Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [200]
If Barclay’s solution made good sense in narrowly Russian military terms, however, it was political dynamite. For the Prussians it would have meant abandoning Silesia and allowing Napoleon to detach a number of corps to reconquer Berlin and Brandenburg. It would probably also have doomed Austrian intervention, certainly in the short run and perhaps for ever. On 31 May, after the news of Bautzen had reached Vienna, the Hanoverian envoy wrote that
the fears of the emperor [i.e. Francis II] of a French invasion grow from day to day. Perhaps they are increased by anxiety lest the Russian emperor abandon the cause. People go as far as to fear that if the allies are pushed back to the Vistula, in a few months Bonaparte will be reinforced by the class of 1814 and will just leave an observation corps of 100,000 opposite the allies and will fall on Austria with the rest of his forces. To avoid this misfortune people are saying that Austria must move at top speed to get peace negotiations underway.
For all Metternich’s fine words about Austrian policy not being affected by military events, Stadion was terrified by the impact on Austrian behaviour of the allied army retreating into Poland and he was entirely correct to be so.65
Initially Alexander deferred to the Prussians and to the need to hug the Bohemian border and keep in close touch with the Austrians. The army was ordered to swing south, off the line of retreat to Poland, and to take up position near Schweidnitz and the old fortified position at Bunzelwitz where Frederick II had defied the Austrians in the Seven Years War. On the Prussians’ advice Alexander believed that, if necessary, the allies could fight Napoleon there on favourable ground. On arrival, however, it quickly became clear that the local authorities had done nothing to execute Frederick William’s orders to rebuild the old defences and that the only favourable ground in the neighbourhood could not be held by a force of 100,000 men. The Silesian Landwehr, which was supposed to be present in force to reinforce the army, was nowhere to be found. In addition, difficulties in feeding the troops soon became acute.66
The basic reason for this was, as already noted, that Upper Silesia depended even in peacetime for food supplies from Poland and could not suddenly accommodate the entire allied army, concentrated as it had to be with the enemy in the offing. Although Kutuzov, back in April, had begged Stein to create food magazines in eastern Saxony nothing had been done: this was just one part of Stein’s overall failure efficiently to mobilize Saxon resources while the allies occupied the kingdom. Barclay partly blamed Wittgenstein, pointedly noting in a letter to him that ‘when first taking over the supreme command of the armies and looking into the question of victualling, it became clear to me that no preparatory measures had been taken to secure food. While the troops were in the Duchy of Warsaw and Saxony earlier they were fed exclusively by requisitioning in the area where they were deployed or through which they were marching, and the requisitioning lasted only so long as they were there. Almost no reserve supplies were created anywhere in the rear for the army.’ Inevitably too, the intendant-general, Georg Kankrin, came in for criticism as the army began to go hungry. On 4 June he responded plaintively to Barclay by stating that the Prussians were providing almost nothing and on Prussian territory he could not requisition food or ‘exert any authority and no one asked me about the possibility of feeding the troops when the route to Schweidnitz was chosen’.67
With the army going hungry, and the Austrian timetable for intervention visibly receding, a Russo-Prussian conference on 2 June backed a retreat towards the river Oder. Petr Volkonsky had already ordered the army’s treasury to be