B009YBU18W EBOK (71 page)

The morning after the French had marched off, Chichagov rode up to the scene of the crossings. He and his entourage would never forget the grim spectacle. ‘The first thing we saw was a woman who had collapsed and was gripped by the ice,’ recalled Captain Martos of the
engineers, who was at his side. ‘One of her arms had been hacked off and hung only by a vein, while the other held a baby which had wrapped its arms around its mother’s neck. The woman was still alive and her expressive eyes were fixed on a man who had fallen beside her, and who had already frozen to death. Between them, on the ice, lay their dead child.’
³⁸

Lieutenant Louis de Rochechouart, a French officer on Chichagov’s staff, was deeply shaken. ‘There could be nothing sadder, more distressing! One could see heaps of bodies, of dead men, women and even children, of soldiers of every formation, of every nation, frozen, crushed by the fugitives or struck down by Russian grapeshot; abandoned horses, carriages, cannons,
caissons
, wagons. One would not be able to imagine a more terrifying sight than that of the two broken bridges and the frozen river.’ Peasants and cossacks were rummaging through the wreckage and stripping the corpses. ‘I saw an unfortunate woman sitting on the edge of the bridge, with her legs, which dangled over the side, caught in the ice. She held to her breast a child which had been frozen for twenty-four hours. She begged me to save the child, not realising that she was offering me a corpse! She herself seemed unable to die, despite her sufferings. A cossack rendered her the service of firing a pistol at her ear in order to put an end to this heartbreaking agony!’ Everywhere there were survivors on their last legs, begging to be taken prisoner. ‘“Monsieur, please take me on, I can cook, or I am a valet, or a hairdresser; for the love of God give me a piece of bread and a shred of cloth to cover myself with.”’
³⁹

Estimates of the numbers left behind on the eastern bank of the river vary wildly, from Gourgaud’s dismissive assertion that only two thousand stragglers and three guns failed to get across, Chapelle’s estimate of four to five thousand along with three to four thousand horses and six to seven hundred vehicles, to Labaume’s of 20,000 and two hundred guns, which is certainly too high. Chichagov recorded that nine thousand were killed and seven thousand taken prisoner, which seems closer to the mark. Most are now agreed that
during the three days the French lost up to 25,000 (including as many as 10,000 non-combatant stragglers) on both banks, of which between a third and a half were killed in action. Russian losses, all inflicted in the fighting, were around 15,000.
⁴⁰

The crossing of the Berezina was, by any standards, a magnificent feat of arms. Napoleon had risen to the occasion and proved himself worthy of his reputation, extricating himself from what Clausewitz called ‘one of the worst situations in which a general ever found himself’. His soldiers had fought like lions. But it was above all a triumph for Napoleonic France, and its ability to create out of the rabble of a score of nations armies which were in every way superior to their opponents, which fought intelligently as well as loyally, and which in this instance did so as though they had been defending their own wives and children. ‘The strength of his intellect, and the military virtues of his army, which not even its calamities could quite subdue, were destined here to show themselves once more in their full lustre,’ as Clausewitz put it.
⁴¹

*
The original plan had been to construct three bridges, but a shortage of materials prevented the third being built.

T
he twenty-two-year-old Captain de la Guerinais was a good swimmer, so when he found himself stranded on the east bank of the Berezina on 28 November he did not bother trying to fight his way onto the bridge but just swam the river. Once across, he found some fellow artillerymen who had got a good fire going. He took off his uniform in order to dry it by the fire, but had the misfortune to fall asleep wrapped in the blanket one of them had lent him. When he awoke, his clothes and boots had gone. He tried to follow the army, wrapped only in the blanket, but it could not protect him from the cold, and he died.
¹

This tale might serve as a parable. The 55,000 or so who had survived the crossing and the fighting of 28 November felt such a rush of relief that they could not help imagining the worst was over. ‘After the crossing of the Berezina, all faces brightened,’ in the words of Caulaincourt. Sergeant Bourgogne was cheered by the numbers of men whom he had thought lost who turned up in the course of the following day. ‘The men embraced, congratulating each other as though we had crossed the Rhine – from which we were still four hundred leagues!’ he wrote. ‘We felt that we had been saved, and, giving vent to less selfish instincts, we pitied and regretted those who had had the misfortune of being left behind.’
²
In fact, the worst was still to come.

A vicious wind whipped up a blizzard on the night of 29 November, and even Napoleon found little shelter in the mean hut in which he had taken up his quarters in the village of Kamen. ‘An icy wind came in from all sides through ill-fitting windows in which almost all of the panes had been smashed,’ recorded his valet, Constant. ‘We sealed up the openings through which the wind was blowing with sheaves of hay. A little way off, on a large open space, the unfortunate Russian prisoners which the army was driving along with it were parked in the open like cattle.’
³

The next two days were, according to some, among the worst of the entire retreat. Some could stand it no longer and shot themselves, but most carried on in what had become a mute endurance test. At Pleshchenitse, which Napoleon reached on 30 November, a temperature of – 30°C (–22°F) was recorded by Dr Louis Lagneau. Frostbite became even more widespread. Those walking barefoot were so anaesthetised by the cold that they did not notice what was happening to their feet. ‘The skin and the muscle peeled away like the layers of a waxwork figure, leaving the bones exposed, but the momentary insensitivity allowed them to carry on in the vain hope of reaching their homes,’ wrote Louis Lejeune. Adjutant Major Louis Gardier of the 111th of the Line noticed a man marching along impassively even though his feet had been lacerated by the jagged surface of the rutted and frozen snow. ‘The skin had come away from his feet, and trailed like a sole that had become unstitched, so that his every step marked with an imprint of blood the ground he covered,’ he wrote.
⁴

The hundreds of vehicles left behind on the eastern bank contained supplies of every sort and the life-support system of many a soldier. The struggle for survival took on a more vicious character in consequence. As the temperature dropped, people whose clothes or boots had fallen apart or been stolen lost all compunction, and helped themselves to whatever they could. Captain von Kurz remembered seeing a soldier walk up to a colonel who had sat down by the roadside and start pulling off his fur coat. ‘
Peste
, I’m not dead yet,’ the Colonel mumbled. ‘
Eh bien, mon colonel
, I will wait,’ answered the
soldier.’ Fezensac saw a man pulling the boots off a general who had collapsed by the roadside. The General protested, begging to be allowed to die in peace, but the soldier carried on. ‘
Mon général,
’ he said, ‘I would be quite happy to, but another will take them, and I prefer it to be me.’ Von Kurz saw comrades from the same regiment murder each other over a fur coat. ‘Necessity had turned us into swindlers and thieves, and, without a trace of shame, we stole from each other whatever we required,’ noted Dr René Bourgeois.
⁵

Although they were now moving through inhabited country in which food could be obtained, it was only available to those at the front, and only if they had money. Those further back and the stragglers were left to scavenge. And as thousands of horses had also been left behind at the Berezina, there was, to put it crudely, less meat on the hoof available. ‘No food was so rotten or disgusting as not to find someone to relish it,’ wrote Lieutenant Vossler of the Württemberg Chasseurs. ‘No fallen horse or cattle remained uneaten, no dog, no cat, no carrion, nor, indeed, the corpses of those who died of cold or hunger.’ There were murderous fights over the carcase of a horse, over the tiniest scrap of food, with men screaming at each other in all the languages of Europe.
⁶

Callousness and selfishness reached new heights. ‘I saw people stubbornly defending access to their fire, not to the half-frozen man who wanted to warm himself for a while … that would have been quite natural … fire in those moments was life, and nobody shares life – but to him who was begging for a little flame with which he could light his wisp of straw in order to start his own fire,’ wrote Aleksander Fredro.
⁷

It was a bitter moment when officers who considered themselves to be gentlemen were faced with having to admit how low they had fallen, as Carl von Suckow relates. ‘I had the luck one day, God knows how, to lay my hands on a dozen half-frozen potatoes. Reaching the bivouac, I began cooking them in the ash, and one of my comrades sat down beside me, inviting himself to share my frugal meal. We had come to know each other very well at Stuttgart, where we had been
garrisoned together. In spite of this, I had the brutality to refuse his request outright. He got up and walked away, saying in a melancholy voice: “That is something I shall never forgive you.” It was only then that the ice encasing my heart melted; I called him back and eagerly shared all with him.’ Colonel Griois, who had procured a small sleigh for himself, encountered a friend who begged to be allowed to share it as he was exhausted, but he brushed him off. ‘A horrible egoism had taken hold of my heart, and whenever my thoughts go back to that time of my life I shudder at the moral degradation to which misery can make us stoop,’ he later wrote.
⁸

One of the memories that evoked particular revulsion was that of the acts of cannibalism to which some were now driven. There had undoubtedly been instances of it earlier in the retreat, but they had been isolated. Most of the earlier reports are from the Russian side, which is not surprising, since the Russians would, as they followed in the wake of the retreating army, have seen those Frenchmen who had been reduced to the last extremities. They also saw prisoners who, being given no food by their cossack escorts, resorted to eating the flesh of their dead comrades. Nikolai Galitzine’s is one of the first accounts to claim to have actually seen French soldiers eating a man at that stage. Wilson relates having seen ‘a group of wounded men, at the ashes of [a] cottage, sitting and lying over the body of a comrade which they had roasted, and the flesh of which they had begun to eat’. In a letter to his wife dated 22 November, General Raevsky reports that one of his colonels saw two Frenchmen roasting pieces of a comrade to eat, and General Konovnitsin wrote to his wife also on the same day affirming that ‘people have seen them devouring men’.
⁹

The earliest convincing first-hand account on the French side comes from Lieutenant Roman Soltyk. Reaching Orsha on his own because he had fallen behind, Soltyk could not obtain a regular distribution of rations, so he walked up to a group of men standing around a steaming pot and offered them some money in return for being allowed to partake of their stew. ‘But hardly had I swallowed the first spoonful than I was gripped by irrepressible disgust, and I asked
them whether it was horsemeat they had used to make it,’ he wrote. ‘They coolly replied that it was human meat and that the liver, which was still in the pot, was the best part to eat.’
¹⁰

The practice grew more widespread as psychological barriers broke down under the strain of the conditions on the last leg of the retreat. ‘I saw – and I do not admit this without a certain sense of shame – I saw some Russian prisoners carried to the very limit by the ravening hunger that possessed them, since there were not enough rations for our soldiers, throw themselves on the body of a Bavarian who had just expired, tear him to pieces with knives and devour the bloody shreds of his flesh,’ wrote Amédée de Pastoret. ‘I can still see the forest, the very tree at the foot of which this horrible scene took place, and I wish I could efface the memory as surely as I fled the sight of it.’
¹¹

On 1 December Lieutenant Uxküll noted in his diary that he had seen men ‘gnawing away at the flesh of their companions’ like ‘savage beasts’. Captain Arnoldi of the Russian artillery saw ‘a small group of [French soldiers] by a fire, carving out the softer parts of a dying comrade of theirs in order to eat them’ while he shelled a retreating French column. General Langeron, who was following the retreat between the Berezina and Vilna, did not witness any cannibalism, but did see ‘dead men who had had strips of meat cut out of their thighs for the purpose’.
¹²

There are those, such as Daru and Marbot, who deny that any cannibalism took place, and Gourgaud is highly sceptical. But the evidence is against them, as is probability. ‘One has to have felt the rage of hunger to be able to appreciate our position,’ wrote Sergeant Bourgogne, who admits that he might well have resorted to the practice. ‘And if there had been no human flesh, we would have eaten the devil himself, if someone had cooked him for us.’ Ravening hunger drove people to anything. ‘It was not unknown even for men to gnaw at their own famished bodies,’ wrote Vossler, and Raymond Pontier, a surgeon attached to the general staff, also noted this phenomenon.
¹³

One of the more interesting things to emerge from the written
accounts of the retreat is that there seems to have been a threshold, beneath which the men cheated, killed and even ate each other, and above which they clung to human dignity, a sense of duty and even aspired to happiness. As thousands froze and some were engaged in acts of cannibalism around Pleshchenitse on the night of 30 November, one of Napoleon’s orderly officers who happened to have a good singing voice entertained his comrades with a recital of songs as they shivered in the ruins of the manor house. While some died cursing and raging as they gnawed like hungry dogs at some carcase, one young officer was found by his comrades frozen stiff in the act of lovingly contemplating a miniature of his wife.
¹⁴
Although circumstances obviously had a major effect, this threshold does not seem to have had anything to do with luck, and everything to do with character.