Authors: Adam Zamoyski
He vented his frustration on anything that came to hand. He wrote to Maret complaining that the Poles of Lithuania had failed to raise enough troops and supplies. He complained that the army was losing men in needless foraging expeditions, and reprimanded the corps commanders. He raved about abuses. He went into a rage when he discovered that a Parisian wine merchant had been using wagons supposedly bringing medical supplies to ship wine for sale to the troops. When he came across some soldiers looting one day, he attacked them with his riding crop, yelling obscenities at them. And he was uncharacteristically ill-tempered and rude with his entourage.
In his desperation to find a way out, he clutched at every straw. General Pavel Alekseyevich Tuchkov, who had been taken prisoner at Valutina Gora, was treated with the greatest consideration by Berthier, who supplied him with shirts from his own wardrobe and offered him the choice of any city in Napoleonic Europe as a place of captivity. He was then granted an audience by Napoleon, who treated him with the utmost consideration. The Emperor poured out a torrent of self-justification and professions of friendship for Alexander, and asked Tuchkov to write to his sovereign telling him that all he wanted was peace. The embarrassed Russian wriggled out of this by saying that he was only a brigade general and that protocol forbade him to write to his Emperor, but he finally agreed to write to his elder brother, who was senior in rank.
‘Alexander can see that his generals are making a mess of things and that he is losing territory, but he has fallen into the grip of the English, and the London cabinet is whipping up the nobility and preventing him from coming to terms,’ Napoleon said to Caulaincourt. ‘They have convinced him that I want to take away all his Polish provinces, and that he will only get peace at that price, which he could not accept, as within a year all the Russians who have lands in Poland would strangle him as they did his father. It is wrong of him not to turn to me in confidence, for I wish him no ill: I would even be prepared to make some sacrifices in order to help him out of his difficulty.’ He would probably have given Alexander the whole of Poland,
and Constantinople as well, in order to get out of the present impasse with a semblance of honour.
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But as he could not stop where he was, and as he would not retreat, he could only advance, in the hope of ‘snatching’ a victory from the Russians. Moscow was only about four hundred kilometres, or eight days’ forced march away, and the Russians would surely make a stand in defence of their old capital. There were still two months of decent campaigning weather ahead. ‘It was therefore reasonable to think that one would be able to bring the enemy to fight before the bad weather set in,’ argued General Berthézène. ‘The strength of our army, its morale, the confidence it had in its leader, the ascendancy the Emperor exerted on the Russians themselves, all this gave us a sense of the certainty of success, and none of us questioned that.’
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A large number of senior officers, however, believed they had gone far enough. ‘Everyone felt they had endured enough fatigues and had enough glorious encounters for one campaign, and nobody wanted to go any further; the need and the wish to stop were felt and frankly expressed by all,’ wrote Colonel Boulart. Many in Napoleon’s entourage, led by Berthier, Duroc, Caulaincourt and Narbonne, begged him to call a halt. But he was adamant. ‘The wine has been poured, it has to be drunk,’ Napoleon retorted to Rapp, who questioned the advisability of further advance. When Berthier nagged him once too often about the inadvisability of proceeding, Napoleon turned on him. ‘Go, then, I do not need you; you’re nothing but a—. Go back to France; I do not force anyone,’ he snapped, adding a few lewd remarks about what Berthier was longing to get up to with his mistress in Paris. The horrified Berthier swore that he would not dream of abandoning his Emperor in any circumstances, but the atmosphere between them remained frosty for several days, and Berthier was not invited to the imperial table.
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‘We are now committed too far to draw back,’ Napoleon finally declared. ‘Peace lies before us; we are only eight days’ march from it; so close to the goal there can be no discussion. Let us march on Moscow!’ While older men and senior officers shook their heads and
grumbled, the younger ones were excited by the prospect. ‘If we had been ordered to march to conquer the moon, we would have answered: “Forward!”,’ recalled Heinrich Brandt of the Legion of the Vistula. ‘Our older colleagues could deride our enthusiasm, call us fanatics or madmen as much as they liked, but we could think only of battles and victories. We only feared one thing – that the Russians might be in too much of a hurry to make peace.’
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There was little danger of that.
Colonel Boulart had been filled with sadness by the fire of Smolensk, ‘not so much on account of the moral effect which a great disaster always produces and of the resources of every kind the flames had devoured, but rather because it announced, on the part of the enemy, an exasperation which left no more hope of negotiation and because it shed light, so to speak, on our future’. His unease was shared by many others in the Grande Armée as they began to appreciate that they were entering alien territory in more senses than one. ‘This kind of warfare is horrible and does not resemble in any way that which we have been used to until now,’ noted Jean-Michel Chevalier.
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The French soldier of 1812, even if he was conscripted against his will (and sometimes brought to the colours in fetters if he had tried to avoid the draft), knew that he was in essence a free citizen who had another life outside the army, to which he would return if he survived. His behaviour while he was in the army was to a large extent dictated by his hopes for that moment. He would do all he could to survive, and to profit from his time in the ranks by gaining reputation, promotion and booty. He could be roused to acts of selfless courage by a mixture of patriotism,
esprit de corps
and love of his Emperor, but he did not believe in unnecessary butchery. Unless he and his comrades had been whipped into some exceptional frenzy, he was always calculating chances and options, and if he was surrounded without hope of relief, he saw nothing wrong in surrender. A free citizen under arms would decide, privately or collectively, at what point his or his unit’s welfare demanded this. The same was true to a greater or lesser extent
for every soldier of the Grande Armée, whatever his nationality.
The same had also been true of every enemy Napoleon’s soldiers had faced: a certain basic human solidarity meant that the men of both sides, however desperate they may have been to destroy them as a force, respected the others’ desire to survive. ‘Soldiers kill without hating each other,’ explained Lieutenant Blaze de Bury, who had taken part in campaigns all over Europe. ‘During a ceasefire, we would often visit the enemy’s encampment, and while we were ready to murder each other at the first signal, we were nonetheless prepared to help each other if the occasion presented itself.’
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This had even held in Spain, where the
guerrilla
, or little war, had introduced a hitherto unknown level of national and religious fanaticism into the proceedings. But it was not true in Russia.
Frederick the Great is alleged to have said that one first had to kill the Russian soldier and then push him over. Napoleon’s troops were reaching the same conclusion after the fighting at Krasny, Smolensk and Valutina Gora. Russian soldiers did not lay down their arms. They had to be hacked to pieces. Clausewitz, who had the advantage of observing the phenomenon from within the Russian army, put it down to ‘motionless obstinacy’. The French were nonplussed, and ascribed the phenomenon to more or less poetic stereotypical atavisms. ‘I could never have imagined that kind of passive courage which I have since seen a hundred times in the soldiers of that nation, which stems, I believe, from their ignorance and credulous superstition,’ wrote Lubin Griois, who had watched them stand impassively as his batteries pounded them at Krasny, ‘for they die kissing the image of St Nicholas which they always carry with them, they believe they will go straight to heaven, and almost give thanks for the bullet which sends them there.’
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Belief in an afterlife was certainly a factor. The unfree Russian soldier, drafted for twenty-five years, did not think in terms of a return to another, normal life on earth. The army was his life. And death, which held out the prospect of heaven, was in many ways preferable to that life. The iron discipline of the army, supplemented
by his experiences in the fighting against the Turks or tribesmen in Georgia or the Caucasus, vicious and genocidal, with quarter neither expected nor given, meant that the concept of surrender was not part of his military consciousness. The decision to surrender is essentially an assertion of human rights against the army and its master the state, and there was no such subversive concept in Russia.
The French were dismayed by all this. This was not how war was supposed to be. What was alarming for the simple soldier was that his opponents’ uncompromising approach to warfare bound him to the actions of his commander and implicated him in his commander’s crimes. He could not say, as soldiers down the centuries have said, that he was an innocent pawn of kings and generals. The whole army was answerable, and it was now looking as though this would be a fight to the death. This became increasingly apparent as the Grande Armée marched out of Smolensk in that last week of August.
They were now moving through fertile country, down a fine road, straight as an arrow and broad enough for columns of infantry and cavalry to march abreast under a double avenue of birch trees on either side of the central causeway, which was reserved for the artillery and the army’s wheeled vehicles. But it was not an easy march. ‘We trotted along from two or three o’clock in the morning until about eleven at night, without dismounting, except to answer an urgent call of nature,’ wrote the Dutch Carabinier Jef Abbeel. ‘The rare pauses we passed in trying to rid ourselves of the vermin that infested us.’
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‘The heat in this part of the world at this time of year is nothing like the heat of southern Europe,’ explained Julien Combe. ‘It was not just the heat of the sun we had to bear, but the vapours emanating from the baking earth. Our horses kicked up a cloud of burning sand as fine as dust, with which we were so covered that it would have been difficult to distinguish the colour of our uniforms. This sand, which got into our eyes, subjected us to excruciating pain.’ The men wrapped scarves round their noses and mouths, and some even made protective masks out of foliage in an attempt to keep the dust out. To no avail. When Napoleon appeared before the 6th Bavarian
Infantry, they could not shout ‘
Vive l’Empereur!
’ because, as Christian Septimus von Martens, one of its officers, pointed out, ‘our tongues were stuck to our gums’.
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These discomforts were added to by the fact that the Russians had adopted a new tactic now that the invaders were in Russia proper. They evacuated the entire population and took the civil administration with them as they retreated, leaving towns and villages deserted. The French began to regret the Jews who had been so useful to them in the former Polish provinces. Lieutenant Charles Faré of the Grenadiers complained in a letter to his mother that food was in short supply and the
cantinières
were charging extortionate prices. Normally, he expected to make money on campaign, but this time they were all being ruined, and were in a hurry to get to Moscow where they might find pots of gold or at least some fine furs they could bring back and sell in Paris.
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The Russians had also taken to encumbering the road with overturned carts, felled trees and other obstacles. They were now leaving behind quantities of dead men and horses, which decomposed rapidly in the scorching heat. More importantly, they had begun demolishing and burning farms and villages in the path of the French, and setting fire to haystacks, wheatfields and anything else that might burn. The smoke of the burning mixed with the fine dust to make the march one of the hardest the veterans of the Grande Armée could remember. ‘At night, the whole horizon was on fire,’ in the words of the artilleryman Antoine Augustin Pion des Loches.
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The scorched-earth policy now being applied by the Russians tested the resourcefulness of even the most accomplished practitioners of ‘
la maraude
’. ‘The very existence of the army was a miracle, renewed every day by the active, industrious and cunning minds of the French and Polish soldiers, their habit of overcoming every difficulty, and their taste for the dangers and fortunes of this terrible game of adventure,’ in the words of Ségur. Dr René Bourgeois of the medical staff could not help but marvel at the men. ‘By their activity and their industry they ensured themselves against excessive
privations, and managed to make the means of existence and succour appear one might almost say out of nowhere,’ he wrote.
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Every regiment was followed by a multitude of wagons and carts, carrying not only regulation supplies, but a whole range of items picked up along the way which constituted its life-support system, as well as flocks of sheep and cows, driven along by those soldiers who in normal life had been shepherds or stockmen. Every man brought the skills of his trade to the support of the unit. ‘The necessisties of this way of life had turned us into millers, bakers, butchers or artisans,’ as Jef Abbeel put it.
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But the men were uneasy about the turn events had taken, and began to murmur about ‘Scythian tactics’ and some diabolical trick.
‘It has to be said that we were beginning to grow anxious as we followed a powerful enemy without being able to reach him,’ confessed Colonel de Pelleport, commanding the 18th of the Line in Ney’s corps. They were growing acutely aware that every step was a step further from home, and it was noted that even the Italians had lost much of their ‘
brio
’. The only thing that kept the troops going was their faith in Napoleon. ‘Fortunately we have unbounded confidence in the vast genius of the one who is leading us, for Napoleon is for the army its father, hero, demi-god,’ noted Jean-Michel Chevalier.
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