Russia Against Napoleon

As they advanced into freezing, barren and devastated Lithuania cold and hunger hit Kutuzov’s troops hard. So too did another enemy: typhus. The disease was rampant among the prisoners of war whom the Russians were capturing in droves and it spread quickly. ‘Its distinguishing features were: exhaustion, loss of appetite, nausea, total weakening of the muscular system, dry heat of the skin and an unbearable thirst.’ Against the disease the regimental doctors used quinine, camphor and emetics so long as their medicines lasted. As the intendant-general, Georg Kankrin, subsequently admitted, however, of all the backup services provided by the Russian commissariat medical help was the weakest. That owed something to the new and confused administration of hospitals, and more to the shortage of trained doctors and hospital administrators. So long as the army was operating in the Great Russian provinces it could hand over care of its sick and wounded to the governors, but once it moved into Belorussian and Lithuanian districts formerly occupied by Napoleon no civilian institutions existed. Many Russian doctors and officials themselves fell ill. The rest were scattered along the army’s line of advance, desperately trying to establish hospitals in a wilderness.⁷⁹

Kankrin wrote that his officials,

themselves barely alive, were forced almost every other day to establish hospitals in ruined areas, in the midst of extreme cold and deprived of almost any help. There was a complete shortage of experienced officials. We took anyone who fell into our hands, grateful for being able to find any officials for this job. The man chosen was given the regulations, some money, open orders to the local administration requiring them to assist him, and a small staff. This was all the help one got in setting up a hospital, together whenever possible with some biscuit and groats, a few beef-cattle and some spirits.

Nevertheless, wrote Kankrin, the majority of the men in hospital did recover and rejoin the army, ‘which on the one hand shows the toughness of Russian soldiers but also shows that they were given some care’.⁸⁰

On 13 December Kutuzov reported to Alexander that unless his army got a rest it might disappear entirely and have to be rebuilt from scratch. Any commander would dread such a possibility, but a Russian general had more reason than most to protect the professional and veteran cadre around which the army was built. Men with the education and willingness to serve as officers were not that plentiful. Highly skilled cadres who could serve in the engineers, artillery or staffs were much rarer still. Above all, the emperor’s army was not the nation in arms. Its strength lay in the great loyalty of its veterans to their comrades and regiments. Destroy these men and these loyalties, and the army would become worse than a mere militia. The inner force which made this army so formidable and resilient would be undermined. In the winter of 1812 this came too close to happening for Kutuzov’s comfort. In fact the army’s core survived, large numbers of veterans subsequently returned from hospital, and around this cadre a fine new army was rebuilt in 1813. But it was not really until the summer of 1813 that it recovered from the awful strains of the 1812 campaign and regained its full potential.⁸¹

1813: The Spring Campaign

Alexander I arrived in Vilna on 22 December 1812. This time he brought with him a smaller entourage than the gaggle of bored and squabbling courtiers who had been such a nuisance in the first weeks of the 1812 campaign. Three men whom he summoned to Vilna were to be his closest assistants for the rest of the war. Prince Petr Mikhailovich Volkonsky became Alexander’s right-hand man as regards military operations; Aleksei Arakcheev remained in charge of all matters concerning the mobilization of the home front, the militia and the provision of reinforcements to the field army. Karl Nesselrode became Alexander’s chief diplomatic adviser. In fact if not in name Nesselrode acted as deputy minister of foreign affairs. The true foreign minister was Alexander himself. The emperor intervened frequently in military matters but he lacked the confidence to take over command or play the leading role in military operations himself. Where diplomacy was concerned, however, Alexander was unequivocally in charge and in 1813 on the whole remarkably skilful and effective.