Clausewitz’s history is extremely interesting and useful but one does nevertheless need to remember the context in which it was written. Under Frederick the Great the Prussian army had been considered the best in Europe. Foreign officers studied it as a model. But in 1806 it was not just defeated but humiliated, with rearguards and garrisons sometimes disintegrating and surrendering in the face of much smaller enemy forces. When Frederick William III sided with Napoleon in 1812 the humiliation increased, especially among those hyper-patriotic officers who like Clausewitz resigned their commissions and entered the Russian service. The xenophobic and faction-ridden Russian army of 1812 was a deeply frustrating place to be for a foreign officer such as Clausewitz who spoke no Russian and had inevitable difficulties in understanding the army and society he had joined. When reading Clausewitz I sometimes think of parallels with an intelligent staff officer in the Free French forces in London in 1940–44. Such an officer might have written a fascinating corrective to standard accounts of the British war effort but it would be surprising if we were to understand the conflict through his eyes alone.8
Studies of the 1812 campaign in English mostly concentrate on Napoleon’s mistakes, on the problems created for the French by Russia’s geography and climate, and on the horror but also the heroism in evidence in Napoleon’s army during the retreat from Moscow. The year 1813 traditionally belongs to German authors celebrating the resurgence of Prussia and the triumph of German patriotism. Some of the Prussian general staff historians, and above all Rudolph von Friederich, are excellent.9 But of course most of the memoirs and many of the histories put forward a Prussian view of events, which subsequently influenced British and American authors. So too do the views of the Austrian official history, not written until just before 1914, some volumes of which have a distinctly anti-Russian tinge.10 If anything, the Russian angle on events gets even less attention or sympathy when it comes to the 1814 campaign. Military historians enthuse about Napoleon’s reinvigorated genius after his disappointing performance in 1813. Historians of diplomacy and international relations on the other hand focus on Metternich and Castlereagh as the creators of a stable and orderly European system. Sometimes this literature has a Cold War feel to it, celebrating the alliance of British and German statesmanship to secure Europe against a threat of Russian hegemony.11
Of course national bias in the writing of history exists in all countries and especially when it comes to writing about war. War is generally the best source of heroic nationalist myths.12 The Napoleonic Wars occurred at the dawn of modern European nationalism. It was exactly at this time that many of the ideas behind modern nationalism were first expressed. Shortly afterwards the Industrial Revolution would create cities, mass literacy and all the other aspects of modern society which helped nationalism to flourish. Traditionally, for example, the British grabbed Waterloo for themselves and it is only very recently that the decisive Prussian contribution to victory has been recognized in the English-language literature.13 In this context it is not at all surprising that the Prussians elbowed Russia aside when it came to interpretations of 1813 or that French historians of the period have gloried in the exploits of Napoleon and his army, without paying too much attention to what enemy accounts and foreign historians had to say.
One crucial area of Napoleonic warfare has attracted too little attention from historians of every nationality. This is logistics, in other words the equipment and feeding of the armies. Commissariat officers had little status in any of the rival armies and societies. Their efforts have won little attention from historians. This is unfortunate because their role was often crucial. Napoleon destroyed his army in 1812 in large part because of logistical failures. By contrast, one of the key triumphs of the Russian war effort was its success in feeding and supplying more than half a million troops outside Russia’s borders in 1813–14. How this was done in a European continent which in those days only had two cities with populations of more than 500,000 is a key part of the present book. The contrast with the Seven Years War (1756–63), when logistics helped to cripple the Russian military effort, is very much to the point.14
