Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (12 page)

From his first combat experience as a rearguard before the Battle of Eylau, Davydov had been impressed by the need to keep moving and stay on the attack. He soon proved to be a high-energy guerrilla leader, raiding French supply convoys and freeing prisoners taken by the French at Borodino—many of whom joined him, making a mockery of the manpower limit Kutuzov had set. When his depredations caused growing concern among the French, the emperor sent a flying column of some two thousand troops to chase down Davydov. But friendly villagers and scouts kept him apprised of French movements, and soon the hunters became the hunted.

Meanwhile, Napoleon and the roughly one hundred thousand troops he had brought to Moscow remained there for a fateful month, in the hope that the tsar would capitulate after the impact of Borodino. But Bonaparte had completely misjudged Alexander, who took this time to begin drawing together fresh forces with which he sought to form a giant pincers to close on the
GRANDE ARMÉE
. All this time, Russian irregulars were giving the French fits. As Caulaincourt observed, the raiders “were harrying our foragers daily and seizing prisoners almost at the very gates of the city.”
12
Given that Moscow had been evacuated, stripped of supplies, and largely burned, foraging had become a critically important function. But the raiders made this nearly impossible. Napoleon knew he would have to retreat well before the weather turned.

By the time the French withdrawal began on October 19, Davydov’s irregular campaign plan had been fully embraced by the Russian command. Not only had his raiding force grown in size and spread further its area of operations, others had sprung up as well. More and more Cossacks came from the south, and villagers throughout the French-controlled area of Russia were covertly killing their occupiers. For the most part, these other insurgent activities grew even without the charismatic leadership of a Davydov in command.

An important exception was in the area of operation of Alexander Figner, another natural guerrilla fighter. Like Davydov, he was an intellectual, his particular skill being a gift for foreign languages and accents. But Figner had a far darker side than Davydov: he reveled in killing the French even after they had surrendered. On one occasion Figner tried to murder Frenchmen captured by Davydov who recalled in his memoirs that “as soon as he [Figner] learned about my prisoners, he came running to beg permission to have them shot.”
13
Davydov would have none of this and tried to prevent such atrocities whenever and wherever possible. But he could not be everywhere, and the brutality of the raiders and other insurgents in Russia rivaled, perhaps surpassed, what was happening at the time in Spain.

As Napoleon’s forces left Moscow—still an army of somewhat more than a hundred thousand effectives at this point—they had a retreat of many hundreds of miles before them, and they were to be harried every step of the way by raiders and partisans. At the same time sizable Russian forces were moving to block the French withdrawal by seizing fortified points that Napoleon had left in the care of lighter formations.
14
Kutuzov would just miss trapping the emperor. No further great battles were fought, though sharp skirmishes occurred from time to time with the vanguards of the main Russian forces.

In the main, perhaps due to Kutuzov’s caution, it was left to the irregulars to strike a multitude of small yet cumulatively terrible blows. In the three weeks it took to cover the roughly 270 miles from Moscow back to Smolensk, Napoleon lost more than two-thirds of his remaining troops. Not all of these tens of thousands of casualties were caused by Davydov and the other raiders, but most were. The weather remained mild until November 6, when the first snow fell, thus exposure to the cold cannot be considered the principal cause of this heavy rate of attrition.

But after Smolensk the weather turned severely cold, further weakening the roughly thirty thousand French troops who were still capable of fighting. They were hurried along by Napoleon’s fear of being caught in the Russian pincers, and hounded every step of the way by Davydov and a swarm of other irregulars. Philippe-Paul de Ségur, another senior French officer who wrote a memoir of the campaign, summed up his frustration with the Russian raiders—and not just the agonizing final stretch—by describing a typical encounter:

We saw them calmly reloading their muskets as they left the field, walking their horses between our squadrons. They relied on the slowness of our picked troops as much as on the swiftness of their own mounts. . . . Their flight was accomplished without disorder. They turned around several times and faced us. . . All this made us think. Our army was fought out, and here was war being born again—fresh and undiminished.
¹⁵

Thus the French had to absorb an unending series of stinging blows, at best beating off the partisans only briefly. All the while they had to race on through the cold, trying to outrun the pursuing Russian field forces that hoped to cut them off at the Berezina River crossing. Only some five thousand French soldiers who made it that far were still in organized units. Stragglers added several thousand more. But this was all that remained out of more than half a million French and allied soldiers that had begun the war six months earlier.

*

For Davydov, the great victory was to have a bittersweet aftertaste. When he finally came to field headquarters just before the end of the campaign, he found that his call to allow raiding forces to strike ahead, deep into Poland—cutting off the last of the
GRANDE ARMÉE
and perhaps even capturing Napoleon—had fallen on deaf ears. He was even chided by staffers who claimed he had been avoiding risk by fighting so far away from the main actions. In his memoirs, Davydov noted that “the duties of a partisan were poorly understood in our army.”
16
He who had actually seen Napoleon during the retreat—too well protected by the Old Guard to be taken that raid—was now tethered to the slow-moving regular Russian army.

Still, the raiders had done their work, mortally wounding a French military machine that had been the scourge of Europe for two decades. The military historian David Chandler has concluded: “The contribution of Russian soldiery was only of secondary importance; the raids of Cossacks and partisan bands did more harm to the Emperor than all the endeavors of the regular field armies of Holy Russia.”
17

Moving now in tandem with the regulars, Davydov could nonetheless interpret his orders in ways that allowed him to advance well ahead of them, scouting the way, seizing important posts, and continuing to inflict sharp blows on the enemy. In the weeks and months after the French were driven out of Russia in December 1812, the tsar was convinced that he should give Napoleon no time to rebuild his forces. The pursuit was to continue.

So Davydov drove ever forward, always on the heels of the French, engaging in one sharp cavalry fight after another. But fresh enemy formations were coming from the west to stiffen the resistance, particularly at the Elbe River. Here the brutal Figner would die trying to cross, last seen on his horse splashing in the river, surrounded by Polish lancers still fighting for Napoleon and the waning life of the “Duchy of Warsaw” he had created. Davydov would have his own problems at the Elbe, though his greatest moment of danger would actually come at the hands of his own superiors.

Showing his usual energy, Davydov had advanced up to the outskirts of the new section of the city of Dresden, on the right bank of the Elbe. He was vastly outnumbered by French troops under the command of a General Durutte, but by various deceptions—like building far more campfires than he had troops—he made his opponent believe that major formations of Russian troops were nearby. Davydov now took boldness a step further, trying to bluff Durutte out of Dresden by offering him a cease fire while the French evacuated the new section of town, crossing from the right bank of the Elbe to Old Dresden. The ruse worked. The French withdrew and blew the city’s bridges. And when Davydov began to assemble boats to give the appearance of an impending amphibious assault, Durutte began evacuating the old city, heading off to Leipzig.

The Dresden city fathers wanted to canonize Davydov. Instead his superiors court-martialed him for the “crime of state” of having “entered into negotiations with the enemy” and for allowing the opposing army to escape.
18
Davydov was relieved of his command, but the testimonials of the Dresden city fathers—grateful for having been spared the horrors of fighting in the streets—provided reason enough for the charges to be quietly dropped. Yet, Davydov was not given back his command, and the general who sacked him claimed credit for the liberation of Dresden, a credit that would last only until Napoleon returned, briefly, to win one of his last battles there in the summer of 1813.

Before Bonaparte’s counteroffensive, Davydov was seconded to the Prussians, with whose cavalry he rode. He fought with distinction over the following year, later with Austrian troops, then finally back among his fellow Russians, right up to Napoleon’s abdication in 1814. By this time he had been promoted to major general, finishing his campaign by returning a teenaged French drummer boy—one Vincent Bode, whom he had captured on a raid back in Russia, and kept with him ever since—to his father in Paris. Davydov had promised that he would see the boy home. And so he did.

After Davydov came home to Russia, he settled for a while in Moscow to write poetry. Returning to work, now as a general officer, he was saddled with staff supervision, something he found distasteful. But at last he had time to develop a deep love for a young woman whom he married in 1819. His happy family life and writing soon seemed to overshadow all else, and in 1823 Davydov resigned from the Russian army.

Yet there may have been more behind his retirement than the lure of family and poetry. Davydov had grown sympathetic to some of the radical reformers who sought an end to the oppression of the Russian serfs, whose hard lives many had seen up close during the war. It is certain as well that Davydov was unhappy with Alexander’s growing authoritarianism and support for reactionary regimes. In December 1822 the tsar had attended the Congress of Verona and offered to send Russian troops to Spain to suppress social reformers there, Mina among them.
19

While Alexander’s offer to intervene in Spain was rebuffed, the tsar continued his reactionary ways until his death in December 1825, when confusion over succession led to a near revolution in Russia. The Decembrists, a group of reform-minded officers, supported the accession of the tsar’s brother Constantine, who it was thought would support a reform constitution. But Alexander had wanted his much younger brother, Nicholas, a very strong conservative, to succeed him. As the crisis mounted, the Decembrists’ ranks thinned and, in the final confrontation in the streets of St. Petersburg, most of their more dedicated followers were killed by grapeshot fired from loyalist cannons. Many of the survivors were exiled. Davydov, who was on friendly terms with a number of the conspirators, was investigated but never charged with wrongdoing. As for Nicholas, he would serve as a bulwark against change for the next thirty years.

In a show of loyalty to the new tsar, Davydov returned to active service, campaigning in the Caucasus in response to a Persian incursion into Georgia. This region would see the rise of Shamil, the great insurgent leader of the resistance to Russian rule and one of the forerunners of a rising tide of Muslim fighters that would reach its peak in the campaigns of Abd el-Kader. For Davydov, now in his mid-forties, life in the field was growing harder, and he soon took ill and was invalided home. The campaign in the Caucasus went on, and Shamil was ultimately defeated. Yet the echoes of his stand resonate in Tolstoy’s classic novella
THE RAID
and can still be detected in the Chechen insurgency that bedevils Russia today.

Ever the soldier, Davydov saddled up one more time, in 1831, to put down yet another Polish insurrection. The Poles had seen their country wiped off the map of Europe at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and were determined to continue fighting for their freedom. Davydov was placed in command of the cavalry vanguard of the Russian army that was marching to put down the rebellion. As usual, he roamed far ahead of the mass of Russian troops—so far that he encountered the main Polish force that greatly outnumbered his troops. Instead of retreating and reporting, Davydov engaged the entire Polish army for half a day, allowing the rest of the Russian forces to envelop the Poles from the flanks. A signal victory was won and, for his heroic stand, Davydov was promoted to lieutenant general.

Soon after, he returned to his family in Moscow and then went on to settle at his wife’s family’s estate at Verkhnyaya Maza in central Russia. Now the country gentleman, Davydov spent his last years writing bawdy poems, insightful memoirs and reflections on irregular warfare before dying in 1839 of a sudden illness. In his “Essay on Partisan Warfare” he crystallized a concept of military operations that prefigured the course and conduct of many of the insurgencies that were to arise over the following two centuries. More than this, Davydov caught a glimpse of future wars—including those of our time and those yet to come—that would be dominated by small, swift groups of irregulars. He saw the power of such partisan-like formations:

By making continuous attacks and turning up at different points, they distract both the enemy’s attention and part of his forces and force him to follow one single route and to grope his way forward, with no hope of wiping out the indestructible swarm of light troops or even of catching up with it, cutting it off, or driving it up against some obstacle that would make it possible to surround it. He [the enemy] therefore has no choice but to retreat, preceded and surrounded by partisans.