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All of the guns and some three hundred men were left behind on the south bank, but Ney had got over with the rest and soon found an unravaged village, well stocked with food, in which they settled down to rest. The following day they set off across country in a westerly direction. It was not long before Platov, who had been following the French retreat along the north bank of the river, located them and began to close in. Ney led his men into a wood, where they formed a kind of fortress into which the cossacks dared not venture. Platov could do no more than shell them with his light field-pieces mounted on sleigh runners, but this produced little effect.

At nightfall, Ney moved off again. They trudged through knee-deep snow, stalked by cossacks who sometimes got a clear enough field of fire to shell them. ‘A sergeant fell beside me, his leg shattered by a carbine shot,’ wrote Fezensac. ‘“I’m a lost man, take my knapsack, you might find it useful,” he cried. Someone took his knapsack and we moved off in silence.’ Even the bravest began to talk of giving up, but
Ney kept them going. ‘Those who get through this will show they have their b—s hung by steel wire!’ he announced at one stage.
⁴²

Unsure of his bearings, Ney sent a Polish officer ahead. The man eventually stumbled on pickets of Prince Eugène’s corps outside Orsha, and as soon as he was informed of Ney’s approach, Prince Eugène himself sallied forth to meet him. Eventually, Ney’s force, now not much more than a thousand men in the final stages of exhaustion as they stumbled through the night, heard the welcome shout of ‘Qui vive?’, to which they roared back: ‘
France!
’ Moments later Ney and Prince Eugène fell into each other’s arms, and their men embraced each other with joy and relief.
⁴³

‘Y
et another victory!’ Kutuzov wrote to his wife with touching swank the day after he let Napoleon slip through to Orsha. ‘On your birthday we fought from morning till evening. Bonaparte himself was there, and yet the enemy was smashed to pieces.’ His report to Alexander was more measured, but it did state that he had wiped out Davout and cut off Napoleon at Krasny, and it was backed up by his despatch to St Petersburg of the defeated Marshal’s baton.
¹
Alexander had the splendid velvet-covered and eagle-studded baton paraded in public as a trophy, but neither he nor anyone else was particularly impressed – a real victory would have been followed by the arrival of at least one captive Marshal of France, not just a few of his baubles.
^*

Vassili Marchenko, a civil servant who arrived in St Petersburg from Siberia in the first week of November, had found the city eerily quiet and gloomy. Many people had fled and the streets were empty. ‘Whoever was able to, kept a couple of horses at the ready, others had procured themselves covered boats, which waited, cluttering the canals,’ he wrote. ‘This sad state of affairs, uncertainty about the
future, and the autumnal weather itself tore at the heart of good Alexander.’
³

This was all the more unwarranted as good news had been pouring in for the past four weeks. On 26 October there had been a solemn ceremony of thanksgiving for the victory at Polotsk. The following day the city resounded to the sound of gun salutes and church bells announcing the victory of Vinkovo and the reoccupation of Moscow. On the twenty-eighth Alexander and the Empress Elizabeth, accompanied by the Dowager Empress and the Grand Dukes Constantine and Nicholas, had driven in state to the cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan for a solemn celebration, and he had been cheered wildly by the crowds. ‘Courage is returning at the gallop, people have stopped sending away their effects, and I believe that some are even unpacking them,’ Joseph de Maistre had noted.
⁴

But there was still much uncertainty. Kutuzov’s rivals and their supporters implied that he had bungled the operations and that in his place they could easily have defeated and captured Napoleon. As the various commanders in the field had their partisans at court, St Petersburg was the scene of endless debates and recrimination. ‘To the foreign observer,’ recorded de Maistre, ‘it appears as either a farcical tragedy or an embarrassing comedy.’
⁵
Alexander himself was by now mistrustful of anything he heard from Kutuzov, and he was receiving contradictory reports.

As he surveyed the map and digested the information coming in from his various armies it seemed clear to him that Vinkovo had not been followed up properly, that Maloyaroslavets had been a missed opportunity, and that a number of chances of cutting off and destroying Davout, Ney, Prince Eugène, Poniatowski and, finally, Napoleon himself had been thrown away. ‘It is with extreme sadness that I realise that the hope of wiping away the dishonour of the loss of Moscow by cutting the enemy’s line of retreat has vanished completely,’ he wrote to Kutuzov, barely concealing his anger, and complaining of the Field Marshal’s ‘inexplicable inactivity’. But he could also see that Napoleon was now stumbling straight into a trap, with
Chichagov and Wittgenstein poised to cut off his retreat and Kutuzov coming up to destroy him from behind.
⁶

Kutuzov had sent news of Vinkovo to the Tsar through Colonel Michaud, who also delivered the Field Marshal’s invitation to Alexander to come and take command of the army himself. The Tsar had declined, but after four more weeks of apparent failures on Kutuzov’s part, he was growing increasingly anxious that Napoleon might actually manage to get away if he did not take a serious hand in the matter. He bestowed the title of Prince of Smolensk on the Field Marshal for the alleged victories of Viazma and Krasny, but also summoned Barclay to St Petersburg.

Alexander briefly thought of going to take command of Wittgenstein’s army, bringing about a juncture with Chichagov’s and putting himself in a position to deal the final blow. On paper it looked as though he could not fail to destroy the Grande Armée and capture Napoleon, a tempting prospect for the frustrated warrior-Tsar lurking in Alexander.
⁷
But on balance it is probably a good thing as far as his reputation was concerned that he did not, for the situation as seen on paper and that on the ground were very different.

The long march that had all but destroyed the Grande Armée had also taken its toll of the pursuing Russians. They did enjoy various advantages over the French, as they were better clothed, received fairly regular distributions of food and forage, and had the initiative, so they could stop and rest when they needed to. But although they were better equipped to endure it, they were not immune to the weather. They were deft at building shelters, as Lieutenant Radozhitsky recorded: ‘It was hard and sad to watch as, having stopped near some small village, each regiment would send out a detail to fetch firewood and straw. Fences would shatter, roofs fall in and whole houses disappear in a flash. Then, like ants, the soldiers would carry their heavy loads to the camp and proceed to build a new village.’ But when there was no village nearby or they did not have the time, half of the men would spread their greatcoats on the snow and the other half use theirs as overblankets as they lay down, pressed together for warmth.
⁸

After the first weeks of the pursuit, distributions of food became more erratic. The men could only expect hard-tack or the occasional thin gruel which they brewed up themselves. They had to rely more and more on sending out foraging parties. ‘It is wrong to blame only the French for burning and looting everything along the road,’ wrote Nikolai Mitarevsky, who had trouble feeding his artillery horses. ‘We did the same … When we went out foraging, those soldiers who in time of peace passed for scoundrels and cheats became extremely useful. Nothing escaped their eagle eye.’ By the time they had crossed the Dnieper they felt little compunction about taking everything from the locals, whom they did not regard as Russians and suspected of having sided with the French.
⁹

If the French were moving along a devastated road, the Russian units were mostly marching cross-country, which made progress difficult, particularly for the artillery. Bennigsen suggested to Kutuzov that they leave behind four hundred of their six hundred guns, which would have speeded up the advance, but Kutuzov dismissed this along with all the General’s other advice.
¹⁰

‘Men and horses are dying of hunger and exhaustion,’ noted Lieutenant Uxküll on 5 November. ‘Only the cossacks, always lively and cheerful, manage to keep their spirits up. The rest of us have a very hard time dragging on after the fleeing enemy, and our horses, which have no shoes, slip on the frozen ground and fall down, never to get up … My underclothes consist of three shirts and a few pairs of long socks; I’m afraid to change them because of the freezing cold. I’m eaten up with fleas and encased in filth, since my sheepskin never leaves me.’
¹¹

Under such conditions the army melted away quickly. By the end of the fighting around Krasny, Kutuzov had lost 30,000 men, and as many again had fallen behind, leaving him with only 26,500 available for action. Mitarevsky found that by the time they had reached Krasny almost all the reinforcements, men and horses alike, that he had received at Tarutino had died or fallen behind. Their morale was inevitably affected by the horrors they witnessed as they followed in
the wake of the Grande Armée. ‘Despite their being our enemies and destroyers, our desire for revenge could not stifle feelings of humanity to the point where we could not pity their sufferings,’ wrote Radozhitsky. But he found Kutuzov’s bombastic proclamations a source of comfort and strength in his weariness and misery, likening them to ‘manna from heaven’.
¹²

Kutuzov certainly had a better understanding of his soldiers’ needs than the parade-ground martinet Grand Duke Constantine, who had rejoined the army. Appalled at the sight of the dirty men wrapped in sheepskins, he held a review with the intention of smartening them up and appeared in full dress uniform without an overcoat in order to make his point. ‘He wanted to set an example, but we felt cold just looking at him,’ recalled Captain Pavel Pushchin of the Semyonovsky Life Guards.
¹³

But even those soldiers who worshipped him ‘started saying that it would be good if our Field Marshal grew a little younger’, according to Mitarevsky. After allowing the French to slip through at Krasny, he held a service of thanksgiving instead of pressing on with the pursuit. The more merciful pointed to his age and his poor health – he was often bent double with lumbago and suffered from acute headaches; others speculated as to his true motives. Several in his entourage, perhaps repeating each other’s testimony (or possibly just their assumptions), report him as saying that his intention was not to destroy Napoleon but to provide him with ‘a golden bridge’ out of Russia. Wilson recorded a conversation in which he claimed the Field Marshal told him that by toppling Napoleon Russia would gain little, while Britain would take over as the dominant power in Europe, which would not be in Russia’s interests.
¹⁴

Others, like Yermolov and Woldemar von Löwenstern, believed that what Kutuzov feared was a cornered and desperate Napoleon, even if he only had 30 or 40,000 fighting men with him. He knew that the Emperor was a better general than him, that his marshals and generals were superior to his own bickering subordinates, and that the soldiers of the Grande Armée would outfight his own, a huge
proportion of whom were peasants who had been conscripted a couple of months before. Napoleon’s orders, written out by Berthier with the usual formality, still mentioned corps, divisions and regiments as though they were fully operational fighting forces, and since many of these orders were now falling into the hands of the Russians, Kutuzov could only have formed the impression that they were.
¹⁵

The most probable explanation for Kutuzov’s behaviour is a combination of these motives. He hoped to wear Napoleon down further before taking him on. When he gave Yermolov a unit to command, he begged him to be prudent. ‘Little dove,’ he said with his usual familiarity, ‘be careful and avoid any actions in which you might suffer losses in men.’ He instructed Platov to harry the French and to ‘create incessant night alarms’.
¹⁶
He himself would, by marching alongside them, force the French to hurry lest he cut them off, which would prevent them from regrouping.

Kutuzov was not the only one to err on the side of caution. Denis Davidov, a confident commander with a well-tried unit, would not take on anything more organised than a band of stragglers or an isolated platoon. Even when the retreating column looked temptingly disorganised, other Russian commanders took nothing for granted. ‘Groups of ten or twenty men would form up and refuse to let us scatter them,’ wrote Woldemar von Löwenstern. ‘Their bearing was admirable. We would let them continue their march and fall instead on other groups which did not put up any resistance.’ There was little point in the Russians exposing themselves, as they could take baggage and cannon without a fight, and as thousands of starving soldiers would come to their bivouacs at night to give themselves up anyway.
¹⁷

Kutuzov probably preferred to take no chances and to wait until he could be certain of success. He was counting on the relatively fresh armies of Chichagov and Wittgenstein to cut off the French line of retreat along the Berezina. Napoleon’s forces would be weakened by fruitless attempts to break through, which would allow Kutuzov to come up from behind and take the Emperor himself. And if Napoleon
should get away, it could be blamed on one or both of the other generals.