B009YBU18W EBOK (63 page)

As the French resumed their march, they were caught in a murderous enfilading fire from the Russian guns. The last of Latour-Maubourg’s cavalry struggled to keep cossacks and Russian cavalry at
bay, while the dense column of men and vehicles made its way down the cluttered road. Colonel Boulart, who had managed to keep all his guns thus far, had a terrible job getting them through here too. The civilians and men who had left the ranks were getting in the way, and their skidding vehicles obstructed the road. Boulart cleared some ground at the side of the road, and, one by one, led his gun teams round the jam. But the chaos increased as the Russian artillery were now shelling the bottleneck, and when he went back for his last gun he found it impossible to move it among the exploding shells, so he spiked and abandoned it. As he struggled free of the mass of civilians with his last team, he saw a harrowing sight. ‘A young lady, a fugitive from Moscow, well-dressed and with striking looks, had managed to free herself from the mêlée and was moving ahead with great difficulty on the donkey she was riding, when a cannonball came and shattered the poor animal’s jaw,’ he wrote. ‘I cannot express the feeling of sorrow I carried away with me as I left that unfortunate woman, who would betimes become the prey and possibly the victim of the cossacks.’
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In an effort to push back the Russian guns, the infantry made a number of exhausting bayonet attacks through the deep snow, in which hundreds perished. Colonel Tyndal’s Dutch Grenadiers, whom
Napoleon used to call ‘the glory of Holland’, lost 464 men out of five hundred. The Young Guard was virtually sacrificed in the process of covering the withdrawal. The Russians kept out of musketshot and merely shelled them, but in the words of General Roguet, ‘they killed without vanquishing … for three hours these troops received death without making the slightest move to avoid it and without being able to return it’.
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Luckily for the French, Kutuzov refused to reinforce the troops barring the road once he heard that it was Napoleon himself who was marching down it. Many on the Russian side felt a deep-seated reluctance to take him on, and preferred to stand by in awe. ‘As on the previous days, the Emperor marched at the head of his Grenadiers,’ recalled one of the few cavalrymen left in his escort. ‘The shells which flew over were bursting all round him without his seeming to notice.’ But this heroic day ended on a less solemn note as they reached Ladi late that afternoon. The approach to the town was down a steep icy slope. It was utterly impossible to walk down, so Napoleon, his marshals and his Old Guard had no option but to slide down it on their bottoms.
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The Emperor struck a more serious tone the following day at Dubrovna, where he assembled his Guard and addressed the dense ranks of bearskins. ‘Grenadiers of my Guard,’ he thundered, ‘you are witnessing the disintegration of the army; through a deplorable inevitability the majority of the soldiers have cast away their weapons. If you imitate this disastrous example, all hope is lost. The salvation of the army has been entrusted to you, and I know you will justify the good opinion I have of you. Not only must officers maintain strict discipline, but the soldiers too must keep a watchful eye and themselves punish those who would leave the ranks.’ The grenadiers responded by raising their bearskins on their bayonets and cheering.

Mortier made a similar speech to what was left of the Young Guard, which responded with shouts of ‘
Vive l’Empereur!
’ A little further back in the marching order, General Gérard applied more summary methods when a grenadier of the 12th of the Line dropped
out of the ranks announcing that he would not fight any more. He rode up to the man, drew his pistol from the saddle holster and, cocking it, announced that he would blow his brains out if he did not return to his place at once. When the soldier refused to obey, the General shot him. He then made a speech, telling the men that they were not garrison troops but soldiers of the great Napoleon, and that consequently much was expected of them. They responded with shouts of ‘
Vive l’Empereur! Vive le Général Gérard!
’
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Later on that same day, 19 November, Napoleon reached Orsha, where he hoped to be able to rally the remains of his army. The city was reasonably well stocked with provisions and arms. ‘A few days’ rest and good food, and above all some horses and artillery will soon put us right,’ he had written to Maret from Dubrovna the previous day. He issued a proclamation giving assembly points for each corps, warning that any soldier found in possession of a horse would have it taken away for the use of the artillery, that any excess baggage would be burnt, and that soldiers who had left their units would be punished. He himself took up position at the bridge over the Dnieper leading into the town, ordering excess private vehicles to be burnt and unauthorised soldiers to give up their mounts. He then posted gendarmes there to carry on in his place and to direct incoming men to their respective corps and inform them that they would be fed only if they rejoined the colours.
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Watching the men streaming into town can only have heightened Napoleon’s anxiety over Ney, who seemed irretrievably lost. That evening he paced the room he had occupied in the former Jesuit convent, cursing Davout for not having waited for Ney and declaring that he would give every one of the three hundred million francs he had in the vaults of the Tuileries to get the Marshal back. His anxiety was shared by the whole army, which held the brave and forthright Ney in high esteem. ‘His rejoining the army from beyond Krasny seemed impossible, but if there was one man who could achieve the impossible, everyone agreed, it was Ney,’ recorded Caulaincourt. ‘Maps were unfolded, everyone pored over them, pointing out the
route by which he would have to march if courage alone could not open the road.’
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Ney had been the last to march out of Smolensk, amid harrowing scenes, on the morning of 17 November. He had been ordered by Napoleon to blow up the city fortifications, and his unfortunate aide-de-camp Auguste Breton was given the job of setting the charges and then visiting the hospitals in order to inform the inmates that the French were leaving. ‘Already the wards, the corridors and the stairs were full of the dead and dying,’ he recorded. ‘It was a spectacle of horror whose very memory makes me shudder.’ Dr Larrey had put up large notices in three languages begging for the wounded to be treated with compassion, but neither he nor they had any illusions. Many of them crawled out into the road, begging in the name of humanity to be taken along, terrified at the prospect of being left at the mercy of the cossacks.
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Ney’s corps by now numbered some six thousand men under arms, and was followed by at least twice as many stragglers and civilians. He marched along a road strewn with the usual traces of retreat, but beyond Korytnia the following morning he found himself crossing what was patently the scene of a recent battle. And that afternoon, 18 November, he himself came face to face with Miloradovich, who, having failed to capture Prince Eugène and then Davout, was determined not to miss his third chance.

He sent an officer with a flag of truce calling on Ney to surrender, to which the latter answered that a Marshal of France never surrendered. Ney then drew up his forces, opened up with the six guns he had left, and launched a bold frontal assault on the Russian positions. It was carried out with such
élan
that it nearly succeeded in overrunning the Russian guns barring the way, but the French ranks were raked with canister shot and a countercharge by Russian cavalry and infantry sent them reeling back. Not to be deterred, Ney mounted a second attack, and his columns advanced with remarkable determination under a hail of canister shot. It was ‘a combat of giants’ in the words of General Wilson. ‘Whole ranks fell, only to be replaced by
the next ones coming up to die in the same place,’ according to one Russian officer. ‘
Bravo, bravo, Messieurs les Français,
’ Miloradovich exclaimed to a captured officer. ‘You have just attacked, with astonishing vigour, an entire corps with a handful of men. It is impossible to show greater bravery.’

But before long the French were beaten back once again. Colonel Pelet, who was in the front rank with his 48th of the Line, was wounded three times and saw his regiment decimated. The neighbouring 18th of the Line was reduced from six hundred men to five or six officers and twenty-five or thirty men, and lost its eagle in the attack. Fezensac’s 4th lost two-thirds of its effectives. Woldemar von Löwenstern, who had been watching the proceedings from the Russian positions, galloped back to Kutuzov’s headquarters and announced that Ney would be their prisoner that night.
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But this forty-three-year-old son of a barrel-maker from Lorraine was not so easily accounted for. Touchy and headstrong, Ney was furious when he realised that he had been left to fend for himself by Napoleon. ‘That b—has abandoned us; he sacrificed us in order to save himself; what can we do? What will become of us? Everything is f—ked!’ he ranted. But it would take more than that to shake his loyalty to Napoleon. And if he was not the most intelligent of Napoleon’s marshals, he was resourceful and certainly one of the bravest. After some discussion with his generals, he decided to try to give the Russians the slip by crossing the Dnieper, which flowed more or less parallel with the road some distance away, and then making for Orsha along its other bank, thus bypassing Miloradovich and putting the river between himself and the Russians.

While he made a show of settling down for the night, Ney sent a Polish officer to reconnoitre the banks of the Dnieper in search of a place to cross. A place was found, and that night, after having carefully stoked up enough bivouac fires to give the impression that the whole corps was camping there, Ney led the remainder of his force – not much more than a couple of thousand men – off the Smolensk – Orsha road and into the woods to the north of it. It was
an exhausting and difficult march, particularly as he was still dragging his last few guns and as many supply wagons as he could through the deep snow. ‘None of us knew what would become of us,’ recalled Raymond de Fezensac. ‘But the presence of Marshal Ney was enough to reassure us. Without knowing what he intended to do or what he was capable of doing, we knew that he would do something. His self-confidence was on a par with his courage. The greater the danger, the stronger his determination, and once he had made his decision he never doubted its successful outcome. Thus it was that at such a moment his face betrayed neither indecision nor anxiety; all eyes were upon him, but nobody dared to question him.’
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They soon got lost and disoriented, but Ney spotted a gully which he assumed to be the bed of a stream. Digging through the snow they found ice, and when they broke that they saw from the direction of flow which way they must follow it. They eventually came to the Dnieper, which was covered with a coating of ice thick enough to take the weight of men and horses spaced out, but not to support large groups or cannon drawn by teams of horses.

The men began to cross, leaving spaces between each other,
prodding the ice in front with their musket butts as it groaned ominously. ‘We slithered carefully one behind the other, fearful of being engulfed by the ice, which made cracking sounds at every step we took; we were moving between life and death,’ in the words of General Freytag. As they reached the other bank, they came up against a steep and slippery incline. Freytag floundered helplessly until Ney himself saw him and, cutting a sapling with his sabre, stretched out a helping limb and pulled him up.

Some mounted men and then a few light wagons did get across, encouraging others to try but weakening the ice in the process. More wagons ventured onto it, including some carrying wounded men, but these foundered through the ice with sickening cracks. ‘All around one could see unfortunate men who had fallen through the ice with their horses, and were up to their shoulders in the water, begging their comrades for assistance which these could not lend without exposing themselves to sharing their unhappy fate,’ recalled Freytag; ‘their cries and their moans tore at our hearts, which were already strongly affected by our own peril.’
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