The Battle of Austerlitz in War and Peace
In this piece, written in graduate school some years ago, I ask several questions:
Was Tolstoy a brilliantly accurate writer of war?
How did Tolstoy research and write about Austerlitz?
If Tolstoy aimed to write Austerlitz accurately, why does his description of the battle exclude so much important information?
1. Introduction
In the dozens of monographs published on Tolstoy in Russian and in English every year, it is often taken for granted that the author’s battle scenes are superlative descriptions of actual events. It is all too easy to assume that Tolstoy was scrupulously well-versed in the art of accurate historical writing. So much is this view prevalent that, in spite of some military veterans' negative reaction at the time of publication of War and Peace, military men have, as Clarence Manning points out 'never failed to praise the accuracy of [Tolstoy's] descriptions [of battles]’.
Manning arrives at an important, if underdeveloped and oversimplified, conclusion: the most striking aspect of Tolstoy’s battle writing is in its omissions. With reference to the absence of reference to General Totleben, who designed the defence of Sevastopol, in the Sevastopol Stories (1855), Manning wonders what else Tolstoy may have omitted. This detailed study of the depiction of the Battle of Austerlitz in War and Peace (1863-69) intends to explore further Tolstoy’s omission of key issues and facts from his battle scenes, a trend that prejudices the authenticity and authority of the novel's historical narrative. While Manning in 1937 wrote with the benefit of hindsight and modern military manuals, I intend to examine the primary sources available to and read by Tolstoy to come to a judgement about the deficiencies of his depiction of the military leaderships at Austerlitz.
While by the time of the publication of War and Peace in the 1860s the Russian reading public had become familiar with a great number of literary works relating to the Napoleonic Wars, the authors of those works were on the whole witnesses of or participants in the events at hand. Tolstoy was among the first of the post-war generation to approach the subject of the Napoleonic Wars, and among the first to deal with the Russian defeat at Austerlitz at all: art had focused almost entirely on the glory of success at Borodino in 1812, which had pushed the Russian nation forth onto the pan-European stage as a major player for the first time. Thus it is of little surprise to find that Tolstoy’s treatment of events is one of a historian, rather than a fictional biographer or even a simple recorder of events, whose resultant work is 'quasi-scientific analysis' in which fact and fiction readily supplement each other within a monistic realism.
In fact, Tolstoy’s original intentions (dating from the early part of the 1850s) with the writing of War and Peace were to produce a 'truthful, just history of Europe in the present century' and thus publish the honest account of the military and social milieux of the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries that he considered absent from both the Russian and French literary canons. As a result, the book is constituted from fictional, psychological and personal narrative interspersed with lengthy historical diatribes and littered with verisimiltudinous, what we might term 'authenticising', factual details. However, if truth and accuracy were his intentions, then, providing Manning’s hypothesis with relation to significant factual omissions holds water, and disregarding the problems inherent in fictionalisied histories, Tolstoy's depiction of Austerlitz may turn out to be seriously historically deficient. While the critics are split between those who consider Tolstoy's historical preparatory work scanty and those who consider it 'colossal', one might use this case study as the basis for a third perspective. Whether scanty or colossal, the real issue at hand is that the presentation of Tolstoy's research may be lacking: errors in historical fact are few (and usually minor), omissions are many.
Austerlitz itself was a turning point in the early part of the Napoleonic Wars. Often considered to be Napoleon’s tactical masterpiece, a French army comprised of just over 70 000 men defeated a numerically superior coalition of approximately 85 000 Austrian and Russian troops, inflicting some 15 000 casualties while sustaining only 9 000 itself. A particularly strategically complex battle, the Allied and French armies drew up in roughly north to south lines facing each other. Neither army’s initial strategy went precisely to plan: the Allies had intended to turn the French right and cut them off from Vienna; Napoleon intended to turn his opponents to their right and drive them into lakes and swamps to the south of the battlefield. However, ultimately, Napoleon concealed the strength of his army’s flank, luring the Allies, unaware of the strength of Napoleon’s reserves, into an attack before successfully counter-attacking through the centre and routing the opposing army. The unexpectedly heavy victory was of crucial importance in the 1805 campaign: within three months, the French had continued their successful march straight into Vienna, effectively wiping out the Holy Roman Empire and leaving France the dominant continental power for the best part of a decade.
In spite of the complexity of Austerlitz, its importance in both historical and narrative terms—it is the moment in War and Peace when Andrei Bolkonsky abandons his dreams of becoming a Napoleon figure, when he sees that war is not a romantic adventure but something in which all depends not on the arrangement of units but on the soul—Tolstoy dedicates barely two chapters of Book One to the engagement itself. There is nothing like the level of detail or purported analysis Tolstoy enters into in the literary staging of Borodino later in the work (there even going so far as to provide a map). In reality, suggesting that the Russians were ill prepared for the battle and naively overconfident, and that in battle generally an individual’s vision and comprehension of events is so severely limited that generals cannot effectively command on the battlefield, Tolstoy does not do his sources, or the level of preparation in the French army, justice. If in the military scenes of War and Peace, Tolstoy’s object is to condemn Napoleon, not on moral or ethical grounds, but because he is small and petty and ‘attempts to give orders’, to give him credit for or to convey the whole of the preparedness with which the French Emperor entered the fray at Austerlitz would detract from that object.
In fact, careful analysis of the facts available to Tolstoy should suggest that no other major power could have quite predicted the success of Napoleon’s developments—honed over a decade and a half of military action—as deployed at Austerlitz. He had in fact through a combination of obligation and volition reformed the French army at every level, transforming it from an ancien régime force dominated by a semi-feudal hierarchy into a proessional force equipped to deal with the generic battlefield issues Tolstoy outlines. No other major power had begun to reform their army in the same way.
Possibly entirely fair in his criticism of the Russians' unfounded braggadocio, Tolstoy does not give Napoleon or the remainder of the French leadership due credit for the extent of their foresight, nor does he admit the possibility that the Russians could not possibly have understood the importance of that foresight. Objective analysis of a battle like Austerlitz was difficult for a near-contemporary like Tolstoy, and it remains a challenge today, but comparison of Tolstoy's text to the sources he read reveal some unequivocal evidence highlighting the absence of key facts from Austerlitz in War and Peace.
Critical analysis of this section and of War and Peace in general has explored in great depth the artistic and philosophical importance of Austerlitz to the novel and especially to Prince Andrei’s personal development, and Tolstoy’s repulsion at the horrific nature of war itself. Alexander Gulin has published a relatively detailed account of the sources used for Tolstoy’s rendition of Schöngraben, ‘Delo pod Shengrabenom v “Voine i mire”’, while K. Pokrovsky has written a fairly detailed analysis of sources relating to the 1812 campaign and L.M. Myshkovskaya’s Masterstvo L.N. Tolstogo includes useful material relating to Austerlitz. However, the kind of detailed analysis of Austerlitz and the sources Tolstoy referred to during his work on it included in this paper is absent from scholarly works in both Russian and English.
It is important to note here that what Tolstoy did not read and what was unavailable to him (for example, due to linguistic barriers or the availability of sensitive texts in tsarist Russia) is beyond the remit of this paper. Likewise, the historical texts the author read after completing and publishing the Austerlitz section in 1865 as The Year 1805 in Russkii Vestnik are irrelevant within the confines of this methodological approach. However, establishing exactly what Tolstoy had read as research for the Austerlitz scenes is not an overly complex task.
It is clear from his diaries, and from receipts available, that Tolstoy drew on several principle sources written from both the French and Russian perspecives and by eyewitnesses and historians alike. The accounts vary in their level of subjectivity and the influence of patriotic fervour on the author. The works are as follows: on the French side, Thiers’ The History of the Consulate and Empire of Napoleon (1845-47) and de Bourienne's Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte; on the Russian, Prince Adam Czartoryski’s memoirs and letters to Alexander I, Alexander Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky’s Opisanie otechestvennoi voiny v 1812 godu (1839) and Aleksei Yermolov’s diaries. Thiers, writing after the events, was a French statesman and historian and vehement supporter of Napoleon and his military campaigns: he is as harsh on the Russians as he is praising of the French. Czartoryski, the influential Russian Foreign Minister, includes in his work an eyewitness account of both the actual battle of Austerlitz and the high-level command of the Russian army in the time leading up to it. He makes an appearance in War and Peace and was described by Tolstoy in the first drafts of the novel as a ‘modest old foreigner'.
Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky, as does Thiers, writes as a historian (admittedly, one with significant military experience after 1811) on the basis of diplomatic and military documents as well as witness statements from the surviving participants. Ermolov, another figure who appears in the actual text of the novel, was a junior officer at Austerlitz, and paints a picture of an army in utter disarray and in no way prepared to combat the French force’s readiness for combat. Ultimately, it is Ermolov who draws attention to the very problems faced by both Tolstoy and the modern analyst: ‘I heard the opinions of many notable officers on this battle but none of them had a clear understanding of it and they agreed only on events they had not witnessed. Histories of this battle will certainly be written but it will be difficult to completely trust them and it will be easier to describe some local actions rather than how they related and connected to each other’.
2. Tolstoy's Austerlitz
I intend to proceed by carefully analysing the events of Tolstoy's version of Austerlitz in War and Peace, and then to compare that content with the historical works Tolstoy read, as referenced above. By only then bringing into the equation more modern historical works, I propose to examine some of the motivation behind the particular bias Austerlitz is given by the author.
In War and Peace, Tolstoy renders Austerlitz from the perspective of two characters: firstly, through the eyes of Prince Andrei, who takes part in the battle as an adjutant to General Kutuzov; secondly, through the eyes of Nikolai Rostov in Prince Bagration's force on the right flank. By way of these experiences, we see that for Tolstoy, Austerlitz is a battle dominated by the intractable vanity and pigheadedness of the Russian contingent, who adhere to a naïve and unthinking belief in glory and the inevitability of their own victory. The Russians are consistently characterised by an unthinking braggadocio—'the fete's for tomorrow', says Dolgorukov—and a rash overconfidence—'the glory of the Russian arms is secure', says Bilibin. The brashness is evident here from the highest to the lowest echelons of the army. Even the inexperienced Nikolai Rostov, entering his first major engagement, wonders to himself: 'How it will be there I don't know, but all will be well!'.
If the Russian army's lower ranks appear to be pigheaded before the battle, the high command is even more reprehensibly intractable. At the council of war that takes place prior to Austerlitz, Prince Bagration simply 'could not be present', while Kutuzov was 'ill-humoured and sleepy', and 'put on the air of a subordinate who obeys without reasoning': the army of 1805, even in its leaders, was dominated by airs and graces, by the play-acting and pretence of a comme il faut attitude. The Austrian general Weierother, meanwhile, 'obviously felt himself at the head of the movement that had been set going and could not be stopped'. He was 'flying along at full speed with no time to consider where this swift motion would land him'. Therefore if we can say that the Allied force entered the build-up to Austerlitz (and, indeed, the entire 1805 campaign) with thoughts of an inevitable victory, then we can also say that in tandem with this inability of the commander to alter the planned course of events, the Allied forces were as blind off the battlefield as Tolstoy ultimately suggests they were on it.
The inflexibility of the Allied military command as a unit, regardless of its individual commander's volition, is repeatedly highlighted. The narrator explains that the disposition for the attack was 'very complicated and intricate'. As a result of the inability of the commander to really effect his own plan, Kutuzov states that, 'the disposition for tomorrow […] can't be altered now', and 'all our arrangements will remain unchanged in the smallest detail'. It is only on the day of a tumultuous battle that Kutuzov changes his orders: ''The dispositions!' exclaimed Kutuzov bitterly. 'Who told you that? […] Kindly do as you are ordered'. Here the internal conflict and friction within the Allied forces, between the commander and the commanded, is obvious. Thus the Russian forces at Tolstoy's Austerlitz are characterised by a lack of preparation beyond an initial, inflexible plan, a plan that they try to change only once the battle has already begun when, it is implicit, it is already too late to change anything.
Tolstoy often inserts supporting (and seemingly accurate) historical details through the voice of his characters and, especially significantly, his narrator. In that manner, one is presented with the historical 'fact' through the veil of the Allied command's arrogance. Weierother, for example, comments that, 'The enemy have extinguished their fires and a continual noise has been heard in their camp. What does that mean? Either they are retreating—the only thing we have to fear, or changing their position'. The historical debate is present in the general's words, yet so too is that arrogance: 'the only thing we have to fear'. Using the incident of the French camp's fires as an example, we see arrogance spread throughout the Russian camp, Dolgorukov being persuaded without any evidence of only one possible explanation: 'It's nothing but a trick, they have retreated and ordered the rearguard to light fires and make a noise to deceive us'. The entrance of the narrator into the debate guides us to what we assume to be the correct explanation of the lights and fires: 'The shouts and lights in the enemy's army had been due to the fact that while Napoleon's proclamation had been read to the troops, the Emperor had himself ridden among the bivouacs'. The juxtaposition of disparate opinions with the narrator's hard 'fact' serves to underline the supposed 'reality' of the Allied forces' incompetence and overconfidence.
However, where Tolstoy is unerringly keen to highlight Allied, and especially Russian, flaws, he makes little mention of French strengths. In spite of the description of the Allied war council, the French plans and preparations for the battle are wholly absent from the text of War and Peace. Naturally, Tolstoy's protagonists are Russians, and this is a Russian novel, so it would be improbable to include an in-depth analysis of the French preparations. However, given the authoritative historical tone of the narrator in the example above (or, further, at Borodino, with the inclusion of a detailed map of the battle), this is an aspect of Tolstoy's historical writing that is lacking. Either the narrator is omniscient and can pass categorical and factual judgement or he is not. Furthermore, Napoleon himself barely appears at Austerlitz in War and Peace. What little of him is given away prior to Austerlitz is deduced through Dolgorukov's eyes, and it is only after the battle that he appears in person as a man of 'paltry vanity and joy'. All the emphasis is on the Russians' mistakes, not on, in this battle considered by both contemporary and later historians to be his masterpiece, Napoleon's actions.
In fact, almost the only reference to Napoleon in Tolstoy's depiction of Austerlitz is as follows:
[Napoleon] drew the glove from his shapely white hand, made a sign with it to the marshals, and ordered action to begin. The marshals, accompanied by adjutants, galloped off in different directions, and a few minutes later the chief forces of the French army moved rapidly toward those Pratzen Heights.
Here, then, we see an indirect acknowledgement of the differences between the French and the Russian armies at Austerlitz. The French army responds here directly to its general's personal command before the actual engagement, while the Russians are clumsy and muddled from the start. However, by omitting the detail of how Napoleon and those marshals Tolstoy mentions continued to direct the action once the battle proper had begun, Tolstoy's historical accuracy is severely compromised through its lack of comprehensiveness.
The action on the day of the battle itself is overshadowed by a creeping layer of fog that obscures the sight of all the participants, both the soldiery and the officer class. Only Napoleon, who remains at an elevation throughout the engagement, is untroubled:
It was nine o'clock in the morning. The fog lay unbroken like a sea down below, but higher up at the village of Schlappanitz where Napoleon stood with his marshals around him, it was quite light.
Citing the exact time here is an example of the manner in which Tolstoy projects historical accuracy, but beyond the veneer of historical verisimilitude, the precision with which he describes events as they actually took place is in doubt. In this sense, the question of fog and mist coverage of the battlefield becomes central, since Tolstoy has it as a determining factor in the ability of the troops and officers alike to comprehend what is happening during the progress of the engagement and thus a crucial element in determining the outcome of the entire battle. In fact, obfuscation of vision caused by the fog here becomes an allegorical representation of the inability of the soldier to see on any battlefield.
Tolstoy makes repeated and unequivocal references to the fog at significant moments before and during the battle. On the eve of the engagement, the fog is already a problem. Nikolai Rostov encounters it as a 'mysterious and dangerous, misty distance', while Prince Bagration struggles to 'make out Rostov's face in the mist': the fog ultimately hinders and foils Rostov's efforts at reconnaissance. The day of the battle itself is dominated by the murky fog: 'The [Russian] column moved forward without knowing where and unable, from the masses around them, the smoke and the increasing fog, to see either the place they were leaving or that to which they were going'. Indeed, vision is so poor that musketry fire is only 'heard', rather than seen, while troops simply disappear into it—'masses of cavalry came up and disappeared in the sea of mist'—and the Russian troops 'could not see ten paces ahead'. Meanwhile, 'nothing [my italics] was visible in the valley to the left'. The same problem confronts both Andrei and Rostov: it is everywhere on Tolstoy's battlefield, and directly linked with the panicking troops. 'At that very instant a cloud of smoke spread all round, diring was heard quite close at hand, and a voice of naïve terror barely two steps from Prince Andrei shouted, 'Brothers! All's lost!''.
While with hindsight it may be impossible to clarify exactly to what extent the fog played a role, and even more difficult to précis the location and movement of the mist throughout the day, using the same primary sources Tolstoy read during his period of research before writing the Austerlitz scenes, as outlined above, can cast some light on the issue. Certainly, they can help us to establish the manner in which the French forces strove to counter the problem, something which is entirely absent from Tolstoy's work. If, as Tolstoy claims, the fog was directly responsible for panic amongst the Russian ranks, which could not be countered by their vainglorious officers and high commanders, does the same hold true for the French? In reality, I suggest that Tolstoy deliberately misconstrued and inflated the importance of the fog as described by the historians whom he had read, since to recognise the extent of Napoleon's preparations to counter the problems of the fog of war (in the metaphorical sense) and of vision of the battlefield during the mêlée would undermine his theory that war is incomprehensible to the individual participant.
However, at Tolstoy's Austerlitz it is not only as a result of poor leadership and the fog that the Russian army is in total confusion both during and after the battle. Tolstoy alludes to the kind of communication problems that affected an early 19th century army yet which, as I shall demonstrate, affected the French to a far lesser degree than their opponents. For example, Andrei delivers a message and one general is surprised by another's actions, Nikolai Rostov seeks 'His Majesty', yet Boris believe he is looking for 'His Highness' (the complicated system of social ranking employed by the Russians here hindering the effectivity of lines of communication), and in a further incident, Rostov 'had been ordered to look for Kutuzov and the Emperor near the village of Pratzen. But neither they nor a single commanding officer were there, only disorganised crowds of troops of various kinds'. The impression given is that the Russians, aside from being unable to see as a result of smoke and fog, clearly have no concept of where their own or their ally's troops are located. One officer even comments, 'What stupid orders! They don't themselves know what they are doing!'. However, neither the narrator nor any of the characters give us any insight into the effectiveness of the French chain of command.
The only positive incidents on the Russian side occur when the officer leads by example, thereby boosting the morale, the dusha of his troops. The most significant instance of this is when Kutuzov is unable to stop his fleeing troops with an order, yet Andrei, even 'looking around bewildered and unable to grasp what was happening in front of him', rallies his unit by picking up the standard. The implication here is that the officer cannot order and cannot even comprehend what is happening, the only way for him to mitigate the impossibility of armed conflict is to lead his troops by example.
3. Reading Tolstoy's Primary Sources
It is evident that Tolstoy's Austerlitz is a battle that the Russians lost, rather than one the French won. Regardless of problems within the Russian army, this is unequivocally contrary to the widely held modern interpretation of Austerlitz as Napoleon's masterpiece. Tolstoy's Austerltiz, furthermore, was a place of confusion, incomprehension, restricted vision and poor communication, one dominated by a tenebrous fog that only reinforced the Allied army's already existing problems. However, Tolstoy deviates at several key occasions from the events as laid out in the works by Thiers, Napoleon, Czartoryski, Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky and Yermolov described in the introduction to this paper. Certainly, there is much in those works that suggest that the Russians really were to blame for their loss at Austerlitz and did little to lessen the negative traits of their own army, but the texts—both those from the Russian and French points of view—also contain a great deal of praise for Napoleon's achievements in attenuating those same problems within his own military. The Russians may have been vain and short-sighted, but the French were far more professional and well-prepared, and it it this latter theme that is lacking from Tolstoy's Austerlitz. What Tolstoy omits, as Clarence Manning proposed with reference to the Sevastopol Stories, is from a historical perspective as significant as what he includes.
Certainly, there is much in the historical works at hand that supports Tolstoy's portrayal of the Russian army of 1805 as a force dominated by vanity. De Bourienne writes, for instance, that 'the junior portion of the Russian army assumed an asburd braggadocio tone'. However, careful analysis of the sources available to Tolstoy suggests that to end the analysis on this note does not reflect the complex reality of the events at and leading up to Austerlitz. The Russians may have been beligerent and overconfident, but they could have done little to control many of the events of a battle hundreds of miles from Russian territory while facing a meticulously prepared army that had been on a war footing for over a decade.
Tolstoy fails to mention the impossibility of the logistical situation the Russian army experienced prior to Austerlitz, which is located over 900 miles away from St. Petersburg. Although he incorporates in an incident with Kutuov the failure of the Austrian army to provide their allies with supplies as agreed beforehand, there is no mention of the poor quality of roads or the inevitable fatigue of an army that had marched across such a vast distance. Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky states that Allied troop movements were seriously hindered by the poor quality, dirt roads around Austerlitz, which problem, writes Ermolov, was only slightly—and luckily—mitigated by the freezing conditions that hardened the roads' surface. The inevitable fatigue and lethargy of movement, mentioned by Thiers in relation to Bagration's infantry during the battle, is absent from Tolstoy's work. Immediately, one wonders how the Russians or, crucially, any ancien régime army could possibly have dealt with these problems hundreds of miles from home and on what was territory dominated by the opposition. Certainly, Tolstoy's own experiences of war in the Crimean involved a Russian army starved of supplies by its motherland's administrative and developmental stagnation—by 1855, Russia had just 650 miles of railways, where Britain, a fraction of the size, had more than 6600—but there is no suggestion from any of the sources relating to the 1805 conflict that Russia could possibly have done anything to lessen this particular problem. Thus to omit this mitigating factor that could have thrown a more positive light on the Russian command is significant in the context of Tolstoy's Austerlitz.
From his own experience, Tolstoy had drawn the conclusion that no individual, even the commander-in-chief, could have a personal knowledge of an entire military engagement. It is clear from those elements of his portrayal of Austerlitz mentioned above that this holds true for Tolstoy in War and Peace. If the general cannot per se command, and cannot understand the battlefield, then his role is as a morale booster. Tolstoy rightly establishes that the Russian army had a plan of attack well in advance of the day of the battle, presumably before the command knew the exact conditions that would prevail on the day in question. As Tolstoy rightly points out through Dolgorukov's words, the idea that Napoleon was ready to retreat was on the eve of the battle widespread in the Russian camp: this is made clear both by Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky and Ermolov.
With regards to the Russian war council prior to Austerlitz, it stands to make several comments. Firstly, even though he was not present, Ermolov claims that the generals at the time were 'filled with ideals of chivalrous times'. However, if Kutuzov's advice, as Tolstoy would have it, was not listened to, then he likely lifted this fact from Czartorsyki's account—the Pole actually was present at the meeting. Yet what is missing here is Thiers' claim that Kutuzov was not just Tolstoy's 'half-asleep' but actually asleep during the meeting. Thiers' entire version of this meeting is of one characterised by Russian inattentive overconfidence:
'My general, all this is very well; but if the enemy take the lead […] what are we to do?'
'The case is not foreseen'
In fact, Thiers' account of Kutuzov's behaviour at Austerlitz is unremittingly critical. Where Kutuzov in War and Peace is a positive character whose relaxed attitude towards military planning is defined by an admirable recognition of the Tolstoyan role of the general, he is in Thiers' text a man who is nothing less than incompetent: 'If the chief of the Austro-Russian army, whose merit was limited to much astuteness concealed under great indolence, had been capable of correct and prompt resolutions', the battle could have turned in the Allies' favour. Indeed, for Thiers, the Allied generals are not vain, merely 'unskilful'. This has nothing to do with social milieu and everything to do with pure military unskilfulness.
Neither Tolstoy nor his source materials have much positive to say about the Allied leaders, albeit for the former due to their vanity, and for the latter due to sheer incompetence. However, it is in the absence of description of Napoleon that Tolstoy is most 'inaccurate' in historical terms. Even the Russian historians at hand recognise the extent of the French Emperor's efforts to solve the problems of the battlefield. Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky records that Napoleon not only personally scouted out the battlefield and the surrounding areas but ordered his generals to each do the same: an element of almost scientific planning that involved equipping all of his battlefield leaders with the eyes and ears to know the terrain as best as possible. This is particularly relevant since the day preceding Austerlitz was light and Napoleon was able to clearly see the movements of the Allied forces. Where the Russian war council was in Tolstoy's words flying at full speed and came up only with an inflexible plan, the French design was based on the latest intelligence. This is further evinced by Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky's claim that Napoleon, under the cover of darkness on the eve of battle, deliberately rearranged his forces. Tolstoy does not mention what was in Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky's eyes a deliberate ploy to deceive the Allied forces: they could not have known that the Frenchman had done this until dawn broke on the morning of 2nd December, not could they have known the extent of their enemy's meticulous planning.
Even on the day of the battle, Napoleon's plan was based on flexibility and up-to-date intelligence from purposeful reconnaissance. The Allied plan may have been, as Tolsoti records, inflexible, but the French strategy was finalised only at the last minute and relied on his knowledge of the Allied forces' locations. Indeed, Mikahilovsky-Danilevsky also writes that Napoleon's generals were convened with him until the last possible moment on the morning of the battle, and on the day of the battle the French leader remained in personal command, giving special commands to Bernadotte's corps even during the battle. This is again absent from Austerlitz in War and Peace, since the figure of Napoleon barely makes an appearance during the battle. While the Russians really may have suffered from inflexible strategising that resulted in, for instance, Kutuzov's orders being ignored in the heat of battle, there is no evidence that the French has the same problems at Austerlitz: it may have been generally true that in battle orders were difficult to follow, but none of the works at hand confirm that to be an issue for the French here. In actuality, through reconnaissance and delegation, Napoleon was able to some extent to combat the problem: Thiers even writes that the French commander Friant responded to an incident of accidental friendly fire to take advantage of what could have been a dangerous situation—and the Frenchman responded only 'at the sight of this'.
It is no wonder that Tolstoy despised Thiers' history, castigating him as a historian for trying to ascribe the flow of events to the will of one man—Napoleon. This is especially true given the sycophantic tone with which the Frenchman relates events at Austerlitz: the French infantry is 'brave' and advances 'with coolness', but we might juxtapose this admittedly biased evidence of the French army's high organisational capacity with the other historians' account of a bumbling and confused Allied strategy. Further evidence of this is in Napoleon's memoir: 'In this extraordinary campaign the exploits of our troops succeeded each other with their rapidity of thought'. The French accounts were, admittedly, always likely to be fairly unctuous, but Tolstoy gives no credence to the possibility of the simple superiority of the French forces' organisation and direction at Austerlitz and in the 1805 campaign generally.
While it is apparent from this reading of the reference material used by Tolstoy that he makes little mention of the evidence from both Russian and French-biased writers that the French army were simply better directed and effectively ('with coolness') carried out manouevres even during the battle, he also does not mention the manner in which the historians at hand repeatedly refer to the morale-boosting actions of the French commanders that echo Prince Andrei's ultimately effective bravery. Thiers mentions a French officer who places himself in the line of fire, crying 'Soldiers, here is your line of battle!'—directly resembling Andrei's action—and even Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky records that Napoleon made efforts to personally boost morale. In the final analysis with regards to the role of the commander on the battlefield, one inevitably concludes that just because the Russian generals could not command effectively and on the fly while simultaneously playing the role of fighting figurehead, it does not mean that it was impossible: what here contradicts Tolstoy's approach to battlefield action is simply omitted from the text of War and Peace.
Tolstoy repeatedly refers to the inability of the troops themselves to comprehend what is occurring on the battlefield (I reiterate that they could not see 'ten paces ahead'). However, Thiers and Czatoryski both suggest that restricted vision (outside of the fog, which issue I shall deal with in due course) only became problematic once individual units were actually engaged in specific hand-to-hand combat. Such combat, according to Thiers, causes the participants to disappear in a 'cloud of horse', while Czartoryski 'saw very distinctly several charges', the confusion only happening once the troops were physically engaged. Thus there is no reason why Tolstoy suggests that the general, away from the mêlée, was unable to observe the general flow of the battle or the movement of individual units. Rather, the Russian confusion may have stemmed from its army's unwieldy and poor organisation: 'There was such chaos that it seemed there were no regiments just various chaotic groups. […] We had no information'.
The commanders might have been unable to see due to the fog cover of which Tolstoy makes such a major issue—but only if that fog was as thick and all-embracing as Tolstoy claims that it was. In fact, his questionable description of the fog at Austerlitz is the author's most serious factual omission, and is even an example either of what is at best speculative description of the historical reality or at worst deliberate contortion of the evidence available in the primary sources under analysis here. While Thiers documents a single incident of French friendly fire stemming from confusion caused by the fog, all of the historians at hand all undermine, if not outright contradict, Tolstoy's version in War and Peace. In reality, the fog that had fallen the previous evening was something the Napoleon took advantage of through his reconnaissance, and the following day was in fact generally clear. Not one of Tolstoy's sources considers the fog to have played a significant role in either the outcome or the fighting in general at Austerlitz. Admittedly, Tolstoy is a writer of fiction, but this incident is a clear indicator of the extent to which he fictionalises certain elements of the historical reality alongside the glut of hard and fast facts—dates, places, names—that he includes.
As per the experience of Nikolai Rostov on the eve of battle, Czartoryski notes that 'on the evening of the 1st it was cold and foggy'. However, he does not mention that the Russian generals did not react to this—Tolstoy's Kutuzov describes the inflexible Allied plan—yet as we know, Napoleon was scouting out the battlefield at this time. Even if he encountered a Cossack patrol that prevented him gettting a clear sight of the Russian positions, it becomes even more pertinent, given the emphasis which Tolstoy places on fog at Austerlitz, that there is no mention in War and Peace of the extent of the French preparation even on the eve of battle. Certainly, the Allies may have been unadaptable in this respect, but the antithetical French approach is simply erased form Tolstoy's history.
Thiers claims that by dawn (at the start of the battle), 'a wintry fog covered the face of the country to a great distance, and only permitted the view of the loftier points of ground, which rose above the midst'. It ought to be noted here that though Thiers appears to contradict himself, writing on one page that the 'vast field of battle [was] illuminated in full splendour' and on the next that the fog 'still covered the low bottoms', it is in his description of the French reaction to the potential consequences of this problem that Thiers is most interesting. While the fog may have been present there is little suggestion that it had any significant negative effect on the commanders' understanding of the course of events. On the contrary, Thiers even suggests that the French commanders deliberately took advantage of the cover provided by the inclement weather: their forces 'were halted at the bottom [of the heights], where they were hidden by the fog and retained by order of the Emperor until the opportune moment for the attack'. What is more, the French officer class at every level—from that action by Napoleon to the individual battalion commanders—are able to respond at a moment's notice to problems caused by the fog. After Legrand's 26th division accidentally opened fire on their countrymen, hidden by the fog, his counterpart Friant was able to respond quickly to extinguish the possibility of any Allied profit from this mistake. If as Tolstoy claims the Russian generals and soldiers alike were confused by the fog (and even this is not noted by Thiers), any confusion on the French side was in Thiers' eyes quickly counteracted by the rapidity of its generals' responses.
Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky provides another perspective on the fog, although one which is equally unsympathetic to Tolstoy's. Tolstoy writes that musketry fire was could only be heard from the Allied left due to the fog, and Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky agrees that the Allied troop movements to the left were hidden from Napoleon by the fog before the battle. However, what Tolstoy does not include is Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky's observation that the final French orders were not given until the fog had cleared, and crucially before contact was made: another incident of the French command using last-minute and up-to-date intelligence to offset the difficulty of effective battlefield communication in the early 19th century. Moreover, the Russian historian concurs with Thiers' conclusion that by the speed of their own initiative the French were able to take advantage of the weather, attacking by design from out of the fog with bayonets. Curiously, this deliberacy of forethought from the French is omitted from Austerlitz in War and Peace, transmuted only into the bewilederment of the Russian forces at the fog's deep cover. The depth of that cover, though, as seen from the lack of concurrence amongst Tolstoy's sources, was likely exagerrated—or guessed at for the sake of expediency which could allegorically demonstrate the general inability of either commander or commanded to understand or affect the progress of a battle underway.
While Thiers and Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky may disagree over the precise location of the fog at Austerlitz—it either covered the Russians' left flank and dissipated early on the 2nd December or remained in swathes around the areas of low elevation on the field of engagement—the crucial point here is that there is no evidence that it either played a crucial role or affected vision at all. Here I reiterate Czartoryski and Thiers' opinion that only during the moment of actual combat was a participant's ability to perceive the battlefield clearly affected. Indeed, Czartoryski goes even further than Thiers or Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky: his eyewitness account of Austerlitz makes no mention whatsoever of fog either being present or having any effect on proceedings on the day of the battle. Alhough confusion is 'everywhere', he, like Thiers, ascribes it to Russian ineptitude and lack of ability to respond to events as they unfolded. Ermolov agrees, writing 'the troops scattered, intermingled, and it was certainly difficult for them to find their places in the dark'. Here it is only darkness that affects the troops, and Ermolov too does not mention any fog at all—and this is from the perspective of a fairly low-ranking officer caught up in the thick of the mêlée. There is nothing in any of Tolstoy's primary sources that suggest anything but strategic ineptitude, rather than a literal fog or a metaphorical fog of war, was to blame for the blunders during the course of the actual battle at Austerlitz. Indeed, Ermolov notes that 'the French army were completely prepared, if confused by how poory led the Russian army seemed to be'. The well prepared army used the fog to its advantage, the Allied forces were simply poorly led. The latter fact dominates War and Peace, the former is absent since it would contradict Toltoi's opinion that the flow of history cannot be dictated by the individual, with the brutal savagery of the battlefield the supreme example of that idea.
The French General Jean Rapp, one of the French army's leaders in the 1805 campaign, wrote of Austerlitz that, 'the Russians were not aware of the scientific plans which the Emperor had laid for drawing them upon the ground he had marked out'. This is a condensed statement of Napoleon's greatest achievement at Austerlitz and in the time immediately preceding it: the French Emperor attempted to counteract the randomness and confusion of the battlefield by turning the art of warfare into the science of warfare. Tolstoy's War and Peace fails to give any kind of credence to this achievement, even though it is apparent through the rapidity of French reaction—both to the conditions and the Allied strategy—detailed in the texts analysed in this paper. Napoleon surveyed the battlefield on the eve of battle, remained with this generals as long as possible on the day itself, despatched subordinates to survey the parts of the field he could not see, and equipped his officers with the knowhow to respond to changing conditions. He took every precaution he realistically could have done. As Tolstoy rightly points out, the Russians did not take. That notwithstanding, Tolstoy paints only half the picture. In the final analysis, the Russians were not aware of the scientific nature of Napoleon's plans, and neither is the reader of Tolstoy's Austerlitz.
4. The Historical Argument: France and Russia in the Early 19th Century
At this point, it is of considerable value to consider the wider historical picture of Austerlit, that is, outside of the sources Tolstoy used and the Austerlitz section of War and Peace. Certainly, Tolstoy may be accurate in laying the blame for defeat at the feet of the Allied force's vain and substandard leadership, yet the aforementioned inconsistencies with regards to description of the fog's role on the day of the battle and the conspicuous lack of description of the French army's actions impair the overall veracity of the Austerlitz he writes. An examination of the build-up to Austerlitz casts considerable light on the reasons behind Tolstoy's bias. By ignoring the relative positions of the French and Russian militaries in the years prior to Austerlitz, and the fact that France was a state going through a period of upheaval and transition, was fortunate to be headed by an intractable strategist and general, Tolstoy leaves his Providential theory of history intact. Simultaneously, recognition that many of the French military's achievements in the early Napoleonic wars were due to Napoleon himself would subvert the entire idea of the impossibility of the individual's dictation of historical events.
By the time of the Battle of Austerlitz in December 1805, France had effectively been on a war footing for almost fifteen years, giving Napoleon ample opportunity to experiment and perfect, for example, his battlefield communication system or the reorganisation of the French corps. Russia, entering the war in April 1805 through a treaty of alliance concluded with Britain, could have had no idea of the scale or speed of these developments within the French military. Indeed, its own period of internal political turmoil and financial troubles in the wake of Alexander I's unexpected accession to the throne in 1801 left Russia and its civil and military leaders in no position to reform the army in the way France had done. Furthermore, even if the transfer of power to Alexander had been seamless, there would still have been only four years, a third of the time available to Napoleon, to revolutionise the country's army. Tolstoy's experience of the Crimean War was of an army that had stagnated for years under a naively overconfident government that failed to even learn the lessons of the Crimean defeat and did not conduct seriously far-reaching military reforms until the 1870s. The situation in 1805 is hardly comparable.
If nobody in Russia had any real idea of the scale of the problem facing the country's army, then opportunities to experiment before the breakout War of the Third Coalition were even fewer. Napoleon, however, had plenty such opportunities—and used them to build an army in which class and society were irrelevant. For example, given the decimation of the French upper classes following the French Revolution, the country's cavalry had to be completely rebuilt 'both in spirit and in organization'. Russia had no such coercive external or internal pressures on its military, but the French had no choice but to rebuild—and were lucky that Napoleon took a personal interest in the modernisation. The opportunity to cleanse the cavalry of lazy aristocrats who stifled tactical growth was taken, but Russia had no such experience prior to 1805 (which, indeed, was the catalyst in many ways for such action prior to the eventual victory in 1812). The Russian commanders were thus neither different in any way from the French aristocracy of the previous decade nor the other military powers of Europe. For comparison, the British cavalry at the turn of the 19th century was undisciplined, unpredictable and had incompetent commanders. Tolstoy's Austerlitz shows a particularly inept leadership at the helm of the Allied forces, yet it was only in France that the leadership had been in any way modernised.
However, Napoleon did more than simply replace old troops with new ones. The French forces established novel drills, tactics and close collaboration between infantry and artillery. Of course, in hindsight, this looks remarkably familiar to Tolstoy's experience of the Crimean War when Russia, fighting in effect in trench warfare, again failed to update its tactics beyond by then outdated Napoleonic precepts. In 1805 and uniquely amongst the major powers, the French regulary practised 'coordinated responses' of massed troops, and their commanders were aware of the changing patterns within battles and rehearsed manoeuvres of use in a variety of scenarios. French formations were deliberately flexible and firefights were ideally calculated rather than spontaneous, with all of these strategies laid out in a codex, the Ordonnance. The result of this was that the French commanders could act spontaneously and in tandem on the battlefield—something lacking from Austerlitz in War and Peace but present in an albeit inchoate form in, for example, Thiers' description of the manner in which Friant was able to respond to friendly fire.
Given Bowden's evidence of a highly-evolved French military, it is difficult to see that Russia or any nation could have done much to prepare better for Austerlitz in the build-up to the 1805 campaign, especially when the Russians were fighting hundreds of miles from home and had endured a forced march, poor supply lines etc. Napoleon, meanwhile, was prepared not only on the day of the battle—as amply evident from the historical works analysed in this paper—but in the decade and a half leading up to it. Russia, meanwhile, remained at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries in effect a feudal state. In spite of the abrupt accession of Alexander I to the thone, it was going through a period of relative stability. As a result, there was no evidence prior to the War of the Third Coalition that the Russian army was in need of complete reform. On the contrary, in its last military encounters with European nations in 1799, Russia had emerged either victorious or undefeated at the Battles of Cassano and Alkmaar. There is, however, no doubting in hindsight only the deficiencies of the Russian military: 25% of the army was conscripted, and the quality of the conscripts was generally low; headquarters was overly bureaucratic; rank was linked with class rather than ability. However, it is easy to see that these problems reflected contemporaneous Russian society as a whole: they are at root cause social, rather than military. If the problems spread throughout the whole of society, it is unfair to blame the military command alone for the resulting failings, as Tolstoy's albeit neatly fictionalised Austerlitz does.
Putting to one side the question of general military development, there is no doubt that the armies of the 18th and early 19th centuries had difficulty acquiring real-time intelligence. Napoleon as military scientist, though, took as many precautions as possible to counteract this problem by, as already described, personally scouting out the battlefield and having his generals remain convened for the maximum possible time as well as personally selecting reconnnaissance officers and creating unity between different arms of the military where the Russians remained class-obsessed and possessed of poor communication lines: in every respect an ancien régime army. Could it have been fortuitous coincidence or Providence at play when Napoleon picked out the Pratzenberg Heights as a crucial focus before the battle, hid troops below them and released them when they would be most likely to break the Russian line (which they did)? Likewise, the fact that Napoleon reconnoitred the terrain and the Russian generals did not? The evidence of the histories Tolstoy read and hindsight suggest that Napoleon recognised that the general cannot entirely control what happens when the battle gets going, but he can certainly better his odds by preparing beforehand. There was no reason why the Russian generals, generally successful before 1805, should have done the same. Napoleon was not just lucky—he made his own luck.
5. Conclusion
If Tolstoy's goal in his war writing was to be truthful—in writing War and Peace to record a 'truthful, just history' and in the Sevastopol Stories to install as his hero 'truth'—then repeated omissions of significant historical facts undermine the truth of his work. What Tolstoy does say may be entirely true, but without the detail of a full picture of reality, that truth can only ever be incomplete and coloured by a deviation from the verisimilitude with which he sought to portray the rest of Russian life in War and Peace. As a result, the novel's depiction of the military leaderships is not factually inaccurate but misleading. This streak of incompleteness is common both, as Clarence Manning points out, to the Sevastopol Stories and, from my analysis, Austerlitz in War and Peace. One wonders to what extent it runs throughout all of Tolstoy's war writing.Manning writes the following: The army for Tolstoy does not exist as a unit. There exist merely seeral thousand soldiers, each of whom has an individual psychology and an individual problem, however much they may be dressed in similar uniforms and consent to move as a unitWhile this may have been a problem for the ancien régime armies on the Allied side at Austerlitz, the French army had by 1805 changed beyond recognition. While the problems that the individual in the unit traditionally faced during battle—disorientation, confusion, incomprehension of the scope of the action—still indubitably existed for them, the French had made a huge number of preparations to eliminate them. With the hindsight of modern histories the scientific approach to the battlefield taken by the French is clear, but is too fairly clear to the diligent reader of the primary sources read by Tolstoy. In the final analysis, Tolstoy's omissions result in a failure to delineate the mob from the army: while the Russian forces, mired in the problems of conscription, snobbery and, may have resembled a mob, the French definitively did not.
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