sometimes been said that Alexander's duplicity, intrigues and expansion
ism forced conflict on an unwilling French Emperor but, the Czar's
despicable nature notwithstanding, there is no warrant for this view in
sober history. The truth is that Napoleon welcomed the looming clash of
arms. From the beginning of I8II the Ordnance Department, and
especially Bader d'Albe's Topography Department, was busy providing
up-to-date maps of the terrain in western Russia. Danzig was made the
centre of a gigantic collection of war materiel sent there from eastern
France and the Rhineland. The Emperor showed the way his mind was
working when he ga¥e Kurakin, the Russian ambassador, the most
ferocious dressing down in an audience at the Tuileries on IS August
I8II which recalled the stormy scene with Lord Whitworth in I803. The
occasion was Alexander's suggestion that he be given part of the Duchy
of Warsaw. 'Don't you know that I have 8oo,ooo troops!' Napoleon
yelled. 'If you're counting on allies, where are they?'
There is a slight hint of protesting too much in this imperial show of
bravado. There is more than a little evidence that Napoleon felt he was
pushing open the door to a dark room never seen before. His spies told
him that Talleyrand openly predicted that France would fail in a war
with the Russians. Captain Leclerc, his statistical expert, warned him of
the dangers of campaigning in Russia and reminded him of the unhappy
fate of Charles XII of Sweden, annihilated at Poltava in I709 during an
invasion of Russia. Bonaparte's ambassador in Russia, Louis de
Caulaincourt, warned him several times in very strong language that he
would be making a very serious mistake if he fought the Russians on
Russian soil, and correctly conjectured that the Russians would employ
the Fabian tactics used by Wellington in Spain. Tired of Caulaincourt's
Cassandra-like prophecies, a tetchy Emperor finally recalled him in June
I8II.
The indomitable Caulaincourt, one of the few people who emerges
with unblemished credit from the saga of I8I2, tried his utmost to
preserve the Tilsit agreement, even when this meant falling foul of his
imperial master. During a tense five-hour 'debriefing' interview when
Caulaincourt returned from Russia in June I 8 I 2, the Emperor lost
patience with his envoy when he kept insisting that Alexander wanted
peace. All Caulaincourt's advice was shrewd but his master would not
listen. Caulaincourt predicted with uncanny accuracy, what the impact of
a Russian winter would be like and repeated the Czar's confident boast:
that in a war the Russians would lose in the short term but win in the
long, if only because Bonaparte could not afford to be absent from France
for the two years it would take to subdue the warriors of the steppes.
marcin
(Marcin)
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