22

Empire of Death

The twenty-two-year-old Captain de la Guerinais was a good swimmer, so when he found himself stranded on the east bank of the Berezina on 28 November he did not bother trying to fight his way onto the bridge but just swam the river. Once across, he found some fellow artillerymen who had got a good fire going. He took off his uniform in order to dry it by the fire, but had the misfortune to fall asleep wrapped in the blanket one of them had lent him. When he awoke, his clothes and boots had gone. He tried to follow the army, wrapped only in the blanket, but it could not protect him from the cold, and he died.¹

This tale might serve as a parable. The 55,000 or so who had survived the crossing and the fighting of 28 November felt such a rush of relief that they could not help imagining the worst was over. ‘After the crossing of the Berezina, all faces brightened,’ in the words of Caulaincourt. Sergeant Bourgogne was cheered by the numbers of men whom he had thought lost who turned up in the course of the following day. ‘The men embraced, congratulating each other as though we had crossed the Rhine – from which we were still four hundred leagues!’ he wrote. ‘We felt that we had been saved, and, giving vent to less selfish instincts, we pitied and regretted those who had had the misfortune of being left behind.’² In fact, the worst was still to come.

A vicious wind whipped up a blizzard on the night of 29 November, and even Napoleon found little shelter in the mean hut in which he had taken up his quarters in the village of Kamen. ‘An icy wind came in from all sides through ill-fitting windows in which almost all of the panes had been smashed,’ recorded his valet, Constant. ‘We sealed up the openings through which the wind was blowing with sheaves of hay. A little way off, on a large open space, the unfortunate Russian prisoners which the army was driving along with it were parked in the open like cattle.’³

The next two days were, according to some, among the worst of the entire retreat. Some could stand it no longer and shot themselves, but most carried on in what had become a mute endurance test. At Pleshchenitse, which Napoleon reached on 30 November, a temperature of – 30°C (–22°F) was recorded by Dr Louis Lagneau. Frostbite became even more widespread. Those walking barefoot were so anaesthetised by the cold that they did not notice what was happening to their feet. ‘The skin and the muscle peeled away like the layers of a waxwork figure, leaving the bones exposed, but the momentary insensitivity allowed them to carry on in the vain hope of reaching their homes,’ wrote Louis Lejeune. Adjutant Major Louis Gardier of the 111th of the Line noticed a man marching along impassively even though his feet had been lacerated by the jagged surface of the rutted and frozen snow. ‘The skin had come away from his feet, and trailed like a sole that had become unstitched, so that his every step marked with an imprint of blood the ground he covered,’ he wrote.⁴

The hundreds of vehicles left behind on the eastern bank contained supplies of every sort and the life-support system of many a soldier. The struggle for survival took on a more vicious character in consequence. As the temperature dropped, people whose clothes or boots had fallen apart or been stolen lost all compunction, and helped themselves to whatever they could. Captain von Kurz remembered seeing a soldier walk up to a colonel who had sat down by the roadside and start pulling off his fur coat. ‘Peste, I’m not dead yet,’ the Colonel mumbled. ‘Eh bien, mon colonel, I will wait,’ answered the soldier.’ Fezensac saw a man pulling the boots off a general who had collapsed by the roadside. The General protested, begging to be allowed to die in peace, but the soldier carried on. ‘Mon général,’ he said, ‘I would be quite happy to, but another will take them, and I prefer it to be me.’ Von Kurz saw comrades from the same regiment murder each other over a fur coat. ‘Necessity had turned us into swindlers and thieves, and, without a trace of shame, we stole from each other whatever we required,’ noted Dr René Bourgeois.⁵

Although they were now moving through inhabited country in which food could be obtained, it was only available to those at the front, and only if they had money. Those further back and the stragglers were left to scavenge. And as thousands of horses had also been left behind at the Berezina, there was, to put it crudely, less meat on the hoof available. ‘No food was so rotten or disgusting as not to find someone to relish it,’ wrote Lieutenant Vossler of the Württemberg Chasseurs. ‘No fallen horse or cattle remained uneaten, no dog, no cat, no carrion, nor, indeed, the corpses of those who died of cold or hunger.’ There were murderous fights over the carcase of a horse, over the tiniest scrap of food, with men screaming at each other in all the languages of Europe.⁶

Callousness and selfishness reached new heights. ‘I saw people stubbornly defending access to their fire, not to the half-frozen man who wanted to warm himself for a while … that would have been quite natural … fire in those moments was life, and nobody shares life – but to him who was begging for a little flame with which he could light his wisp of straw in order to start his own fire,’ wrote Aleksander Fredro.⁷

It was a bitter moment when officers who considered themselves to be gentlemen were faced with having to admit how low they had fallen, as Carl von Suckow relates. ‘I had the luck one day, God knows how, to lay my hands on a dozen half-frozen potatoes. Reaching the bivouac, I began cooking them in the ash, and one of my comrades sat down beside me, inviting himself to share my frugal meal. We had come to know each other very well at Stuttgart, where we had been garrisoned together. In spite of this, I had the brutality to refuse his request outright. He got up and walked away, saying in a melancholy voice: “That is something I shall never forgive you.” It was only then that the ice encasing my heart melted; I called him back and eagerly shared all with him.’ Colonel Griois, who had procured a small sleigh for himself, encountered a friend who begged to be allowed to share it as he was exhausted, but he brushed him off. ‘A horrible egoism had taken hold of my heart, and whenever my thoughts go back to that time of my life I shudder at the moral degradation to which misery can make us stoop,’ he later wrote.⁸

One of the memories that evoked particular revulsion was that of the acts of cannibalism to which some were now driven. There had undoubtedly been instances of it earlier in the retreat, but they had been isolated. Most of the earlier reports are from the Russian side, which is not surprising, since the Russians would, as they followed in the wake of the retreating army, have seen those Frenchmen who had been reduced to the last extremities. They also saw prisoners who, being given no food by their cossack escorts, resorted to eating the flesh of their dead comrades. Nikolai Galitzine’s is one of the first accounts to claim to have actually seen French soldiers eating a man at that stage. Wilson relates having seen ‘a group of wounded men, at the ashes of [a] cottage, sitting and lying over the body of a comrade which they had roasted, and the flesh of which they had begun to eat’. In a letter to his wife dated 22 November, General Raevsky reports that one of his colonels saw two Frenchmen roasting pieces of a comrade to eat, and General Konovnitsin wrote to his wife also on the same day affirming that ‘people have seen them devouring men’.⁹

The earliest convincing first-hand account on the French side comes from Lieutenant Roman Soltyk. Reaching Orsha on his own because he had fallen behind, Soltyk could not obtain a regular distribution of rations, so he walked up to a group of men standing around a steaming pot and offered them some money in return for being allowed to partake of their stew. ‘But hardly had I swallowed the first spoonful than I was gripped by irrepressible disgust, and I asked them whether it was horsemeat they had used to make it,’ he wrote. ‘They coolly replied that it was human meat and that the liver, which was still in the pot, was the best part to eat.’¹⁰

The practice grew more widespread as psychological barriers broke down under the strain of the conditions on the last leg of the retreat. ‘I saw – and I do not admit this without a certain sense of shame – I saw some Russian prisoners carried to the very limit by the ravening hunger that possessed them, since there were not enough rations for our soldiers, throw themselves on the body of a Bavarian who had just expired, tear him to pieces with knives and devour the bloody shreds of his flesh,’ wrote Amédée de Pastoret. ‘I can still see the forest, the very tree at the foot of which this horrible scene took place, and I wish I could efface the memory as surely as I fled the sight of it.’¹¹

On 1 December Lieutenant Uxküll noted in his diary that he had seen men ‘gnawing away at the flesh of their companions’ like ‘savage beasts’. Captain Arnoldi of the Russian artillery saw ‘a small group of [French soldiers] by a fire, carving out the softer parts of a dying comrade of theirs in order to eat them’ while he shelled a retreating French column. General Langeron, who was following the retreat between the Berezina and Vilna, did not witness any cannibalism, but did see ‘dead men who had had strips of meat cut out of their thighs for the purpose’.¹²

There are those, such as Daru and Marbot, who deny that any cannibalism took place, and Gourgaud is highly sceptical. But the evidence is against them, as is probability. ‘One has to have felt the rage of hunger to be able to appreciate our position,’ wrote Sergeant Bourgogne, who admits that he might well have resorted to the practice. ‘And if there had been no human flesh, we would have eaten the devil himself, if someone had cooked him for us.’ Ravening hunger drove people to anything. ‘It was not unknown even for men to gnaw at their own famished bodies,’ wrote Vossler, and Raymond Pontier, a surgeon attached to the general staff, also noted this phenomenon.¹³

One of the more interesting things to emerge from the written accounts of the retreat is that there seems to have been a threshold, beneath which the men cheated, killed and even ate each other, and above which they clung to human dignity, a sense of duty and even aspired to happiness. As thousands froze and some were engaged in acts of cannibalism around Pleshchenitse on the night of 30 November, one of Napoleon’s orderly officers who happened to have a good singing voice entertained his comrades with a recital of songs as they shivered in the ruins of the manor house. While some died cursing and raging as they gnawed like hungry dogs at some carcase, one young officer was found by his comrades frozen stiff in the act of lovingly contemplating a miniature of his wife.¹⁴ Although circumstances obviously had a major effect, this threshold does not seem to have had anything to do with luck, and everything to do with character.

Sheer determination was a strong driving force. Captain François, who was wounded in the leg at Borodino, walked all the way with the help of a crutch, while Captain Brechtel got home on a wooden leg. Louis Lejeune came across a gunner who had just been wounded in the arm, and, spotting two medical orderlies, asked them to see to the wound. They declared that they would need to amputate, but as they had no table to operate on, asked Lejeune to hold the gunner. ‘The orderlies opened their bag; the gunner proffered not a word or a sigh; I could only hear the quiet sound of the saw and, a few minutes later, the orderlies telling me: “It’s done! We regret that we don’t have any wine to give him to brace him.” I still possessed a half-flask of Malaga, which I was making last by leaving long intervals between taking a drop. I handed it to the amputee, who was pale and silent. His eyes came to life instantly, and, downing it in one, he returned the flask completely empty. “I’ve still got a long walk to Carcassonne,” he said, before setting off at a pace that I would have found it hard to keep up with.’¹⁵

Another powerful motive was the shared sense of solidarity within a unit, and men from the same regiment often saved each other from the brink. ‘In the midst of these horrible calamities, it was the destruction of my regiment which was causing me the keenest pain,’ wrote Colonel de Fezensac of the 4th Infantry of the Line. ‘That was my real, or rather my only, suffering, as I do not consider hunger, cold and fatigue to be such. As long as health holds out against physical hardships, courage soon learns to scorn them, particularly when it is supported by the idea of God and the promise of another life; but I admit that courage would leave me when I saw succumbing under my very eyes friends and companions in arms, who are, rightly, termed the colonel’s family … Nothing binds people together like a community of suffering, and indeed I always found in them the same attachment and the same concern as they inspired in me. Never did an officer or a soldier have a piece of bread without coming to share it with me.’ According to him, this was so throughout the 3rd Corps, the remains of which were still marching in orderly fashion to the sound of the drum. There were plenty of instances of commanders remaining with their men: both Prince Wilhelm of Baden and Prince Emil of Hesse were exemplary in this respect.¹⁶

Artillerymen struggled to conserve their guns, which meant making excruciating efforts at every dip or rise in the road; they only spiked them when the last horses gave up the ghost. ‘It would be difficult to express my heartbreak when I found myself obliged to abandon my last piece,’ wrote Lieutenant Lyautey.¹⁷

The anonymous soldiers of the train continued to haul the heavy gold-laden wagons of the Trésor, and even those bearing that part of Napoleon’s Moscow booty which had made it through Krasny and the Berezina crossing. The man in charge of the convoy, Baron Guillaume Peyrusse, a busybody who saw the whole campaign as an irrelevance next to the punctilious execution of his duty, had a way of seizing the worst moments to lobby various influential people with requests that they put in a word with the Emperor in the matter of his promotion to a higher post. He was certainly the right man for the job, and he managed to get the whole convoy, which included a couple of dozen fourgons loaded with gold coins as well as Napoleon’s jewels, as far as Vilna without loss.

A more noble object of devotion to duty was Colonel Kobylinski, one of Davout’s aides-de-camp, who had his leg shattered by a shell while he was reconnoitring the field on the day following Maloyaro-slavets. Fearing that the Colonel would perish in the crowd of wounded trundling along behind the army, Davout entrusted him to a company of grenadiers, with strict orders not to abandon him under any circumstances. The grenadiers took their mission seriously, and carried him all the way. ‘The Colonel lay on a stretcher constructed like a bier, wrapped in blankets, borne by six soldiers who took it in turns to carry him,’ wrote another Polish officer. ‘I often encountered this caravan on the march, and marvelled at their heroic devotion, particularly as its object was not a Frenchman, but one of our countrymen.’ At one stage, the Colonel begged them to leave him and save themselves, but they would not disobey their orders. The last remaining man of the company dragged the stretcher into Davout’s headquarters at Vilna.¹⁸

Scrupulous observance of discipline, often self-imposed, helped some people through, but few managed to set as high a standard as General Narbonne. ‘Monsieur de Narbonne was fifty-six years old and had been used to enjoy all the luxuries of life, yet his courage and gaiety in the midst of our disasters were remarkable,’ wrote Boniface de Castellane. ‘He wore his hair in the old courtly fashion, and always had it powdered in the mornings at the bivouac, often seated on a log, in the nastiest weather, as though he had been in the most agreeable boudoir.’¹⁹

For some, keeping a diary seems to have been a way of reaffirming their humanity as well as performing an act of self-discipline. This is evident from the entry in the journal of Maurice de Tascher, an officer of Chasseurs and a cousin of Empress Josephine, for 4 December, his thirty-sixth birthday, a day on which he might well have fallen below the threshold: ‘– Bitter cold. silent march. Thoughts to cherish. Anniversary of my birth. – Greetings from my mother … tears … agony … Memories of her. Covered six leagues; stopped in a village, quarter of a league in advance of the general staff. Fever and diarrhoea.’²⁰

Sergeant Bourgogne noted that women bore the hardships with greater fortitude than men. Dr Larrey made the observation that hot-blooded southern Europeans coped better than the Germans and the Dutch, which was also remarked upon by others. But that did not Prevent General Zajaczek’s black servant, acquired during the Egyptian campaign, from freezing to death. Albert de Muralt, a Bavarian cavalryman, maintained that officers survived better than soldiers, as they had greater moral resistance and were better educated.²¹

But rank had little to do with perhaps the most vital element in keeping people above the threshold. Devotion to another could be a life-saver. Louis Lejeune encountered a wounded artillery officer waiting by the roadside for his servant to catch up. Two hours later, when he was returning from his errand, he saw the man in the same place and tried to persuade him to go and get some nourishment, which was available nearby, warning him that he was running the risk of freezing, but the man refused, saying: ‘I agree with you, but my servant, Georges, and I shared the same wetnurse. From the moment I joined the army and particularly since I was wounded he has shown his devotion to me a hundred times. My own mother would not have been more attentive. He was unwell, and I promised I would wait for him, and I prefer to die here than to fail in my promise.’²²

It was not just the officers who gave such proofs of loyalty. One officer of Chasseurs whose feet had been incapacitated by frostbite was dragged all the way to Vilna by a boy bugler of the regiment who had harnessed himself to a little sleigh they had found, and similar examples abound. Corporal Jean Bald of the Bavarian Chevau-Légers gave up his horse to a senior officer who had lost his in battle. ‘It is far better to save an officer for the King than a simple corporal, who in any case will probably get out on his two strong legs,’ he said.²³

Captain Baron von Widemann had managed to get across the Vop with nothing more than what he stood in, but as he huddled by the fire trying to dry his clothes that night, his servant waded back across the river, found his carriage, packed a number of essentials into a portmanteau and brought them back to his master. Paul de Bour- going’s servant, a young Parisian boy, tramped along bravely, carrying on his back as many of his master’s possessions as he could, and would be there every evening to attend him as he settled down for the night. One night he failed to show up, and Bourgoing waited on the road for several hours, calling out his name in vain, before lying down to sleep. He woke in the middle of the night to find the boy adjusting the fur rug which had slipped off his feet as he slept. The following evening he did not turn up at all, and was never seen again.²⁴

A drummer of the 7th of the Line, married to the company cantinière, who had fallen ill, led the horse and cart in which she lay and, when the horse died, dragged the cart himself. When he could go no further, he lay down to die beside her. A cantinière in the 33rd of the Line who had given birth to a daughter on the outward march died as she struggled to wade across the Berezina, but with her last strength managed to throw the baby girl onto the bank, where she was picked up and cared for by a stranger, who brought her out of Russia. A fifteen-year-old boy whose parents had died walked along manfully, carrying his three-year-old sister and leading by the hand his eight-year-old brother.²⁵

Sergeant Bourgogne met another sergeant of his regiment carrying the regimental dog, Mouton, on his back, since the unfortunate creature had had all four legs frozen and could not walk. Mouton was a poodle they had picked up in Spain in 1808, and had followed the regiment to Germany the following year, been in battle at Essling and Wagram, then accompanied it back to Spain in 1810. It had set off with the regiment for Russia in the spring of 1812, but got lost in Saxony. It had subsequently recognised an echelon of the regiment by the uniform, and followed it all the way to Moscow. Such devotion was not uncommon: General Wilson noted as he followed the last phase of the retreat that ‘innumerable dogs crouched on the bodies of their former masters, looking in their faces, and howling their hunger and their loss’.²⁶

Marie-Théodore de Rumigny pampered his favourite horse, Charles, helping him up if he stumbled and fell, always finding him something to eat and watering him properly – even when this meant stopping, lighting a fire and melting snow in a tin – and as a result he got himself and Charles out of Russia and back to France. The Polish Chevau-Légers made a point of going off in search of fodder for their horses every evening on little local cognats they had acquired for the purpose. They even managed to steal a couple of haycarts from some Russian cavalry who were too busy cooking dinner to notice.²⁷

Sergeant Bourgogne tells of his friend Melet, a dragoon of the Guard. Melet was devoted to his horse, Cadet, with which he had been through several campaigns, in Spain, Austria and Prussia, and was determined to get it back to France with him. He always went in search of food for Cadet before thinking of himself, and when it became impossible to find any forage at all along the line of retreat of the Grande Armée he went in search of it among the Russians, donning the coat and helmet of a Russian dragoon he had killed in order to get past their pickets. Once inside the enemy’s encampment he would help himself to enough hay and oats for a few days and then make his escape. Sometimes he was discovered, but he always got away, and he did return to France with Cadet. A Bavarian Chevau-Léger whose darling mare Lisette fell through the ice of a bog outside Krasny and could not get out simply lay down to die beside her.²⁸

Napoleon had originally intended to defeat Chichagov after crossing the Berezina and to make for Minsk, but by the evening of 28 November he realised that his army had given its last in the fighting of the past two days. His only hope now lay in a dash for Vilna. The threat of marauding cossacks had halted regular means of communication, and he had not received an estafette for nearly three weeks – a terrible deprivation, as he hated not having news of what was going on in Paris and the outside world. But he was in touch with Maret at Vilna through a number of Polish noblemen who travelled back and forth disguised as peasants, dodging parties of cossacks.

‘The army is numerous, but in a state of terrible dissolution,’ he wrote to Maret on 29 November. ‘It will take two weeks to bring them back to their colours, but where can we find two weeks? The cold and hunger have dissolved the army. We will soon be in Vilna, but can we make a stand there? Yes, if only we can survive the first eight days, but if we are attacked during that first week, it is doubtful whether we will be able to hold on there. Victuals, victuals, victuals! Without that there is no horror that this undisciplined mob will not visit upon the city. It may be that this army will only be able to rally itself behind the Niemen. In that case, it is possible that I may believe my presence to be necessary in Paris, for the sake of France, the Empire, and the army itself.’ He instructed Maret to send away all the foreign diplomats so that they should not see the condition of his army, badgered him for news from Paris, demanding to know why no estafette had reached him for eighteen days, and begged for news of the Empress. In his next missive to Maret, written the following day, he returned to the subject of food, telling him to bake bread in large quantities and to send convoys of victuals out to meet the army. ‘If you cannot provide 100,000 rations of bread at Vilna, I pity that city.’²⁹

But it was the wider political situation that was now uppermost in his mind. He knew that his control over Germany, not to mention other parts of the Continent, would be dangerously impaired if news of the disaster that had befallen him became known. Rumours were already circulating all over Europe, fed by sanguine reports of his defeat coming out of St Petersburg. But if he could rally his forces in Vilna he would still be able to claim some measure of military success, and conceal from the view of Europe the emaciated remnants of his army – which were the most damning evidence of the scale of the catastrophe.

He instructed Maret to trumpet the news of a great victory over the Russians at the Berezina, and ordered Anatole de Montesquiou, one of Berthier’s aides-de-camp, to travel to Paris bearing a full report of the six thousand prisoners and twelve guns taken, and carrying with him the eight captured Russian colours. He was to stop in Kovno, Königsberg, Berlin and other cities long enough for the tidings to be disseminated along the way. Ironically, the day after Napoleon dictated these instructions, a service of thanksgiving was held in St Petersburg for the Russian victory at Studzienka.³⁰

Napoleon’s attempt to manage news could only work if he could hold Vilna and prevent the Russians from moving into Prussia and Poland, and this was looking increasingly doubtful. The relatively fresh corps of Victor and Oudinot on which he had counted quickly became infected by the remnants of the army of Moscow, and within a day or two came to resemble it in terms of condition and discipline.

Yet a skeleton of the army of Moscow, probably fewer than 10,000 men, nevertheless remained operational. And depleted as they were, some units maintained a remarkable degree of spirit. Captain Józef Załuski of the Polish Chevau-Légers recorded an improvement in conditions as they re-entered former Polish lands, and he and his comrades thought nothing of the cold: ‘We sang our marching songs as usual, particularly during the afternoon march or if it was very cold, when, in order to spare the horses or warm up the riders and prevent them from falling asleep, we would dismount and lead them.’ He added that many French veterans also bore the conditions remarkably well. ‘I often marched alongside friends from the Chasseurs who were dressed no more warmly than they would be in France, who were truly astonishing in their endurance and suffered only from the sight of the degradation of the army.’³¹

At Molodechno, which they reached on 3 December, they found welcome stores of food. They also encountered a number of estafettes and mail from Paris, which meant letters from home, a source of great comfort for these worn-out men, many of whom despaired of ever getting back. The following day, at Markovo, they encountered another convoy of food which included bread, butter, cheese and wine. But none of this could prevent the continuing disintegration of the army, as it could not pause to eat and digest the food properly, let alone tidy up its ranks. The Russians, whom Napoleon thought he had shaken off at the Berezina, kept up the pursuit.

The mess they had made of that operation provoked a surge of self-justificatory recrimination throughout the Russian army. Even Lieutenant Aleksandr Chicherin noted in his diary on 1 December that ‘the spirit of intrigue has entered everywhere’. Kutuzov had been quick to blame everyone concerned for allowing Napoleon to get away. He found it ‘unbelievable’ and ‘unforgivable’ that Chichagov should have allowed himself to be duped. He argued, quite rightly, that even though it had been reasonable for him to send troops south along the Berezina, he should have made Borisov his headquarters and stayed there. Czaplic was ‘a cow and a fool’ who should have fallen back on Ziembin and blocked Napoleon’s line of retreat there. Kutuzov had specifically instructed Chichagov to hold the Ziembin causeway, but his order, dated 25 November, only reached the Admiral after Napoleon had slipped through. His worst criticism Kutuzov reserved for Wittgenstein, who had disobeyed specific orders to cross the Berezina and join up with Chichagov on the western bank.³²

Now that Napoleon was beyond his reach, Kutuzov felt even less inclined to force the pace of the pursuit than before. His army was in terrible condition, most units having lost at least two-thirds of their effectives. His main force, which had marched out of Tarutino 97,112 strong with 622 guns, reached Vilna with no more than 27,464 men and two hundred guns, according to his own figures. The Astrakhan grenadiers were down to 120 men, while the Semyonovsky Life Guards could muster only fifty men per company. ‘There were no more than twenty or thirty men in a condition to fight in any squadron of our cavalry regiments,’ noted Woldemar von Löwenstern. ‘Our horses were in very bad state and almost all suffering from saddle sores, so much so that the stench was appalling and one could smell a cavalry regiment a long way off.’ The artillery, according to Lieutenant Radozhitsky, was in no condition to go into action. ‘We are completely disorganised, and we need to be allowed to rest and make up our losses as soon as possible,’ General Dokhturov wrote to his wife on 4 December. ‘Our infantry declined into a state of marked disorder,’ noted Löwenstern. ‘The cold sapped the soldiers’ courage, and once they had managed to find a warm shelter or some heated cottage, it was impossible to get them to leave it. They would snuggle up to the stoves to the point of roasting themselves.’³³

The situation was no better in the other Russian armies. ‘Our regiments marched pell-mell, our officers were often separated from their troops and could not keep an eye on them,’ wrote General Langeron, adding that out of a force of 25,000 men who set out under Chichagov after the battle of the Berezina, only about 10,000 reached the Niemen. Wittgenstein’s army was hardly in better shape, and could not have put up much of a fight at this stage. And they were still wary of taking on any organised French unit.³⁴ But the very fact that the Russians were on their tail, constantly threatening, made it difficult for the French to retreat in good order. And it raised severe doubts as to their ability to rally at Vilna.

As usual, Napoleon blamed all his own mistakes and lack of foresight on others. He blamed Victor for ‘shameful lack of activity’, he blamed Schwarzenberg, he blamed the weather, and he blamed the Poles for not having raised large quantities of ‘Polish cossacks’ to replace the cavalry he had so carelessly squandered. But he gave up trying to hide the truth. At Molodechno on 3 December he composed the twenty-ninth Bulletin of the campaign, in which he told the story of the retreat. Although it did not tell the whole truth, it left no doubt as to the magnitude of his defeat. This Bulletin, which ended with the now famous words ‘His Majesty’s health has never been better,’ was not to be published until 16 December, by which time he hoped to be nearing Paris.³⁵

Napoleon had made the only sensible decision in the circumstances. He had resolved to hasten back to Paris, where he would raise a new army in time to sally forth in the spring and not only reassert his control over central Europe but also defeat the Russians. He hesitated as to whom he should leave in command of the remains of the Grande Armée – his preferred choice was Prince Eugène, but he realised that if he placed him above Murat, the King of Naples would probably mutiny, so he chose the latter. Prince Eugène was not happy with the arrangement and asked to be given leave to return to Turin, but Napoleon reminded him of his duty as a soldier. ‘I have no desire to serve under the King of Naples, who has taken command of the army,’ the Viceroy wrote to his wife the following day. ‘But in the present circumstances it would have been wrong to refuse, and we have to remain at our post, be it a good or a bad one.’ Berthier too begged to be allowed to go back to Paris with the Emperor, but Napoleon would not hear of it. ‘I know very well that you are of no use to anyone here,’ he retorted, ‘but others do not, and your name has some effect on the army.’³⁶

On the evening of 5 December, at Smorgonie, he called together his marshals and, according to some, apologised for his mistake of having remained in Moscow for too long. He told them of his decision, and after listening to their opinions he climbed into a carriage with Caulaincourt and set off into the night. His carriage, with his Mameluke Roustam and a Polish officer on the box, was followed by a second, with Duroc and General Mouton, and a third, with his secretary Baron Fain and his valet Constant.

Reactions to Napoleon’s departure were mixed. There was widespread dismay and a sense of discouragement, but surprisingly little in the way of censure. Officers, and particularly senior officers, generally understood his motives and approved of his decision, and it was only among the lower ranks that imprecations were heard.³⁷ This was largely because by the time the news broke, on 6 December, they had more vital things to think about.

There had been another sharp drop in temperature. At Miedniki on 6 December Dr Louis Lagneau recorded a temperature of – 37.5°C (–35.5°F). ‘It was really intolerable,’ he wrote, ‘one had to stamp one’s feet hard while walking along to stop them from freezing.’ His reading of the thermometer was confirmed, to within a degree or two, by others. François Dumonceau had marched out while it was still dark on that morning. ‘The air itself seemed to be frozen into light flakes of translucent ice which whirled about,’ he wrote. ‘Then we saw the horizon gradually turn an ardent red, the sun rise radiant through a slight aura of vapour enflamed by its rays, and the whole snow-covered plain turn purple and glimmer as though it had been scattered with rubies. It was magnificent to see.’³⁸ But it was hell to walk through.

‘The air itself,’ according to Colonel Griois, ‘was thick with tiny icicles which sparkled in the sun but cut one’s face drawing blood when blown by the wind, which was mercifully quite rare.’ The phenomenon was recorded by many others. ‘One could see frozen molecules suspended in the air,’ noted Ségur. He was astonished by the stillness and silence all around. ‘We walked through this empire of death like miserable shadows! The dull and monotonous sound of our steps, the crunch of the snow and the feeble groans of the dying were the only sounds that disturbed that vast and mournful taciturnity.’³⁹

‘We were covered in ice; the breath coming out of our mouths was thick as smoke, and it created icicles on our hair, our eyebrows, our moustaches and our beards,’ recalled Louis Lejeune. ‘These icicles grew thick enough to obstruct our vision and our breathing.’ ‘It frequently happened that the ice would seal my eyelids shut,’ remembered Planat de la Faye. ‘I would have to press the lashes between my fingers to make the ice melt in order to open my eyes again.’ The horses’ saliva formed huge icicles at the corners of their mouths, where it dribbled out onto the bit. ‘I could no longer breathe, as ice had formed in my nose and my lips were stuck together,’ wrote Sergeant Bourgogne, who felt as though he were walking through ‘an atmosphere of ice’. ‘Tired and dazzled by the snow, my eyes watered, the tears froze, and I could no longer see.’⁴⁰

‘There was something sinister, something implacable about the serenity of the sky,’ records Brandt. ‘Through a translucent mist of brilliant snowdust, which had the effect of needlepoints on our eyes, the sun looked like a globe of fire, but of a fire that gave no warmth. Houses, trees, fields, all had disappeared under a layer of bright, blinding snow!’⁴¹

Many succumbed to snow blindness. ‘The white of the eye would become red and swelled up at the same time as the eyelids, bringing with it a throbbing pain and abundant tears,’ wrote Dr Geissler. ‘The sufferer could no longer bear the light and it was not long before he became quite blind.’ As the retreating column drew closer to Vilna more and more groups could be seen holding each other by the hand as they went.⁴²

The men were having such difficulty buttoning their pants in the intense cold that, humiliating and filthy as it seemed to them, they unstitched the back of their breeches or trousers so as to be able to defecate without undressing. But they also had to take care lest their penis froze while urinating, which happened in some cases.

This was also the point at which most of those who kept diaries were forced to give up. Captain Franz Roeder’s ink froze, shattering the bottle. Boniface de Castellane’s right hand was attacked by frostbite at Miedniki on 7 December, so he had to abandon his journal, to which he could add only a few notes scribbled with his left. As he was leaving the following morning, he found a grenadier on sentry duty standing frozen in death still clutching his musket.⁴³

‘7 December was the most terrible day of my life,’ records Prince Wilhelm of Baden. ‘The cold had reached 30° [–37.5°C (–35.5°F)]. At three o’clock in the morning the Marshal [Victor] gave the order to march out. But when it came for the signal to be given, it turned out that the last drummer boy had frozen to death. I then went among the soldiers, talking to each one, encouraging them, exhorting them to get up, to stand to arms, but all my efforts were vain: I could only assemble fifty men. The others, two or three hundred of them, lay on the ground, dead and stiff from the cold.’⁴⁴

‘It is during this part of the journey that I saw for the first time numerous examples of men literally struck down by the cold as they walked along,’ wrote Heinrich Brandt. ‘They would slow down slightly, totter like drunken men, and then fall, never to rise again.’ He was not the only one to be struck by this sight of men stumbling around like drunks for a few moments. Either just before or just after they fell, blood would pour from their nose and mouth, and sometimes their eyes and ears.⁴⁵

Weeks of relentless hardship and the succession of blows dealt to their hopes and expectations – at Smolensk, Orsha, Borisov, the Berezina – inevitably also affected the men psychologically. Brandt and others speak of reaching a state of febrile agitation that prevented him and his comrades from sleeping. The fear of dying where they were kept them moving all night. ‘We were guided by the light of the fires lit in every village, on the edge of every wood, always surrounded by that horrible jumble of the living and the dead,’ he wrote. ‘Other corpses marked the road. The dazzling serenity of the sky seemed to be insulting our sufferings; the cold became more and more pervasive, and our little column kept diminishing.’⁴⁶

In others, the conditions induced apathy. Dr Larrey observed that ‘we were all in a state of such despondency and torpor that we had difficulty in recognising each other’. Dr Bourgeois noted a similar phenomenon. ‘A great many were in a state of real dementia, plunged in a kind of stupor, with haggard eyes, a fixed and dazed stare, one could single them out in the crowd, in the midst of which they walked like automata in profound silence. If one hailed them one could get only disjointed and incoherent answers; they had entirely lost the use of their senses and were impervious to everything – the insults and even the blows they received could not rouse them or bring them out of this state of idiocy.’ Some became so disoriented by the cold that they would walk drunkenly straight into a fire and stand in it with their bare feet, or even lie down in it.⁴⁷

General Langeron, commanding the vanguard of Chichagov’s army, was following the French as they made for Vilna. ‘The Russian army was marching down the middle of the road,’ he wrote, ‘and on either side of this road marched, or rather stumbled, two columns of the enemy, without weapons.’ The Russians ignored them, as they could get nothing out of them. ‘They knew nothing, remembered nothing, understood nothing,’ recalled Lieutenant Zotov. The road itself was strewn with frozen corpses, and here and there groups of crazed soldiers gnawed at a carcase, human or animal. ‘I was born to die in the service of my motherland, and from the beginning I prepared myself to fear neither shells nor other dangers,’ noted Lieutenant Chicherin in his diary, ‘but I cannot accustom myself to the horrors and torments that continually present themselves to my eyes along the way.’⁴⁸

Another who walked down the same road in the wake of the French retreat was Henri Ducor, who had been taken prisoner on the banks of the Berezina, but, having been stripped and robbed by cossacks and then left to die, had pulled some clothes off a corpse and decided to continue the retreat to Vilna. ‘Every tree trunk was a support for another victim; sometimes three or four dead bodies were grouped around it in the most bizarre attitudes: some on all fours, others crouching on their heels, others sitting with their arms around their knees and their chins resting on them, others sitting with their elbows on their thighs and their heads bent forward, as though they were sleeping or perhaps eating,’ he wrote. ‘But what really aroused my astonishment was a gunner standing erect behind his cannon, his right hand leaning on the breech and facing towards Russia. He still had his uniform. The enemy army had marched past him and left him as he was. In the midst of this ocean of snow he was like a monument commemorating our great disaster.’⁴⁹

Those who could simply trudged on, kept alive by the lure of Vilna. ‘Vilna now became the promised land, the safe haven from every storm and the term of all our misfortunes,’ according to Caulaincourt.⁵⁰ They knew it would not be like Smolensk, that it was a substantial inhabited and friendly city in which they would find shelter and food in abundance. But it would have been better for them if it had been another burnt-out shell like Smolensk.