The Congress of Vienna 53
under the sinister influence of Napoleon and sent an expedi-
tion of forty thousand Cossacks across the plains and moun-
tains to wrest India from the British. Each Cossack had
two horses but no forage or provisions. In obedience to
their Little Father, they went out into the barren steppes to
die, forerunners of those other Russian armies of later days,
which by the insane stupidity or treachery of their superiors
were to die without food in the Crimea, or without ammuni-
tion in Manchuria, or without guns on the slopes of the
Carpathians.
Finally Alexander yielded to the courtiers and reluctantly
entered a conspiracy. It seems that his father’s blood does
not rest upon his memory. He had promised to become czar
if his father’s personal safety were secured. That night Paul
was dethroned and murdered, and this event cast a gloom
over Alexander’s sensitive and naturally affectionate nature
which clouded all his days. He could not punish the mur-
derers, for they were his fellow conspirators and friends,
and Russia was then, as ever, in reality an oligarchy with the
forms of royalty. But he never ceased to blame himself for
his father’s death.
All this had happened fourteen years before Alexander
arrived, last of the important figures who gathered at
Vienna. He had already shown considerable diplomatic
skill, especially when he gained Bessarabia from Turkey, and
Finland from Sweden, and yet managed to keep both coun-
tries on his side in his impending war with Napoleon. In
his own country, Alexander had proved sometimes as abso-
lute as Catharine, again as liberal as his good old friend
La Harpe. To each mood was added much of the mysticism
of all the Romanoffs. With all his brilliance and his charm,
was there also in his melancholy something of his father’s
and his brother’s madness? It may well have been. He