Authors: Adam Zamoyski
But as with every other aspect of this campaign, political imperatives prevented him from taking the course dictated by military considerations, not to say common sense. His original assumption that his occupation of Moscow would produce peace meant that instead of regarding the city as a forward position he treated it as a base. The transportable wounded of Borodino were not sent back to Smolensk and Vilna to recuperate, but brought forward to Moscow. It was only on 5 October that he gave orders that the movable wounded still at Mozhaisk, Kolotskoie and Gzhatsk be gradually taken back to Smolensk, and not until 10 October that a first convoy of wounded left Moscow. Had he begun this process a week earlier, thousands of men of all ranks would have survived. Those who did get sent back in the first week of October travelled unmolested in perfectly good conditions all the way to Paris. Stendhal, who left Moscow with a convoy of wounded as late as 16 October, got through to Smolensk without problem. They were harassed by cossacks, but not enough to disturb him in his reading of Madame du Deffand’s
Lettres
. Even the trophies – banners, regalia and treasures from the Kremlin, the great silver-gilt cross Napoleon ordered to be wrenched from the dome of the tower of Ivan the Great, which he intended to erect in Paris – were not sent on ahead.
He kept ordering all available reinforcements forward, rather than
building up reserves along his line of retreat. It was only on 14 October, the day after the first snowfall, that he gave orders that no more troops were to be sent forward to Moscow, but ordered back to Smolensk, and that the remaining wounded in Moscow be evacuated immediately, those from Mozhaisk and Kolotskoie by 20 October, those from Gzhatsk two days later.
The more seriously wounded, of whom there may have been as many as 12,000, should have been left where they were, which was what Dr Larrey had intended – he even left medical teams, supplemented by French inhabitants of Moscow. Dr La Flise was horrified when the order came to transport them, realising that they would mostly perish from the buffetings on the road even if they escaped the pikes of marauding cossacks.
37
Napoleon fixed on 19 October as the date he would leave Moscow, later rescheduling it for 20 October. But even then, various political considerations vitiated sensible preparations. He could retreat straight back down the road along which he had come, which had the advantages of being familiar, guarded by French units and punctuated with supply depots, as well as being the most direct. The only disadvantage of this road was that the country alongside it had been ravaged by the advance and would not provide much in the way of sustenance. Napoleon therefore asked General Baraguay d’Hilliers, stationed at Smolensk, to identify two side roads running parallel to the main road, so that some elements of his army could march through virgin country.
But going back the way he had come would be tantamount to an admission that he was retreating. He considered marching north-westward, through Volokolamsk, where he could crush Wintzingerode’s detachment, to join up with Victor and St Cyr at Vitebsk, where he could attack Wittgenstein and whence, if necessary, he could withdraw to Vilna. This option had the merit that it would threaten St Petersburg, which might just cause Alexander’s nerve to snap. Or he could march southwards, strike a blow at Kutuzov, and then march back to Minsk via Kaluga or Medyn. This option had the
disadvantage that if he fell back on Smolensk even after defeating Kutuzov, it would look like flight. So he entertained the possibility of returning to Moscow after defeating him. Instead of evacuating the city, he therefore gave orders for Davout’s, Mortier’s and Ney’s corps to gather up and stockpile three months’ worth of rations and six months’ worth of stewed cabbage, to improve the defences of the Kremlin and turn all the monasteries into strongpoints, which were to be held by horseless cavalrymen armed with muskets ‘during the absence of the army’. A large part of his household was also to remain in Moscow when he moved out.
38
‘It is possible that I may return to Moscow,’ Napoleon wrote, as late as 18 October, to General Lariboisière, inspector-general of the artillery, who was worried at the vast quantities of equipment stockpiled there. ‘So nothing that could be of use must be destroyed.’ When, in the end, Moscow did have to be evacuated, Lariboisière would have to burn five hundred
caissons
, 60,000 muskets and several hundred thousand measures of powder before leaving. In the absence of a sufficient number of horses to pull the guns, he also wanted the useless four-pounders destroyed, but Napoleon felt this smelt of defeat.
39
Napoleon should have sent back all his dismounted cavalrymen. There were several thousand of these by the time he reached Moscow, and the number grew daily. Instead, he ordered them to be formed up into dismounted units and issued with carbines, which was pointless. The men did not know how to and did not wish to fight as infantry, they did not know the drill, and they could feel no
esprit de corps
in these units. ‘The worst infantry regiment is much more effective than four regiments of dismounted cavalry,’ wrote Boniface de Castellane. ‘They bleat like donkeys that they were not made for this work.’
40
Colonel Antoine Marbot, commanding the 23rd Chasseurs à Cheval under St Cyr, ignored orders to keep all dismounted men near the front, and sent his all the way back to Warsaw, where he knew they would find horses; in this way he had 250 well-mounted men ready for action at the end of the campaign, while all the dismounted cavalrymen who remained with St Cyr were taken prisoner. ‘It would
have been so easy throughout the summer and autumn to send men to Warsaw, whose remount depot had plenty of horses but no riders,’ he wrote.
41
Had Napoleon evacuated his horseless cavalrymen just one week ahead of the army, he would have had the cavalry whose lack was to rob him of victory in 1813 and 1814.
Colonel Marbot also made his men acquire rough sheepskin coats from the local peasants at the beginning of September, thereby saving the lives of a great many of them. The Colonel of the Polish Chevau-Légers of the Guard did the same, and as Master of the Horse, Caulaincourt made all the riders, grooms and drivers under his command provide themselves with not only sheepskin coats, but also gloves and fur hats.
42
Other officers showed similar prescience, but usually only with respect to themselves, investing in good fur coats (as opposed to fancy items for the ladies back home), fur-lined overboots, gloves and fur caps. Lieutenant Henckens of the 6th Chasseurs bought some small pieces of fur which he got one of his men, a tailor by trade, to make up into a vest, to be worn under his shirt. Colonel Parguez proudly informed his wife in a letter that he had had a pair of bearskin boots made up with the fur on the inside.
43
Captain Louis Bro of the Chasseurs à Cheval of the Guard was taking no chances. ‘I bought two little cossack horses used to surviving off straw and the branches of pine trees. They carried my personal effects and a hundred kilograms of reserve victuals, principally chocolate and
eau-de-vie
; I foresaw that my exhausted French horse would not go far. The two horses, shod with steel, would take me all the way to the Niemen. I also furnished myself with a fur-lined cloak, a fox fur, a fur-lined cap, felt boots, and resin bricks which would allow me to light a fire at any moment.’
44
Louis Lagneau, a surgeon with the Young Guard, had taken the precaution of having a small tent made in Moscow, in which he and three colleagues would be able to sleep in relative warmth and shelter even in the coldest conditions – it got perfectly warm inside with the four of them. And Antoine Augustin Pion des Loches, recently promoted
to the rank of colonel in the foot artillery of the Guard, prepared himself against all eventualities. In his small wagon he packed a hundred large dry biscuits, a sack of flour, three hundred bottles of wine, twenty to thirty bottles of rum and other spirits, ten pounds of tea, ten pounds of coffee, a large quantity of candles, and ‘in the event of winter quarters east of the Niemen, which I felt to be inevitable, a case containing quite a fine edition of the works of Voltaire and Rousseau; a
History of Russia
by Le Cler; and that by Levesque, the plays of Molière, the works of Piron,
de l’Ésprit des Lois
and a few other works, such as Raynal’s
Histoire philosophique
, all bound in white calf and gilt-edged’.
45
Yet while people such as these were clever enough to equip themselves with the means of survival, there was not a single order given from the top, not even at corps command or divisional level, to take appropriate measures to protect the troops during the forthcoming operations. Good commanders such as Davout made sure the soldiers’ uniforms and boots were repaired, but that was as far as it went. And whatever other measures they might have taken would in any case have been largely nullified by one great omission, which was to cost tens of thousands of lives and turn a potentially orderly retreat into a tragic rout.
The moment they had come to rest at Moscow, all Polish units set up forges and began making horseshoes with sharp crampons in preparation for winter. They told their French comrades to do likewise, but their advice bounced off a wall of Gallic unconcern. ‘The stubbornness and arrogance of the French, who felt that having been through so many wars they knew better than everyone else and did not need their advice, did not allow them to sharp-shoe their horses,’ wrote Józef Grabowski, a Polish officer attached to imperial headquarters. Luckily for Napoleon, Caulaincourt, who had seen several Russian winters, took it upon himself to have all the horses of his household properly shod. But when it was suggested the same measures be ordered throughout the army, the Emperor dismissed it – with fatal consequences for him and his whole army.
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N
apoleon’s military success in the past had rested on his capacity to make a quick appraisal of any situation and to act intelligently and decisively on its basis. Yet from the moment he set out on his ‘Second Polish War’ he displayed a marked inability either to make the correct appraisal or to act decisively. There were probably many reasons for this, and without doubt one of them was a difficulty in comprehending what his opponents were trying to achieve.
The Russians had spent a year and a half deploying for an offensive, only to retreat the moment operations began. This at first led Napoleon to expect a trap, and then to assume that they were avoiding battle out of fear of losing. He was not to know that most of it was the result of chaos and intrigue at Russian headquarters. When they did stand and fight, at Borodino, he defeated them, and since they then gave up their capital, he had assumed that they were beaten. Kutuzov’s passivity over the next few weeks appeared to confirm this, and by giving him a false sense of security ultimately contributed to his defeat.
The more romantically minded historians have tried to make out that the Russian Field Marshal’s inaction was a clever ploy to lull Napoleon into staying in Moscow as long as possible so as to ensure that he would be caught by the dread Russian winter. This may indeed have been the case. Or it may have been that Kutuzov simply did not
know what to do, and was afraid of doing the wrong thing. That is certainly what many at his headquarters thought.
Soon after his arrival at Tarutino he began to receive reinforcements. Over the summer months 174,800 regulars, 31,500 irregulars, mostly cossacks, and 62,300 militia were fed into the armies operating against Napoleon, and Kutuzov received the lion’s share. His army was growing stronger with every day that passed, and in the four weeks it spent at Tarutino the force of no more than about 40,000 tired and dispirited troops had grown to 88,386 regulars, with 622 guns, supplemented by 13,000 Don cossacks and 15,000 irregular cossacks and Bashkir cavalry.
1
Kutuzov knew that as his forces grew, those of the French dwindled. Every day his patrols brought in scores of French foragers, marauders and deserters, from whom he knew that the Grande Armée was suffering from an acute shortage of fodder and fresh food, and that morale was sinking. He was contributing to this process through the ‘flying detachments’ he had organised. These hovered on the fringes of the area occupied by the French, catching any who ventured out and occasionally swooping in to snatch a small detachment or supply train. In all, the French lost some 15,500 men in this manner during their five-week stay in Moscow.
2
But Kutuzov was in no hurry to engage in regular warfare. Alexander’s masterplan, brought from St Petersburg by Colonel Chernyshev, which envisaged a great encirclement of Napoleon as he fell back from Moscow by the combined armies of Kutuzov, Tormasov, Chichagov, Wittgenstein and Steinheil, was politely discussed and shelved on the grounds that the Russian army was not strong enough to face the French yet.
3
This was true enough, as, apart from giving the troops time to rest and drilling new recruits, Kutuzov had done little to prepare for offensive operations. He amalgamated the First and Second Armies, leaving Barclay with the title of commander but no actual role. He continued to foster chaos by his idiosyncratic style of command, in which he was ably seconded by his new chief of staff, General
Konovnitsin, who spent his days smoking his pipe and chatting with brother-officers, but refused to sign a single order, according to Captain Maievsky, one of Kutuzov’s duty officers. ‘Fearful for his reputation, Konovnitsin wanted, it seems, to appear highly active; but not being up to taking in the whole, he correctly assumed that everything that was good would be ascribed to him, and everything that was bad would be attributed to the Field Marshal,’ according to Maievsky. ‘But it seems that Kutuzov employed the same tactic, with the opposite aim.’ Konovnitsin was heartily loathed by Yermolov, who was still chief of staff to Barclay, who commanded the combined armies, and who found the atmosphere at headquarters so poisonous that he moved to a village some way from the camp and only came in when summoned.
4