Alexander that the army’s losses had been so enormous that he was obliged to hide them not just from the enemy but even from his own officers. Of the 97,000 men whom Kutuzov had commanded at Tarutino before the beginning of the campaign, 48,000 – in other words almost half – were in hospital. Only 42,000 soldiers were still in the ranks. The position of Chichagov and Wittgenstein’s armies was better but not good. The admiral had 17,000 men in the ranks, plus 7,000 more who had finally arrived from Oertel’s corps. Peter Wittgenstein still commanded 35,000 men, which reflected the fact that his men had been better fed and clothed than the rest of the army and had also marched less far. But most Russian regiments by now were hungry and exhausted, with their uniforms in tatters and dressed in any clothes they could find to keep out the cold. One young staff officer described himself as wearing a soldier’s overcoat, with sleeves badly charred by bivouac fires, boots whose soles were coming off, headgear which combined a soldier’s forage cap and a woollen civilian hood, and a tunic with no buttons but held together by a French sword-belt.78
As they advanced into freezing, barren and devastated Lithuania cold and hunger hit Kutuzov’s troops hard. So too did another enemy: typhus. The disease was rampant among the prisoners of war whom the Russians were capturing in droves and it spread quickly. ‘Its distinguishing features were: exhaustion, loss of appetite, nausea, total weakening of the muscular system, dry heat of the skin and an unbearable thirst.’ Against the disease the regimental doctors used quinine, camphor and emetics so long as their medicines lasted. As the intendant-general, Georg Kankrin, subsequently admitted, however, of all the backup services provided by the Russian commissariat medical help was the weakest. That owed something to the new and confused administration of hospitals, and more to the shortage of trained doctors and hospital administrators. So long as the army was operating in the Great Russian provinces it could hand over care of its sick and wounded to the governors, but once it moved into Belorussian and Lithuanian districts formerly occupied by Napoleon no civilian institutions existed. Many Russian doctors and officials themselves fell ill. The rest were scattered along the army’s line of advance, desperately trying to establish hospitals in a wilderness.79
Kankrin wrote that his officials,
themselves barely alive, were forced almost every other day to establish hospitals in ruined areas, in the midst of extreme cold and deprived of almost any help. There was a complete shortage of experienced officials. We took anyone who fell into our hands, grateful for being able to find any officials for this job. The man chosen was given the regulations, some money, open orders to the local administration requiring them to assist him, and a small staff. This was all the help one got in setting up a hospital, together whenever possible with some biscuit and groats, a few beef-cattle and some spirits.
Nevertheless, wrote Kankrin, the majority of the men in hospital did recover and rejoin the army, ‘which on the one hand shows the toughness of Russian soldiers but also shows that they were given some care’.80
On 13 December Kutuzov reported to Alexander that unless his army got a rest it might disappear entirely and have to be rebuilt from scratch. Any commander would dread such a possibility, but a Russian general had more reason than most to protect the professional and veteran cadre around which the army was built. Men with the education and willingness to serve as officers were not that plentiful. Highly skilled cadres who could serve in the engineers, artillery or staffs were much rarer still. Above all, the emperor’s army was not the nation in arms. Its strength lay in the great loyalty of its veterans to their comrades and regiments. Destroy these men and these loyalties, and the army would become worse than a mere militia. The inner force which made this army so formidable and resilient would be undermined. In the winter of 1812 this came too close to happening for Kutuzov’s comfort. In fact the army’s core survived, large numbers of veterans subsequently returned from hospital, and around this cadre a fine new army was rebuilt in 1813. But it was not really until the summer of 1813 that it recovered from the awful strains of the 1812 campaign and regained its full potential.81
1813: The Spring Campaign
Alexander I arrived in Vilna on 22 December 1812. This time he brought with him a smaller entourage than the gaggle of bored and squabbling courtiers who had been such a nuisance in the first weeks of the 1812 campaign. Three men whom he summoned to Vilna were to be his closest assistants for the rest of the war. Prince Petr Mikhailovich Volkonsky became Alexander’s right-hand man as regards military operations; Aleksei Arakcheev remained in charge of all matters concerning the mobilization of the home front, the militia and the provision of reinforcements to the field army. Karl Nesselrode became Alexander’s chief diplomatic adviser. In fact if not in name Nesselrode acted as deputy minister of foreign affairs. The true foreign minister was Alexander himself. The emperor intervened frequently in military matters but he lacked the confidence to take over command or play the leading role in military operations himself. Where diplomacy was concerned, however, Alexander was unequivocally in charge and in 1813 on the whole remarkably skilful and effective.
Though Nikolai Rumiantsev remained foreign minister in name, he was completely excluded from the making of foreign policy. Alexander claimed to have left him behind in Petersburg to preserve his health. It was indeed true that Rumiantsev had suffered a minor stroke while on campaign with Alexander in 1812. For the emperor this was just a good excuse to escape from his foreign minister in 1813. The last thing Alexander wanted was an ‘Old Russian’ foreign minister, distrusted by all Russia’s current allies and critical of the emperor’s policy, looking over his shoulder. In Rumiantsev’s opinion Alexander’s crusade against Napoleon was wrong-headed. As he said to John Quincy Adams, Napoleon was by no means the only issue in Russian foreign relations. By concentrating so exclusively on Napoleon’s defeat, Alexander was downgrading Russian policy towards the Ottoman Empire and Persia, and even allowing historical Russian interests to be sacrificed to a desire to placate the Austrians and the British. Rumiantsev on occasion even upbraided Alexander in thinly camouflaged terms for forgetting his ancestors’ proud legacy.
The foreign minister also feared anarchy as a result of the efforts being made to incite mass risings against Napoleon, especially in Germany. In Rumiantsev’s words, this was ‘in essence a return of Jacobinism. Napoleon might be considered the Don Quixote of monarchy. He had, to be sure, overthrown many monarchs, but he had nothing against monarchy. By affecting to make his person the only object of hostility, and by setting the populace to work to run him down, there would be a foundation laid for many future and formidable disorders.’ Alexander could afford to ignore Rumiantsev, both far away and sidelined, though when Metternich made precisely the same points two months later he was forced to pay far more attention.1
Decorations and fireworks greeted Alexander’s arrival in Vilna. The day after his arrival was his birthday and Kutuzov hosted a great ball in his honour. Captured French standards were thrown down at Alexander’s feet in the ballroom. Further celebrations and parades followed. The price of luxuries in Vilna became exorbitant. Even Lieutenant Chicherin, an aristocratic Guards officer, could not afford to have a new uniform tailored with the appropriate gold braid. The glitter and congratulations could not conceal even from the emperor the terrible suffering in Vilna at that time. Forty thousand frozen corpses lay in the city and its suburbs awaiting the spring thaw when they could be burned or buried. Starving and typhus-ridden scarecrows roamed the streets, collapsing and dying across the doorways of Vilna’s citizens. The Guards artillery was used to transport the corpses to the frozen walls and hillocks of bodies awaiting disposal outside the town. A third of the soldiers involved fell ill with typhus themselves. Worst of all were the scenes in the hospitals. To his credit, Alexander visited the French hospitals, but there was not much the overstretched Russian medical services could do to help. The emperor recalled a visit ‘in the evening. One single lamp lighted the high vaulted room, in which they had heaped up the piles of corpses as high as the walls. I cannot express the horror I felt, when in the midst of these inanimate bodies, I suddenly saw living beings.’2
On the surface all was harmony between a grateful emperor and his devoted commander-in-chief. Alexander awarded Kutuzov the Grand Cross of the Order of St George, the rarest and most prized of honours any Russian monarch could bestow. In reality, however, the emperor was dissatisfied with Kutuzov’s pursuit of Napoleon and determined to assert control over military operations. Petr Konovnitsyn, the army’s chief of staff, went on extended sick leave. In his place Alexander appointed Petr Volkonsky. Kutuzov would continue to command and to play the leading role in strategic planning but he would do so under the close eye of the emperor and his most trusted lieutenant. In terms of administrative efficiency Volkonsky’s arrival was of great benefit. Both Kutuzov and Konovnitsyn were lazy and inefficient administrators. Key documents went unsigned and unattended for days. Serge Maevsky, a staff officer in Kutuzov’s headquarters, commented that
