‘I spent the evening with the Emperor yesterday,’ Prince Eugène wrote to his wife on 21 September. ‘We played vingt-et-un to pass the time; I foresee that we will find the evenings very long, as there is not the slightest distraction, not even a billiard table.’ The prospect of staying in Moscow did not fill Napoleon’s entourage with enthusiasm. ‘Napoleon was never more than a man of genius, and it was not in his nature to know how to amuse himself,’ remarked Commissaire Henri Beyle, alias the novelist Stendhal, adding that his court was a dreary zone.1
The Emperor had once again taken up residence in the Kremlin, where he occupied the same apartment overlooking the river Moskva and part of the city as Alexander had a few weeks before. It consisted of one vast hall with great chandeliers, three spacious salons and a large bedroom, which doubled as his study. It was here that he hung Gérard’s portrait of the King of Rome. He slept on the iron camp bed he always used on campaign. His campaign desk had been set up in one corner and his small travelling library laid out on shelves – but his copy of Voltaire’s history of Charles XII was always within reach, on either his desk or his bedside table. He instructed his valet to place two burning candles at his window every night, so that passing soldiers would see that he was watching and working on their behalf.
Napoleon had hoped to set up a Russian civil administration, but there was a dearth of Russian citizens of any calibre, and most of those available did everything to wriggle out of collaborating with the French. He therefore fell back on the expedient of appointing Jean-Baptiste de Lesseps, a former French Consul in St Petersburg, who gathered together all those Russian inhabitants prepared to serve in a provisional administration. Aside from restoring order in most parts of the city, this body made housing available to those Muscovites who had lost their homes in the fire, and tried to encourage peasants from the surrounding countryside to come and sell their produce in the city. But those who did come forward were mostly beaten up and robbed by the soldiery.
A semblance of normality was established in other respects. People travelled ‘as easily between Paris and Moscow as between Paris and Marseille’, according to Caulaincourt, although it took a little longer. The post, carrying thousands of letters from the men to their families and sweethearts, took up to forty days. But the Emperor did not have to wait that long. Every day an estafette would arrive from Paris, having covered the distance in only fourteen days. This was the high point of Napoleon’s day, and he would grow restless if, as happened on one or two occasions, it arrived a couple of days late.2
News from Paris was always welcome, particularly if it caressed Napoleon’s vanity. He read with pleasure that his birthday, which he had spent before Smolensk, had been celebrated in his capital by the laying of foundation stones for the Palais de l’Université, a new Palais des Beaux-Arts and a monumental building to house the national archives. He was informed that ‘the enthusiasm of the Parisians, on hearing of the Emperor’s entry into Moscow is tempered only by their fear of seeing him march out of it in triumph on a conquest of India’. News that Wellington had taken Madrid was less welcome.
If he felt any anxiety about his position he kept it well hidden, and attended to affairs of state as well as those of his army with a punctiliousness that probably helped him avoid facing up to the realities of his situation. He badgered Maret, pressing him to put pressure on the American Minister, the poet Joel Barlow, who had just arrived in Vilna, to forge a closer alliance with the United States against Britain. He gave instructions for 14,000 horses to be sent from France and Germany. He ordered the purchase of large quantities of rice in Trieste which was to be shipped across Europe to Moscow. He also held frequent parades on the great Krasnaia Square before the Kremlin, at which he awarded crosses of the Légion d’Honneur and promotions earned at Borodino.3
But he was not looking forward to a winter away from home. ‘If I cannot return to Paris this winter,’ he wrote to Marie-Louise, ‘I will have you come and see me in Poland. As you know, I am no less eager than you to see you again and to tell you of all the feelings which you arouse in me.’4
His soldiers felt much the same. ‘Another winter will go by without the happiness of being able to press you in my arms, for it is said that we are going to take winter quarters, though where exactly has not yet been decided,’ Captain Frédéric Charles List wrote to his wife on 22 September. ‘I am very tired of this campaign and I do not know when God will give us peace,’ the simple ranker Marchal wrote to the curé of his village. General Junot was no less depressed. ‘Enough said about the war, I now want to tell you, my darling L—e, that I love you more every day, that I am bored to death, that I desire nothing in the whole world as much as to see you again, that I am stuck in the most unworthy country in the world, and that I will die of sorrow if I do not see you soon and die of hunger if I remain here much longer,’ he wrote to his mistress from Mozhaisk. A commissaire who had come out on campaign at the age of fifty because he found his desk job dull and thought he might make his fortune, poured out his regret and disgust to his wife, adding, somewhat insensitively, that there were not even any pretty girls in Russia. Marie-François Schaken, a nineteen-year-old surgeon in Davout’s corps, complained to his sister that he was eating poorly, while his horses were gnawing at their manger, but affirmed his unbounded faith in Napoleon, who would undoubtedly lead them home safely. ‘Find me a pretty little mistress for my return, for there are none here,’ he begged her. ‘Tell her I will love her very much.’5
Although he may have turned his nose up at them, there were in fact plenty of women to choose from in Moscow. For one thing, most of the whores seem to have stayed. ‘This class of person was the only one which drew some profit from the sack of Moscow, as everyone, in their eagerness to have a woman, welcomed these creatures with pleasure, and once they had been introduced into our dwellings, they straightaway became the mistresses of the house, and squandered everything the flames had spared,’ according to Jean-Pierre Barrau, quartermaster of Prince Eugène’s corps. ‘There were others who really deserved consideration on account of their birth, their upbringing, and above all their misfortune; hunger and poverty forced their mothers to bring them to us.’6
Louis Joseph Vionnet de Maringoné, a senior officer in the Grenadiers of the Guard, was shocked to see young women reduced to the extremity of selling their sexual favours to French officers in order to be able to feed themselves, and indeed to protect themselves from the attentions of unruly soldiers. ‘I often found during my walks through the city old men weeping to see this awful immorality,’ he wrote. ‘I did not know their language well enough to be able to console them, but I would point to the heavens and then they would come and kiss my hands and conduct me to where their families were huddled in the ruins, moaning from hunger and misery.’7
The worst disorders had largely died down with the fire. Looting became a clandestine activity, carried on at night or in out-of-the-way burnt-out quarters of the city. The frenzied need to save things from the flames had given way to more methodical rummaging. The French soldiers carried it on jointly with abject locals who found a role for themselves as guides and procurers. Violence against citizens and rape also declined, and in several Russian accounts there are instances of young girls pushing away would-be molesters with impunity.8 Moscow was a huge and sprawling city, and parts of it remained dangerous, particularly at night. Yet a somewhat bizarre modus vivendi had evolved between the various groups living side by side in the ruined city.
The best guarantee of safety for the inhabitants was to have a high-ranking officer in residence. One servant girl recalled that there was no trouble of any sort while a French officer took up quarters in the house, but the moment he left the place was looted thoroughly by Russians. Another Muscovite would send a servant to alert the aides of a French marshal who had quarters nearby whenever a gang tried to loot his house, and an armed patrol would immediately be despatched to arrest the miscreants.9
G.A. Kozlovsky, the son of a landowner from Kaluga who was stranded in Moscow when the French arrived, made friends with some French officers, ate and played chess with them. The only risks he ran were at the hands of the city’s inhabitants who had stayed behind. ‘In those days, one feared the Russian peasants more than the French,’ he recalled. ‘In almost all the houses we went into there were still women, children and old people, mostly servants it is true, as the masters had left,’ remembered Jean Michel Chevalier. ‘Not only were they respected and protected by us, but even fed, for we shared with them anything we could get.’ The painter Albrecht Adam moved in with a Russian whom he treated politely, and they made common cause of finding food and the other necessities of life. A group of Italian soldiers became so fond of their ‘hosts’ that when the time came for leavetaking, there were tears on both sides. One French soldier who found a poor Russian woman squatting in some ruins about to give birth, brought her to his lodgings and fed her. And the hardly belligerent Stendhal actually drew his sword against a drunken French soldier who was mistreating a Russian civilian.10
A mounted grenadier of the Guard named Braux came across a great visitors’ book of the city council, and wrote in it, in such bad French that it would be impossible to reproduce its tone: ‘There is not one Frenchman who is not desperately saddened by the misfortune which has befallen your lovely Moscow. I can assure you that as far as I am concerned, I weep for it and regret it, for it was worthy of being preserved. If you had stayed at home it would have been preserved. Weep, weep, Russians, over the misfortune of your country. You alone are the author of all the ills that it endures.’11
The French were very impressed by the city and its many fine buildings. Dr Larrey thought the hospitals ‘worthy of the most civilised nation on earth’, and was of the opinion that the foundling hospital was ‘without argument the grandest and the finest establishment of its kind anywhere in Europe’. And they all wrote admiringly of the fine palaces, many of which succumbed to the fire. ‘Even the French, so proud of their Paris, are surprised at the size of Moscow, of its magnificence, of the elegance of life here, of the wealth we have found here, even though the city was almost entirely evacuated,’ a Polish officer wrote to his wife. Louis Gardier, Adjutant Major in the 111th of the Line, also thought it very fine, but was shocked by Muscovite morals. ‘As an eyewitness, I can say that I have never seen so many indecent pictures and furnishings,’ he wrote, ‘and lewdness was on display in particularly disgusting ways in the houses of the great.’12
Although a large part of the city had been destroyed, those troops stationed in Moscow itself managed to make themselves quite comfortable. ‘I found quarters in the palace of Prince Lobanov,’ recalled Dezydery Chlapowski of the Chevau-Légers of the Guard. ‘General Krasinski took up his quarters opposite, in the house of the merchant Barishnikov. Both of these houses were very well appointed, everything was in order, both upstairs and down there were very comfortable wide beds with morocco-covered mattresses. Behind the palace were outbuildings, haylofts, a garden with an orangery and, beyond, a field and a kitchen garden. The front of the palace was in town, the back seemed to be in the country. There were about a hundred Muscovites in the two ranges of outbuildings, including servants, craftsmen and peasants, whom we found very helpful in everything. Our soldiers gave them work, which they needed. The behaviour of these people towards us was very calm and civil.’13
‘In spite of the disasters, the fire of Moscow and the flight of the inhabitants, the army is quite comfortable here and has found immense supplies of victuals and even wine,’ General Morand, who was recovering from the wound received as he stormed the Raevsky redoubt, wrote to his ‘Émilie adorée’. ‘My division is quartered in a very large building, and I have a very fine and very comfortable house nearby on a large square … I await with impatience news of your confinement, may the good Lord protect you as he has protected me in battle …’14
Baron Paul de Bourgoing found billets in Rostopchin’s palace, and spent happy hours browsing in the Count’s magnificent library. One day he came across an edition of a book written by his father. ‘It is with real pleasure that the son of the author has found one of his father’s books so far from his fatherland,’ he wrote in the flyleaf. ‘He only regrets that it should be war that brought him here.’15
B.T. Duverger, paymaster of the Compans division, installed himself in the house of some German inhabitants of Moscow, and lived quite happily, with the Italian Guard parading outside his windows to good regimental music in the mornings. ‘I was rich in furs and paintings; I was rich in cases of figs, in coffee, in liqueurs, in macaroons, in smoked fish and meats,’ he noted, ‘but of white bread, fresh meat and ordinary wine, I had none.’ There were twelve of them in the house altogether, and as they sat down to dinner they would drink a toast to next year’s campaign and their entry into St Petersburg.16
‘The grenadiers went out and found us some table linen and household items; others furnished us with provisions of every kind; the flocks of cattle which have rejoined the army are providing us with meat; our bakers are making bread with flour found under the ashes; in a word, the army has everything it needs in spite of Rostopchin,’ wrote Captain Fantin des Odoards. In order to provide themselves with vitamins through the winter, the more provident set about making sauerkraut out of the cabbages in which the city’s numerous kitchen gardens abounded.17
The soldiers employed the various cobblers and tailors left in the city to repair their uniforms or make new boots. They also stocked up on essentials at the markets that had sprung up, where they could buy things salvaged or looted by others. The Grenadiers of the Guard, who entered into the city early on and had had ample opportunity to lay hands on every manner of goods when they were detailed to extinguish the fire of the principal trading bazaar, had set up a market outside the Kremlin where an astonishing array of victuals and goods could be had. But although they had managed to corner the market in some types of commodity, stalls sprang up all over the city. ‘The streets which had been spared by the fire resembled real markets, with the peculiarity that all those taking part, merchants and customers, were all soldiers,’ noted Lubin Griois. Another peculiarity was that the troops found it more convenient to barter than to use money, so everyone involved was wandering about with an extraordinary array of objects and delicacies. Frenchmen could sample finer French wines and cognacs than they would ever be able to afford at home, and one had his first taste of a pineapple in Moscow.18
Much of the mercantile activity was driven on the one hand by the need of soldiers to make some money or to provide themselves with objects that would be saleable back home, and on the other by the desire to find presents for wives, mistresses and sisters. What they all wanted was fine furs, for which Russia was famous, and the woven cashmere shawls imported from Persia and India that were a fashionable and indeed essential accessory to the high-waisted but low-cut empire-style dresses. The Continental System had sent the price of both rocketing in Paris. But furs and shawls were not normally stored in cellars, so a large part of the city’s stock had gone up in flames.
General Compans, who was recovering from the wound he received while leading his division’s attack on Bagration’s flèches at Borodino, was newly married and eager to shower his young wife with presents. But, as he wrote to her, he was finding it very difficult, even though he had several people on to the job. On 14 October he was at last able to write:
Here, ma bonne amie, is what I have been able to procure in the way of furs:
One large fur of black and red foxes, in alternating bands;
One large fur of blue and red foxes, in alternating bands;
That is how they assemble fox furs in this country, when they are not using them merely as trimming. These two furs are new and are considered to be very fine.
One large collar of silver-grey fox;
One collar of black fox;
Both of them are very beautiful, but too small for you to make much use of for yourself, but I could not find anything else in that line;
Enough sable for two or three trimmings for furs as large as the one in chinchilla which you bought in Hamburg;
A large muff in grey-black fox made up of choice pieces sewn together in little bands of an inch and a half in width. This muff is highly regarded here; it must have taken quite a few fox furs, much silk and a great deal of work to make up such a muff. I think you could probably use it either as a trimming or as a cape. All of this, my dearest Louise, will be packed in a trunk, and I will seize the first possible opportunity to have it delivered to you.19
Whether the furs ever reached her is doubtful – the letter did not, as it was picked up by marauding cossacks after they attacked a courier.
Fur fever gripped men of every station. ‘I have made the acquisition of an extremely fine pelisse in fox fur backed with a very beautiful violet satin,’ Lieutenant Paradis of the 25th of the Line wrote to his mistress. ‘I would very much like to send it to you, but I do not know how to go about it. As you can imagine, the object is rather voluminous.’ Colonel Parguez, chief of staff to the 1st Division in Davout’s corps, suggested his wife send one of her maids over to collect the ‘six dozen fine sables, all ready and perfect to trim at least six pelisses’. The girl could be back in Paris with them by 1 January, in time for her to wear them in the New Year.20
Guillaume Peyrusse, paymaster to Napoleon’s household, encountered terrible difficulties in getting hold of any of the things his wife longed for. ‘Try as I might, I have been able to find neither piqué, nor muslin, nor cashmere shawl … Nothing delicate in the way of lady’s furs … Not a print, not a view of Moscow, not a medal, not the slightest curio of any sort.’ This was particularly galling, as he had been given a whole list of items by not only his wife, but his sister-in-law and various other members of his family. Many others, including Marshal Davout himself, complained of the difficulty of getting hold of good stuff for their womenfolk. ‘In Moscow, even at court, the conversation turned on nothing except foxes, rabbits and sables,’ as Eustachy Sanguszko put it.21
The more culturally curious explored what was left of the city, visiting the Kremlin and the tombs of the Tsars, which had been ripped apart by looters. Vionnet de Maringoné found a functioning ‘banya’ which he frequented with much pleasure. Colonel Louis Lejeune met his sister, who had been living in Russia for twenty years. Others struck up acquaintance with the French residents of Moscow, though some old revolutionary soldiers sneered at them as ‘émigrés’, and with various other foreign residents, including Germans, Italians, and even some English, who did their best to entertain the invaders.22
A troupe of French actors resident in Moscow had stayed behind, and they gave a series of performances of light comedies by Marivaux and others. They played not in any of the public theatres, which had been reduced to ashes, but in the private court theatre of an aristocratic palace. ‘You cannot imagine through what magnificent salons we passed in order to get to the theatre,’ Major Strżyzewski wrote to his wife in Warsaw. ‘I was entranced by everything I saw. In one of the drawing rooms, I thought particularly of you, since it was filled with the most beautiful flowers.’ He judged the actors ‘passable’. In the interval the spectators were served refreshments by grenadiers of the Old Guard.23
Some arranged their own entertainments. Napoleon did not go to the theatre, but did attend a recital given for him at the Kremlin by the singer Signor Tarquinio. The twenty-seven-year-old Sergeant Adrien Bourgogne and his messmates had, in the process of providing themselves with the necessities of life, amassed quite a wardrobe of rich court clothing, some of it dating back to the previous century, which they had found in abandoned palaces. One evening they and the Russian trollops who had moved in with them prinked themselves up in this finery, with the regimental barber dressing their hair and making them up. They then held a ball and danced to the sound of fife and drum, the whores dolled up as eighteenth-century marquises high-kicking and causing a great deal of mirth.24
Although Moscow boasted a French Catholic church, St Louis des Français, whose parish priest, the Abbé Surrugues, had remained at his post, churchgoing did not figure among the activities of the soldiers. A handful of officers, mostly from aristocratic backgrounds, came to mass or confession, and the Abbé was only asked to give Christian burial on two occasions. He went around the hospitals to talk to the wounded, but found them interested only in their physical wants, not their spiritual needs. ‘They do not seem to believe in an afterlife,’ Father Surrugues wrote. ‘I baptised several infants born to soldiers, which is the only thing they still care about, and I was treated with respect.’25
While Napoleon held frequent reviews, at which his troops looked their best, he had not once since reaching Moscow inspected their bivouacs or quarters, with the result that he had no idea of their real state of mind and body. At Petrovskoie, where a large part of Prince Eugène’s 4th Corps was stationed, the generals had installed themselves in the summer residences of wealthy Muscovites, the officers in various pavilions, follies and summer houses scattered around their parks, and the soldiers in the surrounding fields. They sat around their campfires on fine furniture rescued from some gutted palace, eating their gruel off silver plate and drinking the finest wines from precious goblets. ‘Our actual poverty was masked by an apparent abundance,’ observed an officer on Prince Eugène’s staff. ‘We had neither bread nor meat, and our tables were covered with preserves and sweets; tea, liqueurs and wines of every kind, served in fine porcelain or in crystal vessels, showed how close luxury was to poverty in our case.’26
Junot’s Westphalian 8th Corps, stuck out at Mozhaisk, also suffered from a lack of decent housing and continual shortages of food. The men would come into Moscow whenever they could in order to buy necessary supplies, but as they were obliged to purchase them from the looters, they had to pay high prices.
Undoubtedly the worst off in every way were Murat’s cavalry and Poniatowski’s 5th Corps, stationed to the south of Moscow, around Voronovo and Vinkovo, in close proximity to Kutuzov’s camp at Tarutino. It was an unusual situation. An unspoken armistice had come into existence, with both sides merely keeping an eye on each other. On one occasion, some French foragers came across a herd of cattle in the no-man’s-land between them, and divided the booty up amicably with the Russians. On another Murat himself rode over to some Russian pickets and told them it would be more convenient if they moved a few hundred yards further back, which they obligingly did. One day he had a chat with Miloradovich, who was inspecting his outposts. Whenever Murat rode out in his operatic costume, the cossacks would greet him with shouts of ‘The King, the King!’ As a sign of respect for his reckless courage, they never fired on him, and in his naivety Murat seems to have fancied that he could subvert these wild children of the steppe. Officers on outpost duty would pass the time of day talking to their opposite numbers, exchanging prognoses about the war and debating whether they would soon all be off to India together. The French believed that it was only a matter of time before peace was signed, and the passage of Lauriston through their camp on his way to see Kutuzov only confirmed them in their conviction.27
But the conditions in which the French stationed here waited for the hoped-for peace were terrible. They were mostly camped out in the open fields, with no shelter to protect them from the rain and the cold. They slept on improvised beds of straw or branches under the stars, or under a caisson or carriage. The autumn days were cold, even if it was sunny, and at night there was always a frost. There was a severe shortage of food, and unlike their comrades stationed in or around the city, the men here could not go to Moscow, some eighty kilometres distant, to stock up.
The bivouac of the Polish Chevau-Légers at Voronovo was better than most. They had taken over the ruins of Rostopchin’s magnificent country house, which he had left with a large notice stating that although he had spent years building and planting his estate, he had personally burnt it down lest it provide shelter or comfort for the French invaders. Some of the officers had made makeshift tents in the ruins or squeezed into peasant huts in the village, while the men sheltered wherever they could find even a wall to shield them from the wind. The regimental cantinières created a café with surviving pieces of furniture, including one fine sofa from the palace, and the men sat around drinking coffee from a bizarre array of gold, silver and china vessels, discussing the campaign and listening to General Colbert, who commanded the division, and his two aides-de-camp sing airs from Paris vaudeville in the evenings.
Men and horses wasted away at an alarming rate in these conditions, and the words ‘corps’, ‘division’ and ‘regiment’ are highly misleading when considering the state of the French cavalry by the middle of October. The 3rd Cavalry Corps, consisting of eleven regiments, could only muster seven hundred horsemen. The 1st Regiment of Chasseurs could only field fifty-eight, and that only thanks to some reinforcements which had reached it from France. Squadrons in the 2nd Cuirassiers, usually 130 strong, were down to eighteen or twenty-four men. General Thielmann’s Saxon brigade was down to fifty horses.28
The condition of the horses was dreadful, and by mid-October many of them were ‘entirely spoiled’, in the words of Lieutenant Henryk Dembinski of the 5th Polish Mounted Rifles. ‘It was so bad that, even though we had folded blankets to the thickness of sixteen, their backs had rotted through completely, so much so that the rot had eaten through the saddlecloth, with the result that when a trooper dismounted, you could see the horse’s entrails.’29
What is truly extraordinary is the degree to which even in these conditions Napoleon inspired absolute confidence in his men. As they sat around in camp with nothing to do, they endlessly discussed the situation. ‘We could see that we were slowly perishing, but our faith in the genius of Napoleon, in his many years of triumph, was so unbounded that these conversations always ended with the conclusion that he must know what he is doing better than us,’ recalls Lieutenant Dembinski.30
Most of them were anxious – at being so far away from home, at the state of the army, at the lack of food, at the general turn events had taken. ‘But all our reflections did not give us the slightest fear: Napoleon is there,’ as Captain Fantin des Odoards put it. Among the letters found strewn in the road after a courier had been ambushed by cossacks was one from the Comte de Ségur, dated 16 October, telling his wife in the tenderest tones how much he loved and missed her, and discussing the progress of the tree-planting programme he had initiated in the park of his château.31
Many of them were convinced that Napoleon was bent on a march to India. ‘We are expecting to leave soon,’ noted Boniface de Castellane on 5 October. ‘There is talk of going to India. We have such confidence that we do not reason as to the possibility of success of such an enterprise, but only on the number of months of marching necessary, on the time letters would take to come from France. We are accustomed to the infallibility of the Emperor and the success of his projects.’ Others fantasised about liberating girls from the Sultan’s seraglio, one dreaming of a Circassian girl, another of a Greek, another of a Georgian. ‘After a good treaty of alliance with Alexander, who willy-nilly will be dragged along with us like the others, we will go to Constantinople next year and from there to India,’ one officer wrote home. ‘It is only loaded down with the diamonds of Golconda and the cloths of Kashmir that the Grande Armée will return to France!’32
At the beginning of October, Murat sent his aide-de-camp General Rossetti to Moscow to inform Napoleon personally of the critical condition of the cavalry and of his exposed position. But Napoleon dismissed his report, saying that the Russians were too weak to attack. ‘My army is finer than ever,’ he told Rossetti. ‘A few days of rest have done it the greatest good.’ That was perhaps true of the troops which paraded before him in Moscow, but certainly not of the cavalry. On 10 October Murat wrote to General Bélliard on Berthier’s staff, urging him to get the truth through to the Emperor. ‘My Dear Bélliard,’ he wrote, ‘my position is atrocious. I have the whole enemy army in front of me. Our advance guard is reduced to nothing; it is starving, and it is no longer possible to go foraging without the virtual certainty of capture. Not a day passes without me losing two hundred men in this way.’33
Napoleon was far too astute not to realise that his strategy had gone badly wrong, and that Caulaincourt had been right all along. But he did not like to admit it. And he recoiled from the only logical next step, which was to withdraw. He liked neither the idea of retreat, which went against his instincts, nor the implications of such a withdrawal on the political climate in Europe. He also had an extraordinary capacity for making himself believe something just by decreeing it to be true. ‘In many a circumstance, to wish something and believe it were for him one and the same thing,’ in the words of General Bourienne.34 So he hung on, believing that Alexander’s nerve would break or that his own proverbial luck would come up with something.
He had studied weather charts, which told him that it did not get really cold until the beginning of December, so he did not feel any sense of urgency. What he did not realise, in common with many who do not know those climates, was just how sudden and savage changes of temperature can be, and how temperature is only one factor, which along with wind, water and terrain can turn nature into a viciously powerful opponent.
The unusually fine weather at the beginning of October contributed to his complacency. He teased Caulaincourt, accusing him of peddling stories about the Russian winter invented to ‘frighten children’. ‘Caulaincourt thinks he’s frozen already,’ he quipped. He kept saying that it was warmer than Fontainebleau at that time of year, and dismissed suggestions that the army provide itself with gloves and items of warm clothing. He was not alone in his delusions. ‘We have been having the most wonderful weather for the past few days, which could not have been finer in France at this time of year,’ Davout wrote to his wife. ‘In general, people exaggerate the harshness of the climate here.’35
With every day Napoleon spent in Moscow, the harder it was to leave without loss of face, and the usually decisive Emperor became immobilised by the need to choose between an unappealing range of options on the one hand, and stubborn belief in his lucky star on the other. He fell into the trap of thinking that by delaying a decision he was leaving his options open. In fact, he only really had one option, and he was reducing the chances of its success with every day he delayed.
On 12 October the daily estafette from Moscow to Paris was attacked and captured between Moscow and Mozhaisk, and on the following day the one coming from Paris was intercepted. General Ferrières, who had travelled all the way from Cadiz, was captured almost at the gates of Moscow. These events shook Napoleon, and the gravity of his position was underlined by the first light shower of snow, on 13 October, which covered the ruins of Moscow and the surrounding countryside in a blanket of brilliant white.
‘Let us make haste,’ he said on seeing the snow. ‘We must be in winter quarters in twenty days’ time.’36 It was a bit late, but by no means too late. Smolensk, where he had some supplies, was only ten to twelve days’ march from Moscow, and his well-stocked bases at Minsk and Vilna were only another ten and fifteen respectively from there. Having reached these, his army would be well fed and supplied, safe in friendly country and able to draw on reinforcements from the depots he had built up in Poland and Prussia. In the spring he would be able to march on St Petersburg or any other point he chose.
A withdrawal is always a risky enterprise, as it can easily turn into a flight, but there are ways of limiting the damage, and in this case the first imperative was to ensure mobility by travelling as light as possible. Only this could have given Napoleon the initiative, even as he withdrew. And the need to jettison things along the way tended to lower the morale of the retreating force while raising that of the pursuers. Expediency therefore demanded that he send on ahead or leave behind as much as possible, in terms of people and equipment.
But as with every other aspect of this campaign, political imperatives prevented him from taking the course dictated by military considerations, not to say common sense. His original assumption that his occupation of Moscow would produce peace meant that instead of regarding the city as a forward position he treated it as a base. The transportable wounded of Borodino were not sent back to Smolensk and Vilna to recuperate, but brought forward to Moscow. It was only on 5 October that he gave orders that the movable wounded still at Mozhaisk, Kolotskoie and Gzhatsk be gradually taken back to Smolensk, and not until 10 October that a first convoy of wounded left Moscow. Had he begun this process a week earlier, thousands of men of all ranks would have survived. Those who did get sent back in the first week of October travelled unmolested in perfectly good conditions all the way to Paris. Stendhal, who left Moscow with a convoy of wounded as late as 16 October, got through to Smolensk without problem. They were harassed by cossacks, but not enough to disturb him in his reading of Madame du Deffand’s Lettres. Even the trophies – banners, regalia and treasures from the Kremlin, the great silver-gilt cross Napoleon ordered to be wrenched from the dome of the tower of Ivan the Great, which he intended to erect in Paris – were not sent on ahead.
He kept ordering all available reinforcements forward, rather than building up reserves along his line of retreat. It was only on 14 October, the day after the first snowfall, that he gave orders that no more troops were to be sent forward to Moscow, but ordered back to Smolensk, and that the remaining wounded in Moscow be evacuated immediately, those from Mozhaisk and Kolotskoie by 20 October, those from Gzhatsk two days later.
The more seriously wounded, of whom there may have been as many as 12,000, should have been left where they were, which was what Dr Larrey had intended – he even left medical teams, supplemented by French inhabitants of Moscow. Dr La Flise was horrified when the order came to transport them, realising that they would mostly perish from the buffetings on the road even if they escaped the pikes of marauding cossacks.37
Napoleon fixed on 19 October as the date he would leave Moscow, later rescheduling it for 20 October. But even then, various political considerations vitiated sensible preparations. He could retreat straight back down the road along which he had come, which had the advantages of being familiar, guarded by French units and punctuated with supply depots, as well as being the most direct. The only disadvantage of this road was that the country alongside it had been ravaged by the advance and would not provide much in the way of sustenance. Napoleon therefore asked General Baraguay d’Hilliers, stationed at Smolensk, to identify two side roads running parallel to the main road, so that some elements of his army could march through virgin country.
But going back the way he had come would be tantamount to an admission that he was retreating. He considered marching north-westward, through Volokolamsk, where he could crush Wintzingerode’s detachment, to join up with Victor and St Cyr at Vitebsk, where he could attack Wittgenstein and whence, if necessary, he could withdraw to Vilna. This option had the merit that it would threaten St Petersburg, which might just cause Alexander’s nerve to snap. Or he could march southwards, strike a blow at Kutuzov, and then march back to Minsk via Kaluga or Medyn. This option had the disadvantage that if he fell back on Smolensk even after defeating Kutuzov, it would look like flight. So he entertained the possibility of returning to Moscow after defeating him. Instead of evacuating the city, he therefore gave orders for Davout’s, Mortier’s and Ney’s corps to gather up and stockpile three months’ worth of rations and six months’ worth of stewed cabbage, to improve the defences of the Kremlin and turn all the monasteries into strongpoints, which were to be held by horseless cavalrymen armed with muskets ‘during the absence of the army’. A large part of his household was also to remain in Moscow when he moved out.38
‘It is possible that I may return to Moscow,’ Napoleon wrote, as late as 18 October, to General Lariboisière, inspector-general of the artillery, who was worried at the vast quantities of equipment stockpiled there. ‘So nothing that could be of use must be destroyed.’ When, in the end, Moscow did have to be evacuated, Lariboisière would have to burn five hundred caissons, 60,000 muskets and several hundred thousand measures of powder before leaving. In the absence of a sufficient number of horses to pull the guns, he also wanted the useless four-pounders destroyed, but Napoleon felt this smelt of defeat.39
Napoleon should have sent back all his dismounted cavalrymen. There were several thousand of these by the time he reached Moscow, and the number grew daily. Instead, he ordered them to be formed up into dismounted units and issued with carbines, which was pointless. The men did not know how to and did not wish to fight as infantry, they did not know the drill, and they could feel no esprit de corps in these units. ‘The worst infantry regiment is much more effective than four regiments of dismounted cavalry,’ wrote Boniface de Castellane. ‘They bleat like donkeys that they were not made for this work.’40
Colonel Antoine Marbot, commanding the 23rd Chasseurs à Cheval under St Cyr, ignored orders to keep all dismounted men near the front, and sent his all the way back to Warsaw, where he knew they would find horses; in this way he had 250 well-mounted men ready for action at the end of the campaign, while all the dismounted cavalrymen who remained with St Cyr were taken prisoner. ‘It would have been so easy throughout the summer and autumn to send men to Warsaw, whose remount depot had plenty of horses but no riders,’ he wrote.41 Had Napoleon evacuated his horseless cavalrymen just one week ahead of the army, he would have had the cavalry whose lack was to rob him of victory in 1813 and 1814.
Colonel Marbot also made his men acquire rough sheepskin coats from the local peasants at the beginning of September, thereby saving the lives of a great many of them. The Colonel of the Polish Chevau-Légers of the Guard did the same, and as Master of the Horse, Caulaincourt made all the riders, grooms and drivers under his command provide themselves with not only sheepskin coats, but also gloves and fur hats.42
Other officers showed similar prescience, but usually only with respect to themselves, investing in good fur coats (as opposed to fancy items for the ladies back home), fur-lined overboots, gloves and fur caps. Lieutenant Henckens of the 6th Chasseurs bought some small pieces of fur which he got one of his men, a tailor by trade, to make up into a vest, to be worn under his shirt. Colonel Parguez proudly informed his wife in a letter that he had had a pair of bearskin boots made up with the fur on the inside.43
Captain Louis Bro of the Chasseurs à Cheval of the Guard was taking no chances. ‘I bought two little cossack horses used to surviving off straw and the branches of pine trees. They carried my personal effects and a hundred kilograms of reserve victuals, principally chocolate and eau-de-vie; I foresaw that my exhausted French horse would not go far. The two horses, shod with steel, would take me all the way to the Niemen. I also furnished myself with a fur-lined cloak, a fox fur, a fur-lined cap, felt boots, and resin bricks which would allow me to light a fire at any moment.’44
Louis Lagneau, a surgeon with the Young Guard, had taken the precaution of having a small tent made in Moscow, in which he and three colleagues would be able to sleep in relative warmth and shelter even in the coldest conditions – it got perfectly warm inside with the four of them. And Antoine Augustin Pion des Loches, recently promoted to the rank of colonel in the foot artillery of the Guard, prepared himself against all eventualities. In his small wagon he packed a hundred large dry biscuits, a sack of flour, three hundred bottles of wine, twenty to thirty bottles of rum and other spirits, ten pounds of tea, ten pounds of coffee, a large quantity of candles, and ‘in the event of winter quarters east of the Niemen, which I felt to be inevitable, a case containing quite a fine edition of the works of Voltaire and Rousseau; a History of Russia by Le Cler; and that by Levesque, the plays of Molière, the works of Piron, de l’Ésprit des Lois and a few other works, such as Raynal’s Histoire philosophique, all bound in white calf and gilt-edged’.45
Yet while people such as these were clever enough to equip themselves with the means of survival, there was not a single order given from the top, not even at corps command or divisional level, to take appropriate measures to protect the troops during the forthcoming operations. Good commanders such as Davout made sure the soldiers’ uniforms and boots were repaired, but that was as far as it went. And whatever other measures they might have taken would in any case have been largely nullified by one great omission, which was to cost tens of thousands of lives and turn a potentially orderly retreat into a tragic rout.
The moment they had come to rest at Moscow, all Polish units set up forges and began making horseshoes with sharp crampons in preparation for winter. They told their French comrades to do likewise, but their advice bounced off a wall of Gallic unconcern. ‘The stubbornness and arrogance of the French, who felt that having been through so many wars they knew better than everyone else and did not need their advice, did not allow them to sharp-shoe their horses,’ wrote Józef Grabowski, a Polish officer attached to imperial headquarters. Luckily for Napoleon, Caulaincourt, who had seen several Russian winters, took it upon himself to have all the horses of his household properly shod. But when it was suggested the same measures be ordered throughout the army, the Emperor dismissed it – with fatal consequences for him and his whole army.46