Russia Against Napoleon

Pavel Pushchin of the Semenovskys wrote in his diary during the march to Langres that the roads were awful, the weather atrocious and the local French population very poor. Since France had always been held up to them as the pinnacle of European civilization, many other Russian officers were also very surprised by the poverty they encountered. Their diaries and memoirs offer a strong contrast between French poverty and the prosperity they had so admired in Saxony and Silesia. Initially the French population appeared cowed and apathetic, showing no enthusiasm either to defend Napoleon or to support the Bourbons. Inevitably the huge invading army caused destruction and looting. An officer of the Guards Dragoons recalls that his men had an unerring instinct when it came to finding the hidden treasures of the chateau in which they were quartered. In the end the regiment’s colonel succeeded in tracking down most of the loot and restoring it to its owners. Where the Guards cavalry led, Cossacks were hardly likely to be reticent and most of their officers had fewer scruples than a colonel of the Guards. Very soon after crossing into France Alexander was writing to Platov to complain that even some Cossack generals and colonels were plundering French homes and farms. For Alexander this was not just inherently shameful but also dangerous, since it risked provoking the people’s war which the allies were desperate to avoid.³⁷

While Schwarzenberg’s large army was advancing almost unopposed to Langres, the much smaller Army of Silesia was embarking on a more dangerous march across the Middle Rhine and through the main belt of French fortresses and rivers. Alexander’s instructions to Blücher of 26 December ordered him to cross the Rhine and advance to link up with the main army but left up to him his precise line of advance. The one point on which he insisted was that ‘the key issue is to maintain the link between the two armies so that they are always in a position to unite for a battle’. Blücher was forced to leave almost all of Langeron’s Army Corps to blockade the great fortress of Mainz and all of Yorck’s Army Corps to watch the fortresses of Metz, Thionville and Luxemburg. Pressing forward just with Sacken’s Army Corps and a small detachment led by Lieutenant-General Zakhar Olsufev, Blücher had barely 27,000 men under his command. The field-marshal was never averse to risk but his position was greatly helped by the fact that his Cossacks had captured key enemy dispatches and he was well informed about French numbers and deployment. With Napoleon in Paris mobilizing new troops and much of the Field Army’s elite reserves deployed towards the Low Countries, Blücher knew that he was opposed by an exhausted and thinly spread enemy screen, whose total disposable numbers barely exceeded his own and whose forces were split up into detachments commanded by no fewer than three marshals. This emboldened him to push the French back over the Moselle, the Meuse and the Aisne before heading south-westwards to link up with Schwarzenberg.³⁸

By the end of January 1814 the allies had conquered a huge swath of eastern France, thereby denying its manpower, taxes and food supplies to Napoleon. This was a big additional blow to Napoleon’s war machine at a time when his attempts to mobilize French resources were already facing unprecedented difficulties and opposition. The formidable system of conscription, at its most effective in the period 1810–13, was at last beginning to run down in the face of Napoleon’s insatiable demands. Most of the conscripts summoned to the depots in November 1813 did not turn up, and could not have been armed, equipped or officered even had they done so. Napoleon had not expected the allies to invade in winter and their offensive threw his plans to levy a new Grande Armée into disarray. In addition, Alexander rightly insisted that the large French forces besieged in Dresden, Danzig, Modlin and the other fortresses in central Europe must become prisoners of war when in due course each of these towns surrendered in the winter of 1813–14. He refused to ratify terms of surrender which would have allowed them to return to France, where some of them would undoubtedly have ended up training and forming a cadre for Napoleon’s recruits. By the end of January 1814 Napoleon’s position was looking increasingly desperate. Alexander’s strategy of allowing military operations to determine the limits of the final peace settlement seemed on the point of achieving the result he desired – in other words Napoleon’s defeat and overthrow.³⁹ The first major battle on French soil occurred at the end of January. Napoleon had left Paris for his headquarters at Châlons on 25 January.