B009YBU18W EBOK (42 page)

Auguste Thirion, another cuirassier, experienced similar emotions. ‘In a charge, which in any case never lasts very long, everyone is excited, everyone slashes and parries if he can; there is action, movement, man-to-man combat; but here our position was quite different. Standing still opposite the Russian cannons, we could see them being loaded with the projectiles which they would direct at us, we could distinguish the eye of the gunner who was aiming at us, and it required a certain dose of
sang-froid
to remain still.’ One of his men lost his nerve and was about to run, so Thirion comforted him and offered to share a small crust of bread he had been saving. But at the moment he took it out of his pocket the man was hit in the head by a ball. Thirion brushed the brains from his crust, and ate it himself.
²¹

One cannot be surprised at such apparent callousness. All the officers and men were undernourished and ravenously hungry. They suffered cruelly from thirst, as the tension and the smoke dried their throats. They were surrounded by death. Many of them were unwell, and the length of the battle magnified every kind of discomfort. ‘At Dorogobuzh I again fell victim to the terrible diarrhoea which had afflicted me so cruelly at Smolensk, and in the course of this day I endured the most awful agony imaginable, as I was unable to quit my post or dismount,’ wrote Lieutenant Louis Planat de la Faye, aide-de-camp to General Lariboisière. ‘I will not describe exactly how I managed to dispose of that which was tormenting me, suffice it to say that in the process I lost two kerchiefs which I disposed of as discreetly as I could by throwing them into the trench of the earthworks we passed.’
²²

It was not until shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon that the French began massing for a general assault on the Raevsky redoubt. As
some two hundred cannon pounded the earthwork and the gunners inside, Prince Eugène drew up three divisions of infantry – Gérard’s, Broussier’s, and Morand’s from Ney’s corps. Shortly before three o’clock the dense columns of French infantry, a great sea of blue but for the white uniforms of a battalion of Spaniards from the Joseph Napoleon regiment, lumbered forward up the incline. They were joined by two masses of heavy cavalry moving up on either side, Grouchy’s 3rd Corps on the left, Latour-Maubourg’s 4th and Montbrun’s 2nd (now under the command of General Auguste de Caulaincourt, younger brother of the diplomat) on the right. These two, moving at a trot, overtook the advancing columns of infantry and made for the left flank of the redoubt and the area in its rear.

To Colonel Franz von Meerheimb of the Saxon Zastrow regiment, the handsome Latour-Maubourg looked absurdly boyish in his resplendent uniform, and far too young to lead the mass of horsemen. But as they approached the redoubt he drew them into a charge with great aplomb and, sweeping round the earthworks, they poured into it, some through the openings at the rear, some over the ditches already filled with French and Russian corpses and the pulverised earthen parapets strewn with debris. The first in were the Saxons and Poles of General Lorge’s cuirassier division, followed by Caulaincourt’s cuirassiers, whose gallant young leader fell dead as he rode up to the redoubt. When they came over the breastworks, the horsemen were met by a volley of musketry and plunged into a mass of bayonets. As they fell dead or wounded, their comrades followed, trampling over a writhing mass of wounded men and horses, and the defenders struggled in vain to keep them out.
²³

Colonel Griois of Grouchy’s artillery, watching the scene from the rear, could hardly contain himself when he saw the glinting helmets of the cuirassiers inside the redoubt. ‘It would be difficult to convey our feelings as we watched this brilliant feat of arms, perhaps without equal in the military annals of nations. Every one of us accompanied with his wishes and would have liked to give a helping hand to that cavalry which we saw leaping over ditches and scrambling up
ramparts under a hail of canister shot, and a roar of joy resounded on all sides as they became masters of the redoubt.’
²⁴

‘Inside the redoubt, horsemen and footsoldiers, gripped by a frenzy of slaughter, were butchering each other without any semblance of order,’ wrote Meerheimb.
²⁵
As the horsemen hacked away at the infantry and gunners defending the redoubt, the French infantry poured over the breastworks, and all resistance was quickly extinguished. It was half past three. Grouchy’s cavalry had swept into the area behind the redoubt, where they were followed by other French units, only to find that Barclay had formed up a second line of defence, about eight hundred metres behind the redoubt. The
cavalry found itself powerless against the Russian infantry, which had formed squares.

Barclay himself was directing the defence of this sector, cool and collected as always, appearing to one staff officer like a beacon in a storm. But he was also displaying a recklessness which suggested to some that he was seeking a glorious death. He had ordered up his cavalry reserve, only to discover that Kutuzov had sent it elsewhere without informing him. He was nevertheless able to muster enough cavalry to launch a counter-charge, and the whole area was soon a swirling
mêlée
of horsemen, thrusting and hacking at each other at close quarters. The French fell back to the line of the redoubt, and Barclay’s artillery kept them from venturing forth again as it raked the area in front.
²⁶

According to Clausewitz, the battle was now ‘on its last legs’ as far as the Russians were concerned, and all that was needed for complete victory was for the French to deliver the
coup de grâce
.
²⁷
But none came. The cannonade continued, the cavalry of both sides clashed once more in the centre, and in the south Poniatowski made one final thrust, pushing the Russians back beyond Utitsa. The sky had become overcast and a cold drizzle started to fall. At about six o’clock the guns fell silent as the Russians withdrew about a kilometre. Napoleon painfully mounted his horse and set off to survey the results.

He rode down the slope from which he had been watching the action all day. At the bottom he found the ground covered in spent musket-balls and grapeshot lying as thick as hailstones after a storm. As his horse picked its way between the debris of men, horses and equipment, he saw what one general called ‘the most disgusting sight’ he had ever seen. Since most of the carnage had been performed by artillery fire, the ground was covered in mangled corpses with exposed entrails and severed limbs. Wounded men struggled to free themselves from under dead men and horses, or dragged themselves in the direction of some perceived succour. Wounded horses crushed them as they themselves attempted to get to their feet. ‘One could see
some which, horribly disembowelled, nevertheless kept standing, their heads hung low, drenching the soil with their blood, or, hobbling painfully in search of some pasture, dragged beneath them shreds of harness, sagging intestines or a fractured member, or else, lying flat on their sides, lifted their heads from time to time to gaze on their gaping wounds,’ recalled an appalled Belgian lancer.
²⁸

The Raevsky redoubt presented a gruesome sight. ‘The redoubt and the area around it offered an aspect which exceeded the worst horrors one could ever dream of,’ according to an officer of the Legion of the Vistula, which had come up in support of the attacking force. ‘The approaches, the ditches and the earthwork itself had disappeared under a mound of dead and dying, of an average depth of six to eight men, heaped one upon the other.’ Inside, the Russian defenders, who had died in their ranks, looked as though they had been scythed down.
²⁹

The Russian wounded lay stoically waiting for death or tried to drag themselves free, the French called for help or implored to be put out of their agony with a bullet. ‘They lay one on top of the other, swimming in pools of their own blood, moaning and cursing as they begged for death,’ according to Captain von Kurz. Some were able to drag themselves along the ground, hoping to find help or at least a drink of water. ‘Others just sought to get away, hoping to escape death by fleeing from the place where she reigned in all her horror,’ in the words of Raymond Faure, the doctor attached to the 1st Cavalry Corps.
³⁰

Single soldiers wandered about rifling through the haversacks and pouches of the dead in search of a crust of bread or a drop of liquor. Others stood or sat, grouped in their units, dazed and uncertain of what to do next. ‘Around the eagles one could see the remaining officers and non-commissioned officers along with a few soldiers, hardly enough to guard the flag,’ recalled the Comte de Ségur. ‘Their uniforms were torn by the ferocity of the struggle, blackened by powder and sullied with blood; and yet, in the midst of these tatters, of this misery, of this disaster, they maintained a proud look and even
managed, at the sight of the Emperor, a few cheers; but they were rare and contrived, for in that army, which was capable of clear-sightedness as well as enthusiasm, each one was assessing the overall position.’ Officers and men were struck by how few prisoners had been taken, and they knew that it was by the number of prisoners, guns and standards captured that one could gauge the scale of a victory. ‘The number of dead testified to the courage of the vanquished rather than to the scale of the victory.’
³¹

Napoleon rode back to his tent, which had been brought forward and pitched on the battlefield near the spot from which he had commanded. He wrote to Marie-Louise telling her he had beaten the Russians and sent instructions to the bishops of France to sing
Te Deums
in thanks for the victory. He was joined for dinner by Berthier and Davout, but he ate little and looked ill. They all agreed that they had won a decisive victory, but there was none of the usual sense of elation. Napoleon spent a sleepless night, according to his valet Constant, who heard him sigh, ‘
Quelle journée! Quelle journée!
’
³²

There were no songs around the bivouacs that night, no enthusiastic exchange of experiences and tales of glory. The men settled down where the end of the action had found them, huddling round fires made out of broken musket stocks and gunlimbers, piling corpses one on top of the other to sit on. It was the third day they had received no food, and whatever private supplies they had, as well as the
cantinières
, were behind in the bivouacs of the previous night. They had to make do with whatever they could scavenge, making gruel with the buckwheat found in the knapsacks of the Russian dead, with water from one of the streams criss-crossing the battlefield, already thick with blood. One who ate better than most was a
voltigeur
who had managed to shoot a hare which found itself in the path of his advance at the beginning of the battle, and which he now skinned and cooked. As the men sat around their mean fires, wounded comrades came crawling or dragging themselves towards them, begging to be allowed to share their meagre rations. The Russian wounded had to content
themselves with chewing on the carcase of some dead horse. ‘The night of [7 September] was terrible,’ in the words of an officer of the Grenadiers of the Old Guard. ‘We spent it in the mud, without fires, surrounded by dead and wounded, whose plaintive cries broke one’s heart.’
³³

The wounded had been evacuated from the field of battle during the fighting by special details of soldiers with stretchers – and also by malingerers who would take the opportunity of carrying back a wounded comrade in the hope of then hanging about the dressing station and avoiding a return to the front line. But when night fell the evacuation of the wounded ceased, because of the dark and also because the dressing stations were swamped.

As most of them had been inflicted by cannon or musket at extremely close range, there were unusually few light wounds of the sort that could be dressed – a straightforward procedure which involved washing the wound, strapping on a piece of lint, binding it up and letting nature take its course. There was a severe shortage of surgeons, particularly on the French side, as so many had been left in hospitals along the way. Those remaining had been busy all day, carrying out operations and amputations in improvised conditions, washing their hands and instruments, as Dr Heinrich Roos remembered, in a nearby stream. Due to the shortage of draught animals, the ambulances and much of the medical equipment had been left behind in Vilna. When they ran out of bandages they had to tear up the shirts of the wounded.

As they had so little time to spend on each man, the simplest treatment for any wound to an arm or a leg was to amputate. The men were tied or held down on a table, given a lead bullet or a piece of wood or leather to bite on, and, if they were lucky, a shot of spirits to drink. Some struggled and screamed, cursing fate or calling their mothers, but many showed unimaginable stoicism. After the operation they would be set down on the ground, where they lay untended while the severed limbs piled up.