Russia Against Napoleon

instructions, concluded a secret agreement with the Russians to retreat south-westwards towards Cracow and Austrian Galicia. An elaborate charade was maintained with the Russians so that Vienna could claim that its troops’ retreat had been necessitated by enemy outflanking movements. The only major force which now remained to cover central Poland was General Reynier’s Saxon corps. This was overtaken and heavily defeated by Kutuzov’s advance guard at Kalicz on 13 February 1813. The result of the Austrian retreat to the south-west was that by the end of February the whole of the Duchy of Warsaw had fallen into Russian hands with the exception of a handful of French fortresses and a small strip of land around Cracow.³³

In the first week of March, with Berlin and all Prussia liberated, and with Miloradovich’s and Wintzengerode’s corps of Kutuzov’s army positioned on the Polish border with Prussian Silesia, the first phase of the spring 1813 campaign was over. For the remainder of the month most of the Russian army was in quarters, resting after the winter campaign and attempting to feed itself and its horses, and to get its uniforms, muskets and equipment into some kind of order. Kutuzov issued detailed instructions to commanding officers about how to utilize this rest-period and they did their best to comply. While quartered near Kalicz, for example, the Lithuania (Litovsky) Guards Regiment trained every morning. All its muskets were repaired by skilled private craftsmen under the eagle eyes of the regiment’s NCOs. Its battered wagons were also repaired. A fifteen-day supply of flour was baked into bread and biscuit against future emergencies. The regiment could not replenish its ammunition because the ammunition parks were still stuck along the army’s line of communication, but each company built a Russian bath-house for itself. Material arrived for new uniforms and tailors’ shops were immediately set up to turn this into uniforms.³⁴

Although the Lithuania Guards Regiment enjoyed a rest in these weeks it received almost no reinforcements. This was true of almost all units in Kutuzov’s and Wittgenstein’s armies. The new reserve forces which had formed in Russia over the winter had been summoned to the front but they would not arrive until late May at the earliest. A handful of men dribbled back to the ranks from hospital or detached duties but they merely filled the gaps left by men falling out through sickness or dispatched from the regiments on essential tasks. At Kalicz, the Lithuania Guards had 38 officers and 810 men in the ranks but the Guards were usually far stronger than the bulk of the army. The Kexholm Regiment, for example, was down to just 408 men in mid-March.³⁵

As was typical of Osten-Sacken’s corps operating in south-west Poland, the Iaroslavl Regiment of Johann Lieven’s 10th Infantry Division was much stronger than most of the units in Kutuzov’s army. Even it, however, in mid-March had 5 officers and 170 men in hospital, and 14 officers and 129 men on detached duties. The latter included guarding the regimental baggage, helping the formation of reserves, escorting prisoners of war, collecting uniforms and equipment from the rear, and supervising the collection and dispatch of convalescents from hospitals. These detachments always required a disproportionate number of officers and were the inevitable consequence of a year’s campaigning which had now resulted in lines of communication stretching back for hundreds of kilometres. But they meant that when the campaign’s second phase began in April and the Russian forces advanced to meet Napoleon’s main army they would do so in a thoroughly reduced, even in some cases skeletal, condition.³⁶

While much of the Russian army was resting in March 1813 its light forces were gaining new laurels. Among their new exploits was a brilliant little victory near Luneburg on 2 April where Chernyshev’s and Dornberg’s Russian ‘flying columns’ united to annihilate a French division under General Morand.

The most spectacular exploit of the light forces in March and April was, however, Tettenborn’s seizure of Hamburg and Lubeck, amidst a popular insurrection against the French. In this region, whose prosperity depended on overseas trade, the Continental System and Napoleon’s empire were deeply hated. The arrival of Tettenborn’s cavalry and Cossacks was greeted with ecstasy by the population. Already on 31 January Tettenborn had written to Alexander to say that French rule was detested in north-west Germany and ‘I am firmly convinced that we could quickly create a huge army there’. Now his predictions appeared to be coming true and his reports to Wittgenstein bubbled over with excitement and enthusiasm. On 21 March, for example, he reported that he expected to be able to form a large infantry force from local volunteers. Two days later he added that the formation of volunteer units was progressing ‘with astonishing success’.³⁷

In time unpleasant realities began to undermine the enthusiasm of this German patriot. The good burghers of Hamburg were not, as he had hoped, the German equivalents of the Spanish population of Saragossa, willing to see their houses destroyed over their heads and to fight in the ruins against French attempts to take their city. After initial enthusiasm, volunteering fell away sharply. Greatly outnumbered in Saxony by Napoleon, allied headquarters could spare no regular Russian or Prussian forces to support Tettenborn. The last hope of saving Hamburg from Marshal Davout’s counter-offensive rested with Bernadotte’s Swedish corps, whose first units began to disembark in Stralsund from 18 March. When Bernadotte refused to come to Hamburg’s rescue, however, the city’s cause was lost and Tettenborn evacuated his great prize on 30 May.

The circumstances in which Hamburg fell were the first act in the ‘Black Legend’ created by German nationalists against Bernadotte. Many further acts followed in 1813. It was whispered against him that he had no intention of fighting the French seriously since he wished to win their sympathy and replace Napoleon on France’s throne. More realistically, Bernadotte was accused of caring nothing for the allied cause and of preserving his Swedish troops for the only war that mattered to him, which was the conquest of Norway from the Danes. The latter accusation had some force and Bernadotte, who infuriated both French and German nationalists, traditionally had a very bad press. But even one of his greatest critics, Sir Charles Stewart, who was the British envoy to Prussia, wrote in his memoirs that Bernadotte was correct not to commit Swedish forces to Hamburg.³⁸

Bernadotte himself explained his actions to Alexander’s envoys, generals Peter van Suchtelen and Charles- Andre Pozzo di Borgo. He stated that half of his troops and much of his baggage had not arrived due to contrary winds when the appeal from Hamburg came. His outnumbered men would have faced Davout to their front with hostile Danish forces in their rear. Acknowledging the seriousness of Hamburg’s loss, Bernadotte argued that

despite all the misfortunes which this loss can bring, the defeat of the Swedish army would be a thousand times worse, and Hamburg would in that event be occupied for certain and the Danes would reunite with the French. Instead of this, I am concentrating my forces, I am organizing my troops and am receiving reinforcements from Sweden every day – and thereby I am making the French feel my presence and will stop them crossing the Elbe unless they do this in too great force.³⁹

Though a big disappointment to German patriots, the Hamburg operation actually remained a great success from the point of view of allied headquarters. At the cost of a relative handful of Cossacks and cavalry, Napoleon’s best marshal, Davout, and roughly 40,000 French troops were occupied in what was a strategic backwater at a time when their presence on the Saxon battlefields could have made a decisive difference. In addition, the chaos encouraged in north-western Germany by Tettenborn, Chernyshev and other ‘partisan’ leaders totally disrupted the horse-fairs which traditionally occurred in the region at this time. For the French this was a serious matter. The biggest headache faced by Napoleon as he strove to re-create the Grande Armee was the shortage of cavalry; 175,000 horses had been lost in Russia and this proved to be a more serious matter than the lost manpower. In 1813 ‘France was so poor in horses’ (according to a nineteenth-century French expert) that even requisitioning private horses for the cavalry and other emergency measures ‘could only provide 29,000 horses and even they were not in a state to enter military service immediately’. The Polish and north-east German studs were lost to Napoleon, and efforts to buy from the Austrians were rejected. The wrecking of the horse-fairs in north- western Germany was an additional blow, which further delayed the mounting and training of the French cavalry. Many thousands of French cavalrymen remained without horses in the spring 1813 campaign, and lack of cavalry very seriously undermined Napoleon’s operations.⁴⁰

Apart from the cavalry, however, Napoleon’s efforts rapidly to rebuild his armies in the winter of 1812–13 were a triumphant success. The nature of this new Grande Armee is sometimes misunderstood. Contrary to legend, it was in reality by no means just a melange of the 25,000 men who had crawled back across the Neman in December 1812 and a horde of ‘Marie Louises’, in other words young conscripts from the classes of 1813 and 1814. Even as early as January 1813 some fresh troops were available to reinforce Eugene’s remnant of the old Grande Armee: above all, these were the 27,000 men of Grenier and Lagrange’s divisions, which had never been committed to the Russian campaign. In addition, we have already encountered the French garrisons in Prussia which frightened Frederick William III in the winter of 1812–13.

Armies on campaign usually leave behind some sort of cadre in depots or along the lines of communication, from which their regiments can if necessary be reconstituted. For example, Napoleon’s Guards in theory numbered