Quartermaster-General Prince Volkonsky was the head of his staff, which included generals, aides, diplomatic officials and a large number of foreign nationals, and they were not military personnel. The Tsar could also call on the various services of ex-war minister Arakcheyev; Count Bennigsen, his senior general; the Tsarevich, Konstantin Pavlovich; Count Rumyantsev, the chancellor; Stein, the former Prussian minister; Armfeldt, the Swedish general; Pfuel, his chief campaign planner; Adjutant-General Paulucci, a Sardinian émigré; Wolzogen; and many others. These people may have been without specific army duties, but rank carried influence, and it often happened that a corps commander or even a commander-in-chief couldn’t tell whether full authority lay behind some recommendation or inquiry from Bennigsen or the Tsarevich or Arakcheyev or Prince Volkonsky, or whether some command in the form of a recommendation came from the individual concerned or from the Tsar, and whether or not it had to be obeyed. But all this was on the surface; the actual significance of the presence of the Tsar and all these men was as clear as crystal to any courtier – and in the presence of a monarch all men become courtiers. It went as follows: although the Tsar refrained from calling himself commander-in-chief, he was actually in charge of all three armies, and the men around him were his assistants. Arakcheyev was a tried and trusted guardian of law and order, and the Tsar’s bodyguard. Bennigsen, as a local landholder, was there ostensibly just to honour the Tsar, though in fact he was a good general, a wise councillor and a useful stand-by replacement for Barclay. The Tsarevich was there because it seemed the right thing for him to do. The former Prussian minister, Stein, was there because his advice might be useful, and the Emperor Alexander valued his personal qualities. Armfeldt was a sworn enemy of Napoleon, and his self-confidence always rubbed off on Alexander. Paulucci was there because he was a powerful speaker who knew his own mind. The adjutant-generals were there because the Emperor was never without them. Last but by no means least, Pfuel was there because he had created the plan of action against Napoleon and persuaded Alexander of its validity, and he was now running the whole campaign. Pfuel was assisted by Wolzogen, a specialist in translating Pfuel’s ideas into a more accessible form than Pfuel himself ever could, he being an abrasive academic theorist, full of his own importance and contempt for everyone else.
Besides these Russians and foreigners – the foreigners were a special case, men acting in an alien sphere, who had the nerve to keep coming up with bright ideas every day of the week – there were many more secondary figures, who were with the army because their principals were there.
From all the ideas and opinions circulating in this vast, brilliant, proud and restless realm, Prince Andrey was able to make out the following clearly defined sub-divisions into factions and parties.
The first party consisted of Pfuel and his disciples, military theorists who believed there was such a thing as a science of warfare, a science with its own immutable laws – the law of oblique movement, the law of outflanking, etc. Pfuel and his disciples demanded that the army should retreat into the depths of the country in accordance with the precise laws laid down by the pseudo-science of warfare, any departure from which they saw as outright barbarity, ignorance or evil intent. To this party belonged the Germanic princes Wolzogen, Wintzengerode and others, most of them also Germans.
The second party was diametrically opposed to the first one. As always, where there was one extreme, the opposite extreme found its own representatives. Ever since Vilna men of this party had been demanding the invasion of Poland and the abandonment of all previous plans. Representatives of this party were also representatives of strong action, and beyond that representatives of nationalism, which made them more and more one-sided in this dispute. They were the Russians: Bagration, Yermolov, whose career was now in the ascendant, and others. Yermolov’s well-known joke was on everyone’s lips at the time – he claimed to have asked the Tsar for promotion to the rank of German. Men of this party harked back to Suvorov: all you had to do was stop thinking, stop sticking pins in maps, just go out and fight, thrash the enemy, keep him out of Russia and keep the men’s spirits up.
