Citizen Emperor (88 page)

Napoleon himself arrived at Smolensk on 9 November and began setting up headquarters. The full extent of the disaster had not yet sunk in. He believed Smolensk was the pinnacle of the army’s suffering and that he would be able to start reorganizing what remained of it. Indeed, he began dictating a stream of orders to non-existent regiments.
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It did not take long though for the reality to take root. For most of the march towards Smolensk he had been at the head of his army. Now, at Smolensk, he could see his emaciated army marching into the city, and there was not much of it left. Estimates vary, but at this stage of the retreat there were probably still about 40,000–50,000 men under colours, as well as, remarkably, 220 cannon and as many as 20,000 camp followers. That means that something like 60,000 men had been lost (died, wandered off, killed) in less than three weeks.
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But this does not take into account the number of men that had been picked up along the way at various outposts and towns, such as at Viazma. Junot had been stationed at Borodino with several thousand men. Joachim-Joseph Delmarche, who had been wounded early in the campaign, joined the retreating army with a friend, both of them walking with makeshift crutches, without any food and without any hope of finding any, except for the horse carcasses littering the way.
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At the beginning of November the weather started to get colder – temperatures varied from minus 5 degrees Celsius to minus 12. Lots of snow fell during the night of 2–3 November. In an army that was well prepared and well supplied, these temperatures should not have been a problem. But the retreat from Moscow was so badly organized that the weather had a disastrous impact on the army.
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By the first week of November, not only were the men suffering from a lack of food and warm clothing, but so much snow had fallen that walking had become difficult.
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What made matters worse was the lack of preparations for a winter campaign; no gloves, no stockings, no woollen vests or bonnets. The cold of course affected both sides, to the point where the Russians too had to break contact with the fleeing enemy in order to deal with the conditions. Horses died in their droves from this point, unable to cope with the lack of fodder and the fatigue.
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This was the turning point; it was the beginning of a six-week period in which the remains of the Grande Armée would be devastated. Provisions were so scarce that even generals were reduced to eating horsemeat,
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but the colder it got and the further the army advanced, the fewer horses there were and the more difficult it became to cut into the carcasses. Men were reduced to cutting bits of flesh off live horses as they walked alongside them. According to one witness, ‘the poor beasts did not show the slightest sign of pain’, probably because it was so cold – temperatures soon reached minus 28 degrees Celsius.
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Thus it was that horses walked on with pieces missing from them for a few days before succumbing. Other soldiers lucky enough to possess a small casserole would walk beside a horse, insert a knife and capture the blood that flowed, which they would then cook to make a primitive blood sausage.
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More than one officer, believing that he was leading his horse by its reins, turned to find the reins had been cut and the horse gone.
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As soon as a horse fell to the ground, it was laid upon by groups of starving men cutting away at its flesh.
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By the beginning of November, the army was no longer an army, but a hungry multitude of individuals whose only objective in life was survival.
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Most thought the idea of eating horse repugnant,
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but as the routes were paved with dead carcasses it was the easiest way of gaining some protein. This started to happen a few days into the retreat.
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At the end of a day’s march, one simply chose a carcass and cut off a piece with a knife or sabre, grilled it over a fire and ate. For want of salt, some preferred to season the meat with a little gunpowder.
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Others preferred to cut open a horse that had just fallen in the hope of getting more choice morsels – liver, heart.
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From about the middle of November, men started to fall down along the roads through inanition and fatigue. It was so cold that soldiers could no longer hold their muskets without freezing their hands, even though they had taken the precaution of wrapping them in cloth. As a consequence, many threw away their weapons, even members of the Guard, and those that did not were often too weak to be able to use them.
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Others were suffering from frostbite of the nose, ears, toes or fingers.
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Some well-disciplined units managed to keep together, largely as a result of their officers. As the retreat continued, and units broke down, soldiers tended to group according to nationality so that one would find Frenchmen, Germans, Poles or Italians huddled around camp fires or marching together. The Poles seem to have been better prepared than most, no doubt because they were used to the winters. Individuals who were young and in good health had a better chance of surviving. A surgeon named Lagneau, aged thirty-two, used to walking, unlike most who rode, was able to ‘endure everything without any untoward consequences’.
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His only fear was of being wounded and then left to die on the side of the road.

Napoleon’s Despair

With news of the Malet affair, Napoleon gave up the idea of staying in Smolensk over winter and instead hoped to fall back to Orsha, about 160 kilometres away, or possibly to hold the line along the River Berezina while setting up winter quarters in Minsk. After only four days’ rest in Smolensk, the army set out again on 12 November – Mortier and the Young Guard first, followed by the Old Guard, Prince Eugène, Davout and Ney at one-day intervals. At Korytnia, where he had stopped for the night, Napoleon called Caulaincourt to his bedside and talked about getting back to Paris as soon as possible. He was in fact so worried about being taken – the encounter with Cossacks at Maloyaroslavets had unnerved him – that he ordered his physician, Dr Yvan, to prepare a sachet of poison that between now and his fall in 1814 he kept with him at all times.
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Despair had set in, and was not really to leave him until his fall from power, even if there were fits of enthusiasm and hope.

The next day (15 November) Napoleon found the Russians blocking his path, and was obliged to fight his way through to Krasnyi, between Orsha and Smolensk (near the present-day Belorussian border), where he waited for the rest of the army to catch up. The Russians, however, under General Mikhail Miloradovich, often referred to as the Russian Murat, simply blocked the road again so that each section of the army coming up would have to fight its way through. They had to do so in temperatures of between minus 15 degrees Celsius and minus 25. The toll in lives was significant, as many as 10,000 dead and wounded, with around 200 cannon lost, and over 20,000 men taken prisoner, most of whom were so badly treated by the Russians that they would never see their homes again.
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After Eugène had fought his way through, Napoleon had to decide whether to wait for the others to catch up, in case they had trouble breaking through Miloradovich’s roadblock, or to forge on. The situation was made precarious by Kutuzov, who had turned up a few kilometres south of Krasnyi and threatened to cut the road to Orsha.

So Napoleon decided to take the field. In a gesture that either showed a death wish or was born of his irrational sense of invincibility, or perhaps was simply a sign of the utter desperation in which the army found itself, he led his grenadiers into battle. He even gave them a rousing speech in which he drew his sword and supposedly urged his men to swear to die fighting rather than not see France again.
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They were utterly outnumbered but this did not seem to faze him, and he stood his ground calmly while Russian shells and cannon balls struck all around him. It impressed not only his own men, but the Russians as well, to the point that Miloradovich moved away from the road and left it open for Davout to get through. Even then, Kutuzov could easily have encircled Napoleon – indeed his entourage begged him to – but he stubbornly refused to go head to head with Napoleon.
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Napoleon’s orders spoke of non-existent corps, divisions and regiments, as though they were fully operational units; the missives were being captured by the Russians, giving the mistaken impression that the Grande Armée was much stronger than it actually was. Kutuzov was being very cautious, overly cautious in retrospect, but one has to keep in mind that he was still dealing with Napoleon, considered the greatest general of his day by all concerned. If Kutuzov had been a more hands-on general, or if he had trusted some of his more able subordinates, things would have been very different.

Napoleon did the same thing the next day – that is, he marched at the head of his grenadiers, with shells bursting all around him, as they trudged on to Liady where, that afternoon, he slid into town on his bottom. The approach was so steep and so covered in ice that he and his Old Guard had no other choice. It was perhaps no coincidence that it was only then that Napoleon admitted the army was disintegrating before his eyes. At Dubrovna the next day (19 November), he addressed the Old Guard and told them just that, exhorting them to maintain a strict discipline in order to survive and even inciting them, according to one officer, to punish deserters themselves by stoning.
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Mind you, there were not many in the Old Guard who did desert or who would have considered it. Napoleon’s aura was so great for these men that they responded to his exhortations by raising their bearskins and caps on their bayonets and shouting ‘Vive l’Empereur!’
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Orsha was reached later that day. The city was reasonably well stocked and Napoleon was under the impression that with a few days’ rest here he would be able to rally the army. Also, Victor and Oudinot, in better shape no doubt than the men who had retreated from Moscow, were not far away. What’s more, on the evening of 21 November Ney, who was commanding the rearguard and who was thought lost, arrived at Orsha. He had managed to get through with just 900 men, plus four or five thousand stragglers and refugees.
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In the past week, Napoleon had lost a further 20,000 men, as well as thousands of civilians. At Orsha the order was given to get rid of any excess baggage – incredible to think that it had taken all this time for the order to be given – by burning the carriages and wagons, largely in order to recuperate the horses.

Vengeance

The cold was not the only problem facing the retreating troops. Russian peasants attacked anyone who came to their villages looking for food, or set upon convoys of the sick and wounded, killing anyone they could find.
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In part this was because they had been called upon to do so by leading generals – Barclay had appealed to all Russians in the occupied areas to ‘make sure that not a single enemy soldier can hide himself from our vengeance’
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– and in part it was simply a knee-jerk reaction to protect life, limb and property. Sir Robert Wilson, an English liaison officer with the Russian army, saw a group of peasants beating out the brains of a line of prisoners in time with a song.
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One witness is supposed to have seen a French prisoner sold to some Russian peasants for twenty roubles; he was ‘baptized’ with a cauldron of boiling water and then impaled alive with an iron pike. Prisoners and marauders were hacked to death by women with hatchets, or buried alive.
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These accounts of torture and atrocity might be considered exaggerated if they were not confirmed by Russian sources.
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The zeal with which the Russian peasantry took to massacring members of the Grande Armée surprised even hardened veterans of the Iberian Peninsula. In one account, after Russian peasants had harassed French troops marauding around Moscow, Napoleon ordered a large number of peasants to be rounded up and executed as a warning.
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Russian soldiers were known to exact their vengeance on prisoners as well.
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Somewhere between 90,000 and 100,000 prisoners were taken by the Russians. Of those, around 53,000 died in captivity, and 39,000 survived.
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Although the figures are impossible to verify, we know that the prisoners, made up of all nationalities, also included women (usually wives) and children. They were often stripped naked and killed or left to die, or were marched back to detention camps without being given any sustenance along the way. Stripping victims naked, regardless of their sex, and leaving them to wander in the snow was a common practice among the Cossacks.
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The Cossacks did so not only because the clothes their victims were wearing were valuable or badly needed, but also because it was a way of humiliating the invader. Often Cossacks sold prisoners, or simply handed them over to local peasants who then played with them at their leisure, inflicting the worst kinds of torture.
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Alexander’s brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, was personally seen executing a French prisoner. We do not know how many were killed in this way but it must have been in the thousands, and it is likely that no more than one in five soldiers captured by either marauding Cossacks or regular Russian troops survived the ordeal. There were also instances of humanity. A canteen lady who was pregnant and near term, and who had been captured by Cossacks and stripped naked while they searched her for money, was left in that condition in the snow. She was picked up by some peasants who took pity on her and welcomed her into their village where she gave birth.
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A poor midwife in Orel is supposed to have taken five prisoners of war into her home, and even when she had spent all her own money on food went begging on their behalf.
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