Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [295]
As the campaign unfolded, for a short while it looked as though a reduced version of Napoleon’s master-plan might still be realizable. Barclay’s army had got away to the east and north-east, but the forces of Bagration, though themselves in retreat, were still within reach. From Vilna, Marshal Davout’s I Corps was hastily flung southwards and orders were dispatched to Jerome to abandon the defensive posture originally envisaged for him and press north-eastwards with all speed. Famously, however, the scheme went wrong: Jerome’s forces did not arrive in time, and Bagration escaped. For this failure the King of Westphalia has been widely blamed, an opinion shared by Napoleon, who sharply reproved his brother and placed him under the control of Davout (as Davout and Jerome were old enemies, the latter took umbrage and promptly went home to Kassel). However, the balance of opinion is now that Jerome was hard done by. As a commander he was undoubtedly mediocre, but the situation facing him was quite impossible. His men were deployed much further to the rear than the rest of the grande armée: at the onset of the campaign, indeed, they were anything up to 200 miles from the frontier. The fruit of Napoleon’s desire to keep back his right so as to lure the Russian centre and left into a trap, this could not easily be undone when the orders came for Jerome to move forward. To get to their first objective - the town of Grodno - the troops had to follow a track barely wide enough to take a single wagon that wound for mile after mile through impenetrable forests, while the rain came down in sheets. Not until 30 June did they reach Grodno, and by then the troops were so exhausted that Jerome gave them two day’s rest. Having already lost one sixth of his men, on
4 July he pushed on again in baking heat, but it was too late: he still had 100 miles to cover, and by the time he had reached his destination Bagration had long since gone.
Within a very few days, then, several factors had become clear. The physical problems of operating inside Russia were likely to be very great, if not insurmountable. The support of the local populace, non-Russian though it was, could not be counted upon. Horses and men alike were at serious risk of death by starvation and disease. The grande armée was so cumbersome and Russian distances so great it was going to prove almost impossible to set up the sort of battle of encirclement dreamed of by Napoleon. And, finally, the emperor could no longer exercise the sort of personal control that had been so important in earlier campaigns. At this point, in military terms, the best thing for Napoleon to have done would have been to abandon offensive operations, thin out his troops, consolidate the loyalty of the Poles and Lithuanians and wait for Alexander either to negotiate or to launch a counter-offensive. But this the emperor refused to do even though it fitted in perfectly with the general scheme of operations he had outlined to Metternich at Dresden. Such was the image he had created of himself that he was now its prisoner. ‘Napoleon did not hesitate,’ wrote Ségur. ‘He had not been able to stop at Paris; should he then retreat at Vilna? What would Europe think of him? What result could he offer to the French and Allied armies as a motive for so many fatigues, such vast movements, such enormous individual and national expenditure? It would be at once confessing himself beaten.’17 To quote another observer of the scene in Vilna, ‘The fatal genius of Napoleon pushed him forward, and it was thus that, from illusion to illusion, he rushed to his ruin, rejecting the truth as an apparition whose presence he could not endure.’18
On 9 July, Napoleon left Vilna in search of the victory that every day made more pressing. But, of course, it