Russia Against Napoleon

moral, an army led from bivouac to bivouac, suffering from privation, decimated by sickness, its path strewn with dead, dying, and exhausted bodies, – [the reader] will comprehend with what difficulty each motion was accomplished, and how nothing but the strongest impulses could overcome the inertia of the mass.⁵⁷

None of this was of much consolation to Pavel Chichagov, onto whom Kutuzov had offloaded the emperor’s high expectations of destroying the French army and even capturing Napoleon. The admiral’s campaign had got off to a good start. Though he had needed to leave substantial garrisons behind to watch the Ottomans, the men who marched northwards with him were the veterans of many campaigns and were fine troops. On 19 September they joined Tormasov’s army on the river Styr.

Tormasov’s regiments contained fewer veterans than Chichagov’s but they had gained experience in 1812 while suffering far fewer casualties than the armies of Bagration and Barclay. There were no new recruits, let alone militia, in either army by September 1812. On 29 September Aleksandr Chernyshev arrived at their headquarters with orders for Chichagov to take over command of both armies and for Tormasov to join Kutuzov. He also brought Alexander’s plan, which required Chichagov to push the Austrian and Saxon corps westwards into the Duchy of Warsaw and himself then advance to Minsk and the river Berezina in order to block Napoleon’s retreat.

After uniting with Tormasov, Chichagov initially had 60,000 men available for the campaign, though if Alexander’s plan was properly executed he would be joined in Belorussia by General Oertel’s 15,000 troops, currently in Mozyr, and by 3,500 men under Major-General Luders, who had fought the Ottomans in Serbia during the recent war. When Chichagov advanced in late September, the Austrian and Saxon corps retreated westwards into the Duchy of Warsaw. With his headquarters in Brest, Chichagov then spent two weeks gathering supplies for his advance towards Minsk and the Berezina. Since he would be marching 500 kilometres into a devastated war zone this made good sense, though his delay caused some grumbling. But the delay meant that Chichagov could only arrive on the Berezina just before Napoleon. He would have no time to get to know the unfamiliar terrain he was supposed to defend. It would not be possible to carry out Alexander’s instructions to fortify the key choke- points and defiles through which Napoleon’s army might pass.

In the last week of October Chichagov set off for Belorussia, leaving almost half his army – 27,000 men under Fabian von der Osten-Sacken – to hold off Schwarzenberg and Reynier. Since together the Austrians and Saxons numbered 38,000 men and were expecting reinforcements this was to ask a great deal of Sacken. In fact, however, the Russian general fulfilled his mission to perfection, though he complained – in this case correctly – that his army’s achievements were forgotten since he could not hope for brilliant victories against so superior an enemy and in any case all Russian eyes were turned on the fate of Napoleon and his army.

When Schwarzenberg set off in pursuit of Chichagov in accordance with Napoleon’s instructions, Sacken’s surprise attack on Reynier’s Saxons forced him to turn back to their rescue. Subsequently, Sacken succeeded in slipping away from Schwarzenberg’s attempts to catch him, and in pinning down the Austrian and Saxon corps for the rest of the campaign. Sacken preserved his own little army amidst a flurry of manoeuvres and rearguard actions, and it provided some of the best and freshest regiments for the 1813 campaign. Above all, by drawing both Schwarzenberg and Reynier well away from Minsk and the Berezina he made it possible for Chichagov to advance into central Belorussia and threaten the survival of Napoleon and his army.⁵⁸

Chichagov moved swiftly. His advance guard was commanded by yet another French emigre, Count Charles de Lambert, who had joined the Russian army in 1793. Lambert’s force comprised some 8,000 men, mostly cavalry, its four jaeger regiments being commanded by Prince Vasili Viazemsky, whose diary as we have seen breathed such distrust for the foreigners and parvenus who were wrecking Russia. The main uncertainty for the Russian commanders was the whereabouts of Marshal Victor’s corps. Vasili Viazemsky, one of nature’s pessimists, was convinced that the Russian advance could not succeed since the enemy had at least as many men in central Belorussia as Chichagov. In fact Napoleon had ordered Victor to send one of his divisions to reinforce the garrison of Minsk but by the time the order arrived Victor’s whole corps had already moved northwards to stop Wittgenstein. With Victor deflected northwards and the Austrians and Saxons far off to the west, the defence of the southern approaches to Belorussia was left to General Jan Dombrowski and no more than 6,000 combat-worthy soldiers.

Dombrowski could not have stopped Lambert but he might well have slowed him down. Instead he and his fellow Polish generals made a number of crucial mistakes. The force sent to guard the key crossing over the river Neman allowed itself to be surrounded and captured south of the river, leaving the bridge to fall intact into Lambert’s hands. So too did the immense stores of food and fodder in Minsk, which had been designed to sustain the Grande Armee for a month. From Minsk, Lambert raced for Borisov and the vital bridge over the river Berezina. In what was probably the outstanding achievement of Russian light infantry in 1812, Viazemsky’s four jaeger regiments covered the last 55 kilometres to Borisov in twenty-four hours, and then stormed the fortifications protecting the bridge at dawn on 21 November before the 5,500 enemy troops in the neighbourhood of Borisov could concentrate to defend the river crossing. At least half of Lambert’s 3,200 jaegers were killed or wounded, including Vasili Viazemsky. After the war a gallery was constructed in the Winter Palace in which were hung the portraits of all Russia’s generals in 1812–14. Viazemsky was one of the few names missing. No doubt he would have considered this the final trick played by the Petersburg courtiers in death as in life on a general from Chichagov’s ‘Forgotten Army’ who had no ‘protectors’.⁵⁹

Lambert’s capture of the bridge at Borisov was for the Russians the high point of the winter 1812 campaign. Hopes soared and Alexander’s dream of capturing Napoleon at the Berezina looked as if it might become reality. In a move he was later to regret, Chichagov issued the following proclamation to his troops:

Napoleon’s army is in flight. The person who is the cause of all Europe’s miseries is in its ranks. We are across his line of retreat. It may easily be that it will please the Almighty to end his punishment of the human race by delivering him to us. For that reason I want this man’s features to be known to everyone: he is small in height, stocky, pale, with a short and fat neck, a big head and black hair. To avoid any uncertainty, catch and deliver to me all undersized prisoners. I say nothing about rewards for this particular prisoner. The well-known generosity of our monarch guarantees them.⁶⁰

At just the moment that Russian hopes were at their highest, Chichagov’s prospects began to unravel. Kutuzov’s estimate was that the admiral could bring 45,000 troops to the Berezina, but this depended on Lieutenant-General Oertel, who commanded the garrison at Mozyr, obeying his orders to march his 15,000 men to Borisov. Oertel, however, was a tidy and meticulous administrator, much of whose career had been spent as head of first the Moscow and then the Petersburg police. Training the recruits who formed part of the Mozyr garrison and securing the neighbourhood against Polish insurgents was well within his competence but his imagination quailed at the thought of abandoning his local responsibilities and marching against Napoleon. Oertel found every possible excuse for delay, citing broken bridges, the dangers of local rebellion if he departed, the need to protect his magazines and even cattle plague. By the time Chichagov could replace him it was too late to get his troops to the Berezina. As the admiral reported to Alexander, this left him with just 32,000 men. Half of these soldiers were cavalry, who would be of little use in the defence of a river crossing or in fighting in the woods and swamps on the west bank of the Berezina.⁶¹

If Chichagov was to stop Napoleon, therefore, he would need help, and its likeliest source was Peter Wittgenstein. Before the autumn campaign Wittgenstein’s corps had been reinforced up to a strength of 40,000 men, though 9,000 of these were militia. Marching southwards to join Wittgenstein from Riga were also 10,000 regulars under Count Steinhel. Together on 16–18 October Wittgenstein and Steinhel defeated Marshal Saint-Cyr and recaptured the town of Polotsk and its bridge over the river Dvina. The victory owed much more to superior numbers and the courage of the Russian soldiers than to skilful leadership. Steinhel and Wittgenstein were advancing on opposite sides of the Dvina and coordination was poor. If Wittgenstein had possessed a pontoon train he could have crossed the Dvina beyond Saint-Cyr’s right flank and driven him off to the west, in other words away from Napoleon’s line of retreat. This was the goal set out in Alexander’s plan for the autumn campaign. Instead, however, the Russian commander was forced into a more pedestrian and costly direct assault on Polotsk.

Even so, victory at Polotsk brought important results. General Wrede, who commanded Saint-Cyr’s Bavarian troops, did retreat due west towards Lithuania and effectively removed his men from any further participation in the war, though Wittgenstein could never be quite sure that Wrede would not re-emerge at some point to endanger his right flank. In his report to Alexander on the battle, Wittgenstein claimed correctly that he had weakened the corps of both Oudinot and Saint-Cyr to such an extent that they were no longer capable of serious resistance unless reinforced. Marshal Victor had therefore been forced to abandon Smolensk and march his entire corps to their