The general had learned his craft fighting Prussia in the Seven Years War, during which even Frederick admired his skill. Catherine appreciated his talent but never quite trusted him and appointed him President of the Little Russian College, a position worthy of his status, but safely distant from Court. He remained unimpressed by Catherine, liked the Russian army’s Prussianized uniforms and wigs, believed in Prussian military discipline – and worked to improve on the Prussian tactics of the Seven Years War. He tended to prefer Germans to Russians.16
Rumiantsev was a father to his soldiers but a general to his sons. When one visited him after finishing his studies, he asked, ‘Who are you?’, ‘Your son, replied the boy. ‘Yes, how pleasant. You have grown,’ snapped the general. The son asked if he could find a position there and if he could stay. ‘Certainly,’ said his father, ‘you must surely know some officer or other in the camp who can help you out.’17
Potemkin was always keen to have things both ways – access to the commander and the chance to find glory in the field; chamberlain at Court, general at the front. He wrote to Rumiantsev about ‘the two things on which my service is founded…devotion to my Sovereign and desire for approval from my highly respected commander’.18 Rumiantsev appreciated his intelligence but also must have known of his acquaintance with the Empress. His demands were granted. As the war entered its second year, Catherine was frustrated by the slowness of Russian success. War in the eighteenth century was seasonaclass="underline" in the Russian winter, armies hibernated like hedgehogs. Battle with the main Ottoman armies – and the fall of Bender – had to wait for the spring.
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As soon as it was possible, Rumiantsev reassembled his army in several manoeuvrable corps and advanced down the Dniester. Even in freezing January, Potemkin, now sent by Rumiantsev to serve with the corps of General Schtofel’n, was involved in skirmishes, driving off the attacks of Abdul-Pasha. On 4 February, Potemkin helped capture Jurja in a series of daring cavalry raids, defeating 12,000 enemy troops, capturing two cannons and a handful of banners. It was still bitterly cold but he ‘did not spare himself’.19 At the end of the month, when Rumiantsev’s report was read out at the Council before the Empress, he mentioned ‘the fervent feats of Major-General Potemkin’, who ‘asked me to send him to the corps of Lieutenant-General von Schtofel’n where, as soon as was possible, he distinguished himself both by his courage and by martial skill.’20 The commander recommended Potemkin should be decorated and he received his first medal, the Order of St Anna.
As the Russians marched south after the Turkish army, Potemkin, according to Rumiantsev’s later report, ‘protected the left bank with the troops entrusted to him and repulsed the enemy attacks against him’. On 17 June, the main army forded the Pruth to attack the 22,000 Turks and 50,000 Tartars encamped on the other bank. Meanwhile Major-General Potemkin and the reserves crossed the river three miles downstream and ambushed the Turkish rear. The camp disintegrated; the Turks fled.21
Just three days later, Rumiantsev advanced towards a Turkish army of 80,000, comfortably encamped where the River Larga joined the Pruth, while they awaited the arrival of the Grand Vizier and his main army.22
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Forming up into their squares, on 7 July 1770, Rumiantsev, Potemkin and the Russians stormed the Turkish camp, braced for the wild Turkish charges. This was Potemkin’s first glimpse of an Ottoman army. It was an immense and impressive, noisy vision of silken tents and rickety carts, green banners and swishing horsetails (those Ottoman symbols of power) – sprawling, messy, alive with women and camp-followers and exotic uniforms, as much like a bazaar as an army. The Ottoman Empire was not yet the giant and flabby weakling it was to become in the next century. It was still capable of raising huge forces from its distant pashaliks, from the plains of Mesopotamia and the hills of Anatolia to the Barbary ports and the Balkans: all sent their cannon-fodder when the Sultan raised the banner of the Prophet.
‘The Turks, who pass for blockheads in the art of war, carry it out with a kind of method,’ explained the Prince de Ligne later. The method was to amass teeming armies roughly in a pyramidal formation and then throw them upon the Russians forces in waves of charging cavalry and whooping infantry. Their Janissaries had once formed the most feared infantry in Europe. They were gradually degenerating into a rich and arrogant Praetorian Guard more interested in their trading posts and palace coups than fighting, but they were still proud of their prowess and Islamic fervour: they wore bonnets of red and gold with white shirts, billowing pantaloons and yellow boots and bore scimitars, javelins, muskets.
The best of the Ottoman cavalry were the Tartars and the Spahis, the feudal Turkish horsemen, who leaped on and off their horses to fire their muskets. They wore breastplates embedded with jewels or just bright waistcoats with pantaloons, often leaving their arms bare while bearing curved and engraved sabres, daggers, lances and gem-encrusted pistols. They were so indisciplined that they fought only when they were ready and often mutinied: it was quite common for Janissaries to steal horses and gallop off the battlefield, strike their officers or sell the army’s food for private profit. The mass of the Ottoman armies were unpaid irregulars recruited by Anatolian feudal lords, who were expected to live by plunder. Despite the efforts of French advisers like Baron de Tott, their artillery was way behind that of the Russians and their muskets were outdated. If their marksmanship was admirable, their firing rate was slow.
They wasted much energy in obsolete display. When all was ready, this martial rabble of hundreds of thousands worked themselves up into a fever of religious outrage fuelled with drops of opium.23 ‘They advance’, Potemkin later reminisced to the Comte de Ségur, ‘like an overflowing torrent.’ He claimed their pyramidal formation was arranged in order of decreasing courage – the ‘bravest warriors, intoxicated with opium’, headed its apex while its base was formed of ‘nothing but’ cowards. The charge, recalled Ligne, was accompanied by ‘frightful howlings, the cries of Allah Allah’. It took a disciplined infantryman to hold his ground. Any captured Russian was instantly beheaded with a cry of ‘Neboisse!’ or ‘Be not afraid!’ – and the heads brandished on the end of pikes. Their religious fever ‘increased in proportion to the danger’.
The Russians solved the problem of the momentum of the Turkish charge by using the square, which could withstand any shrieking onslaught. The Turk was both the ‘most dangerous, and most contemptible, enemy in the world’, wrote Ligne later, ‘dangerous, if they are suffered to attack; contemptible, if we are beforehand with them’. The Spahis or Tartars, ‘humming around us like wasps’, could envelop the Russian squares, ‘curveting, leaping, caracoling, displaying their horsemanship and performing their riding-house croups’ until they exhausted themselves. Then Rumiantsev’s squares, drilled with Prussian precision, protected by their Cossacks and Hussars, and linked together by Jaegers, light, sharpshooting infantry, advanced. Once broken, the Turks either fled like rabbits or fought to the death. ‘Dreadful slaughter’, said Potemkin, was the usual result. ‘The instinct of the Turks renders them dextrous and capable of all kinds of warlike employments…but they never go beyond the first idea, they are incapable of a second. When their moment of good sense…is over, they partake of the madman or the child.’24