Authors: Adam Zamoyski
But necessity is a great instructor, and Jakob Walter of the Württemberg division in Ney’s corps soon learned how to find the jars of pickles, the barrels of stewed cabbage, the honey, potatoes and sausages hidden under floors and piles of wood or buried in the orchards of deserted and apparently devastated villages. ‘Here and there a hog ran around and then was beaten with clubs, chopped with sabres and stabbed with bayonets,’ he wrote, ‘and, often still living, it would be cut and torn to pieces. Several times I succeeded in cutting off something; but I had to chew it and eat it uncooked, since my hunger could not wait for a chance to boil the meat.’
22
Eating undercooked pork is notoriously dangerous, but even without that, the diet they were subjected to, rich in meat but poor in bread, rice and vegetables, upset their stomachs and made them prone to diarrhoea and dysentery.
Near Korytnia, Murat’s corps moved into a camp recently vacated by the Russians. ‘The shelters constructed out of branches were still standing, the fires were only just extinguished,’ noted an officer in the Lancers of Berg. ‘Behind this camp was a ditch in which the soldiers had gone to satisfy their natural needs, and I noted the considerable volume of the piles of excrement with which this area was covered, and came to the conclusion that the enemy army had been abundantly fed.’ Heinrich von Roos noted that on coming upon a recently vacated encampment, the surest way of telling whether its last occupants had been friend or foe was to seek out the latrines, explaining that ‘the excreta left behind by men and animals on the Russian side testified to a good state of health, while ours showed in the clearest possible way that the entire army, horses as well as men, was suffering from diarrhoea’.
23
Thirst also tortured them all from the moment they crossed the
Niemen. Daytime temperatures reached 36°C (97°F), and many of those who had campaigned in Egypt claimed they had never marched in such heat.
*
On 9 July the 11th Light Infantry lost one officer and two men to heatstroke. ‘The air along the wide sandy tracks running through endless dark pinewoods was really like an oven, so oppressively hot was it and so unrelieved by the slightest puff of wind,’ recorded a Russian cavalryman retreating before them. The occasional downpour would drench them without refreshing them or the country they marched through, and steam would rise from their uniforms while the water seeped into the sandy soil. Due to the sparseness of the population there were few wells, and the ponds and ditches contained only brackish water. The men would dig holes in the ground and wait for them to fill with water, but it was so full of worms that they had to filter it through kerchiefs before they could drink it. One of Berthier’s staff officers had equipped himself with his own cow and a range of essences, and was able to treat his colleagues to ice cream, but the rank and file on the march had to make do with what was to hand. ‘How many times did I not throw myself down on my belly in the road to drink out of the horsetracks a liquid whose yellowish tinge makes my stomach heave today,’ recalled Henri Ducor, and he was certainly not the only one to drink horse’s urine out of the ruts in the road.
24
Not surprisingly, many died of dehydration or malnutrition. Others got dysentery. The German contingents seem to have been most vulnerable. Their men were less resourceful than the French and others at building shelters, harvesting crops, grinding corn, baking bread or making up a pottage of whatever was going. The Württembergers suffered particularly badly from dysentery – Carl von Suckow’s company had dwindled from 150 to just thirty-eight, without having so much as seen the enemy – and the Crown Prince himself became so ill that he had to leave the army. The Bavarians also
suffered badly, and by the time their contingent of 25,000 men reached Polotsk it was down to 12,000. The Westphalians succumbed to the heat in droves. At the end of a forced march in a temperature of over 32°C (90°F) one regiment was down to 210 men out of a complement of 1980.
25
The more resilient simply suffered from diarrhoea and soldiered on, clutching their bellies and making sudden dashes to the side of the road to drop their pants. This was more than a nuisance to Aubin Dutheillet de la Mothe, a twenty-one-year-old officer in General Teste’s brigade. At one point he felt such an urgent need to defecate that he rode off the road, dismounted and dropped his breeches without pausing to tether his horse. As he squatted helplessly a squadron of cuirassiers clattered by and his own mount trotted off with them, bearing his sabre and much of his kit, never to be seen again.
26
The roadside was littered not only with excrement, but with the carcases of horses and the bodies of men who died on the march. ‘On some stretches of the road I had to hold my breath in order not to bring up liver and lungs, and even to lie down until the need to vomit had died down,’ wrote Franz Roeder, a Hessian Life Guard officer.
27
The horses too were having a terrible time of it. Unused to the kind of diet they were being subjected to, they suffered from colic and diarrhoea or constipation. One artillery officer recorded that he and his men would have to plunge their arms up the poor creatures’ anuses up to the elbow in order to pull out rock-hard lumps of dung. Without such attentions, their stomachs would blow up and explode.
28
As they were continually in action, the horses had also developed saddle sores. ‘Entire columns consisting of hundreds of these poor beasts had to be led along in the most pitiful condition, with sores on their withers and backs stopped up with bits of hemp and dripping with pus,’ noted a witness. ‘They had lost so much weight their ribs stood out and they presented a picture of the most abject misery.’ As the fine-bred creatures brought from France and Germany died they
were replaced with whatever the country could offer, which for the most part were shaggy little peasant horses known throughout the army as ‘
cognats
’, from ‘
kon
’, the Polish for horse.
29
To the discomforts of the march have to be added the swarms of vicious wasps, horseflies and mosquitoes that are a feature of summer in that part of the world, and the terrible clouds of dust churned up by the men and horses as they marched. ‘The dust on the roads was so thick that whether a horse be a bay or a grey it was the same colour, and there was no difference in the colour of the uniforms or of the faces,’ recorded a lieutenant in the 5th Polish Mounted Rifles. The dust was so thick in places that infantry had to have the drummers beating constantly at the head of every company, so they did not lose their way.
30
When they could see around them, they were confronted with an empty, desolate landscape stretching away into the unknown. Towns and villages were few and far between, and most were devastated by the passage of troops. ‘What I have seen in the way of distress in the past two weeks is beyond description,’ the artist Albrecht Adam wrote to his wife. ‘Most of the houses are deserted and without roofs. In the areas we are marching through most of them have thatched roofs, and the old straw from these has been used as fodder for the horses. The houses have been destroyed or ransacked, and the inhabitants have fled, unless they are so poor that they have died of hunger, having had all their food taken away by the soldiers. The streets are strewn with dead horses which give off an awful stink in the hot weather we are having, and every moment more horses collapse. It is a horrible war. The campaign of 1809 seems like a pleasant promenade by comparison.’
31
The population, such as it was, shocked the French and their allies by its abject poverty and backwardness. The Jews, who were such a dominant feature of every town and village in these former Polish lands, revolted the troops and brought out all their innate prejudice as they surrounded them to buy, sell or barter. ‘If you knew the countryside through which we are wandering, my dear Louise,’ General
Compans wrote to his young bride, ‘you would know that nothing in it is beautiful, not even the stars, and that if one were to try and form a harem of four wives for a sultan here, one would have to tax the entire country.’
32
Another factor, enervating as well as striking by its novelty, was the shortness of the summer nights this far north. ‘Many times when we went into bivouac for the night, the great glow of the sun was still in the sky so that there was only a brief interval between the setting and the rising sun,’ wrote Jakob Walter from Stuttgart. ‘The redness remained very bright until sunrise. On waking, one believed it was just getting dark, but instead it became bright daylight. The night-time lasted three hours at most, with the glow of the sun continuing.’
33
Whether they came from Germany or Portugal, the troops felt very far away from home, and their anxiety grew with every step further they took. Such feelings were particularly strong among the young recruits, but even the old soldiers later reflected that the advance into Russia had been in some respects worse than the notorious retreat. Some deserted and headed back homeward. Hundreds committed suicide. ‘Every day one heard single shots coming from the woods lining the road,’ recalled Carl von Suckow. A patrol would be sent out to reconnoitre and would return with the report that a man had shot himself. And it was not just unhappy recruits who took their lives. On 14 July Major von Lindner of the 4th Bavarian infantry cut his throat with a razor from despair.
34
According to the
commissaire des guerres
Bellot de Kergorre, the whole army had been reduced by a third by the time it reached Vitebsk, without fighting a single battle. The Legion of the Vistula had lost between fifteen and twenty men in every company. ‘In a normal campaign,’ explained one of its officers, ‘two proper battles would not have managed to reduce our effectives to such an extent.’ The Army of Italy was down by one-third overall, though some units were even more depleted – one had lost 3400 out of a total of 5900 men. Ney’s 3rd Corps was down from 38,000 to 25,000.
35
The German contingents had suffered more than most. ‘The food is bad, and the shoes, shirts, pants, and gaiters are now so torn that most of the men are marching in rags and barefoot. Consequently, they are useless for service,’ General Erasmus Deroy reported to the King of Bavaria. ‘Furthermore I regret to have to tell Your Majesty that this state of affairs has produced a serious relaxation of discipline, and there is such a widespread spirit of depression, discouragement, discontent, disobedience, and insubordination that one cannot forecast what will happen.’
36
But the worst affected were Poniatowski’s Poles and the West-phalians, now under the command of General Junot, whose march had taken them through the most desolate areas and who, because they had been set in motion after the main force of the Grande Armée, had been obliged to make up for lost time when Napoleon changed his plans and gave them the job of chasing Bagration.
Ironically, the losses in men were in fact beneficial to the Grande Armée. The ranks had been cleared of the weakest, who should never have been sent off to war in the first place. But before they died they had helped to slow down the operations of the army, to ravage the country through which they passed and to overload the supply machine to an extent from which neither recovered. And the sight of them dying in their thousands had an unsettling effect on those who remained.
Napoleon was usually very active when on campaign. He was always up by two or three o’clock in the morning and never retired before eleven at night. He ranged all over the theatre of operations, travelling in his carriage so he could work, and mounting one of his saddle horses which were led along behind in order to go and reconnoitre a position or inspect some troops. His aides-de-camp, who had to ride behind his carriage and often did not have a spare horse to hand, would have trouble in keeping up with him as he galloped off.
But the sheer size of the Grande Armée at the outset of this campaign
and its wide dispersion in so many corps meant that Napoleon never saw most of his troops, on the march or at bivouac, as he usually did. As a result he did not see the condition or catch the mood of the army, and the men did not feel his presence and commitment in the way they had grown used to. He studied lists and figures, many of them wildly inaccurate, and optimistic reports from unit commanders eager to please. General Dedem de Gelder noted that when reporting their numbers, all the commanders inflated the figures in order to make themselves look good, and according to his calculations Napoleon must have thought he had about 35,000 troops more than he did at this stage.
37
Napoleon only saw his troops when they were in action or on parade before him, when, buffed up and motivated, they looked and felt their best. He therefore tended to disregard the occasional honest reports on their condition that did reach him, and as he did not like to hear them, dismissed them as exaggerated scaremongering. Had he taken a closer look, he would have seen that the situation called for some urgent reorganisation.
Murat’s huge cavalry formation had outlasted its usefulness, since it performed no real military purpose and was incapable of feeding itself. The cavalry would have found it much easier to feed its horses and would have been of far more use if it had been broken down into brigades and divisions and dispersed among the various corps.
It had also become obvious to most of the commanders on the ground that the artillery could have done with some weeding. The Russian artillery was not only of a very high standard, it also used guns of greater calibre, which meant that the dozens of light field pieces being dragged along by the French were largely useless. Napoleon had given every infantry regiment its own battery of four-pounders, primarily for psychological effect. They could hold their own in skirmishes between small bodies of troops, but not in a set-piece battle in which the Russian artillery was deployed. But their presence required a vast amount of effort, thousands of horses and tons of fodder. Many had been left behind along the way, at Vilna and elsewhere, for lack of
draught animals, but they were all laboriously dragged up as soon as possible instead of being abandoned.