Russia Against Napoleon

They had been won by better soldiers than he commanded in August 1813, however. Above all, Napoleon remained very inferior to the allies in cavalry. His mounted arm had improved considerably during the armistice, chiefly in terms of numbers. Some good cavalry regiments subsequently arrived from Spain. The Guards cavalry was mostly competent, as were the Polish and some of the German regiments. But the bulk of Napoleon’s French cavalry was still well inferior to the Russian reserves formed by Kologrivov, not to speak of the veteran Russian cavalrymen. In addition, all sources agree that the cavalry was the best arm of the Austrian army. The situation as regards artillery was if anything the opposite. French equipment was much less cumbersome than Austrian guns and caissons. The Prussian artillery was so weak that the Russians had to second some of their own batteries to a number of Prussian divisions in order to give them sufficient firepower. The Prussian general staff history concluded that French artillery officers were usually more skilful than their allied counterparts. The main allied advantage as regards artillery was numerical. If they could concentrate their three field armies and Bennigsen’s Army of Poland on a single battlefield, the weight of their firepower should be overwhelming.⁹

The majority of both the allied and the Napoleonic infantry were recruits, most of whom had never seen action before August 1813. The French conscripts were younger than their allied peers, but on the other hand many of them had experienced the spring campaign, which was true neither of the Austrians nor of the Prussian Landwehr. The Russian reserves were also going into action for the first time but at least in their case they had enjoyed plenty of time to train and were usually very tough and resilient. Above all, however, the Russian infantry contained more veterans than its French counterpart. This meant not just the men who had served throughout the 1812 and spring 1813 campaigns, but also many thousands of veterans who returned to their regiments during the armistice from hospitals and detached duties. Not surprisingly, the Guards contained exceptionally large number of veterans. The Guards regiments had not seen action in the spring 1813 campaign, and many of them had received drafts of veteran troops from regiments of the line. During the armistice, for example, from Osten-Sacken’s Army Corps the Belostok Regiment provided 200 veterans for the Lithuania (Litovsky) Guards and the Iaroslavl Regiment lost 94 to the Izmailovskys.¹⁰

The choice of Sacken’s corps to provide cadres for the Guards was not an accident because his regiments contained exceptional numbers of veterans. A closer look at his units gives a good sense of the Russian infantry’s rather diverse make-up in the autumn campaign.

Sacken commanded two infantry divisions, Dmitrii Neverovsky’s 27th and Johann von Lieven’s 10th. We have already encountered Neverovsky’s men in the 1812 campaign. His regiments were all newly created just before the war began and were made up mostly from soldiers in garrison regiments. In 1812 they had performed magnificently. When Alexander met Neverovsky for the first time in 1813 he told him: ‘Your division fought gloriously and I will never forget its service or yours.’ Glory came at a very high price. When the Odessa Regiment left Vilna in December 1812, for instance, it had only 4 officers, 11 NCOs and 119 men in its ranks, having suffered more than 1,500 casualties in the 1812 campaign. The 27th Division had been so shattered that it was left behind to recuperate in Lithuania in the spring of 1813, only rejoining the army during the armistice. Neverovsky scrounged new uniforms and equipment for his men while they were in the rear, but finding reinforcements proved much harder. The experience of the Odessa Regiment was typical of the whole division. The overwhelming majority of the regiment’s sick and wounded were in hospitals in Russia and Belorussia. Those who recovered were sent to join Lobanov’s Reserve Army. Ultimately the Odessa Regiment received its share of reserve companies from Lobanov, but on the eve of the autumn campaign it still contained only 21 officers, 31 NCOs and 544 men. Roughly half these last were new recruits.¹¹