Russia Against Napoleon

purposes than more volatile nations: yet in both services particular corps, duly practiced in this particular branch, have proved themselves capable of being made by training equal to any men that could be opposed to them.²⁷

Russian jaeger regiments had existed since the Seven Years War. By 1786 there were almost 30,000 jaegers in the Russian army. Mikhail Kutuzov commanded jaeger regiments and actually wrote the general rules for jaeger service. The 1789 regulations for training jaegers stressed the need for marksmanship, mobility, craftiness and skilful use of terrain for concealment. The jaeger must, for example, learn how to reload lying on his back and to fire from behind obstacles and folds in the ground. He must trick his enemy by pretending to be dead or by putting out his shako as a target. The jaegers became associated with Grigorii Potemkin and Russia’s wars against the Ottomans. Potemkin introduced comfortable, practical uniforms to suit the climate and the nature of operations on the southern steppe and in the Balkans. The jaeger regulations told the men not to waste time polishing their muskets.

None of this endeared the jaegers to Paul I, who reduced the number of light infantry by two-thirds. Though one needs to be wary about Russian nationalist historiography’s attacks on German pedantry, in this case the Russian historians were right to believe that Paul’s obsession with complicated drill on the parade ground damaged the Russian army in general and its jaegers in particular. George Cathcart was undoubtedly also correct in believing that serfdom was not the perfect background for a light infantryman. Nor was the discipline to which the new recruit was subjected in order to turn the peasant into a soldier. After 1807 the need to expand and re-train the jaegers was widely recognized at the top of the army. Both Mikhail Barclay de Tolly and Petr Bagration, for example, had been commanders of jaeger regiments. Some senior officers found it hard to believe that Russian peasants could make good light infantry, however. This could easily serve as an excuse for their own failure to train the men intelligently. As Gneisenau noted in the spring of 1812, the training of Russia’s jaegers was often much too rigid, complicated and formalistic.²⁸

Nevertheless one should not exaggerate the failings of Russia’s jaeger regiments. On the whole the jaegers performed well in the rearguard actions during the retreat to Moscow and at Borodino. The key point was that by 1812 the Russian army had over fifty jaeger regiments, which in principle meant well over 100,000 men. Differences in quality between regiments were inevitable. Fourteen line infantry regiments were redesignated as light infantry in October 1810 and one would expect them initially to be poor skirmishers since all sources agree that in the Russian army true jaeger units were much better at operating independently than the infantry of the line. On the other hand, those jaeger regiments which had fought in Finland, in the Caucasus or against the Ottomans in 1807–12 were likely to be best.²⁹

On active service there were plenty of targets and no constraints on the use of live ammunition. The historian of the 2nd Jaegers writes that the campaign in Finland’s forests was excellent training for light infantry in marksmanship, use of terrain and small-scale warfare. General Langeron recalls that the 12th and 22nd Jaegers were among the best marksmen in his corps, since they had years of experience fighting Circassian sharpshooters in the Caucasus. According to the historian of the 10th Jaegers the same was true of the Ottoman campaigns, during which the regiment was sometimes required to cover more than 130 kilometres in five days as it fought a ‘small war’ of skirmishes and ambushes in the foothills of the Balkans. Ottoman raiding parties often had better guns and were better marksmen than the Russian jaegers, at least until the latter learned from experience.³⁰

The difference in quality between Russian jaeger regiments in 1812 was often evident to their enemies. The first Russian skirmishers encountered by the Saxon army after invading Russia were the inexperienced troops of General Oertel’s corps. A Saxon officer recorded that ‘the Russian army was not yet that which it became in 1813… they did not understand how to skirmish in open order’. Some weeks later the Saxons got a great shock when they first encountered the veteran jaegers of the Army of the Danube, fresh from many campaigns in the Balkans. These men were ‘the excellent Russian jaegers of Sacken’s corps. They were as skilled in their movements as they were accurate in their shooting, and they did us great harm with their much superior firearms which were effective at twice our range.’³¹

How to train and use light infantry was one of the themes debated in the Military Journal (Voennyi zhurnal), published for the first time in 1810–12 under the editorship of the highly intelligent Colonel P. A. Rakhmanov. The Journal was designed to encourage officers to think about their profession. Some of its articles were translations from foreign ‘classics’. They introduced Russian officers to the ideas of key foreign thinkers such as Antoine de Jomini, Friedrich Wilhelm von Bulow and Henry Lloyd. Other pieces concerned military history or were anecdotes about recent Russian wars. Very many of the articles concerned the key issues of the day, however, and were written by serving officers, often anonymously. Of course the Journal could not openly debate aspects of a future war with France but it was easy to read between the lines of some of its articles on questions such as the role of fortifications and the relative advantages of offensive and defensive war. The Journal also debated issues such as the proper deployment of artillery on the battlefield, the role of general staffs, and what values and skills military education should seek to instil into the officer corps. The subscription list for the Journal was impressive. Some regimental commanders bought many copies of it for their officers. But there were also very many individual subscriptions, above all of course from what one might describe as the emerging military intelligentsia.³²

The core of this intelligentsia was the general staff, which grew in size and in quality during these years. In fact one could truthfully say that it was in 1807–12 that a real Russian general staff emerged for the first time. The need for such a staff was very evident from the debacle in 1805–7. The Russian army set off for war in 1805 guided by too few staff officers, who were poorly educated for the job. Kutuzov’s chief Russian staff officer was a fine hydrographer of German origin, who had virtually no experience of wartime operations. In all respects Major- General Gerhardt was in fact typical of Russian staff officers of the time, the best of whom were cartographers, engineers, even astronomers but very seldom soldiers in the full meaning of the word. Even the minority of staff officers who had military experience had usually only served against the Ottomans. Fighting against the Turks was no preparation for a number of key tasks of staff officers facing Napoleon in 1805–14, including picking advantageous battlefields on which Russian troops could counter the tactical mobility, concentrated artillery and skilled skirmishing of Europe’s best army.³³

The two most informed Russian staff officers in Kutuzov’s entourage were Prince Petr Mikhailovich Volkonsky and Karl von Toll. These two men learned the lessons of 1805 and were the key figures in the creation of an effective general staff in the subsequent years. Volkonsky was a small, stocky man who, as an officer of the Semenovsky Guards, had known Alexander from his adolescence. Nevertheless he stood in some awe of the monarch, to whom he was absolutely loyal and whose will he never questioned. Kindly, tactful and modest, Volkonsky was quite well educated and exceptionally hard-working. He was an efficient administrator who cut quickly to the heart of problems. His calm, patient good manners made him a useful diplomat at allied headquarters in 1813–14 when wrangling between rival egos and national perspectives threatened to get out of hand. Nobody ever claimed that Volkonsky had an outstanding brain, let alone that he was a great strategist. But he selected first-class subordinates – above all Karl von Toll and Johann von Diebitsch – and had the good sense to trust and support their judgement. Without Volkonsky’s hard work, political skills and connections the Russian general staff would have been much more weakly positioned and less effective in 1812–14. Even after all his efforts, when the war began in 1812 there were still too few staff officers and too many of those that existed were young and inexperienced.³⁴

On returning from Paris, where he had studied the French staff, Volkonsky struck up a good working relationship with Barclay de Tolly which endured throughout the period. In the two years that preceded Napoleon’s invasion he got the Russian general staff on its feet. Acting as Volkonsky’s assistant, Toll produced a manual to guide staff officers. It set out their key responsibilities as being all issues linked to the army’s deployment, movements and choice of battlefields. Meanwhile A. I. Khatov was running the education of an increasing number of bright young cadets who would become junior staff officers and Volkonsky himself was luring some very able officers to transfer into the general staff, of whom Diebitsch, another officer of the Semenovskys, was subsequently the most famous. Bringing into the staff a number of officers who had front-line military experience and some young Russian aristocrats helped to reduce the gap and the suspicion between the fledgling general staff and the generals commanding corps and divisions. So too did the wartime experience gained by staff officers in 1805–12.

Nevertheless distrust remained. A key moment came in 1810 when Alexander decreed that henceforth all