calculated that he could achieve this end by crossing the river Niemen on
a narrow front, with flanks protected by MacDonald's corps at Riga and
Schwarzenberg's Austrian corps at Minsk; this would also allow him to
cut off Bagration if the Russians took the offensive.
These were minimum aims, but there were also 'best-case scenario'
maximum aims in the Emperor's mind. He planned to engage Barclay's
army by pushing forward with the left flank while falling back with the
right. Barclay would presumably then fall back and move south to avoid
encirclement, but would be unable to link with Bagration, as he would be
pinned by Jerome and Schwarzenberg. Bagration would be forced to
advance to attack Bonaparte's right, at which point the more powerful
French left and centre would circle round and cut communications with
Moscow. Both Russian armies would then be herded into a pocket
around Grodno and 'eaten up', bringing the war to an end in twelve days.
It was a good plan but it depended on exact timing, close com
munication and secure lines. Most of all it envisaged blitzkrieg warfare.
But Napoleon's previous victories had all been won with smallish armies
operating over smallish spaces; he had never tried to coordinate vast
armies over distances of hundreds of miles. Had he campaigned
sustainedly in Spain he would have saved himself from this error. It
was clear that too many things could go wrong - messages failing to
get through, commanders failing to obey orders to the letter - and
that execution could never match conception. The plan also assumed
that the Russians would give battle as soon as the French crossed the
frontier, whereas the Czar had already decided to make his stand 200
miles inland along the line traced by the rivers Dnieper, Dvina and
Beresina.
In retrospect one can see that the Russian campaign was fatally flawed
from the outset, and that Napoleon had not thought through most of the
problems confronting him. His most straightforward blunders were
political. He would not have had to face two armies in the first place if he
had not allowed Alexander to outmanoeuvre him in Sweden and Turkey
simultaneously. To turn the campaign into a crusade for liberty he should
have given Poland its independence and freed the Russian serfs. The
reluctance to turn the Duchy of Warsaw into an independent Poland is all
the more surprising now that he no longer had to worry about giving
offence to the Czar. As for his stated reasons for not freeing the Russian
serfs, these seem almost fatuous. To state that manumission would have
turned conservative Europe and the Right against him ignores the
obvious fact that they already were against him, albeit mainly covertly. As
for the argument that the ferocious and mindless mujiks would have
marcin
(Marcin)
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