B009YBU18W EBOK (74 page)

In others, the conditions induced apathy. Dr Larrey observed that ‘we were all in a state of such despondency and torpor that we had difficulty in recognising each other’. Dr Bourgeois noted a similar phenomenon. ‘A great many were in a state of real dementia, plunged in a kind of stupor, with haggard eyes, a fixed and dazed stare, one could single them out in the crowd, in the midst of which they walked like automata in profound silence. If one hailed them one could get only disjointed and incoherent answers; they had entirely lost the use of their senses and were impervious to everything – the insults and even the blows they received could not rouse them or bring them out of this state of idiocy.’ Some became so disoriented by the cold that they would walk drunkenly straight into a fire and stand in it with their bare feet, or even lie down in it.
⁴⁷

General Langeron, commanding the vanguard of Chichagov’s army, was following the French as they made for Vilna. ‘The Russian army was marching down the middle of the road,’ he wrote, ‘and on either side of this road marched, or rather stumbled, two columns of the enemy, without weapons.’ The Russians ignored them, as they could get nothing out of them. ‘They knew nothing, remembered nothing, understood nothing,’ recalled Lieutenant Zotov. The road itself was strewn with frozen corpses, and here and there groups of
crazed soldiers gnawed at a carcase, human or animal. ‘I was born to die in the service of my motherland, and from the beginning I prepared myself to fear neither shells nor other dangers,’ noted Lieutenant Chicherin in his diary, ‘but I cannot accustom myself to the horrors and torments that continually present themselves to my eyes along the way.’
⁴⁸

Another who walked down the same road in the wake of the French retreat was Henri Ducor, who had been taken prisoner on the banks of the Berezina, but, having been stripped and robbed by cossacks and then left to die, had pulled some clothes off a corpse and decided to continue the retreat to Vilna. ‘Every tree trunk was a support for another victim; sometimes three or four dead bodies were grouped around it in the most bizarre attitudes: some on all fours, others crouching on their heels, others sitting with their arms around their knees and their chins resting on them, others sitting with their elbows on their thighs and their heads bent forward, as though they were sleeping or perhaps eating,’ he wrote. ‘But what really aroused my astonishment was a gunner standing erect behind his cannon, his right hand leaning on the breech and facing towards Russia. He still had his uniform. The enemy army had marched past him and left him as he was. In the midst of this ocean of snow he was like a monument commemorating our great disaster.’
⁴⁹

Those who could simply trudged on, kept alive by the lure of Vilna. ‘Vilna now became the promised land, the safe haven from every storm and the term of all our misfortunes,’ according to Caulaincourt.
⁵⁰
They knew it would not be like Smolensk, that it was a substantial inhabited and friendly city in which they would find shelter and food in abundance. But it would have been better for them if it had been another burnt-out shell like Smolensk.

V
ilna was calm. Although Maret had for some time been receiving increasingly desperate letters from Napoleon, demanding more and more horses and men, he had no inkling of the scale of the disaster. He knew the situation was not good, and must have suspected that it was much worse than he was being told, but he was under firm instructions to act as though all was going well. On 2 December he duly celebrated the anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation with the usual twenty-one-gun salute, a
Te Deum
in the cathedral and, in the evening, a grand dinner at the former archepiscopal palace for the diplomatic corps and the local grandees, which was surprisingly gay.

The Governor of Vilna, General Dirk van Hogendorp, gave a ball, while the chief
Commissaire
Édouard Bignon gave a humbler reception at his lodgings. It was in the course of this that the owner of these lodgings, who also happened to be one of the Polish noblemen carrying messages between Napoleon and Maret, a Mr Abramowicz, returned from his latest mission. He had left Napoleon at the Berezina and painted a gloomy picture of the situation.

Over the next couple of days strange rumours began to circulate in the city.
Commissaires
and other administrative personnel started leaving, and some of the nobility thought it wise to take themselves off to their country estates. Maret and Hogendorp then received
Napoleon’s instructions to bake bread and biscuit, and to send out supplies to meet the army. More alarming were the directives telling them to evacuate all unnecessary personnel and to put the city in a state of military readiness.
¹
While Maret asked the ministers of Austria, Prussia, Denmark, the United States and other smaller powers to move to Warsaw, Hogendorp drove out to meet Napoleon.

He found him in a small country house outside Smorgonie on 5 December, and informed him that there were enough rations stockpiled at Vilna to feed 100,000 men for three months, as well as 50,000 muskets, munitions, uniforms, boots, harness and other materiel. There was even, according to him, a small remount depot. He reported that he had ordered the deployment of two fresh divisions that had recently arrived from Germany to form a screen around the city, and three regiments of cavalry along the road from Oshmiana to Vilna. After apparently approving all these measures, Napoleon told him of his intention of leaving for Paris, and asked him to ensure that there would be fresh horses waiting at every posting station on the road to Warsaw.
²

Hogendorp drove back to Vilna to make the arrangements, and later that evening Napoleon himself set off for France. He did not pass through Vilna, only pausing for an hour on the outskirts in the early hours of 6 December in order to see Maret and give his final instructions. His last orders were that Murat must hold Vilna.

On paper, this was quite feasible. The city was well stocked and there were up to 20,000 fresh troops available to fend off any Russian attack while the 10,000 Bavarians falling back under Wrede and the 30 to 40,000 remnants of the Grande Armée caught their breath. ‘Ten days of rest and abundant victuals will bring back discipline,’ Napoleon had assured Maret.
³
The city would not be cut off while Macdonald’s 10th Corps held Prussia and Schwarzenberg and Reynier hovered in Poland, where the remains of Poniatowski’s 5th Corps would soon be reforming. And the various Russian units approaching Vilna were in no fit state to mount a serious challenge to an organised and determined defence. But no such defence was ever organised, and a series of factors conspired to turn the longed-for haven of Vilna into the grave of the Grande Armée.

The first act of the tragedy opened as Hogendorp deployed his two fresh divisions at the approaches to the city, Coutard’s to the north and Loison’s to the south-east, around Oshmiana.
⁴
In normal circumstances this would have been an obvious and salutary manoeuvre, which would have allowed the retreating army to filter through into an area of safety and achieve the final leg of its march without the anxiety of being harried by cossacks. But there was nothing normal in the circumstances by now. The rapid attrition of all fresh units sent out to reinforce the retreating army had shown how quickly untempered troops perished when plunged without preparation into the dire conditions of this campaign. The most recent example was of a march regiment from Württemberg, numbering 1360 men when it joined the retreating army at Smorgonie on 5 December, which marched back into Vilna four days later just sixty strong.
⁵

The Loison division, a mixed bag of German and Italian regiments containing large numbers of freshly drafted boys, many of them with hardly a hair on their upper lip, began to take up positions around Oshmiana on 5 December. They hunkered down for the night in the ruins of devastated villages and, unused to the conditions, had to learn the hard way about frostbite and all the other perils of camping out in a northern winter.

At intervals along the road between Vilna and Oshmiana, Hogendorp posted a regiment of Polish lancers and two Neapolitan regiments made up of volunteers commanded by Prince della Rocca Romana. The Neapolitans were resplendent in crimson Hussar uniforms and white cloaks of the finest cotton, and extraordinarily handsome – Rocca Romana himself was referred to as ‘the Apollo Belvedere’ by the ladies of Vilna, with whom they had all enjoyed a short burst of success before marching out into the cold.
⁶

And it was just after the Loison division and the Neapolitan cavalry reached their positions, on 6 December, that the temperature had dropped to around –37.5°C (–35.5°F). A squadron of Neapolitans
was detailed to complement Napoleon’s escort of two squadrons of Polish Chevau-Légers as he left Smorgonie on the first leg of his journey back to Paris. The Imperial Mameluke, Roustam, noted that the wine in Napoleon’s carriage froze that night, causing the bottles to shatter. He also noticed that by the time they reached their first halt, there were only Poles surrounding the imperial convoy. The Apollo Belvedere had lost his fingers and all but a handful of his men.
⁷

The same icy death met the Loison division. Dr Bourgeois, who passed them on his retreat, could hardly believe the rapidity with which these unprepared men succumbed. ‘First, one saw them totter and walk for a few moments with an unsteady step like drunken men,’ he wrote. ‘It was as though all the blood in their bodies had gone to the head, so red and swollen did their faces become. They were soon gripped entirely and lost their strength, and their limbs were as if paralysed. No longer able to lift their arms, they let them fall under their own weight, their muskets fell out of their hands, their legs gave way beneath them and they fell to the ground after wearing themselves out in vain efforts. As they felt themselves weaken, tears wetted their eyelids, and when they had fallen they would open these several times to stare fixedly at their surroundings; they seemed to have entirely lost all feeling and had a surprised, haggard look, but the whole of their face, the contortions of the muscles in it, were unequivocal evidence of the cruel pain they felt. The eyes became very red, and often blood seeped through the pores, flowing out in drops outside the membrane that covers the inside of the eyelid (the conjunctiva). Thus, one can state without using the language of metaphor, that these unfortunates shed tears of blood.’
⁸

According to Lejeune, the Loison division lost half of its men in a matter of twenty-four hours, and by the time the retreating army had reached Vilna on 9 December, there was not a single one left. Hogendorp estimates that its 10,000 men dwindled to less than two thousand overnight.
⁹
To the miseries of the retreating Grande Armée was added the sight of thousands of smartly uniformed hard-frozen soldiers lining the road as they trudged on towards Vilna.

On 7 December, the first individual soldiers and groups began to trickle into town. The shops and cafés were open as usual, and the tattered men could hardly believe their eyes. Every village, town and city they had seen over the past six months had been a ravaged, burnt-out, deserted shell, and they found the aspect of a normal bustling city untouched by war magical. ‘It was for us the most extraordinary spectacle to see a city where everything was perfectly calm, and one could see ladies at the windows,’ wrote Colonel Pelet. They revelled in the luxury of being able to walk into a café , sit down and order coffee and cakes. Colonel Griois made for the nearest inn and ordered himself a dinner of bread with butter, meat and potatoes, washed down with a bottle of indifferent Spanish wine. ‘You will laugh with scorn when I say that this moment, preceded and followed as it was by so much misery and danger, was certainly one of the moments in my life when I felt the sensation of the truest and most complete happiness,’ he wrote.
¹⁰

Some then went off to find rooms, while others stocked up on provisions. More and more men drifted into the city, and the shops and eating places began to shut as the inhabitants of Vilna realised that the rumours that had been circulating over the past week had been true. ‘At first they looked at us with surprise, then with horror,’ wrote Cesare de Laugier, who was one of the early arrivals, with the debris of Prince Eugène’s 4th Corps. ‘They rushed home to their houses, and began barring doors and windows.’
¹¹

Hogendorp had made what he thought would be adequate arrangements to receive the retreating army. After the briefest of consultations with the monks, he designated each of the many monasteries in the city as a barracks for one of the corps, and posted notices at every street corner informing the men that they would find soup and meat there, and giving directions. He detailed an artillery officer to set up a post at the approaches to the city in order to direct the ordnance to places where it could be parked.