Russia Against Napoleon

Although the despair was fierce, it was also rather brief. Within a few days moods were changing. A staff officer wrote that the sight of Moscow on fire, though initially contributing to the gloom, soon transformed it into anger: ‘In the place of despondency came courage and a thirst for revenge: at that time no one doubted that the French had deliberately set fire to it.’ The view began to spread that all was far from lost and that, as young Lieutenant Aleksandr Chicherin of the Semenovskys put it, the barbarians who had invaded his country would be made to pay for their ‘impertinence’. Barclay de Tolly contributed to the change of mood by visiting every unit in his army to explain why the Russians now had the upper hand and would win the campaign. Lieutenant Meshetich recalled how Barclay explained to the men of his battery that he had operated according to a plan and that ‘the long retreat had denied any successes to the enemy and would lead to his ruin, since he had fallen into a trap which had been prepared for him and would cause his destruction’.⁴³

At Tarutino the army resumed some elements of its normal life. Kutuzov insisted that religious services should be compulsory every Sunday and feast day, and he set an example by attending them all himself. That other great institution of Russian life, the bath-house, also came to the rescue as regiments got down to constructing banias for themselves. The fierce disciplinary code of the army also made its mark, on this occasion usefully. On 21 October, for example, Kutuzov confirmed a court martial’s death sentence on Ensign Tishchenko, who had turned his platoon of jaegers into a robber band, robbing and even killing the local population. The death sentence on eleven of his jaegers was reduced to running the gauntlet three times between 1,000 men.⁴⁴

Perhaps as much as anything, however, the change of mood was owed to the fact that after months of movement and exhaustion, the army finally had a few weeks rest in the camp at Tarutino. The position and fortifications of the camp were not particularly strong but the French army had shot its bolt and left the Russians in peace. Just after the harvest in fertile central Russia the army could remain sedentary for a few weeks without going hungry. Abundant supplies came up through Kaluga from the rich agricultural provinces to the south. Reinforcements moved up too. Lieutenant Chicherin of the Semenovskys arrived in Tarutino soaked to the skin, penniless and without any change of clothes, since all his baggage had been lost in Moscow. But his family came to the rescue, bringing him among other things a tent so palatial that it was temporarily borrowed by Kutuzov himself. He recalls that the weather was perfect and that the officers indulged in conversations, music and reading – all enjoyed with the special flavour of a wartime camp. Only one point truly worried them and that was the fear that their emperor might make peace with the French. One of the officers commented that if that happened he would emigrate and fight Napoleon in Spain.⁴⁵

The decision on war or peace rested with the emperor in Petersburg. In all reason there was no cause to expect him to make peace. Frederick William III had fought on after the fall of Berlin and Francis II had refused to make peace after the fall of Vienna both in 1805 and 1809, though in the latter case the Austrians were fighting without allies. Moscow was not even Alexander’s real capital. In addition, to make peace after Moscow’s fall, in the teeth of elite opposition, was to put his life and throne at risk, as the emperor well knew. Underlying many of the tensions of 1812, however, was the fact that neither Alexander nor the Russian elites fully trusted the other to keep their nerve or preserve their commitment to victory amidst the great strains of Napoleon’s invasion.⁴⁶