Authors: Adam Zamoyski
Chichagov, whose army of Moldavia had been swelled by Tormasov’s forces to a total strength of some 60,000 men, was moving fast to meet Napoleon head-on. On 16 November, the day Napoleon entered Krasny, the Admiral seized Minsk, Napoleon’s best-stocked supply base. He then carried on towards Borisov, where a Polish division under General Dabrowski was guarding the only bridge over the river Berezina. A couple of days’ march to the north, Wittgenstein hovered threateningly with his 50,000 men over Napoleon’s line of retreat, about halfway between Orsha and Borisov.
Although he still knew nothing about the fall of Minsk and assumed that Schwarzenberg was at least keeping Chichagov in check,
Napoleon was nervous. ‘Things are going very badly for me,’ he said to General Rapp, whom he called to his side at one o’clock on the morning of 18 November at Dubrovna. According to Caulaincourt, he guessed that the Russians were planning to encircle him along the Berezina, and that that was why Kutuzov had so far avoided engaging him.
18
That same day he sent urgent orders to Dabrowski to concentrate his forces at Borisov in order to protect the town and the crossing over the Berezina. He ordered Oudinot to join him there with his 2nd Corps and then move on to Minsk and make that safe. Victor was to make some feint attacks against Wittgenstein in order to give the impression that the Grande Armée was about to move against him. Napoleon realised that he could not afford to linger in Orsha as he had hoped to do, and decided to fall back on Minsk and try to hold the line of the Berezina.
‘Will we get there in time?’ he rhetorically asked Caulaincourt, and began turning over in his mind various plans for making a dash for it with what was left of the cavalry of the Guard. As if anticipating him, Chichagov had, on 19 November, published a physical description of Napoleon, with an injunction to all loyal subjects of the Tsar to apprehend him if he attempted to sneak through.
19
Eager to cover the hundred kilometres that still separated him from Borisov, Napoleon moved from Orsha to Baran in the afternoon of 20 November, and it was there that he heard of Ney’s miraculous escape and appearance at the French outposts that morning. The news electrified the army. ‘Never has a victory caused such a sensation,’ recalled Caulaincourt. ‘The joy was universal; we were intoxicated; everyone was in motion, coming and going in order to announce the news; telling everyone they met … Officers, soldiers, everyone felt that neither the elements nor fortune could hurt us any more, and we felt that the French were invincible!’
20
Although Napoleon is unlikely to have been quite so carried away, the news was welcome, and he appreciated its value as a morale-booster.
The distribution of rations at Orsha had brought a number of men
back to the colours and the two-day pause had allowed stragglers to catch up. Those who had lost or thrown away their muskets were issued with fresh ones from the stores, which also contained sixty-two cannon. The remains of Ney’s corps were thus able to replace the equipment they had left behind on the bank of the Dnieper. As luck would have it, there was also among the supplies waiting at Orsha a convoy of wagons carrying a long pontoon bridge. This was of no apparent further use to Napoleon, but the hundreds of fresh horses were invaluable. Napoleon ordered the pontoons to be burnt and the horses given to the artillery.
The weather was fine, with a light frost and a blue sky, as the Grande Armée marched out of the town on 21 November, and the road was straight and even. While Caulaincourt’s assertion that Ney’s escape had ‘restored to the Emperor all the faith in his lucky star’ is perhaps a little wide of the mark, the whole army had been cheered, and ‘we set off once more with more gaiety’.
21
It could hardly have been more misplaced.
The first leg of the retreat, between Maloyaroslavets and Smolensk, had been disastrous because it was unprepared in every way, and the arrival of the cold weather on 6 November had taken everyone by surprise. As the retreating columns struggled into Smolensk over the next three or four days, tens of thousands of men and horses died as much from undernourishment and exhaustion, both physical and moral, as from hypothermia: the temperature varied from –5°C (23°F) to not much lower than –12°C (10.4°F), which should have presented no problem to an organised army.
Even though the temperature dropped drastically while they were there, the army’s short stay in Smolensk did give the men an opportunity to adapt to the circumstances. They adjusted their clothing as best they could, jettisoned some of the more ambitious booty they had set out with, and in most cases tried to provide themselves with personal reserves of food and drink. The first hardships had killed off the least resistant and prompted the weak-willed to give
themselves up to the Russians, leaving the more determined and resilient to continue the march. And these gradually grew more used to the cold and the lack of food, becoming more resistant with every day.
22
The next stage of the retreat, the five-day march from Smolensk to Orsha, was executed in far more difficult conditions than the first, with the temperature varying from – 15°C (5°F) to – 25°C (—13°F) and regular Russian forces harrying every step. It was dominated by the fighting around Krasny, with each unit having to run the gauntlet. And although the French were generally victorious, the five days of fighting around Krasny had emasculated the army of Moscow. Possibly as many as 10,000 of the best soldiers had been killed or wounded, over 20,000 (many of them civilians) had been taken prisoner and more than two hundred guns had been lost.
23
As it marched out of Orsha to continue its retreat, the remnant of the army of Moscow was left alone by regular Russian forces. But stragglers were harried by the ubiquitous cossacks and the detachments of Davidov, Figner and Seslavin, and even by bands of French deserters who had settled in this part of the country and were now withdrawing alongside the army. Conditions remained difficult, with weariness and uncertainty about the future sapping the will. In spite of this, a nucleus kept going, displaying an astonishing degree of resilience.
They would set off at first light, as the short winter days of the north gave them little marching time. ‘We were always in a hurry to leave the frozen bivouacs where we had spent the night, and the hope of being more comfortable on the following night gave us the strength to bear the fatigues of the day,’ according to Colonel Griois. ‘It is in this way that for almost two months the hope of an improvement which never came kept us from succumbing to exhaustion.’
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‘We pursued our road in silence; one could hear only the sound of horses being struck and the sharp but frequent curses of the drivers when they found themselves on an icy incline which they could not climb,’ wrote Cesare de Laugier as he left Smolensk. ‘The whole road
is covered in abandoned
caissons
, carriages and cannon that nobody has even thought of blowing up, burning or spiking. Here and there dying horses, weapons, effects of every sort; broken-open trunks, disembowelled bags mark the way taken by those who precede us. We also see trees at the feet of which people attempted to build fires and, around these trunks, which have been transformed into funerary monuments, the bodies of those who expired while trying to warm themselves. At every step there are dead bodies. The drivers of wagons use them to plug ditches and ruts, to even out the road. At first, we shuddered at such practices, but we soon became accustomed to them.’
25
‘With his head bowed, his hands dug deep into his clothes and his eyes fixed on the ground, each one sullenly and silently followed the unfortunate who walked ahead of him,’ recalled Adrien de Mailly. ‘The plaintive screech of the wheels on the hardened snow and the croaking of the swarms of crows, of northern rooks and other birds of prey which always followed our army were the only sounds we heard.’ B.T. Duverger, paymaster to the Compans division, draws a similar picture. At Krasny he had tried to sell the paintings he had looted in Moscow, all neatly rolled up, but there were no takers, so he dumped them in the snow next to a fine collection of books beautifully bound in red morocco which a friend had also tried to sell. He then followed the flow passively. ‘I was neither gay nor sad,’ he wrote. ‘I had become quite indifferent to the circumstances and had decided to accept whatever destiny held in store.’
26
As they moved slowly, they did not cover much ground. But as they had to prepare shelter and fire for the night, they did not get much time to sleep either, and when they did their rest was interrupted by the need to keep the fire going or to move in order to keep warm. Dr Heinrich Roos noted that the younger soldiers, who needed more sleep, suffered this deprivation keenly, and that they were also prone to fall into such a deep slumber when they did get time to rest that they were more likely to freeze to death where they lay than older men.
27
Every effort was made to keep the men together and under the colours. As the command of a given regiment stopped for the night, the drummers would start beating its signal. ‘This beating of the drum, dull in tone but audible a long way off, with its particular pattern of rolls and individual beats, slowing and quickening, made up a cadenced melody which was etched on the memory of the foot-soldier as distinctly as the sound of the village church bell on the ear of the rural inhabitant,’ explained Lieutenant Paul de Bourgoing of the Young Guard. ‘In time of war, the soldier has no other parish than his regiment, no church steeple other than his colours; when, lost in the night, exposed at every step to come up against enemy patrols or stumble into the midst of one of his columns, he can hear from far away the sound of the drum he recognises, and it is as though he heard a friendly voice egging him on through the murk and the distance.’
28
Sensible men realised that their best chance of survival lay in staying with the colours, and even when regiments were all but destroyed, a kernel stuck together, sometimes no more than a couple of dozen men clustered around their colonel and their eagle. When the number fell below that, they would generally take measures to safeguard the colours. Dr La Flise watched as, just after Krasny, the handful of officers and men of the 84th of the Line left alive unscrewed the eagle from the top of the staff and, wrapping it carefully, strapped it to the Colonel’s back. Then, detaching the flag, they folded it and he buttoned it up under his uniform over his chest. After this they ceremonially embraced and set off, with the Colonel in the middle.
29
Even cavalrymen who had lost their mounts and were obliged to follow on foot did everything to rejoin their mounted comrades for the nightly stop, although it meant making superhuman efforts, as they knew that they would find sustenance, both physical and emotional, among them. Some cavalry units decided to branch out and march parallel to the main road, as this made it easier for them to stay together. General Hammerstein took his remaining hundred West-phalian
troopers off the road, and thanks to that kept them together successfully.
30
Sergeant Bourgogne, who developed a fever after Krasny and fell behind his unit, provides a good example of what could happen to stragglers. He suddenly found himself walking alone along the road, in a gap between marching echelons, and although he was lucky enough not to encounter any cossacks, he saw many corpses of men who had evidently just been killed and stripped of their possessions. When a blizzard engulfed him he got lost and floundered despairingly through knee-deep snow, stumbling over the corpses of men and horses. He was famished, but could not hack away any part of the horse carcases he came across, since they were frozen rock-hard, and had to content himself with a handful of snow which had some horse’s blood in it. He was soon reduced to a whimpering wreck, and would have perished if he had not been rescued by a comrade.
31
Even small gaps between the marching columns were dangerous, as the hovering cossacks were ready to pounce wherever there was no danger to themselves. A wagon whose harness broke and required a pause for repairs was virtually doomed if these could not be completed before the tail of the column it was marching in passed. A soldier or a small group who stopped to chop up a dead horse or make a fire were similarly liable to be taken.
The fate of prisoners grew more dire as the retreat continued into its second month. On their capture they would be robbed. The large numbers of irregular cossacks had no interest in the war beyond looting, and they took anything and everything that might possibly have some value. Towards the end of the campaign one could see cossacks with a couple of dozen fob-watches strung around their necks, wearing several rich uniforms and coats, bedecked with gold epaulettes, a variety of resplendent plumed hats, with an array of booty of every kind strung from their cushion-like saddles. In the baggage left behind at Krasny one cossack found Ney’s dress uniform, which he promptly donned, and thereafter French pickets were occasionally treated to the spectacle of what looked like a hirsute Marshal of France
trotting up on a cossack pony and sticking his tongue out at them before galloping off.
32
Regular cossacks, militia and even troops of the line also saw the war as a unique opportunity to make some money, and this included officers. They could not carry cumbrous booty, and would content themselves with money and valuables. So when the French surrendered to regular troops they were merely robbed of these. But this was of little comfort, as they would be relieved of everything else when they were handed over to the cossacks whose duty it usually was to escort them back into Russia.