Alexander’s determination was born of fatalism and inner conviction rather than any kind of calculation. For one thing, he did not really know whether he had an army left, whatever Michaud might say. One of his aides-de-camp, Prince Sergei Grigorievich Volkonsky, who had been at Wintzingerode’s headquarters, assured him that ‘from the commander-in-chief to the last soldier, all are ready to lay down their lives in the defence of the fatherland and your Imperial Majesty’, which was encouraging, but it did not accord with what he was hearing from other quarters.1
‘The soldiers are no longer an army, but a horde of bandits, looting under the very eyes of their commanders,’ Rostopchin wrote to him from Kutuzov’s camp. ‘One cannot shoot them: how can one punish several thousand people a day?’ Alexander might have been inclined to take anything the Governor General of Moscow wrote with a pinch of salt, but he would almost certainly have had similar reports, either directly or from people who received letters from the army. ‘My heart aches at the disorders and anarchy I see in almost every unit of the army, which is heading for catastrophe,’ General Dokhturov wrote to his wife; Prince Dmitri Mikhailovich Volkonsky lamented that ‘our own marauders and cossacks are robbing and killing people’; and there were plenty of other officers who did not hide the truth or their fears. Many of them were in despair at their army’s failure, and openly proclaimed that they were ashamed to wear the uniform.2
The senior generals were justifying their own conduct by accusing each other of everything from incompetence to treachery. Barclay was the victim of a stream of aspersions, of which he apprised Alexander in hurt tones. Bennigsen informed anyone who would listen that Kutuzov was an imbecile and a coward who had lost the respect of the army. ‘The soldiers hate and despise him,’ echoed Rostopchin in a letter to Alexander. Bennigsen wrote to the Tsar complaining that Toll, whom he held responsible for the disaster at Borodino, had insulted him. Rostopchin warned Alexander that General Pahlen hated him and denounced Platov as a traitor who had made arrangements with the French for his future. Like a gaggle of petulant squabbling schoolchildren, they sneaked on each other to the Tsar in letters that must have made baffling as well as painful reading. Egging them on and criticising them in his regular letters was General Wilson, who mistrusted all of them. Particularly distasteful to the somewhat prudish Alexander was the stream of lewd tittle-tattle about Kutuzov’s private life. Bennigsen and Rostopchin both gleefully informed him that the old commander-in-chief had smuggled a couple of girls disguised as cossacks into his quarters, where he spent whole days attending to them while his demoralised army seethed with indignation.
Clausewitz considered it fortunate that Alexander did not join the army, as the sight of what it had come to might well have weakened his resolve. He also thought that if the Tsar had been able to contemplate at close quarters the devastation being visited on his land and the effect it was having on society, he might have agreed to negotiate with Napoleon.3
The country was in a volatile mood, whatever the later legend of the patriotic war might suggest. Leaving aside questions of patriotism and loyalty, Napoleon’s invasion inevitably raised a number of others as to the viability of the nature and constitution of the Russian state. It had never been put to such a test, and Alexander could not be sure that the rapidly expanded structure of the empire could take the strain.
‘Over the past twenty years I have been present at the funeral of several monarchies,’ the old royalist Joseph de Maistre wrote from St Petersburg at the beginning of October, ‘but none of them struck me as much as what I see now, for I have never seen anything so mighty totter … Everywhere I see loaded boats and carriages; I hear the language of fear, of resentment and even of ill will; I can see more than one terrible symptom.’4
On the face of it, the invasion had provoked a surge of patriotism and devotion to the Tsar in all classes. The nobility were, as Alexander had witnessed in Smolensk and Moscow, apparently eager to sacrifice their lives and their wealth to the cause. When Kutuzov began to organise the St Petersburg militia, he received the following letter, which gives an idea of this:
Having had the pleasure of serving under the command of your excellency in the previous Turkish war, in the Bug rifle corps, I took part in many battles including the storming of Izmail, in three victorious encounters beyond the Danube and at Machin at the defeat of the Vizir, where we were always victorious with you. After that I took part in all the encounters against the French in Italy and was wounded very gravely in the leg, when my thighbone was shattered by a bullet, which remained lodged in it, and as I could not walk I was retired from service with the rank of Major General with the right to wear uniform but no pension. For ten years and six months I suffered from this bullet, seeking relief everywhere, but nobody could remove it; at last here, in St Petersburg, Jacob Vasilievich Wille decided to deliver me, and after an operation counselled by him removed the bullet, the wound healed and the bone grew back, and now I have the full use of my leg and complete freedom, as proof of which I have a certificate from him, which I enclose. Having the most passionate desire to serve my fatherland under the command of your excellency in the militia, I beg most humbly to be admitted into its ranks.5
Young boys ran away from home to join the army, twenty-two pupils at the Kaluga school for nobles volunteered, and from the fringes of the empire Bashkirs, Kalmuiks, Crimean Tatars and Georgian princes declared their willingness to fight. Groups of fashionable young gentlemen clubbed together to form units of volunteers at their own cost, taking the opportunity to design flashy uniforms with death’s-head symbols and to call themselves ‘the immortals’ or some such dramatic name. Some showed their patriotic ardour in drastic ways: Sergei Nikolaevich Glinka burnt his entire collection of richly bound French books.6
But not all were prepared to make such sacrifices. While some picked their best serfs for the militia and personally led them into the ranks, others refused to serve themselves or would only do so on local order-keeping forces. Most did everything they could to hold on to their workforce. Many small landowners sent tearful letters to the authorities in an attempt to evade the obligation. Others dragged their feet, hoping the war would be over before they were forced to part with their serfs. Others still selected the old, the crippled, the shirkers, drunks, miscreants and the village idiots. As a result, the province of Kaluga, which should have yielded 20,843 men, furnished no more than 15,370, and hardly more than a third of the men raised as a whole by the levy were suitable for active service. With patriotic proclamations appealing for defenders of the fatherland to come forward, some serfs, assuming that if they fought they might be rewarded with personal freedom, actually volunteered, but they were pursued and arrested as fugitives and dealt with harshly by their masters. According to Rostopchin, two aristocrats who had loudly pledged to raise and equip a regiment each during Alexander’s visit to Moscow, never contributed a man or a penny between them.7
Notwithstanding numerous proclamations issued by the authorities enjoining them to destroy anything that could be of use to the invader and to abandon occupied areas, many landowners stayed put. There were plenty of instances of them providing forage and victuals to the French, taking payment in cash or notes. A foraging party led by Captain Abraham Rosselet of the 1st Swiss Regiment was not only plentifully supplied by the Russian landowner they visited, but put up for the night and in the morning assisted in evading a unit of cossacks which was preparing to ambush them.8
When Alexander asked Sergei Volkonsky about the attitude of the nobility in the country at large, he replied: ‘Sire! I am ashamed to belong to it.’ But the nobility were not the only ones lacking in patriotic spirit. Grand Duke Constantine himself forced the army to buy remounts from him at inflated prices, and of the 126 horses he sold, only twenty-six were fit for service while the rest had to be destroyed. Arakcheev was taking a cut from suppliers. The civil servants responsible for equipping and supplying the army stole and sold on goods bought for it, inflated prices and took bribes to issue receipts for deliveries that never took place, with the result that the troops never received much of what had been procured for them. Those responsible for caring for wounded officers evacuated out of the war zone deflected to their own pockets the sums destined for the feeding and care of their charges. And according to some sources, members of the clergy showed little courage and abandoned their posts as the French approached.9
The merchant class appears to have been more generous, although much of this could be put down to the fact that the war against France was also a war against the Continental System, which was so ruinous to them. And there were many instances of profiteering among them too. They joined with the commissary officials in fixing prices, and some certainly profited from supplying the army. Following Alexander’s appeal for volunteers and offerings in Moscow, the city’s armourers raised the prices of sabres from six to between thirty and forty roubles; of a pair of pistols from seven or eight roubles to thirty-five or fifty; and of a musket from eleven or fifteen to eighty.10
When asked about the attitude of the common people, Volkonsky answered: ‘Sire! You should be proud of it: every peasant is a hero, devoted to the fatherland and your person.’ But this is hardly borne out by the evidence. The peasants had no interest in the war, but were understandably keen to preserve themselves and as much of their livestock as possible, usually by taking it off to the woods. The retreating Russian army encouraged this trend, telling the peasants of the horrors that awaited them if they stayed behind. ‘These rumours are producing a sensation among the peasants, who with the greatest sang-froid in the world set their huts on fire so as not to abandon them to the enemy,’ recorded one Russian officer. But many were not happy to see the retreating Russian army torching their villages, and some put out the fires as soon as the soldiers had moved off. The peasants had also been told, from the pulpit, that this invader was an infidel, and many referred to the French as ‘Bisurman’, a traditional term for a Muslim.11 Hence the fearful and hostile attitude encountered by the French.
Once the fear was dispelled, relations could be perfectly amicable. Michal Jackowski, an officer in Poniatowski’s horse artillery, rode into a village accompanied only by one trooper, and was promptly surrounded by some fifty armed peasants. But when he gave them the traditional Christian greeting habitual in Poland and Russia, they lowered their weapons and said that if he was a Christian they had nothing against him. He found that this never failed, and that he always obtained supplies by prefacing his request with the statement that he would only buy what they could spare.
A similar attitude is recorded by other Poles, who were better placed than the other nationalities of the Grande Armée to communicate with the locals. Every French division had a Polish officer seconded to it for this purpose, and there are accounts of peaceful and fruitful foraging expeditions. General Berthézène denied that there was any widespread animosity at this stage. ‘On the contrary,’ he wrote, ‘I saw our servants go off singly and without escorts, foraging around Moscow; I saw peasants warning them of the approach of cossacks or of ambushes; I saw others show us where their masters had hidden their supplies and share them with our soldiers.’ A number of French and allied officers corroborate this with accounts of amicable foraging expeditions.12
One Westphalian soldier recorded that when his unit came to evacuate Mozhaisk after a five-week stay, the man they had pressed into service to work for them bade them farewell with tears in his eyes, making the sign of the cross over them. Lieutenant Peppler, whose Hessians were cantoned outside Mozhaisk, found that by treating the locals politely they had nothing to fear. ‘We had won the trust and even the friendship of those good people to such a degree that we felt as safe among them as though we had been in a friendly country,’ he wrote. And when Bartolomeo Bertolini escaped from captivity, he found friendly peasants giving him food as he made his way across country to Moscow.13
Even allowing for some exaggeration, such accounts are revealing, and they are corroborated by evidence from the Russian side, where the attitude of the lower orders aroused the deepest fears. ‘We still do not know which way the Russian people will turn,’ Rostopchin warned Sergei Glinka.14
Soon after the invasion began, there were instances of serfs refusing to carry out their duties and even staging minor revolts, and there was much ransacking of manors abandoned by fleeing nobles. In a letter to a friend, one landowner described how, after a French foraging party had come and taken what they needed from his estate, the serfs rushed in and looted all that remained. Once the local authority had evaporated the peasants began to behave like ‘bandits’, even assaulting priests and torturing them in order to extort supposed Church riches. Peasants also helped French marauders to attack and loot manor houses. Some complained of their condition to the French, and seemed to expect Napoleon to do something about it. Many of those landowners who stayed put, often wives of officers who were away with the army, surrounded themselves with armed servants and asked the French for protection. There were cases of landowners being roughly handled and even killed, but most of the disorders were opportunistic rather than politically inspired.15
Pavel Ivanovich Engelhardt, a landowner on the fringes of the area occupied by the French in the province of Smolensk, led his peasants in an attack on some French marauders. Emboldened by the action, they began to question his rights over them and refused to work. He called on a detachment of cossacks hovering in the area to come and restore discipline. The serfs then denounced him to the French authorities in Smolensk, and he was imprisoned. But as the French could find nothing specific to charge him with, they released him. He once more called in the cossacks, and his serfs were whipped into submission. But the moment the cossacks had gone they buried in his park the bodies of a couple of French soldiers they had killed and then denounced him again. This time he was shot by the French.16
There were also cases of peasants showing extreme devotion to their masters. Aleksandr Benckendorff recounted how his detachment fell upon a party of French marauders looting the estate of one of the Galitzine family and chased them off. The peasants, who had assembled, asked the Russian officer in charge for permission to drown one of their number, a woman. When asked why they wanted to do this, they replied that she had revealed to the French the place where the Princess’s jewels had been hidden. The officer suggested that she might only have done this under duress, and they answered that she had assuredly been flogged to within an inch of her life, but that nevertheless she must be punished.17
The Russian army’s failures, followed by the loss of Smolensk and then Moscow, inevitably lowered respect for the authorities and for the Tsar, so that it was not uncommon to hear peasants making ribald jokes about the incompetence not only of Barclay and the ‘Germans’, but of Alexander himself. In the general mood of mistrust and paranoia even Russian officers in uniform found themselves arrested by the populace and in at least one case nearly lynched as ‘spies’.18
The nationalist Filip Vigel commented, approvingly, that the lower orders had shed their deference and become much more outspoken, while others noted, with alarm, the frequency with which the name of the rebel Pugachov was uttered by them. ‘The influence of the local authorities, particularly of the police, grew weak, and the common people grew restive,’ according to the merchant M.I. Marakuev. ‘It was necessary to treat them with skill and flattery. The decisive tone of authority and mastership was out of place and could be dangerous.’ Even the authorities recognised this, and proclamations were couched in populist terms and a cajoling rather than commanding style.19 ‘The ideas of freedom that have spread through the land, the widespread devastation, the total destitution of some and the selfishness of others, the disgraceful attitude of landowners, the abject example they have set to their peasants – will this not lead to great upheaval and disorder?’ noted Lieutenant Aleksandr Chicherin in his diary as he observed the situation around the retreating army.20
In a letter to a friend, Maria Antonovna Volkova expressed the conviction that Rostopchin had saved Moscow from social upheaval, even though she had lost her house in the fire. ‘Only a man like Rostopchin knew how to deal with minds in such a state of ferment and prevent terrible and irreversible things happening,’ she wrote. ‘Moscow has always had an influence on the whole country, and you can be sure that if there had been the slightest disorder between groups of her inhabitants, the upsurge would have been universal. We all know with what perfidious intentions Napoleon invaded. It was necessary to counteract them, to turn minds against the scoundrel and thereby contain the common people, who are always thoughtless.’ She was talking about revolution.21
A great deal of effort had been put into influencing the attitudes of the people. Alexander’s proclamations and religious sermons were accompanied by a steady trickle of propaganda and rumour. News of the burning of Moscow, universally attributed to the French, of the profanation of churches and of alleged atrocities committed on the population was circulated widely. ‘It is impossible to imagine the horrors the French are said to be committing,’ noted Lieutenant Uxküll. ‘One hears that they’re burning and desecrating churches, that the weaker sex – or rather any individuals who fall into their frantic hands – are sacrificed to their brutality and the satisfaction of their infernal lusts. Children, greybeards – it’s all the same to them – all perish beneath their blows.’22 Rumours were disseminated among the peasants to the effect that Napoleon would convert them all to Catholicism by force and brand them on the heart. Much was also made of the fact that Napoleon was in league with Russia’s historic enemy, the Poles, who were supposedly intent on recapturing parts of Holy Russia.
But according to Yermolov, there would have been no truly national dimension to the war and no way of harnessing the peasants to the Tsar’s cause had it not been for the clumsy and increasingly undisciplined behaviour of the French.23 They did bed down and stable their horses in churches – mainly because these were the only suitable buildings in small towns and villages. They were also undoubtedly rough with the natives. Peasants who brought their produce to sell in Moscow were beaten up and robbed. The more and more widespread depredations of the Grande Armée’s foraging parties, often conducted without any regard for the livelihood, let alone the feelings, of the Russians, forced them to take up arms in order to survive. It was a question of self-preservation.
The peasants began to lay ambushes for foraging parties or lull them into a false sense of security and then overpower them. They acquired arms and were able to take on small units. They vented their rage on their captives in acts of barely believable savagery, mutilating them, burying them alive or roasting them over fires. ‘Approaching a village in order to get some supplies,’ Lieutenant Uxküll noted in his diary, ‘I saw a French prisoner sold to the peasants for twenty roubles; they baptised him with boiling tar and impaled him alive on a piece of pointed iron.’ The French and their allies responded in kind, encouraging a degenerating spiral of horror. ‘People became worse than wild animals and killed each other with incredible cruelty,’ noted A.N. Muraviov.24
There were exceptions, at every level of society. Édouard Déchy, the thirteen-year-old son of a doctor in Davout’s corps, had been brought along by his father since, his mother being dead, there was no one to care for him at home. His father was put in charge of one of the hospitals in Smolensk after the action at Valutina Gora. A local Russian landowner, a countess, seeing the child all alone, begged his father to let her take him off to the country, and the boy spent an idyllic few months being pampered and playing with the Countess’s children. In the city of Orel, a Russian woman took pity on some French prisoners who had been brought there and, taking them into her house, ruined herself clothing, feeding and tending to their wounds; when her means ran out she wandered the city begging for money to feed them.25
Such acts of charity were by no means restricted to the educated classes. A peasant recalled how his entire village had taken refuge in the forest, along with their cattle and all the food they could carry. One day they were discovered by a couple of Frenchmen, so they tried to kill them, but one got away. Expecting a punitive expedition, they sent one of their number to alert some Russian troops stationed nearby, who duly set an ambush. A couple of hundred French troops came and demanded food, threatening to take it if they were not obeyed, whereupon the hidden Russians attacked and the French were quickly disarmed. ‘But as they were all begging for bread,’ explained the peasant, ‘we felt sorry for them, we cooked some potatoes and brought them bread, and even some beef, and we could see how hungry they were, how they all threw themselves on the food we had given them, and with what eagerness they started to eat it. Some of the Frenchmen were trying to say something with tears in their eyes, evidently thanking us in their language, and we said to them: go on, eat, cheers, we have plenty of bread.’26
The unaccountability of the peasants was a source of debate and anxiety, as to involve them in the war was, to some extent, to empower them: it was the first time in Russian history that a Tsar had been obliged to appeal to the serfs to defend him and his state. And nobody could be sure how they might use this implicit power.
First attempts to engage the peasants in the war had mixed results. A detachment of Prince Eugène’s Army of Italy came across a band armed with pikes, scythes and axes, under the command of their squire. He led them bravely towards the Italians, only to find that all his serfs deserted him and fled. When the selection for the militia began, many wounded themselves in order to avoid being drafted. And not all of those who did end up in the militia displayed quite the right spirit. Nikolai Andreev, a lieutenant in the 50th Jaeger Regiment of Neverovsky’s division, noticed that at Borodino the militiamen responsible for carrying the wounded back to the dressing stations relieved the officers of all their valuables as they did so.27
Yet the example of Spain, where the guerrilla was causing such damage to the French, was an alluring one. A Spanish ‘national catechism’ was translated and published, and many believed that the military value of the peasantry, as distinct from those drafted into the militia, should be harnessed to the national cause. ‘But a national war is too much of a novelty for us,’ lamented the populist Fyodor Glinka. ‘It seems that they are still afraid of unbinding hands.’28 Ultimately, it was left to circumstance.
Soon after the beginning of the war, Denis Davidov, an officer of Hussars in the Second Army, wrote to Bagration suggesting that if he were given a small independent command he could carry out effective partisan operations against the French. It was not until the beginning of September, just before Borodino, that he was given his command, of fifty Hussars and eighty cossacks. He began to operate in the French rear, but was put out to find himself being shot at by Russian peasants, who regarded all soldiers with equal hatred. After wasting time and energy trying to convince them that he was on their side, he exchanged his regimentals for a peasant smock, let his beard grow, and replaced the cross of the order of St Anne on his breast with a small icon of St Nicholas. This permitted him to approach villages without being shot at, and he could then begin to convince the inhabitants to make common cause with him. He scored a few successes against French foraging parties and isolated units, and began to involve the local villagers in his actions. By 24 September his detachment had swelled to some three thousand horsemen, as peasants and Russian stragglers or escaped prisoners joined him, and by the end of October he could muster large numbers of local peasants, many armed with muskets taken from the French, for specific operations.
After the fall of Moscow, Kutuzov sanctioned the formation of more such ‘flying detachments’ whose object was to prey on the French lines of communication and supply. He detached General Wintzingerode with 3200 men to operate along the Tver road, and General Dorokhov with two thousand to harry French traffic along the Smolensk road from bases around Vereia. He had also formed smaller detachments under Seslavin, Figner, Lanskoy and others. Some of these units did gather peasant recruits to their side, but mostly they only made use of the intelligence and help provided by the population, occasionally arming them and using them for prisoner or supply escort duty.
Davidov was held up as a hero by Pushkin and admired by Walter Scott, who had a portrait of him in his study, before being immortalised by Tolstoy in the guise of Denisov in War and Peace. His exploits and those of other ‘partisan’ units have been greatly exaggerated by legend, and the claims made on their behalf are often absurd. One Soviet historian assures us that a detachment of a hundred Russians attacked a village defended by two cavalry squadrons and two companies of infantry. They allegedly killed 124 Frenchmen and took a futher 101 prisoner, at a cost of two wounded men and six horses wounded or killed. A child can work out that in the space of time it would take to kill 124 men a substantial number of Russians must have been killed and wounded – unless, that is, the French surrendered after a couple of shots and were then butchered. Sergei Volkonsky, who commanded one of the partisan units, admitted that most of the heroic stories were nonsense. The whole point of this kind of warfare was that it had to be cautious and low-risk. The trick was to avoid a fight and capture the French detachment while it slept. The reality was not as glorious as the legend either. Figner was a cold-blooded murderer. Sergei Lanskoy was, according to General Langeron, a rapist and a brigand.
There were also a number of what one might term guerrilla bands operating along the fringes of the territory held by the French. But it is difficult to disentangle truth from fiction, as the idea of patriotic peasants was alluring to slavophiles and communists alike. It cannot be supported or challenged by documentary evidence, precious little of which ever existed. All one can do is repeat what has been written by Russian historians, and take it with a pinch of salt.
Yermolai Chetvertakov, a Russian dragoon who had been taken prisoner near Gzhatsk but managed to escape, teamed up with a local peasant and together they began ambushing and killing individual French soldiers. They were joined by others, and the band snowballed. Numbers were never constant, as they might be joined by up to several thousand volunteers from the locality if there was a tempting convoy to attack and plunder, but most of these would then go home. Fyodor Potapov, alias ‘Samus’, a Hussar who had been wounded in a skirmish with the French, had taken refuge in the woods, where some peasants gave him shelter. He enlisted their support and similarly built up a band of partisans. Stepan Eremenko, an infantry private who was wounded and left behind outside Smolensk, followed a similar course.
There were also a number of peasants who formed guerrilla bands, and a couple of women have gone down in history as defenders of Holy Russia. In the village of Sokolovo in the province of Smolensk a peasant woman by the name of Praskovia defended her virtue, or possibly her livestock, so effectively that she allegedly sent six Frenchmen to their deaths with her pitchfork. She was outdone by Vasilisa Kozhina, who supposedly despatched dozens with her scythe.
There must have been countless instances of peasants confronting and killing enemy soldiers or civilian camp-followers, particularly in the latter stages of the campaign. But modern Russian historians are generally agreed that there was no guerrilla that could bear any comparison with the Spanish model, and that the contribution of the peasants was largely confined to opportunistic pillage and murder.29
Opportunistic or not, the instincts animating the peasants, and Russian society as a whole, were such as to rally them to the cause of the empire, and this would become ever more apparent as the fortunes of war deserted the French. Despite the foot-dragging, a total of 420,000 men were drafted into the militia, of whom 280,000 managed to take part in the fighting. A total of a hundred million roubles was donated to the cause by all classes – a sum equivalent to the entire military budget for that year.30 And at no stage did the machinery of administration cease to function outside the area controlled by the enemy. Towns such as Kaluga, which were too close to the war zone for comfort, were efficiently evacuated of their institutions, schools, hospitals, archives and so on, which were soon functioning again at a safer distance.
Alexander was not to know any of this. He was unwell, suffering from painful rashes on his leg, and he was sick of the wavering sycophancy of his court, so he had withdrawn into the isolation of Kamenny Island. His only source of comfort was his inner conviction that he was but an instrument of God’s will, acting out a higher purpose. This had outgrown the mere defence and liberation of Russia, and among those whom he now saw with the greatest pleasure were the little group of people working under his wing on the liberation of Germany and indeed the whole Continent. He had formed them into a German Committee under the presidency of George of Oldenburg. This was organising a German Legion under Colonel Arentshild and conducting a propaganda campaign throughout Germany, orchestrated by Stein and his secretary the poet Ernst Moritz Arndt. Alexander’s manifestoes were translated and circulated throughout Germany, enhancing his position as the champion of all those opposed to Napoleonic rule. The idea was to prepare a fifth column which would rise at the appropriate moment. When this moment would come depended on the performance of the Russian troops. ‘The fate of the armies will decide that of Germany,’ Stein declared before the battle of Borodino.31
There is a hackneyed story that, seeing his friend Aleksandr Nikolaevich Galitzine so serene, Alexander had questioned him about the source of his inner peace, to which the Prince is supposed to have answered that it came from reading the Bible, and that a few days later the Prince’s wife lent the Tsar her copy, marked at various passages. In fact, Alexander had been reading the Bible for some time, and using it to find scriptural reinforcement of a sense of his own destiny which had already matured. He had also immersed himself in mysticism, and a detailed memorandum on the origins of mystic literature which he sent to his sister Catherine at this time reveals surprising familiarity with it.32
It was fortunate for Russia that Alexander found the inner strength to resist the temptation to act at this critical moment. ‘If fate has condemned your empire to fall, you must perish with it and fight among your faithful subjects, who have decided to die under your eyes on the field of honour, on which you yourself should win or perish with them,’ Rostopchin urged.33 The idea of assuming command of his army once more and sallying forth to a fight to the death with Napoleon held strong appeal for Alexander. Had he done so, he would have been beaten and Napoleon would have regained the initiative. As it was, the somnolent Kutuzov was the perfect man for the moment, as time was working for the Russians and against the French.
After leaving Moscow to the French, Kutuzov had marched out in a south-easterly direction. He then veered right and began a flanking march around the city which eventually brought him to a point due south of it at Krasnaia Pakhra. It was a risky move, particularly in view of the state of the army.
Morale had reached a nadir. ‘Every part of the army is in a state of terrible disorder,’ noted Dmitry Volkonsky, ‘and not only has there been a general weakening of obedience, but even the sense of courage has weakened since the loss of Moscow.’ Tens of thousands had fallen behind or deserted in the retreat from Borodino and the march through Moscow. Some formed bands of marauders. ‘The saddest thing of all is that our soldiers spare nothing,’ wrote Lieutenant Uxküll of the Imperial Chevaliergardes. ‘They burn, pillage, loot, and devastate everything that comes to hand.’ There were even instances of them looting churches.34
Those that were left were hardly a force to be reckoned with. ‘The soldiers seemed to have taken fright,’ according to the female cavalry officer N.A. Durova. ‘From time to time they would come out with a few words, to say that it would have been better to be dead than to have given up Moscow.’ As they marched round the south of Moscow, the troops could see the city in flames. ‘Mother Moscow is burning,’ they murmured incredulously to each other. ‘The superstitious ones, unable to comprehend what was happening before their eyes, already decided, with the fall of Moscow, that they had witnessed the fall of Russia, the triumph of the Antichrist, soon to be followed by the Final Judgement and the end of the world,’ in the words of Lieutenant Radozhitsky.35
Bennigsen and others were expecting Kutuzov to attack the French advance guard under Murat, which had ventured out on its own, but Kutuzov once more ordered a retreat. This provoked a confrontation with Bennigsen that went beyond their previous disagreements. Bennigsen was convinced that he had saved the day at Borodino. He was horrified by the abandonment of Moscow, and had come to the conclusion that the Field Marshal was an incompetent old fool. He was supported in this view by Wilson and a few others, and accusations of ‘cowardice’ began to be made against Kutuzov.
The Russian army withdrew in a south-south-westerly direction to Tarutino, where Kutuzov set up a fortified camp. Bennigsen began to argue that the position was no good and his tactics were inappropriate, but Kutuzov put him in his place. ‘Your position at Friedland was good enough for you,’ he snapped. ‘Well, I’m quite happy with this one, and this is where we will stay, because it is I who am in command here and I who am responsible for everything.’36
It was a good position. It was far enough from Moscow not to be vulnerable to an attack by Napoleon, it was a good jumping-off point for operations against his lines of communication, and it commanded the approaches to Kaluga and Tula. These were the centres of Russian military production, and they were also the gateways to the fertile south. Once the benefits of this move had been recognised, several of the other commanders ascribed to themselves the merit of having chosen it. In fact, as Clausewitz pointed out, it had been dictated by a logical imperative rather than by any flash of genius.37
What Kutuzov needed was time, and he later described every day spent at Tarutino as ‘golden’, since it helped to restore the strength of the army. Supplies of food and equipment began to flow in from Kaluga and Tula. Local peasants brought eggs, milk, bread and pies, while merchants rolled up in their wagons with all manner of goods, so that the troops could buy whatever they needed. Kutuzov ordered winter uniforms, with thick trousers, sheepskin coats, fur-lined boots and gloves for the whole army. The soldiers dug pits and constructed ‘banyas’, Russian steam-baths, so they could clean up and relax.
‘We spend our time very pleasantly,’ noted Nikolai Dmitrievich Durnovo, an officer on Bennigsen’s staff. ‘All day long we feed, eat and drink.’ ‘We cooked beef stew and often sour soup with cabbage, beetroot and other vegetables,’ recalled Lieutenant Nikolai Mitarevsky with relish. ‘We had fry-ups of beef and even poultry; we cooked buckwheat with butter and potatoes.’ They sat around playing cards and chatting, and in the evenings they smoked their pipes listening to the soldiers singing around the campfires. Every evening there would be prayers before the Virgin of Smolensk accompanied by religious songs, often attended by Kutuzov.38
The Field Marshal had set up quarters in a cottage at the edge of the village of Letashevka. It had one room, in which he worked, with a bed in the corner screened off by a curtain. Bennigsen occupied a somewhat larger cottage opposite, and other officers of the staff crammed themselves into nearby huts as best they could.
Using the field press provided by Alexander, Kutuzov issued a stream of propaganda in regular bulletins, Izvestia iz Armii, which reported every skirmish, magnifying its significance and inflating figures of captured French soldiers and guns. More importantly, the bulletins represented the Russian soldiers as happy, brave and keen to fight, with well-fed horses. The wounded were apparently being lovingly cared for by wives and mothers, and every peasant was a true son of the fatherland ready to support the army in its struggle. The French were represented as hungry, sad and isolated. It was clever psychology, as it gave comfort and emotional support to soldiers who had just suffered not only defeat but also the shock of seeing their revered capital invaded and burnt.
The units were reinforced and the new levies given elementary training. But there was none of the parade-ground discipline that made the Russian army such hell. Nobody bothered to pipeclay their crossbelts. Men wore those elements of their uniform that suited them, and supplemented them with overcoats or cloaks that kept them warm and comfortable. Shakos were jettisoned in favour of soft forage caps. The junior officers developed a swashbuckling swagger. ‘There was no sparkle, no gold or silver; epaulettes and sashes were rare; the only things that gleamed were muskets, bayonets and artillery pieces,’ recalled Mitarevsky. ‘There were no rich or fashionable uniforms, only felt cloaks, thick capes, dirty, torn greatcoats, crumpled forage caps …’39
Many of these young officers had known nothing of soldiering, nothing of the common soldier and nothing of the peasants. Prince Piotr Andreevich Viazemsky, a Moscow aristocrat, had volunteered after Alexander’s visit. ‘I was a middling rider, and had never taken a gun in my hand,’ he wrote. ‘At school I had learned to fence, but my acquaintance with the rapier had grown distant. In a word, there was nothing warlike about me.’ At a dinner he met General Miloradovich, who took him on as an aide-de-camp. He felt confused and out of place as he followed his General about the battlefield of Borodino. But that suddenly changed. ‘When my horse was wounded under me, an inexplicable feeling, of joy, of pride, welled up inside and enveloped me.’40
A large number of young men such as him found themselves for the first time connecting, through the solidarity of war, with each other and with the mass of the Russian people as represented by the common soldier. In the heat of battle and the rigours of the bivouac they were able to see their serf-soldiers as human beings. Their shared experience over the next two years was to give rise to a kinship and a new vision of Russia, one that would perish on the gallows and in the exile that followed the failed Decembrist rising of 1825, but would live on through its enormous influence on Russia’s cultural life.
The shock of Borodino and the destruction of Moscow, followed by the boyish idyll of Tarutino, had produced an extraordinary effect. ‘We were in a state of bliss!’ recalled Dushenkievich, a fifteen-year-old Lieutenant in the Simbirsk Infantry regiment. ‘What had happened to the sorrow, from where did we get the sense of security and self-assurance which now flooded over us, while we grieved over Moscow and the Fatherland?’41
