NAPOLEON, RUSSIA, AND THE KAISER

Why Russia Won in 1812, and Why She Is "Coming Back" in 1915

Frederick James Gregg

THERE have been four surprises, in the present war, as regards Russia. These surprises have been, first, her rapid mobilization; second, the force of her drive into Galicia; third, the seemingly disastrous nature of her retreat, and fourth, the imposing demonstration of her resiliency, when she showed that she could "come back," in spite of the shortage of ammunition, which shortage had been one of the grounds of Teutonic confidence.

When you have the Slav in a corner you have caught a Tartar.

Only a few months ago the timorous were saying that Russia was out of it. They took events at their face value. The occupation of Warsaw by the Germans on August 5th looked like a conclusive victory. But it was no such thing, if we are to take the word of that amateur of war, Napoleon the Great. That authority laid it down as a working rule that to defeat the enemy was a pure waste of men and material, if you did not break up, capture or destroy his army. Our own Lincoln, no fighting man, but a man of great good sense, thought the same way. " We have driven the enemy from our soil," they once telegraphed to him. "My God, is that all?" he exclaimed as he read the despatch.

If we believe, as so many people do, that the Germans know everything, it is impossible to imagine that the great offensive against Russia was the result of anything but a doctrine of despair. The plan to put France out of the game by the capture of Paris had failed. The blow at England by way of Calais had come to nothing. A stroke to the eastward was invited by the oncoming of the Czar's millions.

With the details of Napoleon's adventure familiar to every graduate of a military school in Germany it was not a cheerful enterprise.

The Russians have been brutally frank about their losses, but their secrecy about their general operations has been even greater than that of the English and French. We can't even guess to what extent the original offensive of the Grand Duke was intended to relieve the pressure on Joffre and French on the west, while ammunition factories were being organized, and Kitchener's armies were being recruited in the British Isles. But the fact remains that the Czar's opollchentsi, or soldiers, cheerful, sturdy, reliable, more than met all the demands made upon them when they were put in the field under circumstances which would have been heart-breaking to Germans.

WHAT was not seen by many was that the difficulties of the Kaiser's generals only began when the Russians began to withdraw through their own territory. Fortresses were captured by the Germans, but the great guns and supplies had been removed; cities were taken, but everything valuable was gone, and the invader, instead of finding any place for rest and recuperation, was confronted on all sides by huge conflagrations Farms went up in flames. The population had vanished. Compared with the desert that the Russians left behind them, the country passed over by Sherman on his march to the sea was like a smiling garden. With a characteristic display of sensibility the Kaiser's Chancellor, in the course of a speech, deplored the savage tactics of the foe, who could thus destroy their own property in order to put obstacles in the way of the Fatherland, and the forces of civilization.

BATTLES were fought, but, time and again, the Russians escaped. At the end of the great strategic movements the pincers were closed, but there was nothing there when the points came together. It was as maddening as the experience of Napoleon himself when he complained that the Russians would not wait and accept battle on his terms.

The commonest criticism in the present war has been that there could be no comparison with, say, the Napoleonic wars, because of differences of conditions in respect to equipment. When the advance on Russia began we were told that the Germans would make roads, build railways, in fact extemporize all modern resources as they went along. Indeed, one of the boasts of a high Berlin government official was to the effect that bread baked for the Kaiser's troops in the neighborhood of the Imperial Capital was served to the troops on the Eastern front before it had become stale.

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BUT, as a matter of fact, the mobility of the Germans in the Russian campaign, now in progress, is ridiculous compared with the speed with which Napoleon in 1812 swept with his mongrel Grand Army of 610,000 French, Germans, Italians, Dutchmen and Poles across the border on his disastrous journey to Moscow. Four months after he had crossed the Niemen, then the Russian boundary, the French Emperor was in possession of Moscow, the ancient capital of the Czars. On the other hand it took the so-called victorious generals of the Kaiser no less than thirteen months to get within 300 miles of Petrograd. In four days Napoleon made the journey from Kovno to Vilna. The former city was in German hands on August 18, 1915. It was a whole month later that Vilna was occupied. Four days in Napoleon's time of plain marching, with all that that means, as compared with thirty days in this period of trains, motor cars, motor trucks and all the other instruments of efficiency. And beyond, towards St. Petersburg, stretches a region of swamps, bogs and morasses that must terrify even von Hindenberg himself.

Napoleon thought that by striking at Moscow he was really aiming at the heart of Russia; the Kaiser thought that, by striking at Petrograd, he was hitting at a vital spot. Napoleon found that his achievement brought no gain. The Russian authorities have faced the possible evacuation of Petrograd with equanimity. They realized that the further they withdraw the greater the problem for Germany.

But if the Kaiser's campaign against Russia was dictated by necessity—the necessity of striving to break one of the Allies away from the combination formed against the Teutonic Empires—Germany, having failed in this, is in a worse situation than Napoleon was when he waited in vain in Moscow for the Czar Alexander to surrender. For Napoleon went into Russia of his own free will and without any apprehensions as to what was going on in any other part of Europe. He did not dream that Wellington was hammering nails into his political coffin in Spain. As far back as 1804 Napoleon said that he was "weary of Europe." In 1812 he remarked: "In three years I shall be master of the Universe."

He was seeing colonies in the moon.

From the moment, last year, when the Allies declared that none of them would agree to a peace without the consent of all the rest, they have shown a solidarity greater than that ever displayed by the opponents of Napoleon. Even after the drubbing which he got in the Russian Campaign, he was not chastened. To the Austrian Ambassador's offer of terms he retorted—"I know how to die but not how to yield an inch of territory." History repeats itself in the Prussian talk about the retention of Belgium, a strip of France and the re-organization—from Berlin—of Poland.

RUSSIA cannot be squeezed. Her population is 170 millions, of whom 140 millions are in Europe. She cannot be starved, since she grows 51 per cent of the rye, 33 per cent of the barley, 25 per cent of the oats and 22 per cent of the wheat harvested, on an average, in the whole world. She has plenty of coal and oil. Furthermore, it was the war with Japan that caused her to wake up to the immense mineral and agricultural wealth of Siberia.

Russia got into the war With an effective force of thirty-seven army corps and twenty-six army divisions, while her organization called for the formation of twenty-seven extra reserve divisions.

At that time the German war strength was twentyfive army corps, eleven cavalry divisions, with reserve and Landsturm formations. But in estimating the Russian resources, it is necessary to keep in mind the fact that the population of European Russia is twice that of Germany.

IN THE present war the Czar's armies have been free from the terrible handicap that afflicted them in the Japanese affair. They have not had to operate over a single-track railroad 3,500 miles in length; they have not been interfered with constantly by the authorities at Petrograd, and finally, whereas the other war was conducted to the tune of discontent and threatened revolution in the great cities, the present one is immensely popular and has united all parties, racial and political, as they never were united before. Russia is united as not even Germany is united.