Vilna was calm. Although Maret had for some time been receiving increasingly desperate letters from Napoleon, demanding more and more horses and men, he had no inkling of the scale of the disaster. He knew the situation was not good, and must have suspected that it was much worse than he was being told, but he was under firm instructions to act as though all was going well. On 2 December he duly celebrated the anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation with the usual twenty-one-gun salute, a Te Deum in the cathedral and, in the evening, a grand dinner at the former archepiscopal palace for the diplomatic corps and the local grandees, which was surprisingly gay.
The Governor of Vilna, General Dirk van Hogendorp, gave a ball, while the chief Commissaire Édouard Bignon gave a humbler reception at his lodgings. It was in the course of this that the owner of these lodgings, who also happened to be one of the Polish noblemen carrying messages between Napoleon and Maret, a Mr Abramowicz, returned from his latest mission. He had left Napoleon at the Berezina and painted a gloomy picture of the situation.
Over the next couple of days strange rumours began to circulate in the city. Commissaires and other administrative personnel started leaving, and some of the nobility thought it wise to take themselves off to their country estates. Maret and Hogendorp then received Napoleon’s instructions to bake bread and biscuit, and to send out supplies to meet the army. More alarming were the directives telling them to evacuate all unnecessary personnel and to put the city in a state of military readiness.1 While Maret asked the ministers of Austria, Prussia, Denmark, the United States and other smaller powers to move to Warsaw, Hogendorp drove out to meet Napoleon.
He found him in a small country house outside Smorgonie on 5 December, and informed him that there were enough rations stockpiled at Vilna to feed 100,000 men for three months, as well as 50,000 muskets, munitions, uniforms, boots, harness and other materiel. There was even, according to him, a small remount depot. He reported that he had ordered the deployment of two fresh divisions that had recently arrived from Germany to form a screen around the city, and three regiments of cavalry along the road from Oshmiana to Vilna. After apparently approving all these measures, Napoleon told him of his intention of leaving for Paris, and asked him to ensure that there would be fresh horses waiting at every posting station on the road to Warsaw.2
Hogendorp drove back to Vilna to make the arrangements, and later that evening Napoleon himself set off for France. He did not pass through Vilna, only pausing for an hour on the outskirts in the early hours of 6 December in order to see Maret and give his final instructions. His last orders were that Murat must hold Vilna.
On paper, this was quite feasible. The city was well stocked and there were up to 20,000 fresh troops available to fend off any Russian attack while the 10,000 Bavarians falling back under Wrede and the 30 to 40,000 remnants of the Grande Armée caught their breath. ‘Ten days of rest and abundant victuals will bring back discipline,’ Napoleon had assured Maret.3 The city would not be cut off while Macdonald’s 10th Corps held Prussia and Schwarzenberg and Reynier hovered in Poland, where the remains of Poniatowski’s 5th Corps would soon be reforming. And the various Russian units approaching Vilna were in no fit state to mount a serious challenge to an organised and determined defence. But no such defence was ever organised, and a series of factors conspired to turn the longed-for haven of Vilna into the grave of the Grande Armée.
The first act of the tragedy opened as Hogendorp deployed his two fresh divisions at the approaches to the city, Coutard’s to the north and Loison’s to the south-east, around Oshmiana.4 In normal circumstances this would have been an obvious and salutary manoeuvre, which would have allowed the retreating army to filter through into an area of safety and achieve the final leg of its march without the anxiety of being harried by cossacks. But there was nothing normal in the circumstances by now. The rapid attrition of all fresh units sent out to reinforce the retreating army had shown how quickly untempered troops perished when plunged without preparation into the dire conditions of this campaign. The most recent example was of a march regiment from Württemberg, numbering 1360 men when it joined the retreating army at Smorgonie on 5 December, which marched back into Vilna four days later just sixty strong.5
The Loison division, a mixed bag of German and Italian regiments containing large numbers of freshly drafted boys, many of them with hardly a hair on their upper lip, began to take up positions around Oshmiana on 5 December. They hunkered down for the night in the ruins of devastated villages and, unused to the conditions, had to learn the hard way about frostbite and all the other perils of camping out in a northern winter.
At intervals along the road between Vilna and Oshmiana, Hogendorp posted a regiment of Polish lancers and two Neapolitan regiments made up of volunteers commanded by Prince della Rocca Romana. The Neapolitans were resplendent in crimson Hussar uniforms and white cloaks of the finest cotton, and extraordinarily handsome – Rocca Romana himself was referred to as ‘the Apollo Belvedere’ by the ladies of Vilna, with whom they had all enjoyed a short burst of success before marching out into the cold.6
And it was just after the Loison division and the Neapolitan cavalry reached their positions, on 6 December, that the temperature had dropped to around –37.5°C (–35.5°F). A squadron of Neapolitans was detailed to complement Napoleon’s escort of two squadrons of Polish Chevau-Légers as he left Smorgonie on the first leg of his journey back to Paris. The Imperial Mameluke, Roustam, noted that the wine in Napoleon’s carriage froze that night, causing the bottles to shatter. He also noticed that by the time they reached their first halt, there were only Poles surrounding the imperial convoy. The Apollo Belvedere had lost his fingers and all but a handful of his men.7
The same icy death met the Loison division. Dr Bourgeois, who passed them on his retreat, could hardly believe the rapidity with which these unprepared men succumbed. ‘First, one saw them totter and walk for a few moments with an unsteady step like drunken men,’ he wrote. ‘It was as though all the blood in their bodies had gone to the head, so red and swollen did their faces become. They were soon gripped entirely and lost their strength, and their limbs were as if paralysed. No longer able to lift their arms, they let them fall under their own weight, their muskets fell out of their hands, their legs gave way beneath them and they fell to the ground after wearing themselves out in vain efforts. As they felt themselves weaken, tears wetted their eyelids, and when they had fallen they would open these several times to stare fixedly at their surroundings; they seemed to have entirely lost all feeling and had a surprised, haggard look, but the whole of their face, the contortions of the muscles in it, were unequivocal evidence of the cruel pain they felt. The eyes became very red, and often blood seeped through the pores, flowing out in drops outside the membrane that covers the inside of the eyelid (the conjunctiva). Thus, one can state without using the language of metaphor, that these unfortunates shed tears of blood.’8
According to Lejeune, the Loison division lost half of its men in a matter of twenty-four hours, and by the time the retreating army had reached Vilna on 9 December, there was not a single one left. Hogendorp estimates that its 10,000 men dwindled to less than two thousand overnight.9 To the miseries of the retreating Grande Armée was added the sight of thousands of smartly uniformed hard-frozen soldiers lining the road as they trudged on towards Vilna.
On 7 December, the first individual soldiers and groups began to trickle into town. The shops and cafés were open as usual, and the tattered men could hardly believe their eyes. Every village, town and city they had seen over the past six months had been a ravaged, burnt-out, deserted shell, and they found the aspect of a normal bustling city untouched by war magical. ‘It was for us the most extraordinary spectacle to see a city where everything was perfectly calm, and one could see ladies at the windows,’ wrote Colonel Pelet. They revelled in the luxury of being able to walk into a café , sit down and order coffee and cakes. Colonel Griois made for the nearest inn and ordered himself a dinner of bread with butter, meat and potatoes, washed down with a bottle of indifferent Spanish wine. ‘You will laugh with scorn when I say that this moment, preceded and followed as it was by so much misery and danger, was certainly one of the moments in my life when I felt the sensation of the truest and most complete happiness,’ he wrote.10
Some then went off to find rooms, while others stocked up on provisions. More and more men drifted into the city, and the shops and eating places began to shut as the inhabitants of Vilna realised that the rumours that had been circulating over the past week had been true. ‘At first they looked at us with surprise, then with horror,’ wrote Cesare de Laugier, who was one of the early arrivals, with the debris of Prince Eugène’s 4th Corps. ‘They rushed home to their houses, and began barring doors and windows.’11
Hogendorp had made what he thought would be adequate arrangements to receive the retreating army. After the briefest of consultations with the monks, he designated each of the many monasteries in the city as a barracks for one of the corps, and posted notices at every street corner informing the men that they would find soup and meat there, and giving directions. He detailed an artillery officer to set up a post at the approaches to the city in order to direct the ordnance to places where it could be parked.
On the morning of 8 December he himself went out to greet the incoming army. At around eleven o’clock he saw Murat coming towards him, accompanied by Berthier. ‘They were on foot, on account of the cold,’ he wrote. ‘Murat was enveloped in magnificent large pelisses; a great fur hat, very tall, which crowned his head augmented his height, giving him the air of a giant, beside whom Berthier, whose ample clothing only served to overwhelm his small body, presented a singular contrast.’ No sooner had Murat taken up quarters than he received a call from Maret, who passed on to him Napoleon’s final instructions, which were to hold the city at all costs. ‘No, I refuse to allow myself to be taken in this pisspot of a place!’ Murat is alleged to have answered. And when Berthier asked him for orders, he supposedly told him to write them out himself, since it was obvious what they should be. It is impossible to be sure of this, or of anything else that took place over the next forty-eight hours.12
Even if Napoleon’s departure had not turned the men against him, it had had an effect, and a profound one, on the course of events. ‘The presence of the Emperor had helped to maintain the commanders in their duty,’ noted Eugène Labaume. ‘As soon as it was known he had left, most of them following his example no longer felt restrained by a sense of shame, and without a thought, abandoned the regiments that had been entrusted to them.’ This may have been something of an exaggeration, for there are plenty of examples that belie it, but its essence is supported by others.13
The effects were felt not only in the army. ‘The Emperor’s passage through the city, which was soon common knowledge in Vilna, was an almost universal signal for people to leave,’ wrote Hogendorp, who went on to say that military and civil administrators ‘disappeared in a flash, as if by enchantment’, and painted a picture of panic that may have had something to do with the fact that he himself stands accused by some of having bolted on the morning of 9 December.14
‘In the midst of this extreme disorder, a colossus was needed as a rallying point, and he had just left,’ wrote Ségur. ‘In the great void he left behind him, Murat was hardly noticed. It was then that we saw only too well that a great man is irreplaceable.’ ‘Murat was not the man who was needed at this moment,’ concurred General Berthézène.15
On 9 December the main mass of the army turned up at the gates of Vilna. The men stationed outside the city by Hogendorp to direct traffic were overwhelmed by the disorderly column of troops. The officer in charge of directing the artillery was confronted by men who refused to listen to orders and just wanted to get into town as quickly as possible.
The road by which they came passed into the city through a medieval gate no more than three or four metres wide and more than twice as long, which created a kind of tunnel. The inevitable jam built up before it, with people pushing from behind. ‘One could no doubt have found on the left or on the right other roads leading into the city, but we had developed the unfortunate habit of automatically following the path traced by those who went before us,’ noted Griois, adding that ‘it was, on a smaller scale, the passage of the Berezina all over again’. Some did go off to find other points of entry, but the majority behaved like the sheep they had been reduced to by the experiences of the past weeks.16
Pushed and jostled, men and horses went down, those who came after could not hold the pressure from behind and crushed them underfoot. Christian von Martens saw an officer who was pressed so hard against a cannon by the crush that his stomach burst open and his entrails spilled out. ‘I was swept forward off my feet and finally flung down between two fallen horses, on top of which a rider then stumbled with a third,’ recalled Captain Roeder. ‘I gave myself up for lost. Then dozens of people began to pile up on top of us, screaming horribly as their arms and legs were broken or they were crushed. Suddenly the heaving of one of the horses flung me on top, throwing me into an empty space, where I could pick myself up and stagger through the gate.’17
Once inside, the survivors ignored Hogendorp’s notices and made for the nearest eating places, shops and even private houses, knocking on doors and begging to be let in. One cannot but admire the inhabitants who allowed them into their houses. The men were half-crazed, covered in sores and gaping wounds, filthy and crawling with vermin. ‘Nothing exhales a more foetid odour than frozen flesh,’ recalled Sergeant Thirion, and most of the men had at least some affected limbs.18 The diarrhoea most were suffering from had left traces on their clothes, which cannot have helped, while their breath, after weeks of horseflesh and rotten scraps, was by all accounts particularly foul.
Some of those whose units had disintegrated took the opportunities provided by Vilna to obtain new clothes and stock up with provisions, and promptly moved on along the Kovno road. Many of the officers still with more or less active units made use of their time in the city to prepare themselves for further action. They visited the stores, where they found their trunks with spare uniforms and linen, which had followed the army from Paris via Danzig and then by river and canal to Vilna. Heinrich Brandt was able to have a bath, dress his wounds properly and put on a new uniform; he felt a new man. Major Vionnet de Maringoné also felt transformed by a shave and a change of clothes – which also rid him of the lice infesting his old uniform. Dr Lagneau was delighted to find his trunk, which contained not only fresh clothes, but also some surgical instruments and even books. He took what he needed and gave the rest to the son of the family he was billeted with, who happened to be studying medicine.
But most of the men and officers simply gave in to the luxury of a good meal and a warm, undisturbed night. Colonel Griois took off his boots for the first time in six weeks. A few toenails came away with them, but otherwise his feet seemed in reasonable shape, and he settled down for the night, feeling like a prisoner whose fetters had been removed – but when the time came, he could not get them on again. Marie Henry de Lignières could not resist the temptation of eating a vast amount, after which he climbed into a warm bed for the first time in nearly seven months, but he spent a terrible night and wet himself.
As they relaxed, warm and replete, they felt a sense of security they had not known for six weeks. They were all the more incredulous when they heard the drums beating the stand-to in the morning, and few even considered responding. Even when they heard the sound of cannonfire they assumed that someone else would be dealing with whatever emergency had arisen.19
In fact, nobody was by this stage dealing with anything. Murat had tried to call a meeting of all the senior generals, but most were too busy seeing to the needs of their men or themselves, and did not regard a summons from the King of Naples as quite so urgent as one from Napoleon would have been. He spent the rest of that day trying to decide on some plan, but there is no evidence that he actually fixed on one. The only thing he did was to transfer his headquarters to the western end of the city, which gave rise to a rumour that he had left.
As the remains of the Grande Armée had trudged into Vilna on the previous afternoon, the retreating Bavarian division under General Wrede, which was still a fighting force of nearly 10,000 men, had been ordered to take up defensive positions covering the city. Many of the Bavarians could not resist going into town in search of food and a warm night’s rest, which disorganised the unit, and when, in the early hours, a few detachments of cossacks appeared to threaten its pickets, these fell back, causing panic among their comrades. Wrede himself seems to have lost his head and was seen running into the city screaming that the cossacks had broken in.
Ney had the call to arms sounded and set off at the head of a detachment of the Old Guard to rally the fleeing Bavarians. He managed to steady the situation and restore order, but returned to headquarters in dispirited mood. ‘I had the stand-to beaten a while ago and could hardly get five hundred men together,’ he said to General Rapp. ‘Everyone is frozen, tired, discouraged, and nobody can be bothered any more.’20
Murat decided that he would not be able to hold Vilna and resolved to fall back on Kovno. But instead of getting Berthier to issue formal orders to the various corps, instructing them in what order they were to march and at what time they should leave, he simply gave a blanket order for the retreat. He then set off himself without delay. The order to evacuate Vilna flew around the city in somewhat haphazard manner, so that some did not believe it while others never got it. And many of those who did were simply not prepared to carry it out.
Sergeant Bertrand of the 7th Light Infantry in Davout’s corps had obediently gone to the designated monastery, where he had found food and shelter. When he heard the bugle sound the alarm in the early hours and began rousing his men, many, even veterans of the Egyptian and Italian campaigns, simply refused to budge. ‘That night of complete rest around a good fire had been enough to extinguish their courage and their energy,’ he wrote. ‘They were overcome by a general drowsiness, a heaviness in the head which seemed to obscure the faculty of thought. Stupefied, and as if drunk, they attempted to get to their feet, only to fall back heavily.’21 The story was the same in other units.
‘Instead of staying a whole day in Vilna, it would have been far better to continue the retreat without stopping,’ wrote Prince Wilhelm of Baden. ‘Many officers, calling on their last reserves of strength, would have reached the German frontier and would have been saved.’ When it was time to leave he tried to persuade them to come with him, but after one night of release, these men who had come so far found they had the strength to go no further. ‘We had for some time been measuring out our forces in order to reach this city in which we believed we would find what we needed to satisfy our most imperious needs; rest, bread, and Vilna had come to form a trinity which was united in our minds as a single hope, and as a result we were clear in our minds that we would go no further than this city,’ wrote Adrian de Mailly.22
In many cases, the psychological as well as physical strain of the past weeks had caused something deeper inside to snap. Planat de la Faye tells of an Italian officer who had inspired all his comrades with his fortitude. ‘I have never seen a braver man or a gayer one than this Piedmontese,’ he wrote. ‘He had lost the toes of both feet to frostbite before the passage of the Berezina. At Smorgonie he developed gangrene and could no longer get his shoes on. Every night as we settled down he would cut away with a knife the gangrenous parts and bind the rest up carefully with rags, and all this with a gaiety which tore at one’s heart. The next day he would resume the march, with the help of a stick, only to perform the same operation that evening, so that by the time he reached Vilna, he had not much more than his two heels left.’ But after a good dinner and a warm undisturbed sleep, he went mad. He was not alone, and one inhabitant of Vilna noted that there were many who had ‘lapsed into complete idiocy’.23
Chaos engulfed the city as the evacuation began. Vilna is built on a slope, and the old city is a mass of winding streets. ‘Naturally, in these narrow streets, covered in ice, the wagons, the sleighs, the carts and the carriages crashed into each other, became entangled, and went over,’ wrote Adrien de Mailly. ‘And naturally, the horses knocked each other over, men fell down and got trampled, and the drivers and the crushed screamed as loud as they could, either at their horses or at those who were breaking their limbs.’24 They might have spared themselves the trouble had they known what awaited them a couple of kilometres outside Vilna.
At the small village of Ponary the Kovno road goes up a long incline. Normally, the local authorities would sprinkle sand on such places at regular intervals in winter. But Hogendorp had not thought of doing so. As a result, the compacted frozen snow covering the road became a long sheet of ice, and many of the wheeled vehicles, and even the horses and men on foot, found it difficult to negotiate.
Major Jean Noel, who had come from the opposite direction, bringing two batteries of eight guns each from Germany to supplement the artillery of Loison’s division, whose fate he did not yet know, paused to wait for orders when he reached the top of the hill of Ponary on 9 December. He was astonished to see crowds of fugitives coming towards him, and all through that day his men earned good money helping them and their vehicles up the slope. On the following morning, a carriage came up the hill and stopped beside his guns. Murat leant out and asked him who he was and what he was doing there, surprised to see two fine new batteries with well-fed teams. Having explained himself, Noel asked Murat for orders. ‘Major, we are f—d,’ answered the King of Naples. ‘Get on your horse and run.’25
Soon large numbers of troops, baggage trains, artillery and carriages with wounded officers were struggling up the increasingly slippery hill. As a wagon stalled or slid backwards, it sent the one behind into a downward slide, and the two would only come to a standstill when a third, fourth or tenth further back overturned. Even those whose horses were properly shod found it increasingly difficult to negotiate what had soon become an obstacle course.
The men on foot either dragged themselves up on all fours, using their bayonets to gain purchase on the icy surface, or floundered through the deep snow on either side of it. Some made a detour along a track around the side of the hill. A number even managed to get their sleighs or carts round this way. But most of the wheeled vehicles and many mounted men persisted in trying to get up the main road. The artillery had no option, as their guns would never have made it through the narrow side track. Some Hessians succeeded in hauling their guns up, but the Bavarian artilleryman Captain von Grawenreuth was less fortunate, and with tears in his eyes abandoned his last and favourite gun, ‘Mars’, an exceptionally accurate piece, at the foot of the slope.26
Boulart, who had been unable to get his remaining guns into Vilna when he arrived outside the city on 9 December, had gone out the next day and brought them round by a side road. But by the time he reached the foot of the hill at Ponary the mass of stranded wagons made it out of the question for even the best-harnessed vehicle to get through.
The same went for the convoy carrying the treasury, and all of Baron Peyrusse’s superhuman efforts over the past two months were made vain. The gold-laden wagons were too heavy to be hauled up, even if there had been no jam. He began removing sacks of coins from the wagons and transferring them onto the backs of horses. He even managed to get one wagon, which he had emptied, dragged up the slope and refilled, all the way back to Danzig. Marshal Bessières in passing ordered Noel to take some of the gold on his wagons, but the result of this measure was that the wagons disappeared along with the gold. On the other hand, some German officers from Baden and Württemberg allegedly loaded 400,000 francs in gold onto their sleigh and handed it in to the paymaster at Königsberg two weeks later.27
It was not long before passing soldiers, seeing the abandoned wagons marked Trésor Imperial, began breaking them open and helping themselves, and a free-for-all developed as officers, rankers and civilians fought over sacks of gleaming Napoléons-d’or. The ground was littered with silver coins and other booty being cast aside as the men filled their pockets and knapsacks with gold, jewelled icons and other pieces of Napoleon’s Moscow booty.
It was a tremendous boon for those who had lost everything at some point along the road. Julien Combe noted that one of his Chasseurs managed to grab a bag containing 20,000 francs, which later permitted him to get married and settle down prosperously in Besançon. But for most, the opportunity to loot proved their undoing. A swarm of cossacks appeared on the scene as soon as the orderly units of the retreating army had passed, and showed no mercy as they too joined in the looting.
The most unfortunate were the wounded whose carriages had been caught in the jam, who were either killed there and then or dragged back to Vilna. As one junior artillery officer pointed out, if only Hogendorp or some other official had sprinkled a little sand on the slope, the French would have saved the entire treasury, several batteries of guns, the papers of the general staff, and hundreds if not thousands of wounded officers and men.28
‘What took place in Vilna over the few weeks after 10 December is easier to tell than to believe, not that it is easy to speak of either,’ according to Aleksander Fredro. As soon as the organised units had marched out of the city, swarms of cossacks poured in, hunting down stragglers in the streets and seeking out soldiers and particularly officers who had taken refuge in private houses. They went into the hospitals and the monasteries where the wounded and those who could go no further lay helpless, and began beating and kicking them, tearing off their clothes and their dressings in search of valuables. Those who protested or tried to defend themselves were killed.29
The non-Polish population of the city, perhaps out of desire to assert their anti-French credentials and thereby shield themselves from potential reprisals on the part of the Russians, joined in the sport of hunting down French and allied soldiers. Those who had rented rooms to officers or let them take shelter in their houses were quick to kill the inconvenient guests and, after stripping them of their remaining valuables, throw their bodies into the street. There are accounts of them luring starving officers into their homes in order to kill and rob them, of women enthusiastically battering survivors to death, and one of them stuffing ordure into the mouths of prisoners and wounded, saying, ‘Le monsieur a du pain maintenant.’ Those who were not killed wandered the streets begging for a crust of bread, and eventually died of cold as they huddled against the wall of a building.
Matters did not improve when regular Russian forces under General Czaplic occupied the city. The soldiers scoured the hospitals in the wake of the cossacks, and the medical staff who eventually took over were little better. Despite the availability of victuals, the wounded were left with no food or water for days, and were ill-treated by the orderlies. Typhus had broken out, and the dead and dying were unceremoniously thrown out of the windows and dumped in the street, where heaps of hard-frozen contorted bodies piled up.30
The troubles were far from over for those who had carried on towards Kovno. ‘The sight which the retreat presented at this stage,’ wrote Paul de Bourgoing of the Young Guard, ‘was one of a long stream of men, horses and a few wagons, stretching out of sight like a black ribbon on the uniformly white plain of snow; each man walked on his own, silent and almost crushed by the weight of his thoughts and his fears.’ The weather continued bitterly cold, with the daytime temperature hovering around the – 35°C (–31°F) mark, and frostbite continued to take a toll: ‘One could see an extraordinary number of soldiers with hands and fingers of bone, as the flesh had fallen away,’ wrote Vionnet de Maringoné.31
A hard core still stuck to their colours, in groups of about fifty. ‘I remained, with, alas! very few others, with our eagle, whose pole was adorned with no more than a shred of cloth, and which, deprived of one of its wings, carried away by a shell at Eylau, still hovered over the disasters as our sacred rallying sign,’ wrote Sergeant Bertrand of the 7th Light Infantry. The grim determination of some of the old soldiers is remarkable, and when Marshal Lefèbvre let slip at a moment when they were encircled outside Vilna the despairing comment that they would never see their homes again, one of them turned to him and said: ‘Shut up, you old fool. If we have to die, we’ll die.’32
Sergeant Bourgogne watched as the pitiful remnant of one regiment turned to face the enemy when its bedraggled colonel called out: ‘Allons, children of France, we must stand again! It must not be said that we hurried our pace at the sound of the cannon! About turn!’ Ney, who was commanding the rearguard of some eight hundred men, set a remarkable example of courage and endurance. ‘He was, at that moment, just as one imagines the heroes of antiquity,’ noted Bourgogne, who watched him repel a Russian cavalry attack at the head of his troops. ‘One can fairly say that he was, in the last days of that disastrous retreat, the saviour of the debris of the army.’33
Bourgogne claims that during this last part of the retreat, as they began to feel that they really were reaching safety, solidarity began to reassert itself and people stopped to help those who had fallen or to assist each other in various ways. Although this may have been so, it seems rather that people revealed themselves in extremes of good and bad.
Captain Drujon de Bealieu of the 8th Lancers could go no further and sat down by the roadside to wait for death, but a passing trooper from his regiment who still had a horse stopped, gave him a piece of bread and hoisted him onto his mount. Sergeant Irriberrigoyen, a Provençal cadre serving with the 1st Polish Lancers, was alone with his Lieutenant, having become separated from the rest of their regiment. The Lieutenant turned to him and said that he could go no further. ‘You can do what you want, my friend, but I’m f—d,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to have managed to come all this way, from Moscow, to have reached Vilna and to die here … But I can’t take another step.’ The Sergeant tried to persuade him to carry on, but the Lieutenant was adamant. At this point they saw a sleigh coming up the road. The Sergeant cried out with joy, but as it drew level with them the Lieutenant recognised the driver: a soldier from his company whom he had disciplined four times for insubordination and looting, having him flogged and even threatening him with the firing squad. The sleigh stopped and the driver got down. He told the Sergeant to climb in, then came up to the Lieutenant. After a while he burst out laughing, took a swinging punch at him, picked him up and, thrusting him into the sleigh, covered him with a fur rug. ‘You had me punished for a little bit of looting,’ he said as they drove off, ‘but you must admit that it has its uses at times, and that at this very moment you are not greatly concerned about the fact that I pinched this well-harnessed sleigh, which will nicely take us out of this damned country.’34
But Nicolas Planat de la Faye and his superior, General Lariboisière, reached a small hut one evening in which they decided to halt. They found two young Dutch conscripts warming themselves by a fire inside it, and turfed them out, despite the pleadings of one of them, a boy in his mid teens. They could hear him whimpering outside as they fell asleep, and found him frozen to death when they set off in the morning.35 And in some instances, people found it difficult to tell what was right and what was wrong.
A Belgian soldier of the Guard came across an officer lying in a sleigh, his servant having abandoned him and taken his horse. ‘Wrapped in a large fur cloak, his hands and feet were frostbitten, and he begged me to kill him, as he was certain that he would not live long in this position,’ writes the soldier. ‘I had already primed my musket in order to render him this service which he implored of me, but then I reflected that he might as well die without me. I left him, but I was some way away before I could no longer hear him begging me to kill him.’36
Kovno was well stocked with supplies and was certainly defensible, having been fortified with some earthworks. But Murat did not consider stopping there, and sped on towards Königsberg. The organised units received some rations, but the fleeing rabble that streamed into Kovno on 12 December and the following day was in no condition to defend anything. Most of the men made straight for the stores, where they devoured everything they could lay their hands on, without waiting for bread to be baked or distributed in an orderly way. They came across a large supply of spirits, and fights broke out between drunken French and German soldiers. A great many men sat down to drown their sorrows. The alcohol, which warms the spirits but actually reduces body temperature, was to be their undoing, and thousands froze to death as they collapsed, still clutching their bottles, or dozed off, huddled in doorways and porches.
When he reached Kovno with his dwindling rearguard, a ragbag of depleted units, Ney took up defensive positions outside the city in order to allow as many stragglers as possible to pass through it, pick up supplies and get across the Niemen. It was a slow business, as, although the river was now frozen hard and could be crossed anywhere, everyone was crowding onto the bridge, and the ensuing bottleneck caused the usual fights and casualties.
Ney soon found himself threatened with encirclement by cossacks, and was bombarded by artillery brought up by regular Russian cavalry. He had a few guns, including some of those Major Noel had so unnecessarily brought all the way to Ponary, and he kept the Russians at bay for a time. But his troops were melting away. A company of Germans from Anhalt-Lippe gave up when they saw their Captain, who had been wounded, put a pistol to his head and shoot himself. In the end Ney was left with only a handful of French infantry, so he began falling back, carrying out a fighting withdrawal through the town and over the bridge. A soldier’s musket in his hand, he remained in the front rank of his diminishing force, commanding them and encouraging them to the last. As he reached the western end of the bridge he discharged one last shot at the Russians and then flung his musket into the frozen bed of the Niemen before turning and trudging off.37
The Intendant General Mathieu Dumas had struggled across the river earlier and reached Gumbinnen, where he took shelter in the local doctor’s house. The next morning he was just sitting down to a nourishing breakfast and some good coffee when the door opened and in came a man dressed in a brown greatcoat, his bearded face blackened by smoke and his eyes red and sparkling. ‘Here I am, at last!’ the newcomer announced. ‘What, General Dumas, do you not recognise me?’ Dumas shook his head and asked him who he was. ‘I am the rearguard of the Grande Armée,’ answered the man. ‘I am Marshal Ney.’38
