The Ravishing of Lady Mary Ware (39 page)

Davout entered Smolensk at four o'clock in the morning. The chaos was indescribable. The Russian dead lay everywhere, often in piles. Groans and cries came from the wounded; blinded and legless men begged to be put out of their agony by a bullet. A few thousand civilians had fled with the army, but thousands remained. Driven from their houses by the flames, they ran about the streets, seeking relatives and friends, or wandered aimlessly, imploring God and the Holy Virgin to succour them.

In earlier actions the Russians had sent all their wounded to Smolensk. Thousands of them had been concentrated in a group of warehouses in the oldest quarter of the city. There the few doctors available had done what they could for them, but the great majority had been unable to rise from the boards on which they lay. When the troops had evacuated the city, it had been impossible to take the wounded with them, and a fire had already been raging for hours in the old wooden buildings. Only a few score, scorched and blistered, had managed to stagger out alive. The roaring flames devoured all the rest.

The stench from these many hundred charred bodies was abominable. That, and the pools of blood and excrement from the dead on the streets, together with the sight of grotesquely-twisted bodies and faces distorted by agony, made many of the French sick. But it did not prevent them, with the Germans, Italians, Poles and Dutch, from beginning to loot the still unburned houses, from garret to cellar. In this it was recognised that the Prussians were the worst offenders; for, in addition to robbing their victims, they delighted in inflicting every form of brutality upon them.

With the fall of Smolensk, Napoleon had again expected to be able to launch his legions against Barclay in the open field. On the previous day he had despatched flying columns to encircle the Russians, and had joyfully exclaimed, ‘At last I have them in my hands!' But again he suffered bitter disappointment. Barclay succeeded in getting his army away. A week earlier he had been joined by Bagration and the whole force retreated toward Vyazma.

Meanwhile, on the left Wittgenstein had attacked the corps of Oudinot and St. Cyr with sixty thousand men, handled them very roughly and driven them back. Oudinot being a Marshal was in command of both corps. Leading his famous Grenadiers into battle, after the death of Lannes, he had no equal as an infantry General; but he was no strategist, so things were going very badly for the French. While the Marshal was riding out on a reconnaissance, a sniper put a bullet through his arm—it was the thirty-fourth wound he had received—and he was forced to leave the field.

Gouvion St. Gyr, moody, taciturn, secretive, loathed by all his colleagues, but a man of high intelligence, took over the command. Swiftly he altered all the dispositions, heavily defeated Wittgenstein and took Polotsk. The Emperor sent him his Marshal's baton.

A change was now to take place in the Russian High Command. For weeks past, Barclay and Bagration had been engaged in a most acrimonious dispute. The latter, supported by most of the Russian nobility, was unshakeably convinced that they ought to stand and fight and, as far as he was able, without risking the loss of his entire army, he was doing so. But it was much the smaller of the two and, even with the aid of Wittgenstein, he could not repel the overwhelming hordes of French, Prussians, Rhinelanders and Italians. Barclay, on the other hand, although he dared not say so openly, was equally determined
not to give battle. Bagration sent complaint after complaint to the Czar about Barclay doing no more than fight rearguard actions. At length Alexander appointed as Supreme Commander over both of them Mikhil Illarionavich Golenisch-Kutuzov.

The Czar was very far from liking Kutuzov because before Austerlitz he had done his utmost, as the senior Russian General present, to dissuade him from risking a pitched battle with Napoleon. The headstrong young autocrat had flatly refused to accept this advice. In consequence, he suffered a crushing defeat and had been ignominiously chased from the field.

But Kutuzov, having skilfully fooled the Turks into signing a peace, had returned from the Danube with a reputation second to none in the Russian Army. He and Bagration had been the principal lieutenants of the redoubtable Suvoroff—now almost a legendary figure as Catherine the Great's most brilliant General—and, of the two, Kutuzov was accounted the greater. He was now sixty-seven, so corpulent that he had to be driven about battlefields in a one-man carriage, and he had had one of his eyes shot out by a Turk; but he was clever, courageous and so wily that he was known as ‘the old fox of the north'. His men adored him, and the great Russian nobles had such faith in him that they continued to exert so much pressure on the Czar that, autocrat though he was, he felt himself compelled to give Kutuzov the Supreme Command.

For a week after entering Smolensk the Emperor's refusal to make up his mind about the future, which had caused so much delay in Vilna and Vitebsk, again bedevilled operations. Under Murat and Davout the vanguard pushed forward toward Vyazma, but Napoleon held back the bulk of the army. Once more he felt convinced that he need go no further, as Balashov would be sent to ask for terms; but the Minister of Police did not
come. In desperation, Napoleon sent a captured Russian General with a letter to Alexander, pointing out the folly of continuing the war, but received no reply. Again he told his staff that he thought it best to postpone crushing the Russians till next year. They would winter in Smolensk, then take Moscow in the spring.

But Smolensk was a shambles and the greater part of it in ruins. They had found no large stores of food there, and supplies of all kinds had become scarcer than even far and wide the troops ravaged the countryside, but with little reward for their exertions. They no longer burned the hovels in the miserable villages, because they found them burned already. The Russians were now applying the scorched-earth policy, with the utmost rigour. They were leaving nothing behind which could be of any use to their enemies. Meanwhile, from lack of fodder, more horses were dying every day and more men from wounds they had received, lack of nourishment and dysentery. A constant stream of deserters, now become bandits, trickled back the way they had come. The supply trains and field hospitals still failed to arrive in sufficient numbers.

At last Napoleon reluctantly decided that, if he wintered in Smolensk, he would risk his army falling to pieces, and that to take Moscow was the only way to compel the Czar to sue for peace. Having summoned up, Victor's reserve corps of twenty-five thousand men from Poland to hold Smolensk and guard his lines of communications, on August 25th Napoleon and his Guards marched out of Smolensk by the road to Moscow. The die was cast.

The great host trudged forward; far out on the left the Prussians, far out on the right the Austrians, both in fair trim because they were advancing through unspoiled country. In the centre, Napoleon's masses swarmed across the seemingly-endless plain, with its empty barns and burned-out villages.

One great body of twenty thousand men, at least, never lacked for food—the Imperial Guard—for it was given first call on every supply column that did come up. With bands playing and the Tricolour beneath its Eagles fluttering bravely, it marched out of Smolensk. The Emperor, riding his grey horse, wearing his plain Guides uniform, the undecorated black tricorne hat set squarely on his big head, took the road between the Old Guard and the Young Guard. Behind him rode his staff: Berthier, Duroc, Caulaincourt, his chief secretary Baron Meneval, Rapp and a score of others, with Roger among them.

Their blue and white uniforms were now dull from dust and stains of travel, but the plumes still waved from their hats, the well-polished scabbards of their swords, their stirrups and the bits of their horses shone in the sunshine. The gold of their belts, epaulettes and embroidery on their coats remained untarnished, the jewels in the Orders on their breasts glittered and scintillated. Whichever way they had been heading they would have been thankful to
leave behind the terrible charnel-house that had once been the fine city of Smolensk.

In the wake of the army there followed another army—the great motley horde of sulters, vivandières, cobblers, sweet-sellers, tobacco pedlars, whores and ragamuffins of all descriptions. Their losses had been nothing compared to those of the armed forces, because they were not dependant on the Commissariat. In times of plenty the soldiers often gave them a share of their rations, but they always took their own supplies in small carts that they drove or pulled themselves.

One of the Army's most famous paladins had recently been overtaken by disaster. The Emperor had sent Murat and Ney ahead from Smolensk to endeavour to pin down the enemy, and they had very nearly succeeded. A most bloody encounter had taken place east of Valutina. The plan had been that, while Ney engaged the enemy hotly, Junot with the Eighth Corps, which he had taken over from King Jerome, should outflank them from the north; but he had failed to appear. Murat had galloped off in search of him, and found him with his men halted. Angrily, Murat urged him to attack at once, but Junot said his poor Westphalians were too exhausted. With a part of Junot's force, the tireless Murat then led an attack himself, but it was too weak and too late. The Russians fought him off and escaped from the trap.

Junot's failure to exert himself was, no doubt, due to the head wound he had received in Portugal affecting his brain; for, not long afterwards, he went mad. He had been with Napoleon at the siege of Toulon and served him faithfully for eighteen years. Why the Emperor should have passed over this old friend when first distributing Marshals' batons, no-one could understand. All through the seven years that had since elapsed, Junot had been hoping to receive his. Now he had lost his last chance of becoming a Marshal.

Behind Murat's cavalry screen, many thousands strong, Ney and Davout led the van. The main body followed, reaching Vyazma on August 29th and Gjatsk on September 1st. Four days later they were confronted with a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot-high hill, rising out of the level plain near Shevardino. Kutuzov had made the hill into a big redoubt that had to be stormed before the French could advance further. After severe fighting and at considerable loss, they took it; but it checked them for a day, which was of great value to Kutuzov whose army was working desperately hard to complete a great system of earthworks a few miles further on, either side of the village of Borodino.

Old Kutuzov was strongly in favour of the strategy advised by Bernadotte and adopted by Barclay, of letting his enemies advance further and further into the illimitable Russian steppe until they were exhausted; but he knew that he could not allow them to enter Moscow without fighting a battle. Had he done so he would overnight have become the most-hated man in Russia, and promptly been deprived of his command.

For making a stand, the Borodino position left much to be desired, but it was the best available. He disposed his army along it in a shallow, convex curve. The right followed the line of the little Kalotcha river, near the centre rose a steep ridge and to the left the ground sloped away to the valley of Utitza. Crowning the ridge was a great redoubt, in which were massed the Russian guns. Barclay commanded the right and centre, Bagration the left, where lesser earthworks had been thrown up. Having made his dispositions, Kutuzov retired to a farm two miles behind the line, and left his subordinates to fight the battle.

The Grand Army arrayed itself opposite: Beauharnais' Italians on the extreme left, Murat's, Ney's and Davout's corps, supported by other formations, in the
centre, the Guard on high ground at right centre, in reserve, and on the extreme right, Poniatowski's Poles.

For some days Napoleon had been far from well. He was suffering from his old complaint, dysuria, and could pass water only painfully, in driblets. In addition, the dust and damp bivouacs had given him a nasty dry cough, causing him loss of voice and making it difficult to dictate orders.

His anxieties were many, not least how matters were going on in Spain, where he still had two hundred thousand men tied up. Every few days couriers from the Peninsula reached him with news, and it was rarely good. Now, on the eve of the most important battle of his career, Captain Favrier arrived, having ridden from central Spain in thirty-two days. The despatch he brought reported that Marshal Marmont, one of Napoleon's oldest friends who, like Junot, had been with him at the siege of Toulon, had been seriously wounded, and that Soult had suffered a crushing defeat by Wellington at Salamanca.

When the Grand Army had crossed the Niemen, the odds against the Russians had been three to one in its favour. But ten weeks of campaigning had enormously reduced those odds. The Russians had been reinforced by General Miloradovitch's bringing up fifteen thousand men from the Danube, and Count Markov had reached the front with ten thousand militiamen. Napoleon, on the other hand, had received no reinforcements at all, and his losses in killed, wounded, by disease and starvation and in deserters had been at the least one hundred thousand men. Thus the odds now favoured him only by five to four.

On the morning of the battle, September 7th, when the two armies faced each other, the Grand Army numbered approximately one hundred and twenty-five thousand, and the Russians one hundred and four thousand.
The Russians had nearly six hundred and fifty guns and the Grand Army fewer than six hundred.

The battle opened by de Beauharnais attacking the Russian right. Soon afterwards Ney and Davout launched their massed infantry against the centre, while Poniatowski endeavoured to outflank the Russian left. The great redoubt was taken, retaken and taken again. For over ten hours the lines swayed back and forth, while two hundred thousand men were locked in conflict and unceasing carnage raged. Murat led his hordes of cavalry in charge after charge, only to have his temporary triumphs wrested from him by charge after charge of Platov's Cossacks.