Citizen Emperor (85 page)

However, the longer Napoleon stayed in Moscow the more problematic became his situation. Once the neighbouring villages had been exhausted, the army was obliged to look ever further afield for food and fodder.
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The further afield they were forced to look, the more exhausted became the horses. Lack of fodder meant, naturally, no cavalry, no artillery and no communications with France; the weaker Napoleon became the stronger Kutuzov became. Kutuzov was reinforcing his army of 80,000 men at Tarutino, within easy striking distance of Moscow, as new recruits and soldiers from other fronts arrived over the coming weeks. During that time, the Cossacks constantly harassed Napoleon’s supply lines to the point where the verb
cosaquer
was invented to describe their attacks.

‘I Want Peace, I Need Peace, I Must Have Peace!’

This was hardly an unprecedented situation for Napoleon. There had been other occasions when enemies had failed to submit in the face of defeat – recall Prussia and Spain – but never had an enemy ignored the normal rules of war and continued the struggle in the face of repeated requests to negotiate. It was as much a clash of cultures as a clash of arms, one in which neither side really comprehended the other. Napoleon for one could not hide his disappointment at the way in which the Russians were behaving, or rather were not behaving.
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He had to decide whether to stay, find winter quarters elsewhere or march on to Petersburg. Some officers, including Eugène, thought that Petersburg was the next obvious phase in the campaign. Ney, on the other hand, suggested resting in Moscow a week and then retreating to Smolensk.
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It was also the kind of thing that became the object of conversation among the troops. One soldier, irritated by the Russians’ persistent refusal to negotiate, asked of his brother, ‘How is one supposed to deal with such cannibals?’
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Napoleon was probably asking himself the same thing. He had never intended staying in Moscow for any length of time, and now that most of it had been burnt to the ground, it was no longer an appropriate political space for eventual or potential negotiations with Russian authorities. But he was unsure what to do next and procrastinated. Rumours of a departure from Moscow could be heard one day only to be contradicted the next.
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Napoleon fell back on the hope that Alexander would negotiate; it was the logical thing to do. He desperately looked about Moscow for potential intermediaries, but they were few and far between. One of the few who had not fled Moscow was Alekseyevich Yakovlev, the brother of a Russian diplomatic agent in Germany. He was dragged before Napoleon, who started the interview by berating the poor man, as if he were somehow responsible for the war. In any event, Yakovlev and his family were given safe conduct out of Moscow in order to deliver a letter to Alexander, in which Napoleon stated that ‘a single note from him would put an end to hostilities’.
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About a week or so later, still without a reply, Napoleon wanted to send Caulaincourt to St Petersburg, but Caulaincourt argued his way out of the mission by insisting, probably correctly, that Alexander would not receive him. Instead, Napoleon sent General Lauriston. ‘I want peace, I need peace, I must have peace! Just save my honour!’ Napoleon is supposed to have told him.
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The problem, of course, was that the more he clamoured for peace, the more desperate he looked. He realized this, and yet he still kept sending Alexander new messages.
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Caulaincourt believes that it revealed an extraordinarily blind faith in his star.
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How could Napoleon have entertained such illusions, knowing full well that his position in Moscow was tenuous, and that any reverses would transform the Austrian and Prussian troops guarding his rear into his worst enemies? Possibly because ‘his enthusiasm was such, and so eager was he to nurture his own illusions, that he nursed the hope of receiving a reply from the Tsar, or at least negotiations for an armistice with Kutusov, which would lead to further results’.
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Napoleon by now thought his enemies so weak that he could not conceive of any other outcome than victory and a treaty. He was behaving like a jilted lover, begging his partner, who had left him and who had no intention of coming back, to kiss and make up. He seems not to have realized the extent of the rupture. Moreover, the Russians were only too happy to drag things out in what now looks like a deliberate ploy to keep Napoleon in Moscow as long as possible.
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This had dire consequences for the occupation and the army. Napoleon was in a relatively strong position strategically, but, for reasons that cannot fully be comprehended, he refused to organize the regions he occupied in the way he had done in previous campaigns. Six weeks after the battle of Smolensk, for example, the streets had still not been cleared of the dead. Bands of brigands made up of deserters had established themselves in various regions. As early as August, the region between Vilnius and Smolensk was ‘covered in vagabond soldiers’.
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Desertion rates were high. Nobody capable had been placed in charge of the areas behind the lines. In Moscow, and most of the other cities the troops had occupied, the Russian administration had absconded and nothing had filled the void. The wounded were totally neglected, and were dying not only from lack of treatment, but from starvation and dehydration; Napoleon did not even bother issuing orders to evacuate them westwards.

Another side to Napoleon was revealed; he dug in his heels and made as though he were not going to move from Moscow until Alexander came to the table. It is what Ségur called a ‘struggle of obstinacy’, Alexander holding out and Napoleon deferring the day when he would have to call a retreat.
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Orders had been sent to bring fresh troops to Moscow; there was talk of bringing the Comédie Française to entertain the troops.
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Napoleon later argued that he had declared his intention of passing the winter in Moscow in the hope that the enemy would be more disposed to negotiate a settlement, although this declaration cannot be taken at face value.
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In the meantime, the troops made the best of a bad situation. Since the majority of Russians had fled the city, and two-thirds of it had burnt down, there was not all that much to do. There were some grumblings in the army about staying so long, especially since the lack of supplies began to be felt.
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Others, like General Dessolle and the Comte de Valence, had asked to be transferred back to France, usually on the pretext, sometimes justified, of ill-health. Some complained of the conditions in which they found themselves – ‘badly lodged, no sheets, no shirts, no clothes, no boots, badly fed’
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– although they were far better off than those living off the land around Moscow, where provisions were a good deal harder to come by, and where troops had been obliged to sleep in the open for weeks. They generally came to Moscow to pillage.
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Napoleon on the other hand seems to have been living in a world protected from the harsh realities of the troops, and dismissed reports coming in from Murat in the vicinity of Tarutino about the difficulties he was facing.

He was just hanging on in the vain hope that something would come along to put things right. Caulaincourt noted that Napoleon ‘could not admit to himself that fortune, which had so often smiled upon him, had quite abandoned his cause just when he required miracles of her’.
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This is why the Emperor lingered longer in Moscow than he should have, with the consequences that we shall shortly see. He had gone from being an active agent of his own destiny to a passive agent, a state in which the belief in his star assumed fatalist proportions. The delusion went so far that he dismissed suggestions that the Russian winter was harsh, or that the army should be provided with suitable clothing.
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Admittedly, he was not alone in being lulled into a false sense of security by the exceptionally mild weather they had experienced in October. ‘The weather began to turn bad this morning,’ General Mouton wrote to his wife, ‘but the previous days it was as beautiful and as mild as Brussels, we were all enchanted by the kindness of the heavens.’
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Even so, it started to snow in the middle of October, which should have forewarned Napoleon of the difficulties ahead. The Russians interpreted this change in the weather as a good omen.
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‘A Cadaver of a Capital’

At the beginning of October, Napoleon instructed his corps commanders to be ready to leave Moscow at short notice.
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He had had a conversation with Caulaincourt about whether Alexander would respond to new peace overtures; Caulaincourt did not think so. He repeated what he had said so many times, namely, that as the season progressed and winter arrived, the position of the Russians became ever stronger.
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Napoleon did not want to hear this. He urged Caulaincourt to leave for Petersburg where he could talk directly with the Tsar. At the same time, however, he was issuing orders to fortify the Kremlin and build redoubts on the Moskva.
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His behaviour during this period has been described as ‘moody and taciturn’ but it is a portrayal that fits with his demeanour throughout the campaign, during which he would swing between periods of intense activity – rare but nevertheless testified to by the correspondence that came out of Moscow where he could spend three nights going over the details of the new regulations for the Comédie Française – and stretches when he would while away his time on a sofa, reading novels.
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It is possible that Napoleon sensed he was on the verge of defeat, which is one reason he put off withdrawing from Moscow for so long, to delay the inevitable.
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It is only in hindsight, however, that we can say that the decision to stay six weeks in Moscow was fatal. During that time, Kutuzov was reinforced by twenty-six regiments of Don Cossacks, around 15,000 light, irregular cavalry that were to play havoc with Napoleon’s retreating army. During that same time, Napoleon’s own cavalry was considerably weakened through lack of fodder. If he had stayed only two weeks and had rested his men, one historian has asserted, then the army would have had plenty of time to retreat in good order before both the onset of winter and the arrival of the Don Cossacks in great numbers.
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The choices before him were: to march on St Petersburg some 640 kilometres away – the threat was real enough for Alexander’s court to start packing
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– an option that was quickly ruled out as impractical from a supply perspective;
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to move to Velikiye-Luki, about 160 kilometres north-east of Vitebsk, where he would join with his other two corps commanders, Oudinot and Gouvion Saint-Cyr and go into winter quarters, an option also dropped for supply reasons;
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to stay in Moscow for the winter with the danger of being cut off from the rest of the Empire; or to head for the Ukraine, which was what Davout was urging (there were rumours to that effect as early as September).
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Napoleon seems to have been reluctant to engage Kutuzov once again, almost as though he doubted his own abilities or had been dealt a blow to his self-confidence by Borodino.
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A number of senior military figures in Napoleon’s entourage had been urging a withdrawal from Moscow to an area closer to the Empire. They wanted peace, although they do not appear to have confronted Napoleon openly; they included Ney, Murat, Davout, Caulaincourt and Berthier.
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Some time towards the end of the first week in October he must have made up his mind. He ordered the war booty from the Kremlin packed on 9 October, and the wounded evacuated on 10 October.
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On 14 October, orders were issued not to bring any further cavalry or artillery forward to Moscow.
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The treasure and the sick and wounded, an estimated 12,000 men, left on 15, 16 and 17 October.
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When Napoleon woke on the morning of 13 October, the ruins of Moscow were covered with a thin, white blanket of snow.
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It was the first real fall; snow had fallen as early as 27 September, but it had melted almost immediately.
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This is when it appears he made the decision to take the only other option available to him, to retreat to Smolensk (but not to the Russian border because to do so would give the appearance of a military defeat). But not only the weather played on his mind. The previous day, an incident occurred which demonstrated only too clearly just how precarious was the situation. A courier who had been sent from Moscow to Paris was captured by Cossacks at the same time as a courier from Paris en route to Moscow. Napoleon’s line of communications in other words had become tenuous, and he could not tolerate a situation in which he was cut off from Paris. That left only the question of which route to take: he opted to go back the way he had come, though it was problematic to say the least, since the road had been devastated during the advance and the army would find little succour. It was, however, the best road to Smolensk and the most direct route. He could attempt to find a route parallel to but south of the Moscow–Smolensk road, likely to be a source of more supplies than would be available to the north of that road. He could head south for Kaluga on the Oka River 150 kilometres south-west of Moscow, inflict a defeat on Kutuzov – considered an indispensable preliminary move for any retreat to take place
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– and then head east on a relatively good road to Smolensk. He had left it a bit late but things were by no means dire. Smolensk was ten to twelve days’ march from Moscow, and after that Minsk was another ten, Vilnius another fifteen. All of these cities were well stocked and would be able to supply his army with everything it needed. From there, he could draw on reinforcements that were gathering in Prussia and Poland and in the spring march on Petersburg.
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