French for his country’s humiliation. The battery’s second-in-command described him as ‘good-looking, of medium height: he was a true son of the North, muscular, round-faced, pale and with light-brown hair. His big, bright eyes were full of liveliness and he had a powerful voice. Figner was eloquent, full of common sense, tireless in all his enterprises and with a fiery imagination. He despised danger, never lost his head and was totally fearless.’ Speaking German, French, Italian and a number of other foreign languages fluently, Figner was also an excellent actor. On a number of occasions he went into enemy camps in and around Moscow to gather intelligence, easily passing himself off as an officer of Napoleon’s multi-national army.8
Like many guerrilla commanders in history, however, there was a dark side to the brilliant, cunning and ruthless Figner. In September and October 1812 even Davydov was sometimes disinclined to take prisoners, since these put an intolerable strain on small and fast-moving partisan bands.9 Alexander Figner, however, twisted even this practice. One fellow-officer recalls that ‘his favourite and most frequent amusement was first to inspire captured officers’ trust and cheerfulness by his reassuring conversation, and then suddenly to shoot them with his pistol and watch their agonies before they died. He did this well away from the army, which only heard dark rumours which it either disbelieved or forgot amidst the pressures of military operations.’ In the midst of the awful cruelties and extreme emotions of autumn 1812 senior officers were sometimes willing to turn a blind eye to the nastier side of partisan warfare. By 1813, however, with the war no longer on Russian soil, few officers still harboured any great hatred for their enemy. When Figner drowned in the river Elbe trying to escape from the French few of his fellow-officers shed any tears.10
The many partisan units operating around Moscow overlapped with larger detachments watching the main roads leading out of the city. Some of these detachments also waged partisan war. Their main role, however, was to defend the provinces around Moscow from enemy raiding parties and to provide early warning should Napoleon make any major move out of the city. Of these detachments, the most important was commanded by Major-General Baron Ferdinand von Winzengerode, whose task it was to watch the highroad leading to Tver and thence to Petersburg. Most of Winzengerode’s troops were Cossacks and militia but some regular cavalry were cut off from Kutuzov’s army during the retreat through Moscow and escaped out of the city to the north, joining Winzengerode’s men. Of these reinforcements, the best were the excellent soldiers of the Cossack Life Guard Regiment.
Ferdinand von Winzengerode could best be described as a full-time anti-Bonapartist. His father had been aide-de-camp to the Duke of Brunswick, of all the German dynasties the one most noted for its unwavering hatred of Napoleon. Winzengerode himself transferred on a number of occasions between the Russian and Austrian armies, depending on which service offered the better opportunity to fight the French. Logically enough, having fought with the Austrians in 1809, he moved back to the Russian army early in 1812. In 1812 he was one of a number of political refugees whom hatred of Napoleon had washed up on Russia’s shores. Had circumstances turned out just a little differently, he could easily have been serving alongside many of his compatriots in the King’s German Legion in Spain, under Wellington’s command.
The peppery, pipe-smoking, impetuous Winzengerode was a loyal friend and patron. His excellent French cook and his penchant for whist were much appreciated by his staff. So too were his decency and fairness. In the autumn of 1812, for example, he was outraged when the steward on one of the estates of Aleksandr Balashev, the minister of police, tried to use his master’s position to evade requisitioning for the army’s needs. Winzengerode promptly slapped a double requisition on Balashev and ignored the complaints of Aleksei Arakcheev, who was up to similar tricks as regards his own estates in Novgorod. The problem, however, was that Winzengerode was a decent man but a poor general. When the French were on the point of evacuating Moscow, Winzengerode bungled an attempt to parley with them and was captured. Napoleon was initially intent on shooting him as a traitor but was dissuaded by his horrified generals. Kutuzov rightly called Winzengerode’s capture an act of barely credible carelessness. Though Alexander was overjoyed by Chernyshev’s rescue of Winzengerode, the Russian war effort would actually have benefited had Winzengerode been sitting quietly in French captivity in 1813–14 rather than commanding Russian armies.11
The most competent of Winzengerode’s subordinates was the 31-year-old Colonel Alexander von Benckendorff. In 1812–14 Benckendorff had a ‘good war’ and this was to be the foundation for a brilliant subsequent career. The young Benckendorff started life with many advantages. His mother was the close friend of the Empress Marie, whom she accompanied to Russia as lady-in-waiting after the young Wurttemberg princess married the Grand Duke Paul. Juliana Benckendorff died in Marie Feodorovna’s arms in 1797, bequeathing to the empress the care of her young children. Alexander thereby became a core member of Marie’s circle. His sister Dorothea married Christoph Lieven, who was a key protege of Empress Marie but also close to Alexander I and a source of patronage in his own right.
The Empress Marie sent Alexander von Benckendorff to an excellent school but for a time it seemed that her investment had been in vain. The handsome, charming and pleasure-loving young man proved neither a good scholar nor a particularly virtuous officer. Like Chernyshev and Nesselrode, he served in the Russian mission in Paris in the years after Tilsit. His main achievement in Paris, however, was to fall for a famous French actress and femme fatale, a former mistress of Napoleon, whom he smuggled back to Russia with him after quitting diplomatic life under a cloud. He subsequently redeemed himself by abandoning his actress and volunteering to fight against the Turks, after which Marie paid off his debts. But it was the courage and skill he showed in 1812 which really brought him back into favour.12
As one of Alexander I’s aides-de-camp, Benckendorff started the war by carrying out a number of important and dangerous missions to Bagration’s headquarters. Serving under Winzengerode in the autumn of 1812, he was responsible for protecting a key road and its surrounding territory from French incursions and for launching raids against the main enemy line of communications down the highway from Moscow to Smolensk. In his memoirs, Benckendorff recalls that one of his most difficult tasks was to rescue French prisoners from the clutches of the peasants, in which he did not always succeed. Some of the cruelties perpetrated against the wretched prisoners of war made him think he was living ‘in the midst of a desolation which seemed to witness the abandonment of God and the rule on earth of the devil’. He adds, however, both that the peasants had every reason to be enraged by French behaviour and that the people showed great loyalty to their religion, their country and their emperor. In this context the orders he at one point received from a nervous Petersburg to disarm peasants and punish disorder were nonsensical, as he reported to Alexander I. Benckendorff told the emperor that he could hardly disarm men to whom he himself had given weapons. Nor could he allow to be called traitors a people ‘who were sacrificing their lives for the defence of their churches, their independence, and of their wives and their homes. Rather the word traitor fitted those who at such a sacred moment for Russia dared to tell false tales about the country’s purest and most zealous defenders.’13
Napoleon had entered Moscow on 15 September, and left the city on 19 October. During that period the relative strength of the rival armies changed in ways that had a decisive impact on the autumn campaign. While in Moscow Napoleon was reinforced by substantial numbers of infantry, which brought his overall numbers back over 100,000 and filled most of the gaps left by Borodino. Some of these infantry units were of good quality. They included, for example, the First Guards division, which had not been present at Borodino. By definition, infantry which had marched all the way from central and western Europe to Moscow was relatively tough. The core of Napoleon’s army was his Guards. Very few of these excellent troops had seen any action since the beginning of the campaign, as Kutuzov knew.
The Russian infantry was weaker than Napoleon’s in both numbers and quality. On 5 October Kutuzov had 63,000 officers and men in the ranks of his infantry regiments. Of these men, 15,000 were Moscow militiamen and 7,500 were new recruits. In addition, almost 11,000 men from Lobanov-Rostovsky’s new units were with Kutuzov’s army but had not yet been assigned to his regiments. These men were much better armed and trained than militia but none of them had ever been in action. The Russian commander-in-chief had good reason to avoid pitched battles with Napoleon, in which infantry always played the key role. In particular, he was right to worry about his regiments’ ability to carry out complicated manoeuvres. If he had to fight Napoleon, it would be wise to do so in a strong defensive position. The Russian army traditionally fought with a higher ratio of artillery to infantry than was the case elsewhere in Europe. Given his infantry’s rawness, Kutuzov was unlikely to break with this tradition. His army therefore set off on the autumn campaign with a vast train of 620 guns, which soon far outnumbered Napoleon’s artillery and had inevitable consequences as regards its speed, manoeuvrability and supply.14
The situation as regards cavalry was totally reversed. Napoleon had too few horsemen and, much more importantly, far too few viable horses. Even before he left Moscow some of his cavalry were dismounted. During
