The War of Wars (112 page)

This attack seemed totally to demoralize Napoleon, already a shadow of his former self after the burning of Moscow and the decision to withdraw. The Emperor had never been accused of lack of courage in the past. Now he summoned his generals to a peasant’s hut and there Murat, sometimes hotheaded, often treacherous, but always bold and far-sighted, passionately urged upon Napoleon the need to march forward to Kaluga.

Napoleon, his fighting spirit seemingly spent, argued that the time for confrontation was past: the purpose of the march was to save the army. In fact Murat was doubly right, although he did not know it, for at that precise moment, Kutuzov, reeling from the defeat at Maloyaroslavets, had decided to retire southwards to draw his forces up for another Borodino. Napoleon, fatefully, remained timid and decided to retreat from Kutuzov’s main force northwards back towards the main road from Moscow to Smolensk down which his army had passed just months before on its approach to Moscow.

It was the single most catastrophic decision of that whole misguided campaign: for it signalled to the world that Napoleon’s army was indeed retreating, returning the way it had come, avoiding any further clash with the Russian army of which, it appeared, it was afraid. It handed the initiative to Kutuzov: all he now needed to do was to prevent the French army veering off into the fertile south while harassing its flanks and rearguard; and Napoleon’s route would lead the French across territory that had already been stripped bare by two armies – the Russians and the French – only weeks before, and was now not only barren of supplies and food, its villages and towns
sacked, but inhabited by a bitter and intensely resentful predatory peasantry.

The return to the Smolensk road could hardly have been grimmer for the French: they reached it just above the desolate battlefield of Borodino. Ségur described the terrible scene that awaited them:

After passing the river Kologa we marched on, absorbed in thought, when some of us, raising our eyes, uttered an exclamation of horror. Each instantly looked around him and beheld a plain bare and devastated, all the trees cut down within a few feet from the surface; and farther off craggy hills, the highest of which appeared to be the most misshapen. It had all the appearance of an extinguished volcano. The ground was covered all round with fragments of helmets and cuirasses, broken drums, gunstocks, tatters of uniforms and standards stained with blood. On this desolate spot lay 30,000 half-devoured corpses. A number of skeletons, left on the summit of one of the hills, overlooked the whole. It seemed as if here Death had fixed his empire. It was that terrible redoubt, the conquest and the grave of Caulaincourt. Presently the cry, ‘It is the field of the great battle!’ formed a long and doleful murmur. The Emperor passed quickly. Nobody stopped. Cold, hunger and the enemy urged us on. We merely turned our faces as we proceeded to take a last melancholy look at the vast grave of so many companions-in-arms, uselessly sacrificed and whom we were obliged to leave behind.

A French soldier was found alive who had been living for fifty days inside the carcass of a horse, which had provided him with food and shelter. The hospital in the abbey at Kolotskoi nearby was hardly more cheerful. Napoleon ordered the wounded to be placed on his wagons, filled with the plunder from Moscow. However the unscrupulous wagoneers threw out many of the wounded at the first opportunity rather than lose their plunder.

The French retreat became drawn out and straggled along the road, offering a tempting target for attack by forces under the vigorous Russian General Miloradovich, who inflicted some 4,000 casualties in a
series of attacks. He might have broken the column had Kutuzov ordered a general attack; but the commander-in-chief was content with harassing the French.

On 6 November the deadliest enemy yet made its appearance – one that might have been avoided altogether had Napoleon made his mind up to leave Moscow earlier. After several days of unseasonably fine weather, Ségur described a sinister fog which descended:

These fogs became thicker and presently an immense cloud descended upon it in large flakes of snow. It seemed as if the very sky was falling and joining the earth and our enemies to complete our destruction. All objects changed their appearance and became confused, not to be recognized again. We proceeded without knowing where we were, without perceiving the point to which we were bound. Everything was transformed into an obstacle. While the soldiers were struggling with the tempest of wind and snow, the flakes, driven by the storm, lodged and accumulated in every hollow: their surfaces concealed unknown abysses, which treacherously opened beneath our feet. There men were engulfed and the weakest, resigning themselves to their fate, found a grave in these snow-pits.

Those who followed turned aside but the storm drove into their faces both the snow that was falling from the sky and that which it raised from the ground. It seemed bent on opposing their progress. The Russian winter, under this new form, attacked them on all sides: it penetrated their light garments and their torn shoes and boots; their wet clothes froze upon their bodies; an icy envelope encased them and stiffened their limbs; a keen and violent wind broke their breathing.

The unfortunate creatures still crawled on, shivering, till the snow, gathering like balls under their feet or the fragment of some broken article – a branch of a tree or the bodies of one of their comrades – caused them to stumble and fall. There they groaned in vain. The snow soon covered them. Small heaps marked the spot where they lay: such was their only grave! The road was studded
with these mounds, like a cemetery. The most intrepid and the most indifferent were unaffected: they passed on quickly with averted looks. But before them, around them, there was nothing but snow. This immense and dreary uniformity extended farther than the eye could reach. The imagination was astounded! It was like a vast winding-sheet which Nature had thrown over the army. The only objects not enveloped by it were some gloomy pines – trees of the tomb with their funereal colours and dismal look – which completed the doleful appearance of a general mourning and of an army dying, amidst a nature already dead.

Three days after the first snows had fallen, the bedraggled army arrived at Smolensk: some 6,000 horses had died. Many had been so numbed by cold that they did not flee as slices were taken off their haunches for food by the starving men behind them.

Much of the booty from Moscow had been dumped as men sought desperately to survive and could carry nothing. Many freezing in their light summer apparel ripped clothes off the bodies of dead comrades or wrapped themselves in the furs they had plundered. Napoleon himself decided to walk so as not to succumb to frostbite in his carriage. At Smolensk, however, they found another desolate and ruined city whose stores had largely been exhausted by previous army detachments.

After just four days in the freezing and stricken city, Napoleon ordered its evacuation. He had only 40,000 ill-disciplined men left out of the 100,000 that had left Moscow twenty-five days before. Some 350 wagons – more than half the remaining total – had had to be abandoned. Behind the army were some 60,000 stragglers and hangers-on, a wretched torrent of humanity moving at the speed of a glacier. Napoleon ordered his men to leave in batches – Junot and Poniatowski between 12 and 13 November, the Emperor himself with the Imperial Guard the following day, de Beauharnais on the 15th, and Davout and Ney on the 16th. Ney was ordered to spike the abandoned guns, blow up the remaining ammunition, as well as what was left of the town and city walls, and drive the stragglers before him.

By this means Napoleon sought to impose some order on the retreat.
Instead he merely extended this immense column of misery, making it still more vulnerable to attack. The next milestone along this awesome calvary of human suffering was Krasnoi, where a Russian force under Miloradovich was waiting in ambush along the road to the town. The Russian general permitted the main force under Napoleon to pass, then straddled the road, blocking de Beauharnais. The latter briefly attempted to break through, then marched at night around the Russian force, reaching Krasnoi with just 4,000 survivors.

There Napoleon’s troops had repulsed Kutuzov’s main force. Napoleon sent a force back to rescue Davout, who had similarly run into Miloradovich’s ambush. Of Ney’s rearguard there was nothing to be seen, and Napoleon took the agonizing decision to press ahead and abandon his old comrade. With Vitebsk along the old road ahead having fallen into Russian hands, Napoleon was forced to take a more southerly route via Orsha towards Minsk, only to learn that that city too had fallen to the Russians. Napoleon reached Orsha on 19 November with just 6,000 of his original 35,000 Imperial Guard, Eugène de Beauharnais with 2,000 men out of his 42,000 and Davout with 4,000 out of his 70,000-strong army. The mighty
Grande Armée
had been eaten away by attack and by the cold to a mere skeleton.

At last Napoleon, after crossing the Dnieper, found some provisions and rest. The appalling atrocities that had been meted out on those captured by the Russians or seized by bands of marauding Cossacks and peasants exceeded the danger posed by the weather to the French army. Prisoners had been stripped and beaten, stakes rammed down their throats, their arms and their legs were cut off.

Sir Robert Wilson, a British military adviser to the Russian army, reported such atrocities as the burial of some fifty French soldiers alive, the burning of some fifty others, and the brains being beaten out of others as peasants danced about them singing folkloric songs. Wilson wrote: ‘The naked masses of dead and dying men; the mangled carcasses of 10,000 horses which had in some cases been cut for food before life had ceased; the craving of famine at other points forming groups of cannibals; the air enveloped in flame and smoke; the prayers of hundreds of naked wretches flying from the peasantry, whose shouts of vengeance echoed incessantly through the woods; the wrecks of
cannon, powder-wagons, all stores of every description: it formed such a scene as probably was never witnessed in the history of the world.’

The temperature had now fallen to –30°C. With only eight hours of daylight left, Napoleon made his men march at night for six further hours each evening. The supply of horse meat was now virtually consumed. Men took to eating their dead comrades to survive. Napoleon wrote to his foreign minister Hugues-Bernard Maret laconically of the conditions, abandoning his previous unbridled optimism: ‘Since my last letter to you our situation has become worse. Ice and frost of near zero have killed off nearly all our horses, say 30,000. We have been compelled to burn nearly 300 pieces of artillery, and an immense quantity of transport wagons. The cold has greatly increased the number of stragglers. The Cossacks have turned to account our absolute want of cavalry and of artillery to harass us and cut our communications, so that I am most anxious about Marshal Ney, who stayed behind with 3,000 men to blow up Smolensk.’

There followed the two truly heroic episodes of the expedition, which allowed the French to salvage a modicum of national pride amid this ever deepening disaster.

Michel Ney was a man of striking appearance with fiery red hair, possessed of utter fearlessness, if limited intelligence. He obeyed Napoleon’s order almost too long, staying on in Smolensk with his 6,000-strong rearguard and twelve guns to delay the Russian advance and protect the main French force with its moving township of stragglers. He found himself cut off by Kutuzov’s main army of 80,000 men.

An officer was sent by the Russians to negotiate the seemingly inevitable surrender but even as this happened the ill-disciplined Russian troops opened fire on the French. Ney declared furiously to the officer: ‘A marshal never surrenders. There is no parleying under fire. You are my prisoner.’ Ney ordered his vanguard to attack down a ravine and up the other side against the tens of thousands of astonished Russians: and was repulsed.

Ney took charge himself, personally leading three thousand men into a frontal assault. This time they reached the Russian front line but were blocked by a second massed rank of Russian troops and forced back across the ravine, which the Russians did not dare cross to attack them. His remaining men now faced the Russian army along the road which similarly held back from attacking, believing the French to be stronger than they were. Instead a huge artillery barrage opened up on the French position, to which Ney’s six remaining guns bravely if feebly responded.

To the consternation of his men, Ney ordered a return to Smolensk: the last thing they wanted was to withdraw back further into Russia.
On the way Ney saw a ravine with a stream at the bottom: concluding that this must lead to the Dnieper, he decided to follow it, with the help of a peasant guide, reasoning that his men would be safe if they could cross the great river. Ségur described the subsequent appalling, heroic story:

At last, about eight o’clock, after passing through a village, the ravine ended and the peasant, who walked first, halted and pointed to the river. They imagined that this must have been between Syrokorenia and Gusinoë. Ney and those immediately behind him ran up to it. They found the river sufficiently frozen to bear their weight; the course of the ice which it bore along being thwarted by a sudden turn in its banks, the winter had completely frozen it over at that spot: both above and below, its surface was still moving.

This observation was enough to make their first sensation of joy give way to uneasiness. This hostile river might only offer a deceitful appearance. One officer committed himself for the rest: he crossed to the other side with great difficulty, returned, and reported that the men and perhaps some of the horses might pass over; but that the rest must be abandoned; and there was no time to lose, as the ice was beginning to give way because of the thaw.

But in this nocturnal and silent march across fields, of a column composed of weakened and wounded men and women with their children, they had been unable to keep close enough to prevent their separating in the darkness. Ney realized that only a part of his people had come up. Nevertheless, he might have surmounted the obstacle, thereby securing his own safety, and waited on the other side. The idea never entered his mind. Someone proposed it to him but he rejected it instantly. He allowed three hours for the rallying, and without suffering himself to be disturbed by impatience or the danger of waiting so long, he wrapped himself up in his cloak and passed the time in a deep sleep on the bank of the river.