B009YBU18W EBOK (28 page)

‘The men had spent the night preparing themselves, and on [28] July, the rising of a magnificent sun revealed us in the colourful dress of a parade,’ wrote Henri Ducor of the marine infantry. ‘Weapons glinted, plumes fluttered; joy and delight were visible on every face; the mood of gaiety was universal.’ But the gaiety turned to disappointment, then anger, and even a degree of despair when, as they marched out to take up their positions for battle, they realised that the enemy had vanished overnight.
⁹
Napoleon was stupefied.

It is difficult to be sure whether Barclay had really intended to give battle. In his account of the campaign he maintains that he did. He had no more than about 80,000 men at his disposal, but he was only confronting the corps of Ney and Eugène, Murat’s cavalry and the Guard, rather than the whole of the Grande Armée, so although he would have been outnumbered, the disproportion would not have been that great. And he was under enormous pressure to fight. The murmuring against him and all the ‘Germans’ at headquarters had turned into open accusations of incompetence, cowardice and even treachery, and this was beginning to seep down to the ranks. ‘I beg Your Majesty to rest assured that I will allow to pass no opportunity to harm the enemy,’ he wrote to Alexander on 25 July as he began taking up position at Vitebsk, ‘nevertheless, the most thorough regard for the preservation and security of the army will remain
an inseparable element of my efforts against the enemy forces.’
¹⁰

This last phrase suggests that Barclay was open to any excuse not to fight, and on the afternoon of 27 July, while the two armies were skirmishing and just before Napoleon decided to adjourn the battle to the morrow, he was handed one. A courier arrived from Bagration informing him that the Second Army had failed to break through to Orsha, from where it could have come to his aid. It had found its path blocked at Saltanovka by Davout who, although greatly outnumbered, had beaten it back on 23 July, forcing it to wheel south. This meant not only that Bagration would not be able to come to the support of Barclay, which the latter must have known anyway, but, as Barclay did not hesitate to point out, that even if he scored a victory over Napoleon at Vitebsk he would have Davout’s corps (whose strength the Russians consistently overestimated) in his rear, and when he turned about to defeat this he would have Napoleon, at best beaten but not routed, in his rear. He therefore took the only sensible course. He let Napoleon believe he would fight, and slipped away quietly as soon as darkness fell, leaving only a skeleton force of cossacks to keep the campfires burning.
¹¹

This was not the result of some new plan to draw the enemy into Russia, but of dire necessity. ‘I cannot deny that although many reasons and circumstances at the beginning of military operations made it necessary to abandon the frontiers of our land, it was only with the greatest reluctance that I was obliged to watch as these backward movements continued all the way to Smolensk itself,’ Alexander wrote to Barclay a couple of weeks later. And Smolensk was the very furthest fallback position contemplated.
¹²

Barclay did the right thing. If he had stood and fought, he would almost certainly have been defeated, and that would have entailed the loss of, in Alexander’s words, the only army he possessed. In the highly unlikely event that Barclay had won, the victory would not have been a decisive one, as it would only have defeated part of Napoleon’s forces, and it would not have expelled the French from Russia. Finally, robbing Napoleon and his army of the chance of a
fight had a negative effect on their morale, and it was in very low spirits that they took possession of Vitebsk on 28 July.

The men were at the end of their endurance. They had been on the march for up to three months, and some, like one regiment of flankers of the Young Guard made up of youths barely out of school, had come all the way from Paris with only a single day’s rest at Mainz and another at Marienwerder. Some units were marched for thirty-two hours at a stretch, with only a couple of hours’ rest in brief intervals, covering as much as 170 kilometres. Carl Johann Grüber, a Bavarian cuirassier officer, recalled that his men were so tired after some of the marches that ‘hardly had the cry of “Halt!” rung out, than they fell to the ground and into a deep sleep without even bothering to cook up the slightest meal’. And even if they were not moving out early in the morning, they had to go through the tedious ritual of ‘
la Diane
’.
¹³

As they moved from Germany into Poland the quality of the roads declined, and when they crossed the Niemen these turned into troughs of sand or mud, according to the weather. Wading through either required twice the effort of marching along a firm road. The terrain between the Niemen and the borders of Russia proper is wooded and boggy in places. It is cut across by a multitude of small rivers, many of which trickle along the bottom of deep ravines. Existing bridges often consisted of no more than a few tree trunks, so if the sappers were not at hand, infantry, cavalry, artillery and supply wagons had to tumble down into the ravines and scramble up the other side.

Where they ran into woods, the tracks often became so narrow that infantry had to break ranks, while
caissons
and guns got jammed. Cavalry had to contend with low branches, which were a particular menace to those, like the Italian Guardia d’Onore, whose tall Roman-style helmets seemed made to catch on them. ‘Many riders who had fallen asleep in the saddle out of sheer exhaustion hit their heads on the branches,’ recorded Albrecht Adam, an artist who accompanied the staff of Prince Eugène on campaign. ‘Their helmets either fell off or hung lopsidedly by the chinstraps, and several of the men tumbled to the ground.’
¹⁴

The sheer volume of traffic on these country roads and tracks ground the dust finer and churned the mud to its most viscous. It also caused jams, delays, arguments over precedence, and sometimes fights. A gun team which had to stop in order to repair a piece of harness or tend to a lame horse would lose its place and then have to literally fight against infantry units unwilling to let it back into the stream of traffic, with the result that it would get cut off from its battery and might not be able to rejoin it for a day or more. And the multinational make-up of the army meant that arguments over precedence could turn ugly.

Seasoned soldiers were used to hardship, and needed to be, as marching for hundreds of miles burdened with a heavy backpack, a full cartridge case, a sword and a musket was no picnic. But none of them could remember as difficult and painful a march as this. By
the middle of July most of the footsoldiers were barefoot, as their boots had fallen to pieces, and even the proverbially jolly French infantrymen had stopped singing their songs as they marched.

In France, Germany, Italy and even Spain, troops would be found billets in towns and villages on the march, and only had to bivouac out in the open on the eve of battle. But there could be no question of lodging anyone in the miserable villages of eastern Poland and Russia. The troops had not slept under any kind of cover since crossing the Niemen five weeks before, as they hardly ever had the time to construct shelters out of branches and whatever else came to hand. Prescient officers had had canvas sleeping bags run up for themselves, but their men had only their greatcoats to sleep under. The young recruits, away from home for the first time, adjusted particularly badly to this.

On warm summer evenings a bivouac could be a pleasant experience, with either some of the regimental bandsmen or odd strummers playing music and the men smoking their pipes as they chatted by the fireside. That is certainly how it struck the nineteen-year-old Baron Uxküll, an officer in the Russian Imperial Guard. ‘What a sight tonight!’ he wrote in his diary on 30 July. ‘Imagine a dense forest that had taken in two cavalry divisions beneath its majestic, bushy roof! The campfires, now gleaming brightly, now dying down, could be seen burning through the foliage their heat kept agitating; at every moment they revealed to astounded eyes groups of men sitting, standing, and lying down around them. The confused noise of the horses and the axe strokes that were cutting away to feed the fires, all this added to the blackest night I’ve ever seen in my life – created, in fact, an effect that was as novel as it was bizarre; it resembled a magic tableau. I thought involuntarily of Schiller’s
The Robbers
and of mankind’s primitive life in the forest.’ It is worth noting that this particular young man had set off to war with Madame de Staël’s
Delphine and
the poems of Ossian in his saddlebag.
¹⁵

He omits to mention the swarms of mosquitoes that tormented the men in the predominantly marshy areas they were marching through,
or the fact that, as often as not, they had nothing to eat as they sat around their campfires. The sweltering heat of the July days was frequently followed by bitterly cold nights, and they sometimes had to lie down to sleep under torrential rain. ‘The rain and the cold of the night meant that we had to keep campfires burning all night in front of the shelters,’ recalled another Russian officer. ‘The smoke from the damp brushwood, mixed with that of tobacco from the men who smoked, stung our eyes and tickled our throats, making us weep and cough.’
¹⁶
Even in summer there is dew, so their clothes were invariably damp when they rose; some never did, having died of hypothermia in the night.

Because of the forced marches they usually stopped for the night quite late, and instead of being able to rest had to busy themselves making fires, gathering supplies and cooking something to eat. ‘It was, to my mind, the hardest part of this campaign,’ recalled the Comte de Mailly, an officer in the Carabiniers à Cheval. ‘Imagine what it was like for us, after having marched ten leagues, in atrocious heat, with a helmet and cuirass, and often without having had enough to eat, to start killing a sheep, skinning it, plucking geese, making the soup, and keeping the fire going so as to roast what we would eat or take with us for the next day.’
¹⁷

Often they had nothing with them, and had to send out men to forage in the locality. By the time these returned with victuals, or the regimental supply wagons rolled up, the men had fallen asleep, so they would take it in turns to cook the food while most of them slept, and the men would eat their dinner before setting off in the morning. This meant that they had to wolf it down in a hurry; sometimes, if there was an alarm or an order to move out urgently, they had to leave it behind uneaten.

The sheer misery comes through the pages of the journal kept by Giuseppe Venturini, a Piedmontese conscript. ‘Horrible day!’ reads the entry under 20 July. ‘Bivouacked in the mud, thanks to our two cretinous generals. Ditto on the 21st, 22nd, 23rd. On the 24th, in a nice meadow. I felt as though I was in a palace. I was on sentry duty at
General Verdier’s. I was lucky that day; I ate a good soup. On the 26th six men died of hunger in our regiment.’
¹⁸

Hunger was the worst affliction of all. ‘You who have never felt the pangs of hunger, you whose palate has never been parched by thirst, you do not know what real need is, a need which never lets up for an instant, and which, only partly satisfied, becomes all the more urgent and more acute,’ wrote one of the paymasters in Davout’s 1st Corps. ‘In the midst of the great events which unfolded before my eyes, one dominant thought preoccupied me: to eat and to drink, that was my only goal, the nub around which my whole mind was concentrated.’
¹⁹

The regimental supplies carried on wagons and the herds of cattle driven along in the wake of the advancing troops inevitably fell behind if the tempo of the march quickened, and in many cases they were three or four days behind. As a result, regular distributions of rations rarely, if ever, took place. Major Everts of Rotterdam, serving in Davout’s corps, noted that his men had not had a crust of bread for thirty days when they reached Minsk. Captain François of the 30th of the Line claims that outside Vilna they received two rations of mouldy bread, the only such distribution during the entire campaign. These were not isolated experiences. ‘As soon as we had crossed the Vistula all regular supplies and normal distribution of food ceased, and from there as far as Moscow we did not receive a pound of meat or bread or a glass of brandy through orderly distribution or normal requisitioning,’ reported General von Scheler to the King of Bavaria.
²⁰

Ultimately, it was down to the men to find something to eat and to prepare it themselves. The most resourceful were, by all accounts, the French and the Poles, who procured – by purchase or looting – cooking pots and utensils, and knew how to make out of the most unpromising raw materials a dish that would at least lull the stomach even if it did not nourish. They were also, according to General von Scheler, better at bringing in supplies. They would find what they needed quickly and bring it straight back to the unit for all to share; if everyone did this there would be plenty to go round. Scheler’s
Bavarians were slow off the mark, and if they found something to eat would set about filling their own bellies. They would only then try to rejoin their unit with the rest of their booty, by which time it would have moved off and they would either have to jettison their load or fall behind for good.
²¹