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On the morning of 8 December he himself went out to greet the incoming army. At around eleven o’clock he saw Murat coming
towards him, accompanied by Berthier. ‘They were on foot, on account of the cold,’ he wrote. ‘Murat was enveloped in magnificent large pelisses; a great fur hat, very tall, which crowned his head augmented his height, giving him the air of a giant, beside whom Berthier, whose ample clothing only served to overwhelm his small body, presented a singular contrast.’ No sooner had Murat taken up quarters than he received a call from Maret, who passed on to him Napoleon’s final instructions, which were to hold the city at all costs. ‘No, I refuse to allow myself to be taken in this pisspot of a place!’ Murat is alleged to have answered. And when Berthier asked him for orders, he supposedly told him to write them out himself, since it was obvious what they should be. It is impossible to be sure of this, or of anything else that took place over the next forty-eight hours.
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Even if Napoleon’s departure had not turned the men against him, it had had an effect, and a profound one, on the course of events. ‘The presence of the Emperor had helped to maintain the commanders in their duty,’ noted Eugène Labaume. ‘As soon as it was known he had left, most of them following his example no longer felt restrained by a sense of shame, and without a thought, abandoned the regiments that had been entrusted to them.’ This may have been something of an exaggeration, for there are plenty of examples that belie it, but its essence is supported by others.
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The effects were felt not only in the army. ‘The Emperor’s passage through the city, which was soon common knowledge in Vilna, was an almost universal signal for people to leave,’ wrote Hogendorp, who went on to say that military and civil administrators ‘disappeared in a flash, as if by enchantment’, and painted a picture of panic that may have had something to do with the fact that he himself stands accused by some of having bolted on the morning of 9 December.
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‘In the midst of this extreme disorder, a colossus was needed as a rallying point, and he had just left,’ wrote Ségur. ‘In the great void he left behind him, Murat was hardly noticed. It was then that we saw only too well that a great man is irreplaceable.’ ‘Murat was not the man who was needed at this moment,’ concurred General Berthézène.
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On 9 December the main mass of the army turned up at the gates of Vilna. The men stationed outside the city by Hogendorp to direct traffic were overwhelmed by the disorderly column of troops. The officer in charge of directing the artillery was confronted by men who refused to listen to orders and just wanted to get into town as quickly as possible.

The road by which they came passed into the city through a medieval gate no more than three or four metres wide and more than twice as long, which created a kind of tunnel. The inevitable jam built up before it, with people pushing from behind. ‘One could no doubt have found on the left or on the right other roads leading into the city, but we had developed the unfortunate habit of automatically following the path traced by those who went before us,’ noted Griois, adding that ‘it was, on a smaller scale, the passage of the Berezina all over again’. Some did go off to find other points of entry, but the majority behaved like the sheep they had been reduced to by the experiences of the past weeks.
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Pushed and jostled, men and horses went down, those who came after could not hold the pressure from behind and crushed them underfoot. Christian von Martens saw an officer who was pressed so hard against a cannon by the crush that his stomach burst open and his entrails spilled out. ‘I was swept forward off my feet and finally flung down between two fallen horses, on top of which a rider then stumbled with a third,’ recalled Captain Roeder. ‘I gave myself up for lost. Then dozens of people began to pile up on top of us, screaming horribly as their arms and legs were broken or they were crushed. Suddenly the heaving of one of the horses flung me on top, throwing me into an empty space, where I could pick myself up and stagger through the gate.’
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Once inside, the survivors ignored Hogendorp’s notices and made for the nearest eating places, shops and even private houses, knocking on doors and begging to be let in. One cannot but admire the inhabitants who allowed them into their houses. The men were half-crazed, covered in sores and gaping wounds, filthy and crawling with vermin.
‘Nothing exhales a more foetid odour than frozen flesh,’ recalled Sergeant Thirion, and most of the men had at least some affected limbs.
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The diarrhoea most were suffering from had left traces on their clothes, which cannot have helped, while their breath, after weeks of horseflesh and rotten scraps, was by all accounts particularly foul.

Some of those whose units had disintegrated took the opportunities provided by Vilna to obtain new clothes and stock up with provisions, and promptly moved on along the Kovno road. Many of the officers still with more or less active units made use of their time in the city to prepare themselves for further action. They visited the stores, where they found their trunks with spare uniforms and linen, which had followed the army from Paris via Danzig and then by river and canal to Vilna. Heinrich Brandt was able to have a bath, dress his wounds properly and put on a new uniform; he felt a new man. Major Vionnet de Maringoné also felt transformed by a shave and a change of clothes – which also rid him of the lice infesting his old uniform. Dr Lagneau was delighted to find his trunk, which contained not only fresh clothes, but also some surgical instruments and even books. He took what he needed and gave the rest to the son of the family he was billeted with, who happened to be studying medicine.

But most of the men and officers simply gave in to the luxury of a good meal and a warm, undisturbed night. Colonel Griois took off his boots for the first time in six weeks. A few toenails came away with them, but otherwise his feet seemed in reasonable shape, and he settled down for the night, feeling like a prisoner whose fetters had been removed – but when the time came, he could not get them on again. Marie Henry de Lignières could not resist the temptation of eating a vast amount, after which he climbed into a warm bed for the first time in nearly seven months, but he spent a terrible night and wet himself.

As they relaxed, warm and replete, they felt a sense of security they had not known for six weeks. They were all the more incredulous when they heard the drums beating the stand-to in the morning, and
few even considered responding. Even when they heard the sound of cannonfire they assumed that someone else would be dealing with whatever emergency had arisen.
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In fact, nobody was by this stage dealing with anything. Murat had tried to call a meeting of all the senior generals, but most were too busy seeing to the needs of their men or themselves, and did not regard a summons from the King of Naples as quite so urgent as one from Napoleon would have been. He spent the rest of that day trying to decide on some plan, but there is no evidence that he actually fixed on one. The only thing he did was to transfer his headquarters to the western end of the city, which gave rise to a rumour that he had left.

As the remains of the Grande Armée had trudged into Vilna on the previous afternoon, the retreating Bavarian division under General Wrede, which was still a fighting force of nearly 10,000 men, had been ordered to take up defensive positions covering the city. Many of the Bavarians could not resist going into town in search of food and a warm night’s rest, which disorganised the unit, and when, in the early hours, a few detachments of cossacks appeared to threaten its pickets, these fell back, causing panic among their comrades. Wrede himself seems to have lost his head and was seen running into the city screaming that the cossacks had broken in.

Ney had the call to arms sounded and set off at the head of a detachment of the Old Guard to rally the fleeing Bavarians. He managed to steady the situation and restore order, but returned to headquarters in dispirited mood. ‘I had the stand-to beaten a while ago and could hardly get five hundred men together,’ he said to General Rapp. ‘Everyone is frozen, tired, discouraged, and nobody can be bothered any more.’
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Murat decided that he would not be able to hold Vilna and resolved to fall back on Kovno. But instead of getting Berthier to issue formal orders to the various corps, instructing them in what order they were to march and at what time they should leave, he simply gave a blanket order for the retreat. He then set off himself without delay. The order to evacuate Vilna flew around the city in somewhat
haphazard manner, so that some did not believe it while others never got it. And many of those who did were simply not prepared to carry it out.

Sergeant Bertrand of the 7th Light Infantry in Davout’s corps had obediently gone to the designated monastery, where he had found food and shelter. When he heard the bugle sound the alarm in the early hours and began rousing his men, many, even veterans of the Egyptian and Italian campaigns, simply refused to budge. ‘That night of complete rest around a good fire had been enough to extinguish their courage and their energy,’ he wrote. ‘They were overcome by a general drowsiness, a heaviness in the head which seemed to obscure the faculty of thought. Stupefied, and as if drunk, they attempted to get to their feet, only to fall back heavily.’
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The story was the same in other units.

‘Instead of staying a whole day in Vilna, it would have been far better to continue the retreat without stopping,’ wrote Prince Wilhelm of Baden. ‘Many officers, calling on their last reserves of strength, would have reached the German frontier and would have been saved.’ When it was time to leave he tried to persuade them to come with him, but after one night of release, these men who had come so far found they had the strength to go no further. ‘We had for some time been measuring out our forces in order to reach this city in which we believed we would find what we needed to satisfy our most imperious needs; rest,
bread
, and
Vilna
had come to form a trinity which was united in our minds as a single hope, and as a result we were clear in our minds that we would go no further than this city,’ wrote Adrian de Mailly.
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In many cases, the psychological as well as physical strain of the past weeks had caused something deeper inside to snap. Planat de la Faye tells of an Italian officer who had inspired all his comrades with his fortitude. ‘I have never seen a braver man or a gayer one than this Piedmontese,’ he wrote. ‘He had lost the toes of both feet to frostbite before the passage of the Berezina. At Smorgonie he developed gangrene and could no longer get his shoes on. Every night as we settled
down he would cut away with a knife the gangrenous parts and bind the rest up carefully with rags, and all this with a gaiety which tore at one’s heart. The next day he would resume the march, with the help of a stick, only to perform the same operation that evening, so that by the time he reached Vilna, he had not much more than his two heels left.’ But after a good dinner and a warm undisturbed sleep, he went mad. He was not alone, and one inhabitant of Vilna noted that there were many who had ‘lapsed into complete idiocy’.
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Chaos engulfed the city as the evacuation began. Vilna is built on a slope, and the old city is a mass of winding streets. ‘Naturally, in these narrow streets, covered in ice, the wagons, the sleighs, the carts and the carriages crashed into each other, became entangled, and went over,’ wrote Adrien de Mailly. ‘And naturally, the horses knocked each other over, men fell down and got trampled, and the drivers and the crushed screamed as loud as they could, either at their horses or at those who were breaking their limbs.’
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They might have spared themselves the trouble had they known what awaited them a couple of kilometres outside Vilna.

At the small village of Ponary the Kovno road goes up a long incline. Normally, the local authorities would sprinkle sand on such places at regular intervals in winter. But Hogendorp had not thought of doing so. As a result, the compacted frozen snow covering the road became a long sheet of ice, and many of the wheeled vehicles, and even the horses and men on foot, found it difficult to negotiate.

Major Jean Noel, who had come from the opposite direction, bringing two batteries of eight guns each from Germany to supplement the artillery of Loison’s division, whose fate he did not yet know, paused to wait for orders when he reached the top of the hill of Ponary on 9 December. He was astonished to see crowds of fugitives coming towards him, and all through that day his men earned good money helping them and their vehicles up the slope. On the following morning, a carriage came up the hill and stopped beside his guns. Murat leant out and asked him who he was and what he was doing there, surprised to see two fine new batteries with well-fed teams.
Having explained himself, Noel asked Murat for orders. ‘Major, we are f—d,’ answered the King of Naples. ‘Get on your horse and run.’
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Soon large numbers of troops, baggage trains, artillery and carriages with wounded officers were struggling up the increasingly slippery hill. As a wagon stalled or slid backwards, it sent the one behind into a downward slide, and the two would only come to a standstill when a third, fourth or tenth further back overturned. Even those whose horses were properly shod found it increasingly difficult to negotiate what had soon become an obstacle course.

The men on foot either dragged themselves up on all fours, using their bayonets to gain purchase on the icy surface, or floundered through the deep snow on either side of it. Some made a detour along a track around the side of the hill. A number even managed to get their sleighs or carts round this way. But most of the wheeled vehicles and many mounted men persisted in trying to get up the main road. The artillery had no option, as their guns would never have made it through the narrow side track. Some Hessians succeeded in hauling their guns up, but the Bavarian artilleryman Captain von Grawenreuth was less fortunate, and with tears in his eyes abandoned his last and favourite gun, ‘Mars’, an exceptionally accurate piece, at the foot of the slope.
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