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The need to raise an army almost twice as large as the territory and the population could realistically furnish or support put a terrible strain on the economy and the administration. The government of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw was insolvent, and no official had been paid for eight months. ‘The hardships we were suffering seemed so bad that things could not get much worse,’ wrote the wife of the Prefect of Warsaw to a friend at the end of March 1812, ‘but it turns out that things can get worse, and worse without limit.’
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Things did indeed get much worse as hundreds of thousands of hungry men and horses flooded into the area.

As there were no stores, military or otherwise, the troops took
what they needed where they could find it. Giuseppe Venturini, a Piedmontese lieutenant in the 11th Light Infantry, bemoaned the fact that when he was ordered to go out and requisition supplies, he ‘reduced two or three hundred families to beggary’. As the locals were unwilling to sell or give away the little that stood between them and hunger, the troops took it by force. The French system of provisioning effortlessly turned into looting.
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And matters quickly degenerated from there.

‘The French destroy more than they take or even want to take,’ noted an eighteen-year-old captain in the 5th Polish Mounted Rifles. ‘In the houses, they smash everything they can. They set fire to barns. Wherever there is a field of corn, they ride into the middle of it, trampling more than they feed on, without a thought for the fact that in a couple of hours their own army will come up looking for forage.’ The situation was aggravated by the multinational make-up of the army, as there was no sense of national pride or responsibility to restrain men who marched under a foreign flag. Everyone blamed another nationality, and even Polish troops looted their compatriots.
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A Polish officer travelling to join the army found himself moving though a scene of devastation: every window was smashed, every fence had been ripped up for firewood, many houses were half demolished; horse carcases as well as the heads and skins of slaughtered cattle lay by the roadside being gnawed by dogs and pecked at by carrion birds; people fled at the sight of a rider in uniform. ‘One felt that one was following a fleeing rather than an advancing army,’ wrote a Bavarian officer following in the wake of Prince Eugène’s corps, astonished at the numbers of dead horses and abandoned wagons littering the road.
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The situation was no better in East Prussia, where violent national animosities also came into play. Even troops from other parts of Germany found the atmosphere hostile, and stragglers were attacked by locals. The soldiers responded in kind. The Dutchman Jef Abbeel and his comrades took full advantage of their position to show what they
thought of the Prussians. ‘We would force them to slaughter all the livestock we judged we needed for our sustenance,’ he writes. ‘Cows, sheep, geese, chickens, all of it! We demanded spirits, beer, liqueurs. We were billeted in villages, and, since only the towns were provided with shops, we would sometimes demand the locals to drive three or four leagues to satisfy our needs. And they would be thanked on their return with blows if they failed to procure everything we demanded. They had to dance as we sang, or they would be beaten!’
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A cold start to the year meant that the harvest was late. ‘We were obliged to cut the grass of the meadows, and, when there was none, reap corn, barley and oats which were only just sprouting,’ wrote Colonel Boulart of the artillery of the Guard. ‘In doing so we both destroyed the harvest and prepared the death of our horses, by giving them the worst possible nourishment for the forced marches and labours to which we were subjecting them day after day.’
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Fed on unripe barley and oats, the horses blew up with colic and died in large numbers.

Without bread, meat or vegetables, the men, particularly the younger recruits, fell ill and perished in alarming numbers. Many sought salvation in desertion and a dash for home. Others, preferring quick release to the long-drawn-out pangs of hunger and the uncertainties that lay ahead, put their muskets to their heads and shot themselves. One major in the 85th Line Infantry of Davout’s corps complained he had lost a fifth of his young recruits by the time he reached his position on the Russian border.
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Napoleon did not see the worst of this as he rushed ahead. Before leaving Poznan he had written to Marie-Louise that he would be back in three months; either the Tsar’s nerve would break when he saw the Grande Armée come up to the border or he would be knocked out in a quick battle. Napoleon was now in a hurry to bring things to a head. He raced to Danzig, moving so fast that he left most of his household behind, arriving there on 8 June. He inspected troops and supplies, accompanied by the military governor, General Rapp. At Danzig he also met up with Marshal Davout, commander of the 1st
Corps, and with his brother-in-law Joachim Murat, King of Naples.

It would be hard to bring together two more different characters. Louis-Nicolas Davout was a year younger than Napoleon. He came from an old Burgundian family with roots in the Crusades, and was the most devoted as well as the ablest of Napoleon’s marshals. He was strict and demanding, a hard taskmaster to those serving under him, feared and disliked by most of his peers, but loved by his soldiers because, in order to get the most out of them, he made sure they had everything they needed and were not tired out with unnecessary duties.

Joachim Murat, who was three years Davout’s senior, was of a different cut in every way. The son of a Gascon innkeeper from Cahors, he had studied for the priesthood at a seminary in Toulouse before running away to join the army. Although not without a certain cunning, he was stupid, which allowed him to be absurdly and recklessly brave even though he lacked real courage. He was, in Napoleon’s words, ‘an
imbecille
[sic] without judgement’. But he was an instinctively brilliant cavalry commander in battle. He was also devoted to Napoleon. He had married the Emperor’s sister Caroline, and in 1808 he was made King of Naples.
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In Danzig, Napoleon explained to Davout and Murat what part they were to play in his plans. Murat would command the huge body of cavalry, a great battering ram of four divisions, with a nominal strength of 40,000, which was to spearhead the attack. Napoleon wanted to fight and defeat the Russians as quickly as possible, so he decided to strike them at the point where they might feel strong enough to make a stand, which meant a frontal attack at Vilna. He would attack Barclay’s First Army, using Davout’s 1st Corps of 70,000 men, flanked by Ney’s 3rd Corps of 40,000 to the north and backed up by the Guard, numbering some 40,000. Prince Eugène’s 4th and St Cyr’s 6th Corps, totalling 67,000 Italians, Bavarians and Croats as well as Frenchmen, would advance to the south of this thrust, driving a wedge between Barclay and Bagration. Further south, Jérôme was to advance against Bagration with three other army corps (5th Polish,
7th Saxon and 8th Westphalian), altogether some 60,000 men. In the north, Marshal Macdonald’s 10th Corps, made up of Prussians as well as Frenchmen, would cross the Niemen at Tilsit and advance on Riga, while Oudinot’s 2nd Corps supported both him and the main strike force by attacking Barclay’s right wing. South of the Pripet, Schwarzenberg’s Austrians were to mark Tormasov’s Third Army.

It is impossible to be precise about the numbers involved. On paper, the overall strength of the forces poised for invasion was 590,687 men and 157,878 horses, while the total number of French and allied troops in the whole theatre of operations, including Poland and Germany, was 678,000. But these figures beg many questions.
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The strength of an army which has taken up positions, as the Russian had done over the months, can be established fairly accurately, as the units are concentrated in one place, and there is little reason or scope for anyone to absent themselves for more than the few hours it might take to report to headquarters or pick up some stores. But an army on the move is far more volatile.

Whatever the technical strength of any unit on campaign, it is never concentrated in a single place, or even area, at one time. It always leaves a skeleton force, sometimes a whole battalion, at its depot. It does not move, lock stock and barrel, from one place to another: its head races ahead, leaving its body and tail to catch up, which they occasionally do, only to be left behind once more, in the manner of a huge centipede. It is constantly leaving behind platoons or smaller clusters of men to hold, defend or police areas. Numbers vary, almost always downwards, with every day.

A company of 140 men marches out from town A on its way to town B. On the morning they are setting off, it turns out that three of the men are too ill to march, so they are left behind, in the care of a corporal and two orderlies. In addition, one of the captain’s four horses is lame, and a second is out of condition, so they remain behind, in the care of an orderly. One of the company’s ammunition
caissons
or luggage wagons has a broken axle, and remains in town A while it is being repaired, in the care of two men. One man failed to report for roll call before the company marched out. This means that only 130 men actually set off. Along the way, eight men are detailed to find supplies, and they set off into the countryside with a couple of wagons. Another ten men fall behind in the course of the day’s twenty-five-kilometre trek, and, another of the wagons having broken a wheel, two more are detailed to look after it until it can be fixed. By that evening, the company with a technical strength of 140 men can only assemble 110 men in a single place. And that diminution took place without the intervention of disease, bad weather or the enemy. It would probably have been more drastic in the case of a cavalry squadron, where lameness and saddle sores played their part. And there has been no account taken of desertion, which is far easier on the march than in a fixed position, and which increases the further an army is from its home ground.
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Some of the men left behind catch up, but the faster and further an army moves, the fewer do, and so the gap between those catching up and those falling away widens. If that same company had to make a forced march over three days and then fight on the fourth, its captain would be lucky to lead much more than half its paper strength into battle – less than a week after setting out.

Numbers arrived at by means of adding up the paper strength of the units present in an army can therefore serve only as a rough guide to the situation on the ground. It is generally accepted that the strength of the Grande Armée as it invaded Russia was about 450,000, but this has been arrived at by computing theoretical data, and the reality was certainly very different.

On 14 June Napoleon issued a circular to the commanders of every corps insisting that they must provide honest figures on the numbers of the able-bodied, the sick and deserters, as well as the dead and
the wounded. ‘It has to be made clear to the individual corps that they must regard it as a duty towards the Emperor to provide him with the simple truth,’ ran the order.
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This admonition was ignored. ‘He was led astray in the most outrageous way,’ wrote General Berthézène of the Young Guard. ‘From the marshal to the captain, it was as if everyone had come together to hide the truth from him, and, although it was tacit, this conspiracy really did exist; for it was bound together by self-interest.’ Napoleon was always angry when provided with dwindling figures, particularly if these could not be explained by battle casualties, so those responsible simply hid the losses from him. Berthézène went on to say that the Guard, which was usually written up as being nearly 50,000 strong, never exceeded 25,000 during the whole campaign; that the Bavarian contingent, given as 24,000, was never stronger than 11,000; and that the whole Grande Armée was no larger than 235,000 when it crossed the Niemen. One can quibble with his estimates, but not with his argument, which is supported by others.
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Russian estimates of the French forces at this stage were much lower than the generally accepted figures (and intriguingly close to Berthézène’s), which has surprised historians and led them to believe that they must have had very poor intelligence. But it may simply be that while French figures were based on paper computations, the Russians based their estimates on reports from spies, and those reports may have been more accurate as to the numbers of troops actually present than the paper calculations.

It would be rash to try to be precise, but a sensible guess would be that no more than three-quarters and possibly as little as two-thirds of the 450,000 crossed the Niemen in the first wave, and that the remainder, if and when they caught up with the main body, were only plugging gaps left by men dropping away. At the same time, it would be difficult to
over
estimate the number of civilians following in the wake of the army, and a figure of 50,000 would certainly be on the conservative side.