Russia Against Napoleon

Immediately the armistice had ended on 10 August Winzengerode ordered raiding and scouting parties to move out around the western flank of Oudinot’s army and into its rear. Rumours that Napoleon himself was moving up towards Oudinot’s headquarters even persuaded the Russian commander that he might seize the French emperor. Löwenstern was given a detachment of Cossacks and the task of bagging Napoleon. Moving southwards before swinging into Oudinot’s rear, Löwenstern’s Cossacks promptly pillaged a juicy manor house they encountered en route. Löwenstern records that he gave the men one hundred lashes each and degraded an NCO but he could not get most of the plunder back because his Cossacks were much too experienced in hiding it away. Löwenstern’s scouts quickly discovered that Napoleon was far away in Silesia. Much closer was Oudinot’s weakly guarded treasury, on which Löwenstern pounced with glee. The Russian colonel was something of a pirate by nature. In Petersburg before the war he won and more often lost vast sums at cards. During the war he combined great courage and boldness in action with the seduction of women all the way from Vilna to Paris. Even so, he was in his way a rather honourable pirate. Although he records that prisoners of war were a big nuisance for a raiding party, he always took them along with him and he despised Figner for murdering his French captives.

Oudinot’s treasury contained the equivalent of 2.4 million paper rubles in coin. Löwenstern insists in his memoirs that by Russian military convention the treasure was his, since he had captured it sword in hand. Getting it home safely was quite a challenge. Judging by Löwenstern’s memoirs, evading the French was less of a problem than beating off ‘allies’ anxious to share his spoils. The first threat was his own Cossacks. Russian military convention may (or may not) have made Löwenstern the rightful owner of his spoil but Cossack convention was more democratic. The Cossacks were the descendants of full-time plunderers who traditionally divided up their booty equally, with a special bonus for their commander. No one had quite got round to codifying how this tradition might be modified when in the service of the emperor. To avoid misunderstandings, Löwenstern gave each Cossack 100 silver francs and promised them the same again when they got the booty back to Berlin. His next success was to outwit and evade the neighbouring raiding party of Cossacks under Colonel Prendel, who felt an urgent need to help protect Löwenstern’s loot from the awful possibility of recapture by the French.

Having got back to Berlin Löwenstern then faced the most dangerous enemy of all in the person of the city’s fierce military governor, General L’Estocq. At a time when Prussia was desperate for cash, L’Estocq saw no reason to allow piracy to succeed untaxed and under his nose. There followed a strange hide-and-seek across Berlin as the governor tried to discover Löwenstern’s carts and their contents. By the time he found them Löwenstern had his loot safely hidden. He then paid off a number of possible threats to his haul. In his memoirs he adds that old acquaintances popped up from all sides and ‘it was a real joy to me to be useful to my friends’. Prince Serge Volkonsky, Winzengerode’s duty general, was very much an old friend. He records that Löwenstern’s haul of foreign coin was so enormous that it depressed the exchange rate of the Prussian taler in the entire Berlin region. Judging by Löwenstern’s memoirs, business also increased dramatically among the best whorehouses and champagne-sellers in the Prussian capital.⁹³

Meanwhile Napoleon was making the first of his two attempts to take Berlin, led in this case by Marshal Oudinot. Napoleon’s obsession with capturing Berlin was fortunate for the allies. Had he simply masked Bernadotte’s army he could have transferred substantial forces elsewhere. Bernadotte is most unlikely to have gone over to a bold offensive. He would instead have sat down to besiege Wittenberg, since he was determined to hold a fortified crossing over the Elbe before moving across the river and exposing himself to a sudden counter-thrust from his former boss. Not merely did Napoleon order first Oudinot and then Ney to march on Berlin but he also gave them too few soldiers of too low quality to perform their assigned task. He did this partly because he despised the Prussian infantry and discounted its potential on the battlefield.