1812. Adam Zamoyski
Cesare de Laugier, a native of Elba. Lieutenant von Meerheimb found leavetaking from his native Saxony gloomy and tearful, but the mood changed as soon as they were on the march. ‘From the very first stage, every face reflected universal gaiety, and good humour reigned along the whole length of the snaking column,’ he wrote. They were warmly greeted as they trudged through southern Germany, and had many an amorous adventure along the way.39
‘The ancients had a great advantage over us in that their armies were not tailed by a second army of penpushers,’ Napoleon frequently complained in conversation.40 He was not referring to the vastly expanded commissariat he had organised for this campaign.
From the moment he became ruler of France, he had begun to take elements of government as well as a military staff off to war with him. And when he became Emperor, he began to take a skeleton court. For this campaign, whose scope and duration were both so imponderable, he decided to take his whole life-support system, the means to exercise government, and everything that was necessary to make a grand show wherever he went and whatever he might decide to do – be it enthroning a King of Poland or having himself crowned Emperor of India. Napoleon’s equipage, under the command of the Master of the Horse Caulaincourt, consisted of some four hundred horses and forty mules carrying or drawing tents, camp beds, office, wardrobe, pharmacy, silver plate, kitchen, cellar and forges as well as an assortment of secretaries, officials, servants, cooks and grooms; and 130 saddle horses for the Emperor and his aides-de-camp. His baggage included a great many tents that would never be pitched and equipment that would never be unpacked. There was also a force of a hundred postillions attached to him. These would be posted along the road of the advance to supervise the rapid movement of mail between Paris and Napoleon’s headquarters by passing over the locked boxes containing his state correspondence from one courier or estafette to another.41
The exigencies of administrating the army, its support services and the Emperor’s entourage had exponentially inflated the numbers. Thousands of commissaires and lesser administrators, each with his servants, followed in the wake of the army. ‘The military administration was full of people who had never seen war and who said out loud that they had come on this campaign in order to make their fortune,’ complained Colonel de Saint-Chamans. Colonel Henri-Joseph Paixhans ranted against these people, ‘penetrated with the importance of their little persons’, who together with their minions made up ‘a cloaca of ineptitude, baseness and rapacity’.42
Every officer had at least one carriage, in which he kept spare uniforms, arms, maps, books and personal effects, driven by his own coachman and attended by at least one servant. General Compans, commanding the 5th Division in Davout’s 1st Corps, was by no means a sybarite; if anything, he was one of the plainer-living officers. Yet his establishment at the outset of the campaign consisted of his maitre d’hôtel Louis; his valet de chambre Duval; his coachman Vaud; two valets, Simon and Louis; his gendarme Trouillet; three other servants, Pierre, Valentin and Janvier; five carriage horses, half a dozen saddle horses and some thirty draught horses; one carriage and several wagons.43
The unknown object of the campaign, the uncertainty as to where it might take them and the likelihood of great distances to be covered made many an officer stock up against all eventualities, and more than one had new uniforms made for himself and new liveries for his servants. Faced with the possibility of a long absence from home, many, particularly among the Italians, appear to have defied Napoleon’s strict instructions and brought their wives along.44
As they marched across Germany and Poland, they had no clear vision of the aims of the campaign, and this dampened the ardour of some. ‘The future was vague, and its fortunes very distant; there was no inkling, nothing to exercise the imagination, nothing to awaken the enthusiasm,’ wrote Colonel Boulart of the artillery of the Guard. This did not stop them from speculating wildly. Jakob Walter of Stuttgart thought they were being marched up to some Baltic port, from which they would be shipped to Spain. But most looked eastwards. ‘We thought that, together with the Russians, we would cross the deserts of that great empire in order to go and attack England in her possessions in India,’ wrote General Pouget. One soldier wrote home saying they were marching to England, overland through Russia.45
‘Some said that Napoleon had made a secret alliance with Alexander, and that a combined Franco-Russian army was going to march against Turkey and take hold of its possessions in Europe and Asia; others said that the war would take us to the Great Indies, to chase out the English,’ remembered one volunteer.* ‘All of this concerned me very little: whether we were going to go to the right, to the left or straight ahead was a matter of indifference to me, as long as I could enter into the real world,’ wrote another. ‘My friends, my childhood companions were almost all in the army; they were already storing up glory. Was I, useless burden on this earth, to remain with my hands crossed to shamefully await their return? I was eighteen years old.’ Another, a fusilier in the 6th Regiment of the Guard, wrote to his parents telling them he was off to the ‘the Great Indies’ or possibly ‘Egippe’. ‘As for me, I don’t care either way; I would like us to go the ends of the earth.’ He spoke for many.46
* The term ‘grande armée’ in French military parlance designated the main operational force in any given campaign, but in the popular imagination the two words are above all associated with the great force that marched on Moscow.
* Curiously enough, Alexander’s secret information services had also reported to him that Napoleon’s plan was to knock out Russia with a quick blow, force peace on her and then, using 100,000 Russian auxiliaries, march on Constantinople, thence to Egypt, and then to Bengal.47
As hundreds of thousands of men drawn from every corner of Europe tramped across Germany ready to fight and die for him, dreaming of an epic march to India or just of getting back home as quickly as possible, the Emperor of the French was setting the scene for the catastrophe that would engulf all but a handful of them.
Napoleon was about to pit himself against a huge empire while still engaged in a wasting war in Spain, with Germany in a state of ferment and Britain hovering on the sidelines ready to take advantage of any opportunity that might arise. It is customary before going to war to firm up as many allies as possible, and for one such as this it was an absolute necessity. As luck would have it, he had a number of them lining up to support him. Sweden was a natural ally, with a long history of francophilia and an interest in recovering Finland and her enclaves on the Baltic from Russia; Turkey, another traditional ally of France, was actually engaged in a bloody war with Russia; Austria, whose emperor was Napoleon’s father-in-law, had many interests in common with the French; Prussia was begging to be allowed into an alliance with France; and the Poles were only waiting to be given the signal to rise up all over western Russia.
In the circumstances, Napoleon’s behaviour is astonishing. On 27 January 1812, under the pretext that the Continental System was not being enforced rigorously enough there, he sent his armies into Swedish Pomerania and took possession of it. He followed this up with a demand to Sweden for an alliance against Russia and a contingent of troops. When this was rejected by Bernadotte, he said he would allow the Swedes to recapture Finland, and offered some trading concessions. When this too was rejected, Napoleon offered to return Pomerania and threw in Mecklemburg as well as a large subsidy. But it was too late. His high-handed seizure of Pomerania had been taken as an insult in Sweden, and within two weeks of the news reaching Stockholm, Bernadotte’s special envoy was in St Petersburg asking for a treaty with Russia, which was duly signed on 5 April.
As for France’s other traditional ally, Turkey, Napoleon did nothing,