B009YBU18W EBOK (61 page)

Another unwelcome piece of news waiting for him at Smolensk was that General Baraguay d’Hilliers, who had been sent out with his division to meet Napoleon’s intended retreat along the Medyn road at Yelnia, had met not Napoleon but Kutuzov’s main forces, and one of his brigades, General Augerau’s, 1650 strong, had been surrounded and forced to surrender.

As his own columns trudged into Smolensk from Viazma Napoleon could see how depleted they were. Estimates of the forces at his disposal in Smolensk vary wildly, but most sources agree that he had lost at least 60,000 men since leaving Moscow three weeks earlier, and that there were no more than about 40,000 left with their colours.
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And this included several thousand cavalrymen who were of no use without their mounts. ‘Horses, horses and more horses, whether for cuirassiers, dragoons, or light cavalry, or artillery or military
caissons
, that is the greatest of our present needs,’ Napoleon wrote to Maret in Vilna on 11 November.
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On the same day he heard of the disaster that had befallen his stepson.

He had ordered Prince Eugène to leave the main road at Dorogobuzh and make in a more or less straight line for Vitebsk. After a day’s march he came to the Vop, an insignificant river no more than fifteen or twenty metres wide at this point, and his sappers set about building a bridge across it. The best they could do with the materials to hand was not good enough, and the bridge collapsed. The entire 4th Corps had by now come up, and a two-mile-long tailback formed as the
troops waited for it to be rebuilt. As they stood patiently in driving snow and freezing temperatures, Platov’s cossacks had time to come up and unlimber their guns, and began shelling the queuing Italians. With no possibility of rebuilding the bridge Prince Eugène decided to ford the river, which was nowhere deeper than a metre and a half. The Royal Guard led the way, and although the water came up to the chins of the shorter men, they got across without much difficulty.

Prince Eugène himself followed, and ordered the artillery to be brought over so it might deploy on the western bank and cover the crossing with its fire. But although it is not deep, the Vop flows between steep banks some three metres high, made slippery by the snow. After only two guns had been dragged across and up the opposite bank, a
caisson
got stuck and then overturned. The vehicle behind it also became wedged in the river’s bed, and the one behind that slammed into the back of it. Other guns and caissons trying to bypass the jam also got stuck in the softened ooze, and soon the riverbed was a mass of vehicles whose wheels had sunk into the mud, and of horses desperately thrashing about trying to free themselves from the freezing water. ‘I can still see those brave soldiers of the train, obliged to spend whole hours with their teams in the water and, after having managed to drag one cannon or
caisson
out, go back in and double the team on another vehicle and start the struggle all over again,’ wrote Colonel Griois, who spent the whole day trying to get the guns across.
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He succeeded in dragging a dozen to the other side, but as night began to fall and the cossacks crept nearer, he realised that he would have to spike the rest. As soon as it became clear that the carriages and wagons would have to be abandoned, pandemonium broke out. Trunks were hauled down and broken open as men hurriedly transferred their most precious possessions and as much food as they could carry onto the backs of the unharnessed horses or their own before plunging into the river. Others seized the opportunity to rifle through the abandoned luggage of others before following. As they struggled to get across, many of the men and horses, gripped by the shock of the
icy water, went under and drowned. Many more died of hypothermia as they huddled round bivouac fires in their wet clothes that night. ‘It is impossible to describe the situation of the men after this crossing, or the physical torments endured and the pain resulting from this icy bath,’ wrote one of them, and the Italians dubbed it ‘
la notte d’orrore
’.
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Prince Eugène lost around 2500 men at the crossing, about a quarter of his force, as well as a large number of civilians and stragglers who had balked at the cold water. He also left behind fifty-eight spiked guns and his baggage train, which meant virtually all his rations and ammunition. He was now in no position to march as far as Vitebsk, and had to make a dash for Smolensk. This was just as well, since Vitebsk had fallen to the Russians. But the experience of the Vop crossing had demoralised many of his men and, notwithstanding his fine leadership qualities, there was not much he could do about it. ‘I ought not to hide from Your Highness,’ he reported to Berthier, ‘these three days of suffering have so crushed the spirit of the soldier that I believe him at this moment to be hardly capable of making an effort. Many men have died of hunger or of cold, and others, out of despair, have gone off to get themselves taken by the enemy.’
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In Smolensk, Napoleon vented his frustration at the course events had taken by blaming all his marshals and accusing them of not carrying out his orders. ‘There’s not one of them to whom one can entrust anything; one always has to do everything oneself,’ he complained to Pastoret in a long diatribe which covered many subjects. Everything was somebody else’s fault, even his presence in Russia. ‘And they accuse me of ambition, as though it was my ambition that brought me here! This war is only a matter of politics. What have I got to gain from a climate like this, from coming to a wretched country like this one? The whole of it is not worth the meanest little piece of France. They, on the other hand, have a very real interest in conquest: Poland, Germany, anything goes for them. Just seeing the sun six months of the year is a new pleasure for them. It is they that should be
stopped, not me. These Germans with all their philosophy don’t understand a thing.’
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Rant as he might, the retreat would have to go on. And it would have to be rapid, for St Cyr and Victor would not be able to hold back Wittgenstein for much longer, while Kutuzov was already overtaking Napoleon on his other flank. And an altogether new threat was developing in the south, where Schwarzenberg and Reynier had been obliged to give ground before the combined forces of Tormasov and Chichagov: instead of falling back towards Minsk, where they would have joined forces with Napoleon, they had gone off westwards, back into Poland, leaving Napoleon’s line of retreat through Minsk dangerously exposed.

Napoleon’s disappointment on reaching Smolensk was as nothing compared to that of his troops. The last stages of the march had sapped not only the physical strength but also the spirits of the bravest soldiers. ‘Morale nevertheless held,’ according to Dedem de Gelder, ‘the majority of the army believing that Smolensk would be the term of their misfortunes.’ On 7 November the front echelons passed a substantial convoy of food moving the other way destined for Ney’s rearguard and this lifted their spirits, as it seemed to endorse the image of plenty at Smolensk. Soldiers hurriedly rejoined their units in the expectation of regular distributions of food. They somehow managed to forget that the last time they had seen the city it had been a smouldering ruin, and as they approached they had a picture of warmth and abundance in their minds. ‘The idea that the end of our travails was nigh lent us a kind of gaiety,’ wrote one, ‘and it was with many a joke about our prolonged slitherings and frequent falls that my comrades and I came down the hill and up to the city walls.’
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But while the Guard, which entered the city with Napoleon, received a distribution of food and spirits, and settled into the ruins for a welcome rest, the units marching behind it were less fortunate. The Guard had been preceded by a rabble of fleeing deserters who
had tried to storm the stores, with the result that those in charge of distributing them became even more fussy than normal in following procedure. After the Guard had entered, the gates of the city were shut, and the gendarmes manning them admitted only armed units marching under the command of an officer. But as well as excluding the stragglers, this measure punished those who had fallen behind through no fault of their own, the wounded, and the cavalrymen whose units had quite simply dissolved through the death of their mounts.

Even those who managed to regroup outside the town and present an organised appearance received a less than satisfactory distribution. As Napoleon did not want news of his setbacks to spread, he had not warned the authorities in places such as Smolensk of his impending arrival, let alone of the real state of affairs. With prior warning, the local administration could have baked bread and divided stores up
into rations which could have been distributed quickly and easily. As it was, companies were simply issued with sacks of flour which, as they lacked the means of baking bread, they boiled up into a thin gruel, an ox which they had to set about slaughtering, and a barrel of spirits, half of which would be wasted as it was decanted.
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All attempts at maintaining order were nullified by the deserters and stragglers who managed to infiltrate the city and set up dens of brigands in the cellars of burnt-out houses, from which they sallied forth to steal and raid the magazines. Fights kept breaking out in the stores, officials in charge of distributing them were beaten up, those carrying away rations for their units were waylaid by those who could not obtain food through regular channels, and a vast amount was wasted in the process.

The Guard was accused by other troops of having stolen the supplies, and there was much grumbling against it, but in effect most of those still with their colours did receive distributions of rice, flour, spirits and in some cases beef.
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The Guard also aroused envy and anger as it appeared to take control of the great bazaar which sprang up at one of the main crossroads in the town.

The conditions of the retreat had turned out to be very different from those envisaged as they left Moscow, and as a result everyone was trying to adapt their arrangements by trading one kind of booty for a more manageable or transportable variety. ‘Here a suttler-woman would be offering watches, rings, necklaces, silver vases and precious stones,’ recalled Amédée de Pastoret. ‘There a grenadier was selling brandy or furs. A little further on a soldier of the train was hawking the complete works of Voltaire or the letters to Émilie by Desmoustiers. A
voltigeur
had horses and carriages on offer, while a cuirassier had set up a stall with footwear and clothing.’
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Those who had failed to get a regular distribution of food sold whatever they had in order to buy some.

The civilians, who did not qualify for military distributions, had no other way of obtaining it, and when they ran out of money or things to sell they were reduced to begging. In this, the women had an unenviable
advantage, as Labaume records. ‘Mostly on foot, shod with cloth
bottines
and dressed in thin dresses of silk or percale, they wrapped themselves in pelisses or soldiers’ greatcoats taken from corpses along the way. Their predicament would have wrenched tears from the hardest of hearts, if the rigours of our position had not been such as to strangle every feeling of humanity. Among these victims of the horrors of war, there were some who were young, pretty, charming, witty, and who possessed all the qualities capable of seducing the most insensitive man, but most of them were reduced to begging for the slightest favour, and the piece of bread they were given often required the most abject form of gratitude. While they implored our help, they were cruelly abused, and every night belonged to those who had fed them that day.’
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The misery was compounded by the fact that on 12 November the temperature fell sharply, with readings as low as – 23.75°C (–10.75°F). On the night of 14 November it was so cold that the men on picket duty around Ney’s bivouac had to be threatened with the direst consequences to keep them from coming in to find shelter. Marshal Mortier took a more relaxed view. Seeing a sentry standing outside his lodgings, he asked him what he was doing and received the reply that he was on guard. ‘Against whom and against what?’ Mortier asked. ‘You won’t prevent the cold from coming in or hardship from attacking us! So you may as well come in and find a place by the fireside.’
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A large proportion of the army was camped out in the open outside the city, and they struggled desperately to escape the cold. ‘Around our bivouac there were some huts in which officers and men had sought shelter from the cold and in which they had lit fires,’ recalled Sergeant Bertrand of the 7th Light Infantry in Davout’s corps. ‘One of my good friends had gone inside as well. Foreseeing what was bound to happen, I begged him to come out. At my insistence, the officers and several soldiers, who were already numbed by the warmth and incapable of making a decision, did come out, but he would not hear of it and found his death there. As I had foreseen, crowds of
other men soon began to assail these huts while those inside tried to defend their haven, a terrible struggle began and the weaker men were crushed mercilessly. I ran to the bivouac to get help, but I had barely reached it when flames engulfed the huts with all those inside them. In the morning there were only ruins and corpses.’ Sergeant Bourgogne, who had himself tried to get into one of the buildings, stood by helplessly as he watched screaming comrades being devoured by the flames.
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