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When asked his opinion on what should be done, Caulaincourt came up with two alternatives. Napoleon should either give a significant part, if not the whole, of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw to Alexander, thereby cementing the alliance, or he should go to war with the aim of restoring the Kingdom of Poland. He pointed out that Austria could easily be compensated, and maintained that the cause of Poland was so universally recognised as a just one that even Britain would ultimately approve.
²⁴
Asked which course of action he would adopt given the choice, Caulaincourt replied that he would give the Grand Duchy to Alexander, thereby guaranteeing a stable peace. Napoleon countered that he could not have peace without honour, and the abandonment of the Poles would dishonour him. At the same time, such appeasement of Alexander would inevitably lead to further Russian expansion into the heart of Europe.

Alexander’s military ardour had in fact cooled by then. Memories of Austerlitz must have played their part, for, as Czartoryski noted, he was still ‘very afraid’ of Napoleon. His mind was troubled by the uncertainties of his position at home, his heart was bruised by the public rejection of his policies and, at a more personal level, by the successive deaths, in 1808 and 1810, of two baby daughters. But perhaps the main consideration holding him back was that he did not want to be seen as the aggressor. In July 1811 he wrote to his sister that the best course to follow was to let time and circumstances destroy Napoleon. ‘It seems to me more reasonable to hope that this evil will be remedied by time and by its own sheer scale, for it is such that I cannot rid myself of the conviction that this state of affairs cannot last, that the suffering of all classes, both in Germany and in France, is so great that patience must necessarily run out.’
²⁵

But it was Napoleon’s patience that had run out. He viewed the
Russian abandonment of the Continental System as a betrayal, he saw her troop build-up as a threat and a provocation, and he was convinced that she was using the Polish question and the subject of trade as excuses to break out of the alliance. This seemed to be confirmed by the increased diplomatic activity of the Russians in Vienna, where they were quite openly trying to turn Austria away from France.

Napoleon needed to go and take charge of operations in Spain personally in order to throw out the British and pacify the peninsula, but he could not contemplate such a move with a Russian army hovering on the borders of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and exciting German hopes of revenge. He was convinced that, just as the Austrians had done in 1809, Alexander would stab him in the back the moment he turned it.
²⁶

His exasperation erupted on 15 August 1811, his forty-second birthday. At midday he strutted into the throne room at the Tuileries, which was filled with the entire court and all the senior officers in Paris, all perspiring in full ceremonial and parade uniforms on what was an exceptionally hot day. He took his place on the throne to receive the good wishes of the dignitaries and the diplomatic corps. This part of the ceremony over, Napoleon stepped down from the throne and began to circulate among the guests.

When he reached the Russian ambassador Prince Kurakin, he mentioned Russian reports of a recent victory over the Turks at Ruschuk on the Danube, and queried why, if they had indeed won, the Russians had evacuated the town. Kurakin explained that the Tsar had been obliged to withdraw some troops from the Turkish front for financial reasons, and had therefore decided not to hold the town. At this Napoleon exploded, saying that the Russians had not won, they had been beaten by the Turks, and they had been beaten because they had withdrawn troops from the Turkish front not for any financial reasons, but because they were massing their armies on the frontiers of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and that all the so-called outrage over Oldenburg was but an excuse for their intention to invade the Grand Duchy in an open act of hostility to him, Napoleon. The unfortunate
Kurakin kept opening his mouth to reply, but could not get a word in edgeways and looked like a fish gasping for air, while perspiration poured down his face in the intense heat. Napoleon accused Russia of harbouring hostile intentions, and when Kurakin assured him of the contrary, he turned on the ambassador and asked whether he had powers to negotiate, for if he had, they could conclude a new treaty there and then. The answer was negative, so Napoleon merely walked away, leaving the ambassador in a state of shock.
²⁷

Napoleon was back at Saint Cloud late that evening, and on the following morning he locked himself up with the punctilious and hard-working Hugues Maret, Duc de Bassano, who had succeeded Champagny as Foreign Minister. Together they trawled through all the documentation concerning the Russian alliance since Tilsit. According to their analysis, the problems had started in 1809, when the Russians had hung back in the war against Austria instead of marching in loyally and capturing Galicia. Had they done so, they could have been allowed to keep it. As they did not, it was captured by the Poles, who could not be denied some of it. This caused panic in Russia and led the Tsar to demand slices of the Grand Duchy. France could never accede to such a request. Not just for the sake of her honour, but also because if Russia were to receive one piece of the Grand Duchy she would in time expect to get another, and would soon entrench her position on the Vistula if not the Oder. For similar reasons, France could not countenance any further Russian advance against Turkey.

In the memorandum summing up the situation, they stated France’s position as follows: France wanted Russia’s friendship and needed her as an ally in her struggle against Britain, which was the one remaining obstacle to a general peace. She did not want to fight Russia, as there was nothing that she wanted to take from her. Also, she had more pressing business in Spain, which required Napoleon’s personal attention. But France could not go down the road of buying Russia’s friendship through endless cession of Polish or Ottoman lands. France must therefore prepare for war in order to be in a position to dictate a
peace. Lauriston was told that he had to make it clear that ‘we want peace, but we are prepared for war’.
²⁸

Napoleon’s sense of exasperation at not being able to bring Alexander back into a close alliance is obvious in a personal letter he had written him on 6 April. ‘The effect of my military preparations will make Your Majesty increase his own; and when news of his actions reaches me here, it will force me to raise more troops: and all this over nothing!’ he wrote. They had been drawn into a spiral of mistrust and power politics that made it very difficult to arrive at a negotiated settlement. Napoleon later admitted that they had got themselves ‘into the position of two blustering braggarts who, having no wish to fight each other, seek to frighten each other’.
²⁹

*
While many assumed that Napoleon’s creation of the Grand Duchy owed much to his infatuation at the time with his mistress Maria Walewska, now many in Russia suspected Alexander’s mistress Maria Antonovna Naryshkina, also a Pole, of exercising a similar influence.

*
It is true that some teachers at Russian universities did use German or Latin.

†
According to some sources, almost certainly apocryphal, even Captain Bonaparte applied for a post in the Russian army in 1795.

‡
Martinists were followers of the illuminist philosopher and mystic Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, whose obscure writings had a surprisingly wide influence.

*
In February a similar plan was submitted by General Bennigsen, while Generals Bagration, Württemberg, d’Allonville and Saint Priest also contributed theirs.

O
n the evening of 25 March 1811, as he was scouring the night sky from his makeshift observatory in Viviers, Honoré Flaugergues discovered a comet in the now defunct constellation of Argo Navis. He saw it again the following day and began to track its progress. The comet was low in the south and was moving northward and brightening. On 11 April it was spotted by Jean Louis Pons in Marseille, and on 12 May by William J. Burchell in Cape Town. The comet soon became visible to the naked eye, and by the late autumn it lit up the night sky from Lisbon to Moscow. People gazed up at it, some with interest, many more with a sense of foreboding.
¹

This seemed to increase the further east one went in Europe. ‘As they contemplated the brilliant comet of 1811,’ recalled a parish priest there, ‘the people of Lithuania prepared themselves for some extraordinary event.’ Another inhabitant of the province never forgot how everyone got up from dinner and went out to gaze on the comet and then talk of ‘famine, fire, war and bloodshed’. In Russia, many linked the comet to a plague of fires which swept the land that summer and autumn, and a blind terror gripped them as they looked on it. ‘I remember fixing a long look on it on an autumn moonless night, and I was struck with childlike fear,’ wrote the son of a Russian landowner. ‘Its long, bright tail, which seemed to wave with the movement of the wind and to leap from time to time, filled me with
such horror, that in the days that followed I did not look up at the sky at night, until the comet had disappeared.’

In St Petersburg, Tsar Alexander himself became fascinated by the phenomenon, and discussed it with John Quincy Adams, then American ambassador at his court. He claimed to be interested only in the scientific aspects of the comet, and made fun of all those superstitious souls who saw in it a harbinger of catastrophe and war.
²

But he was either being disingenuous or he was deluding himself, for the machinery of war had already clanged into gear, and its wheels were by now turning with such momentum that it would have taken a complete climbdown on the part of Napoleon or himself to stop them. Observing events from Vienna, Metternich was in no doubt that ‘the supreme struggle’ between the
ancien régime
and what he termed Napoleon’s revolutionary designs was now imminent. ‘Whether he triumphs or succumbs, in either case the situation in Europe will never be the same again,’ he wrote to his imperial master on 28 December 1811. ‘This terrible moment has unfortunately been brought on us by the unpardonable conduct of Russia.’
³

‘I am far from having lost hope of a peaceful settlement,’ Napoleon wrote to his brother Jérôme on 27 January 1812. ‘But as they have adopted towards me the unfortunate procedure of negotiating at the head of a strong and numerous army, my honour demands that I too negotiate at the head of a strong and numerous army. I do not wish to open the hostilities, but I wish to put myself in a position to repulse them.’
⁴
He therefore needed to field an army vast enough to intimidate Alexander or, failing that, to force him into submission with a rapid and shattering blow. There was an element of haste involved, as he had to count with the possibility of a Russian first strike at any moment. Fortunately, he was not starting from scratch.

Following the treaty of Tilsit, a body of French troops remained in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw while the local forces were being organised, along with garrisons in key fortresses in Prussia such as Danzig, Glogau, Stettin and Küstrin. After the 1809 war with Austria, Napoleon left further garrisons at Düsseldorf, Hanau, Fulda, Hanover,
Magdeburg, Bayreuth, Salzburg and Ratisbon. In May 1810 he strengthened all the forces on German soil and organised them into the Armée d’Allemagne, under Marshal Davout. In the autumn of 1810, following the Russian troop build-up along the border of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Napoleon reinforced this further. He also began moving units stationed in France closer to Germany, concentrating his artillery parks at Strasbourg, Metz, Wesel and La Fère, and withdrawing selected units from Spain.

In the spring of 1811, fearing a Russian invasion of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Napoleon ordered the Poles to mobilise 50,000 men. He had already ordered his stepson Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, to place the Army of Italy on a war footing. Now he instructed his brother Jérôme and other allied monarchs to mobilise the armies of Westphalia, Württemberg, Bavaria, Baden and the lesser German states. He meant to put together a force of half a million men with which to confront Russia. He began calling up men in France on a massive scale, and gendarmes combed the countryside for the tens of thousands of deserters who regularly sneaked away from the colours and went to ground. They would be rounded up and fed back into the army, along with the new recruits.

The French army was organised in divisions, which were usually made up of four regiments. A regiment of foot normally consisted of about 3800 men, with a hundred officers. It had up to five battalions, one of which was always at the depot, and these battalions consisted of six companies each, of which one would be a company of grenadiers, one of
voltigeurs
(skirmishers) and four of fusiliers. A company was supposed to number 140 men, including two drummer boys, and was commanded by one captain, one lieutenant, one sub-lieutenant, a sergeant major and a dozen other sergeants and corporals. To accommodate the new influx, Napoleon added a fifth and then a sixth battalion to existing regiments. The recruits were spread through the old battalions as well as the new ones, which were fortified with a sprinkling of veterans.

Napoleon attended personally to every detail. His correspondence
in these matters reveals a staggering degree of familiarity with every brigade, regiment and battalion, where they were stationed, where they were due to move to, who commanded them, how many reinforcements they needed, where these could be drawn from, and how soon they could be made available. No detail was too insignificant for him. He attended to lettering on standards and badges, to the quality and calibre of arms and equipment, to numbers of horses and types of supply wagon required. To deal with the many rivers he would need to negotiate, he formed a bridging train equipped with pontoon boats and other necessaries at Danzig.