performance of a brilliant actor letting off steam. Alexander’s actions after Speransky’s fall betray a politician’s cool rationality. Speransky was to some extent replaced by Aleksandr Shishkov, appointed imperial secretary in the following month and largely employed to draft resounding patriotic appeals to the Russian people during the subsequent years of war. In May Fedor Rostopchin was named military governor of Moscow, with the job of administering and maintaining morale in the city which would be not just the army’s major base in the rear but also crucial to sustaining public enthusiasm for the war throughout the empire’s interior.
As regards diplomatic preparation for war, Alexander put little effort into mending fences with Britain. This partly reflected his wish to postpone the outbreak of war for as long as possible and deny Napoleon any legitimate justification for invading Russia. He also knew that the moment war began Britain would automatically become his enthusiastic ally so preparation was not necessary. In any case there was not much direct help that Britain could offer for a war fought on Russian soil, though the 101,000 muskets it provided in the winter of 1812–13 were to be very useful. In terms of indirect help, however, the British in Spain were doing far more than they had ever managed before 1808. The performance of Wellington and his troops had not just transformed perceptions of the British army and its commanders. In 1810 it had also shown how strategic retreat, scorched earth and field fortifications could exhaust and ultimately destroy a numerically superior French army. In 1812 Wellington’s great victory at Salamanca not only boosted the morale of all Napoleon’s enemies but also ensured that scores of thousands of French troops would remain tied down in the Iberian peninsula.
The key issue before 1812, however, was which way Austria and Prussia would go, but here Russian diplomacy faced a very uphill struggle. It is true that Rumiantsev, and probably Alexander, did not help matters by their stubborn determination to hang on to Moldavia and Wallachia. There were influential figures in Vienna who saw Russia as a greater threat than France because Napoleon’s empire might well prove ephemeral whereas Russia was there to stay. Probably, however, Austria would have swung into Napoleon’s camp whatever Russia did.
Francis II was embarrassed to have to own up to the existence of the Franco-Austrian military convention aimed against Russia, and all the more so because the terms of this convention had been discovered by Russian espionage in Paris. But he told the Russian minister, Count Stackelberg, that he had been forced into this convention by the ‘strict necessity’ to preserve the Austrian Empire; the same necessity, added Francis, which had led him to sacrifice his daughter to Napoleon. The basic point was that Austria had made a similar decision in 1810 to the one that Russia had made at Tilsit. Confronting Napoleon was too dangerous. Another defeat would spell the end of the Habsburgs and their empire. By sidling up to Napoleon Austria preserved its existence for better times. If the French Empire survived, so would Austria as its leading satellite. If on the contrary Napoleon’s empire disintegrated then Austria, having regained its strength, would be well placed to pick up many of the pieces. The main difference between Russia in 1809 and Austria in 1812 was that the Habsburgs were in a much weaker and more vulnerable position. For that reason the Habsburg war effort in support of Napoleon in 1812 was far more serious than the Russian campaign against Austria had been in 1809. Nevertheless the two empires did quietly maintain diplomatic relations throughout 1812 and the Austrians stuck to their promise made on the eve of the war never to increase their auxiliary corps above 30,000 men and to move their troops into Russia through the Duchy of Warsaw, keeping the Russo-Austrian border in Galicia neutralized.42
The Prussian situation was even clearer. King Frederick William loathed and feared Napoleon. All other things being equal, he would have far preferred to ally himself with Russia. But things were not equal. Prussia was surrounded by French troops who could overrun the country long before Russian help could arrive from the other side of the river Neman. In the king’s view, the only way in which Prussia could ally itself with Russia was if the Russian army surprised and pre-empted Napoleon by invading the Duchy of Warsaw. To be effective this would require Austrian assistance and Polish consent. To that end Frederick William urged Alexander to support the re- establishment of an independent Polish kingdom under a Polish monarch.43
The Russians might well have conceded this had they been defeated by Napoleon, but they were unlikely to do so before the war had even begun. The emperor was in fact discussing the restoration of Poland with his old friend and chief adviser on Polish affairs, Prince Adam Czartoryski. Conceivably, had his feelers to the Poles met an enthusiastic response, he might have considered a pre-emptive strike to occupy the Duchy of Warsaw and win Prussian support, but there is no evidence in the Russian diplomatic or military archives of preparations for an offensive in 1810 or 1811. Alexander was in any case convinced that Russian security and Russian public opinion made it essential that any reconstituted Poland had the Russian emperor as its king. In 1811–12 this idea could not compete in Polish hearts with the hope of a restored Poland, within its full old borders, and guaranteed by the all- conquering Napoleon. The union of the Russian and Polish crowns was also unacceptable to the Austrians.44
By the summer of 1811 Alexander had decided on a defensive strategy. He made this clear to both the Austrians and the Prussians, thereby ruling out the last faint hopes that either country would join him against Napoleon. In August 1811 the emperor told the Austrian minister, the Count de Saint-Julien, that although he understood the theoretical military arguments for an offensive strategy, in the present circumstances only a defensive strategy made sense. If attacked, he would retreat into his empire, turning the area he abandoned into a desert. Tragic though this would be for the civilian population, he had no other alternative. He was arranging echelons of supply bases and new reserve forces to which his field army could retreat. The French would find themselves fighting far from their bases and even further from their homes: ‘It is only by being prepared, if necessary, to sustain war for ten years that one can exhaust his troops and wear out his resources.’ Saint-Julien reported all this to Vienna but added, significantly, that he doubted whether Alexander could hold his nerve and pursue such a strategy when the invasion actually occurred.45
To Frederick William, Alexander was even more explicit. In May 1811 he wrote to the king:
We have to adopt the strategy which is most likely to succeed. It seems to me that this strategy has to be one of carefully avoiding big battles and organizing very long operational lines which will sustain a retreat which will end in fortified camps, where nature and engineering works will strengthen the forces which we use to match up to the enemy’s skill. The system is the one which has brought victory to Wellington in wearing down the French armies, and it is the one which I have resolved to follow.
Alexander suggested to Frederick William that he set up his own fortified camps, some of which should be on the coast where they could be supplied by the British navy. Not at all surprisingly, this prospect did not appeal to Frederick William, whose country would first be abandoned by the Russians and then fought over and ravaged as enemy territory by the French. In his last letter to Alexander before war began, Frederick William explained that he had seen no alternative but to succumb to Napoleon’s pressure and join the French alliance. ‘Faithful to your strategy of not taking the offensive, Your Majesty deprived me of any hope of prompt or real assistance and placed me in a situation where the destruction of Prussia would have been the preliminary to a war against Russia.’46
Though it failed as regards Austria and Prussia, Russian diplomacy did achieve its other key goals by ending the war against Turkey and neutralizing any threat from Sweden.
The Ottomans had declared war against Russia in 1806 in the wake of Austerlitz. This seemed a good opportunity to win back some of the territories and other concessions which the empire had been forced to make to Russia in the last forty years. The Russians instead soon overran the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, and made their acquisition the key Russian war aim. No doubt over-impressed by his father’s achievements, Rumiantsev in particular was hell-bent on acquiring the provinces and too optimistic about how easy it would be to get the Turks to concede them. As war with Napoleon loomed and most Russian diplomats and generals yearned to end the sideshow in the Balkans, Rumiantsev’s stubbornness made him many enemies but in fact there is not much evidence that Alexander was any more willing to give way than his foreign minister.
One reason the Turks proved so recalcitrant was that they were urged to resist Russian demands first by the British and then by the French. Since by 1810 they were well aware that a war between Napoleon and Russia was in the offing, they had every incentive to hold out and wait until the Russians became desperate to cut their losses and redeploy their troops northwards against the French.
There were also military reasons why the war dragged on. In the field the Ottoman army was hopeless. To win battles in this era required infantry trained to deliver rapid volleys and to move in formation across the battlefield. The troops must be able to shift between column, line and square according to circumstances and to do so rapidly and in good order. The infantry needed to be supported by mobile artillery and by cavalry trained to charge home in massed formation to exploit any wavering by the enemy. Though all this sounds simple, amidst the
