cavalryman and something of a
Harmony at headquarters was combined with professional skill. Wittgenstein’s chief of staff was Friedrich d’Auvray, an intelligent, loyal and excellently educated staff officer of French origin who was born in Dresden and began his military career in the Polish army. The commander of First Corps’s artillery was the Georgian, Prince Lev Iashvili. His deputy was the 24-year-old Ivan Sukhozhanet, the son of a Polish officer. Both men had performed well in the East Prussian campaign of 1806–7.5
The pick of the bunch, however, was the 27-year-old quartermaster-general of Wittgenstein’s corps, Colonel Johann von Diebitsch. He was the son of a senior Prussian staff officer who had transferred to the Russian service in 1798. The young Diebitsch had begun his military service in the Semenovsky Guards regiment, from which Petr Mikhailovich Volkonsky – another former Semenovsky officer – had plucked him for the general staff. Diminutive, pop-eyed and ugly, Diebitsch’s appearance had so appalled the Semenovskys’ colonel that he had tried to keep the young officer away from service at court and on the parade ground. Diebitsch was known by his many friends as ‘the samovar’ because when he became excited he boiled over, with words spilling out in almost incomprehensible fashion. For all his oddities, Diebitsch was probably the ablest staff officer in the Russian army in 1812–14. He also showed energy, initiative and judgement on the occasions when called upon to command detachments. Though ambitious and determined, Diebitsch was also very loyal to the army and the cause which he served. By 1814, aged only 28, he was a lieutenant-general, having skyrocketed past his former peers in the Semenovskys. Nevertheless, to his credit and theirs, he remained on good terms with his old comrades.6
After Kliastitsy Oudinot complained to Napoleon that he was faced by far superior Russian numbers. Often in 1812–14 the emperor was to torment his subordinates by underestimating the size of the enemy forces they faced. On this occasion, however, his sour response to Oudinot was accurate and justified:
You are not pursuing Wittgenstein…and you are allowing this general the freedom to attack the Duke of Tarento [i.e. MacDonald] or to cross the Dvina to raid our rear. You have the most exaggerated notions of Wittgenstein’s strength: he has only two or at most three divisions of the line, six reserve battalions under Prince Repnin and some militia who aren’t worth counting. You must not allow yourself to be hoodwinked so easily. The Russians are announcing everywhere that they have scored a great victory over you.7
Despite this criticism, Napoleon reinforced Oudinot by all the infantry and artillery of Gouvion Saint-Cyr’s Sixth (Bavarian) Corps. Marching in the wake of the first echelon of Napoleon’s army, Sixth Corps was 25,000-strong when it crossed the Neman but had only 13,000 men left by the time they joined Oudinot at Polotsk just five weeks later. It is true that the Bavarian cavalry had been detached to join Napoleon’s main body, but most of the losses were due to sickness, straggling and desertion. During this period the Bavarians had not fired a shot in anger.
Although Wittgenstein knew that with the arrival of Saint-Cyr’s corps he was heavily outnumbered, he was determined to retain the initiative and impose his will on the enemy. With this goal in mind he attacked the joint forces of Oudinot and Saint-Cyr at Polotsk on 17 August. Unfortunately for Wittgenstein, although on the battle’s first day he succeeded in pushing the French back into the town of Polotsk, Oudinot himself was wounded and command passed to the far more competent Saint-Cyr. The next day the new French commander concentrated much of his artillery and two fresh infantry divisions for a counter-attack on the Russian centre. With a sleight of hand rather familiar in descriptions of battles at this time, Saint-Cyr claimed that his army was substantially outnumbered. He wrote in his memoirs that one-quarter of the 31,000-strong French force was absent ‘foraging’, whereas Wittgenstein had more than 30,000 soldiers to hand. In reality, as Wittgenstein reported to Alexander, constant battles, combined with the need to need to keep an eye on MacDonald, meant that his available strike force was reduced to barely 18,000 men.8
Surprise combined with overwhelming numbers meant that the Russians were forced to retreat but they did so with great steadiness and courage. The Estland Regiment, for example, had been formed in 1811 from the soldiers of garrison units. The battle of Polotsk was its first serious action. As part of Major-General Gothard Helfreich’s 14th Division, the men of the Estland Regiment stood right in the path of the French counter-attack. Despite this and despite losing fourteen officers and more than 400 men, the Estland Regiment held off repeated enemy attacks during 18 August, skirmished effectively in the woods, and finally won their way to safety. The regiment’s commanding officer, Colonel Karl Ulrikhin, was wounded twice and subsequently forced to retire from the army as a result. But he stayed with his men throughout the retreat, leading a number of counter-attacks to keep the enemy at a safe distance. Forty-three men of the Estland Regiment won military medals for their performance on 18 July and the regiment itself was awarded a standard to mark its exploits.9
One might perhaps take a regimental history’s account of its own soldiers’ courage with a pinch of salt, but in this case the Russian story is supported by Saint-Cyr himself, who wrote that
the Russians showed in this battle a sustained courage and an individual boldness of which one finds very few equivalents in the armies of other nations. Surprised, fragmented, with their battalions isolated as much as actually attacked (for we had penetrated through their lines), they nevertheless were not disconcerted and continued to fight as they retreated, which they did very slowly, facing about in all directions with a courage and a steadiness which is, I repeat, particular to the soldiers of this nation. They performed prodigies of valour but they could not beat back the simultaneous attack of four concentrated and ordered divisions.10
Technically the battle of Polotsk was a defeat for Wittgenstein but in fact it helped him to achieve his strategic goal, which was so to weaken and impress the enemy that they would refrain from advancing down the roads to Pskov, Novgorod and Petersburg. After the battle, Wittgenstein fell back roughly 40 kilometres to a fortified position near Sivoshin, where the French left him in peace for the next two months. During that time stalemate reigned in the north-west, with the war degenerating into raids and a competition between the two armies to feed themselves and rebuild their strength. To an extent, what happened next was precisely what Pfuhl had planned at Drissa. Weakened by the advance across the western borderlands, Saint-Cyr lacked the numbers either to attack Wittgenstein behind his entrenchments or to move past his flank. Pinned down in a static position in a poor and devastated countryside, sickness and hunger melted away the French army.
Meanwhile Wittgenstein’s corps was abundantly supplied by the Russian administration and population in its rear, which in this case meant the province of Pskov. As Wittgenstein recognized with his customary generosity, the true hero here was Pskov’s governor, Prince Petr Shakhovskoy. In mid-August Wittgenstein wrote to Alexander that ‘from the first moment when First Corps stood on the river Dvina, it received all its victuals from Pskov province. Thanks to the untiring efforts, the efficiency and the care of the governor, Prince Shakhovskoy, these victuals were supplied all the time and with excellent efficiency so that the troops were provided with everything they needed and suffered not the slightest lack of anything.’ Shakhovskoy mobilized thousands of carts from his province to transport food to Wittgenstein. The governor’s efforts continued throughout the 1812 campaign, by the end of which it was reckoned that Pskov province alone had voluntarily contributed 14 million rubles to the war effort. This voluntary contribution from just one (out of more than fifty) provinces, amounted to one-third of the war ministry’s total budget for feeding the entire army in 1811.11
By September Napoleon was facing growing danger on his northern flank as Steinhel’s men approached Riga and the hungry and exhausted corps of Oudinot and Saint-Cyr melted away in front of Wittgenstein. Meanwhile an even greater danger was looming to the south where Admiral Chichagov’s Army of the Danube was about to link up with Tormasov’s Third Army near Lutsk in north-west Ukraine.
In the first weeks of his campaign Napoleon had underestimated the size of Tormasov’s army. Though Tormasov’s 45,000 men had to be quite widely dispersed to guard Ukraine’s northern border, nevertheless they far outmatched the 19,000 Saxons of General Reynier’s corps who were initially given the task of protecting Napoleon’s southern flank. Urged on by Alexander and Bagration, Tormasov advanced northwards and on 27 July destroyed a Saxon detachment at Kobrin, taking more than 2,000 prisoners. Tormasov was more a military administrator and diplomat than an aggressive commander in the field. He was widely criticized after Kobrin for failing to press his advantage and destroy the rest of Reynier’s corps. Napoleon was given time to send Prince Schwarzenberg southwards with the whole of the Austrian corps to rescue Reynier. In the face of overwhelming numbers, Tormasov was forced to move back to a strong defensive position on the river Styr.
Though this seemed at the time to be a disappointing aftermath to the victory at Kobrin, in fact Tormasov had achieved his main objective. It was premature in July 1812 to think that one or other of the Russian flanking
