Meanwhile, of the eighty-seven fourth battalions from the Recruit Depots twelve joined the Riga garrison and six fought under Wittgenstein but the rest were incorporated into the retreating First and Second armies on the march. General Mikhail Miloradovich joined Kutuzov’s forces on the eve of the battle of Borodino with most of the last remaining group of battalions, some 13,500 men. The fourth battalions were all broken up and their men distributed to refill the ranks of Kutuzov’s regiments. This made good sense. The recruits in the fourth battalions had never seen their parent regiments and had little sense of regimental identity. In addition, battalions packed with men who had never seen action could not be relied on in battle. But these men all had basic military training and would be a safe and valuable addition when distributed among Kutuzov’s veteran units. In addition, this policy allowed the fourth battalions’ officers and NCOs to be detached to instruct the horde of new conscripts mobilized by the wartime levies.42
In principle Russia’s third line of defence was the entire able-bodied manpower of the empire. During the war more than a million men were to be mobilized into the armed forces, over and above the hundreds of thousands of soldiers already in the ranks when the war began. Very few of this million saw active service in 1812, however, and it might seem strange that with such resources at his disposal Alexander allowed himself to delay mobilizing his potential manpower and thereby to be seriously outnumbered by Napoleon at the war’s outbreak.
A number of plausible explanations exist. The full dimensions of Napoleon’s invasion force only became apparent early in 1812. Alexander was also intent on not provoking Napoleon by ostentatiously increasing the size of the Russian army. Probably even more to the point were issues of cadres and finance. There was no sense in mobilizing hordes of recruits to fill their stomachs at the government’s expense unless there were officers and NCOs to train and lead them. The government did all it could to create effective military cadres in 1807–12. Regiments were instructed to train junior NCOs. Three so-called Grenadier Training battalions were established to train likely looking young soldiers to become sergeant-majors and quartermaster-sergeants. A range of inducements were offered to potential officers. For instance, the widows of officers killed in action would receive their full salaries as pensions. Above all the ministry of war created the so-called Noble Regiment, which offered free, compressed officer-training courses and was attached to the Second Cadet Corps. Between 1807 and the end of 1812 more than 3,000 young men had passed through this regiment and received commissions, the great majority of them entering the line infantry. Nevertheless both before and during the war finding reliable officer and NCO cadres was always a bigger problem than netting recruits.43
Alexander’s actions and words around the time of Napoleon’s invasion provide some clues to his thinking. He told a Finnish official in August 1812 that the only way to unite Russian society behind the immense sacrifices needed to defeat Napoleon was for the latter to be seen as the aggressor and to invade Russian territory. Fighting on Russian soil, the emperor clearly felt he could appeal for ‘voluntary’ contributions towards the military build-up in a way that would not have been possible had he begun the war himself or fought it abroad, like all the other wars of the previous century. He had already begun to appeal for these contributions on the eve of Napoleon’s invasion. There was therefore a political and financial logic for a bankrupt government to delay full-scale mobilization until war was in sight and it could tap society for contributions. It continued to follow this policy throughout 1812.44
Planning for war began early in 1810. In March of that year Barclay de Tolly submitted a memorandum to Alexander entitled ‘The Defence of Russia’s Western Frontiers’. The document is crucial both for what it did and did not say. Most of its ideas underlay all subsequent planning by Barclay and Alexander, who in the end were the only two people who truly mattered when it came to deciding how to fight the war.
