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These wild horsemen were of no military value in themselves. Their principal tactic was to rush forward yelling ‘Hurrah!’, hoping to terrify the enemy into flight, at which point they would catch a few fugitives and pick through whatever booty the others had left behind. If a soldier stood his ground and levelled a musket at them they would invariably run, but he was wise not to fire it, as they would return and get him while he was reloading. The cossack pike had a thin round point which could only prick and not sever tendons or muscles, so unless it found a vital organ its wound was not serious.

On the advance, the French had ignored the cossacks, making fun of their shameless unwillingness to expose themselves to the slightest danger. ‘If one were to raise a regiment of French girls they would, I believe, show more courage than these famous cossacks with their long pikes and their long beards,’ commented one soldier. But in the conditions of a retreat, and in the absence of adequate numbers of cavalry on the French side, they were to exert an influence quite beyond their potential. ‘The French soldier is easily demoralised,’
remarked Lieutenant Blaze de Bury. ‘Four Hussars on his flank terrify him more than a thousand in front.’
¹¹

On 2 November Marshal Lefèbvre harangued the Old Guard on the subject with his usual directness. ‘Grenadiers and Chasseurs, the cossacks are there, there, there and there,’ he said, gesturing to the four points of the compass. ‘If you do not follow me, you are f—d. I am no ordinary general, and it is with good reason that in the army of the Moselle I was known as the Eternal Father. Grenadiers and Chasseurs, I say to you again: if you do not stay with me you are f—d. And anyway, I don’t care a f—k. You can all go and f—k yourselves.’
¹²
The Guard did not disappoint, and the ranks remained steady throughout; but the same could not be said of other troops. Once morale began to crack on the retreat, an irrational fear took over, and the mere shout of ‘Cossacks!’ would send old soldiers scurrying for cover.

The French were retreating in echelons, with Napoleon leading the way accompanied by the Old Guard, the Young Guard, the remains of Murat’s cavalry and Junot’s corps, and reaching Viazma on 31 October. Next came Ney, followed by Prince Eugène’s Italians and what was left of Poniatowski’s Poles. Bringing up the rear was Davout with his 1st Corps.

Progress was slow, mainly due to lack of horsepower. Shortage of fodder had debilitated the horses, which were growing too weak to pull the guns and
caissons
. Guns normally drawn by three pairs were now having teams of twelve or fifteen horses hitched to them, and even these could not manage to pull the heavy pieces over the muddy rivulets and up the many inclines in the road. Passing infantry would be enlisted to help push the guns, but the exhausted footsloggers did not relish this task and did everything to avoid it. Powder wagons were blown up and surplus shells jettisoned to lighten the load. The private carriages and booty-laden wagons of individuals were seized and burnt by the artillery, who commandeered the horses. At Gzhatsk on 30 October Henri-Joseph Paixhans, an aide-de-camp to General
Lariboisière, passed a column of wagons laden with wounded men whose horses had been taken. ‘These poor unfortunates implored our pity with their hands joined in prayer,’ he recalled. ‘They called out to us in heart-rending tones that they too were Frenchmen, that they had been wounded fighting at our side, and they begged us tearfully not to abandon them.’
¹³

Part of the problem was that Napoleon saw himself as carrying out a tactical withdrawal rather than a retreat. Several of the corps commanders wanted to abandon a proportion of their guns, which were of no use to them. This would have liberated horses with which to draw the rest and saved much time, but Napoleon would not hear of it, maintaining that the Russians would claim the abandoned guns as trophies. This determination not to lose face would cost him dear.
¹⁴

Along with other unnecessary impedimenta, the French had with them some three thousand Russian prisoners. Even though their presence cost nothing in terms of supplies – the unfortunate wretches were given no food at all, so they fed off the dead horses they found by the wayside and ended up, by some accounts, eating their own dead – they were an aggravating encumbrance to the Portuguese infantry detailed to escort them, and took up valuable space on the road.
¹⁵
And space was at a premium.

A major drawback of retreating in echelons down the same road, as Napoleon had elected to do, was that only the leading unit had a clear field of march, while all the others had to move through the mess left behind by the preceding ones. Their path was laboured by tens of thousands of feet, hooves and wheels – into a stormy sea of mud if it was wet, and into a skating rink of compacted snow and ice when it began snowing. Such supplies as there might have been along the way were devoured, and even the available shelter was dismantled for firewood by those who had gone before. The road was littered with abandoned carriages and wagons, dead horses and jettisoned baggage; and, worst of all, the following columns kept coming up against a slow-moving mass of traffic.

Apart from the tens of thousands of civilians following the army
there were
commissaires
and other functionaries attached to it, and officers’ servants. They were mixed up in a throng of booty-laden deserters, some on foot, some in wagons;
cantinières
with their laden vehicles; and wounded officers travelling in carriages, tended by their servants. There were also some lightly wounded from the transports which had left Moscow in the days before the evacuation who were caught up and eventually overtaken by the retreating army. Their numbers were swelled daily by those wounded in the fighting along the way.

There were a large number of soldiers who had fallen behind and become separated from their units, which they sought, and occasionally managed, to rejoin. But it was difficult for them to catch up, as they had to push their way through a compact mass of people, horses and vehicles. There were others who, having fallen behind, threw away their weapons and were absorbed into the mass of stragglers, demoralised and guided more and more by herd instinct.

This swelling throng of people moved along the same road as the army, using up whatever resources were left and cluttering its path. It encumbered the approaches to every bridge and defile, as the absence of discipline coupled with a desperation verging on panic invariably produced chaos at such places. ‘Men, horses and vehicles would press forward pell-mell, pushing and shoving without any mutual consideration,’ wrote Dumonceau. ‘Woe betide those who allowed themselves to be knocked over! They could not get up, were trodden underfoot and caused others to trip and fall on top of them. In this manner mounds of men and horses, dead and dying, gradually piled up, blocking the way. But the crowd kept coming, banking up and cluttering the approaches to the obstacle. Impatience and anger would come into play. People quarrelled, pushed each other away, knocked each other over, and then one could hear the cries of the unfortunates who, knocked over, trampled, were caught and crushed beneath the wheels of carriages or other vehicles.’
¹⁶
And if a cry of ‘Cossacks!’ went up, the ensuing panic would multiply the number of those crushed to death.

As well as slowing their progress, all this had a demoralising effect on the following troops, who marched down a devastated road and saw only abandoned equipment, human and equine corpses, and men who had thrown away their weapons. The situation was worst for the rearguard, which not only had to march over a veritable obstacle course, but also to roll before it a snowballing mass of stragglers who impeded its movements and even impaired its ability to fight. Colonel Raymond de Fezensac, who found himself in the rearguard with his 4th of the Line between Viazma and Smolensk, would have his bivouacs crowded by cadging or thieving stragglers, who refused to make use of the night to move ahead but would try to march with his force when it set off in the morning. He would chase them off with rifle butts and warn them that he would not let them take refuge inside his squares if he was attacked. But still they hung about his regiment, getting in his way and making it easier for his men to desert.

The constant sight of disbanded men thinking only of themselves weakened the resolve of those who were still trying to do their duty. ‘The soldier who remained with the colours found himself in the role of a booby,’ explained Stendhal. ‘And as that is something the Frenchman abhors above all, there were soon only soldiers of heroic character and simpletons left under arms.’
¹⁷

On the evening of 2 November Miloradovich, who was full of fight and keen to get at the French, tried to cut the road in front of Davout’s corps, which was bringing up the rear, at a defile near Gzhatsk. His guns wreaked havoc in the pile-up of field guns,
caissons
, private carriages and stragglers. A convoy of civilians and wounded was caught up in this chaos, and many of those who were not able to abandon their vehicles and make a dash for it perished. But Miloradovich did not have enough infantry to attack the French, and had to back off when Davout deployed troops against him.

Two days later, with a full complement of some 25,000 men, he made a second attempt to cut off Davout, just east of Viazma. This
time he came between Davout’s 14,000 or so exhausted men and the preceding echelons, while Platov attacked Davout from the back and Figner’s and Seslavin’s irregulars harried his flanks. The French rearguard was thus caught between two fires and found itself in a perilous situation.

Prince Eugène and Poniatowski heard the guns and promptly turned about. Mustering about 13,000 and 3500 men respectively, they mounted a determined attack which repulsed Miloradovich and opened the road, while Ney, who had also turned about, covered the approaches to Viazma. The Russians were reinforced by the arrival of Uvarov’s cavalry, but Davout was nevertheless able to beat an orderly retreat and, when the Russians tried to harry him too closely, he even sallied out and captured three guns. In the late afternoon two fresh Russian divisions, Paskievich’s and Choglokov’s, attacked the outskirts of Viazma, and Ney withdrew across the river, burning the bridges.

Losses on the French side were about six thousand dead and wounded, and two thousand taken prisoner, while Russian casualties were no higher than 1845, and possibly less. Poniatowski’s horse fell while he was jumping a ditch, crushing his knee and shoulder and causing severe internal injuries, which put him out of action. But the most depressing aspect of the battle for the French was that two standards had been lost, and that at one point towards the end of the day some of Davout’s men had broken into a panicked flight.
¹⁸

The Russians, however, had nothing to rejoice over. If Miloradovich and Platov had squandered an opportunity to destroy Davout’s corps, Kutuzov had missed an even greater one. The Field Marshal with his 65,000-odd men had spent the day a couple of miles to the south of Viazma in a position from which he could, without any trouble at all, have taken Ney’s corps in the rear, thus nullifying Prince Eugène’s and Poniatowski’s efforts, and wiping all four of the enemy corps off the chessboard, leaving Napoleon with little more than his Guard. Although he did despatch some reinforcements to Miloradovich, the old man had resolutely opposed any and every
suggestion to make an offensive move. He was not even on speaking terms with Bennigsen by now, having suspended him from his duties and told a staff officer he had sent to him: ‘Tell your General that I do not know him and do not wish to know him, and that if he sends me one more report I shall hang his messenger.’ Bennigsen, Toll, Konovnitsin, Wilson and others were beside themselves. That night Wilson wrote to Lord Cathcart, British Ambassador in St Petersburg, asking him to use all his influence to get Kutuzov sacked. On 6 November he wrote to the Tsar himself, saying that Kutuzov was a tired old man who should be replaced with Bennigsen.
¹⁹
In the event it hardly mattered who was in command of the Russian army, as on that very day a new element had come into play.

Accounts of the retreat vary a great deal, depending on who the memoirist was, which part of the army he was with, and what befell him. The distance between the head of the column and the rearguard was rarely less than thirty kilometres, and at times stretched to a hundred, which meant that various units often marched through different weather on the same day. By the same token, the one who writes that the retreat was an orderly one up to Smolensk and the one who paints a picture of chaos on the first day can both be right.

Captain Hubert Biot, a Chasseur incapacitated by a shell at Borodino, left Moscow on 18 October in a carriage with two other wounded officers, and the three of them rolled without mishap all the way to Paris, because they were always ahead of the army. Madame Fusil, one of the French actresses in Moscow who decided to return to Paris with the Grande Armée, was perfectly comfortable in an officer’s carriage until 7 November, when his horses died. She then had a very difficult time, but eventually managed to find a place in a marshal’s carriage and rolled on comfortably enough in the first echelon. The aristocratic young Adrien de Mailly and his friend Charles de Beauveau, both of them wounded, shared a comfortable carriage and sang songs or read to each other as they drove. ‘To support the misfortunes of war with courage and gaiety, there is nothing like
being French, being young, and also, perhaps, being a nobleman,’ he wrote.
²⁰
Those who trudged further back had a rather different picture of events.