thought it was prompted by bravado rather than conviction. He therefore sent a courier to Lauriston in St Petersburg instructing him to go to the Tsar’s headquarters at Vilna, as a last resort.

Napoleon was not afraid of war with Russia. ‘Never has an expedition against them been more certain of success,’ he said to Fain, pointing out that all his former enemies were now allied to him. It was true that he had just received a somewhat disheartening reply to his last proposal for an alliance with Sweden. But it had only been a verbal one, and he assumed that in the event of his invading Russia Sweden would be unable to resist the opportunity of recovering Finland. ‘Never again will such a favourable concourse of circumstances present itself; I feel it drawing me in, and if the Emperor Alexander persists in refusing my proposals, I shall cross the Niemen!’

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He adopted a confident, even a blustering tone. ‘Before two months are out, Alexander will sue for peace,’ he declared, ‘the great landowners will force him to.’ He brushed aside Narbonne’s warnings that this campaign would be difficult to win on account of the special nature of the nation and the terrain. ‘Barbarian peoples are simpleminded and superstitious,’ he asserted. ‘A shattering blow dealt at the heart of the empire on Moscow the great, Moscow the holy, will deliver to me in one instant that whole blind and helpless mass.’

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But his plans were still dangerously confused, as he had come no closer to defining his goals. ‘My enterprise is one of those to which patience is the key,’ he explained to Metternich. ‘The more patient will triumph. I will open the campaign by crossing the Niemen, and it will end at Smolensk and Minsk. That is where I shall stop. I will fortify those two points, and at Vilna, where I shall make my headquarters during the coming winter, I shall apply myself to the organisation of Lithuania, which is burning to be delivered from the Russian yoke. I shall wait, and we shall see which of us will grow tired first – I of making my army live at the expense of Russia, or Alexander of nourishing my army at the expense of his country. I may well myself go and spend the harshest months of the winter in Paris.’ And if Alexander did not sue for peace that year, Napoleon would mount another campaign in 1813 into the heart of the empire. ‘It is, as I have already told you, only a question of time,’ he assured Metternich.

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He seemed to produce a different plan for every interlocutor. ‘If I invade Russia, I will perhaps go as far as Moscow,’ he wrote in his instructions to one of his diplomats. ‘One or two battles will open the road for me. Moscow is the real capital of the empire. Having seized that, I will find peace there.’ He added that if the war were to drag on, he would leave the job to the Poles, reinforced by 50,000 French and a large subsidy.

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He still refused to see Alexander as an enemy to be defeated, thinking of him rather as a wayward ally. Had it not been so, he would have declared the restoration of the Kingdom of Poland with its 1772 frontiers, thereby launching a national insurrection in the rear of the Russian armies. He could also have proclaimed the liberation of the serfs in Russia, which would have ignited unrest all over the country. This would have reduced the Russian empire to such a state of chaos that Alexander would have been in no position to mount a serious defence and Napoleon could have marched his troops about the country as he chose. But he wanted to bring Alexander back to heel with as little unpleasantness as possible and a minimum of damage. ‘I will make war on Alexander in all courtesy, with two thousand guns and 500,000 soldiers, without starting an insurrection,’ he had said to Narbonne back in March.

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Narbonne and Maret repeatedly put the case for creating a strong Polish state which would become a French satellite and a bulwark against Russian expansion. Napoleon did not rule this out. He did have to keep the Poles on his side, and he needed to prime, even if he did not need to fire it, the weapon of Polish national insurrection in Russia. In a word, he had to manipulate and deceive the Poles. And in order to do this, he must send a clever man to Warsaw as an unofficial personal ambassador.

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He had originally selected Talleyrand for this purpose, but for a number of diplomatic reasons his choice now fell on the Abbé de Pradt, Archbishop of Malines, ‘a priest more ambitious than cunning, and more vain than ambitious’, as one contemporary described him. Pradt had made himself useful to Napoleon in the past, but he inspired neither confidence nor respect, and lacked the qualities necessary for the job in hand. He was described by one of the Poles with whom he would be working as ‘a nonentity, without a trace of dignity’ who loved intrigue and gave the impression that he despised Napoleon. But whether anyone else could have done a better job in the circumstances is another question. Napoleon made it clear that Pradt was to encourage the Poles to announce their intention of resurrecting a Polish state and to start a national insurrection, without committing himself or his imperial master to backing it up.

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Napoleon even gave some thought to the question of whom to put on the Polish throne if he did decide to restore the kingdom. It would be too important a place for the volatile Murat or the inexperienced Prince Eugène, both of whom believed themselves to be in line for the job. He did consider Marshal Davout, who was a good soldier and administrator, and popular with the Poles, but the example of Bernadotte raised questions as to his future loyalty. One of his brothers might be a better bet in the circumstances. ‘I’ll put Jérôme on it, I’ll create a fine kingdom for him,’ he told Caulaincourt, ‘but he must achieve something, for the Poles like glory.’ He duly put Jérôme in command of an army corps and directed him to Warsaw, where he was supposed to win the love of the Poles. Napoleon could hardly have made a worse choice.

Jérôme made a regal entry into the Polish capital and announced that he had come to spill his blood for the Polish cause in the spirit of the crusaders of old. The Poles found him overbearing and ridiculous, and it was not long before all sorts of malicious stories were circulating about him, including one that he took a bath in rum every morning and one in milk every evening. His army corps, composed of German troops, behaved abominably, as did its French commander General Vandamme, who demonstrated his contempt for the locals by, among other things, putting his muddy-booted and spurred feet up on fine silk upholstery as he lounged in Warsaw drawing rooms. The Poles longed to be rid of Jérôme and his unruly soldiers.

‘In truth, the king of Poland should have been Poniatowski,’ Napoleon admitted later, during his exile on St Helena. ‘He had every title to it and he had all the necessary talents.’ But at the time, the thought did not cross his mind, which was beset by more pressing considerations.

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His armies were now reaching their prescribed positions, and he needed to take charge. So, after thirteen days in Dresden, where he had settled nothing, he climbed into his travelling carriage, a yellow coupé drawn by six horses. His mameluke Roustam climbed onto the box next to the coachman, and Berthier installed himself inside with Napoleon.

The vehicle was fashioned to suit his every need and fitted out to allow him to make the best use of his time. It could be turned into a makeshift study, with a tabletop equipped with inkwells, paper and quills, drawers for storing papers and maps, shelves for books, and a light by which he could read at night. It could also be turned into a couchette, with a mattress on which he could stretch out, a washbasin, mirrors and soap-holders so he could attend to his toilette and waste no time on arrival, and, naturally, a chamberpot.

One of the outriders from the Chasseurs à Cheval of the Guard noted that the Emperor took a long time over his farewells to Marie-Louise, and that there were tears in his eyes as he got into the carriage. But feelings of tenderness were quickly dispelled by unpleasant realities.

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Napoleon drove through Glogau in Silesia to the Polish city of Poznan, which he entered on horseback, riding under an arch inscribed with the words Heroi Invincibili. The whole town was illuminated and festooned with flags and garlands. He reviewed units of the Legion of the Vistula fresh from Spain, but was vexed at the sight of the recruits. ‘These people are too young,’ he complained to Marshal Mortier. ‘I want people capable of standing up to hardship; young people like this only fill up the hospitals.’ It was true. Teenagers made poor soldiers, not only because they were puny and prone to exhaustion and illness, but also because they could not stand up for themselves, and were easily bullied and pushed around, which led to demoralisation.

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After criticising the recruits he attended a ball in his honour at which he made a poor impression on the inhabitants, telling them he wanted to see them booted and spurred, not in dancing pumps. But it was not the attitude of the Poles that lay at the root of Napoleon’s displeasure. On his arrival in Poznan he had sat down with the head of the commissariat, Pierre Daru, to review the provisioning of his troops, only to discover severe shortcomings. Matters only got worse as he progressed on his journey. By the time he reached Torun, he was furious. He complained bitterly to General Mathieu Dumas, Intendant General in charge of supplies, that none of his orders had been carried out.

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The supply machine he had devoted so much time and thought to had never quite materialised. ‘The means of transport, whether supplied by the military teams belonging to the army or by auxiliary means, were almost everywhere insufficient,’ admitted Dumas. ‘This immense army, which crossed the Prussian lands like a torrent, consumed all the resources of the land, and supplies from the reserve could not follow it with enough speed.’ There was a shortage of draught horses from the outset, and the consequences grew serious as the army began massing in Poland.

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The troops had already been subjected to a rude awakening. For those who had not taken part in the 1807 campaign, there was an element of surprise at the exoticism and the backwardness of many of the areas east of the Oder. They marvelled at the emptiness of the landscape and the flocks of storks. Henri Pierre Everts, a native of Rotterdam and a major in the 33rd Light Infantry regiment in Davout’s corps, could hardly believe his eyes when he beheld a Polish village for the first time. ‘I stopped in astonishment, and remained for some time sitting still on my horse observing those miserable wooden cottages of a type unknown to me, the small low church, also made of planks, and at the squalid appearance, the dirty beards and hair of the inhabitants, amongst whom the Jews seemed extraordinarily repulsive; all of this engendered some bitter reflections on the war which we were about to wage in such a country.’

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The meat and potatoes washed down with beer or wine which they had got used to on the march through France and Germany were replaced by buckwheat gruel, and the best they could find to drink was bad vodka, mead or kwas, made of fermented bread. Even these had to be purchased, mostly at inflated prices, from the Jews who swarmed round them in every town and village. Communication took place in a variety of pidgin French, German and Latin. ‘Up to that point, our march had been no more than a pleasant promenade,’ wrote a rueful Julien Combe, a lieutenant in the 8th Chasseurs à Cheval.

(#litres_trial_promo) From now on, it was to be an ordeal.

East Prussia and Poland were neither as rich nor as intensely cultivated as most of western Europe. The Continental System had diminished the amount of land under cultivation, since much of the produce had previously been exported, and had lost its markets as a result of the blockade. The traditional exports such as timber, potash, hemp and so on had also been cut off from their markets. To make matters worse, the previous year had seen a serious drought and the harvest had failed. This meant that landowners had been obliged to use up all their reserves of grain and fodder just to keep themselves and their peasants alive, so much so that there was a shortage of grain for sowing in the spring of 1812. The poorest peasants were eating bread made of acorns and birch bark, and pulling thatch off roofs in order to feed their horses and cattle.

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The need to raise an army almost twice as large as the territory and the population could realistically furnish or support put a terrible strain on the economy and the administration. The government of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw was insolvent, and no official had been paid for eight months. ‘The hardships we were suffering seemed so bad that things could not get much worse,’ wrote the wife of the Prefect of Warsaw to a friend at the end of March 1812, ‘but it turns out that things can get worse, and worse without limit.’