Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [86]
5
The Retreat
In March 1812 Mikhail Barclay de Tolly was appointed to command First Army, whose headquarters were in Vilna, much the biggest city in Lithuania. Though he retained the title of minister of war, Barclay handed over the day-to-day running of the ministry to Prince Aleksei Gorchakov, who remained in Petersburg when Barclay and many of the other most able officers departed the capital for army headquarters.
First Army was roughly 136,000 strong. This made it bigger than Prince Bagration’s Second Army (around 57,000 men) and General Tormasov’s Third Army (around 48,000) combined.1 Together these three armies guarded Russia’s western borders against invasion by Napoleon. Barclay was in no sense the supreme commander of all three forces. In fact he was junior to both Bagration and Tormasov, which mattered greatly in the acutely rank-conscious elite of imperial Russia. The only supreme commander was Alexander himself, who arrived in Vilna in April.
The bulk of First Army was made up of the five infantry corps which by June 1812 were arrayed along the frontier of East Prussia and the northern border of the Duchy of Warsaw. Each of these corps contained two infantry divisions, which in turn were made up of three brigades. Two of these brigades were formed from regiments of the line, one from jaegers. As we have seen, a Russian infantry regiment went on campaign with its first and third battalions, which fought side-by-side. An infantry brigade usually therefore contained two regiments of four battalions. At full strength at the beginning of a war it should in principle be almost 3,000 strong. A Russian infantry division should therefore have 6,000 infantry of the line and 3,000 light infantry, though in reality sickness and the many men absent in detachments meant that no formation ever actually reached these numbers. A Russian division also usually contained three twelve-gun artillery batteries. Two of these batteries were designated as ‘light’ and most of their guns were six-pounders. The other was a heavy battery, with twelve-pounder cannon. Both heavy and light batteries included a section of howitzers, designed to shoot at high angles.
A small number of Cossack and regular light cavalry regiments were attached to infantry corps. Most of the light cavalry, however, was formed into separate mounted formations. Confusingly, these were called ‘Reserve Cavalry Corps’ though in fact they were neither reserves nor corps. The three so-called ‘Reserve Cavalry Corps’ of First Army were each roughly 3,000 strong, and contained anything from four to six regiments of dragoons, hussars and lancers, and one battery of horse artillery. Fedor Uvarov commanded the first of these cavalry corps. The Second Cavalry Corps was commanded by Baron Friedrich von Korff and the Third by Major-General Count Peter von der Pahlen, the son and namesake of the man who had led the conspiracy which overthrew and murdered Alexander I’s father in 1801. His ancestry does not seem to have damaged greatly the career of the younger Pahlen, who was to prove himself an exceptionally able cavalry commander in 1812–14.
First Army’s actual reserves stood behind the front line in the vicinity of Vilna. They were the Grand Duke Constantine’s Fifth Corps, made up of nineteen battalions of Guards infantry and seven battalions of Grenadiers. To them were attached the four heavy cavalry regiments of First Cuirassier Division, which included the Chevaliers Gardes and the Horse Guards. The Grand Duke Constantine