1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. Adam Zamoyski
off, and set about loading up with another cartridge. If the first one then went off, the barrel was likely to explode in his face. But that was considered just another of the hazards of war. Footsoldiers were expendable, and there were always plenty more where they came from.
The relentless build-up of forces continued through the autumn and winter of 1811 and into the spring of 1812. The twenty-year-old son of a wine-grower in Burgundy presented himself at seven o’clock on the morning of 3 January 1812 at the Préfecture in Lyon, and a couple of days later he was in the barracks of the 17th Light Infantry at Strasbourg. ‘The very morning after our arrival, we were uniformed and armed, and, without giving us time to breathe, the corporals set about inculcating in us the principles of our new trade,’ he remembered. ‘They were in a hurry …’5
Raising the troops was only part of the task: the men had to be fed, clothed and armed. On campaign, the French soldier was supposed to receive a daily ration of: 550 grams of biscuit, either thirty grams of rice or sixty grams of dried vegetables, 240 grams of meat or two hundred grams of salt beef and lard, some salt, a quarter of a litre of wine, a sixth of a litre of brandy and, in hot weather, a shot of vinegar. By January 1812 Napoleon had amassed fifty-day supplies of biscuit, flour, salted meat and dried vegetables for 400,000 men and forage for 50,000 horses at Danzig. This was on top of the million rations stored at Stettin and Küstrin.6
The enterprise also required the provision of hundreds of thousands of items of clothing, of boots of various kinds, and of small arms. It entailed the purchase of tens of thousands of horses for the cavalry, which had to be trained to carry a heavily armed rider and respond to his intentions as he wielded his sword, lance or carbine. They also had to be habituated to the roar of cannon and the clash of arms, by being led and then ridden, again and again, towards lines of men shouting, banging cooking pots and letting off guns in their direction, and to be rewarded each time with a carrot.
Napoleon prepared massive supplies of ammunition, setting up depots at Magdeburg, Danzig, Küstrin, Glogau and Stettin. By May 1812 he would have amassed 761,801 rounds of ammunition for his field artillery – over a thousand rounds per gun for some calibres of the more than eight hundred cannon he was putting into the field. This did not include the siege train of heavy guns which he had built up there so as to be able to reduce enemy fortresses. Such figures do not compare at all badly with the preparations made by a highly industrialised imperial Germany a hundred years later.
As he was expecting Russia to launch her attack at any moment, his first preoccupation was to secure the line of the Vistula and strengthen the garrisons of the fortresses at Modlin, Torun and Zamosc. This would allow his main forces to concentrate in the first couple of months of 1812. He hoped to have over 400,000 men in the area of northern Germany and Poland by the middle of March, which would allow him to deal with any Russian strike, even if it were accompanied by outbreaks of German national insurrection.7
The situation in Germany had been growing increasingly tense for some time, and patriots watched the preparations for war on both sides with mounting excitement. The Russian embassy in Vienna was orchestrating agitation throughout Germany. Colonel Chernyshev was recruiting disaffected Prussian officers and working on a plan to found a German Legion in Russia which, in the event of war, would enlist all prisoners of German nationality taken from Napoleon. He was also investigating the possibility of creating a fifth column of sympathisers all over Germany who would be ready to rise up when a Russian army marched in.8
Reports from French military commanders and diplomatic agents in Germany were full of stories of plots by secret societies, and warned Napoleon that the hardships imposed by the Continental System were driving people to desperation. In the autumn of 1811 Prussia appeared to be on the brink of revolt, with the King and his pro-French cabinet barely able to control the nationalists. The Prussian army was surreptitiously mobilising its reserves. In Westphalia, Jérôme was growing nervous. ‘The ferment has reached the highest degree, and the wildest hopes are fostered and cherished with enthusiasm,’ he reported to Napoleon on 5 December 1811. ‘People are quoting the example of Spain, and if it comes to war, all the lands lying between the Rhine and the Oder will be embraced by a vast and active insurrection.’ Napoleon did not believe the Germans had the stomach for popular insurrection and thought the secret societies ridiculous. But he instructed Davout to be ready to march on Berlin at a moment’s notice in order to disarm the Prussian army.9
The army Napoleon was assembling would be the largest the world had ever seen.* It included soldiers from almost every nation of Europe. Its main body was made up of Frenchmen, Belgians, Dutchmen, Italians and Swiss from the areas incorporated into the Empire. This was supplemented by contingents from every vassal or allied state. The presence of such a wide variety of nationalities inevitably raised questions of cohesion, quite apart from motivation or loyalty. But with the exception of the Polish and the Austrian corps, all the contingents were commanded by French generals. And most were imbued with French military culture, and fortified by the reputation of French arms. ‘The belief that they were invincible made them invincible, just as the belief that they were sure to be beaten in the end paralysed the enemy’s spirits and efforts,’ in the words of Karl von Funck, a German officer attached to the French imperial staff.10
‘Three-quarters of the nations which were about to take part in the struggle had interests diametrically opposed to those which had decided the opening of hostilities,’ wrote Lieutenant Count von Wedel, a German serving in the 9th Polish Lancers. ‘There were many who in their heart of hearts wished the Russians success, and yet at the moment of danger, all fought as though they had been defending their own homes.’11 The urge to emulate was strong, and there was the magic presence of Napoleon.
‘Anyone who was not alive in the time of Napoleon cannot imagine the extent of the moral ascendancy he exerted over the minds of his contemporaries,’ wrote a Russian officer, adding that every soldier, whatever side he was on, instinctively conjured a sense of limitless power at the very mention of his name. Wedel agreed. ‘Whatever their personal feelings towards the Emperor may have been, there was nobody who did not see in him the greatest and most able of all generals, and who did not experience a feeling of confidence in his talents and the value of his judgement … The aura of his greatness subjugated me as well, and, giving way to enthusiasm and admiration, I, like the others, shouted "Vive l’Empereur!"’12
The largest non-French contingent were the Poles, who numbered some 95,000. Many of them had been fighting under French colours since the late 1790s and were enthusiastic allies. In 1807 Napoleon created an élite regiment of Polish Chevau-Légers in the Imperial Guard as a token of how much he valued his Polish troops. In the same year the Grand Duchy of Warsaw began recruiting its own army, and raised the Legion of the Vistula, an auxiliary corps which was to fight for the French. These troops had distinguished themselves in various theatres, and had no difficulty in operating alongside the French. The only problem was that Napoleon’s insistence on the Grand Duchy raising more troops than such a small state could support, either in human or economic terms, meant that the barrel had been scraped. Men who were physically unfit had been drafted, uniforms had been skimped on, training was inadequate, and nobody was paid after June 1812. But at least their loyalty to the cause and devotion to Napoleon were never in question.13
The next largest contingent were the Italians, grouped in the Army of Italy, commanded by Prince Eugène, and the Neapolitan army of Joachim Murat. The Army of Italy was a fine force of 45,000 – 25,000 Italians organised on French lines, highly disciplined, with a strong esprit de corps, particularly in units such as the Royal Guard, and 20,000 Frenchmen, many of them from Savoy and Provence, stationed in