Russia Against Napoleon (21 page)

Of Russia’s twenty-three existing divisions, Barclay argued that eight would need to remain in Finland, the Caucasus and the Ottoman border to defend these regions. This assumed some construction of fortresses in Finland, peace with the Ottomans and no Austrian invasion of Wallachia and Moldavia. Even given this optimistic scenario only fifteen divisions – barely 200,000 men – would be available for the western front. Seven of these divisions were to be deployed in the south, in other words on the left of the Russian line. They would block an enemy advance towards Kiev. Four divisions were to be concentrated on the right in Courland. In the enormous gap between these two armies the Reserve Army of just four divisions would deploy between Vilna and Minsk.

For whatever reason, Barclay said nothing about what would happen if the defence line along the Dvina and Dnieper was breached. Nor did he venture an opinion as to whether 200,000 men would be sufficient. Only weeks into his new job, perhaps he felt that he had risked enough by advocating the abandonment of the whole of Belorussia and Lithuania in his first discussion of strategy with the monarch.
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For two years after Barclay wrote this memorandum Russian generals debated whether to adopt a defensive or offensive strategy in the face of the threat from Napoleon. Given the fact that the defensive strategy initially suggested by Barclay in March 1810 was the one which was finally adopted and which ultimately proved successful it might seem self-evident that this was the correct option. In fact this was far from clear at the time. A number of intelligent proposals for an offensive strategy were put forward by key generals. A point to note is that for much of the period between March 1810 and April 1812 both Barclay de Tolly and Aleksandr Chernyshev advocated at least a limited initial offensive into Prussia and the Duchy of Warsaw. The leading advocate of a purely defensive strategy was Lieutenant-General Karl von Pfühl, a former senior Prussian staff officer accepted into Russian service in December 1806. Pfühl’s chief assistant was Lieutenant-Colonel Ludwig von Wolzogen, who was responsible for choosing the position of the famous fortified camp at Drissa on which Pfühl’s defensive strategy rested. But in October 1811 even Wolzogen argued that an offensive strategy made more sense.
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The reasons for this were partly political. It was clear to everyone that unless the Russian army advanced at the beginning of the war there was no chance of keeping Prussia as an ally. Right down to the winter of 1811–12 this issue hung in the balance, with a Russo-Prussian convention pledging Russia to an offensive signed but ultimately never ratified by the Prussian side. Another vital political issue was the competition to secure Polish loyalty. As Bennigsen argued in February 1811, a Russian offensive into the Duchy of Warsaw would stymie Napoleon’s wish to mobilize Polish support in Russia’s western borderlands. If the moral effect of a Russian offensive was combined with attractive political concessions to the Poles, large sections of the Polish army might fight on the Russian side.
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There were also powerful military reasons for an offensive. Invading the Duchy of Warsaw meant that Polish rather than Russian soil would bear the costs of war. More important, if Napoleon was to invade Russia, the Duchy of Warsaw and East Prussia would be his key bases. Huge stores would need to be amassed well in advance to sustain the invading army. As this army made its way across Europe to take up position on the Russian border their stores and their sources of food and fodder in the Duchy would be vulnerable to a Russian preemptive strike. For a sensible invader, the campaigning season in Russia was short. It was lunacy to invade before early June, when there would be sufficient grass in the field to feed the horses. That allowed less than five months before the snows began to fall in November. At the very least, a Russian pre-emptive strike might delay Napoleon’s plans for an offensive and gain an additional year for Russian defensive preparations.

Above all, Russian generals advocated an offensive because they understood how very risky and difficult a purely defensive strategy would be. The western border was immensely long. If Russia was still at war with the Turks, French or Austrian troops could invade Bessarabia and threaten the entire Russian position on the north shore of the Black Sea, at the same time as Napoleon’s main army was tying most of the Russian forces down in Belorussia and Lithuania. In the spring of 1812 peace with the Ottomans and the Austrian promise not to invade Russia from Galicia at least ended these worries.

Nevertheless the border with East Prussia and the Duchy of Warsaw alone remained very long. The Russians had to defend the approaches to Petersburg and Moscow. The latter could be threatened directly via Smolensk in the west or from Kaluga and the south-west. The defence of Kiev and Ukraine was also a top priority. Russian armies would therefore be stretched very thin. Communications through the huge area of the Pripet marshes were extremely poor. The Russian southern army defending Ukraine would be on its own. It would be within Napoleon’s power to block the two main roads across the marshes and turn most of his army against one or other half of the Russian defensive screen.

It was in the nature of a defensive strategy that it gave the enemy the initiative. Added to the geography of the western borderlands, it would give Napoleon every opportunity to drive through the Russian forces, keep them separated and defeat them in detail. Moving through the centre of the Russian armies, he would then have the advantage of being between them and using interior lines. Bagration, Petr Mikhailovich Volkonsky and the emperor’s uncle, Duke Alexander of Württemberg, all stressed this danger in the early months of 1812.
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To make the situation worse, in the impoverished western borderlands it was very difficult to keep large armies concentrated and static for weeks on end, except possibly in the weeks immediately after the harvest. Sickness rates also shot up once the army was concentrated. In addition, much the most effective way to eat up the region’s food supplies and deny them to the French was to quarter the Russian army across a large swath of the area and use it to requisition supplies in lieu of tax. A state of war was declared in the border provinces in late April, which helped with requisitioning, but army headquarters was loath to concentrate its forces too early and too narrowly. In any case, once Napoleon left Paris the sources of Russian intelligence partly dried up. Napoleon himself was hoping for a Russian offensive and did not make final plans for an invasion until very late. He then of course did his utmost to hide where he intended to make his main thrust. Not until late May 1812 did the Russians begin to get a clear sense of where the main enemy attack was likely to come.
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In his March 1810 memorandum Barclay had stated that Russia’s western borderlands were very weakly defended by man or nature. Many other officers expanded on this theme in reports written between then and June 1812. Russian military engineers were badly overstretched in these years. In 1807–11 the small corps of engineers was deployed in the Baltic seaport fortresses against possible British attack, in the Caucasus and in attempts to refortify strong-points taken from the Ottomans in the Balkans. From March 1810 it was also lumbered with the immense task of fortifying the western borderlands at breakneck speed. As was pointed out in a number of memorandums, fortresses bypassed by Napoleon would be a big threat to his fragile communications. This would slow down his advance. More importantly, a retreating army with no fortresses in its rear had nowhere secure for its supplies and baggage, and was therefore always obsessed with the need to protect them. In this situation an army tended to retreat quickly since only distance provided security.
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But fortresses, however necessary, could not easily be built from scratch in two years. On their southern flank, the Russians succeeded in preparing Kiev’s defences for a siege and constructed a strong fortress at Bobruisk. On their northern flank, Riga was strengthened though the commander of the corps of engineers, General Oppermann, doubted whether it could hold out for long against a serious siege unless its garrison was very large. Once the new fortress of Dünaburg on the Dvina was completed, Oppermann wanted to move all supplies and stores there from Riga, since he feared that the latter’s fall to the French would otherwise threaten the logistics of the main Russian armies.

Unfortunately, however, Dünaburg could not be completed by the summer of 1812. This meant that the entire central sector of the Russian defence line was open. As Bennigsen pointed out, this central sector gave access to the core territories of the Russian Empire, including the army’s likely supply bases in Moscow and Smolensk. To make matters worse, this huge central sector had no natural defences of real value. Wolzogen had obeyed his orders to choose a defensive position on the river Dvina and had selected the spot for a fortified camp at Drissa. Nevertheless he warned that the upper two-thirds of the Dvina was shallow and easily forded in summer. Moreover at most points the west bank was higher than the east, which put defenders at a serious disadvantage. Barclay received the same advice from an even more authoritative voice, namely General Oppermann, who told him in August 1811 that the river Dvina could not be defended against a serious enemy advance, ‘however good any specific position may be’. The reason for this was that ‘in summer the river is easily crossed, the areas close to its banks are almost everywhere open and easily traversed, and any position on or near the river’s banks can be outflanked’.
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Between Riga on the Baltic coastline and Bobruisk far to the south the only significant defence-works in June 1812 were the fortified camp at Drissa, way upriver on the Dvina towards Vitebsk, whose construction began in the spring of 1812. Alexander’s unofficial adviser, General Pfühl, made the camp at Drissa the key to his plan for the defence of the empire’s heartland. By the time Napoleon’s forces approached Drissa, Pfühl expected them to be exhausted and reduced in number after crossing a devastated Belorussia and Lithuania. If they attempted to storm the fortified camp in which the bulk of First Army had taken refuge they would be at a great tactical disadvantage. If they tried to move beyond Drissa then First Army could attack their flank. Meanwhile Bagration and Platov’s forces would be striking deep into Napoleon’s rear.

In principle Pfühl’s plan had much in common with Barclay’s proposals in March 1810. There was the same reliance on strategic retreat and devastating the abandoned territory; on fortified camps as a means to strengthen the defending army when it finally turned at bay; on the role of other Russian forces in striking into Napoleon’s flanks and rear. Pfühl had merely transported Barclay’s concept from the two flanks, where Barclay had seen the greatest threat, to the centre of the Russian line, which now seemed the likeliest target for Napoleon’s main blow. But Barclay’s fortified camps were to rely on the support of fortresses, Riga in the north and Bobruisk in the south. With Dünaburg gone, Drissa must stand alone. In addition, in 1810 Barclay had not anticipated that Russia would be invaded by an army of anything like half a million men.

Even in 1812 Pfühl was probably not fully aware of the size of Napoleon’s invasion force. Access to Russian intelligence material was confined to a very tight circle. By March 1812 Alexander, Barclay and their de facto chief intelligence officer, Petr Chuikevich, knew that even the first wave of Napoleon’s army would be 450,000 strong. A force of this size could both mask and outflank Drissa without danger. It could also block any attack by Bagration and Matvei Platov without difficulty. If First Army took refuge in Drissa, it might be surrounded and captured as easily as Mack’s troops in Ulm had been at the beginning of the 1805 campaign.

Nevertheless Alexander’s plan of campaign in 1812 at least on the surface revolved around the fortified camp at Drissa. The Russian army was to make a strategic withdrawal to Drissa at the war’s outbreak and would then attempt to hold the French on the line of the river Dvina. Perhaps Alexander genuinely believed in Pfühl’s plan. He always tended to value foreign soldiers’ opinions above those of his own generals, in whose abilities he usually had little confidence. In addition, Pfühl’s ‘scientific’ predictions as to the precise moment when Napoleon’s supplies would run out may have appealed to Alexander’s liking for tidy, abstract ideas. Undoubtedly the emperor believed that Pfühl’s plan was based on the same concept as Barclay’s earlier proposals. He will also have remembered that in 1806–7 Bennigsen had kept at bay for six months an enemy double his numbers. Nevertheless there is room for some cynicism. Alexander did not want Napoleon to penetrate into the Russian heartland, though he feared that he might do so. Any open admission that Napoleon might reach Great Russia in his initial campaign, let alone the circulation of plans based on such an idea, would have destroyed the emperor’s credit. If Napoleon was to be stopped short of the Great Russian border, Pfühl’s plan seemed the only one currently available. Should it fail, Alexander knew that Pfühl would be the perfect scapegoat. A foreigner without protection, he was also despised by the Russian generals as the epitome of a German pedantic staff officer who knew nothing about war.
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Though Alexander may have retained faith in Pfühl’s plan even in June 1812, it is very hard to believe that the experienced Barclay allowed it greatly to affect his thinking on how the war should be conducted, given the advice he had received from the army’s chief engineer. From Barclay’s perspective, however, the camp at Drissa did no harm. It absorbed almost none of his resources, since it was built with local labour. It was also a useful stopping point in the army’s retreat and almost unique as a place where stores could be established for the retreating army under some kind of protection. In any case, final decisions on Russian strategy rested with the emperor, not with Barclay. But the best guide to Barclay’s thinking immediately before the war is provided by a memorandum written by Chuikevich in April 1812. It says nothing about fortified camps in general or the camp at Drissa in particular.