Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [214]
Arranging the march of scores of thousands of inexperienced troops was also not easy. While drowning in the detailed preparations which needed his attention, Lobanov-Rostovsky suddenly received urgent orders to divert part of his forces to suppress a mutiny in the Penza militia, ‘in the name of His Imperial Majesty the Sovereign’, ‘without the slightest loss of time’ and with ‘extreme severity’. The mutiny was suppressed without difficulty but the tone of Count Saltykov’s instructions reflected the central government’s acute fear that a horde of armed peasant and Cossack militiamen might unleash mayhem in a region where Pugachev had roamed forty years before.46
Lobanov-Rostovsky reported his arrival in Belitsa to Alexander on 1 February 1813. It was at this point that his worst troubles began. His troops’ deployment area covered three provinces: northern Chernigov, southern Mogilev and south-eastern Minsk. In today’s terms this means north-central Ukraine and south-eastern Belarus, the region of Chernobyl. This was a poor area in 1812, much poorer and less densely populated than central Great Russia. Suddenly establishing a city of 80,000 men in this region in the middle of winter was a great challenge. Immense efforts went into housing, feeding and training the troops and providing medical services.47
These arrangements were barely in place, however, when Lobanov received two new commands from Alexander on 1 March. These orders breathed the impatient ruthlessness which was the hallmark of Aleksei Arakcheev, the emperor’s assistant on all matters concerning reserves and the mobilization of the rear. The first wave of reinforcements was to be dispatched to the Field Army immediately. Lobanov was to inspect all departing units personally to ensure they were fully equipped and victualled. He was then to remove himself and the remainder of his troops hundreds of kilometres north-westwards to Belostok, on the Russo-Polish frontier. The emperor had decided to create a united Reserve Army which would be deployed in the Belostok area and would be responsible for training and dispatching all future reinforcements to the armies in the field. Even initially this Reserve Army was to be over 200,000 strong. Lobanov was appointed its commander and ordered to submit plans for the new Reserve Army’s deployment immediately.48
Lobanov was not exaggerating when he responded to Alexander on 1 March that he feared that his physical powers could not sustain such burdens. The following month must surely have been among the most stressful in his life. Within a week he had submitted to Alexander a plan for the organization and quartering of the new Reserve Army. Immediately on receiving Alexander’s orders on 1 March to dispatch the reinforcements at once, Lobanov responded that ‘Your Majesty may do with me what you want and I place my head on the block’, but it was totally impossible to execute this command. He did, however, promise to do everything possible to speed the troops’ departure and proved as good as his word. By the middle of March he had dispatched 37,484 reinforcements to the Field Army.49
It was not just Lobanov, however, who suffered because of the Field Army’s urgent need for reinforcements. Of the 37,000 men, 2,350 had died by the time the reinforcements reached Warsaw and a further 9,593 were left behind along the way because of illness or exhaustion. Reinforcements sent from Petersburg and Iaroslavl suffered similar losses. Lobanov subsequently put down most of these casualties to exhaustion: many of these men – almost all of them new recruits – had marched 3,000 kilometres or more in the past few months, through snow and mud, and latterly across a ravaged war zone where typhus raged. In time, most of the 9,000 men left behind would recover and