The Shadow of Great Britain

Chapter 1370: Chapter 197: Arthur Hastings’ Report_2

In the military district of Novgorod, almost all officers and doctors were killed by rebellious peasants, including several generals and dozens of colonels. Even the foreign officer group sent by the King of Prussia did not leave any survivors. To escape punishment, the rebellious peasants sent representatives to Yinola to confess their crimes to the Emperor, carrying with them a forged poisoning list, allegedly forced upon the officers in the military district before their deaths.

According to this poisoning list, the peasants claimed that the officers and doctors conspired to poison the military district to create a large-scale cholera outbreak. Tsar Nicholas I summoned the peasant representatives and assured them that he would personally go to Novgorod to severely punish the poisoners and pardon the insurgents. Nicholas I kept his promise and led his army to Novgorod. According to the testimony of a constitutional soldier present, the Emperor had lunch in the military district, where soldiers presented him with honey and bread. He initially intended to pardon the riotous crowd as planned, but General Arendt, standing beside the Emperor, angrily declared: ’Today, they should not have presented you with bread, but with our funeral porridge.’

Then, Tsar Nicholas I gathered the troops on the parade ground, ordered a priest to recite prayers for the deceased soldiers, kissed the cross, and then turned to the rioters, announcing: the Emperor will never forgive them and demanded they hand over the ringleaders. The leaders of the riot were ordered to be all beheaded, but the eight participants from the military district were not severely punished, instead, they were relocated to Gatchina, located about 30 miles south of Saint Petersburg, the site of the Tsar’s summer palace.

I have ample reason to suspect that the formation of a ’Peasant Committee’, unknown to the Foreign Office, should be significantly linked to this uprising since its establishment coincides closely with the Novgorod military district uprising. The imperial authorities dispatched military personnel to study the events of the 18th-century Pugachev rebellion, likely due to recognizing that the existence of the military district had greatly threatened the stability of their rule. They attempted to provide direction for agricultural policy formulation by analyzing ’why Pugachev was able to gain significant influence among the people.’

Although the Russian government, after the 1831 military district uprising, issued a new military service ordinance. The new ordinance declared that the Russian army would still implement conscription, but it specified that the main targets were peasants, small citizens, and sons of soldiers (hereditary soldiers) among the laboring people. Nobles, merchants, and clergy, the ruling classes’ children, continued to be exempted from military service. Moreover, the new ordinance did not solve the fundamental problem, as under previous rules, Russian soldiers’ service term was still as long as 22 to 25 years.

Suggestions such as implementing mandatory military service and shortening the service term were not adopted by the Tsarist Government, mainly because these suggestions were pivotal propositions of the noble officers who launched the Decembrist uprising, and thus were considered highly disrespectful to the Emperor in Russia. Moreover, because mandatory military service would significantly affect the interests of Russian landlords by pulling their serfs off the land and into the army, it also faced widespread opposition within Russia.

Talking about the Russian army, what especially caught my attention was the generally low literacy rate of Russian soldiers. I was invited to visit the garrison barracks of a certain city, and through contact with the garrison soldiers, I found that among over a hundred soldiers in the city, only two could read and write their own names. The situation was similar in Russia’s elite Cossack Cavalry. Applying this same standard to the British Army, our literacy rate approaches 48%. Of course, I do not intend to disparage the army that once defeated Napoleon.

This is an excellent army with many veterans who have served for 25 years. Russian soldiers are models in terms of drill training. During my visit to the barracks, I was greatly impressed by the discipline of this army. However, I also found the phalanx formations of this unit impeccable, yet they were very inept at dispersing formations and fighting in small units. As a result, Russian officers’ tactical options only included ordering the soldiers’ phalanx to charge the enemy fiercely.

All tactical maneuvering thoughts have been abandoned here. The only slogans I heard were: advance, advance, advance. Such dense infantry formations, due to their compactness, naturally make ideal targets for artillery fire. Here, I must borrow a statement I heard while chatting with a Russian merchant in a hotel: A single Russian picked out individually would not get into heaven, but if it were an entire village, they must be allowed through.

According to the account of the officers in that place, he was proud that all his tactical ideas were learned from the Military Academy. Since Russia’s highest military institution, intended to provide excellent operational staff for the General Staff Headquarters, the General Staff Military Academy, had only been established two years earlier. Before that, apart from about seventy percent of the hereditary nobility who had never attended military school, Russia’s remaining thirty percent of officers graduated from the Military Academy.

Thus, I have reason to believe that the vast majority of Russian officers hold the same tactical thoughts as the garrison officer I encountered and train their soldiers in the same way. This tactical concept is likely to influence the Russian army for at least another 20 years.

My perspective is validated in Russia’s ”Infantry Regulations”. Through the Russian army regulations I borrowed from the garrison captain, I discovered that the first article pointed out that the focus of training was on dense formations and steps, emphasizing strict and complex marching movements and not mentioning tactical movements.