Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (11 page)

But the ripples from Spain did not reach their end in Prussia. They continued eastward, where they freshened Russian strategic thought. The Russians soon formulated a synthesis of the Spanish notion of the armed masses and the Prussian preference for keeping irregular formations under the thumb of the regular forces. The Russian solution was to create a number of small, mobile military units capable of mounting deep strikes against invading armies while at the same time linking up with and directing the actions of local cells of popular resistance. Thus they came to enjoy both a “deep strike” military capability and a controlled form of people’s war.

This answer to the problem posed by Napoleon and his incomparable
GRANDE
ARMÉE
was not arrived at ahead of time in military seminars or planning sessions. No, before the invasion of 1812 Russian strategic thought remained mired in conventional approaches to dealing with Bonaparte. After all, it was argued at the time, Russian forces had acquitted themselves bravely, if not outright victoriously, in their fight against the French in 1807 at Eylau. Its sequel, the Battle of Friedland, was a defeat, but one in which the Russian army nevertheless fought hard and avoided destruction. In the immediate aftermath of this losing struggle, the 1807 Franco-Russian Treaty of Tilsit was negotiated—in part on a raft in the middle of the Niemen River where Emperor Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I met.

The peace agreement, a treaty arrived at between near equals, seemed to confirm Russia’s unimpaired strength. While Prussia was for the most part territorially dismantled and occupied by the French, Russia maintained a great freedom of action. In fact Napoleon urged Alexander to invade Finland in return for the tsar’s promise to support the imperial economic blockade against Britain. As the French historian Georges Lefebvre observed, one view was that Alexander had “extricated himself from a nasty situation without loss.”
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He also retained his large, tough military along with the option to use it at the time and place of his choosing, treating Tilsit as but a truce.

But this big Russian army and its generals had not been shaken sufficiently to change their approach to battle, and they would go into the next fight with the French much as they had the last. The only difference this time was that the war would be fought on Russian soil. Napoleon had no intention of ceding the initiative to Alexander. As tensions rose sharply in the first years after Tilsit, the French emperor resolved to invade Russia.

In June 1812 he massed more than half a million French, Polish, and other allied troops for a march on Moscow.
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Russian field and reserve forces were divided and dispersed, somewhat smaller, and still saddled with their largely conventional battle doctrine. The only new wrinkle was the idea of retreating into the Russian hinterland, a delaying strategy to wear down the French and wait for the right moment to launch a counterstroke, whenever that might be. In the event, the Russians retreated some four hundred miles before making a brief stand at Smolensk under the command of Barclay de Tolly, a Livonian of Scottish descent who was a principal architect of the plan to trade space for time.

Popular Russian outrage over the loss of Smolensk led the tsar to sack Barclay; but the new commander, the sixty-seven-year-old Mikhail Kutuzov, soon retreated yet another two hundred miles without a fight. Some seventy miles west of Moscow, at Borodino, he finally made a stand early in September. Once again Russian soldiers acquitted themselves very bravely; but they retreated from the field after a tremendously bloody fight that saw each side suffer tens of thousands of casualties. And then Moscow itself was the French target.

At this point it seemed that the only Russian hope lay in the “scorched earth” policy that had been implemented during the French advance in the hope of denying sustenance to the
GRANDE ARMÉE
. Crops and homes were burned as people in the path of the invasion evacuated; even Moscow was abandoned and put to the torch. This tactic created many difficulties for the French but was not about to defeat them. Clausewitz, who had gone over to the Russians and was with the army in the field at and after Borodino, noted in his account of the campaign that “there prevailed at this time a condition of grief and despondency.”
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Clearly, the Russians would need something more.

It came in the form of a synthesis of insights from Spanish guerrillas and Prussian strategic thinkers, crafted by a brilliant cavalryman, Lieutenant Colonel Denis Davydov. In August, just a month before Borodino, Davydov had proposed the creation of a long-range raiding force of one thousand riders who would strike at French logistics and communications. They would also be employed to link up with the peasants, most of whom were eager to fight the French and their allies after the rape, pillage, and general brutality the invaders had visited upon them.

Davydov took this proposal to one of his immediate superiors, General Pëtr Bagration, whom he had come to know after serving as his aide-de-camp. For his part, Bagration respected Davydov as a fighter and for his many intellectual gifts. In addition to his skill in the saddle, Davydov wrote popular poetry that idealized the hussar’s life of courage in battle and the pursuit of excess in every other area. Leo Tolstoy in fact used Davydov as his model in later crafting dynamic characters like Denisov and Dolohov for
WAR AND PEACE
. Alexander Pushkin, who knew him well, wrote of Davydov in a beautiful poem as “my marvelous rider.”

In any event, Bagration was impressed and took the plan to Kutuzov. A veteran commander whose record had been besmirched by Russia’s humiliating defeat at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, Kutuzov was ill disposed toward the notion of setting loose a thousand horsemen at a time when he needed every musket and saber close at hand for the looming battle with Napoleon. But he was prevailed upon to give the plan at least a tentative try, and in a fateful moment a bureaucratic compromise was reached: Davydov would be given a force of fifty regular hussars and eighty Cossacks with which to conduct an irregular raiding and insurgent campaign against the French. He took them and immediately rode off to strike swiftly at the enemy—but also to be already gone in the event Kutuzov had a change of heart.

Within a few weeks of Davydov’s setting out, he learned of his mentor Bagration’s death in battle while commanding the Russian army’s center at Borodino. Davydov and his men, operating far inside French-occupied territory, were filled with sadness and rage. They determined to strike the enemy immediately in retaliation for the loss of their beloved leader. Soon a scout came with word of an approaching French infantry column of some four hundred soldiers. An ambush was laid, then sprung by Davydov’s smaller force. Some of the French were killed and the rest, about three hundred, sought to surrender. For a brief moment the lust for revenge competed with Davydov’s military code of conduct, then the Frenchmen were taken prisoner. As Davydov wrote in his memoirs, he was “convinced that the greatest tribute I could show to the memory of my heroic benefactor was to be merciful.”
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He held a memorial service for Bagration later that day.

Over the next ninety days the “hussar poet” mounted a whirlwind campaign with his irregular forces, which Tolstoy would label Davydov’s “terrible weapon.” It was a weapon destined to play a crucial role in the ultimate, utter destruction of the invading army. The impact of this relatively junior officer on such a major campaign impels us to ask, “Who was Davydov?”

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Born in 1784, Denis Davydov was a career military officer whose family background and apparently liberal leanings made his authority-loving superiors suspicious of him. His father, also a serving officer, had been compelled to resign his commission under a cloud of pending charges, the family suffering financially and in loss of reputation. Denis himself briefly left the service in 1804 but returned two years later and fought bravely in the campaigns leading to the climactic struggle for Russia. Just before Eylau, he first tested his light cavalry skills in rearguard actions against the French, almost losing his life in the process.
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But he learned a lesson about the need for a defensive rearguard sometimes to take the tactical offensive, moving from position to position and striking out, not just sitting in wait for the approaching enemy mass. After the Tilsit treaty—during the negotiations he saw Napoleon close up and exchanged a glare with the emperor—Davydov fought in Finland in 1808, learning from the Finns’ use of small, dispersed raiding forces and incubating ideas of his own.

Central and Eastern Europe in Napoleonic Times

In the time between Tilsit and the French invasion in June 1812, Davydov cut a dashing figure in Russian society when he wasn’t off in the field. As he described himself, he was, “a company commander in the Hussar Life Guard Regiment, with two crosses around my neck and two other decorations on my gold-braided red jacket. I was drowning in delights and, as is customary, was in love up to my ears.”
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The conservative Russian court remained concerned about his father’s sullied reputation and about the seriousness and political reliability of the hussar poet who, even in these days—fifteen years before the rising of the liberal Decembrists—seemed to view the ruling regime with an alarming insouciance. Whatever the concerns at court, in the darkest moments of the campaign after Borodino his energy, confidence, and intelligence proved most welcome.

Davydov’s basic mission was to cripple the
GRANDE ARMÉE
with deep raids far behind the lines against security outposts and supply lines. He was little concerned with the small numbers that had been allotted to him, as he knew that he could rely on the fighting spirit of the Cossacks, many of whom were already roaming about and attacking targets of opportunity wherever they could find them. The great French eyewitness chronicler of the campaign, Napoleon’s aide Armand de Caulaincourt, noted in his account that, from the very outset of the war until Smolensk, for the most part “we were faced only by Cossacks.”
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After Borodino, Clausewitz observed that their role increased hugely. The Cossacks, he recalled, “swarmed in every direction.”
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These amazing natural horse soldiers had been living in southern Russia and Ukraine for centuries, banditry and raiding being at the core of their way of life. The best-known portrayal of the Cossack style remains Nikolai Gogol’s
TARAS BULBA
, a novel in which Cossacks are seen, in many respects, as the heroic personification of Russia itself.
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It was no surprise that, though nominally under the command of their
HETMAN
, Matthew Ivanovitch Platov, Cossack riders soon swelled the ranks of Davydov’s force once he got moving.

In imitation of some of the “people’s war” aspects of the insurgency in Spain, Davydov also reached out to villagers living deep within the area of Russia controlled for now by the French. At first the villagers mistook him and the other hussars for Frenchmen or their allies because of their showy uniforms. So, in an act of “branding” of his own, Davydov and his men let their beards grow and put on peasant caftans. For Mina in Spain branding had been achieved by adopting his cousin’s name and cutting his men’s (and his own) hair. For Davydov, branding consisted of dressing down, looking scruffy, and speaking in peasant dialect.

Once he gained the confidence of the various villagers, Davydov proceeded to instruct them in resistance methods that he had conceived. The basic idea was to get the occupiers drunk, wait until they passed out, then kill them. Dayvdov went on to advise that the Frenchmen killed at the end of these bacchanals had to be hauled deep into the forest and buried, along with their uniforms. No clothes or trophies were to be taken, as these might be spotted by French soldiers investigating their comrades’ disappearance, and would bring retributive violence upon the village.
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It appears that, for all his other traits, Davydov was meticulous about his insurgent tradecraft. His thoughtful dissemination of these procedures led to the establishment of what might be called “resistance franchises.” The imprint of this innovation may still be seen today in the al Qaeda network’s effort to mobilize and train widely dispersed terrorist cells along common lines of instruction. This notion of armed franchises truly began with Davydov.