I don’t know what planned deployment Your Imperial Majesty intends for the future’. When Lieutenant-General Count Shuvalov, the commander of Fourth Corps, suddenly fell ill Alexander replaced him on 1 July with Count Aleksandr Ostermann-Tolstoy, claiming that there was no time to consult Barclay on this appointment.12
This degree of confusion was obviously dangerous and Alexander subsequently usually refrained from undermining Barclay’s control over his subordinates. The fact that both the emperor and Barclay had agreed on an initial retreat to the camp at Drissa also helped to reduce misunderstanding. Nevertheless tensions remained, not least because Alexander had been accompanied to Vilna by a gaggle of underemployed senior generals, courtiers and relatives who attempted to press their own ideas about how best to combat Napoleon on both the emperor and Barclay.
Among this gaggle the most competent but also in the long run probably the most destructive person was Levin von Bennigsen. Since Tilsit Bennigsen had been living in retirement and semi-disgrace on his estate at Zakrent very close to Vilna. When Alexander arrived in Vilna in April 1812 he invited the general back into his suite. In some ways bringing Bennigsen back into active service made sense and was part of Alexander’s policy of mobilizing all resources and all talents at this time of extreme emergency.
Bennigsen was undoubtedly a talented soldier. In the eyes of some observers he was indeed the most skilful tactician among the senior Russian generals. On the other hand, he was a born intriguer and a man of great pride and ambition. He himself confessed in his memoirs to ‘ambition and a certain pride which cannot, indeed ought not, ever to be absent from a soldier’. He also admitted that this pride made him ‘feel repugnance at the thought of serving in a subordinate position having once been commander-in-chief against Napoleon’. He did not forget that Barclay had once upon a time been a mere major-general in his army. He was also much inclined to remind people that in 1806–7 he had held his ground for six months against Napoleon though outnumbered two to one. In the early stages of the campaign Bennigsen was merely a minor nuisance. In time, however, he was to contribute greatly to the conflicts and jealousies that wracked the Russian high command.13
When news arrived in Vilna late on 24 June that Napoleon’s advance guard had crossed the Russian border earlier that day Alexander was actually attending a ball in Bennigsen’s country house at Zakrent. The roof of a temporary ballroom erected for the occasion had collapsed and the guests danced beneath the stars. The emperor was not surprised by the timing of the invasion or by the place where Napoleon had chosen to cross the river Neman and enter the Russian Empire. Russian intelligence and French deserters had given ample warning of the attack in the previous two days. Russian intelligence also had an accurate sense of enemy numbers. Alexander and Barclay had long since agreed on the need for a strategic withdrawal to the camp at Drissa in the face of this overwhelming enemy force. Orders went out immediately to the Russian commanders to execute this planned move. Manifestos had already been printed in advance to prepare both the army and Alexander’s subjects for the forthcoming struggle.
In the two weeks between the French invasion and First Army’s arrival in Drissa most of Barclay’s units retreated in good order and without significant losses. From the perspective of the high command, things mostly went according to plan. As is always true in war, matters did not look so orderly and well managed to the officers and men at ground level. Though most stores were carried away or burned, inevitably some fell into enemy hands, though not remotely enough to satisfy the enormous demands of Napoleon’s horses and men. Barclay’s attempt to requisition local carts for his army’s ‘mobile food magazine’ was delayed by the foot-dragging of local – often Polish – officials and many of these carts were lost to Napoleon.14
For troops who had been in quarters for weeks the sudden need for forced marches could be quite a shock. Even the Guards, which had least far to march, suffered initially. On 30 June Captain Pavel Pushchin of the Semenovskys wrote in his diary that they had broken camp and marched for eleven hours in pouring rain. As a result, forty of the regiment’s Guardsmen had fallen ill and one had died. Further long marches followed amidst intermittent downpours and extreme heat. To Pushchin’s great indignation three Polish soldiers in his company deserted. Especially in the lancer regiments, mostly recruited from Poles, desertion rates were far higher than this. The basic point, however, is that, in comparison to the devastating losses of horses and men in Napoleon’s ranks during these days, the losses on the Russian side were pinpricks.15
Of Barclay’s units the ones most at risk in these first two weeks stood on his left flank where they were in danger of being cut off from the rest of First Army by Napoleon’s advance. The biggest single error made by the Russian high command in the war’s first days was Fourth Corps’s failure quickly to notify its advance guard deployed close to the river Neman that the French had crossed the river to their north. As a result, the 4,000 men commanded by Major-General Ivan Dorokhov were very nearly overwhelmed and only escaped by marching southward to join up with Bagration’s Second Army.
Dorokhov’s detachment comprised one hussar, two Cossack and two jaeger regiments, including the excellent 1st Jaegers. An officer of this regiment, Major Mikhail Petrov, wrote in his memoirs that the 1st Jaegers only escaped by dint of uninterrupted days and nights of forced marches which left some men dead and others near senseless from exhaustion. Petrov recalled that the officers dismounted, piled the men’s equipment on their horses and helped to carry the muskets of their soldiers. For the first but by no means the last time in the campaigns of 1812–14 Russian light infantry displayed phenomenal endurance as they kept up with light cavalry and horse artillery while serving in advance and rearguards.16
Lieutenant-General Dmitrii Dokhturov’s Sixth Corps was much larger than Dorokhov’s detachment and therefore less likely to be overwhelmed. Nevertheless Dokhturov did well by not just avoiding Napoleon’s clutches but also cutting across the advancing French army and rejoining First Army before Drissa. Among Dokhturov’s officers was young Nikolai Mitarevsky, an artillery lieutenant in the Twelfth Light Battery. He recalled that on the eve of the war it had never occurred to any of the officers that they would retreat. All expected to advance in time- honoured style to meet the invader and when this did not happen rumours quickly spread about the unstoppable strength of Napoleon’s army.
Mitarevsky’s battery had long been posted far in the Russian interior and it took officers and men some time to learn how to survive on campaign. Initially they went hungry when their transport carts temporarily vanished but they quickly learned to carry enough food to last men and horses festooned on their guns and caissons. Though the horses had to eat grass for part of the two-week retreat this was a small hardship since they began the campaign in fine condition and the battery was equipped with sickles to cut the long grass. Most of the population had fled into the forests but Sixth Corps had little difficulty in either finding sufficient food to requisition or ensuring that nothing was left for the French.
Though rumours abounded that the enemy was nearby, the closest Mitarevsky’s battery came to action was when a large herd of cattle in a forest was mistaken for French cavalry. The worst actual enemy assault on the column came when the Poles captured two straggling regimental priests, tied their beards together, fed them an emetic, and returned them to Dokhturov’s furious soldiers, for whom Orthodoxy and suspicion of Poles were much of what it meant to be a Russian. Sixth Corps eluded the French partly by dint of hard marching. In addition, however, it was expertly shielded and shepherded by Peter von der Pahlen’s cavalry.17
In a retreat of this sort a strong cavalry arm was essential. Barclay was weakened by the fact that Napoleon’s advance had cut off General Matvei Platov’s independent Cossack detachment from First Army and forced it to move southwards to join up with Bagration. Platov’s force was made up of nine Cossack regiments, all but two of them from the Don region. It also included four ‘native’ regiments of irregular cavalry, of which two were Crimean Tatar, one was Kalmyk and one was Bashkir.
No one needed to fear for the safety of Platov’s regiments. Napoleon’s whole army could have chased these Cossacks all year without the least chance of catching them. But the temporary loss of almost all its irregular cavalry put Barclay’s regular cavalry regiments under some strain. Fedor Uvarov reported that in the absence of the Cossacks he had been forced to use regular line and even Guards cavalry regiments for outpost duty. Not merely did this exhaust their horses, it also involved them in work for which they had often not been fully trained. One result of this was that Uvarov could not harass the enemy or pick up anything like the normal number of prisoners, who were important as a source of intelligence about the enemy’s size and movements.18
Even without the Cossacks, however, the Russian cavalry usually came out on top in its skirmishes with the French. The French cavalry had very little success in impeding or embarrassing Barclay’s men in their planned retreat to Drissa. In other ways, too, the Russian high command had reason to be satisfied. Napoleon had yearned for a decisive battle in the first days of the war. His overriding strategic purpose was not the conquest of territory but the destruction of the Russian army. Correctly, he believed that if he could annihilate the armies of Barclay and
