Authors: Adam Zamoyski
A troupe of French actors resident in Moscow had stayed behind, and they gave a series of performances of light comedies by Marivaux and others. They played not in any of the public theatres, which had been reduced to ashes, but in the private court theatre of an aristocratic palace. ‘You cannot imagine through what magnificent salons we passed in order to get to the theatre,’ Major Strżyzewski wrote to his wife in Warsaw. ‘I was entranced by everything I saw. In one of the drawing rooms, I thought particularly of you, since it was filled with the most beautiful flowers.’ He judged the actors ‘passable’. In the interval the spectators were served refreshments by grenadiers of the Old Guard.
23
Some arranged their own entertainments. Napoleon did not go to the theatre, but did attend a recital given for him at the Kremlin by
the singer Signor Tarquinio. The twenty-seven-year-old Sergeant Adrien Bourgogne and his messmates had, in the process of providing themselves with the necessities of life, amassed quite a wardrobe of rich court clothing, some of it dating back to the previous century, which they had found in abandoned palaces. One evening they and the Russian trollops who had moved in with them prinked themselves up in this finery, with the regimental barber dressing their hair and making them up. They then held a ball and danced to the sound of fife and drum, the whores dolled up as eighteenth-century marquises high-kicking and causing a great deal of mirth.
24
Although Moscow boasted a French Catholic church, St Louis des Français, whose parish priest, the Abbé Surrugues, had remained at his post, churchgoing did not figure among the activities of the soldiers. A handful of officers, mostly from aristocratic backgrounds, came to mass or confession, and the Abbé was only asked to give Christian burial on two occasions. He went around the hospitals to talk to the wounded, but found them interested only in their physical wants, not their spiritual needs. ‘They do not seem to believe in an afterlife,’ Father Surrugues wrote. ‘I baptised several infants born to soldiers, which is the only thing they still care about, and I was treated with respect.’
25
While Napoleon held frequent reviews, at which his troops looked their best, he had not once since reaching Moscow inspected their bivouacs or quarters, with the result that he had no idea of their real state of mind and body. At Petrovskoie, where a large part of Prince Eugène’s 4th Corps was stationed, the generals had installed themselves in the summer residences of wealthy Muscovites, the officers in various pavilions, follies and summer houses scattered around their parks, and the soldiers in the surrounding fields. They sat around their campfires on fine furniture rescued from some gutted palace, eating their gruel off silver plate and drinking the finest wines from precious goblets. ‘Our actual poverty was masked by an apparent abundance,’ observed an officer on Prince Eugène’s staff. ‘We had
neither bread nor meat, and our tables were covered with preserves and sweets; tea, liqueurs and wines of every kind, served in fine porcelain or in crystal vessels, showed how close luxury was to poverty in our case.’
26
Junot’s Westphalian 8th Corps, stuck out at Mozhaisk, also suffered from a lack of decent housing and continual shortages of food. The men would come into Moscow whenever they could in order to buy necessary supplies, but as they were obliged to purchase them from the looters, they had to pay high prices.
Undoubtedly the worst off in every way were Murat’s cavalry and Poniatowski’s 5th Corps, stationed to the south of Moscow, around Voronovo and Vinkovo, in close proximity to Kutuzov’s camp at Tarutino. It was an unusual situation. An unspoken armistice had come into existence, with both sides merely keeping an eye on each other. On one occasion, some French foragers came across a herd of cattle in the no-man’s-land between them, and divided the booty up amicably with the Russians. On another Murat himself rode over to some Russian pickets and told them it would be more convenient if they moved a few hundred yards further back, which they obligingly did. One day he had a chat with Miloradovich, who was inspecting his outposts. Whenever Murat rode out in his operatic costume, the cossacks would greet him with shouts of ‘The King, the King!’ As a sign of respect for his reckless courage, they never fired on him, and in his naivety Murat seems to have fancied that he could subvert these wild children of the steppe. Officers on outpost duty would pass the time of day talking to their opposite numbers, exchanging prognoses about the war and debating whether they would soon all be off to India together. The French believed that it was only a matter of time before peace was signed, and the passage of Lauriston through their camp on his way to see Kutuzov only confirmed them in their conviction.
27
But the conditions in which the French stationed here waited for the hoped-for peace were terrible. They were mostly camped out in the open fields, with no shelter to protect them from the rain and
the cold. They slept on improvised beds of straw or branches under the stars, or under a
caisson
or carriage. The autumn days were cold, even if it was sunny, and at night there was always a frost. There was a severe shortage of food, and unlike their comrades stationed in or around the city, the men here could not go to Moscow, some eighty kilometres distant, to stock up.
The bivouac of the Polish Chevau-Légers at Voronovo was better than most. They had taken over the ruins of Rostopchin’s magnificent country house, which he had left with a large notice stating that although he had spent years building and planting his estate, he had personally burnt it down lest it provide shelter or comfort for the French invaders. Some of the officers had made makeshift tents in the ruins or squeezed into peasant huts in the village, while the men sheltered wherever they could find even a wall to shield them from the wind. The regimental
cantinières
created a café with surviving pieces of furniture, including one fine sofa from the palace, and the men sat around drinking coffee from a bizarre array of gold, silver and china vessels, discussing the campaign and listening to General Colbert, who commanded the division, and his two aides-de-camp sing airs from Paris vaudeville in the evenings.
Men and horses wasted away at an alarming rate in these conditions, and the words ‘corps’, ‘division’ and ‘regiment’ are highly misleading when considering the state of the French cavalry by the middle of October. The 3rd Cavalry Corps, consisting of eleven regiments, could only muster seven hundred horsemen. The 1st Regiment of Chasseurs could only field fifty-eight, and that only thanks to some reinforcements which had reached it from France. Squadrons in the 2nd Cuirassiers, usually 130 strong, were down to eighteen or twenty-four men. General Thielmann’s Saxon brigade was down to fifty horses.
28
The condition of the horses was dreadful, and by mid-October many of them were ‘entirely spoiled’, in the words of Lieutenant Henryk Dembinski of the 5th Polish Mounted Rifles. ‘It was so bad that, even though we had folded blankets to the thickness of sixteen,
their backs had rotted through completely, so much so that the rot had eaten through the saddlecloth, with the result that when a trooper dismounted, you could see the horse’s entrails.’
29
What is truly extraordinary is the degree to which even in these conditions Napoleon inspired absolute confidence in his men. As they sat around in camp with nothing to do, they endlessly discussed the situation. ‘We could see that we were slowly perishing, but our faith in the genius of Napoleon, in his many years of triumph, was so unbounded that these conversations always ended with the conclusion that he must know what he is doing better than us,’ recalls Lieutenant Dembinski.
30
Most of them were anxious – at being so far away from home, at the state of the army, at the lack of food, at the general turn events had taken. ‘But all our reflections did not give us the slightest fear: Napoleon is there,’ as Captain Fantin des Odoards put it. Among the letters found strewn in the road after a courier had been ambushed by cossacks was one from the Comte de Ségur, dated 16 October, telling his wife in the tenderest tones how much he loved and missed her, and discussing the progress of the tree-planting programme he had initiated in the park of his château.
31
Many of them were convinced that Napoleon was bent on a march to India. ‘We are expecting to leave soon,’ noted Boniface de Castellane on 5 October. ‘There is talk of going to India. We have such confidence that we do not reason as to the possibility of success of such an enterprise, but only on the number of months of marching necessary, on the time letters would take to come from France. We are accustomed to the infallibility of the Emperor and the success of his projects.’ Others fantasised about liberating girls from the Sultan’s seraglio, one dreaming of a Circassian girl, another of a Greek, another of a Georgian. ‘After a good treaty of alliance with Alexander, who willy-nilly will be dragged along with us like the others, we will go to Constantinople next year and from there to India,’ one officer wrote home. ‘It is only loaded down with the diamonds of Golconda
and the cloths of Kashmir that the Grande Armée will return to France!’
32
At the beginning of October, Murat sent his aide-de-camp General Rossetti to Moscow to inform Napoleon personally of the critical condition of the cavalry and of his exposed position. But Napoleon dismissed his report, saying that the Russians were too weak to attack. ‘My army is finer than ever,’ he told Rossetti. ‘A few days of rest have done it the greatest good.’ That was perhaps true of the troops which paraded before him in Moscow, but certainly not of the cavalry. On 10 October Murat wrote to General Bélliard on Berthier’s staff, urging him to get the truth through to the Emperor. ‘My Dear Bélliard,’ he wrote, ‘my position is atrocious. I have the whole enemy army in front of me. Our advance guard is reduced to nothing; it is starving, and it is no longer possible to go foraging without the virtual certainty of capture. Not a day passes without me losing two hundred men in this way.’
33
Napoleon was far too astute not to realise that his strategy had gone badly wrong, and that Caulaincourt had been right all along. But he did not like to admit it. And he recoiled from the only logical next step, which was to withdraw. He liked neither the idea of retreat, which went against his instincts, nor the implications of such a withdrawal on the political climate in Europe. He also had an extraordinary capacity for making himself believe something just by decreeing it to be true. ‘In many a circumstance, to wish something and believe it were for him one and the same thing,’ in the words of General Bourienne.
34
So he hung on, believing that Alexander’s nerve would break or that his own proverbial luck would come up with something.
He had studied weather charts, which told him that it did not get really cold until the beginning of December, so he did not feel any sense of urgency. What he did not realise, in common with many who do not know those climates, was just how sudden and savage changes of temperature can be, and how temperature is only one factor, which
along with wind, water and terrain can turn nature into a viciously powerful opponent.
The unusually fine weather at the beginning of October contributed to his complacency. He teased Caulaincourt, accusing him of peddling stories about the Russian winter invented to ‘frighten children’. ‘Caulaincourt thinks he’s frozen already,’ he quipped. He kept saying that it was warmer than Fontainebleau at that time of year, and dismissed suggestions that the army provide itself with gloves and items of warm clothing. He was not alone in his delusions. ‘We have been having the most wonderful weather for the past few days, which could not have been finer in France at this time of year,’ Davout wrote to his wife. ‘In general, people exaggerate the harshness of the climate here.’
35
With every day Napoleon spent in Moscow, the harder it was to leave without loss of face, and the usually decisive Emperor became immobilised by the need to choose between an unappealing range of options on the one hand, and stubborn belief in his lucky star on the other. He fell into the trap of thinking that by delaying a decision he was leaving his options open. In fact, he only really had one option, and he was reducing the chances of its success with every day he delayed.
On 12 October the daily
estafette
from Moscow to Paris was attacked and captured between Moscow and Mozhaisk, and on the following day the one coming from Paris was intercepted. General Ferrières, who had travelled all the way from Cadiz, was captured almost at the gates of Moscow. These events shook Napoleon, and the gravity of his position was underlined by the first light shower of snow, on 13 October, which covered the ruins of Moscow and the surrounding countryside in a blanket of brilliant white.
‘Let us make haste,’ he said on seeing the snow. ‘We must be in winter quarters in twenty days’ time.’
36
It was a bit late, but by no means too late. Smolensk, where he had some supplies, was only ten to twelve days’ march from Moscow, and his well-stocked bases at Minsk and Vilna were only another ten and fifteen respectively from
there. Having reached these, his army would be well fed and supplied, safe in friendly country and able to draw on reinforcements from the depots he had built up in Poland and Prussia. In the spring he would be able to march on St Petersburg or any other point he chose.
A withdrawal is always a risky enterprise, as it can easily turn into a flight, but there are ways of limiting the damage, and in this case the first imperative was to ensure mobility by travelling as light as possible. Only this could have given Napoleon the initiative, even as he withdrew. And the need to jettison things along the way tended to lower the morale of the retreating force while raising that of the pursuers. Expediency therefore demanded that he send on ahead or leave behind as much as possible, in terms of people and equipment.