seems almost to have believed that the resources could be conjured out of
thin air.
Meanwhile the flower of the Grande Armee was earmarked for the
coming campaign. The elite French battalions were all in I, II and III
Corps, commanded respectively by Davout, Oudinot and Ney; together
with the Guard and Murat's cavalry this made up the 25o,ooo-strong
First Army Group. Second and Third Army Groups (rso,ooo and
r6s,ooo strong respectively) were to guard frontiers and lines of
communication and provide reinforcements. IV Corps under Eugene de
Beauharnais was basically the Army of Italy with a stiffening of French
and Spanish regiments; the faithful Poniatowski led his Poles in V Corps
while Reynier led the Saxons in VII Corps. Command of VI Corps went
to Gouvion St-Cyr who, after near-disgrace in Spain, made a remarkable
comeback in r8r2 and ended with a marshal's baton; Victor, commanding
mixed battalions of French, Germans and Poles in IX Corps, was another
reprieved after less than satisfactory service in Spain. Yet another mixed
corps (French, Italians and Germans) served under Augereau in XI
Corps, while the Westphalians and Hessians in VIII Corps had
Vandamme as their taskmaster. This by no means exhausted the units
detailed for service in Russia, for there were also four cavalry corps, two
of them led by Murat and a second Support Army under Jerome. Finally,
Napoleon himself would command the so,ooo 'immortals' of the Old and
Young Guards. The Corps were of widely differing manpower:
Oudinot's had 37,000 men but Davout's was nearly twice as large with
72,000.
While these massive military preparations went on, a complicated game
of diplomatic manoeuvring continued, in which Alexander won every
round on points. On 26 February r8r2 Napoleon sent the Czar's special
envoy Tchentchev back to Russia with a threatening message for
Alexander, but a police raid on Tchentchev's apartments threw up the
alarming intelligence that the Russians had all along had a well-placed
mole at the heart of Bonapartist decision-making, who had revealed all
the most important intelligence about French military strength and troop
movements. This development seriously harmed the valiant attempts of
Caulaincourt to cobble together a compromise peace; caught between the
giant egos of Napoleon and Alexander, he was the true unsung hero of
r8r2.
In any case, the Czar was intransigent in his reply on 27 April. His
terms for Russia's return to the Continental System were impossibly
steep : French evacuation of Prussia, compensation for the loss of the
Duchy of Oldenburg and the creation of a neutral buffer zone between
marcin
(Marcin)
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