The Two Armies
Napoleon's army
Napoleon gathered a huge army for the Russian campaign, approx. 422,000 men.
At the time this was the largest army ever mobilized. It consisted of
Frenchmen, Italians, Swiss, Dutch, Spaniards, Portuguese, Croats, Lithuanians and
Germans. Napoleon had never gone into war with more than 200,000 men, and did not
realize the difficulties of feeding such a big army without proper provisions.
For the Russian campaign only minimum food supplies were taken as Napoleon's goal was
to live off the country as much as possible and have a supply system as a
backup. It turned out that such a huge army could not be sustained off the land and
the supply service failed because of long distances and poor roads. By the
time the army reached Moscow, there were only 100,000 men left and only about 10,000
made it back home. The rest had either died from hunger or diseases or had been
left behind because they were wounded or sick.
The Russian Army
The Russian army was smaller at the beginning (only about 218,000 plus 15,000
Cossacks) but as Napoleon lost men and Russian
reinforcements joined the army, the Russians grew stronger and stronger. The
Russians were less experienced soldiers and had less skilled leaders.
Alexander I did not want to lead the army, but passed on this task to
Prince Mikhail Barclay de Tolly. Both Barclay and his successor,
Prince Michail Kutuzov,
were hesitant to engage in battle with the French and decided to wait for a
better moment. On the other hand, the Russian forces had the advantage of
fighting on their own terrain and they were more accustomed to and better
equipped for extreme weather conditions than the French.
[Minard's Map]
[Introduction]
[Napoleon]
[Alexander I]
[Reasons for the War]
[Niemen]
[Smolensk]
[Borodino]
[Moscow]
[Retreat Begins]
[Cossacks]
[Krasnoe, Dnieper and Berezina]
[Vilna]
[Kutuzov]
[Ney]
[Napoleon's Afterthoughts]
[Charles XII Revisited]
[Bibliography]
Please send comments to:
paivir@fiat.gslis.utexas.edu