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By Root 2716 0

a willingness to stake France’s all on a series of ever more improbable throws of the dice. In this, however, there lay but one hope - that somehow the coalition facing him would fall apart and thereby restore him to the position that he had been able to exploit so well prior to 1812. With every day that passed, however, Napoleon’s conduct made this prospect ever less likely, the end result being ultimately a coalition the like of which the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had never seen.

In 1812, however, all this was far away. Indeed, as he explained to Metternich at Dresden, his plan of campaign was relatively rational:

My enterprise is one of those of which the solution is to be found in patience . . . I shall open the campaign by crossing the Niemen. It will be concluded at Smolensk or Minsk. There I shall stop. I shall fortify these two points, and occupy myself at Vilna, where the chief headquarters will be during the next winter, with the organization of Lithuania, which burns with impatience to be delivered from the yoke of Russia. I shall wait and see which of us tires first: I of feeding my army at the expense of Russia, or Alexander at the expense of sustaining my army at the expense of his country.1

With Napoleon the great exponent of the concept of the decisive battle, it is a little odd to find him discussing the campaign in terms of the occupation of territory. But battle remained at the heart of the emperor’s intentions. If the Russians advanced, as he hoped, he would envelop them from the north and west somewhere in the region of the river Narew: ‘If the enemy takes the offensive on the right bank of the river Narew . . . he will present his flank to the Viceroy [i.e. Prince Eugène], who will fall upon his right. If he does so between the Narew and the Bug, V Corps and VIII Corps will be able to move via Ostrolenka and Pultusk and achieve the same effect.’2 Supposing they did not move, however, the day of reckoning would simply come elsewhere. While Napoleon crossed the Niemen at Kovno with the majority of his forces, and marched directly on Vilna, supported to his right rear by two corps under Eugène de Beauharnais, the four corps forming his right wing, which had been placed under the somewhat unlikely figure of Jerome Bonaparte, were to fix in place the Second West Army of General Bagration. Striking south towards the impassable Pripet marshes, Napoleon would then cut Bagration’s communications and smash his forces, together, it was hoped, with Barclay’s centre and left.

What all this assumed was that the Russians would fight for Vilna. As Napoleon acknowledged, even a limited advance into Russia posed many problems. That he clearly recognized this is suggested by a conversation he had with Pasquier on the eve of his departure from Paris, in which he referred to the forthcoming campaign as ‘the greatest and most difficult enterprise that I have ever attempted’.3 In consequence, everything possible had been done to ease the passage of the grande armée. In addition to the establishment of immense supply depots at Königsberg and other towns, the number of transport battalions was raised from fourteen to twenty-three, of which fifteen served in Russia, and the size of the individual units was greatly increased. Between the thousands of wagons in these battalions and the packs of the troops themselves, there were sufficient rations for twenty-four days, a far more generous allowance than in many previous campaigns. And more supplies could be brought up from the rear. If Kovno and Vilna were selected as the main point of penetration into Russia, it was in part because the river Niemen was navigable as far as the latter city. Yet within a very short time it became clear that even in the vicinity of the frontier the French faced immense problems. Even before the invasion began there were reports of trouble. On 20 June, for example, Poniatowski reported from Novogrodek that his men were going short: ‘Thanks to the country’s want of resources . . . the question of supply is becoming more difficult