Putting Theory into Practice: Ludwig von Wolzogen and the Russian Campaign in 1812

This article aims at the reconstruction of the intellectual background to the Russian campaign in 1812 and seeks to readdress a particular theoretical approach to war in history. In a first step, we consider the contemporary controversy that still exists today regarding Russian war planning before 1812 and the sources available to us. In a second step, we enter into a detailed analysis of Wolzogen’s ‘Memorandum concerning Napoleon and the way to wage war against him’ (written 1809). ¹

The Napoleonic Era is known for its decisive battles. Nevertheless its turning point was not brought about by battle but by retreat of the defender. The discussion on whether the Russian retreat all the way back to Moscow had followed a design or had rather been induced by circumstance is as old as the legendary campaign itself. What seems to be certain, though, is that if there had been a plan to withdraw beyond the Dvina river it was known but to a few persons. A letter which Tsar Alexander I. wrote to his minister of war, Michael Alexander Barclay de Tolly, in late 1812 supports this view:

Le plan de campagne que nous avons adopté, … devait cependant nécessairement rencontrer beaucoup de dèsapprobation et de dépréciations dans une nation, qui connaissant peu l’art de la guerre et se rappellant des succès faciles, … ne pouvait que s’effaroucher d’opérations militaires, qui avaient pour but de conduire l’ennemi dans l’intérieur du pays. ²

With that said, Carl von Clausewitz’s subsequent claim that there had never been a plan of retreat beyond the Dvina must be called into question. The Tsar’s letter furthermore helps to understand the confusion that existed even amongst Russian generals. ³ As archive-based research shows, there existed a vast amount of memoranda before 1812 suggesting a defensive strategy. ⁴ The earliest plan for a retreat beyond the Dvina–Dnieper line, which has been passed down to us, was handed in on 22 August 1810 by Ludwig von Wolzogen, a newcomer in the Russian army and assistant to Phull. ⁵

Further research in the nineteenth century has shown that the peculiar emphasis which Wolzogen laid on the importance of subsistence is a feature which proves his intellectual affinity with General Carl Ludwig von Phull’s scientific writings. ⁶ Phull, one of the closest military advisors to Tsar Alexander since December 1806, is chiefly remembered for having initiated the retreat to his ‘famous fortified camp at Drissa’. But was Drissa, a fortification at the Dvina river, really the point ‘on which [Phull’s] defensive strategy rested’? ⁷ The Prussian general Carl von Müffling later gave an account which sheds further light on the possible causes of the confusions which struck Russian generals in 1812. In 1819 he visited Phull in The Hague taking the opportunity to inquire into the Russian planning for the campaign of 1812 which had by then acquired legendary status. The rumour that a retreat beyond the Dvina had never been designed was contradicted by the following conversation:

… but [I] was friendly received by him and since he lived only in the past he obliged me by reading out his operational plan to the campaign of 1812 with all its details.

The first section laid out the concentration in the camp of Drissa, the following steps continued with the retreat on the street to Moscow. What caught my attention was the diligence with which the subsistence of the retreating army was calculated, whilst at the same time it was arranged that the enemy during his advance would find neither food supplies nor people nor cattle and horses ….

In beforehand chosen segments the army was supposed to perform a fighting retreat. …

Phull closed: the emperor [Alexander I.] had approved of the plan entirely but only announced the first segment up to the camp of Drissa as instruction, whereas commanding absolute secrecy in respect to all further steps whereby he [Phull] had been deprived of all means to defend his plan since his first segment must have made the impression of mere patchwork, indeed, if considered without the others and not as part of a whole. ⁸

This evidence fits in with the Tsar’s testimony that Phull had actually planned the Russian retreat ⁹ as it finally took place (all the way beyond Moscow) and with the fact that the Tsar intentionally had left his generals to believe in a Russian offensive plan until the outbreak of hostilities. ¹⁰ The erroneous inference that Drissa had supposedly been picked as a scene for a ‘major battle’ (as for instance Clausewitz had hoped) ¹¹ thus is to be accounted for by a selective information policy on Tsar Alexander’s part. The detailed plan that Phull showed to Müffling in 1819 seems to have been lost. ¹² Wolzogen’s memorandum of 1809, written while he was assistant to Phull, therefore proves to be the document on which to reconstruct the secret Russian war plan for 1812. However, even if the importance of Wolzogen’s memoranda is generally accepted, confusion continues to exist. Wolzogen’s drafts, though published, are repeatedly associated with the erroneous idea that a Russian plan had not contained a retreat beyond the Dvina–Dnieper line. Richard K. Riehn, for instance, summons his planning as follows:

The suggested objective of Wolzogen’s retreat was a fortress or fortified encampment. He had proposed Riga, Drissa, Bobruisk, and Kiev as likely points for such a scheme. The major flaw in this plan was that it did not envision continuing operations beyond the Dvina, Beresina, and Dnieper rivers, thus eschewing the utilization of the vast Russian expanses to effect a fragmentation and dispersal of the enemies’ forces. ¹³

But this does not reveal Wolzogen’s planning. None of the positions he picked was explicitly meant to define a termination-point of retreat but only to be a temporary halt along the ‘lines of retreat’. His idea was a ‘defensive system’ which would allow a dynamic reaction to the enemy’s advances in order to ‘avoid battles whatsoever’, since he knew that

Any position can be outflanked … Some positions, therefore, will only be advantageously maintained for hours, some for several days. Thus, it is highly necessary to evaluate the quality of any position according to time and location and to know the points, which, if taken by the enemy, nullify the advantages of a position. …

So far we have deduced the principles … for seeking rearward-lying, suitable, entrenched positions, and adopted as the main rule: to avoid battles whatsoever …. But – as might be demurred – would we not by this system soon come out on the opposite border of our country?’ ¹⁴

Certainly such an outcome was not to be expected in consideration of Russia’s vast dimensions and the comparably limited resources of the French army. Riehn’s interpretation is therefore wrong. The key of Wolzogen’s plan was a retreat of gigantic dimensions, though not for its own sake but only as a response to the enemy’s advances. Highly significant, Riehn in this context stresses the influence of a Prussian war theorist, Dietrich von Bülow, and his considerable impact on Phull’s and Barclay’s war planning by his strategic maxim to acquire flanking positions towards the enemy. ¹⁵ Riehn, however, did not realize that his interpretation of Wolzogen and Phull contradicts this theoretical background. To stop the retreat in Drissa would have meant a major battle and thereby a departure from Bülow. His theory required a retreat in divergent directions towards one’s ‘base of operations’, that is a ‘defensive system’, so that the enemy’s advance would cause its encirclement itself.

Wolzogen’s memorandum offers unique insights into the intellectual background on which the Russian victory was achieved. Beneath the chaotic events of 1812 there lay a structure only visible to those acquainted with a specific dynamic theory of non-violence originally elaborated by the Prussian war theorist Dietrich von Bülow.

Although research in war theory has repeatedly implied a major theoretical back story to Russian war planning before 1812 by alluding to Bülow’s influence, this has never gone into any detail. ¹⁶ Below, I therefore want to offer a closer analysis by comparing Wolzogen’s way of planning with its supposed ultimate source, namely the Bülowian theory.

For this purpose I will first try to reconstruct the intellectual environment in which Wolzogen was educated and which made him specifically perceptive to Bülow’s theory of war and dynamistic approach to conflict. In a second step, I will turn to the historical events in which Wolzogen elaborated his memorandum of 1809, and analyse its debts to Bülow’s theory.

In October 1809 Ludwig von Wolzogen (1773–1845) drafted a memorandum to cope with the feared possibility that Napoleon would invade Russia. This ‘Memorandum concerning Napoleon and the way to wage war against him’ (‘Denkschrift über Napoleon und die Art gegen ihn Krieg zu führen’) ¹⁷ was first handed to the Prince of Wolkonsky on 22 August 1810 and then passed on to Tsar Alexander I, upon whom it made a ‘deep and lasting’ impression. ¹⁸ One of the central aspects of this plan was to avoid all battles. In the time of Napoleonic warfare, what – one may ask – could make anybody put forward a plan like this? The answer seems to lie here: the new confidence in dynamics. Eleven years earlier, in his ‘Spirit of the Modern System of War’ (‘Geist des neuern Kriegssystems’), ¹⁹ the Prussian Dietrich von Bülow had suggested that armies should be viewed as bodies which interact dynamically and can find their equilibrium as (strategic) forces acting at a distance. Even his fellow-countryman and founder of modern war theory, Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), who was fundamentally critical of Bülow’s theory, admitted that his own career as a philosopher of war had begun with Bülow. ²⁰ It has often been said that an important change in Clausewitz’s view of the nature of war occurred with Napoleon’s defeat after his occupation of Moscow. ²¹ Whereas Clausewitz had hitherto concentrated on the all-importance of battle, this belief was then shaken. After his own experiences in 1812, he himself declared that in every war there was such a thing as a ‘common centre of gravity’ (‘gemeinschaftliche[r] Schwerpunkt’) which if ignored by any of the war parties would eventuate in its being ‘condemned to the costs’. ²² A theory of war required more than mere material considerations. Apart from Clausewitz’s criticism of Bülow’s idea of abandoning the priority of battle, he himself started to rethink his own ideas and came up with the idea of ‘a dynamic system of forces’ ²³ and supposed war to be suffused by ‘spirits’ (‘Geister’), ²⁴ which allowed no reductionist perspective on the battleground, but rather widened a general’s outlook by pointing at hidden dynamic causes, still to be discovered. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Clausewitz’s former classmate Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern (1780–1847) had begun to make dynamics an explicit demand of military thought, creating the term ‘war dynamics’ (Kriegsdynamik). ²⁵ Despite the essential differences between Bülow’s concept of strategic forces at a distance and the rather romanticist idea of dynamics later displayed in the works of Clausewitz and Rühle von Lilienstern, it is apparent that the quest for dynamics was at the core of this essentially Prussian debate at the outset of the nineteenth century.

Napoleon’s defeat in Russia had an essential impact on Clausewitz. He himself had taken part in the campaign of 1812 in Russian service. In his masterpiece ‘On War’ he later wrote,

When, in the beginning of the campaign of 1812, the Russian army backed away from the French, it was certainly able to consider the whole of Russia as its base all the more since the great dimensions of this country provided the army with great space wherever it turned to. This idea was not illusive, but entered into life when other Russian armies advanced against the French from several sides … ²⁶

During the campaign of 1812 Clausewitz came to know Ludwig von Wolzogen personally, but he was never taken into confidence over the secret plan the Russian high command had been pondering since 1807. ²⁷ It revealed itself to Clausewitz only by the subsequent course of events. Nevertheless, Wolzogen’s ideas had their roots in a discussion in which Clausewitz had participated. Being a former student at the ‘Academy of young officers’ (‘Akademie für junge Offiziere’) and member of the ‘Military Society of Berlin’ (‘Militärische Gesellschaft in Berlin’), Clausewitz himself had experienced this new discussion since 1801 from close quarters. Bülow was soon considered a ‘higher celebrity’. ²⁸ But how, if at all, did this idea of war dynamics, which would – perhaps for the first time in war theory – push battle to the background, so swiftly emerge in Russia, not only to be discussed as in Berlin, but to be put into action in 1812? We will see later that it was Napoleon’s expansion in Germany, for one thing, that caused this idea to travel further north-east, with former Prussian officers such as Carl Ludwig von Phull and Ludwig von Wolzogen who were seeking Russian service. ²⁹

Curiously, the Prussian quest for a dynamical system of war had initially taken off in the late 1790s through the work of a dedicated pacifist, the Prussian veteran Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst (1733–1814). Having served as an adjutant to King Frederic II of Prussia during the Seven Years’ War, he had never forgotten the horrors of the battlefields. Instead of celebrating the king who soon acquired the status of a German national hero, Berenhorst, in his ‘Reflections on the Art of War’ (‘Betrachtungen über die Kriegskunst’), ³⁰ made it a matter of conscience ‘not to commit the old folly’ of historians ‘to whittle idols’. This was an open affront to Frederic’s many admirers, who spoke of him as ‘Frederic the Great’. Berenhorst’s ‘Reflections’, published in three volumes in the 1790s, were to invoke a change in the Prussian army. As Clausewitz’s famous teacher Gerhard von Scharnhorst (1755–1813) later put it, ‘No other book was read like his.’ ³¹ With deep concern Berenhorst looked into the future of Europe. In his eyes the French Revolution was the result of what he called the ‘bellicose system’ of Europe destroying its ‘political system’. Revolutions were the result of wars fought without restraints. Wars produce debts which would eventuate in bankruptcy: ‘wars, though, will from now on be followed by revolutions’. ³²

The deeper roots lay in the unpredictability of conflicts. What was needed was a scientific device for accurately ‘estimating the power and vigour of the fighting parties to forestall salubriously the bloody industry of battle defiling mankind’. In his recourse to Kantian philosophy he therefore asked for a ‘stable point of view’ (‘festen Standpunkt’) to discover ‘dynamic rules’ (‘dynamische Regeln’) as a necessary precondition for a peace system that would last. It was Adam Heinrich Dietrich von Bülow (1763–1807) who would continue this scheme. He took Berenhorst at his word, developing a model closely orientated in Newtonian physics. Bülow stressed that, as the law of gravity depended on the heaviness of mass, so could social systems be looked at as solely dependent on the maintenance of social bodies and their sources of subsistence. In a close analogy to Newton’s concept of mass, he argued that states are attracted towards each other by the other’s resources. At the same time, these resources provide social bodies with some sort of inertia. Thus they are saved from colliding because of their constant need of maintaining their own supply lines and subsistence. The dependency of social bodies, and thus armies, on considering the maintenance of their own ‘mass’ – that is, their own sources of subsistence – opened the way for predicting their necessary interactions or decay in a scientific ‘balance of power’, just like the ‘planetary world bodies’ of our solar system. The astonishing idea he came forward with in 1799 was a ‘system’ that, as he supposed, would guarantee a ‘perpetual peace’ forced upon humankind by their own wish to maintain their subsistence, and which would connect war theory with the recent peace discussion in Germany strongly initiated by Immanuel Kant. In the eyes of many, Bülow had caused a sensation. The Prussian war theorist Julius von Voss (1768–1832) celebrated him as a man who had approached the scientific quest for a system of war ‘with the elementary perspicacity of a Newton’. ³³ Bülow promoted a theory of war that was meant to fulfil the Kantian ‘categorical imperative’ with his newly developed ‘theory of subsistence’, which would make battle a mere ‘complement’ of an essentially dynamic system of excentric and concentric motions chiefly focusing on saving one’s own supply lines. In Prussia this turned the whole debate up-side-down, making war studies now a peace discussion which would guarantee social balances with a minimum of physical violence. As his English translator Charles Malorti de Martemont put it,

The general and vague object of conquering the enemy … was abandoned for that of conquering him in a particular point … and stopping judiciously in the midst of triumphs, not so much on an estimate respecting the enemy, over whom a superiority might be still maintained, as respecting the victorious army, in order that its forces might not be exhausted. ³⁴

Bülow became the ‘strategic and operational mentor of a whole generation’. ³⁵ This new theory was eventually put into practice by Ludwig von Wolzogen and the Russian high command in 1812.

Wolzogen was no Prussian. Nevertheless the new Newtonian paradigm of dynamics had long reached the continent and by 1800 suffused German intellectual life. Wolzogen was a child of the Enlightenment. He was educated at one of the leading institutions of German education, the famous ‘Hohe Carlsschule’, founded by Carl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg, as a sort of ‘nursery’ for his military elite. This institution had a great impact on German intellectual history. It proved to be receptive to the Scottish Enlightenment and the idea of broadening the scope of the Newtonian model to issues of biology, society, and epistemology. One of its most influential teachers was Carl Friedrich (von) Kielmeyer (1765–1844), who taught at the institution while Wolzogen was its student. ³⁶ Kielmeyer became famous for his endeavours to acquire a dynamical theory of the evolution of life, strongly focused on Newton and Kant. ³⁷ His booklet ‘About the Forces of Nature’ (‘Über die Kräfte der Natur’) became one of the founding documents of the pre-Darwinian discussion about the evolution of species on the continent. Kielmeyer’s most celebrated student and friend was Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), who was one of the classmates of Ludwig von Wolzogen and who, as Wolzogen puts it, ‘undoubtedly became the most famous amongst us’. ³⁸ After his time at the ‘Carlsschule’ Wolzogen had entered Prussian service in 1794 and in 1802 ‘received the honour’ of becoming an associate member of the ‘Military Society of Berlin’, which was a Prussian pilot scheme for military reforms. ³⁹ Stationed in Silesia during these years, Wolzogen used his free time for military studies, visiting the various theatres of the recent Seven Years’ War, which had made Prussia famous in the world. On these trips, Wolzogen remembered, ‘Tempelhof’s History of the Seven Years’ War was my steady companion’. ⁴⁰ What he meant was the German translation of ‘The History of the Late War in Germany’, written by the Welshman Henry H.E. Lloyd (c.1718–83), which Georg Friedrich von Tempelhof (1737–1807) not only translated but later continued and completed on his own with five further volumes. ⁴¹ Tempelhof’s translation of the first volume contained substantial commentaries, which put an emphasis on supplies and thereby proved an essential basis for Bülow’s later achievements. In retrospect, Wolzogen realized that, during these years of additional self-education, he had made the acquaintance of important protagonists of the Prussian war-theoretical discussion, such as Christian von Massenbach, who would eventually publish his counter-criticism of Berenhorst’s ‘Reflections on the Art of War’ in 1802, and Konstantin von Lossau, who would have his later work ‘Der Krieg’ (‘The War’) proofread by the elderly Berenhorst. Wolzogen started his career in a vibrant atmosphere of new ideas. It was the ‘Golden Age’ of a theoretical approach to the chaotic phenomenon of war, but at the same time it was an atmosphere of alarming social upheavals that made it so intense. When the Napoleonic Era reached its climax in 1812, Wolzogen would play a central role in the events and bring the theoretical outlook he had gathered in his times in Württembergian and Prussian service to the test.

Since the great events of 1812, which were to prove so fatal for the Grande Armée, there has been constant debate whether the Russian retreat had – or had not – followed a grand design. For decades after their posthumous publication since 1832 the views expressed in Clausewitz’s writings held sway. ⁴² According to Clausewitz, the outcome of 1812 had not been planned by anybody. In his view, the Russian retreat had been the result of mere chance and had ‘made itself by itself’. ⁴³ For Clausewitz it seemed impossible that there had been a master plan behind the events of 1812, which he recalled as chaotic. Battles like Borodino seemed to prove that no such plan had ever existed. In fact for him it had become apparent that the Russian high command had sought a tactical solution: ‘If the voluntary retreat into the centre of the Russian Europe would have ensued a system, one could unhesitatingly have set oneself to a further retreat … But there was not a trace of such a thinking in those who conducted the war.’ ⁴⁴ Though he had entered Russian service only as late as 1812 and was likely to be ill-informed, Clausewitz was sure that, if anyone had ever discussed the idea ‘that Bonaparte would perish by the great dimensions of the Russian Empire’, then it would have been Scharnhorst, his own teacher. Clausewitz regarded it as an idea that had only been put forward ‘in Berlin’ and not been taken into consideration. ⁴⁵ Ironically, he even believed that he himself had been one of the first to make the Russian general and close advisor of Tsar Alexander, Carl Ludwig von Phull (1757–1826), consider a strategy of retreat. According to Clausewitz this had happened at Russian headquarters near Drissa in late June 1812, in the midst of the Russian operations. ⁴⁶ But according to one important witness, the Russian general Prince Eugen of Württemberg (1788–1857), Clausewitz, though a close observer and on good terms with Ludwig von Wolzogen, remained ill-informed and was pretty much kept in the dark:

What Clausewitz says about the Russian plan of operations is, in so far as he could have been informed, true. The [strategic] point at Drissa was in fact still to close [to the western borders of Russia] to receive the benefits of a defensive war. That is why it was abandoned for the more decisive orientation. Still in Germany and France one has constantly tried to deny the true existence of a fixed plan which in principle stood behind all the manoeuvres on the Russian side during this campaign … ⁴⁷

The publication of various memoirs and sets of documents, and archive-based research in the nineteenth century, soon revealed that the retreat had not been the result of mere chance. The memoirs of the subsequent Prussian Field Marshal Carl von Müffling confirm what rumours had suggested. When in 1819 Müffling visited General Phull, the latter had the chance to confirm that a retreat far beyond the camp of Drissa, and if necessary even to Moscow, had been envisaged. Phull declared that in 1812 he had not been able to defend himself against the otherwise just criticism of his fellow generals because Tsar Alexander had strictly forbidden him to reveal anything of the full plan that went beyond the retreat to Drissa. ⁴⁸

But still Clausewitz’s account was the one which established the terms in which these events were to be viewed. Things started to change in the German-language literature when the Russian veteran Prince Eugen of Württemberg, who had commanded Russian troops in 1812, published a crucial document written in October 1809 by his former teacher Wolzogen, who had been Phull’s right-hand man since 1807, ⁴⁹ giving the ultimate proof that a retreat far beyond the Dvina and Dnjepr had in fact been planned. The prince, who had accompanied Wolzogen during the genesis of this document in 1809, published this paper in 1846 – just after Wolzogen’s death – declaring that he had no other intention but to enlighten history about what had truly happened in 1812:

Time is pressing, if with myself is not to disappear one of the last in the land of the living who can personally give an account and response for the true context of the greatest incident of our epoch. At any rate I will succeed to submit the most unmistakable proof that the emperor Alexander in the year of 1812 acted completely systematically, and that Napoleon’s downfall was not the success of incidental and unexpected circumstances but the work of a plan calculated in advance, well-conceived and considered in all its prospects, the fundamentals of which I possess the most reliable evidence. ⁵⁰

When Wolzogen’s memoirs were published posthumously, the old preconceptions were shaken all the more. A reviewer in the ‘Allgemeine Zeitung München’ tried to explain these confusions:

This probably happened in the wake of the account of the Russian campaign by the greatest military thinker of our time, the General v. Clausewitz, who shows no inclination to concede any personage any dominating, leading influence on the events of that time. ⁵¹

This assumption prevailed until 1851. Not only did Wolzogen’s memoirs reveal the perspective of a man who had moved in the inner circles of Russian high command since entering Russian service in 1807, they contained a supplement with a whole collection of detailed drafts since 1809 which proved that the events of 1812 had followed a design and that Wolzogen had been one of the chief architects. But why did all this remain obscure for so long and is even still today? Even in the most recent accounts of 1812 there is ignorance about the fact that such a plan of retreat had existed and that this plan had been discussed within the highest circles of the Russian military leadership, including the Tsar himself. The prevailing opinion was recently propagated again by Adam Zamoyski

Withdrawal into Russia was not something that could be seriously considered when there was a numerous and well-equipped army standing in defence of her borders, and neither Barclay nor Alexander, nor any of the Russian generals for a moment contemplated such a strategy. It would have been politically inadmissible and militarily absurd. ⁵²

Zamoyski based himself upon Clausewitz and others who, with similar clarity, rejected such a possibility altogether. ⁵³ One reason of this plan’s continuous obscurity lies in its highly innovative and revolutionary content, which had been kept strictly secret even during the campaign. A hundred years later Otto Stockhorner von Starein was able to give a startling explanation for what had been so mysterious to Clausewitz, by showing that Tsar Alexander thought Wolzogen’s plan altogether too innovative to be made known to his army. ⁵⁴ Shortly after Wolzogen had handed in his first memorandum on 22 August 1810, he was made personal adjutant by the Tsar and officially ordered to continue his scientific work with General Carl Ludwig von Phull, in whose house Wolzogen had been living since moving to St Petersburg. ⁵⁵ In 1811 the Tsar sent Wolzogen on a journey in order to develop in more detail the plan for the expected war theatre. Its main purpose was to find the best ‘lines of retreat’, which were supposed to be ‘as long as possible’, as Wolzogen’s first ‘Memorandum’ had put it. Eight further plans were the result of this mission, which lasted from 29 June to 20 November 1811. ⁵⁶ In his later memoires Wolzogen always took pains to emphasize the fact that the ‘leading idea’ behind all preparations should be attributed to his protégé Phull. ⁵⁷ Nevertheless, as Smitt confirmed, no such plan drafted by Phull himself could be found amongst the documents of the Russian General Staff. ⁵⁸ Since Wolzogen’s position was akin to that of a student to the much older general, it was strongly suspected by authors like Smitt and Friedrich von Batz that Wolzogen’s plan – being in strong accordance with Phull’s ideas – was in fact what Wolzogen called the ‘Phull’schen Plan’, with himself being perhaps the only one who had ever drawn it up effectively on paper. ⁵⁹

Let us now turn to Wolzogen’s central concepts, first put forward in his ‘Memorandum’ of October 1809. If France decided to enter Russia, Wolzogen argued, the ‘first rule’ for a campaign would be ‘not to risk a battle against Napoleon’. ⁶⁰ With great self-confidence Wolzogen declared, ‘This extraordinary man simply has the art for himself; therefore one has to offer the science in reply.’ ⁶¹ Wolzogen reveals a conception of war that in no way concentrated on the idea of guarding borders of a country:

… anyway one has to banish the notion to defend the country or the borders. Only by wearing down the enemy’s army one covers his country, may this happen a hundred miles before our borders or a hundred miles backwards in the centre of our country – near Bialistok or Pultava –; howsoever! ⁶²

But how was this to happen without battle? According to Wolzogen, two principles applied, which would follow a dynamical perception of war and would in his eyes necessarily eventuate in a stable equilibrium. These two principles were: (1) retreat excentrically as far as necessary to cover your own resources and (2) advance concentrically against your enemy’s supply lines, which will be exposed by his own advancement. According to this model, war was a dynamical interaction of bodies defined not by physical contact but by their maintenance of supplies and attraction of the enemy’s resources. The one who could save his ‘base of operations’ (‘Operationsbasis’), that is his source of subsistence through the events, would succeed in the end. The equilibrium – advancing the enemy’s resources and keeping up one’s own supply lines – constituted a system modified only by the historically given allocation of supplies. Neither the theatre nor its battlegrounds but the distribution of masses of supplies were to provide war with the requirements of a dynamical balance. This perspective concentrated on the idea of anticipating interactions without physical contact. It obliged Wolzogen to see Russia’s only chance in limiting its actions to a ‘defensive system that is based on motions’. The idea was to locate ‘lines of retreat’ for the Russian army which Napoleon would have to follow in his aim of achieving a decisive battle and would result in his becoming trapped – not tactically but strategically. For this purpose Wolzogen proposed using two armies. Their function would be to suggest the possibility of battle before falling back and retreating in different directions to the furthest points of the Russian hinterland. Should the Grande Armée advance, these two Russian armies, by retreating excentrically, would gain the flanks of the enemy’s ever more overstretched supply lines. The more the French army tried to attack one of the retreating armies with superior forces, the more these lines would be exposed. The progress of the French alone had to broaden their frontline and thereby endanger their subsistence with every further advancement into the Russian Empire. The essential idea to deploy two separate armies implied a system of excentric retreats and concentric counter attacks against the Grand Armée, which were not to be directed against the army itself but against its supply lines from the west. The idea that armies were dependent on supplies was not new. What was new was the extent to which this plan relied on its relevance to predict socio-dynamic processes of world-historical dimensions and Wolzogen’s exclusive confidence in this device:

… for this makes it possible for us to force the enemy into retreat through mighty diversions. These diversions alone give our defensive system life and strength and therefore we advise deploying a second army, which to that end at the beginning of its appearance would have to take a direction according to that purpose. Its direction will meet these ends if the frontlines of both armies cross each other if prolonged in an inward angle. Accordingly, their respective lines of retreat are diverging going back to their large base, whereas their lines of attack are converging, that is, directed against the back of the progressing army of the enemy.

Once they are attacked, the task of both is to retreat successively into the previously selected positions, every single one of which will, provided it is chosen correctly and furnished with entrenchments, detain the enemy and cost him men. If hereby the enemy has turned himself against one of the two armies, the other, which is under no threat, has to make use of this gain in time by launching a powerful offensive … ⁶³

Even this ‘powerful offensive’ was not meant to end in a battle. On the contrary, Wolzogen warned his readers that ‘one always has to be wary that the enemy turns back all of a sudden’. This makes perfectly clear what Wolzogen was aiming at. The central scheme was, as he put it in his first draft, ‘to avoid a major battle’ (‘eine Generalschlacht zu vermeiden’). ⁶⁴ If we consider Wolzogen’s plan, it becomes obvious that the camp of Drissa besides the Dvina had never been planned as the ultimate point of retreat. ‘Any position’, Wolzogen had explained, ‘can be outflanked’ and the central ideal was most certainly ‘to retreat successively into the previously selected positions’ and this, having a vague idea of the dramatic scale Napoleon’s efforts would finally take on in 1812, ‘as long as possible’. Wolzogen obviously did not contemplate seeking battles and instead only counted on ‘fortresses inside our country’ to resist the enemy, but still ‘only for some time’. Accordingly, when he was made adjutant to Barclay de Tolly in 1812, he constantly advised Tolly to avoid battle. Only in the case of Smolensk did he recommend Tolly to hold his position, and then for the sole purpose of gaining time. ⁶⁵

The essential plan for defeating Napoleon had been devised more than two years before the events took place. ⁶⁶ It was a remarkable theoretical achievement and perhaps almost too remarkable to be indeed effective in the end. In his work, Otto Stockhorner von Starein seeks to explain why this plan fell into oblivion. Wolzogen’s plan quickly convinced Tsar Alexander I., who had learned the lesson of Austerlitz (1805). But, as Stockhorner’s study reveals, the Tsar, Barclay de Tolly, Phull, and Wolzogen knew that this elaborate plan had the great disadvantage of looking like ‘retreat’. Wolzogen’s concept appeared essentially unwarlike to say the least. It seemed to be against the very spirit of martial behaviour. The Tsar and his closest advisers thus decided to keep the whole plan top secret. It looks like a conspiracy of the Tsar himself against his army. The actual plan of operations was kept to the minister of war Barclay de Tolly, Phull, Wolzogen, and the Tsar himself. ⁶⁷ This decision seems to have been justified. The outcome was a compromise that deluded observers such as Clausewitz. Like Clausewitz, Prince Eugen of Württemberg and Wolzogen confirmed that the Russian army was keen to offer the French battle. ⁶⁸ The command to retreat provoked indignation and even riots amongst the Russian army, furious against the high command. To uphold authority, even executions were necessary. ⁶⁹ In view of the latent mistrust in the army, it was a dangerous gamble that a few insiders and the Tsar dared to take. After the engagements at Smolensk, Alexander considered it necessary for the sake of internal peace to prepare for battle by taking the weight off Barclay and giving command to Kutusov, even though he despised him personally. ⁷⁰ When, during the battle of Borodino, Wolzogen hurried to Kutusov, he realized that the new commander-in-chief was far off the battle ‘on the country road to Moscow half an hour behind the army’ and ‘showing in no way any interest in the dreadful seriousness of this day’. When Wolzogen reached him, and hoped to make him give up the battle and not renew it, Kutusov shouted with anger,

What filthy bitch have you been getting sloshed with to give me such an insipid report? I should know better than anybody how the battle is doing! The French attacks were victoriously repelled everywhere, so that I myself will take the lead tomorrow to easily drive the enemy off the sacred soil of Russia! ⁷¹

From this new perspective, it is apparent that Clausewitz had no opportunity to grasp what a crucial role his fellow officer Wolzogen had played. It puts the events of 1812 into a new light. The disastrous slaughter of Borodino had never been designed. It was a concession to the old style of conducting war on the basis of mere physical interaction. In his memoirs Wolzogen would call it ‘that mighty catastrophe’. ⁷² At the same time his design was secretly maintained and it finally generated the success that would eventually crush Napoleon’s Continental System.

Thanks to the findings of Stockhorner von Starein, Clausewitz’s depiction of the events can now be reinterpreted. They explain that he had trouble understanding what Wolzogen’s close attachment to the high command had to signify in 1812:

That the lieutenant-colonel Wolzogen, who had only been in Russia for about 5 years, remained attached to the person of General Barclay …, allowed him to be viewed as an intimate advisor of Barclay and shed intensified light upon the latter’s alienness [Fremdlingschaft]. Wolzogen himself, who had a sober nature … was pursued with a true hate. This author [Clausewitz himself] heard an officer who returned from Barclay’s head quarters lamenting with bitterness and saying he [Wolzogen] sat there in the corner of the room like a fat poisonous garden spider. ⁷³

Clausewitz made revealing observations: ‘To the Russians colonel Wolzogen became increasingly suspicious …. With a sort of superstition, they considered him an ill spirit that would bring misfortune to the army’s command.’ ⁷⁴

Clausewitz, though watching closely, had to come to the wrong conclusions. He subsequently stated that people in the army ‘did him [Wolzogen] much too much honour with the confidence, they presumed Barclay did put in him.’ ⁷⁵ Even though ignorant of what was behind it all, he nonetheless realized that ‘It was Barclay and Wolzogen who first evoked the distrust against the foreigners and which in the more brute parts of the army bit by bit spread over all other foreigners.’ ⁷⁶ Wolzogen, however, held the Russian army in high esteem and later recalled with true respect how it had fought ‘with the greatest sang froid’ during Borodino. ⁷⁷ But what caused severe tensions was his belief in a theoretical device that followed a wholly new outlook of solving conflicts by means of a dynamic model of ‘divergent and convergent motions’. Wolzogen did not believe in battle against Napoleon but in finding the ‘means, if not to win preponderance over him, then at least to hold him the balance’. ⁷⁸ This remarkable conjunction – of an army that believed in the decisive battle of the Napoleonic style and at the same time a high command that followed the new dynamical outlook introduced by Wolzogen’s grand design – inflicted strains of prodigious dimensions.

What remains to be elucidated is the origin of Wolzogen’s new outlook. It is curious that Clausewitz subsequently assumed that the idea of a strategy of retreat had solely been discussed ‘in Berlin’ but never had any influence upon actual events. In fact, Stockhorner made it clear that Clausewitz was wrong on this point and that the discussion of such a system in Berlin as late as 1811 stemmed from the Tsar’s conversations with the Prussian deputy in St Petersburg. Clausewitz’s hint to Phull in Drissa was nothing more than an unwitting re-importation of an idea already unfolding in the Russian manoeuvres. ⁷⁹

In truth, the campaign of 1812 was the putting into practice of such a scheme, and with it a startling new cutting-edge science of war dynamics, which Wolzogen had perhaps first grasped during his years in Prussian service. But it was most certainly not Clausewitz’s teacher Gerhard von Scharnhorst, as Clausewitz seemed to believe.

Friedrich von Smitt was perhaps the first to address the further-reaching question of what theoretical approach had initiated Wolzogen’s drafts, calling him ‘Bülow’s student’. ⁸⁰ Taking a closer look, one can see that Wolzogen’s reasoning relied on a certain nomenclature. His first memorandum contained the revealing term ‘line of operations’ (‘Operationslinie’), which was a term first defined by Henry H.E. Lloyd in 1779. ⁸¹ What is more, this term was further qualified in Wolzogen’s draft ‘as the line of connection of the army with its base’. Wolzogen explicitly declared that the longer such a line is, ‘the wider the base has to be’, on the grounds that if the enemy attacked a wide base of operations, it would be easy to fall back in any direction (excentrically) and hold up one’s own supplies no matter how the enemy manoeuvred. ⁸² The term ‘base of operations’ (‘Operationsbasis’) was invented by Dietrich von Bülow. Wolzogen’s first memorandum has the appearance of an accelerated introductory course to the Bülowian model that by then had been under discussion in Berlin for 10 years. Furthermore it can be shown that by 1809 even Tsar Alexander was well acquainted, through his military advisor Phull, with Bülow’s most important contribution, the principle of the incessant maintenance of some ‘base of operations’ conditioning a dynamic system of war manoeuvres. ⁸³ According to Smitt, ‘Bülow was the great master’ of the latter. ⁸⁴ Even Wolzogen’s later memoirs expressed his own profound debt to the way in which Bülow defined strategy as being ‘outside the scope of view of the enemy’ and tactics as moving ‘within his scope of view’. ⁸⁵ This was first put forward in Bülow’s ‘Geist des neuern Kriegssytems’ in 1799, thereby giving the first, and still influential, definition of tactics and strategy.

Wolzogen thus deployed a new theory which had made its inventor famous and notorious at the same time. In Prussia Bülow was considered dangerous. To the great distress of many Prussian officers, he had rejected the primacy of battle, stating, ‘If one finds oneself placed in the necessity to fight a battle, a mistake must have preceded.’ ⁸⁶ Bülow was essentially pacifistic and had therefore evoked mistrust amongst the Prussian officers. He believed in the possibility of a ‘perpetual peace’ on the basis of his dynamical approach, stressing that the defence of a country would be more easily achieved by standing aside in front of the invader, thereby endangering the enemy’s supplies. ⁸⁷ This concept, promoted again and again by Phull, would eventually also ‘enlighten’ Barclay de Tolly like a ‘sudden flash’. ⁸⁸ Today Bülow is mostly only remembered for having invented the term ‘base of operations’ and for having first created the distinction between strategy and tactics. ⁸⁹ What is forgotten is that these served as initial elements of a dynamical model of excentric and concentric motions which, as we saw, Wolzogen would eventually deploy in Russia in 1812. For Bülow war was a dynamical system of interactions at a distance (like Newton’s ‘System of the World’) and in which battle was a mere ‘ultimatum’ if not in most cases the result of a dreadful ‘mistake’ caused by ignorance about the dynamics that lay behind social interactions constituted by the necessity to save the ‘system of subsistence’.

The preservation of one’s own base and the attraction of the enemy’s resources were to constitute a socio-dynamic equilibrium, which would be guaranteed by the desire to see it maintained. This idea he first set forth in his masterpiece ‘Spirit of the Modern System of War’ (‘Geist des neuern Kriegssystems’). War was to be reduced to dynamic motions, which led Bülow to the idea of concentric and excentric motions. According to his theory every distribution of resources provides a specific ‘system of subsistence’ with a common centre not to be surpassed by any of the war parties without destroying the ‘balance of powers’ to their own disadvantage. Instead of offering battles to one another, armies had to manoeuvre according to the distribution of resources, which alone decided which party could put pressure on the other’s supplies. The idea of Wolzogen’s ‘Memorandum’ was that the Russians had to retreat excentrically in ‘space and time’ to a point that the ‘base of operations’ of their army ‘in regard to its extension would be in every moment greater than the one of the enemy, so that it could not be outflanked by him’. ⁹⁰ Success was dependent not on battles but on this baseline, constituted by a broad range of resources at the rear of the army. The broad distribution of the masses of supplies would make it possible to retreat excentrically and thereby provide the stability of an equilibrium guaranteed by the danger for the advancing party of being trapped. Drawing strongly on the Newtonian outlook, this system was to establish a ‘Kriegsvortex’ (‘vortex of war’), that is to say, a balance with a common centre of mass that was to be kept up by the protagonists in saving their ‘base of subsistence’ (‘Subsistenz-Basis’). This ‘System of Subsistence’ (‘System der Subsistenz’) supplied Bülow’s dynamics of war – in the guise of the Newtonian model – with a new, that is social, concept of mass:

However, through the great dimensions [of modern armies], sooner or later the masses, or the greater or lesser quantity of war materials, to which belong men as well as things, will bring the decision about, for the military presence [das kriegerische Daseyn] of men is based on things. Here it is possible to calculate the outcome. Further: the greater the extension [of the masses], the lesser space there is to manoeuvre. During manoeuvres chance prevails, as the history of war shows. Least of all it plays a part when estimating the product of the masses. War is becoming evermore an arithmetic problem to be solved by algebraic formulas. War is growing evermore mechanical and, like the attractive force of the planetary world bodies, the prevailing military vortex of an army determined by natural boundaries, which perhaps increases and decreases according to the inverse square of the distance, can be calculated with certainty. ⁹¹

Bülow drew an analogy between the distribution of the different bases of supplies and the distribution of physical masses in Newtonian space. If the parties were fully aware of their exclusive dependency on the maintenance of their subsistence, they were able to act accordingly in a system stabilized by their own ‘masses’, as defined by their dependency on resources. This provides the intellectual background to Wolzogen’s idea of a system of divergent and convergent motions without battle. Its engineer was Bülow:

Whereas concentric operations are the most advantageous in offensive wars, excentric ones therefore must be the best in defensive wars. For things are converse in both kinds of war, because the interest of a war of defence and protection is of a converse nature [entgegengesetzter Beschaffenheit]. ⁹²

Around 1800 Dietrich von Bülow turned the debate into one of ‘war dynamics’ (Kriegsdynamik), as Clausewitz’s fellow student Otto A. Rühle von Lilienstern later put it. Though no doubt a ‘celebrity’, Bülow still faced problems concerning his social status, which will help to explain why he and his theory – and thereby one of the most important contributions to Russian war planning – fell into oblivion soon after 1812. He had left Prussian military service very early in 1786 at an age of roughly 23. This made him a kind of outsider in Prussian society. Worse still, he was a great admirer of republicanism and the American Revolution. In 1791–2 and 1795–6 he had left Prussia to seek happiness in the United States. After having lost all his money through disadvantageous speculations, he was forced to return to Europe and bring his scientific interests to bear by starting a career as a writer. His lifestyle, conduct, and republican convictions made him look suspicious to the Prussian officers. The more his writings revealed great ambitions to revolutionize warfare and, what is more, to connect it in the most original way with the pacifistic endeavours of his fellow countryman Immanuel Kant, the greater their doubts became. The war theorist Julius von Voss recollected,

But to allow some former cornet, some layman such important influences would not have harmonized with their [the Prussian officers’] ideas and feelings about the honour of the Prussian army. So here it was pride that countered the inventor.

Moreover, a philosophical mind, who at times lived amongst nations whose customs differ from the local, at times locked himself in his study room for days, falls short in fulfilling that particular tact of courtesy and representation to which men – whose approval all subordinates try to satisfy by the most tender reverences, uniform, military decorum etc. – are accustomed. That is to say, for his appearance alone the philosophical mind does not please here, and this is crucial. Therefore love of formality was again his enemy in this case. ⁹³

Bülow suffered agonies. In 1804 he had to acknowledge ‘that most of the very recent military writings lecture on the grounds of my principles, sometimes even in my military terminology, all this however without mentioning me’. ⁹⁴ It must have been this disappointment that caused Bülow to express himself with ever more corrosive humour. In 1806 he argued in ‘Der Feldzug von 1805’ (‘The Campaign of 1805’) that the battle of Austerlitz had not been of any use for Austria and Russia. Angrily, he made the allies appear ridiculous. Perhaps the most important contribution was his accurate prediction of Prussia’s defeat in October of the same year. ⁹⁵ According to Bülow’s principles, for Prussia, there was but one course of action towards Napoleonic France: ‘apathetic neutrality’. ⁹⁶ In October 1806 Prussia issued an ultimatum to France and received its worst defeat in history. It took some courage for Julius von Voss to dare to pay tribute to Bülow’s warnings a year later in his book Eingetroffene Weißsagungen (Fulfilled Prophecies), ⁹⁷ all the more since Bülow had expressed his views with such force and clarity that the Prussian King Frederick William III had put him into custody. One important detail is that it was chiefly on the initiative of the Russian deputy in Berlin that Bülow was arrested for having insulted the Russian Tsar in his latest book, Der Feldzug von 1805. ⁹⁸ The events of the summer of 1806 are therefore crucial in understanding why the theoretical background of the Russian campaign of 1812 remained obscure for so long. It had been Bülow who had first declared it to be a grave mistake in the Russian army to seek battles such as Austerlitz. In late 1806 Bülow was condemned to four years of fortress detention. One of the charges accused him of ‘breach of the law of nations’ having ‘insulted the sovereigns of foreign powers’. ⁹⁹ He was consigned to the Russian citadel in Riga where he died soon after, on 16 July 1807.

Bülow had started a discussion that excited responses all over Europe. So in a rather different way Berlin was the origin of the new ideas put forward in Russia in 1812. The fact that Wolzogen planned the retreat does not make him the sole progenitor of the system behind it. Authors such as Batz and Smitt have stressed before that the central ideas had come from Phull, who, before entering Russian service in 1807, had been a leading figure in the reorganized Prussian General Staff, where he was chiefly engaged with scientific war planning. This is strongly confirmed by Wolzogen, who in his memoirs always referred to the retreat as Phull’s plan. Significantly, Prince Eugen of Württemberg also hinted that Wolzogen’s memorandum had followed Phull’s main idea, using for it the term of ‘excentric retreats’. Credit for this innovation, however, properly belongs to the most innovative thinker of Prussian war theory at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dietrich von Bülow. The first time this cornerstone of Russian war planning was emphasized was by Friedrich von Smitt.

As shown above, Wolzogen’s draft of 1809 put into practice a dynamical approach that was almost too new to be put forward in the open. But the revolutionary content – its original simplification of war as being a dynamical system of excentric and concentric motions – had by then become notorious, together with its creator. By 1806, Bülow had foreseen this, sneering at the superstitiousness of the Prussian officers, who rejected ‘the notorious Bülowian system and the notorious Bülowian writings’. ¹⁰⁰ This reveals another reason for the great mystery of the legendary retreat of the Russian campaign in 1812. It was not merely kept strictly secret. The fact that the mastermind behind it had been put into Prussian jail at the intervention of the Russian government seems to have made it all the more impossible, or at least politically inadvisable, to stress Bülow’s great contribution to the Russian operational planning of 1812. So it came to pass that Bülow’s books, though – according to the German diplomat Friedrich von Gentz – they had been ‘read endlessly’, ¹⁰¹ have not been seriously considered in explanations of the defeat of Napoleon.

As the events of 1812 prove, it was hard enough to implement such a theoretical device. Clausewitz, though ignorant of this theoretical background, still demonstrated his intuition by stating about Wolzogen, ‘He was too wise to believe that, being a stranger with alien ideas, one could gain such a confidence and such a power over the masses of the Russian [army] to come into the open frankly and straightforwardly.’ ¹⁰² These are the considerations Wolzogen had to keep in mind. At the same time the Tsar, Wolzogen, and the two other insiders, Phull and Barclay de Tolly, decided to keep the whole plan secret for very much the same reasons. Everything seems to have conspired to keep hidden both the author and his idea of a dynamical and even pacifistic approach to social conflict, and with them, the kernel of the Bülowian war theory that made it so revolutionary in its time: to consider physical violence only as an ‘ultimatum’ in an essentially dynamic ‘system of subsistence’ acting at a distance.