whom he had conceived a warm affection, and determined that Prussia should not make a separate peace with the French, Alexander had decided to reenter the war. Beyond the issue of Prussia, meanwhile, was that of Germany: the abortive D’Oubril treaty had made the cost of peace without victory very clear to the tsar, and he was in consequence determined to put an end to the Confederation of the Rhine. Napoleon could have peace, but the terms would in essence be those of Lunéville and Amiens. The Russian advance, of course, in turn raised the issue of Poland. Hitherto Napoleon had had little interest in the Polish question - indeed, it is clear that, had Russia recognized the gains that he had made since 1803, she could have had peace, for the emperor had no desire to wage a winter campaign in the depths of Poland. Continued war with Russia, however, transformed matters, for now Napoleon was free to lay claim to the mantle of hero and liberator. In the absence of any fear of provoking Russia, a Polish state could be restored and Poland’s manpower made available to the grande armée. As yet no concrete assurances were given, for there were serious worries that going too far might provoke Austria into re-entering the war, but even so Napoleon summoned a number of Polish exiles to his presence and hinted that a serious military effort against Russia might well buy Poland her freedom. So far as Prussia was concerned, this meant that the terms that had been on offer were now obsolete, for she could no longer be guaranteed her lands east of the Elbe. Instead of a treaty, then, all that Frederick William’s emissaries could obtain was a truce and even then one whose price would be the evacuation of Silesia and of Prussia’s gains from the second and third partitions of Poland. To accept this, however, meant the certainty of peace being made over the heads of the Hohenzollerns, and this even the badly shaken Frederick William III could not accept. On 21 November Napoleon’s terms were rejected, leaving Prussia’s agony to drag on. As for the emperor, he had no hesitation in picking up the gauntlet thrown down by Alexander: on 5 November the first French troops entered Poland (it is noticeable that a special mission was simultaneously dispatched to Vienna to secure a declaration of Austrian neutrality). For the grande armée the move was scarcely welcome. While cantoned in and around Berlin, the troops had lived a life of relative ease and plenty - many memoirs, indeed, comment on the seeming generosity with which they were treated by the local populace - but now things were very different:
It was . . . the beginning of a most terrible winter in a deserted country covered with woods and with roads heavy with sand. We found no inhabitants in the deserted villages . . . The weather was terrible: snow, rain and thaw. The sand gave way under our feet, and the water splashed up over the sinking sand. We sank down up to our knees. We were obliged to tie our shoes round our ankles with cord, and when we pulled our legs out of the soft sand, our shoes would stick in the wet mud. Sometimes we had to take hold of one leg, pull it out like a carrot, lift it forwards, and then go back for the other, take hold of it with both our hands, and make it take a step forwards also . . . The older men began to lose heart; some of them committed suicide rather than face such privations any longer.29
Once again, we see a hint of imperial overstretch. But to such problems Napoleon was blind. Convinced, as he put it, that ‘impossible’ was not a French word, his reaction was essentially one of irritation: ‘The emperor showed some ill-temper . . . At Posen I saw him . . . mount his horse in such a rage that he vaulted right over it, and give his groom a cut with his whip.’30 As for checking his course, in the autumn of 1806 there seemed no limit to Napoleon’s capacity for extending the scope of his operations. We come here to the issue of the Continental Blockade. Despite Austerlitz and Jena, Britain remained unbowed. Hence the famous ‘decree of Berlin’ of 21 November