Authors: Adam Zamoyski
While he waited, Napoleon surveyed the city through his telescope, asking Caulaincourt about various buildings. At length, one of Berthier’s aides appeared accompanied by a French merchant established in Moscow, and they conversed for a while. Other officers returned with whomever they had been able to find, but none of this satisfied Napoleon, who wanted someone official. In the end, it became plain that the Russians were simply leaving the city to him unconditionally. ‘The barbarians, they really mean to abandon all
this?’ he exclaimed. ‘It is not possible. Caulaincourt, what do you think?’ ‘Your Majesty knows very well what I think,’ replied the Master of the Horse.
4
Napoleon did not make his entry into Moscow that day, and spent the night in a wooden house just inside the city limits. At six o’clock on the following morning he rode into the Kremlin and took up his quarters there, while his Imperial Guard in full parade dress made a triumphant entry behind its regimental bands.
About two-thirds of the inhabitants had left, and the remainder, including many foreign tradesmen, servants and artisans, were cowering in their homes. Even members of the several-hundred-strong French colony kept out of the way. The shops were closed and there was little traffic in the streets, although there were still numbers of Russian soldiers wandering about.
5
Sergeant Bourgogne, whose regiment marched in behind its band, was disappointed. ‘We were surprised not to see anyone, not even one lady, come to listen to our band, which was playing
La Victoire est à Nous!,
’ he recalled. ‘The solitude and the silence which greeted us there calmed down in a disagreeable way the frenzy of happiness which had made our blood race a few moments before, and caused it to be succeeded by a vague sense of anxiety,’ according to Lieutenant Fantin des Odoards. There was certainly something sinister about the inhabitants’ apparent refusal to acknowledge, let alone greet, the arrival of the French, and it made many of them uneasy. ‘This means we will soon be defending Paris,’ General Haxo remarked gloomily to Colonel Louis Lejeune as they rode through the silent streets.
6
In a normal surrender, the city authorities would have been obliged to find all the men billets and make arrangements for feeding them, but in the present circumstances there was a free-for-all to find lodgings and obtain the necessities of life. Generals and groups of officers selected aristocrats’ palaces and noblemen’s town houses, while their men settled in as best they could in the surrounding houses, stables and gardens. Some did well. Roman Soltyk and a group of officers on
Berthier’s staff found a fine-looking town house which turned out to be the property of Countess Musin-Pushkin, whose servants met them at the door. ‘At their head was a butler or intendant, dressed with elegance in silk stockings, who asked me in quite good French what I desired, adding that the Countess had before leaving given instructions that we should be suitably received, and had left behind a sufficient number of servants to wait on us,’ he recalled. She had also left behind her French
dame de compagnie
and a French governess, who entertained the officers at dinner.
7
Napoleon had appointed Marshal Mortier Governor of Moscow with the stern injunction that there was to be no looting, and according to most sources, the French occupation began in a relatively civilised manner. As all the shops were closed and shuttered, the famished soldiers went from house to house looking for people from whom they could buy or beg victuals and clothing. Some were polite, and most were willing to pay. But as many of the owners had left, the men began to break into shops and private houses and help themselves. While not averse to taking money if they found it, they were at this stage preoccupied almost exclusively with filling their bellies and acquiring shirts, socks, boots and other essentials. ‘When soldiers enter a city that has been abandoned by its inhabitants, where everything is at their disposal, and take for themselves victuals and items of clothing, can one say that this is looting?’ wrote the Saxon Sub-Lieutenant Leissnig. ‘There was nobody there to give to the men that to which they had a right, so what could the French soldiers do?’
8
But there were many instances of bad behaviour. I.S. Bozhanov, a priest attached to the Uspensky cathedral, was set upon by a group of soldiers and forced to take them to his house, where he had to feed them before they set about ransacking it. The monks of the Donskoi monastery were visited by a couple of hundred soldiers who rifled through the whole place, stealing anything of value they could find and beating up the monks. This kind of thing was soon to become the norm, thanks in large measure to the exalted nature of the city’s Russian Governor.
Rostopchin had several times let slip that if he did have to abandon Moscow, he would make sure the French found nothing but a pile of ashes. Even before he had been informed by Kutuzov that the army would not defend the city, he had made preparations for anything that might be useful to the French – food stores, granaries, warehouses containing cloth and leather – to be torched. He had also ordered all the fire pumps to be evacuated along with the men who manned them. Before leaving the city himself, he gave orders to Police Superintendent Voronenko to set fire not only to the supplies, but to everything he could.
Voronenko and his men went to work, and fires flared up at various points around the city as the last units of the Russian army were leaving. Voronenko seems to have ceased his work that night, but it was carried on the following day by others, probably from the city’s criminal elements as they went about looting, by careless French soldiers engaged in the same activity, and abetted by a strong wind which got up that day. As night fell on 15 September, large parts of the city were on fire, an alarming development as more than two-thirds of the houses were made of wood. Napoleon ordered Mortier to send out firefighting details and to arrest the incendiaries. There was not much the soldiers could do against the fires without pumps or other equipment, but they were more successful in arresting incendiaries, real or imagined, who were promptly shot.
9
The fire raged out of control and spread to several districts of the city. By four o’clock on the morning on 16 September, as the sea of flame began lapping around the walls of the Kremlin, Napoleon was woken up by his fearful entourage. There were large stores of powder in the Kremlin arsenal, and it was feared that one of the sparks and embers swirling through the air might ignite it. He was finally prevailed upon to quit the city, and rode out along flaming streets, followed by most of his guard. He took up residence in the imperial country palace at Petrovskoie, a few kilometres outside Moscow.
From there, the spectacle was beautiful, if terrifying. It was possible
to read at night and to feel the heat, and even at this distance the fire made a roar as of a distant hurricane. ‘It was the most grand, the most sublime, and the most terrific sight the world ever beheld!’ Napoleon reminisced on St Helena. The Dutch General Dedem de Gelder thought it ‘the most beautiful horror one could ever witness … I gazed in wonder all night at this unique spectacle, horrible, yet majestic and imposing.’ But inside the city, it was infernal. ‘The whole city was on fire, thick sheaves of flame of various colours rose up on all sides to the heavens, blotting out the horizon, sending in all directions a blinding light and a burning heat,’ in the words of Dr Larrey. ‘These sheaves of fire, swirling in every direction through the violence of the wind, were accompanied in their upward rise and onward progress by a dreadful whistling and by thunderous explosions resulting from the combustion of powders, saltpetre, resinous oils and alcohol contained in the houses and shops.’ Tin tiles from the roofs flew through the air, borne upward by the rush of hot air, while whole tin roofs and domes buckled with a bang and flew upwards in one piece.
10
The fire had displaced not only Napoleon. Those inhabitants who had stayed put in their houses were flushed out by the onward march of the flames, and gathered in herds in the larger squares, trying to find a way out of the inferno. There were scenes of horror as the fire reached the hospitals where the Russian wounded from Borodino had been laid. ‘When the flames took hold on the buildings in which they were crammed,’ wrote Chambray, ‘they could be seen dragging themselves along corridors or throwing themselves out of windows, yelling with pain.’
11
With Napoleon and most of the military authorities out of the way, there was nothing to stop the soldiers from looting. A city ablaze is not conducive to the niceties of respect for other people’s property, particularly if it has been abandoned by the owners. Even to those who might have had qualms, it seemed wrong to allow precious supplies and indeed precious objects to be destroyed. The instinctive desire to salvage such things from the flames turned everyone into looters. Officers and even generals joined in the frenzy – and frenzy it
was, because there was no time to lose, and reticence was out of place in the face of the rapidly advancing flames.
And once they had rescued things from a burning house or shop, people felt little compunction in rescuing them from houses that were still intact, but which were condemned to burn as well. The German painter Albrecht Adam, attached to Prince Eugène’s staff, was shocked when a senior general took him into a palace which contained a fine art collection and exclaimed: ‘Come, Monsieur Adam, now we must become picture thieves!’ But it did not stop him from taking an Italian Madonna for himself. The situation degenerated rapidly as the soldiers struggled to get hold of as much as they could before the roaring fire destroyed it. As they often passed through cellars they were also for the most part drunk. ‘The men of Marshal Davout’s 1st army corps, which was stationed in Moscow and its environs, flooded into the city, penetrating into every accessible place, and particularly into the cellars, looting everything they could find and indulging in all the excesses of drink,’ in the words of Colonel Boulart. ‘One could see a continuous procession of soldiers carrying off to their camp wine, sugar, tea, furniture, furs, and so on.’
12
In this, they were ably seconded and even incited by some of the inhabitants and Russian soldiers who had stayed behind. The convicts who had been released were amongst the first to start looting, and in many cases servants left behind helped themselves to their masters’ possessions as soon as they realised their actions could be blamed on others. In some cases they showed the soldiers where the masters had walled up or buried their most valued possessions. The Russian looters were soon accosted by French or allied soldiers, who not only robbed them but forced them to help by carrying their booty.
‘The army had dissolved completely; everywhere one could see drunken soldiers and officers loaded with booty and provisions seized from houses which had fallen prey to the flames,’ wrote Major Pion des Loches. They would stumble on better pickings, and dump what they had already looted in order to make room for more valuable
booty. ‘The streets were strewn with books, porcelain, furniture, and clothing of every kind.’
13
The roar of the fire was pierced by the screams of people being beaten up and women being raped, and by the howls of chained-up dogs being burnt alive. ‘All these excesses of avarice were joined by the worst depravations of debauchery,’ according to Eugène Labaume. ‘Neither the nobility of rank nor the candour of youth nor the tears of beauty were respected in a rush of cruel licentiousness which was inevitable in this monstrous war in which sixteen united nations differing in language and customs felt at liberty to give full rein to their lusts safe in the knowledge that their depredations would only be attributed to one of them.’
14
The
cantinières
were in the forefront, determined to stock up for the next few months, and they were among the most determined and pitiless looters, ripping the clothes off women in their search for precious items. Anyone who put up any resistance or tried to safeguard their valuables was likely to be bludgeoned to death, irrespective of age or sex. And any French looter who became isolated from his companions and wandered into a cellar where a larger number of the inhabitants were hiding was likely to meet the same fate.
Captain Fantin des Odoards remembered seeing three drunken soldiers being drawn in a gilded chariot by half-starved nags, people carrying precious supplies of flour wrapped in costly silks and vodka in gilt chamberpots, the only receptacle that had come to hand, and raddled old
cantinières
flouncing around in looted ballgowns. ‘The saturnalia of the carnival back home never came close to these hideous and grotesque sights,’ he recalled.
15
Those of the remaining inhabitants who ventured out were beaten up, stripped even of their shirts and often forced to carry the very things stolen from them back to the looters’ camp. As they were dispossessed, so they too were forced to join in the scavenging in order to survive, and old men, women and children were soon all busy, mainly at night so as to avoid the French.
One minor official stranded in Moscow with his family was robbed
and turned out of his house by a gang of soldiers. They were then set upon in the street by another gang, who took everything the first lot had left them. As the family huddled in a courtyard they were accosted by a third gang who, finding nothing to steal, simply beat them up. They were then picked on to carry things by various groups of looters.
16
After three days the fire began to abate, and on 18 September Napoleon rode back into Moscow. The fire died out the following day, order was restored and normality of a sort returned. Some of the inhabitants who had fled actually began to drift back into the city. But nothing seemed normal about this campaign any more to the men of the Grande Armée, who were horrified at the Russian burning of the city. ‘How can one make war on barbarians like these?’ complained Lieutenant Henckens, echoing a widely-held view.
17
And Napoleon himself was baffled.