The Illustrious Dead (21 page)

T
HE ARMY LEFT
MOSCOW a shadow of its former self. Anyone watching the regiments depart would have noticed two things: The men were often in terrible physical shape, “crawling rather than marching.” And they had grabbed an enormous pile of loot, which they had loaded onto every available cart, droshky, chaise, and carriage: trophies such as flags captured from the Turks and the cross of Ivan the Great from the Kremlin, Oriental rugs, entire wardrobes, ornate furniture, even ornaments used in the coronation of the tsars and a gem-encrusted Madonna. Most officers commanded a single cart, while generals had six or more to haul their swag. Common soldiers had packed their knapsacks with anything jeweled or golden (though many mistook gold leaf for solid gold artifacts) for resale back home or exotic dresses and capes for their wives or girlfriends. Some of the hams, mutton, shoe leather, and fur caps necessary for a march of 2,000 miles through hostile and often barren country were also loaded on carts, but far less than was needed. The more enterprising of the soldiers had bullied Russian peasants into carrying their take; these long-bearded men were the final pieces of booty the army was carrying back to Paris. The carriages jostled for room, five across on the road.

The army was depleted physically, but the soldiers still carried themselves as conquerors, “one of those armies of antiquity laden with spoils and slaves, returning from some horrible destruction,” as Ségur wrote. Behind the caravans came an assortment of refugees: French actresses, Russian whores, servants, sutlers, and criminals fleeing the prisons. As many as 50,000 stragglers accompanied the Grande Armée on its way out of the blackened city.

The enormous cavalcade inevitably led to delays. One officer estimated that the army took six hours to travel a distance that a single carriage would have covered in one. But there was an air of carnival to the day. “It was afterwards justly said,” Eugène Labaume wrote, “that our retreat commenced with a masquerade and ended with a funeral.”

With Moscow being abandoned for a second time, 1,850 of the sick awaited their fate in the Foundling Hospital. Captain Thomas-Joseph Aubry of the 12th Regiment of Chasseurs, who had been wounded at Borodino and caught typhus while recovering in Moscow, described how the past few weeks had gone:

The typhus made appalling inroads in our ranks. We were forty-three officers in our ward. All of them died, one after the other, and delirious from this dreadful disease, most of them singing, some in Latin, others in German, others again in Italian—and singing psalms, canticles, or the mass. When this happened they were nearly always in their death agony .   .   .

As soon as the Young Guard, forming the rear of the retreating army, had cleared the Moscow gates, the patients looking out the hospital windows saw vigilantes combing through the abandoned buildings looking for stragglers. Frenchmen were run through with bayonets and their bodies dumped in the Moskva. When the Cossacks reached the hospital entrances, the sick troops fired down on them with the muskets left by their beds.

According to Aubry, 1,800 of the 1,850 French soldiers in the hospital died from typhus—a nearly 100 percent mortality rate. Aubry himself escaped the epidemic and recovered fully in Siberia. But almost all of the sick patients who were surrendered to the Russians perished.

The evacuated men typically fared little better. The winnowing of baggage began almost immediately on the army’s escaping the suburbs of Moscow. Men opened their knapsacks and dumped out whatever they thought expendable: often the ammunition and cleaning equipment or spare uniforms went first and the baubles survived. But the sick, too, were excess weight, and drivers frequently sped over bumps in the road in order to knock them off their carts. They would lie by the side of the rode, delirious, stretching their hands out to the passing troops. The Russian captives who had been used to haul the loot and who strayed back to the rear guard because they were too weak or hungry met a more merciful fate. They were shot in the back of the head, smoke wafting out of the fresh bullet holes as the French soldiers glanced quickly down and then marched on.

And the army was barely out of Moscow.

The Emperor’s forces left by two routes: the main body went southward down the old Kaluga road, while IV Corps marched in a parallel line down the new Kaluga road to the west. Napoleon had prepared assiduously for the march to Moscow, collecting books, topographical surveys, and atlases on everything Russian, but his research on the current route was incomplete. The generals found their maps were often inaccurate and they had to blunder their way through towns and hamlets with unpronounceable names. One unit actually kidnapped a peasant and forced him to act as their guide, “but he was so stupid that he only knew the name of his own village.” Once reached, the thoroughfare presented its own problems. The mud surface quickly became deeply rutted, and the narrow bridges resulted in bottlenecks when they held up or in long delays when the timbers snapped under the loads. A few days into the retreat, a torrential rain turned the road into a swamp, and travel times decreased again.

Three retreat routes would eventually be considered by Napoleon: the southern route that would bring them through virgin territory toward the city of Kaluga; the due-west Moscow-Smolensk road that the Grande Armée had used to reach the capital; and a third way, southwest to the town of Medyn, with a dogleg that would eventually lead the army back to Smolensk. Each had its advantages and risks: The untouched Kaluga route would provide fresh supplies of rye and livestock, but the Russian army blocked the way. The Smolensk route would allow Napoleon to avoid a confrontation with Kutuzov, but it had been stripped bare of all supplies on the approach. And the Medyn route promised sustenance to the remaining men, but it was unfamiliar terrain, risking unpleasant surprises and a possible encounter with the enemy.

Now it was Napoleon who avoided battle. Two days into the march, he suddenly swerved from the old Kaluga road and marched westward to join up with Prince Eugène and IV Corps, which was headed toward the key junction town of Maloyaroslavets. He had intended to freeze Kutuzov into position and then skirt along his left flank and secure the resources-rich depots of Kaluga before the Russians could catch him. He even sent a colonel to Kutuzov to follow up on Lauriston’s request for a meeting with Alexander, as if his armies were still waiting patiently in Moscow instead of hurrying south. But Kutuzov had Cossacks, peasants, and French informers to keep him abreast of the emperor’s movements. Definitive evidence that Napoleon was in retreat came on October 23, when a messenger reported to Kutuzov that information from captured officers indicated that the French had abandoned Moscow and that the emperor and his staff were camped at Fominskoye, forty miles from the capital. The Russian commander knew instantly that the campaign had turned in his favor. He wept and, turning to face an icon of Jesus mounted in the corner of the room, cried a few words of thanks: “Oh Lord, my creator! At last you harkened to our prayer, and from this minute Russia is saved!”

However damaged, Moscow was returned to its inhabitants and Napoleon was on the run. But before the last soldiers of the Imperial Guard quit the capital, they received final orders instructing them to destroy the Kremlin with explosives. They began rigging the ancient buildings, hurrying to escape the vigilantes and Cossacks now slipping back into the city. On the road, a French captain near the town of Charopovo heard a “tremendous report” from the north; had many of the explosives not failed to ignite, the sound would have carried miles farther. It was an act of rage and spite on Napoleon’s part, revenge for the inhuman war he felt the Russians had pursued. Eugène Labaume regretted the action and pitied Moscow. “She experienced from the native of an obscure and remote island the most lamentable of human vicissitudes,” he wrote. To him, it was a signal that Napoleon’s claim to be fighting a civilizing war—bringing French culture and ideals to the savages— was finally acknowledged to be a fiction.

A
T
M
ALOYAROSLAVETS, THE LEAD
elements of both armies clashed, turning the town into a blood-spattered hellhole. The French won the encounter, but Kutuzov retreated only two miles away to the city of Kaluga. Now Napoleon had to choose which route to take.

The emperor quickly called a conference with his marshals. After a heated, almost violent discussion, Napoleon dismissed his marshals with a dejected air and sat alone to make the decision. As at Borodino, the key issue became manpower: Napoleon no longer had the troops to sacrifice in a bruising push through Kutuzov’s lines on the way to Kaluga. The Grande Armée was like a sick man whose every ounce of fat had been burned away by fever: there was little or nothing to spare. And about a third of his forces were now spread out on missions: 10,000 of the Young Guard and other troops were still guarding the evacuation of the last units from Moscow; 8,000 members of VIII Corps were trudging the route along the Smolensk road; and the valiant Poles under Poniatowski were on their way to secure Vereya and Medyn. He was down to 72,000 effectives and the number decreased daily due to disease. “The time has come now for us to turn all our thoughts to saving the remains of the army,” Napoleon told Davout. He had sworn that he would never return to Germany by the “desert we ourselves created.” Finally, he decided on the Smolensk road.

Rickettsia
had again deprived him of live options. Had the Grande Armée finished off the Russians at Borodino, they could have retreated at their leisure down the Kaluga road and eaten their fill. Or, had Napoleon not lost thousands more since Borodino, he might have considered his army strong enough to break through the Russian lines. But those possibilities had vanished. Now his men would have to traverse a moonscape.

The French turned their heel on the Russian army and headed directly north, toward Borowsk and then Mozhaisk, where they would swerve west and head toward Smolensk (two hundred miles away) and finally Vilna, both of which cities were supposed to hold enormous depots of food and ammunition, as well as structures that could shelter the army from the winter, which wouldn’t stay over the horizon forever. After that, there was the Niemen River, the fateful border, and then Germany and France. It was an incredibly conservative decision for the emperor, one that showed how dispirited the offensive genius had become. Both commanders flinched from another engagement, but it was Napoleon who would pay dearly for his decision to preserve the remaining troops. The Grande Armée was the emperor’s personal guaranty of power, and he wanted to save as many men as possible. He ordered Ponia-towski to abandon the Medyn route and head for Smolensk by the burned-over road, and Ney and Prince Eugène followed suit.

The imperial party made it to the outskirts of Mozhaisk on October 28, and here Napoleon was confronted with the sight of the wounded left after Borodino and fresh numbers of sick arriving from Moscow. He refused to leave them behind and ordered they be placed “wherever they could hang on”: on top of wagons, inside the carts sent out on foraging missions, on commandeered droshkies. But the sick men weighed down already overburdened vehicles and slowed their journeys over the rutted roads. “We were going back to the deserted and devastated road by which we had come full of illusion of enthusiasm,” wrote one Frenchman. Drivers were pushing their horses fifteen hours a day and to lighten the load did everything to knock the patients off their wagons. Caulain-court estimated that of the hundreds loaded onto vehicles, only 20 made it to Vilna in Lithuania. No one wanted to be left behind; for many of the sick, it wasn’t if they were going to die, but how. And being taken by Cossacks or peasants was the worst imaginable fate.

Captured soldiers were now being routinely executed by the Russians, with General Aleksey Yermolov enforcing a particular personal hatred against the Polish troops. At Viazma, 50 French troops were burned alive “by a savage order.” The choice of the Smolensk road also meant that the army was retracing its steps through hamlets and villages that it had raped, pillaged, and terrorized its way through on the way forward. Any trace of sympathy for Napoleon as a potential liberator was gone. Many areas now boasted peasant militias. If the battles between Kutuzov and Napoleon still retained shreds of the knightly code in treatment of the wounded and respect for bravery, the mini-guerrilla war that the Grande Armée now experienced was without rules, red in tooth and claw.

The Russian peasants actually paid the Cossacks to get their hands on French soldiers (2 francs a head was considered a fair price) and made the prisoners the center of a grotesque revenge. There were several popular methods for brutalizing the prisoners. Men were hoisted on pulleys with their hands and feet tied together. After the soldier was suspended high in the air, the rope was let go and the prisoner smashed to the ground, snapping bones and causing grave injuries to the internal organs. The soldier would be hoisted and dropped repeatedly until he became a jellied bag of bone and viscera.

Other captives were marched naked through nights of -4 degree weather. They were burned alive and their skulls caved in with rifle butts. They were thrown into mass graves while still alive and then buried by peasants. (Sir Robert Wilson saw a drummer boy exempted from such a fate jump into the pit to die with his comrades.) The sack method was also popular: Prisoners were wrapped in sacks dipped in water, with a pillow underneath to partially shield the man’s organs, prolonging his agony. The townspeople would be handed hammers and rocks and invited to bash at the man’s midsection, until he died of internal bleeding. But perhaps the most bestial “game” had naked French soldiers spread-eagled and tied across huge logs, their heads extended over the edge. The serfs would dance and sing, and when they passed the captive they would smash his bowed head with cudgels until the skull broke open. Denis Davidov, the legendary partisan fighter, recalled what happened when he captured some elite French troops. Another leader named Figner arrived on the scene and begged Davidov to allow some new Cossack recruits to kill the prisoners, so that they would be “blooded.” An appalled Davidov refused.