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By Root 3518 0

of exoticism and Orientalism. Blaming defeat on the Cossacks or the weather was also useful. Since the French army had no Cossacks and the weather was an ‘unfair’ act of God, no French officer need fear that by invoking these sources of disaster he was questioning his own superior virility or professional skill. The way in which the English-language literature often uncritically repeats French accounts is likely to drive to distraction anyone who has studied the Russian sources or even just walked over the battlefields in question.

The German-language sources are much more mixed. In 1812–14 Germans fought both with and against Russia. Germans who fought with Russia in 1812 were either ethnic German subjects of the tsar or officers who had left their own armies in order to fight against Napoleon. There are actually a number of German-language memoirs which tell one a great deal about the Russian army and the Russian war effort in 1812. For example, of all the Russian generals’ memoirs, probably the best are those of Prince Eugen of Württemberg, which are written in German.5 Even so, they are very little used by English-language authors. The same is true of a number of other valuable memoirs written in German, for the most part by men who were Alexander’s subjects.6 By far the most frequently cited source is Clausewitz, both because of his fame and because his history of the 1812 campaign is translated into English.7

Clausewitz’s history is extremely interesting and useful but one does nevertheless need to remember the context in which it was written. Under Frederick the Great the Prussian army had been considered the best in Europe. Foreign officers studied it as a model. But in 1806 it was not just defeated but humiliated, with rearguards and garrisons sometimes disintegrating and surrendering in the face of much smaller enemy forces. When Frederick William III sided with Napoleon in 1812 the humiliation increased, especially among those hyper-patriotic officers who like Clausewitz resigned their commissions and entered the Russian service. The xenophobic and faction-ridden Russian army of 1812 was a deeply frustrating place to be for a foreign officer such as Clausewitz who spoke no Russian and had inevitable difficulties in understanding the army and society he had joined. When reading Clausewitz I sometimes think of parallels with an intelligent staff officer in the Free French forces in London in 1940–44. Such an officer might have written a fascinating corrective to standard accounts of the British war effort but it would be surprising if we were to understand the conflict through his eyes alone.8

Studies of the 1812 campaign in English mostly concentrate on Napoleon’s mistakes, on the problems created for the French by Russia’s geography and climate, and on the horror but also the heroism in evidence in Napoleon’s army during the retreat from Moscow. The year 1813 traditionally belongs to German authors celebrating the resurgence of Prussia and the triumph of German patriotism. Some of the Prussian general staff historians, and above all Rudolph von Friederich, are excellent.9 But of course most of the memoirs and many of the histories put forward a Prussian view of events, which subsequently influenced British and American authors. So too do the views of the Austrian official history, not written until just before 1914, some volumes of which have a distinctly anti-Russian tinge.10 If anything, the Russian angle on events gets even less attention or sympathy when it comes to the 1814 campaign. Military historians enthuse about Napoleon’s reinvigorated genius after his disappointing performance in 1813. Historians of diplomacy and international relations on the other hand focus on Metternich and Castlereagh as the creators of a stable and orderly European system. Sometimes this literature has a Cold War feel to it, celebrating the alliance of British and German statesmanship to secure Europe against a threat of Russian hegemony.11

Of course national bias in the writing of history exists in all countries and especially