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What made the conditions so hard to bear was the blow morale had suffered from the disappointed hopes. ‘A bivouac set up in deep snow in the ruins and the courtyard of a burnt-out house, a few meagre victuals, for the possession of which we had to come to blows at the entrance to the stores with thousands of ghosts enraged by hunger, and one single day of rest, with a temperature of [– 22.5°C (– 8.5°F)]: that was all we found in Smolensk, in those much-vaunted winter quarters,’ recalled an artillery officer of Ney’s 25th Württemberg Division.
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‘In an attempt to prevent the men from losing heart, the Emperor affected impassivity in the face of all this bad news, in order to make himself seem above all the adversity and ready to face any eventuality,’ noted Louis Lejeune. ‘But this was wrongly interpreted as indifference.’ The fatherly concern the troops used to sense in Napoleon was not in evidence. Auguste Bo net, a simple soldier, wrote to his mother from Smolensk on 10 November. ‘
Ma chère maman
, write to me often and at length, it is the only pleasure, the only consolation that remains to me in this wild country that the war has turned into a wilderness.’
²¹

Perhaps the most unfortunate were Prince Eugène’s Italians who, having lost all their possessions and supplies at the crossing of the Vop, survived their icy bath and finally struggled into Smolensk, only to find the gates closed. After three hours of pushing, shoving and arguing they were at last admitted, only to discover that the supplies had been thoroughly pillaged. They camped in the streets, and the few wounded they had managed to bring along on their remaining
wagons died in the night without shelter. ‘Many of us lost what was left of our spirit, of that spirit that kept hope alive,’ wrote Cesare de Laugier, while Bartolomeo Bertolini felt that ‘every soldier had lost the hope of ever seeing his motherland again’.
²²

The Italian Guardia d’Onore, a kind of cadet force made up of the scions of the nobility of northern Italy who held officer’s rank but served as simple soldiers, elicited general pity, for they lacked all the skills of the regular soldier. They had lost their mounts and tramped awkwardly in their ungainly top-boots instead of cutting them down, they had been too pampered to know how to fix their footwear or sew up a tear in their uniforms, let alone how to cook up a stew from whatever might be on offer; and they had been too well brought up to stoop to pillaging or even pilfering from dead men. Only eight of them survived out of a total of 350, which was low even by the standards of this campaign.
²³

Cavalry were particularly vulnerable, as every time a horse died another man was left behind. They were gradually dispersed, and therefore denied any mutual support system. So even while they had plenty of able-bodied men, cavalry units tended to disintegrate. On 9 November General Thielmann wrote to the King of Saxony that he must regard the two cavalry regiments which had been under his command as completely lost. But there were exceptions, and the lancers Dr La Flise had teamed up with rode into Smolensk with unfurled colours and music, and managed to get food for themselves and fodder for their horses.
²⁴

It required a strong hand to keep any regiment together, as the kindly but gruff Colonel Pelet of the 48th of the Line in Davout’s corps attested. Not without effort, he had managed to obtain a quantity of flour, a barrel of vodka and four live oxen from the stores, but before he could set about feeding his men he was ordered to turn them out on parade before Davout. He was determined not to let his precious victuals out of his sight, so he took them along to the parade. Luckily, Davout was late. ‘I kept an eye as constantly as I could on the regiment and the barrel,’ Pelet wrote, ‘and suddenly
I noticed that it had been broken open. I ran over to it, but it was too late; nearly all the spirits had been pillaged, or at least distributed without measure or order. I hastened to overturn the barrel, but my men were already tipsy, and a number of them dead drunk. In order to hide this accident from the severe eye of Davout I tried to make the regiment manoeuvre, but this proved beyond them.’ He managed to lead them out of sight of the dreaded Davout’s quarters and then came back to clear up. ‘More than eighty knapsacks, muskets and shakos were strewn about as after a battle,’ he added.
²⁵

Despite the general demoralisation, there was still a nucleus of disciplined men in most units, and many regiments found reinforcements in Smolensk, in the shape of echelons sent from depots in France, Germany or Italy. Pelet’s regiment, for instance, had shrunk to six hundred men but found a couple of hundred uniformed and armed men waiting for them. Raymond de Fezensac’s 4th of the Line was down to three hundred, but was joined by two hundred fresh men. The only problem with these men was that they had not been through the same tempering process as their comrades, and they were not up to dealing with the conditions. The 6th Chasseurs à Cheval received 250 recruits from their depot in northern Italy, but the shock to their system was such that not one of them was alive a week later.
²⁶

The loss of up to 60,000 men and possibly as many as 20,000 camp followers since leaving Moscow could, theoretically, have been to Napoleon’s advantage. Caulaincourt was one of those who believed that if a couple of hundred cannon had been thrown into the Dnieper, along with the wagons carrying the trophies from Moscow, and all the wounded left in Smolensk with medical attendants and supplies, liberating thousands of horses, the slimmed-down but more mobile force of 40,000 or so men could have operated in a more aggressive manner and fed itself more easily. He blamed Napoleon for failing to take stock of the situation. ‘Never has a retreat been less well ordered,’ he complained.

It is certainly true that Napoleon’s unwillingness to lose face
prevented him from taking drastic measures and making a dash for Minsk and Vilna. He put off every decision to fall back further until the very last moment. ‘In that long retreat from Russia he was as uncertain and as undecided on the last day as he was on the first,’ wrote Caulaincourt. As a result, even the march could not be organised properly by the staff.
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But the real problem vitiating any attempt to reorganise the Grande Armée was that at every stop along the line of retreat it picked up fresh troops, who were often more of a liability than an asset, as well as
commissaires
, local collaborators, wounded and sick who had been left behind on the advance, and all the riff-raff who had been infesting the area under French occupation. As the Grande Armée retreated, it pushed all this dead weight before it, and had to march through it, losing resources and gaining chaos in the process.

Napoleon still entertained hopes of halting the retreat at Orsha or, failing that, along the line of the river Berezina. After four days in Smolensk, he sent the remnants of Junot’s and Poniatowski’s corps ahead, and left the city himself on the following day, 14 November, preceded by Mortier with the Young Guard and followed by the Old Guard. Prince Eugène, Davout and Ney were to follow at one-day intervals.

The going was hard, through deep snow which became slippery when compacted by the tramp of feet and hooves. There were many slopes in the road testing men and horses, and a number of bridges over small ravines causing bottlenecks. On the evening of the first day out of Smolensk, Colonel Boulart with part of the artillery of the Guard got stuck at a bridge which was followed by a steep rise. There was the usual jam of people, horses and vehicles, all vying for precedence, and every so often cossacks would ride up and cause panic. The Russians had now placed light guns on sleighs, which meant they could be brought up, fired and pulled away before the French had time to unlimber their cannon and fire back. Boulart realised that if he did not take decisive action, his battery would disintegrate in the
midst of the jam. He therefore forced a passage for himself, by over-turning civilian vehicles or pushing them off the road. He got his men to dig under the snow on either side of the road until they found earth, and to sprinkle this on the icy surface of the road leading up the slope, which he also broke up with picks. It took him all night to get his cannon across the bridge and up the slope. ‘I fell heavily at least twenty times as I went up and down that slope, but, sustained as I was by the determination to succeed, I did not let this hinder me,’ he wrote.
²⁸

While Boulart struggled with his guns, Napoleon, who had stopped at Korytnia for the night, called Caulaincourt to his bedside and again talked of the necessity of his going back to Paris as soon as possible. He had just heard that Miloradovich had cut the road ahead of him near Krasny. He could not rule out the possibility of being taken, and his close encounter with the cossacks outside Maloyaroslavets had unnerved him. In order to arm himself against capture he bade Dr Yvan prepare him a dose of poison, which he henceforth wore in a small black silk sachet around his neck.
²⁹

The following morning, 15 November, Napoleon fought his way through to Krasny, where he paused to allow those behind him to catch up. But Miloradovich had closed the road once more behind him, and when Prince Eugène’s Italians, now not much more than four thousand strong, came marching down it the following afternoon they in turn found themselves cut off. Massed ranks of Russian infantry supported by guns barred the road in front of them, while cavalry and cossacks hovered on their flanks. Miloradovich sent an officer under a white flag to inform Prince Eugène that he had 20,000 men and that Kutuzov was nearby with the rest of the Russian army. ‘Go back quickly whence you came and tell him who sent you that if he has 20,000 men, we are 80,000!’ came the reply. Prince Eugène unlimbered his remaining ten guns, formed up his corps into a dense column and forged ahead.

The Russians, who could see how few of them there were, once again summoned them to surrender. When this was rejected, they
opened fire, and a fierce and bloody fight ensued. ‘We fought until nightfall without giving ground,’ recalled one French officer, ‘but it fell just in time; one more hour of daylight and we would probably have been overpowered.’ The Russians were nevertheless still between them and Krasny, and would easily crush them on the following day. In the circumstances, Prince Eugène could see no way out other than to fall in with the plan of a Polish colonel attached to his staff. When darkness fell, he formed up his remaining men in a compact file and, leaving behind all unnecessary impedimenta, marched off the road, into the woods, and across country round the side of the Russian army. When challenged by Russian sentries, the Polish colonel marching at the head of the column brazenly replied in Russian that they were on a special secret mission by order of His Serene Highness Field Marshal Prince Kutuzov. Unbelievably, the ploy worked, and in the early hours, just as Miloradovich was preparing to finish it off, the 4th Corps marched into Krasny behind his back.
³⁰

Napoleon was relieved to see his stepson, but he was now in something of a quandary. He ought to wait for Davout and Ney, in case they too had difficulty in breaking through Miloradovich’s roadblock,
but he was in peril of being stranded himself, as Kutuzov had turned up a couple of miles to the south of Krasny, and could easily cut the road between him and Orsha. In order to gain time, he decided to take the field himself at the head of his Guard.

Walking in front of his grenadiers, Napoleon led them out of Krasny back onto the Smolensk road and then turned them to face the Russian troops who had massed in a long formation to the south of the road. ‘Advancing with a firm step, as on the day of a great parade, he placed himself in the middle of the battlefield, facing the enemy’s batteries,’ in the words of Sergeant Bourgogne. He was vastly outnumbered, but his bearing, standing calmly under fire as the Russian shells struck men all around him, seems to have impressed not only his own men but the enemy as well. Miloradovich moved back from the road, leaving it open for Davout to march through. And Kutuzov resisted the entreaties of Toll, Konovnitsin, Bennigsen and Wilson, who could all see that the Russians were in a position to encircle Napoleon and overwhelm him by sheer weight of numbers, ending the war there and then.
³¹

Napoleon was alarmed to discover that Davout had hurried on westwards without waiting for Ney, who was still some way behind. But he could not afford to wait any longer himself, as Kutuzov had by now turned his wing and threatened his line of retreat to Orsha. He left Mortier and the Young Guard to hold Krasny and cover Davout’s retreat, and himself marched through the town and out onto the Orsha road, at the head of the Old Guard.

It was not long before he came up against a horde of civilians and deserters who had gone on ahead and, finding the road cut by the Russians, come rushing back in a panic. Napoleon steadied them, but not before they had caused chaos in the ranks and among the wagons following the staff, with the result that some careered off the road and sank in the deep snow covering the boggy ground on either side of it.