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Boulart, who had been unable to get his remaining guns into Vilna when he arrived outside the city on 9 December, had gone out the next day and brought them round by a side road. But by the time he reached the foot of the hill at Ponary the mass of stranded wagons made it out of the question for even the best-harnessed vehicle to get through.

The same went for the convoy carrying the treasury, and all of Baron Peyrusse’s superhuman efforts over the past two months were made vain. The gold-laden wagons were too heavy to be hauled up, even if there had been no jam. He began removing sacks of coins from the wagons and transferring them onto the backs of horses. He even managed to get one wagon, which he had emptied, dragged up the slope and refilled, all the way back to Danzig. Marshal Bessières
in passing ordered Noel to take some of the gold on his wagons, but the result of this measure was that the wagons disappeared along with the gold. On the other hand, some German officers from Baden and Württemberg allegedly loaded 400,000 francs in gold onto their sleigh and handed it in to the paymaster at Königsberg two weeks later.
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It was not long before passing soldiers, seeing the abandoned wagons marked
Trésor Imperial
, began breaking them open and helping themselves, and a free-for-all developed as officers, rankers and civilians fought over sacks of gleaming
Napoléons-d’or
. The ground was littered with silver coins and other booty being cast aside as the men filled their pockets and knapsacks with gold, jewelled icons and other pieces of Napoleon’s Moscow booty.

It was a tremendous boon for those who had lost everything at some point along the road. Julien Combe noted that one of his Chasseurs managed to grab a bag containing 20,000 francs, which later permitted him to get married and settle down prosperously in Besançon. But for most, the opportunity to loot proved their undoing. A swarm of cossacks appeared on the scene as soon as the orderly units of the retreating army had passed, and showed no mercy as they too joined in the looting.

The most unfortunate were the wounded whose carriages had been caught in the jam, who were either killed there and then or dragged back to Vilna. As one junior artillery officer pointed out, if only Hogendorp or some other official had sprinkled a little sand on the slope, the French would have saved the entire treasury, several batteries of guns, the papers of the general staff, and hundreds if not thousands of wounded officers and men.
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‘What took place in Vilna over the few weeks after 10 December is easier to tell than to believe, not that it is easy to speak of either,’ according to Aleksander Fredro. As soon as the organised units had marched out of the city, swarms of cossacks poured in, hunting down stragglers in the streets and seeking out soldiers and particularly
officers who had taken refuge in private houses. They went into the hospitals and the monasteries where the wounded and those who could go no further lay helpless, and began beating and kicking them, tearing off their clothes and their dressings in search of valuables. Those who protested or tried to defend themselves were killed.
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The non-Polish population of the city, perhaps out of desire to assert their anti-French credentials and thereby shield themselves from potential reprisals on the part of the Russians, joined in the sport of hunting down French and allied soldiers. Those who had rented rooms to officers or let them take shelter in their houses were quick to kill the inconvenient guests and, after stripping them of their remaining valuables, throw their bodies into the street. There are accounts of them luring starving officers into their homes in order to kill and rob them, of women enthusiastically battering survivors to death, and one of them stuffing ordure into the mouths of prisoners and wounded, saying, ‘
Le monsieur a du pain maintenant.
’ Those who were not killed wandered the streets begging for a crust of bread, and eventually died of cold as they huddled against the wall of a building.

Matters did not improve when regular Russian forces under General Czaplic occupied the city. The soldiers scoured the hospitals in the wake of the cossacks, and the medical staff who eventually took over were little better. Despite the availability of victuals, the wounded were left with no food or water for days, and were ill-treated by the orderlies. Typhus had broken out, and the dead and dying were unceremoniously thrown out of the windows and dumped in the street, where heaps of hard-frozen contorted bodies piled up.
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The troubles were far from over for those who had carried on towards Kovno. ‘The sight which the retreat presented at this stage,’ wrote Paul de Bourgoing of the Young Guard, ‘was one of a long stream of men, horses and a few wagons, stretching out of sight like a black ribbon on the uniformly white plain of snow; each man walked on his own, silent and almost crushed by the weight of his thoughts and his fears.’ The weather continued bitterly cold, with the daytime
temperature hovering around the – 35°C (–31°F) mark, and frostbite continued to take a toll: ‘One could see an extraordinary number of soldiers with hands and fingers of bone, as the flesh had fallen away,’ wrote Vionnet de Maringoné.
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A hard core still stuck to their colours, in groups of about fifty. ‘I remained, with, alas! very few others, with our eagle, whose pole was adorned with no more than a shred of cloth, and which, deprived of one of its wings, carried away by a shell at Eylau, still hovered over the disasters as our sacred rallying sign,’ wrote Sergeant Bertrand of the 7th Light Infantry. The grim determination of some of the old soldiers is remarkable, and when Marshal Lefèbvre let slip at a moment when they were encircled outside Vilna the despairing comment that they would never see their homes again, one of them turned to him and said: ‘Shut up, you old fool. If we have to die, we’ll die.’
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Sergeant Bourgogne watched as the pitiful remnant of one regiment turned to face the enemy when its bedraggled colonel called out: ‘
Allons
, children of France, we must stand again! It must not be said that we hurried our pace at the sound of the cannon! About turn!’ Ney, who was commanding the rearguard of some eight hundred men, set a remarkable example of courage and endurance. ‘He was, at that moment, just as one imagines the heroes of antiquity,’ noted Bourgogne, who watched him repel a Russian cavalry attack at the head of his troops. ‘One can fairly say that he was, in the last days of that disastrous retreat, the saviour of the debris of the army.’
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Bourgogne claims that during this last part of the retreat, as they began to feel that they really were reaching safety, solidarity began to reassert itself and people stopped to help those who had fallen or to assist each other in various ways. Although this may have been so, it seems rather that people revealed themselves in extremes of good and bad.

Captain Drujon de Bealieu of the 8th Lancers could go no further and sat down by the roadside to wait for death, but a passing trooper from his regiment who still had a horse stopped, gave him a piece of bread and hoisted him onto his mount. Sergeant Irriberrigoyen, a
Provençal cadre serving with the 1st Polish Lancers, was alone with his Lieutenant, having become separated from the rest of their regiment. The Lieutenant turned to him and said that he could go no further. ‘You can do what you want, my friend, but I’m f—d,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to have managed to come all this way, from Moscow, to have reached Vilna and to die here … But I can’t take another step.’ The Sergeant tried to persuade him to carry on, but the Lieutenant was adamant. At this point they saw a sleigh coming up the road. The Sergeant cried out with joy, but as it drew level with them the Lieutenant recognised the driver: a soldier from his company whom he had disciplined four times for insubordination and looting, having him flogged and even threatening him with the firing squad. The sleigh stopped and the driver got down. He told the Sergeant to climb in, then came up to the Lieutenant. After a while he burst out laughing, took a swinging punch at him, picked him up and, thrusting him into the sleigh, covered him with a fur rug. ‘You had me punished for a little bit of looting,’ he said as they drove off, ‘but you must admit that it has its uses at times, and that at this very moment you are not greatly concerned about the fact that I pinched this well-harnessed sleigh, which will nicely take us out of this damned country.’
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But Nicolas Planat de la Faye and his superior, General Lariboisière, reached a small hut one evening in which they decided to halt. They found two young Dutch conscripts warming themselves by a fire inside it, and turfed them out, despite the pleadings of one of them, a boy in his mid teens. They could hear him whimpering outside as they fell asleep, and found him frozen to death when they set off in the morning.
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And in some instances, people found it difficult to tell what was right and what was wrong.

A Belgian soldier of the Guard came across an officer lying in a sleigh, his servant having abandoned him and taken his horse. ‘Wrapped in a large fur cloak, his hands and feet were frostbitten, and he begged me to kill him, as he was certain that he would not live long in this position,’ writes the soldier. ‘I had already primed my musket in order to render him this service which he implored of me, but then
I reflected that he might as well die without me. I left him, but I was some way away before I could no longer hear him begging me to kill him.’
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Kovno was well stocked with supplies and was certainly defensible, having been fortified with some earthworks. But Murat did not consider stopping there, and sped on towards Königsberg. The organised units received some rations, but the fleeing rabble that streamed into Kovno on 12 December and the following day was in no condition to defend anything. Most of the men made straight for the stores, where they devoured everything they could lay their hands on, without waiting for bread to be baked or distributed in an orderly way. They came across a large supply of spirits, and fights broke out between drunken French and German soldiers. A great many men sat down to drown their sorrows. The alcohol, which warms the spirits but actually reduces body temperature, was to be their undoing, and thousands froze to death as they collapsed, still clutching their bottles, or dozed off, huddled in doorways and porches.

When he reached Kovno with his dwindling rearguard, a ragbag of depleted units, Ney took up defensive positions outside the city in order to allow as many stragglers as possible to pass through it, pick up supplies and get across the Niemen. It was a slow business, as, although the river was now frozen hard and could be crossed anywhere, everyone was crowding onto the bridge, and the ensuing bottleneck caused the usual fights and casualties.

Ney soon found himself threatened with encirclement by cossacks, and was bombarded by artillery brought up by regular Russian cavalry. He had a few guns, including some of those Major Noel had so unnecessarily brought all the way to Ponary, and he kept the Russians at bay for a time. But his troops were melting away. A company of Germans from Anhalt-Lippe gave up when they saw their Captain, who had been wounded, put a pistol to his head and shoot himself. In the end Ney was left with only a handful of French infantry, so he began falling back, carrying out a fighting withdrawal
through the town and over the bridge. A soldier’s musket in his hand, he remained in the front rank of his diminishing force, commanding them and encouraging them to the last. As he reached the western end of the bridge he discharged one last shot at the Russians and then flung his musket into the frozen bed of the Niemen before turning and trudging off.
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The Intendant General Mathieu Dumas had struggled across the river earlier and reached Gumbinnen, where he took shelter in the local doctor’s house. The next morning he was just sitting down to a nourishing breakfast and some good coffee when the door opened and in came a man dressed in a brown greatcoat, his bearded face blackened by smoke and his eyes red and sparkling. ‘Here I am, at last!’ the newcomer announced. ‘What, General Dumas, do you not recognise me?’ Dumas shook his head and asked him who he was. ‘I am the rearguard of the Grande Armée,’ answered the man. ‘I am Marshal Ney.’
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T
he first stages of Napoleon’s flight had passed in a gloomy silence as he and Caulaincourt shivered beneath layers of furs in the commodious coach. But that had changed once they crossed the Niemen at Kovno on 7 December. ‘As soon as we were in the Grand Duchy [of Warsaw] he became very gay and kept talking about the army and of Paris,’ recorded Caulaincourt. ‘He would not admit any doubts that the army would manage to hold on at Vilna, and refused to face up to the extent of its losses.’
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They had exchanged their coach for a primitive sleigh made out of an old carriage mounted on runners, and Napoleon chattered on as they sped along, with snow blowing in through the cracks around the ill-fitting doors.

He went over all the events that had led up to the war, which he protested that he had never wanted, and maintained that he had always meant to re-establish the Kingdom of Poland in the interests of world peace. ‘They do not understand: I am not ambitious,’ he complained. ‘The lack of sleep, the effort, war itself, these are not for someone of my age. I love my bed and rest more than anyone, but I have to finish the work I have embarked on. There are only two alternatives in this world: to command or to obey. The policies of every cabinet in Europe towards France have proved that she could only count on her own power, and therefore on force.’ He kept drifting back to the subject of Britain, which he represented as the one
obstacle to the desired peace, and tried to convince Caulaincourt that he was fighting against her on behalf of the whole of Europe, which did not realise that it was being exploited by the fiendish islanders.
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