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The only bright spot for Napoleon on an otherwise bleak landscape came when he learned that his rapid advance had driven a wedge between Barclay and Bagration’s Second Army; if he exploited this breach, he would be able to annihilate the latter. He sent Davout with his two remaining divisions (two had been detached to support Murat) and Grouchy’s cavalry corps in a south-westerly direction to cut off Bagration’s retreat, and despatched orders to Jérôme, Eugène and the commanders of other units in the area instructing them to encircle Bagration. But getting orders through at all, let alone with the requisite speed, was another unexpected problem.

On the morning of 1 July one of the duty aides-de-camp, Boniface de Castellane, was summoned to the Emperor’s quarters. He found Napoleon in his dressing gown, a red and yellow kerchief on his head. The Emperor showed him a point on the map where he would find General Nansouty with his cavalry corps. ‘I am manoeuvring to cut them off, I have 30,000 within my grasp, make haste,’ he said to Castellane as he handed him sealed orders to deliver to Nansouty.
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Napoleon needed a victory to throw into the balance against the losses he had borne, and catching Bagration became a priority.

A few hours later Napoleon summoned Balashov, who had presented himself to the French advance posts and been brought to
headquarters bearing Alexander’s letter. He was now ushered into the very same room in the former archbishop’s palace in which Alexander had delivered the letter to him six days earlier. Napoleon was in a filthy mood. ‘Alexander is making fun of me,’ he thundered in response to the letter. ‘Does he really think I have come all the way to Wilna to negotiate commercial treaties?’ He had come to deal once and for all with the barbarians of the north. ‘They must be thrown back into their icy wastes, so that they do not come and meddle in the affairs of civilised Europe for the next twenty-five years at least.’
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Balashov was hardly allowed to get a word in as Napoleon paced the room, giving voice to his thoughts and feelings, venting his disappointment and the anxiety that was beginning to eat away at him. The monologue veered from whining reproach to squalls of anger as disappointment and fury struggled against each other for expression. He complained that it was all Alexander’s fault, that the war had been started by Russia, by her demands that he evacuate Prussia and by Kurakin requesting his passport. He professed his esteem and love for Alexander, and reproached him for surrounding himself with adventurers and turncoats such as Armfeld, Stein and the murderer Bennigsen. He could not understand why they were fighting instead of talking as they had at Tilsit and Erfürt. ‘I am already in Wilna, and I still don’t know what we are fighting over,’ he said.
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The wheedling would turn to bluster, with Napoleon defying the Russian generals to fight him, accusing them of ineptitude and cowardice, and threatening to unleash the army of a restored Kingdom of Poland at them. He shouted, stamped his foot and, when a small window which he had just closed blew open again, tore it off its hinges and hurled it into the courtyard outside. The detailed accounts of the interview by Balashov and Caulaincourt make embarrassing reading.

He was no more polite or dignified at dinner that evening, to which he sat down with Balashov, Berthier, Bessières and Caulaincourt. He fumed and bullied, declaring that Alexander would regret his stubbornness and that Russia was finished as a great power. With
his customary wishful thinking, he warned that the Swedes and the Turks would not resist the opportunity to take their revenge for past defeats, and would pounce on Russia as soon as he advanced further. But in the letter addressed to Alexander that he handed to Balashov, Napoleon professed continuing friendship, peaceful intentions and a desire to talk, without however acceding to Alexander’s precondition of a withdrawal behind the Niemen.
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There can be no doubt that Napoleon still wanted to patch up the alliance with Alexander. ‘He has rushed into this war which will be his undoing, either because he has been badly advised, or because he is driven by his destiny,’ he declared after Balashov had gone. ‘But I am not angry with him over this war. One more war will be one more triumph for me.’ Much later, in exile on the island of St Helena, he stated that if he had felt that Alexander’s letter was sincere, he would have fallen back behind the Niemen. ‘Wilna would have been neutralised, we would each have come there with two or three battalions of our guards, and we would have negotiated in person. How many proposals I could have suggested! … He would have been free to choose! … We would have parted good friends …’ Another Tilsit.
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This continuing self-delusion could only hamper his conduct of the campaign, both at the military and the political level. Napoleon had hoped that he would be able to defeat the Russians and reach an agreement with Alexander before he had to confront the Polish question, since that would probably have been part of the agreement. But the time had come to make some sort of decision.

Many of the inhabitants of Vilna and its environs had come to terms with Russian rule over the past decade and a half, and a number of Polish aristocrats had left in the wake of the Russian army. Many of those that had stayed behind and longed for Lithuania to be reunited with an independent Poland were unimpressed by Napoleon’s treatment of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and wary of his intentions for the future. There was nevertheless much enthusiasm.

‘Our entry into the city was triumphal,’ wrote Count Roman
Soltyk, who was among the first to ride in with his squadron of Polish lancers. ‘The streets, the public squares, were full of people; all the windows were garnished with ladies who displayed the wildest enthusiasm; some of the houses were decorated with precious carpets, kerchiefs were waved by every hand, and repeated shouts of joy were echoed far and wide.’ Another who was deliriously greeted as his troop of Chasseurs à Cheval trotted into town was Lieutenant Victor Dupuy, who was showered with sweets and flowers by excited ladies.
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On the very day Napoleon had his interview with Balashov, the Polish patriots of Vilna had held a solemn
Te Deum
in the cathedral, followed by a ceremonial act of reunification of Lithuania and Poland (a confederation of patriots had already proclaimed the resurrection of Poland in Warsaw). They expected him to make a public announcement endorsing this and proclaiming the restoration of the Kingdom of Poland. In an attempt to duck the issue, on 3 July he set up a government for Lithuania, which was to administer the country and, most important, gather supplies and raise troops. But this evasion was recognised by many locals for what it was, and the ardour of the patriots began to cool. ‘Even though we were Poles, the population received us quite coldly,’ an infantry lieutenant in the Legion of the Vistula noted in his diary. ‘The troops which had preceded us had exhausted most of the enthusiasm – and most of the victuals as well.’
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The question of victuals was of the essence.

The moment they crossed the Niemen, the men of the Grande Armée began to suffer from a shortage of food. The first wave might find people in the villages willing to give or sell them some, but the units coming up behind saw only deserted towns and villages with a handful of Jews who had stayed behind to sell whatever they had managed to preserve. Not surprisingly, as they ran out of food the men began pillaging.

In his proclamation launching his ‘Second Polish War’, Napoleon had given his troops the impression that from the moment they crossed the Niemen they were in enemy territory, so they felt licensed to behave as they liked. And they behaved atrociously. ‘All around the
city and in the countryside there were extraordinary excesses,’ noted a young noblewoman of Vilna. ‘Churches were plundered, sacred chalices were sullied; even cemeteries were not respected, and women were violated.’ Józef Eysmont, a local squire, had greeted a French cavalry unit with traditional bread and salt when they arrived at his small estate outside Vilna, but within an hour they had emptied his barns and stables, scythed the entire crop in the fields, thoroughly looted his house, smashing every window and anything they could not carry, and left him and all the peasants in his village destitute.
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There were instances of local gentry rising up against the retreating Russian troops as the French approached, capturing arms and supplies which they handed over to the incoming liberators, only to be subjected to looting and rapine themselves. Some peasants took the opportunity of rising against hated landlords, but most, particularly in northern Lithuania, were with their masters in greeting the French. But as soon as they saw how the French behaved, they took themselves and their livestock off to the forests, as they had done since time immemorial every time the Tatars raided. ‘The Frenchman came to remove our fetters,’ the peasants quipped, ‘but he took our boots too.’
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The situation in the south was even worse. ‘To begin with we greeted the armies of Napoleon with open arms as liberators of the motherland and as benefactors, as everyone, in the manor and the village, felt that they were going into battle in the Polish cause,’ wrote Tadeusz Chamski, the son of a landowner. People prevented the retreating Russians from burning bridges and stores, and greeted the French warmly. In Grodno, the French forces were met by a procession with religious images, candles, incense and choirs. In Minsk, Davout’s troops were welcomed and a
Te Deum
was held to thank God for the liberation. Resplendent in full dress uniform, General Grouchy personally handed around the plate at Mass, but at the other end of town his cuirassiers were breaking into shops and warehouses, and ill-treating the locals.
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The peasants lost interest once they realised that Napoleon was
not going to emancipate them, while the gentry were quickly forced to regret the arrival of the French by the depredations of the troops. ‘The path of Attila in the age of barbarism cannot have been strewn with more horrible testimonies,’ in the words of one Polish officer who was accosted by a beggar pleading for bread only to discover that it was a friend of his, a local prince.
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Napoleon fumed when reports of these depredations reached him, and sent out patrols of gendarmes with orders to shoot all those caught looting. But the firing squads had little effect on the marauders. ‘They went to their execution with an incredible insouciance, with their pipes stuck in their mouths,’ wrote young Countess Tiesenhausen. ‘What did they care whether they died sooner or later?’ Even the most radical methods of restoring discipline were bound to fail in the circumstances, as one lieutenant in the Polish Chevau-Légers pointed out: ‘Our generals tried a new method of punishment: the guilty man would be completely stripped and tied by his hands and feet in a square or street, whereupon two troopers were ordered out of the ranks to lash and cut him with whips until the skin peeled off him and he looked like a skeleton,’ he wrote. ‘After this punishment the whole regiment would file past so that they should see this horrific sight: but even this did not help much.’
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Many of the culprits had left the ranks altogether, and therefore evaded punishment. At least 30,000 deserters, and possibly three times as many, were roaming the countryside in gangs, attacking manor houses and villages, raping and killing, sometimes in collusion with mutinous peasants. They drove about on stolen carts filled with booty, avoiding organised French units. There was no way of enforcing the law in view of their numbers, and those rounded up simply deserted again at the first opportunity. Officials were not safe: imperial
estafettes
carrying the Emperor’s mail were attacked, and the man appointed by Napoleon as governor of Troki was robbed and beaten up.
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The miseries visited on the population were such that, in the words of one Polish officer, ‘the inhabitants who were at first overjoyed to
see their reputed liberators, soon began to regret that the Russians had abandoned them’. Another Polish officer found himself greeted with ill-concealed resentment where he should have been embraced. ‘The Muscovites were far more polite than you gentlemen,’ a young noblewoman explained to him.
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On 11 July, eight deputies from the Confederation in Warsaw arrived in Vilna, led by Józef Wybicki, one of the most pro-Napoleonic men in Poland. But the Emperor kept them hanging about for three days before giving them an audience, and listened impatiently to their request that he announce the restoration of the Kingdom of Poland. ‘In my position, I have many different interests to reconcile,’ he told them, but added that if the Polish nation arose and fought valiantly, Providence might reward it with independence. The delegates were crestfallen. ‘They left full of fire,’ recalled Pradt in Warsaw, ‘they returned with ice in their souls. The chill communicated itself to the whole of Poland, and it was not possible to warm her after that.’
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The investigation set up by the Russians after the war to identify who had collaborated with the enemy and who had remained loyal reported that there had been no single recorded manifestation of loyalty to the Tsar in the entire province of Vilna during the whole period of French occupation. And many of the Russian commanders had first-hand experience of open hostility. The province was entirely for Napoleon in political terms. Yet he did not take advantage of it. A group of students from the University of Vilna volunteered to create a kind of political guerrilla group which would fan out over the country behind the Russian lines, raising the villagers against the Russians, but Napoleon replied that he did not want social unrest or revolution. He did not want anything that might stand in the way of reconciliation with Alexander. ‘He’s an excellent emperor!’ he told Jan Sniadecki, rector of the university, when the Tsar was mentioned.
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