In many areas of military history the gap left by the universities is filled by army staff colleges. There are some excellent books by military specialists – often but not always serving officers – on the Napoleonic era but almost none of this work covers Russia.3 One reason why military specialists have avoided Russia is that the military archives have only become accessible to foreign researchers since 1991. More important, however, has been the belief that the French and Prussian armies of the Napoleonic era are much more worth studying, because they appear more modern. In the case of Napoleon, one had the timeless lessons to be learned from military genius, but the French army was also seen as pioneering aspects of modern warfare such as the all-arms division and corps. In the Prussian case one had Clausewitz, generally seen as the greatest of all thinkers on modern war. In addition, Prussia was believed to have created two other key elements of military modernity in this era: the first modern general staff and a highly effective and motivated mass conscript army. By contrast, there seemed little point in struggling to learn Russian and scrounge for information outside the archives in order to study an army that was still unequivocally Old Regime. The result is that the Russian side of the story is ignored or misinterpreted, with historians largely seeing Russia through the prism of French- or German-language sources.
As regards the French sources,4 there are obvious dangers of interpreting any army or campaign largely through enemy eyes. Of course French officers usually wrote reports or memoirs to win promotion, boost their egos, achieve glory or justify their actions. No one who looks at the uniforms of the era can expect to find much modesty or self-effacement from the men who wore them. On the contrary, aggressive and boastful self-promotion often flourished in the armies of both Napoleon and his enemies. If the French were more boastful than most of the others, they had some reason to be, since their army was in most respects the best in Europe until 1812. When facing the Russians, their normal sense of superiority was sometimes heightened by an almost colonial scorn for the irrational barbarians of Europe’s borderlands. Napoleon himself set the tone by finding few words of praise for any Russian troops other than Cossacks. This to some extent perhaps reflected a French variation on the theme of exoticism and Orientalism. Blaming defeat on the Cossacks or the weather was also useful. Since the French army had no Cossacks and the weather was an ‘unfair’ act of God, no French officer need fear that by invoking these sources of disaster he was questioning his own superior virility or professional skill. The way in which the English-language literature often uncritically repeats French accounts is likely to drive to distraction anyone who has studied the Russian sources or even just walked over the battlefields in question.
The German-language sources are much more mixed. In 1812–14 Germans fought both with and against Russia. Germans who fought with Russia in 1812 were either ethnic German subjects of the tsar or officers who had left their own armies in order to fight against Napoleon. There are actually a number of German-language memoirs which tell one a great deal about the Russian army and the Russian war effort in 1812. For example, of all the Russian generals’ memoirs, probably the best are those of Prince Eugen of Württemberg, which are written in German.5 Even so, they are very little used by English-language authors. The same is true of a number of other valuable memoirs written in German, for the most part by men who were Alexander’s subjects.6 By far the most frequently cited source is Clausewitz, both because of his fame and because his history of the 1812 campaign is translated into English.7
