During the truce of summer 1813 the Russian army was
transformed. By the time the autumn campaign began it was not just rested, well
fed and reorganized but also much larger than had been the case in May. To
understand how this happened requires us to retrace our steps a little and to
look at events behind the front lines. In part this means understanding the
complicated process of raising, training and equipping the hundreds of thousands
of conscripts who reinforced the field armies in 1812–14. Just moving these
forces from the Russian heartland to German battlefields was a challenge. In
the autumn of 1812 the main training area of the reserve armies was in Nizhnii
Novgorod province, some 1,840 kilometres even from Russia’s frontier with the
Duchy of Warsaw. The war ministry reckoned that it took fifteen weeks of
marching to cover this distance.
Once in Poland and Germany, Russian armies had to be fed and
supplied while operating a huge distance from their home bases. One way of
putting this in perspective is to remember that more than half a million
Russian soldiers served outside the empire’s borders in 1813– 14, and this in a
Europe where only two cities had populations of more than 500,000. It is
equally useful to recall Russia’s experience in the Seven Years War (1756–63),
when Russian armies operated in the same German regions as in 1813. Their
efforts were crucially undermined by the need to retreat eastwards hundreds of
kilometres every autumn because they could not supply themselves on Prussian
soil. For the Russians in 1813–14, to defeat Napoleon was only half the
problem. Getting large armies to the battlefield in a state to fight him was as
great a challenge and an achievement.
In accordance with Barclay de Tolly’s January 1812 law on
the field armies, as Russian troops advanced westwards a network of military
roads spread across eastern and central Europe. It began well within the
Russian Empire and stretched all the way to the front lines. Down these roads
travelled the great majority of the reinforcements, ammunition and other
supplies which kept the Russian army strong and in the field. At regular
intervals along these roads food depots and hospitals were set up, and town
commandants appointed. These commandants had detachments of up to 100 Bashkir
and Kalmyk cavalry at their disposal, who if properly supervised were
formidable military police. The commandant’s job was to make sure that roads
and bridges were in good repair, and hospitals and depots properly supplied and
administered. He registered the arrival and departure of all units on his
stretch of road, reporting all movements to headquarters every ten days. The
military roads made it much easier to ensure that troops en route to the front
line were properly watched over, fed and cared for. The system was also a
disincentive to desertion or marauding.
The January 1812 (OS) army law also set out in some detail
how Russian soldiers were to be supplied and fed when serving abroad. A sharp
distinction was made between operating on the territory of allies, where all
such matters were regulated by treaties between the states involved, and
campaigning on enemy soil. The law made no allowance for neutrals: their
territory should be treated in the same way as that of enemies. On hostile or
neutral territory the army must supply itself from the land by requisition. Its
day-to-day upkeep must not be the responsibility of the Russian treasury.
Requisitioning should be carried out in orderly fashion, however, in order to
preserve the troops’ discipline and protect the local population and economy.
Wherever possible this must be done through the local administration, overseen
by officials of the army’s intendancy. The intendant-general of the field army
was ex officio to be the governor-general of all occupied territory and all
officials were bound to obey his orders under threat of severe penalties for
disobedience. Receipts were to be given for all food and materials
requisitioned in order to prevent disorder and allow the local authorities to
equalize burdens by repaying the holders of these receipts from their tax
revenues.
In the first half of 1813 Russian armies operated above all
in Prussia and Poland. Well before the alliance with Frederick William was
signed Alexander had agreed to pay for food requisitioned in Prussia. One-fifth
of the value was to be paid immediately in Russian paper rubles, the rest
subsequently in return for receipts. The instigator of this policy was Stein,
who argued for it on political grounds and because it made no sense to ruin the
population of a future ally, all of whose meagre resources would soon be needed
for the war effort. This concession to the Prussians was never repeated when
Russian troops were campaigning on Saxon and French territory.
Immediately after the Russo-Prussian treaty of alliance was
signed, the two governments came to an agreement on the upkeep of Russian
forces operating on Prussian territory. Prussian commissars attached to Russian
corps would requisition the necessary food in return for receipts. The
commissars would then either arrange for food to be supplied from stores or for
troops to be quartered on the population. The terms of repayment for the
overall upkeep of the Russian forces on Prussian soil were generous. Food
prices were calculated on a six-month average across the whole of Prussia, not
at the hugely inflated rates of the districts in which masses of troops were
actually operating. Three-eighths of the cost was to be covered by shipping
grain from Russia to the Prussian ports, which the Russians were intending to
do anyway for their own army. A further three-eighths would be in receipts,
repayable after the end of the war. The final two-eighths was to be paid in
paper rubles. Completely avoided was any requirement for the Russians to part
with scarce silver and gold coin.
The situation in the Duchy of Warsaw was very different, for
this was conquered enemy territory.
Polish food was to be crucial to the
Russian war effort in 1813. Without it the Russian army could not have remained
in the field in the summer and autumn of that year. The fact that all this
requisitioned food was free was also vital for the Russian treasury. Though
precision is impossible, the contribution of the Duchy of Warsaw to feeding and
supplying both the Russian field armies and the Reserve Army, which was
quartered on Polish territory from spring 1813, amounted to tens of millions of
rubles.
Russian policy in Poland was ambivalent, however. On the one
hand, the Poles had to be milked if the Russian war effort was to be sustained.
On the other hand, the emperor was anxious to win the loyalty of the Poles,
whom he wished to make his future subjects. Kutuzov’s proclamation setting up
the Polish provisional government in March 1813 promised that ‘all classes
should feel His Imperial Majesty’s care for them and through this, and also
through the abolition of conscription, would experience how great was the
difference between his fatherly administration and the former one, which had
been forced to plunder in order to satisfy the insatiable thirst for conquest
of masters who called themselves allies’. Promised full pay, full protection
for persons and property, and strict punishment for any bad behaviour by the troops,
the overwhelming majority of Polish officials in the Duchy of Warsaw stayed in
their jobs. This was a great benefit to the Russians, who could not remotely
have found the cadres to run Poland themselves. It did mean, however, that most
officials in Poland would only requisition energetically for the Russians if
their own lives and careers were clearly at stake.
The new provisional government was headed by two Russians:
its deputy head was Alexander’s old friend, Nikolai Novosiltsev, a shrewd and
tactful political operator whose appointment showed just how high a priority
winning over the Poles was for the emperor. The head of the government, and
simultaneously the governor-general of the Duchy, was the former
intendant-general of Kutuzov’s army, Vasili Lanskoy, who was himself now
replaced by Georg Kankrin. Lanskoy’s appointment underlined the even higher
priority of using Poland to feed the Russian army, though most generals soon
came to believe that he had ‘gone native’ and was serving Polish rather than
Russian interests. For the Russians, however, the big problem was not in Warsaw
but at provincial level. Despite what was said in the army law, it was
impossible for the overstretched army’s intendancy to spare officials to
oversee the Polish provincial administration. Nor could the army spare
front-line officers. Kutuzov had appealed to Alexander to send officials from
the Russian interior instead and this is what was done. But the number and
quality of these officials was well below what was needed.
On the whole, from January until the middle of May 1813 the
feeding of the troops went well and caused few clashes. This was especially
true in Prussia and in Prussian settlements in the Duchy of Warsaw, where the
population detested Napoleon and saw the Russian troops as liberators. Even in
Polish areas matters usually went reasonably well, though Kutuzov’s advance
guard moving through the centre of the Duchy of Warsaw subsisted on biscuit for
most of January and only received its wartime meat and vodka rations from the
beginning of February. The Poles undoubtedly suffered but not as much as
civilian populations in areas conquered by Napoleon or, in the Seven Years War,
by Frederick the Great. The Russians imposed neither conscription nor a war
indemnity. Their leaders tried with some success to sustain discipline and
protect the civilian population. For example, on 18 February 1813 Kankrin
published instructions for the feeding of the Russian troops from Polish stores
or by the households on which they were quartered. After spelling out the
troops’ proper rations, which for soldiers operating abroad included meat and
spirits three times a week, he encouraged the local population to report any
excessive demands or misbehaviour by the soldiers. Given the men’s exhaustion
and the way in which traditional distrust of Poles had been fed by the events
of 1812, the regular troops appear to have behaved remarkably well. On 23
March, writing from Kalicz, Kutuzov told his wife that ‘our soldiers’ behaviour
surprises everyone here and the morals shown by the troops even surprise me’.
For six weeks from mid-May 1813, however, the army faced a
crisis as regards food supply. Barclay explained the reasons for this crisis in
a key memorandum for Alexander. He stated that the army’s problems were the
consequence of a year’s campaigning back and forth across an enormous area in a
manner which had no precedent in history. Disorder was inevitable. ‘The army
has drawn far ahead of the supplies prepared in Russia and has almost no food
reserve left with its units.’ According to the terms of the convention, the
Prussian government was supposed to feed Russian troops when they were on
Prussian soil. In Silesia, however, the Prussians did not have enough in their
magazines to feed even their own troops in May 1813. A little could be done if
one was prepared to purchase supplies with silver but the army’s treasury was
almost empty. It had received thus far in 1813 less than one-quarter of the
money owed it by the ministry of finance. In the longer term, however, the
answer to the army’s needs was not the use of limited Russian funds to buy food
but instead effective requisitioning in the Duchy of Warsaw. The key aims of
Barclay’s memorandum were to get Alexander to force the finance minister,
Dmitrii Gurev, to release funds immediately and to make the governor-general of
Warsaw, Vasili Lanskoy, carry out the army’s plan for massive requisitioning in
the Duchy. Barclay concluded by stating that unless Alexander did this, ‘I
cannot guarantee that we will not face catastrophic consequences which will
have a fatal impact on our soldiers and on military operations’.
In his report Barclay told Alexander that the only thing
which had saved the soldiers from starvation in early June was the providential
arrival of the mobile magazine of Chichagov’s former Army of the Danube. The
large store of biscuit it carried had tided the troops over for a number of
weeks. Initially put together in Podolia and Volhynia in the summer of 1812,
the 2,340 surviving carts of this magazine had struggled forward through snow
and mud for 1,000 kilometres or more, despite the fact that heavily loaded
peasant carts were supposed to be able to operate over distances of only 150
kilometres. Many of the carts had been hastily constructed of unseasoned wood.
Most were of light construction and all were low slung with small wheels. In
the autumn and spring mud it was almost impossible for horses to pull them. In
comparison to Austrian carts, noted the magazine’s commander subsequently, the
Russian civilian ones in his magazine carried less goods, were more fragile,
and required more horses.
Matters were not improved by the fact that initially many of
these carts were drawn by oxen. Given their voracious appetites, it was
impossible for a train pulled by oxen to move in winter. In January and
February 1813 therefore the mobile magazine had come to a halt and its oxen had
been turned into rations. Urged on by Kutuzov, the mobile magazine had got
under way again once spring arrived, its oxen replaced by requisitioned horses,
but its Heath Robinson appearance was accentuated by the fact that most of the
horses were having to pull the carts with furnishings initially designed for
oxen. Many of the drivers had never had to deal with horses before, had not
been paid since departure, and were in some cases individuals whom their
landlords were trying to get rid of. In the circumstances it was a miracle that
the magazine turned up.
The arrival of the mobile magazine bought enough time for
the Prussians to get their system for supplying the Russians back in order.
Once it became clear that the armistice would last for weeks, it was possible
to disperse the army into quarters. The Russian cavalry commanders were always
extremely concerned about their horses’ proper feeding: now their regiments
could be redeployed to areas well behind the front where oats were plentiful.
Meanwhile the Prussian authorities had been helpful in organizing a deal
between Kankrin and private Prussian contractors, who offered 55,000 daily
rations of flour and bread partly on credit and partly for paper rubles. In a
theatre of operations the first deficit item was always carts. The arrival in
mid-July of 4,000 carts of the main army’s mobile magazine was therefore a huge
asset. Kankrin divided some of the mobile magazines’ carts into echelons to
bring up supplies from Poland by stages. Others were utilized to pick up food
purchased from or provided by the Prussians, which had previously been
impossible to transport.
By the time the main army’s magazine arrived, Alexander had
already responded effectively to Barclay’s appeal for money. He immediately
commandeered for army headquarters almost 2.5 million paper rubles of ministry
of finance funds held in Germany and he ordered Gurev to remit the remainder
immediately, commenting that he himself was a witness to the army’s urgent
needs. Faced with a direct imperial command, Gurev wrote to Barclay on 13 July
that he had already sent him 4.8 million silver and 4 million paper rubles, and
more was on the way.
From the perspective of headquarters Gurev’s delay in
sending money already agreed in the military budget was indefensible.
Inevitably, the finance minister saw things differently. Even before Napoleon’s
invasion, budget deficits could only be covered by the printing of paper money
and fears of financial collapse were common. As a result of the war,
expenditure shot up and revenues shrank. Nearly 25 per cent of anticipated
revenue had failed to arrive in 1812. In the first quarter of 1813 things were
worse: only 54 per cent of expected revenues had come in by late April. Gurev
blamed ‘the shock felt throughout the state in 1812, when on top of normal
taxes, both traditional and newly established in that year, the population was
burdened by the mobilization of the militia, by recruit levies, by military
demands, duties and contributions: by a very conservative estimate all this
amounted to over 200 million rubles’. Faced with a vast looming deficit all
Gurev could do was to reduce expenditure wherever possible and fill the gap
with additional printing of paper money. In April 1813 he predicted that if the
war lasted throughout 1814 and its financing continued as at present then ‘no
means will remain to rescue us from the final destruction of our financial
system’.
Although Gurev feared hyper-inflation within Russia he
tended to believe that the enormous amount of economic activity linked to
repairing the damage caused by Napoleon’s invasion would mop up much of the
newly issued paper money. So too would growing Russian external trade now the Continental
System was destroyed once and for all. The finance minister’s true source of
panic was the large amounts of Russian paper money which the Field Army was
spending abroad. No foreigner would wish to hang on to this money, nor would
private individuals use it in payment for goods and services provided by other
Germans. Therefore the entire sum was likely to be remitted back to Russia for
exchange, with dire consequences for the ruble’s rate against foreign
currencies.
Gurev warned that if the paper ruble’s exchange rate
collapsed, the Field Army’s financing would become impossible. To avoid this he
dragged his heels as regards remitting funds to army headquarters and got the
committee of ministers to agree to a number of proposals, including paying
officers and men abroad only half their pay with the remainder to be given them
on return to Russia.
Gurev’s argument, partly true, was that officers and men
serving abroad to a great extent lived off the land and did not need much cash.
Nevertheless, had it been implemented, the impact of this policy on the morale
of the troops can easily be imagined: the army was already very badly paid by
European standards and was fighting an exhausting campaign on foreign territory
in a cause many even of the officers did not understand.
Faced with peremptory orders from the emperor, Gurev would
have released funds for the army in all circumstances but he was also greatly
encouraged in this direction by news of a large impending British subsidy, of
which he had despaired. In 1812 Alexander had not requested a British subsidy.
This was partly a question of pride. In addition, fighting on his own territory
he could finance the war without great difficulty. Perhaps for this reason, it
was actually many months after diplomatic relations with Britain were restored
that Alexander got round to appointing an ambassador in London.
Once Russian
armies advanced across the empire’s borders, however, the matter became urgent and
the emperor nominated Christoph Lieven and sent him to London in January 1813
with a message for the British government: ‘In the present circumstances every
dispatch of troops abroad is becoming very expensive for me. It requires the
emission of metallic currency which totally undermines our rate of exchange.
This would have a serious effect on our finances which they could not
ultimately sustain, since the state’s revenues are bound to shrink considerably
this year as a result of the complete devastation of some provinces.’ Lieven
was ordered both to ask for a subsidy and to present the British government
with a scheme for ‘Federal Paper Money’. This paper was to bear interest and to
be redeemable immediately after the war. It was to be guaranteed by the British,
Russian and Prussian governments, and was to be used to pay for part of the
Russian and Prussian war effort. The scheme had been devised in Petersburg with
the help, among others, not just of Stein but of the British financier Sir
Francis d’Ivernois.
