Above all Neverovsky was honest, direct, generous and hospitable. He was also very courageous. These were the legendary qualities of a Russian regiment’s commander. Neverovsky kept a close eye on his soldiers’ food and health. When he took over the regiment he found a high level of desertion in two of the companies. Like many other senior officers he believed that if Russian soldiers deserted it almost certainly meant that their officers were incompetent, cruel or corrupt. Both company commanders were quickly forced out of the regiment. Meanwhile he set up a regimental school to train NCOs and teach them to read and write. Above all, he put a heavy stress on training the men in marksmanship, personally overseeing the upkeep of muskets and participating in shooting practice alongside his men.25
If good shooting was important for infantry of the line such as the Pavlovskys, it was even more so for the light infantry (in Russia called jaegers), whose job it was to skirmish and to pick off enemy officers and artillerymen with accurate fire. Here, however, one needs to be a little cautious. The history of light infantry in the Napoleonic era has acquired a certain degree of mythology and ideological colouring. Given the nature of the weapons available at the time, it was still in most cases only close-order massed formations of infantry that could deliver the firepower and shock which brought victory on the Napoleonic battlefield. Nor was every
General George Cathcart had served with the Russian army and was well placed to make international comparisons. His comments on the Russian army’s jaegers are balanced and realistic. Cathcart believed that where light infantry were concerned,
individual intelligence is the main requisite; and the French are, without question, by nature the most intelligent light infantry in the world…The Russians, like the British, are better troops of position than any of the other nations; but it is difficult to excel in all things, and their steadiness in the ranks, which after all is the great object to be desired, as well as their previous domestic habits, render them naturally less apt for light infantry purposes than more volatile nations: yet in both services particular corps, duly practiced in this particular branch, have proved themselves capable of being made by training equal to any men that could be opposed to them.27
Russian jaeger regiments had existed since the Seven Years War. By 1786 there were almost 30,000 jaegers in the Russian army. Mikhail Kutuzov commanded jaeger regiments and actually wrote the general rules for jaeger service. The 1789 regulations for training jaegers stressed the need for marksmanship, mobility, craftiness and skilful use of terrain for concealment. The jaeger must, for example, learn how to reload lying on his back and to fire from behind obstacles and folds in the ground. He must trick his enemy by pretending to be dead or by putting out his shako as a target. The jaegers became associated with Grigorii Potemkin and Russia’s wars against the Ottomans. Potemkin introduced comfortable, practical uniforms to suit the climate and the nature of operations on the southern steppe and in the Balkans. The jaeger regulations told the men not to waste time polishing their muskets.
None of this endeared the jaegers to Paul I, who reduced the number of light infantry by two-thirds. Though one needs to be wary about Russian nationalist historiography’s attacks on German pedantry, in this case the Russian historians were right to believe that Paul’s obsession with complicated drill on the parade ground damaged the Russian army in general and its jaegers in particular. George Cathcart was undoubtedly also correct in believing that serfdom was not the perfect background for a light infantryman. Nor was the discipline to which the new recruit was subjected in order to turn the peasant into a soldier. After 1807 the need to expand and re-train the jaegers was widely recognized at the top of the army. Both Mikhail Barclay de Tolly and Petr Bagration, for example, had been commanders of jaeger regiments. Some senior officers found it hard to believe that Russian peasants could make good light infantry, however. This could easily serve as an excuse for their own failure to train the men intelligently. As Gneisenau noted in the spring of 1812, the training of Russia’s jaegers was often much too rigid, complicated and formalistic.28
