According to his secretary Baron Fain, Napoleon felt disheartened and disgusted at the turn events had taken. He had beaten the Russians and taken a major city. But while he had inflicted heavy casualties on them, he had lost as many as 18,000 seasoned troops himself in the two engagements, and had failed to force the Russian army to accept defeat. As is abundantly clear from his contradictory utterances, he did not know what to do next.
‘In abandoning Smolensk, one of their holy cities, the Russian generals have dishonoured their arms in the sight of their own people,’ he said to Caulaincourt. ‘This gives me a good position. We will push them away a little distance in order to be at our ease, and I will consolidate. We will rest and use this strongpoint to organise the country, and we shall see how Alexander likes that. I will take command of the corps on the Dvina, which are doing nothing, and my army will be more formidable, my position more threatening to Russia than if I had won two battles. I will take up quarters at Vitebsk, arm Poland and later I will choose between Petersburg and Moscow.’1
But he knew he was talking nonsense. All the arguments militating against stopping in Vitebsk went, in magnified form, for Smolensk. The burnt-out city represented neither an effective bastion nor a resource for his army. But to retreat now was even more unthinkable than it had been at Vitebsk. He had led himself into a trap.
He vented his frustration on anything that came to hand. He wrote to Maret complaining that the Poles of Lithuania had failed to raise enough troops and supplies. He complained that the army was losing men in needless foraging expeditions, and reprimanded the corps commanders. He raved about abuses. He went into a rage when he discovered that a Parisian wine merchant had been using wagons supposedly bringing medical supplies to ship wine for sale to the troops. When he came across some soldiers looting one day, he attacked them with his riding crop, yelling obscenities at them. And he was uncharacteristically ill-tempered and rude with his entourage.
In his desperation to find a way out, he clutched at every straw. General Pavel Alekseyevich Tuchkov, who had been taken prisoner at Valutina Gora, was treated with the greatest consideration by Berthier, who supplied him with shirts from his own wardrobe and offered him the choice of any city in Napoleonic Europe as a place of captivity. He was then granted an audience by Napoleon, who treated him with the utmost consideration. The Emperor poured out a torrent of self-justification and professions of friendship for Alexander, and asked Tuchkov to write to his sovereign telling him that all he wanted was peace. The embarrassed Russian wriggled out of this by saying that he was only a brigade general and that protocol forbade him to write to his Emperor, but he finally agreed to write to his elder brother, who was senior in rank.
‘Alexander can see that his generals are making a mess of things and that he is losing territory, but he has fallen into the grip of the English, and the London cabinet is whipping up the nobility and preventing him from coming to terms,’ Napoleon said to Caulaincourt. ‘They have convinced him that I want to take away all his Polish provinces, and that he will only get peace at that price, which he could not accept, as within a year all the Russians who have lands in Poland would strangle him as they did his father. It is wrong of him not to turn to me in confidence, for I wish him no ill: I would even be prepared to make some sacrifices in order to help him out of his difficulty.’ He would probably have given Alexander the whole of Poland, and Constantinople as well, in order to get out of the present impasse with a semblance of honour.2
But as he could not stop where he was, and as he would not retreat, he could only advance, in the hope of ‘snatching’ a victory from the Russians. Moscow was only about four hundred kilometres, or eight days’ forced march away, and the Russians would surely make a stand in defence of their old capital. There were still two months of decent campaigning weather ahead. ‘It was therefore reasonable to think that one would be able to bring the enemy to fight before the bad weather set in,’ argued General Berthézène. ‘The strength of our army, its morale, the confidence it had in its leader, the ascendancy the Emperor exerted on the Russians themselves, all this gave us a sense of the certainty of success, and none of us questioned that.’3
A large number of senior officers, however, believed they had gone far enough. ‘Everyone felt they had endured enough fatigues and had enough glorious encounters for one campaign, and nobody wanted to go any further; the need and the wish to stop were felt and frankly expressed by all,’ wrote Colonel Boulart. Many in Napoleon’s entourage, led by Berthier, Duroc, Caulaincourt and Narbonne, begged him to call a halt. But he was adamant. ‘The wine has been poured, it has to be drunk,’ Napoleon retorted to Rapp, who questioned the advisability of further advance. When Berthier nagged him once too often about the inadvisability of proceeding, Napoleon turned on him. ‘Go, then, I do not need you; you’re nothing but a—. Go back to France; I do not force anyone,’ he snapped, adding a few lewd remarks about what Berthier was longing to get up to with his mistress in Paris. The horrified Berthier swore that he would not dream of abandoning his Emperor in any circumstances, but the atmosphere between them remained frosty for several days, and Berthier was not invited to the imperial table.4
‘We are now committed too far to draw back,’ Napoleon finally declared. ‘Peace lies before us; we are only eight days’ march from it; so close to the goal there can be no discussion. Let us march on Moscow!’ While older men and senior officers shook their heads and grumbled, the younger ones were excited by the prospect. ‘If we had been ordered to march to conquer the moon, we would have answered: “Forward!”,’ recalled Heinrich Brandt of the Legion of the Vistula. ‘Our older colleagues could deride our enthusiasm, call us fanatics or madmen as much as they liked, but we could think only of battles and victories. We only feared one thing – that the Russians might be in too much of a hurry to make peace.’5 There was little danger of that.
Colonel Boulart had been filled with sadness by the fire of Smolensk, ‘not so much on account of the moral effect which a great disaster always produces and of the resources of every kind the flames had devoured, but rather because it announced, on the part of the enemy, an exasperation which left no more hope of negotiation and because it shed light, so to speak, on our future’. His unease was shared by many others in the Grande Armée as they began to appreciate that they were entering alien territory in more senses than one. ‘This kind of warfare is horrible and does not resemble in any way that which we have been used to until now,’ noted Jean-Michel Chevalier.6
The French soldier of 1812, even if he was conscripted against his will (and sometimes brought to the colours in fetters if he had tried to avoid the draft), knew that he was in essence a free citizen who had another life outside the army, to which he would return if he survived. His behaviour while he was in the army was to a large extent dictated by his hopes for that moment. He would do all he could to survive, and to profit from his time in the ranks by gaining reputation, promotion and booty. He could be roused to acts of selfless courage by a mixture of patriotism, esprit de corps and love of his Emperor, but he did not believe in unnecessary butchery. Unless he and his comrades had been whipped into some exceptional frenzy, he was always calculating chances and options, and if he was surrounded without hope of relief, he saw nothing wrong in surrender. A free citizen under arms would decide, privately or collectively, at what point his or his unit’s welfare demanded this. The same was true to a greater or lesser extent for every soldier of the Grande Armée, whatever his nationality.
The same had also been true of every enemy Napoleon’s soldiers had faced: a certain basic human solidarity meant that the men of both sides, however desperate they may have been to destroy them as a force, respected the others’ desire to survive. ‘Soldiers kill without hating each other,’ explained Lieutenant Blaze de Bury, who had taken part in campaigns all over Europe. ‘During a ceasefire, we would often visit the enemy’s encampment, and while we were ready to murder each other at the first signal, we were nonetheless prepared to help each other if the occasion presented itself.’7 This had even held in Spain, where the guerrilla, or little war, had introduced a hitherto unknown level of national and religious fanaticism into the proceedings. But it was not true in Russia.
Frederick the Great is alleged to have said that one first had to kill the Russian soldier and then push him over. Napoleon’s troops were reaching the same conclusion after the fighting at Krasny, Smolensk and Valutina Gora. Russian soldiers did not lay down their arms. They had to be hacked to pieces. Clausewitz, who had the advantage of observing the phenomenon from within the Russian army, put it down to ‘motionless obstinacy’. The French were nonplussed, and ascribed the phenomenon to more or less poetic stereotypical atavisms. ‘I could never have imagined that kind of passive courage which I have since seen a hundred times in the soldiers of that nation, which stems, I believe, from their ignorance and credulous superstition,’ wrote Lubin Griois, who had watched them stand impassively as his batteries pounded them at Krasny, ‘for they die kissing the image of St Nicholas which they always carry with them, they believe they will go straight to heaven, and almost give thanks for the bullet which sends them there.’8
Belief in an afterlife was certainly a factor. The unfree Russian soldier, drafted for twenty-five years, did not think in terms of a return to another, normal life on earth. The army was his life. And death, which held out the prospect of heaven, was in many ways preferable to that life. The iron discipline of the army, supplemented by his experiences in the fighting against the Turks or tribesmen in Georgia or the Caucasus, vicious and genocidal, with quarter neither expected nor given, meant that the concept of surrender was not part of his military consciousness. The decision to surrender is essentially an assertion of human rights against the army and its master the state, and there was no such subversive concept in Russia.
The French were dismayed by all this. This was not how war was supposed to be. What was alarming for the simple soldier was that his opponents’ uncompromising approach to warfare bound him to the actions of his commander and implicated him in his commander’s crimes. He could not say, as soldiers down the centuries have said, that he was an innocent pawn of kings and generals. The whole army was answerable, and it was now looking as though this would be a fight to the death. This became increasingly apparent as the Grande Armée marched out of Smolensk in that last week of August.
They were now moving through fertile country, down a fine road, straight as an arrow and broad enough for columns of infantry and cavalry to march abreast under a double avenue of birch trees on either side of the central causeway, which was reserved for the artillery and the army’s wheeled vehicles. But it was not an easy march. ‘We trotted along from two or three o’clock in the morning until about eleven at night, without dismounting, except to answer an urgent call of nature,’ wrote the Dutch Carabinier Jef Abbeel. ‘The rare pauses we passed in trying to rid ourselves of the vermin that infested us.’9
‘The heat in this part of the world at this time of year is nothing like the heat of southern Europe,’ explained Julien Combe. ‘It was not just the heat of the sun we had to bear, but the vapours emanating from the baking earth. Our horses kicked up a cloud of burning sand as fine as dust, with which we were so covered that it would have been difficult to distinguish the colour of our uniforms. This sand, which got into our eyes, subjected us to excruciating pain.’ The men wrapped scarves round their noses and mouths, and some even made protective masks out of foliage in an attempt to keep the dust out. To no avail. When Napoleon appeared before the 6th Bavarian Infantry, they could not shout ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ because, as Christian Septimus von Martens, one of its officers, pointed out, ‘our tongues were stuck to our gums’.10
These discomforts were added to by the fact that the Russians had adopted a new tactic now that the invaders were in Russia proper. They evacuated the entire population and took the civil administration with them as they retreated, leaving towns and villages deserted. The French began to regret the Jews who had been so useful to them in the former Polish provinces. Lieutenant Charles Faré of the Grenadiers complained in a letter to his mother that food was in short supply and the cantinières were charging extortionate prices. Normally, he expected to make money on campaign, but this time they were all being ruined, and were in a hurry to get to Moscow where they might find pots of gold or at least some fine furs they could bring back and sell in Paris.11
The Russians had also taken to encumbering the road with overturned carts, felled trees and other obstacles. They were now leaving behind quantities of dead men and horses, which decomposed rapidly in the scorching heat. More importantly, they had begun demolishing and burning farms and villages in the path of the French, and setting fire to haystacks, wheatfields and anything else that might burn. The smoke of the burning mixed with the fine dust to make the march one of the hardest the veterans of the Grande Armée could remember. ‘At night, the whole horizon was on fire,’ in the words of the artilleryman Antoine Augustin Pion des Loches.12
The scorched-earth policy now being applied by the Russians tested the resourcefulness of even the most accomplished practitioners of ‘la maraude’. ‘The very existence of the army was a miracle, renewed every day by the active, industrious and cunning minds of the French and Polish soldiers, their habit of overcoming every difficulty, and their taste for the dangers and fortunes of this terrible game of adventure,’ in the words of Ségur. Dr René Bourgeois of the medical staff could not help but marvel at the men. ‘By their activity and their industry they ensured themselves against excessive privations, and managed to make the means of existence and succour appear one might almost say out of nowhere,’ he wrote.13
Every regiment was followed by a multitude of wagons and carts, carrying not only regulation supplies, but a whole range of items picked up along the way which constituted its life-support system, as well as flocks of sheep and cows, driven along by those soldiers who in normal life had been shepherds or stockmen. Every man brought the skills of his trade to the support of the unit. ‘The necessisties of this way of life had turned us into millers, bakers, butchers or artisans,’ as Jef Abbeel put it.14 But the men were uneasy about the turn events had taken, and began to murmur about ‘Scythian tactics’ and some diabolical trick.
‘It has to be said that we were beginning to grow anxious as we followed a powerful enemy without being able to reach him,’ confessed Colonel de Pelleport, commanding the 18th of the Line in Ney’s corps. They were growing acutely aware that every step was a step further from home, and it was noted that even the Italians had lost much of their ‘brio’. The only thing that kept the troops going was their faith in Napoleon. ‘Fortunately we have unbounded confidence in the vast genius of the one who is leading us, for Napoleon is for the army its father, hero, demi-god,’ noted Jean-Michel Chevalier.15
Napoleon was made uneasy by the sight of the burning villages, but attempted to dispel his fears by heaping ridicule on the Russians and calling them cowards. ‘He sought to avoid the serious reflections which this terrible measure raised as to the consequences and duration of a war in which the enemy was prepared to make, from the very outset, sacrifices of this magnitude,’ explained Caulaincourt. On the evening of 28 August Napoleon was walking in the garden of a country house he had stopped at just outside Viazma. Murat was arguing with Davout, trying to convince him that they should go no further, and the argument grew heated, but the Emperor merely listened pensively and then went into the house without saying a word.16
Uncertainty would be succeeded by bluster. Two days later, when he and his entourage stopped for lunch by the roadside, Napoleon walked up and down in front of them, holding forth about the nature of greatness. ‘Real greatness has nothing to do with wearing the purple or a grey coat, it consists in being able to rise above one’s condition,’ he declaimed. ‘I, for instance, have a good position in life. I am Emperor, I could live surrounded by the delights of the great capital, and give myself over to the pleasures of life and to idleness. Instead of which I am making war, for the glory of France, for the future happiness of humanity; I am here with you, at a bivouac, in battle, where I can be struck, like any other, by a cannonball … I have risen above my condition …’17
The following day he entered the pretty town of Viazma, which delighted the French with its low, brightly painted houses. The retreating Russians had set fire to it, but the fires were soon put out. The even prettier town of Gzhatsk, with its blue-painted wooden houses, was intact when they entered it on 1 September hot on the heels of the Russians, but by that evening it was on fire through the carelessness of the soldiers, who would light campfires in inappropriate places. At Gzhatsk they also found large stores of wheat and spirits, which helped the supply situation.
Davout wrote to his wife telling her they would be in Moscow in a matter of days. ‘This campaign will have been one of the Emperor’s most extraordinary, and not the least useful to our children, for it will protect them from the invasions of the hordes of the north.’ But on the following day an estafette from Paris brought Napoleon the unwelcome news that Marshal Marmont had been defeated by Wellington outside Salamanca on 22 July. ‘Anxiety was clearly visible on his usually serene brow,’ according to General Roguet of the Young Guard, who lunched with him that day.18
The mood at Russian headquarters was hardly better, even though the general situation was changing rapidly in their favour. Clausewitz saw the fighting at Smolensk as a strategic victory for the Russians: they had lost a great many men, but French losses had been heavy, and while the Russians would be able to make good their losses as they moved back to meet their reinforcements, the French would not.
But that was of little comfort to the Russian soldiers as they trudged through the heat and dust, with only slightly better provisioning than the French – General Konovnitsin’s rearguard sometimes went for two days without any food. And even when they did have food, they had to decamp before they could prepare or eat it, according to Lieutenant Uxküll, who had waxed so poetic about bivouac life. ‘We’re running away like hares,’ he noted in his diary outside Dorogobuzh on the night of 21 August. ‘Panic has seized everyone.’19
The rearguard never managed to shake off the French pursuers, so the pace had quickened, and they were covering up to sixty-five kilometres a day. The retreat was a good deal less orderly than before, and they were now leaving behind them a trail of abandoned wagons and dead or dying men and horses. ‘We continue to retreat, without knowing why,’ Prince Vassilchikov wrote to a friend. ‘We lose men in rearguard actions, and we are losing our cavalry, which can hardly move any more … I believe that within a couple of weeks we shall have no cavalry left at all.’20
‘All this retreating is incomprehensible for me and for the army, which has to leave its positions and flee, in the heat and at night,’ Bagration wrote to Rostopchin. ‘We are tiring our men and leading the enemy on behind us. I am afraid that Moscow may suffer the same fate as Smolensk.’ The junior officers and the other ranks were bewildered. ‘Gathering in small groups, officers talked of the impending destruction of the fatherland and wondered what fate awaited them,’ writes Lieutenant Radozhitsky of the artillery. ‘The arms which they had borne so bravely in the defence of their fatherland now seemed useless and cumbersome.’ Ensign Konshin felt ‘a heavy bleakness’ oppressing his soul. ‘Our courage is crushed,’ wrote Uxküll in his diary. ‘Our march looks like a funeral procession. My heart is heavy.’21
Like the French, the Russians were disturbed at the turn the campaign had taken. ‘The war had gone beyond the bounds of humanity, becoming desperate, implacable, exterminatory; its conclusion could only lie in the destruction of one or other of the warring sides,’ noted Radozhitsky. For the Russians, a new and unfamiliar factor had come into play.22
‘The destruction of Smolensk acquainted me with a feeling I had never experienced before, which wars carried on outside one’s own frontiers do not contain,’ wrote Yermolov. ‘I had not seen my own land laid waste, I had not seen the cities of my fatherland in flames.’ Lieutenant Luka Simansky of the Izmailovsky Life Guards had also experienced strong sensations as he watched Smolensk burn and the civilians streaming out of it. ‘I was vividly reminded of my own family, which I had left behind,’ he wrote, adding that while he was still prepared to die for his country, he had now understood what this would mean to them, and he began praying to his guardian angel for protection. He had suddenly become aware of the real cost of war. The fifteen-year-old D.V. Dushenkievich, who had fought so heroically with his Simbirsk regiment in defence of Smolensk, was overwhelmed by sorrow, but also felt a growing anger.23
This anger was echoed in the feelings of many officers, particularly at staff level, where the customary restraints of deference and even discipline were fast breaking down. The muttering about ‘foreigners’ had grown louder, and everyone was on the lookout for traitors. ‘[Napoleon] knows our movements better than we do,’ Bagration wrote to Rostopchin after the Rudnia fiasco, ‘and it looks to me as though we advance and retreat at his orders.’24 The conspiracy theorists were soon crowing over what seemed like a piece of real evidence.
Among the papers that fell into Russian hands when Platov’s cavalry had overrun Sebastiani’s camp at Rudnia was a letter from Murat informing Sebastiani that he had received intelligence of an impending Russian attack. When this came to be known at Russian headquarters, there was a general outcry and demands that the ‘spies’ should be rooted out. Suspicion hovered over all foreign officers, but fell most heavily on Ludwig von Wolzogen and Waldemar von Löwenstern, who were known to have spent time in France. What was significant about the fact that these two were picked on was that both always spoke German with Barclay – in other words, by naming them, their accusers were pointing the finger at him.
Yermolov was demanding that Löwenstern be sent to Siberia, but Platov suggested a more reliable expedient. ‘This is how to deal with the matter, brother,’ he said to Yermolov. ‘Get him ordered to go and make a reconnaissance of the French positions and send him off in my direction. I’ll make it my business to separate the German from everyone else. I’ll give him guides who will show him the French in such a way that he’ll never see them again.’25
There had in fact been no treachery, and it was later discovered that Murat had gleaned his intelligence from an intercepted letter written by a Polish staff officer to his mother, whose estate lay in the path of the offensive, warning her to remove herself. But the anti-German party was in full hue and cry, and Barclay did not have enough authority to oppose it. He had Löwenstern sent to Moscow under guard, and the staffs were purged of other foreigners, such as officers of Polish descent. Löwenstern’s brother Eduard, himself serving in Pahlen’s corps, was outraged. ‘The army and the nation wanted to believe that Russia had been sold and betrayed from the start,’ he wrote. ‘One had to let these people clutch at this idea, as one leaves a naughty child with its toy, to stop it crying any more.’26
This did not reduce the pressure on Barclay, who, far from running away, was now desperately looking for a favourable position in which to give battle. Toll located one at Usviate which was suitable, according to Clausewitz, but Bagration criticised it. When Toll attempted to defend his choice and point out its virtues, Bagration flew into ‘a violent passion’, accused him of insolence and insubordination, and threatened to have him demoted to the ranks. Rather than stick up for his quartermaster, Barclay agreed to fall back further. He found another favourable position before Dorogobuzh, but Bagration objected to this one too, and another damaging quarrel ensued.27
Yermolov urged Bagration to write to the Tsar demanding Barclay’s removal from command, and if Bagration did not quite dare to do that, he was writing to Arakcheev, Rostopchin, Chichagov and others. He accused Barclay of being a ‘fool’ and a ‘coward’, he petulantly declared that he was ashamed to wear the same uniform as him, and repeatedly bragged that if he had been in command, he would have ‘pulverised’ Napoleon. He even threatened to take his army off and do the deed on his own. He was not the only one making trouble. Generals and influential officers throughout the army were writing to friends in high places demanding the removal of Barclay, and in some cases even his execution as a traitor.28
All this was having a detrimental effect on the army and Barclay’s authority. ‘Senior officers accused [Barclay] of indecision, junior officers of cowardice, while the soldiers murmured that he was a German who had been bribed by Bonaparte and was selling Russia,’ recorded one of Yermolov’s aides-de-camp. ‘The army began to complain that the commander-in-chief, a German, does not attend religious services, does not give battle, and there were those who called the conscientious and brave Barclay a bogeyman,’ according to Nikolai Sukhanin. The rank and file started referring to the commander by the disparaging wordplay on his name ‘boltai da i tolko’, which roughly translates as ‘all bark and no bite’. As he rode past marching columns of troops, the unfortunate commander could hear shouts of: ‘Look, look, there goes the traitor!’29
Had it not been for the essentially passive attitude of the Russian conscript and the framework of iron discipline within which he functioned, the army would have been in trouble. If he felt let down by authority, the ‘foreign traitor’ excuse allowed him to continue to trust in the regimental structure and in his immediate superiors. There was thus no threat of mutiny. But desertion was becoming rife. More importantly, things had come to such a pass that, according to Yermolov’s aide-de-camp Grabbe, if they had given battle now, everyone would have suspected treason at the slightest setback and consequently not obeyed orders they did not clearly see the point of, resulting in a free-for-all.30
Yet a battle was what Barclay was hoping for. He identified a strong position outside Viazma, and on 26 August, as his men began to dig in, he wrote to the Tsar that ‘the moment has come for our advance to begin’. He needed two full days to prepare the positions and tidy up his army, but he was not to get them, as Konovnitsin’s rearguard failed to hold back the advancing French, and he was obliged to fall back once again, ‘like one who has lost his balance and cannot stop himself’, in the words of Clausewitz. For once, Bagration had approved of the position chosen by Barclay, so now he could wax indignant about the other’s order to continue the retreat. ‘I say forward, he says back!’ he wrote to Chichagov the next day. ‘In this manner we shall soon find ourselves in Moscow!’ But Barclay was now determined to make a stand, whatever the consequences, and began to dig in at Tsarevo-Zaimishche, just 160 kilometres – three to four days’ march – short of Moscow.31
This was too close for comfort. News of the fall of Smolensk had had a devastating effect around the country, spreading panic in its wake. Many thought that all was lost. People began to pack up and flee, even when they were nowhere near the front. Kursk filled up with refugees from Kaluga. In Kharkov, a merchant found that none of his regular clients would sell on credit. Even in faraway cities, people were calling in debts, selling at discounts, and going liquid.32
Moscow had hitherto been calm, and it was still basking in the patriotic glow produced by Alexander’s visit. Its military governor, Count Rostopchin, was determined that it should remain so. He was a fine-looking man of fifty with polished manners, a broad education and a jaunty wit. In his privy he had installed a fine bronze bust of Napoleon, suitably adapted to serve the lowest function. He was a prized raconteur, and made an impression on Madame de Staël, who passed through Moscow accompanied by the poet August Wilhelm Schlegel just before the middle of August, and whom he entertained to dinner and showed around the city. For all his liberal French education, Rostopchin was a xenophobe and a reactionary. Over the years he had talked himself into believing in a vast conspiracy of Freemasons, Jacobins, democrats, Martinists and other freethinkers aimed at destroying Russia, and was convinced that the French invasion could be the catalyst for this, by sparking off popular rebellion.
He was determined to control the mood of the people through propaganda and news-management. He composed proclamations, full of demagogic patriotism and braggadocio, which were posted at street corners for all to read. They painted Napoleon and the French in the blackest of colours, and plucked every xenophobic chord in order to forestall any French appeal to the lower orders; at the same time they gave those lower orders an object of hatred that would distract them from any hostile feelings they might have entertained towards the nobility. Rostopchin also enjoyed sowing shameless lies. ‘I gave instructions that a rumour should be spread to the effect that the Turks are now going to be supporting us, and this morning I received reports that the peasants are saying: “The Turks have submitted and have promised our Tsar to pay him a tribute of 20,000 Frenchmen’s heads a year,”’ he wrote to Alexander with satisfaction on 23 July.33
Rostopchin inflated every skirmish into a victory, and organised grandiose religious thanksgiving services. On 17 August everyone in Moscow was rejoicing in rumours of a victory over the French at Smolensk. General Tuchkov had apparently beaten Napoleon, and it was said that he had killed 17,000 Frenchmen and taken 13,000 prisoners. Two days later, Rostopchin was reporting to Balashov that the city was calm; sixty people swore to having seen a vision of God blessing Moscow appear over the Danilovsky monastery; a French resident who had been extolling the wonders of French liberty was flogged and sent into exile; in Bogorodsk, a Russian worker who had been saying that Napoleon would bring freedom to Russia, causing the whole of his factory to down tools, was flogged and imprisoned, while his comrades were driven back to work.34
The shock produced by the truth about Smolensk, when it finally reached Moscow, was predictable. ‘Moscow was shaken with horror; all thoughts turned to flight and to either removing or burying valuables, or walling them up,’ remembered a young noblewoman. ‘Houses were cluttered with trunks, streets filled up with wagons, heavy carriages and light breaks crammed with whole families and their entire wealth.’ Churches remained open night and day, crowded with praying multitudes. Most of the nobles in Moscow had estates, on which they would normally spend the summer, and many of those who had stayed behind in town or come up for Alexander’s visit now made for the country. ‘Every day one could see hundreds of carriages driving across the city, mostly occupied by women and children,’ recalled Rostopchin’s daughter. Men of military age who were spotted leaving were jeered and sometimes even threatened by the rabble. ‘In order to avoid the taunts and the insults of the populace, men of all ages adopted the costumes of their wives and mothers, hoping to save themselves from any disagreeable comments with the aid of this disguise.’35
They were being replaced now by refugees from Smolensk, who told tales of horror, and wounded officers evacuated from the front, whose complaints about Barclay and the German ‘traitors’ began to circulate in the city. Soon even Moscow’s coachmen were cursing Barclay for a German traitor.36
Rostopchin himself began evacuating the treasuries of churches, libraries and the Kremlin. But he continued to pen his proclamations, which grew increasingly warlike, and walked the city streets accosting people and telling them that they need not fear, that the French would soon be beaten, and that he would burn the city sooner than let them into it. ‘The people here, who are faithfully devoted to their sovereign and filled with love for their country, are resolved to die under the walls of Moscow and, if God refuses us His succour in our noble enterprise, then, in accordance with the old Russian saying “You will not fall into the hands of the wicked”, the city will be reduced to ash, and instead of a rich prize, Napoleon will find only a heap of dust where the ancient capital of Russia stood,’ he wrote to Bagration on 25 May.37
On Rostopchin’s orders, ‘spies’ and ‘agitators’ were being arrested every day. They were flogged and either incarcerated or, if they were foreign, sent to some far-off town under surveillance. French inhabitants of the city who appeared to be too pleased at Napoleon’s successes were exiled to Nizhni Novgorod. Rostopchin proudly reported to Bagration on 24 August that he had the situation under control, that they had nothing to fear from the lower orders as the only people who had been heard extolling Napoleon and French liberty were a few drunks. ‘The mood of the people is such that every day I find myself shedding tears of joy,’ he wrote to Balashov.38
On 18 August hundreds of peasant draftees were brought into the city, accompanied by keening wives, mothers and children who had come to see them off. They were the first batch of the 24,835 men raised in the province to date. They were given their militia uniforms – grey knee-length peasant kaftans and baggy pants tucked into Russian boots, cloth forage caps with earflaps that could be tied under the chin, adorned with a brass cross and the motto: ‘For Faith and Tsar’. They were then paraded before the military governor, exhorted by the historian Nikolai Karamzin and blessed by the metropolitan Bishop of Moscow, who sprinkled them with holy water and gave them sacred banners to carry into battle, before being marched out to the front.39
Rostopchin was nothing if not conscientious, and he was prepared to consider almost anything that might contribute to the destruction of the French. He was taken in by a German charlatan by the name of Leppich, who claimed that he could build a huge aerostat which would sail over the French army and destroy it at a stroke by pouring fire down on it. Having relieved the city treasury of a great deal of money, Leppich set to work, in secret.
But Rostopchin’s activities were sewing confusion and generating an increasingly febrile atmosphere. People who used any language other than Russian in the street were set upon by angry mobs. The proclamation issued by Rostopchin on 30 August, which announced that he would lead the people of the city out to face the enemy, armed with hatchets and pitchforks if necessary, actually caused rioting, with shops being broken into and innocent citizens being roughed up on the streets on suspicion of being French spies.40 All this boded ill for the ancient capital of the tsars.