B009YBU18W EBOK (82 page)

Sergeant Bourgogne noted that whenever he would get together with old comrades from the Imperial Guard still alive in the 1820s, their talk would invariably turn to the Moscow campaign, which held a fascination for them quite unlike that of any of the other great expeditions in which they had taken part.
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And when Balzac wanted to engage his readers’ nostalgia for the Napoleonic epos, in his novel
Le Médecin de Campagne
, he did not conjure some glorious moment of triumph, but created the character of Gondrin, an old sapper who had helped to build the Berezina bridges and hailed Napoleon from the icy water.

The very name of that muddy river has enormous resonance, even for people who know little history. It is a powerful symbol of the failure and the tragedy that lie at the heart of the Napoleonic myth; the images of heroism and shipwreck it conjures are a fitting nemesis to the hubris not only of Napoleon’s crossing of the Niemen five months earlier, but of the whole Napoleonic era.

This sketch of Napoleon, made by Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson in March 1812, shortly before the Emperor’s departure for the Russian campaign, shows the unhealthy plumpness which had recently set in, belying his attempt to appear aquiline.

The French army on campaign was a far cry from the glorious image suggested by most military prints, as this scene, drawn from life by Albrecht Adam, shows. Here, a party of cuirassiers are concerned with the vital business of herding food on the hoof.

Tsar Alexander I, painted by Gerhard von Kügelgen in 1804, the year he denounced Napoleon as an upstart and before he had been forced to flee from him on the battlefield of Austerlitz.

General Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, Russia’s Minister of War and commander of the First Army, a brave but prudent soldier who knew the limitations of his force, by an unknown artist.

A group of Russian gunners, drawn from life by Johann Adam Klein.The Russian artillery was probably the best in the world at the time.

General Prince Piotr Ivanovich Bagration, commander of the Second Army, a firebrand who believed he should be in overall command, sketched at the start of the campaign by one of his staff officers, General Markov.

General Count Levin Gottlieb Bennigsen, who, despite having been soundly beaten by Napoleon at Friedland in 1807, believed he should be in command in 1812, by George Dawe.

Cossacks on the march, by Johann Adam Klein.A type of light cavalry recruited largely from the cossacks of the Don and the Kuban, they were used mostly to harry rather than to fight.Those depicted here belong to one of the regular cossack regiments.

Napoleon’s stepson Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, loved throughout the army and esteemed by his peers for his bravery and chivalry, by Andrea Appiani.

Marshal Davout, a strict disciplinarian, probably the most capable and loyal of Napoleon’s marshals, from a miniature on porcelain by Jean-Baptiste Isabey.