Citizen Emperor (79 page)

While in Dresden, Napoleon made one last attempt to reach Alexander. He sent one of his aides-de-camp, Louis de Narbonne, an old courtier under Louis XVI, to Vilnius where Alexander had set up his headquarters. Narbonne arrived there on 18 May. Alexander is supposed to have asked, ‘What does Napoleon want? To subject me to his interests, to force me to measures which ruin my people and, because I refuse, he intends to make war on me, in the belief that after two or three battles and the occupation of a few provinces, perhaps even a capital, I will be obliged to ask for peace whose conditions he will dictate. He is deluding himself!’ Then, with a map spread before him, he more or less explained the strategy the Russians would implement over the coming campaign: ‘Space is a barrier. If after a few defeats I retreat, sweeping along the population, if I leave it to time, to the wilderness, to the climate to defend me, I may yet have the last word.’
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Narbonne reported back his conversation with Alexander.
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As soon as he had returned to Dresden (on the afternoon of 26 May), he was shown into Napoleon’s presence, still covered in the dust from the journey. Alexander had given him a message – ‘Tell the Emperor that I will not be the aggressor. He can cross the Niemen, but I will never sign a peace dictated on Russian territory.’
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Narbonne is supposed to have recommended that Napoleon reconstitute Poland, which he could use as a buffer, but that he should never cross the Niemen.
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Napoleon, however, was utterly convinced that he would succeed. ‘Never has an expedition against them [the Russians] been more certain of success,’ he told one of his secretaries, Baron Agathon Jean François Fain. ‘Never again will such a favourable concourse of circumstance present itself; I feel it drawing me in, and if the Emperor Alexander persists in refusing my proposals, I shall cross the Niemen.’
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He thought the whole thing would be over in two months and that a blow to the heart of the Russian Empire, at Moscow, the great, the holy, would shatter any resistance.
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This not only underestimated Alexander’s determination to see the war through to victory, but was an entirely erroneous idea. It might have been apt if someone had remembered that the fall of a major city or a capital – Berlin in 1806, Vienna in 1809, Lisbon or Madrid in 1808 – did not invariably lead to victory. More than likely, however, Napoleon had the Vienna of 1797 and 1805 uppermost in his mind when, the capital being threatened with occupation, the Austrian court sued for peace.

Napoleon was also making the same tactical mistake he had made when venturing out of Egypt into Syria in 1798. Rather than wait for the enemy to cross vast distances, thereby weakening it in the process, he preferred to attack first. Patience was not one of his virtues. His enthusiasm, or self-belief, was enough to persuade some in his entourage that he must be right. Berthier wrote in June 1812 to Soult, in the thick of campaigning in Seville, that ‘In one month, we will be at it. A good battle won will decide the question, in January [1813], we will be able to give you a helping hand to finish with the English so that we can get back to our wives.’
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The problem though was that Napoleon had no real objectives. In May 1812 he told the Austrian foreign minister, Metternich, that the campaign ‘will end at Smolensk and Minsk. That is where I shall stop.’ He would then establish winter headquarters at Vilnius, from where he would ‘organize’ Lithuania.
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He was telling his ambassador in Warsaw, however, that ‘I will perhaps go to Moscow.’
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Not only did he not have an established plan, he changed his mind and hesitated constantly. Historians have concluded that Napoleon’s initial intention was, as it had been with every campaign, to seek out one or more decisive battles and to bring the enemy to the negotiating table.
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There is some indication that he realized just how difficult the task before him was,
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and that Russia was likely to take a little more time to subdue than other European powers. That is why the troops were to be supplied with twenty-four days’ rations, much more than was normally the case, although given the difficulties the supply wagons had in keeping up with the advancing army, this provision soon proved illusory.
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One of the great events of the year was the appearance of what was known as the Great Comet of 1811, which remained visible to the naked eye for nine months, a record it held until the appearance of the Great Comet of 1997. The last time the comet was seen by humans was in the time of Ramses II, in about 1254 bc. This time around, it was first seen at Viviers in France on 26 March 1811, and was last seen in southern Russia at Neu Tscherkask on 17 August 1812. In August 1811, the tail divided into two streams, at right angles to one another. By the middle of October that year, William Herschel, who discovered the planet Uranus, estimated that the comet’s tail was 160 million kilometres in length. It was variously interpreted as either a good or a bad omen for Napoleon. He was personally convinced that the comet boded well for the coming campaign.

Napoleon remained almost two weeks in Dresden, hoping that Alexander would break down and that, isolated in the face of such power, he would come to the negotiating table. Many people at the time thought he would. When he did not, Napoleon set out on 29 May 1812 to join his troops at their launching positions. The night before the crossing, starting out from the Prince of Eckmühl’s headquarters, about a league from Kaunas (Kovno) and the Niemen, he carried out a reconnaissance of the river looking for a place to cross. It was then that, as he was galloping through a wheat field, a hare startled his horse so that he fell. He was almost immediately back on his feet, but it was enough to cast a gloomy pall over Napoleon himself and over those who witnessed the incident, all of them superstitious, thinking it a bad omen.
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In that moment the comet was forgotten; Napoleon’s fall quickly did the rounds of the army.

Only a few hours after he had left Marie-Louise at Dresden, Napoleon was writing to her. His letters to her during the first months of the Russian campaign are different in tenor to those he once wrote to Josephine during his first campaign in Italy. They are less erotic, less passionate, and much more paternal, but they nevertheless demonstrate the depth of his love for her, the love of an older man for a younger woman. They provide us with an insight into his thinking. ‘All the promises I made will be kept, so that our separation will last only a short time.’ Napoleon hoped that the campaign would last no more than two or three months.
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HUBRIS, 1812

18

The Second Polish War

The Tempest Breaks

He was likened to a modern Darius, watching part of the army cross from a hill, standing in front of his tent, humming an old folk song, ‘Marlborough Has Left for the War’, while playing with his riding crop.
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He was in his element, which is why he was happy.

When Second Lieutenant Ducque arrived on the banks of the Niemen on 23 June 1812, not far from Kaunas, he bivouacked on the hills along the river. There was nothing but troops as far as the eye could see.
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It must have been an impressive sight and left many men with feelings of ‘joy, pride and satisfaction’.
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Some of them had been marching for four months and it was only now that they were about to set foot on enemy territory.
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The army started to cross around two in the morning. Pontoon bridges had been constructed over the river, about 180 metres wide at this spot. Since the banks were so steep in parts, the troops found themselves sliding down on their backsides, breaking their speedy descent by grabbing hold of whatever they could. ‘It was like a noisy cataract, a cascade of living men.’
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Napoleon had already encountered serious supply problems. In Torun´?, in the Duchy of Warsaw, he had raged, furious that Pierre Daru, head of the commissariat, and General Mathieu Dumas, intendant general, had not carried out his orders.
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The problem was transport; it simply could not keep up with the army, nor adequately deliver supplies on time.
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The French army had not always lived off the land – in 1800 and again in 1807 large supply depots had been organized – and Napoleon had ordered massive supply magazines to be arranged in Prussia and Poland before the start of the campaign. The problem was getting supplies to the front quickly enough. The supply train consisted of more than 25,000 wagons, which included ammunition caissons, portable ovens for baking bread and even portable mills for grinding grain, drawn by something like 90,000 animals, but the roads were so bad that they could not keep up with an army on foot. Even when supplies already existed in the larger towns, such as Torun´?, they were often in poor condition. Around 100,000 head of cattle were supposed to follow the army into Russia in order to provide the troops with fresh meat, but one witness who saw a herd of cattle that had originated in Poitou on the way to Torun´ described them as skeletons no longer in a state to walk.
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Jakob Walter, who belonged to the Württemberg corps, described the salted meat they were given to cook (which they suspected had been there since the last campaign in 1807), as ‘bluish-black and . . . salty as herrings. It was already tender enough to eat, and we boiled it a few times only to draw off the muriatic acid; and then the broth, not being useful for soup, had to be thrown out.’
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The supply situation was so bad that recruits fell ill and died in large numbers before they even reached the Russian border. Even the Young Guard, chosen from among the best recruits, was having trouble keeping up.
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There was already a sort of conspiracy to hide the truth from Napoleon, even if it was tacit, and had its origins, according to one general of the Young Guard, in self-interest.
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General Pierre Berthezène gave the example of the Guard, always written up as 50,000-strong, when in reality it almost never exceeded 25,000. It is not that the men in Napoleon’s entourage were made up of toadies and flatterers. On the contrary, many frankly spoke their mind. The problem was that Napoleon often either ignored their advice – believing that they did not know enough about the matter or did not possess an overview of the whole – or he got angry when provided with dwindling figures. Rather than face his ire, most preferred to lie.
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Although the Grande Armée that marched into Russia was about 450,000 men, only about 235,000 crossed the Niemen on that day in a first wave (the rest followed in the days and weeks to come). Russian figures, often dismissed by historians as inaccurately low, actually support this. On the other hand, the number of civilians accompanying the army – wives, prostitutes, servants, victuallers of one kind or another – at a conservative estimate numbered around 50,000.
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It appeared that every staff officer brought several servants as well as several barouches and calashes carrying their personal effects, not to mention their victuals of wine, pâtés, cheeses, hams and so on.
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Whatever the true figure, the reason traditionally offered for gathering such a large army in the first place is that either Napoleon was seeking an overwhelming superiority in numbers in order to carry out a crushing blow, or he was expecting a protracted war.
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It was more likely the former than the latter.

There is some indication too that Napoleon believed the campaign would be over in a matter of weeks or months.
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He may have been hoping to intimidate Alexander into submission by the sheer size of his force. A number of historians assert that, based on Napoleon’s previous campaigns, he was looking for a decisive knockout blow that would be delivered in one or two battles, that he planned to have the campaign over in twenty days, and that he had no intention of being drawn into the vast Russian interior.
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The Russians themselves believed that this was exactly what he was looking for. If this were the case, then, in hindsight at least, it made little strategic sense to gather such an imposing army that was likely to prevent any sensible Russian general from giving battle. Nor does there seem to be an explanation why Napoleon entered Russia at this particular point and headed for Moscow, rather than going through the more densely populated northern regions towards the capital, St Petersburg, unless it is because he believed that Moscow was the ‘veritable’ capital of the Russian Empire, the centre of Russian power.
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