The War of Wars (111 page)

Napoleon desperately wrote a conciliatory letter to Alexander.

Monsieur Mon Frère:

The beautiful and splendid city of Moscow no longer exists. Rostopchin has burnt it down. Four hundred incendiaries have been caught in the act; all declared they were starting fires by order of the governor and of the chief of police: they were shot. The fire seems to have died out at last; three quarters of the houses have gone, a quarter remains. Such conduct is atrocious and aimless. Was the object to deprive us of a few resources? Well, those resources were in cellars that the fire did not reach. Even then the destruction of one of the most beautiful cities in the world, the work of centuries, for so slight an object, is inconceivable. If I supposed that such things were being done under the orders of Your Majesty, I should not write this letter; but I hold it impossible that any one with the high principles of Your Majesty, such heart, such right feelings, could have authorized these excesses, unworthy as they are of a great nation. I have conducted the war against Your Majesty with no animosity. A line written to me before or after the last battle would have stopped my march, and I would gladly have foregone the advantage of entering Moscow. If anything of our old friendship remains, Your Majesty will take this letter in good part. In any case I shall deserve thanks for rendering this account of what is happening in Moscow.

In that terrible act of self-immolation, the destruction of his own capital and the nation’s heritage, the Tsar had turned the tables. Contemptuously
he declined to answer. The cold young man with the psychopathic personality would offer Napoleon no hope of peace: the self-destruction of Moscow had been his answer. Truly, the Frenchman was helpless against such an enemy as this.

Napoleon was left facing an appalling dilemma. He could hardly move on into the vast interior of Russia without endangering his army – and what anyway would be the objective – another city, another pile of ashes, another retreating Russian army? But with much of Moscow in ruins and deserted, there was soon likely to be a severe shortage of horses and such supplies as winter clothing for his men, although there was some food. Daru advised that he should stay in Moscow. Napoleon replied:

Remain here, make one vast entrenched camp of Moscow and pass the winter in it. Here we might stay till the return of spring, when our reinforcements and all Lithuania in arms should come to relieve us and complete the conquest. This is a lion’s counsel! But what would Paris say? What would they do there? What have they been doing for the last three weeks that they have not heard from me? Who knows what would be the effect of a suspension of communications for six months? No: France would not accustom itself to my absence and Prussia and Austria would take advantage of it.

It was in fact his main concern that his absence from Paris would encourage his enemies there to move against him, both within and without France. Daru’s counsel was hopelessly unrealistic.

The man of decision, Napoleon, did nothing: he was thrown into a miasma of indecision. With every passing day the predicament of Napoleon’s shrunken army amid the ruins of Moscow grew more precarious. To do nothing was not a neutral option: it was further to endanger his men.

His scant lines of communication, back to Smolensk were threatened by the emergence of peasant guerrillas who visited Peninsular-style atrocities upon the French soldiers they caught along the road: eventually Napoleon ordered that the French could only move in
force – a minimum of some 1,500 men – along that highway of death. Napoleon sought a guarantee from Kutuzov to desist from this barbaric method of warfare; he was rebuffed: ‘It is difficult to control a people who for three hundred years have never known war within their frontiers, who are ready to immolate themselves for their country, and who are not susceptible to the distinction between what is and what is not the usage of civilized warfare.’ Meanwhile Napoleon sent foraging expeditions southwards to provide for the army camped miserably in blackened Moscow, which was still burning. When the men set out in small groups, they were attacked by peasants. The Russians set fire to whole villages to deny them provisions.

Worst of all, Kutuzov was busily reinforcing his army. His 70,000-strong force was swollen to some 215,000 men by the soldiers of General Wittgenstein, recently reinforced from Finland, and by other troops from the south. Moscow was turning into a gigantic trap while Napoleon dithered. If Napoleon’s army stayed much longer, it would be faced with slow starvation, complete encirclement and isolation from outside, dwindling as his men were picked off and eventually facing a far larger force than his own. Daru’s counsel had indeed been madness.

Napoleon’s best option after the burning of the city would have been to declare he had won a great victory by capturing the capital and to retire to winter quarters at Vitebsk, or perhaps across the Prussian border, declaring his honour satisfied, his troops undefeated and continuing to threaten Russia with a renewed offensive by a much strengthened French army the following spring. But having come so far and been deprived of the object of his dreams, Napoleon was now prey to delusions and indecision – the latter entirely untypical of him. He could not bear to abandon his charred and ruined prize, the pile of ashes that were all that remained of his triumph.

The surreal atmosphere of burned-out Moscow seemed to turn his mind. Ségur wrote:

Scarcely a third of his army – and of that capital – now existed. But himself and the Kremlin were still standing. His renown was still
intact and he persuaded himself that those two great names, Napoleon and Moscow combined, would be sufficient to accomplish everything. He determined, therefore, to return to the Kremlin, which a battalion of his Guard had unfortunately preserved. The camps which he crossed on his way there presented an extraordinary sight. In the fields, amidst thick and cold mud, large fires were kept up with mahogany furniture, windows and gilded doors. Around these fires, on a damp straw, imperfectly sheltered by a few boards, were seen the soldiers and their officers, splashed all over with mud and blackened with smoke, seated in armchairs or reclined on silken couches. At their feet were spread or heaped cashmere shawls, the rarest furs of Siberia, the gold stuffs of Persia and silver dishes, off which they had nothing to eat but a black dough baked in the ashes and half-broiled and bloody horseflesh. A singular assemblage of abundance and want, of riches and filth, of luxury and wretchedness!

Amid this wreckage, Napoleon wrapped himself in false hopes. The destruction of Moscow, he said ‘is no doubt a misfortune . . . But this misfortune is not without advantage. They have left us nothing but ruins, but at least we are quiet among them. Millions have no doubt slipped through our hands but how many thousand millions is Russia losing! Her commerce is ruined for a century to come. The nation is thrown back fifty years: this, of itself, is an important result. When the first moment of enthusiasm is passed, this reflection will fill them with consternation.’ He alternated between ferocious and undignified outbursts of temper in front of his troops, sleepless nights in which he unburdened himself to his faithful Davout, huge meals, reading novels in a reclining position, and playing cards with the reliable de Beauharnais.

He despatched an envoy, Jacques-Alexandre Lauriston, to Alexander, with a litany of despair in his instructions: ‘I want peace, I must have peace, I absolutely will have peace – only save my honour.’ Kutuzov met Lauriston but refused to permit him to travel to St Petersburg to deliver the message to the Tsar. A Russian emissary took the message instead.

Alexander’s contemptuous response was: ‘Peace? My campaign is just beginning.’ He did not trouble to reply. Alexander explained his
view: ‘Let us vow redoubled courage and perseverance! The enemy is in deserted Moscow as in a tomb, without means of domination or even of existence. He entered Russia with 300,000 men of all countries, without union or any national or religious bond; he has lost half of them by the sword, famine and desertion: he has but the wreck of his army at Moscow. He is in the heart of Russia and not a single Russian is at his feet!’

The same hand that had burnt down his own capital city showed no inclination to display the slightest weakness towards his opponent. Napoleon lingered in Moscow for five fateful weeks, in a miasma of indecision, depression and wishful thinking, waiting for Alexander’s reply which never came, while his enemies reinforced themselves around Moscow and the Russian winter inexorably approached.

In the event, this long and needless delay was to decide the fate of his men. The master of instant decisions and lightning manoeuvres was behaving like a befuddled old woman in the grip of hubris, unreality, uncertainty and fear. At times listless and inert, Napoleon seemed a spent force, the victim not the master of events. This was to change. But for the moment, the illusions of this conqueror of a city of ashes, this lord of the flies, were shattered.

On 18 October, Murat, in command of the French forces probing south of Moscow for food under an armistice agreement, was shot at by a Cossack. Murat promptly abrogated the armistice, then realized that his men were dangerously exposed with the Cossacks to the left moving around them to cut them off. Attacking frontally and then engaging in a forced march to his rear, Murat nearly lost his force and 4,000 of his men were killed or wounded. Murat himself was wounded, Two generals perished and twelve cannon were taken. Murat rallied his forces and, with Poniatowski’s cavalry coming to the rescue, the remainder of his men were saved. Hostilities had broken out again.

At last the inert Emperor realized that his position in Moscow was no longer tenable. He departed from the city the following day, ordering the rest of his army to follow and leaving behind Mortier with 200,000 pounds of gunpowder and orders to blow up the Kremlin. Following him there were 140,000 men and 50,000 horses, some 220 cannon and 2,000 wagons. It was, in Ségur’s words, ‘a caravan, a wandering nation or rather one of the armies of antiquity returning loaded with slaves and spoil after a great devastation’. The army was equipped with vast quantities of useless booty, dressed in splendid furs and fabrics, and already extremely ill-disciplined; yet it was a massive body of men and still a formidable fighting force. It boasted of having taken the enemy’s capital and won a major battle. It was far from demoralized. It had no idea of the terrible fate that awaited, the horrors to come.

The retreat from Moscow had started. Deciding neither to stay in Moscow nor to march on St Petersburg, Napoleon had in fact belatedly decided on the right course of action – to march down to Kaluga a hundred miles further south in the rich heartland of Russia, which would allow him to circle westwards, plundering across prosperous territory towards Poland. It was to be a retreat, but one in which the army could sensibly reprovision itself and prepare for another campaign in the spring. This was also a strategy of some boldness, even representing an advance into Russia rather than a retreat.

Kutuzov’s army, having marched eastwards on its withdrawal from Moscow had circled south and to the west, presumably to block a French march into these fertile areas. Napoleon was moving to confront him head on, thus recovering some of the
Grande Armée
’s tarnished glory. Napoleon’s real intention was to bypass Kutuzov’s base at Tarutino and enter the fertile region. If this move had succeeded the
Grande Armée
might have been reinvigorated and moved more or less intact back to the west to fight another day against the Russians. It was the right policy, the only possible exit from the colossal debacle of the burning of Moscow.

Heavy rains soon began to bog the French down. Much worse, Napoleon had failed to take the elementary precaution of sending forward a force to seize the one key bridge on his route south – that at the small, nondescript town of Maloyaroslavets, which commanded the vital river crossing over the Luzha. Although few have ever heard that mouthful of a name, it was to prove a far more decisive turning point than the huge and indecisive Battle of Borodino or the burning of Moscow itself: for it marked the point of no return for the French, the moment when the invasion of Russia turned from being a victory on points or at least a draw, to the most terrible, protracted defeat ever suffered by a great army. After Maloyaroslavets, a French victory was no longer possible, defeat inevitable.

Napoleon’s army was discovered by General Docturev, one of Kutuzov’s aides, by accident. He marched through the night to seize the little timber-framed town with a view to destroying the bridge, and there found a tiny French advance detachment on 23 October. The
fighting between the two small forces was vicious, with the town being burnt to the ground and exchanging hands no fewer than seven times that day. The heroes of the day were undoubtedly the Italians under Colonel Perladi, loyal to de Beauharnais, who with around 18,000 men stormed a Russian position overlooking the town manned by 50,000. Some 4,000 Italians were killed or wounded, but they were eventually triumphant.

Kutuzov’s main army of 120,000 had by now had time to position itself further south to block the road to Kaluga. Napoleon, in blissful ignorance of what had transpired at that bloody river crossing, continued southwards himself – until he had his narrowest escape ever from either capture or death. For on the misty morning of 25 October, as he crossed the plain leading to the devastated town escorted by a few officers and his hospital and baggage wagons, he heard cries which he took to be the customary ‘
Vive l’Empereur!
’ They were in fact the war cries of a force of 6,000 Cossacks.

Ségur described the outcome:

When they had once started, they approached with such speed that Rapp had but just time to say to the Emperor, ‘It is the Cossacks! Turn back!’ The Emperor, whose eyes deceived him or who disliked running away, stood firm and was on the point of being surrounded, when Rapp seized the bridle of his horse and turned him round, crying, ‘Indeed you must!’ And really it was high time to fly, although Napoleon’s pride would not allow him to do so. He drew his sword, Berthier and Rapp did the same; then placing themselves on the left side of the road, they waited the approach of the horde, from which they were scarcely forty paces distant. Rapp had barely time to turn himself round to face these barbarians, when the foremost of them thrust his lance into the chest of his horse with such force as to throw him down. The other aides-de-camp and a few troopers belonging to the Guard saved the General. This action, the bravery of Le Coulteux, the efforts of a score of officers and chasseurs and, above all, the thirst of these barbarians for plunder, saved the Emperor. And yet they needed only to have stretched out their hands and seized him, for at the same moment the horde, in
crossing the highroad, overthrew everything before them: horses, men and carriages, wounding and killing some and dragging them into the woods for the purpose of plundering them; then, loosing the horses harnessed to the guns, they took them along with them across country. But they only had a momentary victory, a triumph of surprise. The cavalry of the guard galloped up; at this sight they let go their prey and fled and this torrent subsided: leaving indeed melancholy traces but abandoning all that it was hurrying away in its course.