Lieutenant-General Dmitrii Dokhturov’s Sixth Corps was much larger than Dorokhov’s detachment and therefore less likely to be overwhelmed. Nevertheless Dokhturov did well by not just avoiding Napoleon’s clutches but also cutting across the advancing French army and rejoining First Army before Drissa. Among Dokhturov’s officers was young Nikolai Mitarevsky, an artillery lieutenant in the Twelfth Light Battery. He recalled that on the eve of the war it had never occurred to any of the officers that they would retreat. All expected to advance in time-honoured style to meet the invader and when this did not happen rumours quickly spread about the unstoppable strength of Napoleon’s army.
Mitarevsky’s battery had long been posted far in the Russian interior and it took officers and men some time to learn how to survive on campaign. Initially they went hungry when their transport carts temporarily vanished but they quickly learned to carry enough food to last men and horses festooned on their guns and caissons. Though the horses had to eat grass for part of the two-week retreat this was a small hardship since they began the campaign in fine condition and the battery was equipped with sickles to cut the long grass. Most of the population had fled into the forests but Sixth Corps had little difficulty in either finding sufficient food to requisition or ensuring that nothing was left for the French.
Though rumours abounded that the enemy was nearby, the closest Mitarevsky’s battery came to action was when a large herd of cattle in a forest was mistaken for French cavalry. The worst actual enemy assault on the column came when the Poles captured two straggling regimental priests, tied their beards together, fed them an emetic, and returned them to Dokhturov’s furious soldiers, for whom Orthodoxy and suspicion of Poles were much of what it meant to be a Russian. Sixth Corps eluded the French partly by dint of hard marching. In addition, however, it was expertly shielded and shepherded by Peter von der Pahlen’s cavalry.17
In a retreat of this sort a strong cavalry arm was essential. Barclay was weakened by the fact that Napoleon’s advance had cut off General Matvei Platov’s independent Cossack detachment from First Army and forced it to move southwards to join up with Bagration. Platov’s force was made up of nine Cossack regiments, all but two of them from the Don region. It also included four ‘native’ regiments of irregular cavalry, of which two were Crimean Tatar, one was Kalmyk and one was Bashkir.
No one needed to fear for the safety of Platov’s regiments. Napoleon’s whole army could have chased these Cossacks all year without the least chance of catching them. But the temporary loss of almost all its irregular cavalry put Barclay’s regular cavalry regiments under some strain. Fedor Uvarov reported that in the absence of the Cossacks he had been forced to use regular line and even Guards cavalry regiments for outpost duty. Not merely did this exhaust their horses, it also involved them in work for which they had often not been fully trained. One result of this was that Uvarov could not harass the enemy or pick up anything like the normal number of prisoners, who were important as a source of intelligence about the enemy’s size and movements.18
Even without the Cossacks, however, the Russian cavalry usually came out on top in its skirmishes with the French. The French cavalry had very little success in impeding or embarrassing Barclay’s men in their planned retreat to Drissa. In other ways, too, the Russian high command had reason to be satisfied. Napoleon had yearned for a decisive battle in the first days of the war. His overriding strategic purpose was not the conquest of territory but the destruction of the Russian army. Correctly, he believed that if he could annihilate the armies of Barclay and Bagration in a second Austerlitz then Alexander would have little option but to make peace on French terms. The Russians had encouraged his hopes of an early decisive battle by ‘turning’ a key French agent in Lithuania and passing disinformation through him that they intended to fight for Vilna. Caulaincourt recalls that ‘Napoleon was amazed that they had yielded Vilna without a struggle, and had taken their decision in time to escape him. It was truly heartbreaking for him to have to give up all hope of a great battle before Vilna.’19
