Russia Against Napoleon (36 page)

At the same time as they were helping to feed the army, the provincial governors and nobles were also being asked to help with the creation of new military units which would form a second line of defence behind Barclay’s and Bagration’s armies. The first requests for assistance went out from Alexander in Vilna in early June, in other words before Napoleon had crossed the Russian border.

Part of this new military reserve was to be the recruits currently assembled in the ten so-called ‘second-line’ recruit depots. Major-General Andreas Kleinmichel was given the task of forming six new regiments – in other words somewhat fewer than 14,000 men – from these conscripts. With Napoleon now advancing through Belorussia, Kleinmichel was ordered to concentrate and train his six regiments well to the rear, in the area between Tver and Moscow. He was given an excellent cadre of officers and veteran troops to help him in this task. They included all the training cadres from the second-line recruit depots and all the officers and NCOs left behind to evacuate stores and close down the twenty-four first-line depots. In addition, he was sent two battalions of the Moscow garrison regiment and two fine battalions of marines from Petersburg. In time Kleinmichel had enough officers to be able to dispatch some of them to help Prince Dmitrii Lobanov-Rostovsky, who was struggling to form twelve new regiments in the central Russian provinces.
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Alexander’s orders to create these twelve regiments were drafted on 25 May in Vilna. The great novelty was that these regiments were supposed to be created and paid for by the efforts of provincial society. The state would supply recruits and muskets but it was hoped that nobles who had previously served in the army would come out of retirement and provide all the officers. A province’s nobles were expected to pay for their regiment’s uniforms, equipment and food. The town corporations must pay for their transport. The twelve regiments would be formed in six provinces: Kostroma, Vladimir and Iaroslavl to the north, and Riazan, Tambov and Voronezh to the south. Each of these six provinces was supposed to officer and equip one regiment. Nine other provinces were to share responsibility for the formation of the six remaining regiments.
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As usual when receiving orders of this sort, the governor’s first move was to discuss the matter with his province’s marshal of the nobility. The district noble marshals were summoned to the provincial capital to organize the new decree’s execution. Given the size of Russian provinces, it was seldom possible to arrange the governor’s crucial meeting with the district marshals within less than eight days. Both the nobles and the town corporations immediately accepted the task set by the monarch. Alexander had suggested that the three southern provinces – Riazan, Tambov and Voronezh – coordinate their efforts to form their regiments. Their governors reckoned that it would cost 188,000 rubles to feed, clothe and equip each regiment and a further 28,000 rubles to build its transport wagons. Prices differed greatly across Russia’s regions, however. The Kostroma noble marshals believed that in their province 290,000 rubles would be needed. The marshals agreed to divide the required sum equally among all the province’s serfowners.
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Raising the money was relatively simple. Acquiring the uniforms, equipment and wagons was far more complicated. The governors and noble marshals had little experience of forming regiments and these weeks of dire emergency as Napoleon advanced into Russia were not the easiest time to learn. All the provinces agreed that most of the equipment and materials would have to come from Moscow. Since a single regiment required, for example, 2,900 metres of dark-green cloth and almost 4,500 pairs of boots, a great deal of transport had to be arranged. The three southern provinces opted to have the uniforms tailored in Moscow because they did not have sufficient workers competent to do the job in time themselves. The result was that, for example, 1,620 uniforms for the Riazan regiment never left Moscow and were destroyed in the fire. The northern provinces were much less purely agricultural, however, and Governor Nikolai Pasynkov was convinced that the tailors of Kostroma could handle the task for themselves.
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All the provinces baulked at the need to construct ammunition and provisions wagons on the models supplied by the army, though in Kostroma Governor Pasynkov told the local artisans to construct an approximation to the model. Much more common was the wail from the governor of Penza, deep into the agricultural region south-east of Moscow: ‘For all my desire and zeal to help with the actual construction of the ammunition and provisions wagons, it is totally impossible for me to do so because we completely lack artisans who could do such work.’ Very soon the governors were relieved to hear that they need only provide the money for the wagons, which would be built in Moscow under the supervision of the city’s commandant, Lieutenant-General Hesse. Unfortunately, however, Alexander and Balashev had neglected to forewarn Hesse, who reacted to the governors’ joyous thanks for his help with bafflement. It was to avoid messes like this in the future that on 29 June Alexander made Aleksei Arakcheev his chief assistant for military administration. Arakcheev never had much influence on strategy or operations but for the rest of the war he was to be a very effective overlord of all matters concerning the mobilization, training and equipment of Russia’s reserve and militia forces.
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The desperate efforts required to form the new regiments tell one much about Russian provincial life in Alexander’s reign. In Riazan, the local merchants tried to charge exorbitant sums to feed the regiments forming around the town. Perhaps because they would have to pay for half of this food anyway, the nobility offered to provide it all for free. The provincial marshal, retired Major-General Lev Izmailov, who had a vicious reputation for mistreating his serfs, took a large proportion of this burden on himself. More difficult was medical help for the new regiments. There only appear to have been two doctors available in Riazan in 1812. One of them, young Dr Gernet, behaved heroically, adding care for the regiments’ sick to his usual job, volunteering to accompany them when they went on campaign, and even paying for some of their medicines out of his own pocket. Dr Moltiansky on the other hand did everything possible to avoid helping the soldiers even when they were in Riazan and flatly refused to accompany them on campaign. In the end Governor Bukharin forced him to do so by threatening to exile him from the province and thereby destroy his practice.
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The most difficult task of all was to find enough officers for the new regiments. Alexander clearly overestimated nobles’ willingness to return to service, and failed to offer sufficient incentives for them to do so. The governor of Voronezh province reported to Lobanov in early July that although he had summoned an emergency assembly of the province’s nobles not one of those present had volunteered to return to military service. In Riazan, ‘the number of men wanting to become officers was very small, even among the very numerous nobility of the province’. Returning to military service contradicted the basic pattern of life for Russian nobles, by which young men served for a number of years as bachelor officers and then retired to the provinces to marry, run their estates, or take up elected jobs in the local administration. In time the number of volunteers grew, and it may have helped that the emperor now allowed ex-officers to return at the rank to which they had been promoted on retirement, rather than the one last held when in their regiments. In some cases, however, dire poverty seems to have been the main motive for nobles to return to military service.
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Lobanov did not help his own cause by interpreting Alexander’s decree in typically nit-picking and infuriating fashion. Among the governors, Prince Aleksei Dolgorukov of Simbirsk seems to have been the most enthusiastic about trying to mobilize volunteers to return to military service. By mid-August he had sent forty-two would-be officers to join Lobanov’s regiments. By Dolgorukov’s own recognition one of these men, retired Sub-Lieutenant Ianchevsky, was a marginal case, since he had at one point been censured for drunkenness. The governor wrote to Lobanov that he was submitting Ianchevsky’s case to him for decision, since the man was very repentant and wanted to redeem himself on the battlefield. Lobanov believed in fulfilling imperial orders down to the last comma, however, and promptly issued an official reprimand against Dolgorukov since the emperor’s decree inviting ex-officers to return to service had required them to have good records.
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Even by mid-September Lobanov’s regiments had less than half their full complement of officers, and of the 285 men assigned to regiments only 204 were nobles returning to service, most of the rest coming from that thoroughly dubious source, the internal security troops. The urgent need for the 227 spare officers dispatched by Andreas Kleinmichel is clear. On the other hand Lobanov had been sent twelve excellent officers from the Petersburg cadet corps, as well as an almost complete battalion of trainee NCOs from one of the grenadier training units. He had also been promised officers, NCOs and the best unmarried veterans from the units patrolling the frontier in south-western Siberia, who had already set out on their long trek to join his command.
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Lobanov’s battle with Prince Dolgorukov was by no means the only fight which enlivened the formation of the twelve regiments. One of Lobanov’s two assistants, Major-General Rusanov, was so infuriated by his boss’s behaviour that he denounced him directly to the emperor, much to Arakcheev’s rage. There were also conflicts between the military officers overseeing the regiments’ formation and the provincial marshals, since the officers were interested only in getting the units ready at top speed whereas the marshals were also concerned at the price of the uniforms and equipment, for which they were going to have to pay. For all the arguments and difficulties, however, the new regiments proved a success. Six of them, together with three of Kleinmichel’s regiments, reinforced Kutuzov’s army while the latter was in camp at Tarutino. The field-marshal reported to Alexander that despite the ‘very short’ time available to train them ‘they were extremely well formed and most of the men also shoot well’.
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Whatever the quality of Lobanov and Kleinmichel’s troops, 40,000 reinforcements were far too few to turn the war in Russia’s favour. Even as the two generals were struggling to form their eighteen regiments, Alexander ordered a massive new recruit levy – the 83rd – designed to net well over 150,000 conscripts. It would take months to assemble and train these men, however. To provide a second line of defence in the interim Alexander appealed to his nobles to mobilize and officer a temporary wartime militia from their serfs. In fact, with French troops already threatening their province the nobility of Smolensk was beginning to organize a ‘home guard’ even before the emperor’s appeal. But the drive to mobilize the militia was really launched when Alexander travelled to Moscow in late July. There he met a strong patriotic response to his appeal from the Moscow nobility. On 30 July a manifesto was issued, calling for a militia to be mobilized in sixteen provinces.
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In all, some 230,000 men served in the militia. Almost all of them were private serfs, just as their officers were in the great majority of cases nobles from the militia’s own province. No state or crown peasants joined the militia. This made good sense. It was vital not to drain the pool of recruits for the regular army since the army would always be the core of Russian military power and the key to victory. In addition, finding enough officers for the militia was bound to be difficult. Nobles might well feel some obligation to serve in militia forces volunteered and formed by their own province’s noble assemblies, though many did in fact do everything possible to avoid this obligation. Finding suitable men to officer a militia drawn from state and crown peasants would be impossible.
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The militiaman was to keep his civilian clothes. He needed a cloak (
kaftan
) which had to be voluminous enough for him to wear a fur jacket underneath it. His two pairs of boots also had to be wide enough to accommodate feet wrapped in socks and leggings against the winter cold. He would also need two Russian shirts with slanted collars, some handkerchiefs and puttees, and a cap which could be tied under his beard and keep his head warm in winter.
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Both the peasant militiamen and the state liked this arrangement. For the militiaman it implied recognition that he was not a soldier and would return home at the end of the war. Meanwhile the state was freed from the obligation to provide militiamen with uniforms, which in present circumstances it was totally incapable of doing. As the minister of the interior reported in mid-July, there was already a 340,000-metre deficit on existing military orders for uniform cloth. It was totally inconceivable to meet the projected additional wartime requirement for 2.4 million metres. Not merely, wrote the minister, were there too few factories but Russia even lacked the sheep to provide this amount of wool. In fact, apart from the Guards, Dmitrii Lobanov-Rostovsky’s men were the last Russian recruits in 1812–14 to be supplied with the dark-green uniforms traditional in the Russian infantry. All subsequent conscripts had to struggle along in shoddy, grey ‘recruit dress’, made from inferior ‘peasant cloth’ and ill-suited to the rigours of a campaign.
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The new militia was divided into three districts. The eight provinces of the first district were in principle committed to the defence of Moscow. The two provinces (St Petersburg and Novgorod) which made up the second district were given the task of defending the emperor’s capital. Both these districts were to be mobilized immediately. The third district of six provinces was not to be mobilized until after the harvest, and even then in stages. The third district’s commander was Lieutenant-General Count Petr Tolstoy, previously the ambassador in Paris. Tolstoy was far happier fighting Napoleon than paying court to him. As he explained, if only someone would give him enough artillery to cover his attacks, he would launch his columns of militia armed with pikes against the enemy in a Russian version of France’s own
levée en masse
of 1793.
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Much the most effective militia in 1812 were the regiments formed by St Petersburg and Novgorod. With Wittgenstein keeping the French at bay, they had a short time to train before being committed to action. The capital’s garrison provided officers and NCOs with long experience of training recruits. With the St Petersburg Arsenal at their service, all these militiamen received muskets. After five days and nights of training, Alexander I reviewed the Petersburg militia in the presence of the British ambassador, Lord Cathcart. Watching the new recruits perform their basic drill with remarkable skill, the ambassador commented to Alexander that ‘these men have sprouted out of the earth’. In the autumn 1812 campaign the Petersburg and Novgorod militias were to fight alongside Wittgenstein’s regulars in a number of battles, performing better than anyone had a right to expect.
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