6

The Road to Tauroggen (1812)

        Fear cripples the intellect, courage inspires it.

“On September 14 the Russian army passed through Moscow,” Clausewitz wrote, “and the rearguard was ordered to follow the same day.” General Miloradovitch asked the French for time to evacuate the city, and had orders to fight if they refused. Murat, the French cavalry commander, declined to meet with him, sending General Sebastiani instead. They came to a deal, Miloradovitch asking that “Moscow might be spared as far as possible.” Clausewitz, who happened to be riding near the pair, heard Sebastiani say: “Sir, the emperor will place his Guards at the head of his army to make any sort of disorder absolutely impossible.” Four times he heard Sebastiani commit himself to protecting Moscow. Clausewitz “thought it worth notice, because these words implied the strongest wish to take control of an undamaged city.”¹

    Clausewitz estimated that it was three or so in the afternoon when he and his unit entered Moscow, “and between five and six when we took up positions beyond the city.” Miloradovitch had to have some of his cavalry clear a path through the wagons thronging the streets. “The most painful sight was long rows of wounded soldiers, who lay along the houses and were vainly hoping to be moved away. All of these unfortunates probably died in the city.” Famously, fires began engulfing Moscow as the Russians retreated and the French entered. Moscow’s governor Fedor Rostopchin believed it better to set the city ablaze than leave it to the French. Clausewitz wrote to Marie: “We held ourselves close behind the city and saw it burning at every corner during the night.”²

    Clausewitz by now found himself in a minor position on Miloradovitch’s staff since Uvarov had taken sick and the Russians rolled his command into Miloradovitch’s. To his great joy, he learned while marching through Moscow that the army was retreating south, a move he favored. Colonel Toll had remarked to Clausewitz several times since Borodino that south was the best route, though he had different reasons, and told Clausewitz of his fear that the commanders would block his choice. It was also a topic of discussion among the junior general staff officers. “The march toward Kaluga, which subsequently became famous as a peak of intellectual brilliance, did not suddenly spring from the head of the commanding general or of one of his advisors like Minerva from Jupiter’s helmet. In any case we have always believed that ideas in war are usually so simple and obvious that the merit of devising a strategy cannot constitute the essence of generalship.”³

Map 6.1. The Invasion of Russia, 1812.

    His experiences in the campaign led Clausewitz to another conclusion: “in Russia one could play hide and seek with the enemy, and by always retreating might in the end return to the frontier together with him.” The size of the country made it impossible for Napoleon “to cover and strategically control the areas behind him simply by advancing. In developing this idea, the author had reached the conclusion that a very large western country could be conquered only with the help of internal dissension.” In his study of the campaign, Clausewitz analyzed it in terms similar to those used in On War. “Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The military instrument resembles a machine with tremendous friction, which unlike in mechanics, cannot be reduced to a few points, but is everywhere in contact with chance,” and goals that seem plausible on paper prove unachievable in the field.⁴

    The abandonment of Moscow disillusioned many in Kutosov’s army. It had weakened their confidence in the Russian government, and many thought peace the only option. They did not know that Alexander had refused all offers of settlement from Napoleon, which Clausewitz saw as without question the correct choice. “We can see from this how little the army understood the meaning of these great events,” he wrote in his history of the campaign, “and yet we were already near the culminating point of the French offensive, near the moment when the entire burden that the French had lifted but could not carry would fall back on them.” After the French occupied Moscow, Kutusov took his army south of the city, setting up camp at Tarutino. This allowed him to draw supplies and men from untouched southern regions of Russia. He rebuilt his army and encouraged guerrillas to operate against the French and their lines of communication—creating friction—and he also hit them with cavalry. Meanwhile, Napoleon waited in Moscow for a message of surrender from Alexander that never came.⁵

    Clausewitz had by now been appointed to yet another position in Russian service. A different unit had assumed the post of rearguard after they departed Moscow, leaving Clausewitz without a job. He reported to the Russian headquarters for reassignment and found a letter waiting for him from the emperor appointing him chief of staff to General Essen, the garrison commander of Riga. The order had lain fallow for weeks, surfacing only because a junior officer told Clausewitz of its existence. Clausewitz received the appointment because he was a German; his predecessor and old friend, Lieutenant Colonel Karl von Tiedemann, had been killed on August 22, and the emperor thought it fitting to replace one German with another. Tiedemann’s death upset Clausewitz greatly. “My friend Tiedemann is dead,” he wrote Marie a few weeks later, killed near Riga by a pistol shot from a Prussian hussar. “I have wept for him as I would weep for a brother. Even now I can hardly think of his loss without tears.” But the change in position undoubtedly gave him great psychological relief because of his continued inability to see himself used in a manner he defined as satisfactory, a situation arising from his inability to speak Russian.⁶

    Clausewitz looked forward to his new assignment and set off by mail coach on September 24. At Serpuchov, on his way to St. Petersburg, he was arrested by Russian militia, who, because he didn’t speak Russian, suspected him of being French. He couldn’t convince them otherwise, so they sent him back whence he came in the tow of a Russian officer. He decided to wait at headquarters before trying to make the trip again, this time in the company of a courier. He left a few days later with a group that included his old comrade Chasot and a former Saxon officer, Baron von Bose, both of whom were heading to St. Petersburg to help lay the groundwork for the Russo-German Legion. Even with a Russian guide they were arrested in a number of villages, which helped make the trip particularly harrowing. These arrests, and Chasot’s poor health, meant the journey took more than two weeks and delayed their arrival in St. Petersburg until mid-October.⁷

    In St. Petersburg Clausewitz spent at least part of his time in a stone inn on the banks of the Neva River, where Stein had set up headquarters. His company included other Prussian officers who had served in the recent campaign and who had gathered to birth the Russo-German Legion: his old friend Hermann von Boyen, Ferdinand Wilhelm von Stülpnagel, Chasot, and the poet and German nationalist writer Ernst Moritz Arndt. But Clausewitz also received bad news on several fronts. He discovered that King Frederick Williams’s government had launched legal proceedings against him to confiscate his assets. Marie wrote later that when Clausewitz went to Russia, he hoped that the king would “see in this bold step only new proof of his loyalty.”⁸ Clearly, he did not. “That the king must do something against us I realize,” Clausewitz wrote Marie, “but that he should mark me for his anger makes me very bitter, for I have done nothing to deserve it.” He insisted he only worried about it because it might cause trouble for Marie and for his two brothers serving in the Prussian army. He told Marie that they had to console themselves with the fact that they had done the right thing, and not out of self-interest. He thought a drastic change in the political situation would see the proceedings suppressed, but if not, they would find themselves exiles.⁹

    Next, Clausewitz learned, to his disappointment, that there was little possibility of his advancing in the Russian army. St. Petersburg was extremely expensive and he related to Marie that they could not hope to live there on their income. This stiffened his conviction that his best hope of advancement lie with the Russo-German Legion, and he determined to transfer immediately. Something undoubtedly feeding this dissatisfaction was his belief that since he didn’t speak Russian he had been badly treated and also had had no chance to make a name for himself under fire; these joined with the war’s harshness. “I cannot describe how unpleasant are the impressions I’ve had of this time, and how few joyful moments,” he wrote Gneisenau. Nevertheless, Clausewitz refused to let regret overtake him. Although he wanted to serve in a German unit (preferably one commanded by Gneisenau), a post in the Legion would suffice.¹⁰

    In a further piece of bad news, Clausewitz found that Essen had been replaced at Riga by Marquis Philip Osipovich Paulucci, whom he had met in Barclay’s headquarters at the beginning of the war. Clausewitz found Paulucci “peculiar,” and to have “a good deal of ill nature.” Simultaneously, word came that the French had begun to retreat, which meant Riga would now become a military backwater. He convinced the Duke of Oldenburg to appoint him the senior staff officer to his newly forming Russo-German Legion, (he had been previously considered for this post), and also asked the czar to second him to the corps commanded by Ludwig Adolf Peter zu Sayn-Wittgenstein until Oldenburg finished raising his force. Alexander approved both requests and Clausewitz received his orders on November 11. Four days later he departed St. Petersburg for Czaśniki (today in Belarus about 120 miles northeast of Minsk), traveling via Pskov and Polotsk.¹¹ The war had changed. Napoleon was now the prey.

    When Napoleon occupied Moscow he hoped it would bring the Russians to terms; it had the opposite effect. Alexander determined to fight on in extremis, even if it consumed his empire. “Napoleon or me,” Alexander announced. “I or him, we cannot both rule at the same time; I have learned to understand him and he will not deceive me.” After receiving Kutusov’s missives from Borodino, the czar began planning a multipronged Russian counteroffensive. The Russian armies in the north and south of Napoleon’s lines of communications through Belorussia were to push and sever them. Admiral Pavel Chichagov pushed from the south, Wittgenstein from the north, and Kutusov from the west. Subsidiary operations by smaller forces pinned the French troops under Marshal Jacques MacDonald in the Courland region of modern-day Latvia and kept the Austrians in the south under Karl Philipp zu Schwarzenberg from interfering with Chichagov. Alexander planned to have 160,000 men block Napoleon’s potential retreat routes across the Berezina and Ulla Rivers by October 27. Meanwhile, the peasants, encouraged by the regime, rose against the invader and waged a “People’s War,” while Cossacks and other units fought a partisan war against French detachments and supply lines, the latter something of which Russian generals had been previously unaware.¹²

    Napoleon abandoned Moscow on October 19. Alexander and the Russians had done everything to encourage him to stay there. The French emperor had received substantial infantry reinforcements since taking the city, boosting his numbers to about 100,000. On October 5 Kutusov’s army had only 63,000 infantry, but of this number 7,500 were raw recruits and 15,000 Moscow militia. He did have 620 guns, which would slow his pursuit of Napoleon. Kutusov also had far more cavalry. His Cossack reinforcements alone amounted to 15,000. Napoleon had waited six weeks in Moscow, and the first snows had begun to fall. Kutusov planned to use the oncoming winter, pressure from his Cossacks, hunger, and the gradual erosion of discipline in the French ranks to defeat Napoleon’s army.¹³

    By November 6 snow had both armies in its grip. The winter was not cold by Russian standards; the last half of November was actually unseasonably warm. This melted the ice over the Berezina River, which had disastrous consequences for the French. The Russians also suffered from the winter and the rigors of the march; the realities of war always torture both sides. Kutusov’s infantry strength eroded as he advanced.¹⁴

    Napoleon reached Smolensk on November 9. Indiscipline had begun tearing his units apart. They marched out of the city on the 12th. Kutusov had a chance to put his army between Napoleon and his route of retreat to Orsha but he refused to take the risk. Had he done so he might have destroyed Napoleon’s army there, but he was intentionally giving Napoleon a way out. Moreover, he did not want his own army broken by the time it reached the Russian frontier, something indeed a danger, as the farther Kutusov marched the more difficult it became to feed his forces.¹⁵

    Kutusov also knew that Chichagov was marching to Minsk, which held Napoleon’s primary Belorussian food supply. Almost fifty miles from here stood Borisov and its bridge over the Berezina River. Chichagov’s advance units seized Minsk (along with its food stores) as well as the bridge over the Berezina at Borisov, and the situation began to appear as it might deliver Alexander’s dream: the capture of Napoleon. But Chichagov couldn’t quickly get sufficient reinforcements to Borisov. He needed help to decisively block the French retreat. This had to come from Wittgenstein, Clausewitz’s new superior.¹⁶

    Since early in the war, Wittgenstein had protected St. Petersburg from French thrusts, and done so very well, stopping a numerically superior force while losing no territory. “General Wittgenstein was a man of some forty years,” Clausewitz recalled, “full of good will, with an enterprising, adventurous spirit. Only his judgment was not unfailingly clear, and his energy sometimes flagged.” His chief of staff was a fiftyish former Saxon officer, Major General Friedrich d’Auvray, who had long served the czar, and always had the state’s best interests at heart. “The prime mover in Wittgenstein’s command,” recalled Clausewitz, was a Prussian who had entered Russian service as a youth, Major General Johann von Diebitsch, the quartermaster general, who had made general in the recent campaign at the surprising age of twenty-seven. Clausewitz described him as “fiery, brave, and enterprising, decisive and bold, with great firmness and natural intelligence, somewhat brazen and imperious, a leader of men, and very ambitious.”¹⁷

    Wittgenstein advanced from the north with about 50,000 men, though 9,000 were militia. On October 16–18 his forces liberated Polotsk, giving them control of the bridge over the Dvina River. Wittgenstein then fought a nasty defensive battle against Marshal Claude Victor’s troops near Smolyantsy on the Ulla River on November 13–14, stopping an effort ordered by Napoleon to try to push him away from the French line of retreat. Clausewitz joined Wittgenstein’s force a few days after this fight. A day-and-a-half march to his south, on the road between Orsha and Borisov, lay Napoleon’s route of retreat.¹⁸

    Chichagov worried that Napoleon was making for Minsk, and many other Russian leaders shared his fear, or thought that he marched for Bobruisk. Napoleon had a bridge built at Ukholoda, south of Borisov, to leave this impression. Instead, he crossed north of Borisov at Studenka, marching for Vilna. Napoleon’s forces swam the Berezina at Borisov on November 26, brushed aside the thin screen of defenders, and began laying two bridges. Napoleon then fought his way through Chichagov’s main force, which appeared late on the 27th and lacked the strength to stop the retreating French.¹⁹

    At the same time, Wittgenstein battled the French rearguard commanded by Victor on the Berezina’s eastern shores. Wittgenstein now showed none of the aggressiveness that hard marked his generalship in the summer. On November 27 his troops reached Borisov, then turned and marched north to Studenka to halt the crossing. They hit the rearguard on the 28th, but stubborn French resistance, and the fact that Wittgenstein only committed 14,000 of his men to the fight, allowed the remains of the French force to escape across the Berezina. Clausewitz noted later that he had not been at the headquarters then, but instead was with a detachment that stayed back to protect the left flank, returning to Wittgenstein’s army on the evening of November 28. He did nonetheless see the carnage of the debacle that was Napoleon’s crossing of the Berezina in temperatures that had dropped to -20 Fahrenheit. A Russian observer described the scene: “The river was covered with ice which was as transparent as glass: there were many dead bodies visible beneath it across the whole width of the river. The enemy had abandoned huge numbers of guns and wagons. The treasures of ransacked Moscow had also not succeeded in getting across the river.”²⁰

    The experience affected Clausewitz deeply. He wrote of it to Marie on November 29 from the ruins of Borisov on the Berezina’s banks: “But what scenes I’ve seen here! If my feelings had not already been hardened, or rather jaded, I would not get a hold of myself for shuddering and disgust, and still after many years I will not be able to think about it without shuddering.” Near the end of his letter, he wrote, mournfully, “I am writing you between corpses and the dying, among the smoking ruins, and thousands of ghost-like people file past and shout, and stand, and cry in vain for bread. God grant a quick change to these scenes!”²¹

    Napoleon lost 25,000 to40,000 troops crossing the Berezina, and nearly all of his artillery and baggage. As historian Dominic Lieven writes, “Had Napoleon held the bridge at Borisov or had the Berezina been firmly frozen, the great majority of these casualties would have been avoided.” Yet three more weeks of miserable flight faced Napoleon and the remnants of his army, and, in a complete reversal from the previous month, December dawned bitterly cold even by Russian standards.²²

    Many believe he should not have escaped at all. Clausewitz was among them. “For ten or twelve days I have found myself once again in the midst of military action, namely in Wittgenstein’s army,” he wrote Marie, “where I arrived just at the moment of the loosening of one of the most crucial knots to have ever been released. The catastrophe is over; it could have been more decisive; however, we can be pleased with the entire campaign, which will be ended in four weeks at the latest.”²³ In his later history of the 1812 invasion, Clausewitz spread the blame for not crushing Napoleon among the three Russian commanders, a criticism in line with the most recent scholarship. But Clausewitz also thought Alexander’s plan to trap Napoleon in the retreat had been unrealistic and unworkable because of the conditions on the ground, and remarked that none of the prongs fulfilled its appointed task. He noted that Wittgenstein could have marched to Borisov and attacked the French. “He might have been beaten by Bonaparte, but he would certainly have delayed his passage by a day and might have made it impossible on the following day as well.” This kind of sacrifice for the good of the whole, however, though it “sounds fine in books,” Clausewitz wrote, was not something to count upon in the real world. Chichagov and Wittgenstein simply feared meeting Napoleon face to face, which was understandable considering his military reputation. Among the soldiers of Napoleon’s army who escaped across the Berezina was Antoine-Henri Jomini, whose early works Clausewitz had read, and who would later be an intellectual rival.²⁴ This would not be the last time they stood on opposing sides, in war and out.

    The war in Russia dragged on. Wittgenstein’s army followed the path of the French retreat for three days before taking a different route. The Russian winter had descended in full fury. Frozen bodies of dead men and horses lined the icy roads of the French flight. Men’s limbs turned to ice and broke off. Birds fell from the sky, completely frozen. “All its horrors were heaped up in almost unbelievable measure,” Clausewitz wrote. “The sufferings of the French army have been described so often that the author considers it superfluous to add any new strokes to the picture.” Often overlooked, however, are the simultaneous sufferings of the Russian forces. Clausewitz wrote that “the road taken by the advance guard was always marked by dead Russian soldiers who had succumbed to cold and fatigue. Wittgenstein also lost a good third of his troops in the last four weeks of the campaign, for he had above 40,000 men at Czaśniki and scarcely 30,000 at Vilna.” Clausewitz himself suffered from frostbite, cold, and prolonged exposure to the elements. This permanently reddened his face, which led some to later accuse him of spending too much time with the bottle.²⁵

    They rested at Niemenczyn (about fifteen miles northeast of Vilna), leaving the town on December 17th. Clausewitz now served on the staff of the aforementioned General Diebitsch, who though Wittgenstein’s quartermaster general, temporarily led part of their army’s advance guard. On December 23 their 1,300-man force stood west of Telstch, two days’ march from Diebitsch’s objective: Memel (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). He had planned to take Memel, believing that the enemy corps of the French marshal MacDonald had already withdrawn through this Baltic coast city and across the sands of the Kurland Spit. But they received intelligence that MacDonald was actually approaching them from the east. Diebitsch turned his force around and marched eastward to the village of Wormi. Learning here that the French rearguard was southeast at Wengkowa, they headed due south, planning to ambush them on the 25th at Koltiniani, which lay on the French line of retreat. When they reached Koltiniani at about 10 the next morning, however, instead of the French rearguard they discovered sutlers—civilian merchants who supply armies in the field—who had been supporting the Prussian expeditionary force fighting with Napoleon. Although they learned from the sutlers that most of the enemy column had already marched by, Diebitsch decided to go after the rest of the rearguard.²⁶

    The approach of the rearguard caused Clausewitz grave distress: two of his older brothers served as officers in the Prussian force. “The older was a major and commanded its light infantry,” Clausewitz wrote, and one “could assume with fair certainty, that, as a good outpost officer, he would be in command of the entire rear guard. The thought of perhaps seeing him here taken prisoner was even more painful than that of being opposed to him all day under fire.” Information from captured stragglers relieved this fear, but created new ones. Coming at them was not the Prussian rearguard, but four infantry battalions, a pair of cavalry squadrons, and an artillery battery, all under the command of General Friedrich von Kleist. Diebitsch’s men stood no chance against such a force.²⁷

    Diebitsch, living up to the description Clausewitz gave him, concocted a plan. He asked Clausewitz if he would take a flag of truce to Kleist and see if they could confer. Clausewitz said that as a Russian officer he would do whatever his superior wished, but advised Diebitsch to send someone else, as the appearance of a former Prussian officer—now wearing Russian green—would not be kindly received. Diebitsch agreed, and dispatched Major von Rönne, who told Kleist that Russian forces blocked his route but that they could reach an arrangement to prevent any pointless bloodletting. Kleist refused to talk because he wasn’t in command, but noted that his superior, General Yorck, was expected that evening and that the matter could wait until then. This news shook Clausewitz and his Russian comrades. It meant that they had not cut off the rearguard, but actually faced the vanguard of the main Prussian force.²⁸

    The situation presented Diebitsch with both opportunity and danger. The Russians had periodically negotiated with Yorck; one of the activities of Clausewitz’s unfortunate friend Tiedemann had been trying to convince the Prussians in Yorck’s corps to switch allegiance and fight the French in the ranks of the Russo-German Legion. Yorck had rebuffed their efforts, but he had also informally offered himself as mediator between the crowns, and a message soon went via Yorck to Berlin. But the military situation had certainly changed since then. If Diebitsch could reach some kind of profitable understanding with Yorck, it would be a great coup for the Russians. This effort was naturally not without risks. Yorck had 14,000 men under his command. If he decided to simply crush Diebitsch and continue his march, the Russian general couldn’t stop him.²⁹

    Clausewitz personally had mixed views of Yorck, all gleaned from lengthy experience working with him and other members of the Prussian elite: “General Yorck is an upright person,” Clausewitz noted in his history of the 1812 campaign, “but he is morose, melancholic, and secretive and therefore a bad subordinate. Personal attachment is rather foreign to him; what he does, he does for the sake of his reputation and because he is naturally competent.” Diebitsch decided to take his chances. Yorck arrived as expected and met Diebitsch at dusk on Christmas night. Diebitsch spoke frankly, admitting that he didn’t think he had the forces to stop the Prussians, but that he would try his best to snare Yorck’s baggage and guns if it came to a fight. The core of his argument was that Napoleon’s army had been destroyed and Czar Alexander had ordered that the Prussians be treated as the old allies they were—and were expected to be again. Because of this, Diebitsch offered Yorck a neutrality agreement. Yorck, believing his military situation not so dire as to honorably take the course suggested, demurred. The two agreed to leave their men in place that night, and Yorck would march in the direction of Lawkowo the next day to meet with Diebitsch at Schelel. “You have quite a few former Prussians officers with you,” Yorck said to Diebitsch at the end of their parley. “Do send one of them to me from now on; it will give me more confidence.” Diebitsch asked a willing Clausewitz to take up the task and a string of talks followed.³⁰

    That night at their camp at Koltiniani, Clausewitz warned Diebitsch of Yorck’s cunning streak and told him to keep alert. Later, Clausewitz recalled, he and the general “dismounted at a house, laid ourselves down on the straw fully clothed, and had scarcely closed our eyes when pistol shots were heard from the rear of the village. They were not single shots but a general fire, which lasted some minutes.” Clausewitz thought it was Yorck. He and Diebitsch mounted their horses and discovered that a detachment of Prussian Dragoons had pushed some Cossacks back into the village, but not being strong enough to fight their way through, had retreated. Later, they learned the men were carrying a message to Yorck from Marshal MacDonald, his French superior. This would cause problems for Clausewitz.³¹

    Diebitsch and Clausewitz went to meet York on the 26th as planned. When they arrived, Yorck refused to talk, and dressed down the officer who escorted Diebitsch and Clausewitz. Instead of appearing in person, Yorck sent Friedrich zu Dohna, Scharnhorst’s son-in-law and an old friend of Clausewitz’s with whom he had entered Russia in 1812. Dohna, now a lieutenant-colonel, was in the Russo-German Legion and had been sent to Yorck as a negotiator by another Russian general. Dohna made it clear that Yorck was sincere, but had to keep up appearances. The way to do this was for him to slowly move toward the Prussian border.³²

    Diebitsch still didn’t trust Yorck, and continued to press him to make an agreement, while each day Yorck marched a little closer to Tilsit—and the Prussian frontier. Meanwhile, Yorck’s French superior, MacDonald, moved farther to the west, drawing out the distance between the two forces and giving Yorck the ability to claim abandonment by his French ally. The talks also went on and Clausewitz and Yorck negotiated long into the night of December 28, Clausewitz failing to bring the general to a decision.³³

    Diebitsch’s superiors, however, were losing patience with Yorck. At noon on December 29, carrying two letters from his superiors, Clausewitz was dispatched to yet another meeting. Clausewitz walked into Yorck’s room. “Keep away from me,” Yorck barked. “I want nothing more to do with you. Your damned Cossacks have let a messenger from Macdonald through, who brings me an order to march on Piktupöhnen and join him there.... Your troops do not advance, they are too weak, I must march, and I won’t have any further negotiations, which would cost me my head.” Clausewitz replied that he had some letters to lay before the general, and asked that he be allowed to carry out his mission. Yorck relented and summoned candles and Colonel Roeder, his chief of staff. The first note revealed that Wittgenstein’s advance forces would be in striking distance of Yorck’s army and line of retreat in two days and made it very clear that Yorck would be given no more time to vacillate. The second letter was a captured dispatch from Marshal MacDonald disparaging the leadership of the Prussian contingent. Yorck thought for a moment. “Clausewitz,” he said, “you are a Prussian. Do you believe that General d’Auvray’s letter is honest, and that Wittgenstein’s troops will really reach the places named by the 31st? Can you give me your word of honor?” Clausewitz vouched for the honesty of the letter, but, he added, “whether these dispositions will really be achieved I can, of course, not guarantee, since Your Excellency knows that in war with the best will in the world one must often fall short of the line one has set oneself.”³⁴

    Yorck asked Roeder his counsel. Roeder believed the matter too important for him and refused to comment, but he warned that the choice would be dangerous for Yorck personally. “What? My person?” scoffed Yorck. “For my king I would go the scaffold—I agree.” Yorck turned to Clausewitz and thrust out his hand. “You have me,” he said. He promised to bring other Prussian forces with him and summoned a cavalry officer from outside. “What say your regiments?” he asked. The horseman was enthusiastic about changing sides and insisted his men felt the same. “It’s easy for you to talk, you young people,” Yorck said, “but this old man’s head is shaking on his shoulders.”³⁵

    That night Dohna and Clausewitz brought Diebitsch the news. Diebitsch embraced Dohna and “shed tears of joy.” The next morning at the mill in Poscherun the parties signed one of the pivotal agreements of the Napoleonic Era: the Convention of Tauroggen, which Clausewitz drafted. It rendered Yorck’s army neutral for two months—and changed the nature of the war. As we will see, Yorck had made a monumental decision that utterly overturned Prussian policy and changed Prussian history.³⁶

    Even before the destruction of Napoleon’s army, Clausewitz realized that he had been part of something momentous. He wrote Gneisenau on November 7, bursting with pride: “We have, however, made a campaign that certainly ranks among the most original in the history of warfare, and which perhaps will be the most momentous in the annals of nations.” The December 30, 1812, agreement at Tauroggen only solidified this assessment. Clausewitz wrote later of Yorck’s decision—and its effects—in a very measured, understated tone: “It cannot be denied that the decision of this general had enormous consequences and in all likelihood very considerably speeded up the final outcome.”³⁷ It meant this—and more.

Figure 6.1. The Conclusion of the Convention of Tauroggen.

Wood engraving by Heinrich Merté, after the drawing by Moritz Blanckarts. Published in “Das Buch für alle.” Stuttgart, ca. 1880.

Figure 6.2. Clausewitz in His Russian Uniform. It is possible that Marie painted the now lost original.

    The same day Clausewitz wrote Marie about the events there and his hopes for the immediate future, which seemed brighter because of Yorck’s capitulation and Clausewitz’s reunion with the Prussian forces. “Tomorrow fate divides us again, but at least now we don’t stand opposite one another, and, if the monarch wills it, not again.” He told her that he hoped to leave for the German Legion, which already boasted some 4,000 men, in four to eight weeks. “I am told that Gneisenau is on the way back and will probably be put at the head of the Legion; then I am happy!...I cannot write any more at this moment because time is too short. I hope to soon be in Königsberg.”³⁸

    This letter marked a noticeable change in Clausewitz’s attitude. Before Tauroggen, despite all he had seen and accomplished during his Russian sojourn—with the added bonus of having emerged alive when so many hundreds of thousands of others had not—Clausewitz remained profoundly disappointed with what the war had brought him. He had been in many battles, including Borodino, one of the biggest of the age, experiences he found “rich in instruction.” But he had not earned any special distinction for himself, which, he confessed, had been one of his primary reasons for going. Clausewitz’s inability to communicate with most Russian officers and men meant that the most practical postings for him were on staffs, but he felt strongly that one achieved glory leading men in action; not pushing a quill.³⁹ Though Clausewitz never seems to have admitted it, considering his training and experience, and the great shortage of men with such skills in the notoriously poorly educated Russian officer corps, the Russians had generally made the wisest disposition of the asset they possessed in him.

    All of his youth Clausewitz dreamed of distinguishing himself on the battlefield in a manner that would set him apart from other men—a dream that never came true. The most important military achievement of his life was his action at Tauroggen, an action fought with words, not with his sword. And it is because of his words that we remember him today.