Russia Against Napoleon полностью

Nevertheless one should not exaggerate the failings of Russia’s jaeger regiments. On the whole the jaegers performed well in the rearguard actions during the retreat to Moscow and at Borodino. The key point was that by 1812 the Russian army had over fifty jaeger regiments, which in principle meant well over 100,000 men. Differences in quality between regiments were inevitable. Fourteen line infantry regiments were redesignated as light infantry in October 1810 and one would expect them initially to be poor skirmishers since all sources agree that in the Russian army true jaeger units were much better at operating independently than the infantry of the line. On the other hand, those jaeger regiments which had fought in Finland, in the Caucasus or against the Ottomans in 1807–12 were likely to be best.²⁹

On active service there were plenty of targets and no constraints on the use of live ammunition. The historian of the 2nd Jaegers writes that the campaign in Finland’s forests was excellent training for light infantry in marksmanship, use of terrain and small-scale warfare. General Langeron recalls that the 12th and 22nd Jaegers were among the best marksmen in his corps, since they had years of experience fighting Circassian sharpshooters in the Caucasus. According to the historian of the 10th Jaegers the same was true of the Ottoman campaigns, during which the regiment was sometimes required to cover more than 130 kilometres in five days as it fought a ‘small war’ of skirmishes and ambushes in the foothills of the Balkans. Ottoman raiding parties often had better guns and were better marksmen than the Russian jaegers, at least until the latter learned from experience.³⁰

The difference in quality between Russian jaeger regiments in 1812 was often evident to their enemies. The first Russian skirmishers encountered by the Saxon army after invading Russia were the inexperienced troops of General Oertel’s corps. A Saxon officer recorded that ‘the Russian army was not yet that which it became in 1813…they did not understand how to skirmish in open order’. Some weeks later the Saxons got a great shock when they first encountered the veteran jaegers of the Army of the Danube, fresh from many campaigns in the Balkans. These men were ‘the excellent Russian jaegers of Sacken’s corps. They were as skilled in their movements as they were accurate in their shooting, and they did us great harm with their much superior firearms which were effective at twice our range.’³¹

How to train and use light infantry was one of the themes debated in the Military Journal (Voennyi zhurnal), published for the first time in 1810–12 under the editorship of the highly intelligent Colonel P. A. Rakhmanov. The Journal was designed to encourage officers to think about their profession. Some of its articles were translations from foreign ‘classics’. They introduced Russian officers to the ideas of key foreign thinkers such as Antoine de Jomini, Friedrich Wilhelm von Bülow and Henry Lloyd. Other pieces concerned military history or were anecdotes about recent Russian wars. Very many of the articles concerned the key issues of the day, however, and were written by serving officers, often anonymously. Of course the Journal could not openly debate aspects of a future war with France but it was easy to read between the lines of some of its articles on questions such as the role of fortifications and the relative advantages of offensive and defensive war. The Journal also debated issues such as the proper deployment of artillery on the battlefield, the role of general staffs, and what values and skills military education should seek to instil into the officer corps. The subscription list for the Journal was impressive. Some regimental commanders bought many copies of it for their officers. But there were also very many individual subscriptions, above all of course from what one might describe as the emerging military intelligentsia.³²