1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. Adam Zamoyski
could provide. ‘The senior officers feared Napoleon, seeing him as a fearful conqueror, a new Attila,’ wrote Lieutenant Radozhitsky of the light artillery, ‘but we younger ones romped with the god of love, sighing and moaning from his wounds.’32
People far away from the front could not understand why the Russian army, whose officers wrote home letters full of bravado, did not attack and drive the French out of Prussia and Poland. There was grumbling about the lack of action, reinforced by widespread fear of a French advance into Russia, not least because it might provoke social unrest.
In May the erroneous news reached St Petersburg that Badajoz and Madrid had fallen to the British and that a Spanish army had crossed the Pyrenees into southern France. Why, people asked themselves up and down the country, was Alexander not marching out to deal the final blow against Napoleon? He and his entourage appeared to be whiling away the time at balls and parties, and it was reported in the capital that the officers were indulging in ‘orgies’.33
Russian estimates of the size of the Grande Armée were very low. Barclay and Phüll put the strength of the French forces at 200–250,000; Bagration at 200,000; Toll at 225,000; Bennigsen at 169,000; and Bernadotte at 150,000. The highest estimate drawn up by anyone on the Russian side was 350,000, and that included all reserves and rear formations.34 This meant that an attack on it would have been seen as perfectly feasible, and Alexander undoubtedly longed to launch one. His excitement about the Chichagov plan and his attempt to bribe Poniatowski can only be viewed in the context of an offensive. And there are other indications that he wanted to take command of it.35
But he was heavily influenced by Phüll’s views, and Phüll was against any attack, believing as he did that the Russian army was not up to it.36 Above all, Alexander wanted to be seen as the innocent victim rather than the aggressor, and his religious instincts told him to play the part of passive tool of the divine will.
In recent years he had made more and more references to the will of God in his letters and utterances, and he had been increasingly guided by the wish to make himself a worthy and righteous instrument of that will. ‘I have at least the consolation of having done everything that is compatible with honour to avoid this struggle,’ he had written to Catherine in February. ‘Now it is only a question of preparing for it with courage and faith in God; this faith is stronger than ever in me, and I submit with resignation to His will.’37
Nesselrode was still advising Alexander to negotiate rather than provoke a war, but Alexander seems to have ruled out negotiations entirely as an option, and he was in no mood to talk when Narbonne arrived in Vilna on 18 May.38 He received him and read the letter he had brought, but told him that as Napoleon had ranged the whole of Europe against Russia it was evident his intentions were hostile, and that there was therefore no point in negotiating. He reiterated that he would only consider doing so if Napoleon withdrew his troops beyond the Rhine.
‘What does the Emperor want?’ he asked Narbonne rhetorically. ‘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 a peace whose conditions he will dictate. He is deluding himself!’ Then, taking a large map of his dominions, he spread it on the table and continued: ‘My dear Count, I am convinced that Napoleon is the greatest general in Europe, that his armies are the most battle-hardened, his lieutenants the bravest and the most experienced; but 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 over the most formidable army of modern times.’39
Although most people at Russian headquarters assumed that the only purpose of Narbonne’s mission was to spy out their dispositions and rouse local patriots to stage an uprising, Alexander invited him to attend a parade on the following day, and to dine with him afterwards. But the next day Narbonne was informed by one of Alexander’s aides-de-camp that a carriage generously provisioned for the journey back to Dresden would be waiting at his door that evening.40
* One verst = 1060 metres, approximately five-eighths of a mile.
Narbonne’s post-chaise, almost white from a thick coating of dust, rolled into the courtyard of the Royal Palace in Dresden on the afternoon of 26 May. He was shown upstairs and promptly summoned into the imperial presence. He gave a full account of his conversations with Alexander, laying stress on the Tsar’s determination and on his parting words. ‘Tell the Emperor that I will not be the aggressor,’ Alexander had told him. ‘He can cross the Niemen; but never will I sign a peace dictated on Russian territory.’1
It is difficult to know what Alexander expected Napoleon to make of this message. He had stipulated that he would not enter into any talks unless Napoleon evacuated all his troops from the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and Prussia, while he was himself poised with his army on the borders of those states. Napoleon had only two options: to disband his huge army and go home, exposing himself to attack as he did so, and leaving the whole of Poland and Germany open to invasion; or he could invade himself. He could only have taken Alexander’s message as a taunt, ‘a sullen challenge’ as the British historian William Hazlitt put it.2 But he thought it was prompted by bravado rather than conviction. He therefore sent a courier to Lauriston in St Petersburg instructing him to go to the Tsar’s headquarters at Vilna, as a last resort.
Napoleon was not afraid of war with Russia. ‘Never has an expedition against them been more certain of success,’ he said to Fain, pointing out that all his former enemies were now allied to him. It was true that he had just received a somewhat disheartening reply to his last proposal for an alliance with Sweden. But it had only been a verbal one, and he assumed that in the event of his invading Russia Sweden would be unable to resist the opportunity of recovering Finland. ‘Never again will such a favourable concourse of circumstances present itself; I feel it drawing me in, and if the Emperor Alexander persists in refusing my proposals, I shall cross the Niemen!’3
He adopted a confident, even a blustering tone. ‘Before two months are out, Alexander will sue for peace,’ he declared, ‘the great landowners will force him to.’ He brushed aside Narbonne’s warnings that this campaign would be difficult to win on account of the special nature of the nation and the terrain. ‘Barbarian peoples are simpleminded and superstitious,’ he asserted. ‘A shattering blow dealt at the heart of the empire on Moscow the great, Moscow the holy, will deliver to me in one instant that whole blind and helpless mass.’4
But his plans were still dangerously confused, as he had come no closer to defining his goals. ‘My enterprise is one of those to which patience is the key,’ he explained to Metternich. ‘The more patient will triumph. I will open the campaign by crossing the Niemen, and it will end at Smolensk and Minsk. That is where I shall stop. I will fortify those two points, and at Vilna, where I shall make my headquarters during the coming winter, I shall apply myself to the organisation of Lithuania, which is burning