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Why, then, did the war continue? For answer, we must turn to the figure of Alexander I, who had again come west to Vilna. The invasion had had an impact upon him that can only be described as tremendous. Under great pressure, he had turned for comfort to the Bible and discovered in its pages both help and inspiration. The Lord would sustain him and send him his justice and by the same token deliver Russia. As for Alexander, the servant of the Lord, he would strike down the Napoleonic anti-Christ, and bring peace and freedom to the whole of Europe. To stop at the frontier, then, was to frustrate God’s plan, but, even if this had not been the case, to Alexander it simply seemed folly not to go on. As he told his personal entourage, ‘After so disastrous a campaign in Russia, and the great reverses which France has just met with in Spain, she must be entirely drained of men and of money . . . We have had the precaution . . . to have printed intelligence thrown in on all sides of France, and in all the ports, to deliver that country from the blindness in which she is plunged, and in which every effort is made to keep her. We know, moreover, that Malet’s conspiracy is far from being suppressed, and that there are many malcontents in France. We must hope that all these events will unite in promoting the result desired - a solid peace in Europe.’48 With plenty of fresh troops coming up, it was therefore very unlikely that the tsar would have held back, and all the more so as his entourage included a number of figures who were just as belligerent. One such was the erstwhile Prussian chief minister, Heinrich vom Stein, who had been invited to Russia to act as an unofficial adviser to Alexander and had since the day of his arrival been pressing for the liberation of Germany. Another was Rumiantsev’s de facto deputy at the Foreign Ministry, Karl von Nesselrode. An experienced diplomat with close ties with the courts of both Prussia and Austria, by 1812 Nesselrode had in effect taken the aged Rumiantsev’s place, for all that the latter continued to be the titular head of department. A thoroughly Western statesman - his father was German and his mother English - he had no time for either Russian traditionalism or Russian isolationism, and believed that it was in Russia’s interest to be a European power rather than an Asiatic one. More immediately, it was also very much in her interest to help restore order to Europe by defeating Napoleon and working towards a general peace settlement, something which in his mind was tied up very closely with the principle of legitimacy. But in the end what mattered was not Stein or Nesselrode but the tsar, and, what is more, a tsar possessed by over-confidence, ambition and vainglory, not to mention a determination to avenge himself on Napoleon and take his place as the greatest hero of the age.

Alexander’s view of himself as servant of God and liberator of Europe should not, of course, be taken wholly at face value. As far as Germany was concerned, for example, he wanted to ensure that freedom did not interfere with the interests of his numerous princely relatives, as witness the way in which he infuriated Stein by insisting that the Duke of Oldenburg and his two sons be included in the so-called ‘German committee’ - the body set up in St Petersburg in June 1812 to oversee German affairs and, so Stein hoped, organize a rising against Napoleon. More immediately of interest, however, was the issue of Poland. Thanks to Czartoryski, this had once more come to the fore. For Czartoryski, the involvement of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in a war against Alexander I was a personal tragedy, and he had sat out the fighting in unhappy exile in Austrian Galicia. But with the Russians on the offensive, a way out of his dilemma offered itself, and in December he therefore wrote to the tsar begging him to adopt his old scheme of a restored Poland ruled by a Russian monarch (though no longer Alexander: Czartoryski now wanted the throne to go to the tsar’s younger brother,