Authors: Adam Zamoyski
As often as not, they had to bed down for the night in open countryside, with no cover of any kind, too exhausted to think even of building shelters out of branches. They would use their sabres to cut down saplings to burn. But the green, resinous wood produced clouds of acrid smoke before giving off any warmth, and quickly burnt out, so the fire had to be fed regularly all night. Even when they did get a good fire going it could only provide warmth for the hands and face, while their backs remained exposed to the temperature of the night. They would lay down branches around the fire to sit or lie down on, and huddle round the flames in tight groups of eight or ten men, hoping to create a small circle of warmth. But the fire would melt the snow, and they would soon find themselves sitting or lying in wet mud.
If they were lucky, they might find a half-ruined deserted village, but it usually contained unwelcome relicts. ‘Under its still-warm cinders, which the wind drove into our faces, would be the bodies of several soldiers or peasants,’ wrote Eugène Labaume, ‘and sometimes one could also see murdered children and young girls who had been slaughtered in the very place they had been raped.’ The generals and senior officers would usually take possession of the best of the remaining huts, but disagreements about precedence sometimes led to duels. The men would crowd into whatever huts, barns, sheds, styes or other shelter they could find. If there were large numbers of them they would trample each other in the process, on some occasions even suffocating those who had got in first and were pressed harder and harder by an incessant flow of new arrivals desperate to get out of the cold.
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Once a group occupied a hut, it would defend the entrance by force. But the thatch would soon be stripped off the roof by others eager to feed their horses. Those who could find no shelter would settle down in the lee of the hut and start tearing slats off the roof, shutters and any other accessible elements in order to build fires, with the result that those inside would find their shelter gradually dismantled around them. All too often those outside would build their
campfires too close to the walls, and the huts would catch fire. If they were very crowded or those inside were asleep, they might be burnt alive.
Even without outside intervention, soldiers who found a hut for the night ran the risk of finding their death in it. The Russian huts were heated by stoves, about two metres square, made of wood rendered with clay, which had to be heated up gradually, but the frozen soldiers would stoke them up with every piece of wood they could lay their hands on, and as often as not the stove would catch fire and the hut would go up in flames as they slept.
The misery of having no shelter for the night was compounded by lack of food. Most of the rations brought from Moscow had been consumed by the time the army reached Mozhaisk, and they were now condemned to retreat along a road which had been devastated by the retreating Russians and then bled dry by themselves on the way to Moscow. It was not possible to send foraging parties out on either side of the road, for these would naturally fall behind the main body of the army, and become easy prey for the pursuing enemy.
As supplies ran out and materiel was left behind in abandoned wagons, organised feeding of the troops became impossible. There might be a sack of corn, but there would be no way of grinding it (a large supply of small grinders had been distributed at Dorogobuzh, but most had been left by the roadside as the horses died). There might be some groats or buckwheat, cabbage or scraps of meat, but no pot in which to make a stew.
Conscientious and resourceful officers who managed to keep their companies together ensured that essentials were not discarded, and organised the fairly shared consumption of whatever was available, so soldiers belonging to a disciplined unit had a better chance of survival. When they stopped for the night, one detail went in search of firewood, another built shelters, another prepared food, and so on; others were detailed to feed the pack animals; others still kept the fires burning and stood watch while their comrades slept.
Some units took care of themselves remarkably well. Dr La Flise,
who had become separated from his regiment, fell in with a squadron of Polish lancers who would leave the road in the evening, find an inhabited village, surround it, and then strike a bargain with the peasants, promising not to harm them if they would just give them a little food and shelter for the night. They and their horses were thus able to keep in good shape, and as they had a couple of women with them, the officers would even spend the evenings entertainingly.
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Another who made sure he lacked for nothing was Colonel Chopin, commander of the 1st Cavalry Corps artillery. ‘A happy-go-lucky man who believed that the important thing in life was to think of oneself first, Colonel Chopin had, as soon as the retreat began, gathered about him a dozen of his most alert and resourceful gunners,’ recalled one of his comrades. ‘
A fourgon
with a good team of horses followed him and every evening this was the rallying point for all the gunners, each of whom brought in what he had managed to procure, either in the villages along the way or from isolated stragglers, from whom they took by guile or by force whatever they might have. In this way the Colonel’s band (and one cannot call it otherwise) lacked for nothing, the
fourgon
was amply stocked, and watching and listening to his purveyors, one sensed it would never be empty.’
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‘It was rare for those who had stayed with their unit not to be able to share some kind of stew,’ wrote Colonel Boulart. ‘But woe betide those who had become separated, for they found no help anywhere.’ The only exception was if they had something to offer. Colonel Pelet watched a singular trade taking place around a large fire. ‘Who’s got some coffee? I’ve got sugar. Who’ll exchange some salt for flour? Who’s got a pot? We could cook up a
popote
between us. Who’s got a coffee pot?’ and so on. ‘The man who had a small bag of salt could count on several days’ food, as he could trade it everywhere,’ he wrote. Albert de Muralt owed his life to the possession of a small iron cooking pot, which he would lend to people who had food to prepare in return for being allowed to share their meal.
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The only hope for those who had nothing was to team up with others in the same situation, and as a result corporations of eight or a dozen men
sprang up, usually owning a horse or a wagon, which operated in much the same way as Colonel Chopin’s gunners.
A particularly vulnerable group were the servants of officers. As they were not soldiers, they could not claim rations, and if their master were killed or wounded, or found them surplus to requirements, they were left without resource. By the same token, a good master was, for many, the only hope of salvation. In Moscow, General Dedem de Gelder had been prevailed upon to take on an extra servant, a bright young boy who drove his carriage and cared for his horses, and it was only much later, in the chaos of the retreat, that he realised the boy was a fifteen-year-old French girl who had fallen in love and run away from home to follow an artillery officer, only to see him killed at Borodino.
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Reading the accounts of survivors, one is struck by how little food was required to stay alive. But it was essential, for psychological as well as physical reasons, to have a regular supply. Lieutenant Combe had received a packet from home just before the army left Moscow. ‘What joy! News from Paris, from my father, my beloved mother, my whole family, my friends!’ he wrote. ‘Nothing in the world could compare with what I felt then.’ It was only later that he would come to realise that this packet saved his life, for it contained little tablets for making hot chocolate and stock cubes to make bouillon. This meant that he could brew up a cup of something nourishing whenever all else failed. Others had the intelligence to load their pockets with tea and sugar, and quite a few claim to have survived for up to two weeks on nothing but tea.
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On the retreat as on the advance, thoughts of food never left the soldiers’ minds. They would try to distract themselves by imagining that they were sitting down to dinner in one of the best restaurants in Paris. ‘Each of us would order his favourite dish, we would discuss their relative merits against other dishes, and in this way would distract ourselves for a while from the hunger which devoured us,’ recalled Victor Dupuy of the 7th Hussars, ‘but all too soon the horrible reality would assail us in all its power.’
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The reality was indeed repellent, the principal source of meat being dead horses, but even that was not easy to come by. When a horse fell and could not find the strength to get up, soldiers would rush up and start cutting it up. The most experienced would slit open its stomach in order to get the heart and liver. They would not bother to kill the horse first, and would swear at it for making their job more difficult as it struggled and kicked. Captain von Kurz noted that after the men had finished, the carcase looked as though veterinary surgeons had been carrying out an anatomical investigation.
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Many were disgusted by the idea, as well as the taste, of horsemeat, but the taste could be smothered by tearing open a cartridge and sprinkling a liberal dose of gunpowder on it, and most of them soon got used to it. Jacques Laurencin, a geographer attached to Napoleon’s headquarters, wrote to his mother explaining that horsemeat was really quite pleasant if sliced thinly and fried. General Roguet of the Young Guard thought it worth recording that the meat of the local
cognats
had a more delicate taste than that of French or German horses.
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Horses were not the only source of meat. ‘At Viazma we treated ourselves to a very good fricassée of cats,’ Laurencin assured his mother in a letter which would never reach her. ‘Five of us devoured three fine cats which were excellent.’ On the evening of 30 October, at Gzhatsk, Christian Septimus von Martens and his comrades cooked their first cat. ‘In order to allay the disgust which was welling up in us,’ he wrote, ‘I assured them that the gondoliers of Venice, who were by no means as miserable as we were at that moment, regarded a
ragoût
of cat as a treat.’
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The marching column was accompanied by dogs from the villages they had burnt, howling and disputing the carcases of horses with the famished men, and these too found their way into the pot if they were not careful. The pet hunting dogs or poodles various officers had brought along with them also began to disappear into cooking pots or onto the straight swords of cuirassiers and dragoons, which made good spits.
Bread was almost impossible to get hold of, but flour and groats of
one sort or another could be obtained here and there, so the men would make a paste of these using water and chopped-up straw for binding, and bake it into flat biscuits in a peasant stove or in the ashes of a campfire. But usually they would throw anything they could find into a pot and boil up a pottage, often adding the stump of a tallow candle to provide nourishing fat. Jakob Walter from Stuttgart, who had found it so difficult to adapt to campaign conditions at first, had grown quite resourceful, learning to pick hemp seeds and dig up cabbage stalks, which could be turned into nourishment if boiled for long enough.
‘We made our gruel with all kinds of flour mixed with melted snow,’ explained Captain François. ‘We would then throw in the powder from a cartridge, as the powder had the virtue of salting or at least of enhancing the bland taste of food prepared in this way.’ Duverger, the paymaster of the Compans division, wrote down the recipe for what he called ‘The Spartans’ Gruel’: ‘First melt some snow, of which you need a large quantity in order to produce a little water; then mix in the flour; then, in the absence of fat, put in some axle grease, and, in the absence of salt, some powder. Serve hot and eat when you are very hungry.’
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The conditions under which they had to take their meals did not help. The men were often so hungry that they scoffed the food raw, and even if they did cook it they would swallow it hurriedly, in fear of the enemy. Among the consequences were vomiting, indigestion, colic and diarrhoea. Another reason for wolfing down any food they might come across was that it might otherwise be stolen. ‘Thieving and bad faith spread through the army, reaching such a degree of brazenness, that one was no more secure in the midst of one’s own than one would have been surrounded by the enemy,’ noted Eugène Labaume. ‘All day long one heard only: “Oh God! somebody’s stolen my portmanteau; or knapsack, or bread, or horse,”’ recalled Louise Fusil.
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For many, particularly those who were on their own, stealing had become the only possible means of survival other than pilfering abandoned wagons, trunks and the pockets of those who had died
along the way. Everyone despised these disbanded men, referring to them as
fricoteurs
, from the word
fricoter
, to cook something up, as they were often to be seen pathetically trying to concoct something to eat by the roadside. If they came up to a campfire looking for a little warmth they would be brutally pushed away. Sometimes they would stand just behind those sitting round the fire, hoping to glean at least some warmth from it.
Many of these unattached men walked over to the Russian bivouac fires to give themselves up, in their thousands on particularly cold nights. But their hopes that this would put a term to their sufferings were soon dashed, and their fate was not to be envied. Although they officially subscribed to the code accepted throughout Europe, the Russian attitude to prisoners was generally one of contempt.
There were some shining examples of consideration. When the much-loved young Colonel Casabianca, commander of the part-Corsican, part-Valaisain 11th of the Line, was captured outside Polotsk, his captors spared no effort to keep him alive. When he died of his wounds a few days later they returned his body, escorted by a guard of honour whose officer handed over a note from General Wittgenstein. ‘I am returning the body of the valorous Colonel of the 11th regiment, whom we mourn as much as you, for
a
brave man must always be honoured,’ it ran.
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