I've been silent for awhile, and there's a good reason for that - 557 pages of enthralling account and impeccable scholarship demands that you take your time over things.
You can accuse Hitler of being many things, but a Historian ain’t one of them. If he had been, he’d have realised that invading a certain very big, very totalitarian and very cold country to his immediate north-east wasn’t that great an idea. Unfortunately for the Whermacht, old Adolf thought he knew better. If he had been a historian then he would have known that when Napoleon had tried it, he’d succeeded only in destroying the mightiest fighting force Europe had yet seen.
The contrast between the two, and the comparisons, make for an interesting background to a book like this; Hitler grabbed more land but the Corsican managed what he didn’t – capturing Moscow. However, although the proverbial door was open and the lights on, no one was home. Or rather, not the people that he had been banking on. The Napoleonic system of war was primarily to do with threatening or capturing the enemy's capital, then waiting for them to resign themselves to the inevitable, stack arms and surrender. Unfortunately in 1812, Moscow wasn't the Russian capital....
The Muscovites had fled but had put everything to the torch first, which for a force that pillaged what it needed was a disaster; the Grand Armee had nothing to eat and nowhere to shelter from the vicious winter whilst not eating it. So goes accepted wisdom. Zamoyski shows us that this was not the case - Moscow had plenty of food for a few months and not everything had burned; there was still shelter available. But his lines of communication were distressingly long and vulnerable. History teaches us that when two rulers, each with an ego the size of a continent, clash there can only be one result. Dead men. And when the egos in question command millions of people, tha’s an awful lot of dead men.
So why did Napoleon, the foremost military commander of his age, one of the greatest in history, launch the invasion of a country that had nothing to interest him? He wasn’t obsessed with the idea of Lebensraum, nor did he have a thing for slaughtering any Jews or Slavs that he could find; at this point Russia didn’t know it had oil reserves, didn’t have a very good economy, had no agriculture worth spitting at and was generally inferior to his European domain. So why did he do it?
To put it bluntly it was because the Russians were pissing him off. They refused to enforce his Continental System – the trade embargo against Britain – were fomenting insurrection in the German states and what had been Poland, delighting in the kicking that he was getting in Spain, were scrapping with the Turks (a potential French ally) and were being generally snotty towards all things French. And from a strategic position, to leave Russia unhindered whilst he pacified Spain in person would have been the equivalent of handing Tsar Alexander the keys to Paris and inviting him to stay for awhile. In the man’s own words:
One way or another I want to finish the thing….I don’t want to find myself in my old age in a position where people can kick me in the backside…I am determined to bring things to a finish one way or the other.
And yet, and yet, Zamoyski takes pains to explain that a few years before, France and Russia had been allies of the first degree. What, then, had changed? This book will give you every answer you have ever wanted. It’s a masterwork, nothing less.
One of the enduring mysteries of this campaign (at least in hindsight) is why, when Napoleon knew about the extreme conditions, knew about Russian resolve and knew that he still had an undefeated enemy in Spain and the Germanic states seething under his occupation, why did he wait until so late in the campaigning season to get everything under way?
Zamoyski goes into some detail on this point in an effort to nail down the reasons and distils everything to a few very obvious points, yet they’re so obvious that people seem to have missed them for decades;
1. To gather a polyglot army of half a million from states the length and breadth of Europe took time.
2. The roads in many cases were little more than dirt tracks rapidly churned into mud, not today’s motorways.
3. None of the oats and barley required to feed more than 40,000 cavalry would be ready to harvest until July at the very earliest.
4. Nothing moved faster than a galloping horse. Men had to march the whole way. This was exhausting.
5. The commissariat supply system, unheard of in French armies before this campaign, was still amassing supplies from Paris to Poland.
As mentioned before, the comparisons with 130-odd years later are overwhelming. Supply lines were too long. There wasn't an overall firm idea of what to do (never a good way to launch an invasion - Iraq, anyone?). Preparations weren't accomplished as exactingly as they may have been. Armies assembled from all the nations of Europe weren't enmeshed closely enough. Winter uniforms were not issued and both invaders envisioned a fast war with quick victories and relatively few casualties. And again, in defeating their aggressors, the Russians lost more men than the invaders did - and they were willing to do it.
Again, I cannot stress just how good this book is. If Adolf had had the same depth and quality of information, well, maybe he'd have thought twice about things.
But probably not.
9 out of 10
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