The entire plan of the Russian campaign was consistent and good. The Bonaparte of 1796 would probably have carried it through, despite its unprecedented difficulties. But its execution was seriously marred by the absence of Napoleon at the front, and the want of his ancient decisiveness. To be sure he had nearly half a million men to command and feed; but he was no longer the slim, nervously active, omnipresent man. He was corpulent, liked his ease, and shunned bad weather. This want appears in his long stay in Wilna, his failure to put his own individuality into the details of the advance; his now relying on his lieutenants, whom he had never trained, and some of whom were unable, to rely on themselves. Napoleon began to draw his conclusions, not from personal observation, but from assumed premises. He had from the beginning the habit of underrating the enemy’s forces. It now grew to be a rule with him to take one-third off from what the enemy really had and double his own forces, in order to encourage his subordinates. This exaggerated reckoning could not but lead to evil. There is none of Frederick’s straightforward dependence on his own brain and his army’s courage. The king’s frankness stands out in high relief against Napoleon’s simulation.
But we must constantly bear in mind that Napoleon led an army of unprecedented size, made up of different nationalities, in a limitless territory, and that his difficulties were enormous. It should be noted that Alexander’s largest army in the field numbered one hundred and thirty-five thousand men; Hannibal’s less than sixty thousand; Cæsar’s about eighty thousand; Gustavus’ never reached eighty thousand men; Frederick had to parcel out his forces so that of his one hundred and fifty thousand men he rarely could personally dispose of more than fifty thousand in one body. Napoleon carried three hundred and sixty thousand men into Russia. This is not a final measure of the task, but it stakes out its size.
Some of Napoleon’s Russian manœuvres are fully up to the old ones. The manner of the attempt to turn the Russian left at Smolensk and seize their communications so as to fight them at a disadvantage, is a magnificent exhibition of genius. But at the last moment he failed. The spirit of his plan was to seize the communications of his opponent and force him to fight; the letter was to seize Smolensk. When he reached Smolensk, the Russians had retired to the east of the city. Napoleon apparently overlooked the spirit of his plan, and though he could easily have done so, he did not cut the Russians off by a tactical turning movement. He was not personally where he needed to be,—on the right,—but remained at his headquarters. It may be claimed that the commander of so huge an army must necessarily remain at central headquarters. It is rather true that his administrative aide should be there, and he at the point of greatest importance. At Smolensk, theoretically and practically, this was the right, and operations at this point were intrusted to by no means the best of his subordinates. Napoleon’s intellect was still as clear as ever. It was his physique and his power of decision which were weakening. Even allowing the utmost to all the difficulties of the situation, if tried by the rule of 1796 or 1805, this seems to be indisputable.
When Napoleon did not bring on a battle at Smolensk, the Russian campaign had become a certain failure. For it was there settled that he could not reach Moscow with a force sufficient to hold himself. He had crossed the Niemen with three hundred and sixty-three thousand men. At Moscow he could have no more than one hundred thousand. Arrived at Smolensk he was called on to face retreat, which was failure; or an advance to Moscow, which was but worse failure deferred,—almost sure annihilation. This seems clear enough from the military standpoint. But Napoleon advanced to Moscow relying largely on the hope that the Russians would sue for a peace. For this dubious hope of the statesman, Napoleon committed an undoubted blunder as a captain. It is hard to divorce the statesman from the soldier. All great captains have relied on state-craft, and properly so. But such was the purely military syllogism.
Much has been written about Napoleon’s failure to put the guard in at Borodino. Under parallel conditions at an earlier day, he would certainly have done so. That he did not is but one link more in the growing chain of indecisiveness. But had he done so, and won a more complete victory, would it have made any eventual difference? Smolensk was his last point of military safety. Even had he been able to winter in Russia, it is not plain how spring would have bettered his case, in view of the logistic difficulties and of the temper of the Russian emperor and people. Time in this campaign was of the essence.
Once or twice on the terrible retreat, Napoleon’s old fire and decision came to the fore, but during the bulk of it he was apparently careless of what was happening. He habitually left to his generals all but the crude direction of the outlying corps. The contrast between Napoleon in this disaster and Napoleon after raising the siege of Acre, or after the defeat at Aspern and Essling, is marked. He did not oppose his old countenance to misfortune.
After this campaign, in which the grand army of half a million men was practically annihilated, Napoleon showed extraordinary energy in raising new troops, and actually put into the field, the succeeding spring, no less than three hundred and fifty thousand men. They were not the old army, but they were so many men. Napoleon understood this: “We must act with caution, not to bring bad troops into danger, and be so foolish as to think that a man is a soldier.” He had thirteen hundred guns. “Poor soldiers need much artillery.” The lack of good officers was the painful feature. The few old ones who were left were ruined by bad discipline. The new ones were utterly inexperienced.
In the campaign of 1813, Napoleon showed all his old power of conception. The intellectual force of this man never seemed overtaxed. But the lack of resolution became still more marked. He began by winning two battles,—Lützen and Bautzen,—in which he freely exposed himself and worked with all his old energy, to lend his young troops confidence. He was then weak enough to enter into an armistice with the allies. This was a singularly un-Napoleonic thing to do. He had turned the enemy’s right and was strategically well placed. It was just the time to push home. If the reasons he alleged—want of cavalry and fear of the dubious position of Austria—were really the prevailing ones, Napoleon was no longer himself, for his wonderful successes hitherto had come from bold disregard of just such things.
Napoleon here shows us how often fortune is of a man’s own making. So long as he would not allow circumstances to dictate to him, fortune was constant. When he began to heed adverse facts, we see first indecisive victories, then half successes, and by and by we shall see failure and destruction.
The operations about and succeeding Dresden show a vacillation which contrasts with the intellectual vigor. For the first time Napoleon conducted a defensive campaign. He studied his chances of an offensive, and cast them aside for reasons which would not have weighed a moment with him in 1805. And yet the defensive against his concentrically advancing enemies was no doubt the best policy. It shows Napoleon’s judgment to have been better than ever. After this brilliant victory Napoleon ordered a pursuit—which he ought to have made effective—across the Erzgebirge, but without issuing definite instructions. Sickness forbade the personal supervision he had expected to give; troops intended to sustain the advanced corps were diverted from this duty by a sudden change of purpose. Here was, as Jomini says, “without contradiction, one of Napoleon’s gravest faults.” But Napoleon had got used to seeing things turn in his favor, until he deemed constant personal effort unnecessary. Decreasing strength had limited his activity; great exertion was irksome. The immediate result of this ill-ordered operation was the destruction of a corps; the secondary result, the re-encouragement of the allies, whose morale had been badly shaken by three defeats, and whose main army he should have followed into Bohemia and broken up. The grand result was loss of time, which to Napoleon was a dead loss, a new advance of the allies, and the battle of Leipsic. During all this time, while Napoleon’s execution was weak compared to his old habit, his utterances and orders showed the clearest, broadest conception of what was essential. But he was no longer the man who used to gallop forty to sixty miles a day to use his eyes. Even at Leipsic he exhibited at times his old power; when defeat was certain he lapsed into the same indifference he had shown on the Russian retreat.