Had Napoleon known what was going on in Kutuzov’s mind, he could have advanced boldly and made for Medyn, where he would have found victuals and forage, and from there to Yelnia, where he had a division under General Baraguay d’Hilliers waiting to meet him, and on to Smolensk, which he would have reached in fairly good shape on 3 or 4 November. But taking into account the strong positions the Russians had taken up, he decided otherwise. That evening, he ordered the retreat, through Borovsk and Vereia to Mozhaisk, and from there along the main road to Smolensk. In one of the more bizarre episodes in military history, the two armies were now moving away from each other.
Two days later, as he reached Mozhaisk, Napoleon met Mortier coming from Moscow with the Young Guard. He also had with him two prisoners, General Ferdinand von Wintzingerode and his aide-de-camp Prince Lev Naryshkin, who had unwisely ridden into Moscow to verify reports that the French had left, only to be captured by a patrol. On seeing Wintzingerode, a native of Württemberg in Russian service who seemed at that moment to epitomise the internationale that was forming against him, Napoleon erupted into a violent rage, the like of which none of his entourage had ever witnessed. ‘It is you and a few dozen rogues who have sold themselves to England who are whipping up Europe against me,’ he ranted. ‘I don’t know why I don’t have you shot; you were captured as a spy.’ He took out all his frustration and mortification on the unfortunate General, accusing him of being a renegade. ‘You are my personal enemy: you have borne arms against me everywhere – in Austria, in Prussia, in Russia. I shall have you court martialled.’1
Even this tirade did not succeed in venting all his pent-up anger, and on seeing a pretty country house that had somehow escaped destruction, Napoleon ordered it to be torched, along with every village they passed through. ‘Since Messieurs les Barbares are so keen on burning their own towns, we must help them,’ he raged. He soon countermanded the order, but that hardly made much difference.2 As they stopped for the night the troops would dismantle houses to feed their campfires or crowd into them for warmth. They would light fires inside or overheat the mud stoves, which often led to them catching fire, and in villages or small towns in which every building was of wood, this usually led to a general conflagration.
The order to retreat had a depressing effect on the army, which instinctively felt that something had gone wrong with the infallible Emperor’s calculations. But, ironically, it was when they began to feel threatened that the troops rallied to him and took comfort in his perceived greatness. On the day the retreat began, General Dedem de Gelder reported to the Emperor for orders. ‘Napoleon was warming his hands behind his back at a small bivouac fire which had been laid for him on the edge of a village one league beyond Borovsk on the road to Vereia,’ he recalled. The General disliked Napoleon, partly because of the way he had treated his native Holland, but he could not help being impressed by him now. ‘I have to do justice to this man hitherto so spoilt by fortune, who had never yet known serious setbacks; he was calm, without anger, but without resignation; I believed he would be great in adversity, and that idea reconciled me to him … I saw then the man who contemplates disaster and recognises all the difficulties of his position, but whose soul is in no way crushed and who says to himself: "This is a failure, I have to quit, but I shall be back.”’3
The spirits of the army were further lowered when, shortly after rejoining the Moscow – Smolensk road at Mozhaisk on 28 October, they found themselves marching across the battlefield of Borodino. It had never been cleared, and the dead had been left where they lay, to be pecked at and chewed by carrion crows, wolves, feral dogs and other creatures. The corpses were nevertheless surprisingly well preserved, presumably by the nightly frosts. ‘Many of them had kept what one might call a physiognomy,’ recorded Adrien de Mailly. ‘Almost all of them had large open staring eyes, their beards seemed to have grown, and the brick-red and Prussian blue which marbled their cheeks made them look as though they had been horribly sullied or luridly daubed, which made one wonder if this were not some grotesque travesty making fun of misery and death – it was odious!’4 The stink was indescribable, and the sight cast a pall over the passing troops.*
At Mozhaisk and at Kolotskoie they saw thousands of emaciated wounded, barely surviving in dreadful conditions. Colonel de Fezensac went into the Kolotsky monastery to see if there were any men from his regiment. ‘They had left the men there without medicines, without rations, without any form of succour,’ he wrote. ‘I was barely able to get in, so encumbered were the stairs, corridors and the middle of the rooms with ordure of every kind.’6
Napoleon was annoyed to find so many wounded still there, and grandly determined that they should all be taken along. Against the advice of Larrey and other doctors, who had left medical teams to care for them, he gave instructions for them to be placed in carriages, on fourgons, on the wagons of the cantinières, gun carriages and every other possible conveyance. The result was predictable. ‘The healthiest people would not have stood up to such a method of transport, or been able to remain for long on the vehicles, given the way they had been loaded on,’ wrote Caulaincourt. ‘One can therefore judge the state these unfortunates were in after a few leagues. The jolting, the exertion and the cold all assailed them at the same time. I have never seen a more heart-rending sight.’ The owners of the carriages in question were far from happy to have extra weight laid on vehicles which their horses could barely draw as it was, and faced with trepidation the prospect of having to feed their new charges. Realising that they were unlikely to survive anyway, they mostly decided to precipitate the inevitable. ‘I still shudder as I relate that I saw drivers purposely drive their horses across the roughest ground in order to rid themselves of the unfortunates with whom they had been saddled and smile, as one would at a piece of luck, when a jolt would rid them of one of these unfortunates, whom they knew would be crushed under a wheel if a horse did not step on him first.’7
After giving the orders for the evacuation of the wounded on the afternoon of 28 October, Napoleon rode on to Uspenskoie, where he stopped for the night in a devastated country house. But he could not sleep. At two o’clock in the morning he called Caulaincourt to his bedside and asked him what he thought of the situation. Caulaincourt replied that it was much graver than Napoleon thought, and that it was unlikely that he would be able to take up winter quarters at Smolensk, Vitebsk or Orsha, as he still hoped. Napoleon then said that it might be necessary for him to leave the army and go to Paris, and asked him what he thought of such a plan and what he thought the army would make of it. Caulaincourt replied that going back to Paris was the best course of action, though he would have to choose his moment well, and that what the army thought was of no consequence.8
Napoleon’s position was indeed very bad. Ten days after leaving Moscow, he was only three days’ march down the Smolensk road. This not only represented a dangerous delay, it also meant that his army had used up ten days’ rations. At the rate it was now moving, Smolensk was still over ten days’ march away, and the only sustenance to be found before that was a small magazine at Viazma. And, with no intelligence and not enough cavalry to send out scouting parties, Napoleon had no idea of what the Russians were up to.
When Volkonsky had reached St Petersburg and handed Alexander the letter Napoleon had sent through Lauriston, the Tsar had hardly bothered to read it. ‘Peace?’ he said. ‘But as yet we have not made war. My campaign is only just beginning.’9 In fact it would be some time before it began.
It was only after a couple of days’ hurried retreat that Kutuzov turned about and began gingerly to follow the retiring French. He sent Miloradovich on ahead, and himself followed at a more leisurely pace. Having marched north to Mozhaisk, the French were now marching west along the Moscow road in a wide arc that curved southwards. Kutuzov was therefore excellently placed to cut across their line of retreat. But while he could not resist writing to his wife that he was the first general who had ever made Napoleon run, he made no attempt to intercept him.
The only enemy the French saw were cossacks, who followed them at a respectful distance, like hyenas stalking a wounded animal. The regular cossack regiments they had met hitherto were now outnumbered by irregulars from the Don and the Kuban. ‘Dressed and hatted in a variety of styles, without any appearance of uniformity, dirty-looking and scruffy, mounted on mean raw-boned little horses with unkempt manes which kept their necks stuck out and hung their heads, harnessed with no more than a simple snaffle, armed with a crude long pole with a sort of nail at its point, milling around in apparent disorder, these cossacks made me think of teeming vermin,’ remembered François Dumonceau.10 The cossacks were supplemented by bands of Bashkir horsemen armed with bows, who amazed the French by firing arrows at them.
These wild horsemen were of no military value in themselves. Their principal tactic was to rush forward yelling ‘Hurrah!’, hoping to terrify the enemy into flight, at which point they would catch a few fugitives and pick through whatever booty the others had left behind. If a soldier stood his ground and levelled a musket at them they would invariably run, but he was wise not to fire it, as they would return and get him while he was reloading. The cossack pike had a thin round point which could only prick and not sever tendons or muscles, so unless it found a vital organ its wound was not serious.
On the advance, the French had ignored the cossacks, making fun of their shameless unwillingness to expose themselves to the slightest danger. ‘If one were to raise a regiment of French girls they would, I believe, show more courage than these famous cossacks with their long pikes and their long beards,’ commented one soldier. But in the conditions of a retreat, and in the absence of adequate numbers of cavalry on the French side, they were to exert an influence quite beyond their potential. ‘The French soldier is easily demoralised,’ remarked Lieutenant Blaze de Bury. ‘Four Hussars on his flank terrify him more than a thousand in front.’11
On 2 November Marshal Lefèbvre harangued the Old Guard on the subject with his usual directness. ‘Grenadiers and Chasseurs, the cossacks are there, there, there and there,’ he said, gesturing to the four points of the compass. ‘If you do not follow me, you are f—d. I am no ordinary general, and it is with good reason that in the army of the Moselle I was known as the Eternal Father. Grenadiers and Chasseurs, I say to you again: if you do not stay with me you are f—d. And anyway, I don’t care a f—k. You can all go and f—k yourselves.’12 The Guard did not disappoint, and the ranks remained steady throughout; but the same could not be said of other troops. Once morale began to crack on the retreat, an irrational fear took over, and the mere shout of ‘Cossacks!’ would send old soldiers scurrying for cover.
The French were retreating in echelons, with Napoleon leading the way accompanied by the Old Guard, the Young Guard, the remains of Murat’s cavalry and Junot’s corps, and reaching Viazma on 31 October. Next came Ney, followed by Prince Eugène’s Italians and what was left of Poniatowski’s Poles. Bringing up the rear was Davout with his 1st Corps.
Progress was slow, mainly due to lack of horsepower. Shortage of fodder had debilitated the horses, which were growing too weak to pull the guns and caissons. Guns normally drawn by three pairs were now having teams of twelve or fifteen horses hitched to them, and even these could not manage to pull the heavy pieces over the muddy rivulets and up the many inclines in the road. Passing infantry would be enlisted to help push the guns, but the exhausted footsloggers did not relish this task and did everything to avoid it. Powder wagons were blown up and surplus shells jettisoned to lighten the load. The private carriages and booty-laden wagons of individuals were seized and burnt by the artillery, who commandeered the horses. At Gzhatsk on 30 October Henri-Joseph Paixhans, an aide-de-camp to General Lariboisière, passed a column of wagons laden with wounded men whose horses had been taken. ‘These poor unfortunates implored our pity with their hands joined in prayer,’ he recalled. ‘They called out to us in heart-rending tones that they too were Frenchmen, that they had been wounded fighting at our side, and they begged us tearfully not to abandon them.’13
Part of the problem was that Napoleon saw himself as carrying out a tactical withdrawal rather than a retreat. Several of the corps commanders wanted to abandon a proportion of their guns, which were of no use to them. This would have liberated horses with which to draw the rest and saved much time, but Napoleon would not hear of it, maintaining that the Russians would claim the abandoned guns as trophies. This determination not to lose face would cost him dear.14
Along with other unnecessary impedimenta, the French had with them some three thousand Russian prisoners. Even though their presence cost nothing in terms of supplies – the unfortunate wretches were given no food at all, so they fed off the dead horses they found by the wayside and ended up, by some accounts, eating their own dead – they were an aggravating encumbrance to the Portuguese infantry detailed to escort them, and took up valuable space on the road.15 And space was at a premium.
A major drawback of retreating in echelons down the same road, as Napoleon had elected to do, was that only the leading unit had a clear field of march, while all the others had to move through the mess left behind by the preceding ones. Their path was laboured by tens of thousands of feet, hooves and wheels – into a stormy sea of mud if it was wet, and into a skating rink of compacted snow and ice when it began snowing. Such supplies as there might have been along the way were devoured, and even the available shelter was dismantled for firewood by those who had gone before. The road was littered with abandoned carriages and wagons, dead horses and jettisoned baggage; and, worst of all, the following columns kept coming up against a slow-moving mass of traffic.
Apart from the tens of thousands of civilians following the army there were commissaires and other functionaries attached to it, and officers’ servants. They were mixed up in a throng of booty-laden deserters, some on foot, some in wagons; cantinières with their laden vehicles; and wounded officers travelling in carriages, tended by their servants. There were also some lightly wounded from the transports which had left Moscow in the days before the evacuation who were caught up and eventually overtaken by the retreating army. Their numbers were swelled daily by those wounded in the fighting along the way.
There were a large number of soldiers who had fallen behind and become separated from their units, which they sought, and occasionally managed, to rejoin. But it was difficult for them to catch up, as they had to push their way through a compact mass of people, horses and vehicles. There were others who, having fallen behind, threw away their weapons and were absorbed into the mass of stragglers, demoralised and guided more and more by herd instinct.
This swelling throng of people moved along the same road as the army, using up whatever resources were left and cluttering its path. It encumbered the approaches to every bridge and defile, as the absence of discipline coupled with a desperation verging on panic invariably produced chaos at such places. ‘Men, horses and vehicles would press forward pell-mell, pushing and shoving without any mutual consideration,’ wrote Dumonceau. ‘Woe betide those who allowed themselves to be knocked over! They could not get up, were trodden underfoot and caused others to trip and fall on top of them. In this manner mounds of men and horses, dead and dying, gradually piled up, blocking the way. But the crowd kept coming, banking up and cluttering the approaches to the obstacle. Impatience and anger would come into play. People quarrelled, pushed each other away, knocked each other over, and then one could hear the cries of the unfortunates who, knocked over, trampled, were caught and crushed beneath the wheels of carriages or other vehicles.’16 And if a cry of ‘Cossacks!’ went up, the ensuing panic would multiply the number of those crushed to death.
As well as slowing their progress, all this had a demoralising effect on the following troops, who marched down a devastated road and saw only abandoned equipment, human and equine corpses, and men who had thrown away their weapons. The situation was worst for the rearguard, which not only had to march over a veritable obstacle course, but also to roll before it a snowballing mass of stragglers who impeded its movements and even impaired its ability to fight. Colonel Raymond de Fezensac, who found himself in the rearguard with his 4th of the Line between Viazma and Smolensk, would have his bivouacs crowded by cadging or thieving stragglers, who refused to make use of the night to move ahead but would try to march with his force when it set off in the morning. He would chase them off with rifle butts and warn them that he would not let them take refuge inside his squares if he was attacked. But still they hung about his regiment, getting in his way and making it easier for his men to desert.
The constant sight of disbanded men thinking only of themselves weakened the resolve of those who were still trying to do their duty. ‘The soldier who remained with the colours found himself in the role of a booby,’ explained Stendhal. ‘And as that is something the Frenchman abhors above all, there were soon only soldiers of heroic character and simpletons left under arms.’17
On the evening of 2 November Miloradovich, who was full of fight and keen to get at the French, tried to cut the road in front of Davout’s corps, which was bringing up the rear, at a defile near Gzhatsk. His guns wreaked havoc in the pile-up of field guns, caissons, private carriages and stragglers. A convoy of civilians and wounded was caught up in this chaos, and many of those who were not able to abandon their vehicles and make a dash for it perished. But Miloradovich did not have enough infantry to attack the French, and had to back off when Davout deployed troops against him.
Two days later, with a full complement of some 25,000 men, he made a second attempt to cut off Davout, just east of Viazma. This time he came between Davout’s 14,000 or so exhausted men and the preceding echelons, while Platov attacked Davout from the back and Figner’s and Seslavin’s irregulars harried his flanks. The French rearguard was thus caught between two fires and found itself in a perilous situation.
Prince Eugène and Poniatowski heard the guns and promptly turned about. Mustering about 13,000 and 3500 men respectively, they mounted a determined attack which repulsed Miloradovich and opened the road, while Ney, who had also turned about, covered the approaches to Viazma. The Russians were reinforced by the arrival of Uvarov’s cavalry, but Davout was nevertheless able to beat an orderly retreat and, when the Russians tried to harry him too closely, he even sallied out and captured three guns. In the late afternoon two fresh Russian divisions, Paskievich’s and Choglokov’s, attacked the outskirts of Viazma, and Ney withdrew across the river, burning the bridges.
Losses on the French side were about six thousand dead and wounded, and two thousand taken prisoner, while Russian casualties were no higher than 1845, and possibly less. Poniatowski’s horse fell while he was jumping a ditch, crushing his knee and shoulder and causing severe internal injuries, which put him out of action. But the most depressing aspect of the battle for the French was that two standards had been lost, and that at one point towards the end of the day some of Davout’s men had broken into a panicked flight.18
The Russians, however, had nothing to rejoice over. If Miloradovich and Platov had squandered an opportunity to destroy Davout’s corps, Kutuzov had missed an even greater one. The Field Marshal with his 65,000-odd men had spent the day a couple of miles to the south of Viazma in a position from which he could, without any trouble at all, have taken Ney’s corps in the rear, thus nullifying Prince Eugène’s and Poniatowski’s efforts, and wiping all four of the enemy corps off the chessboard, leaving Napoleon with little more than his Guard. Although he did despatch some reinforcements to Miloradovich, the old man had resolutely opposed any and every suggestion to make an offensive move. He was not even on speaking terms with Bennigsen by now, having suspended him from his duties and told a staff officer he had sent to him: ‘Tell your General that I do not know him and do not wish to know him, and that if he sends me one more report I shall hang his messenger.’ Bennigsen, Toll, Konovnitsin, Wilson and others were beside themselves. That night Wilson wrote to Lord Cathcart, British Ambassador in St Petersburg, asking him to use all his influence to get Kutuzov sacked. On 6 November he wrote to the Tsar himself, saying that Kutuzov was a tired old man who should be replaced with Bennigsen.19 In the event it hardly mattered who was in command of the Russian army, as on that very day a new element had come into play.
Accounts of the retreat vary a great deal, depending on who the memoirist was, which part of the army he was with, and what befell him. The distance between the head of the column and the rearguard was rarely less than thirty kilometres, and at times stretched to a hundred, which meant that various units often marched through different weather on the same day. By the same token, the one who writes that the retreat was an orderly one up to Smolensk and the one who paints a picture of chaos on the first day can both be right.
Captain Hubert Biot, a Chasseur incapacitated by a shell at Borodino, left Moscow on 18 October in a carriage with two other wounded officers, and the three of them rolled without mishap all the way to Paris, because they were always ahead of the army. Madame Fusil, one of the French actresses in Moscow who decided to return to Paris with the Grande Armée, was perfectly comfortable in an officer’s carriage until 7 November, when his horses died. She then had a very difficult time, but eventually managed to find a place in a marshal’s carriage and rolled on comfortably enough in the first echelon. The aristocratic young Adrien de Mailly and his friend Charles de Beauveau, both of them wounded, shared a comfortable carriage and sang songs or read to each other as they drove. ‘To support the misfortunes of war with courage and gaiety, there is nothing like being French, being young, and also, perhaps, being a nobleman,’ he wrote.20 Those who trudged further back had a rather different picture of events.
But most were still in relatively good spirits in the last days of October, glad to be heading for home. ‘It was the 29th or the 30th, the weather was magnificent, and in the course of the morning a regiment which was marching by me was singing joyfully and continually,’ recalled Lubin Griois, Colonel of artillery in Grouchy’s corps. ‘I was struck by this: there had been no singing at our bivouacs for a long time, and this was the last I was going to hear.’ Colonel Jean Baptiste Materre who was on Ney’s staff, marching in the middle echelon, noted signs of a general flagging of spirits on 31 October. The process gained over the next couple of days. ‘The position of the army is beginning to look rather unfortunate,’ noted Cesare de Laugier on 2 November.21
The weather had something to do with it. On 31 October, at Viazma, Napoleon again compared it favourably with that at Fontainebleau at the same season, and derided those who had been attempting to scare him with stories of the Russian winter. The nightly frosts did not bother anyone unduly. Colonel Boulart, writing on 1 November to his wife from a camp outside Viazma, summed up the mood. ‘I am writing to you, my darling, on the most beautiful day with the most beautiful frost, sitting on the most beautiful hummock, feeling cold all over, which also means at the tips of my fingers, in order to tell you that you should not be anxious on my account.’22 The army’s postal service still functioned, erratically it is true, and even when the probability of their letters getting through had diminished, the men still wrote, clinging to that tenuous link with home.
The weather remained fine during the first days of November. ‘The days are as warm as in summer, and the nights are cold,’ noted Boniface de Castellane on 3 November. ‘I can remember seeing fields carpeted with pansies of every hue, which I amused myself by making into bouquets,’ wrote the bluff Colonel Pelet of the 48th of the Line. But 3 November was to be the last warm day. The new moon on the night of 4–5 November brought with it a sharp drop in temperature, and on 6 November the retreat entered a new phase. ‘That day has remained deeply engraved on my memory,’ continued Pelet. ‘After we had passed through Dorogobuzh it started raining quite hard, and it began to get cold; the rain turned to snow, and in a very short time it lay two feet thick on the ground.’23
Sergeant Bourgogne, two days’ march further west, would not forget that day either. It had already started getting cold on the eve, which unfortunately for her was the moment their cantinière Madame Dubois went into labour. The grenadiers built her a shelter out of branches and the Colonel himself lent his cloak to lay over it, but the poor woman nevertheless had to give birth in sub-zero temperatures.24
Another who could not forget that first cold night of 6 November was François Dumonceau. ‘Our campfires, which we could only keep going with difficulty, did not succeed in warming us,’ he wrote. ‘The biting north wind came and found me even under the bearskin rug I was covered with. Frozen on one side, scorched on the other, suffocated by the smoke, alarmed by the roar of the wind as it tore at the trees of the dense wood, I could not bear it and, like the others, ran this way and that in order to warm myself, spending a night without rest and experiencing suffering the like of which we had never known.’25
While he stamped his feet in the wood, further east, at Dorogobuzh, a group of Italian officers huddled together in the ruins of a roofless hovel watching their comrade, Lieutenant Bendai, die from his wounds, malnutrition and cold. ‘I only regret two things,’ the Lieutenant murmured before breathing his last. ‘Not to be dying for the freedom and independence of our Italy … and not to be able to see my family again before I go.’26
The following night Colonel Pelet gallantly invited the actress Madame Fleury, who was sitting in her carriage while her coachman had gone in search of fodder for the horses, to share his dinner and his fireside. But when morning came it turned out that her horses had died of cold in the shafts.27 The day after that he saw for the first time a man who had frozen to death.
It was not just the wounded, lying still on the top of some wagon and unable to seek the warmth of a fireside, who died. On the morning of 7 November, Faber du Faur, a Württemberger serving in Ney’s 3rd Corps, caught up with some fellow countrymen who had been a day’s march ahead of him. He approached the camp of makeshift huts constructed out of pine branches in which, to his surprise, they seemed to be still fast asleep. In actual fact, they were frozen stiff. Colonel von Kerner, chief of staff to the Württemberg division, came out of the barn in which he and his companions had spent the night in order to muster the troops, but came running back after a while. ‘I have just seen the most appalling sight of my life,’ he said. ‘Our men are there, sitting around their campfires just as we left them last night, but they are all dead and frozen.’ This sight became commonplace until the men learned to keep their fires going and to sleep only for short periods. ‘When we got up in order to move out,’ recalled Marie Henry de Lignières, ‘many would remain seated; we would shake them to wake them up, thinking they were asleep; they were dead.’28
The drop in temperature had not been that great – certainly not more than – 10°C (14°F). But the French army was not dressed for cold weather. There was no such thing as a winter uniform, since in those days armies did not fight in winter. Most of the uniforms were cut away and did not even cover the stomach, which was protected only by a waistcoat, and while the infantry had proper greatcoats, the officers had only tailored overcoats which ended well above the knee. The cavalry had cloaks, but these were not lined, so they provided little shelter from the weather. While the bearskin bonnets of the grenadiers and the fur kolpaks of Chasseurs afforded some protection, most of the headgear, and the helmets of cuirassiers and dragoons in particular, had quite the opposite effect. To this has to be added the fact, easily verifiable by a visit to the Musée de l’Armée or any other repository of surviving uniforms, that the quality of the cloth and other materials used was generally poor, and the uniforms were flimsy. ‘The greatcoats of our infantry are probably the worst in Europe,’ observed Henri-Joseph Paixhans.29
As it grew colder, the men began to supplement their kit in various ways. Scarves were wrapped around the head under the regulation shako, knitted shawls worn around midriffs, and muffs and mittens brought into play to protect the hands. Those who had furnished themselves with sheepskins or fur coats donned these over their regimentals. Those who had not thought of acquiring such winter clothing were forced to put to use the furs (usually lined with feminine shades of silk or satin), shawls, bonnets and other items of clothing they had laid hands on meaning to sell them in Paris or give them to sweethearts.
As falling temperatures vanquished self-consciousness, even ladies’ dresses and richly embroidered liturgical vestments came into use. Women’s voluminous garments had the advantage of creating a kind of tent, thereby insulating the wearer from the cold. Cavalrymen whose horses died turned their shabracque, the sheepskin or embroidered cloth that went under the saddle, into a poncho by cutting a hole in the middle. All sorts of ingenious stratagems were thought up to cover every extremity – some even passed their legs through the sleeves of sheepskin coats and strapped them round their waist in order to keep their legs warm.
‘One could see all the provisions and loot of Moscow being gradually brought out; the most elegant dresses and the crudest clothes, headgear of every kind, round caps, some trimmed with silver or gold, the jerkins and fur-lined blouses of the peasant women, the silk pelisses of ladies, dressing gowns; in a word, everyone appeared in whatever he had brought,’ recalled Colonel Pelet. ‘It was a hilarious sight to see these tanned faces, these moustaches, these fearsome miens enveloped in the most tender colours, these huge bodies barely covered by the most frivolous raiments. It was a continuous masquerade, which I found highly entertaining, and ribbed them about it as they passed.’30 Amusing as it may have been, this kind of get-up did not facilitate movement, and often impeded the men in wielding their weapons.
Many agree that the first serious snowfall on 6 November, accompanied as it was by a sharp drop in temperature, had a profound effect on the cohesiveness of the army. ‘It is from that point that our misery began,’ wrote Colonel Boulart, ‘and that misery was to grow and to last for another six weeks! Luckily, we could not see into the future; the present sufferings absorbed all our faculties, we thought only of ways of attenuating them and we thought little of the sufferings of the morrow; each day held quite enough affliction.’31
The snow was soon compacted by the tramp of tens of thousands of feet into a rock-hard and slippery surface. As the horses were having difficulty in pulling wheeled vehicles, many coachmen and wagoners took the wheels off their vehicles and improvised runners. On 8 November there was a thaw and the roadway turned boggy. Those who had thrown away their wheels could do nothing but abandon their vehicles. But on the following day there was a hard frost, and the roadway now turned into a sheet of ice.
It was difficult to stay upright even while walking along the level, and Lieutenant Marie Henry de Lignières counted that he made over twenty falls a day. ‘Whenever we came across steep slopes we had to descend, which happened frequently, we would sit down and allow ourselves to slide down to the bottom; which meant that those behind would fall on top of one with their arms and luggage,’ he wrote.32 Carts and gun teams had to be secured by men pulling on ropes from behind to stop them sliding down inclines, but if those holding the ropes slipped, the whole lot, gun, limber, horses, men and all, would go crashing down, taking with it anyone and anything in its path. As it became more difficult to walk, many more soldiers fell behind.
The cold made it painful to touch the muskets, and below a certain temperature the skin would stick to the frozen steel and come away from the hand. Those who had no gloves and could not improvise some form of protection for their hands were obliged to throw away their arms, and many more took the cold as an excuse to do so.
The cold also proved the last straw as far as many of the horses were concerned. Tens of thousands of the undernourished and exhausted beasts died in the space of three days, partly from the cold and partly because they were improperly shod. The ordinary shoes with which they were for the most part shod gave no purchase on compacted snow or ice, and acted rather like skates. Some French units did have studded shoes, and the artillery began fitting these after the first snows fell, but they wore down quickly to a smooth surface. What was required was shoes with sharp crampons, and these had only been fitted by the Poles, by Caulaincourt to the horses of the imperial household, and by a few sensible officers. The rest of the Grande Armée’s bloodstock did not stand a chance once the snow fell and the cold set in. They would slip and fall, often breaking a leg in the process, and the terrible thrashing efforts involved in getting them to their feet again exhausted and distressed them further.
Some people tried wrapping rags round the horses’ hooves, others realised that it was better for the horses to have no shoes at all than the standard ones, and prised theirs off. The little local cognats with their broad hooves and their low centre of gravity were at a premium, as they could still trot without shoes. Jacob Walter acquired one that even knew how to sit down on its hindquarters at the top of an icy incline and slide down without his having to dismount.33
But there was no substitute for proper sharp-shoeing. ‘As we Poles mounted on sharp-shod horses passed French generals at a gallop, they looked at us with surprise and envy, while at every hillock their guns got into difficulty and could only be pulled to the top thanks to the shoulders of infantrymen,’ wrote Józef Załuski of the Polish Chevau-Légers.34
Prince Eugène’s 4th Corps lost 1200 horses in two days. Albert de Muralt, a Swiss lieutenant serving in the Bavarian Chevau-Légers, recorded that his brigade, numbering two hundred horsemen when it reached Viazma, was down to about thirty to fifty the following day, and ceased to be a fighting unit on the next. The same story was repeated throughout the army.35 The loss of the cavalry and a large part of the artillery radically reduced the fighting potential of the Grande Armée and made it vulnerable to the ubiquitous cossacks, who circled the retreating columns like blowflies.
But it was the loss of thousands of draught animals that had the greatest impact on the army and its chances of survival. Hundreds of vehicles had to be abandoned, some with much-needed supplies and equipment, as well as the personal effects and booty of the troops. Many threw away their arms in order to carry their belongings. ‘The road was strewn with precious objects, such as paintings, candlesticks and many books,’ recalled Sergeant Bourgogne, ‘and for the best part of an hour I would pick up books which I would look through, and which I threw away in turn, to be picked up by others who, in their turn, threw them away.’ Prince Józef Poniatowski, who trundled past, his mangled body laid out in his carriage, asked a passing soldier to hand him something to read from the selection at the roadside, and this book, which absorbed him, was to be his only booty of the campaign.36
On 8 November Commandant Vionnet de Maringoné of the Grenadiers of the Guard realised that his horses would be unable to draw his carriage much further. He therefore transferred all the most essential items, beginning with vital rations of food and some spare clothes, into one portmanteau and left all unnecessary luxuries in the carriage, which he abandoned. By not overloading it, he was able to keep one horse alive to carry this portmanteau. Major Claude- François Le Roy of the 85th of the Line in Davout’s corps sat down with needle and thread at Viazma and sewed two huge pockets onto the inside of his coat, into which he stuffed all his most vital possessions, thereby ridding himself of the need to carry a bag.37 Others were not as prescient and, when forced to make the choice, ditched the sack of grain or the bag of rice and kept the gold and silver vessels. It is easy to condemn them, but it must have been difficult to part with a lifetime’s chance – of being able to afford to marry, to buy a house, to start a business. And they did not realise what lay ahead. They struggled on as best they could, hoping that things would improve.
As often as not, they had to bed down for the night in open countryside, with no cover of any kind, too exhausted to think even of building shelters out of branches. They would use their sabres to cut down saplings to burn. But the green, resinous wood produced clouds of acrid smoke before giving off any warmth, and quickly burnt out, so the fire had to be fed regularly all night. Even when they did get a good fire going it could only provide warmth for the hands and face, while their backs remained exposed to the temperature of the night. They would lay down branches around the fire to sit or lie down on, and huddle round the flames in tight groups of eight or ten men, hoping to create a small circle of warmth. But the fire would melt the snow, and they would soon find themselves sitting or lying in wet mud.
If they were lucky, they might find a half-ruined deserted village, but it usually contained unwelcome relicts. ‘Under its still-warm cinders, which the wind drove into our faces, would be the bodies of several soldiers or peasants,’ wrote Eugène Labaume, ‘and sometimes one could also see murdered children and young girls who had been slaughtered in the very place they had been raped.’ The generals and senior officers would usually take possession of the best of the remaining huts, but disagreements about precedence sometimes led to duels. The men would crowd into whatever huts, barns, sheds, styes or other shelter they could find. If there were large numbers of them they would trample each other in the process, on some occasions even suffocating those who had got in first and were pressed harder and harder by an incessant flow of new arrivals desperate to get out of the cold.38
Once a group occupied a hut, it would defend the entrance by force. But the thatch would soon be stripped off the roof by others eager to feed their horses. Those who could find no shelter would settle down in the lee of the hut and start tearing slats off the roof, shutters and any other accessible elements in order to build fires, with the result that those inside would find their shelter gradually dismantled around them. All too often those outside would build their campfires too close to the walls, and the huts would catch fire. If they were very crowded or those inside were asleep, they might be burnt alive.
Even without outside intervention, soldiers who found a hut for the night ran the risk of finding their death in it. The Russian huts were heated by stoves, about two metres square, made of wood rendered with clay, which had to be heated up gradually, but the frozen soldiers would stoke them up with every piece of wood they could lay their hands on, and as often as not the stove would catch fire and the hut would go up in flames as they slept.
The misery of having no shelter for the night was compounded by lack of food. Most of the rations brought from Moscow had been consumed by the time the army reached Mozhaisk, and they were now condemned to retreat along a road which had been devastated by the retreating Russians and then bled dry by themselves on the way to Moscow. It was not possible to send foraging parties out on either side of the road, for these would naturally fall behind the main body of the army, and become easy prey for the pursuing enemy.
As supplies ran out and materiel was left behind in abandoned wagons, organised feeding of the troops became impossible. There might be a sack of corn, but there would be no way of grinding it (a large supply of small grinders had been distributed at Dorogobuzh, but most had been left by the roadside as the horses died). There might be some groats or buckwheat, cabbage or scraps of meat, but no pot in which to make a stew.
Conscientious and resourceful officers who managed to keep their companies together ensured that essentials were not discarded, and organised the fairly shared consumption of whatever was available, so soldiers belonging to a disciplined unit had a better chance of survival. When they stopped for the night, one detail went in search of firewood, another built shelters, another prepared food, and so on; others were detailed to feed the pack animals; others still kept the fires burning and stood watch while their comrades slept.
Some units took care of themselves remarkably well. Dr La Flise, who had become separated from his regiment, fell in with a squadron of Polish lancers who would leave the road in the evening, find an inhabited village, surround it, and then strike a bargain with the peasants, promising not to harm them if they would just give them a little food and shelter for the night. They and their horses were thus able to keep in good shape, and as they had a couple of women with them, the officers would even spend the evenings entertainingly.39
Another who made sure he lacked for nothing was Colonel Chopin, commander of the 1st Cavalry Corps artillery. ‘A happy-go-lucky man who believed that the important thing in life was to think of oneself first, Colonel Chopin had, as soon as the retreat began, gathered about him a dozen of his most alert and resourceful gunners,’ recalled one of his comrades. ‘A fourgon with a good team of horses followed him and every evening this was the rallying point for all the gunners, each of whom brought in what he had managed to procure, either in the villages along the way or from isolated stragglers, from whom they took by guile or by force whatever they might have. In this way the Colonel’s band (and one cannot call it otherwise) lacked for nothing, the fourgon was amply stocked, and watching and listening to his purveyors, one sensed it would never be empty.’40
‘It was rare for those who had stayed with their unit not to be able to share some kind of stew,’ wrote Colonel Boulart. ‘But woe betide those who had become separated, for they found no help anywhere.’ The only exception was if they had something to offer. Colonel Pelet watched a singular trade taking place around a large fire. ‘Who’s got some coffee? I’ve got sugar. Who’ll exchange some salt for flour? Who’s got a pot? We could cook up a popote between us. Who’s got a coffee pot?’ and so on. ‘The man who had a small bag of salt could count on several days’ food, as he could trade it everywhere,’ he wrote. Albert de Muralt owed his life to the possession of a small iron cooking pot, which he would lend to people who had food to prepare in return for being allowed to share their meal.41 The only hope for those who had nothing was to team up with others in the same situation, and as a result corporations of eight or a dozen men sprang up, usually owning a horse or a wagon, which operated in much the same way as Colonel Chopin’s gunners.
A particularly vulnerable group were the servants of officers. As they were not soldiers, they could not claim rations, and if their master were killed or wounded, or found them surplus to requirements, they were left without resource. By the same token, a good master was, for many, the only hope of salvation. In Moscow, General Dedem de Gelder had been prevailed upon to take on an extra servant, a bright young boy who drove his carriage and cared for his horses, and it was only much later, in the chaos of the retreat, that he realised the boy was a fifteen-year-old French girl who had fallen in love and run away from home to follow an artillery officer, only to see him killed at Borodino.42
Reading the accounts of survivors, one is struck by how little food was required to stay alive. But it was essential, for psychological as well as physical reasons, to have a regular supply. Lieutenant Combe had received a packet from home just before the army left Moscow. ‘What joy! News from Paris, from my father, my beloved mother, my whole family, my friends!’ he wrote. ‘Nothing in the world could compare with what I felt then.’ It was only later that he would come to realise that this packet saved his life, for it contained little tablets for making hot chocolate and stock cubes to make bouillon. This meant that he could brew up a cup of something nourishing whenever all else failed. Others had the intelligence to load their pockets with tea and sugar, and quite a few claim to have survived for up to two weeks on nothing but tea.43
On the retreat as on the advance, thoughts of food never left the soldiers’ minds. They would try to distract themselves by imagining that they were sitting down to dinner in one of the best restaurants in Paris. ‘Each of us would order his favourite dish, we would discuss their relative merits against other dishes, and in this way would distract ourselves for a while from the hunger which devoured us,’ recalled Victor Dupuy of the 7th Hussars, ‘but all too soon the horrible reality would assail us in all its power.’44
The reality was indeed repellent, the principal source of meat being dead horses, but even that was not easy to come by. When a horse fell and could not find the strength to get up, soldiers would rush up and start cutting it up. The most experienced would slit open its stomach in order to get the heart and liver. They would not bother to kill the horse first, and would swear at it for making their job more difficult as it struggled and kicked. Captain von Kurz noted that after the men had finished, the carcase looked as though veterinary surgeons had been carrying out an anatomical investigation.45
Many were disgusted by the idea, as well as the taste, of horsemeat, but the taste could be smothered by tearing open a cartridge and sprinkling a liberal dose of gunpowder on it, and most of them soon got used to it. Jacques Laurencin, a geographer attached to Napoleon’s headquarters, wrote to his mother explaining that horsemeat was really quite pleasant if sliced thinly and fried. General Roguet of the Young Guard thought it worth recording that the meat of the local cognats had a more delicate taste than that of French or German horses.46
Horses were not the only source of meat. ‘At Viazma we treated ourselves to a very good fricassée of cats,’ Laurencin assured his mother in a letter which would never reach her. ‘Five of us devoured three fine cats which were excellent.’ On the evening of 30 October, at Gzhatsk, Christian Septimus von Martens and his comrades cooked their first cat. ‘In order to allay the disgust which was welling up in us,’ he wrote, ‘I assured them that the gondoliers of Venice, who were by no means as miserable as we were at that moment, regarded a ragoût of cat as a treat.’47 The marching column was accompanied by dogs from the villages they had burnt, howling and disputing the carcases of horses with the famished men, and these too found their way into the pot if they were not careful. The pet hunting dogs or poodles various officers had brought along with them also began to disappear into cooking pots or onto the straight swords of cuirassiers and dragoons, which made good spits.
Bread was almost impossible to get hold of, but flour and groats of one sort or another could be obtained here and there, so the men would make a paste of these using water and chopped-up straw for binding, and bake it into flat biscuits in a peasant stove or in the ashes of a campfire. But usually they would throw anything they could find into a pot and boil up a pottage, often adding the stump of a tallow candle to provide nourishing fat. Jakob Walter from Stuttgart, who had found it so difficult to adapt to campaign conditions at first, had grown quite resourceful, learning to pick hemp seeds and dig up cabbage stalks, which could be turned into nourishment if boiled for long enough.
‘We made our gruel with all kinds of flour mixed with melted snow,’ explained Captain François. ‘We would then throw in the powder from a cartridge, as the powder had the virtue of salting or at least of enhancing the bland taste of food prepared in this way.’ Duverger, the paymaster of the Compans division, wrote down the recipe for what he called ‘The Spartans’ Gruel’: ‘First melt some snow, of which you need a large quantity in order to produce a little water; then mix in the flour; then, in the absence of fat, put in some axle grease, and, in the absence of salt, some powder. Serve hot and eat when you are very hungry.’48
The conditions under which they had to take their meals did not help. The men were often so hungry that they scoffed the food raw, and even if they did cook it they would swallow it hurriedly, in fear of the enemy. Among the consequences were vomiting, indigestion, colic and diarrhoea. Another reason for wolfing down any food they might come across was that it might otherwise be stolen. ‘Thieving and bad faith spread through the army, reaching such a degree of brazenness, that one was no more secure in the midst of one’s own than one would have been surrounded by the enemy,’ noted Eugène Labaume. ‘All day long one heard only: “Oh God! somebody’s stolen my portmanteau; or knapsack, or bread, or horse,”’ recalled Louise Fusil.49
For many, particularly those who were on their own, stealing had become the only possible means of survival other than pilfering abandoned wagons, trunks and the pockets of those who had died along the way. Everyone despised these disbanded men, referring to them as fricoteurs, from the word fricoter, to cook something up, as they were often to be seen pathetically trying to concoct something to eat by the roadside. If they came up to a campfire looking for a little warmth they would be brutally pushed away. Sometimes they would stand just behind those sitting round the fire, hoping to glean at least some warmth from it.
Many of these unattached men walked over to the Russian bivouac fires to give themselves up, in their thousands on particularly cold nights. But their hopes that this would put a term to their sufferings were soon dashed, and their fate was not to be envied. Although they officially subscribed to the code accepted throughout Europe, the Russian attitude to prisoners was generally one of contempt.
There were some shining examples of consideration. When the much-loved young Colonel Casabianca, commander of the part-Corsican, part-Valaisain 11th of the Line, was captured outside Polotsk, his captors spared no effort to keep him alive. When he died of his wounds a few days later they returned his body, escorted by a guard of honour whose officer handed over a note from General Wittgenstein. ‘I am returning the body of the valorous Colonel of the 11th regiment, whom we mourn as much as you, for a brave man must always be honoured,’ it ran.50
Some officers treated their captured counterparts with courtesy. The partisan leader Denis Davidov went to great pains to trace and return the lover’s ring, locket and love letters taken from a young Westphalian Hussar lieutenant who had been stripped of them on being taken by the cossacks. But his colleague Alexandr Samoilovich Figner took sadistic pleasure in slaughtering his prisoners, often when they least expected it. General Yermolov also ill-treated prisoners, particularly Poles, whom he despised as traitors to the Slav cause. After Vinkovo he spat in Count Plater’s face and instructed the cossack escorting him to feed him only with lashes of his whip. Yermolov’s attitude was not unusual. ‘Our soldiers took some prisoners among the French,’ noted a young Russian officer after the fighting at Smolensk, ‘but all the Poles fell victim to vengefulness and contempt.’ When one officer reported in after a patrol in the course of which he had taken some French soldiers who were looting a church, he was told by his senior officer that he should not have bothered to bring them back. So he went out and told his men to bayonet them to death.51
The Tsar himself wrote to Kutuzov complaining of reports of ill-treatment of prisoners and insisting that all captured men must be treated humanely, fed and clothed. But the example set by his own brother undermined any chance of his complaints being heeded. General Wilson was riding along with other senior officers behind Grand Duke Constantine when they passed a column of prisoners. Their attention was attracted by one of them, a distinguished-looking young officer, and Constantine asked him if he would not rather be dead. ‘I would, if I cannot be rescued, for I know I must in a few hours perish by inanition, or by the cossack lance, as I have seen so many hundred comrades do, on being unable from cold, hunger, and fatigue to keep up,’ he answered. ‘There are those in France who will lament my fate – for their sake I should wish to return; but if that be impossible, the sooner the ignominy and suffering are over the better.’ To Wilson’s horror, the Grand Duke drew his sabre and killed the man.52
There was a set of regulations in existence which laid down not only where prisoners should be held, but how much they were to receive for their sustenance. But it was a dead letter in the reality of this campaign. Sergeant Bartolomeo Bertolini, who had been taken while foraging on the eve of Borodino, could hardly believe the treatment he and his companions were subjected to. They were forcibly relieved of everything, even their uniforms and their boots. ‘Our misery was so great that I could never adequately convey it in words,’ he wrote. ‘They gave us no pay, as happens normally with prisoners among civilised nations, nor did they give us any rations to keep us alive.’ They were marched quickly, beaten, and killed if they strayed off the path to pick up a rotten potato or scrap of food.53
Dr Raymond Faure was taken at Vinkovo. He and other captured officers were brought before Kutuzov, who treated them with chivalry, giving them clothes and some money. The same treatment was not accorded to rank-and-file prisoners, who were robbed, stripped and beaten. And as soon as the convoy of prisoners left the Tarutino camp, under the escort of militia levies, the officers began to suffer the same fate, being robbed by the militia officers of everything Kutuzov had given them.54
By the time the retreat started the war had grown more vicious, and captives had become an unwelcome encumbrance: with food and clothing scarce on both sides, there was none to spare for them. As the Russian prisoners being goaded down the road by the French weakened and fell behind, they would be despatched with a bullet to the head. The Russians were no less brutal. Most of the prisoners were taken by cossacks, whose first action was invariably to strip them and take not only all valuables but also all serviceable items of clothing. They would then hand them over, or preferably sell them, to local peasants, who would massacre them with varying degrees of sadism.
Some would be buried alive, others would be tied to trees and used for target practice, others would have their ears, noses, tongues and genitalia cut off, and so on. General Wilson saw ‘sixty dying naked men, whose necks were laid upon a felled tree, while Russian men and women with large faggot-sticks, singing in chorus and hopping around, with repeated blows struck out their brains in succession’. In one village the priest told his flock to be humane and drown the thirty prisoners under the ice of a lake rather than torture them. At Dorogobuzh, Woldemar von Löwenstern was horrified to see Russian troops stand by while the locals massacred unarmed camp followers with axes, pitchforks and clubs. ‘It was a ghastly spectacle,’ he wrote, ‘they looked like cannibals and a fierce joy lit up their faces.’55
Common humanity did occasionally triumph in the midst of all this savagery, as in the case of Lieutenant Wachsmuth, a Westphalian wounded in the hip at Borodino. He was in the process of relieving himself by the roadside when some cossacks overran the group he was travelling in. Seeing him squatting helplessly with his trousers around his ankles, they burst out laughing and subsequently treated him well. Julien Combe had strayed off the main road with five other officers in search of fodder for their starving mounts, and got lost. After spending a cheerless night during which they were nearly buried under the snow, they found a hamlet where the peasants gave them shelter and food. ‘The snow was falling in thick flakes, and the aspect of this miserable countryside, seen through the small panes of dull yellow glass, the danger of our position, the uncertainty of our future, all seemed to conspire to plunge us into the most sombre reflections,’ he wrote. ‘But I was suddenly awakened from my musings by an exclamation of Mama! Mama! distinctly uttered by a child, whose cradle, suspended like a hammock by four ropes from the roof beams and hanging in a dark corner, had escaped our notice.
‘Nothing could convey the impression that this word, almost a French one, made on us,’ he continued. ‘It brought everything back to us; it seemed to contain in itself all our memories of family, of happiness and of home.’ He took the child in his arms and wept. The mother was so touched that she looked after them and alerted them when cossacks were signalled in the area, giving them directions on how to escape and food for the journey.56
At Viazma, Lieutenant Radozhitsky, who was following the retreating French, came across a Russian woman who had been hired by a French colonel and his wife as a wetnurse for their baby. They had been killed in the fighting, but she had saved herself and the child. ‘He’s only a little Frenchman, why bother with him?’ the Lieutenant asked. ‘Oh, if you only knew how good and kind these masters were,’ she replied. ‘I lived with them as with my own family. How can I not love their poor orphan? I will not abandon him, and only death can separate us!’57
* Eugène Labaume, an officer on the staff of Prince Eugène, was the first to print the story that as they were passing the battlefield they heard a man call out and discovered a soldier who had lost both legs during the battle and been left for dead but managed to survive by finding shelter in the belly of a dead horse and feeding off scraps found in the pockets of dead men. This story, incredible and almost certainly untrue, was subsequently repeated by countless other chroniclers, some of whom claimed to have seen or spoken to the man, and provides a good example of how strong the power of suggestion can be when old men try to remember.5
