Authors: Adam Zamoyski
He had talked himself into a good mood by the time they reached Warsaw in the early evening of 10 December, and in order to stretch his legs he got out at the city gate and walked to the Hôtel d’Angleterre, where the sleigh had been sent on. He wondered aloud to Caulaincourt whether anyone would recognise him as they walked through the busy streets, but nobody took any notice of the small plump man in his green velvet overcoat and fur-lined bonnet. He seemed almost disappointed.
3
He continued to talk with animation while dinner was prepared and a servant girl struggled to light a fire in the freezing room they had taken at the hotel. Caulaincourt had been sent to fetch Pradt, who was struck by the jolly mood of the Emperor when he arrived. But that did not make the interview any easier for the Archbishop of Malines. Dismissing his own failure with the phrase ‘From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step,’ Napoleon laid into Pradt, blaming him for having failed to galvanise Poland, raise money and furnish men. He declared that he had never seen any Polish troops during the whole campaign, and accused the Poles of lacking in courage and determination.
His tone changed with the appearance of the Polish ministers he had summoned. Although he did not attempt to hide the fact that he had been forced into a disastrous retreat which had cost him thousands of men, he told them that he had 120,000 still at Vilna, and would be back in the spring with a new army. They must raise money and a mass levy in order to defend the Grand Duchy. The ministers stood around getting colder and colder as he paced up and down, carried away into a lengthy monologue by his own fantasies.
‘I beat the Russians every time,’ he ranted. ‘They don’t dare to stand up to us. They are no longer the soldiers of Eylau and Friedland. We will hold Wilna, and I shall be back with 300,000 men. Their successes will make the Russians foolhardy; I will fight them two or three
times on the Oder, and in six months’ time I will be back on the Niemen … All that has happened is of no consequence; it was a misfortune, it was the effect of the climate; the enemy had nothing to do with it; I beat them every time …’ And so it went on, with the occasional self-justificatory ‘He who hazards nothing gains nothing’ and the frequent repetition of the phrase he had just coined, and which he appeared to relish: ‘From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step.’
4
Having had his dinner and impressed upon the Poles that he was not beaten, Napoleon climbed back into his sleigh and sped out of Warsaw at nine o’clock that evening. As they passed through the little town of Lowicz, he realised that he was not far from the country house of his mistress, Maria Walewska. He knew she was at home, and decided to make a small detour and call on her. Caulaincourt was shocked. He told the Emperor that it would be madness to do any such thing. Not only would it delay their arrival in Paris, and increase the danger that some German patriot might hear of their passage and take it into his head to detain or kill them. It would be an insult to Marie-Louise. And public opinion would never forgive him if he were known to have gone off to revel in his
amours
while his army was freezing to death in Lithuania. Napoleon took some time to be convinced.
As the sleigh flew on through the dismal snow-covered landscape, he turned over the whole political situation again and again, as if trying to convince himself that all it had been was a minor setback. ‘I made a mistake,
Monsieur le Grand Écuyer
, not on the aim or the political opportunity of the war, but in the manner in which I waged it,’ he said, giving Caulaincourt’s ear an affectionate tug. ‘I should have stopped at Witepsk. Alexander would now be at my knees. The way the Russian army divided after I crossed the Niemen blinded me … I stayed two weeks too long in Moscow.’
5
This was perfectly true. Two weeks before Napoleon left Moscow, Kutuzov had no more than about 60,000 men under arms, and the 20,000 cossacks he was counting on were still a long way off.
Napoleon could have stormed his camp at Tarutino, or just withdrawn through Kaluga, Medyn or Smolensk without being molested. He would have been able to evacuate all the wounded and the materiel he needed, and go into winter quarters wherever he wished long before the weather grew cold. And although the cold may not have been the original or even the major cause of the disaster, it was what had ultimately undermined every effort to retrieve anything from it. Most Russians at the time, as well as observers such as Clausewitz and Schwarzenberg, were adamant that the defeat of the French had nothing to do with Kutuzov and everything to do with the weather. ‘One has to admit,’ wrote Schwarzenberg, who referred to the Field Marshal as ‘
l’imbécile Kutuzov
’, ‘that this is the most astonishing kick from a donkey any mortal has ever had the whim to court.’
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Napoleon’s marshals and generals, not to mention his soldiers, were agreed that the Russians could take no credit for what had happened. ‘In every instance the Russians were beaten, and as soon as the army has had a little rest, they will see their victors again,’ Davout wrote to his wife from Gumbinnen on 17 December. ‘The conduct of the troops is splendid; no grumbling. It is as though they all, down to the last soldier, realised that no power and no genius can prevent the damage inflicted by weather.’ A few days later General Compans wrote to his wife, rebuking her for suggesting that Napoleon had gone mad, albeit admitting that ‘the calculations of his brain were not as successful in this campaign as in others and that fortune has not been as favourable’. The troops were more direct in their appraisal. ‘We are f—ked, but it doesn’t matter … we always beat them all the same,’ muttered a starving Grenadier à Cheval of the Old Guard as he trudged out of Vilna, his uniform in shreds, his bearskin hanging in tatters about his face, with only one boot. ‘Those little Russkies are no more than schoolboys.’
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Although Napoleon realised his setback in Russia would give heart to his enemies and threaten his ascendancy, he was confident that he would be able to reassert himself. His aptitude for wishful thinking
had not been among the casualties of this war, and he was already preparing the ground for the coming spring campaign as he raced on. He laid great importance on the conflict that had broken out between Britain and the United States of America, assuming that this would distract and weaken his eternal enemy. ‘He did not doubt that it would turn to [the Americans’] advantage,’ wrote Caulaincourt. ‘He saw this moment as that of their total political emancipation and their development into a great power.’
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He reached Dresden in the early hours of 14 December, and stopped at the French Minister’s lodgings. As he dictated letters to his various allies, an officer was sent over to the royal palace, where after much argument he was allowed to wake King Frederick Augustus and inform him that Napoleon was in town. When the bleary-eyed monarch had fully taken in the situation, he dressed hurriedly and had himself carried in a sedan chair to the French Minister’s residence. Napoleon, who had managed to snatch an hour’s sleep, was sitting up in bed, and it was in this position that he reaffirmed his alliance with Saxony and received assurances that fresh troops would be raised.
Napoleon resumed his journey in a commodious vehicle lent by the Saxon King, pausing only to change horses. At many of the stops he would not even leave the carriage, and he would only go into a coaching inn in order to lunch or dine. At Weimar, where his carriage paused briefly in the middle of the night, he nevertheless found a moment to ask someone to convey his respects to ‘Monsieur
Gött
’. Four days later he was rolling into Paris.
As the carriage drove up to the Tuileries at a few minutes to midnight on 18 December and the two men wrapped in heavy cloaks with their faces hidden by fur caps got down, the sentries let Napoleon and Caulaincourt pass, taking them to be bearers of urgent news. In the palace itself, the concierge took some persuading that this really was the Emperor and the Master of the Horse. A few minutes later, Marie-Louise heard a commotion and came out to see her ladies-in-waiting trying to forbid entry to two unfamiliar figures. But she could not
hide her joy on recognising her beloved husband, and they fell into each other’s arms.
Before allowing himself to indulge in marital comforts, however, Napoleon gave a last instruction, one that shows he had lost nothing of his statesmanship. He ordered Caulaincourt to go to the house of the Arch-Chancellor, Cambacérès, to inform him of the Emperor’s return and to instruct him that there would be a normal
lever
the next morning.
The twenty-ninth Bulletin had been published three days before, on 16 December. For over a decade every
Bulletin de la Grande Armée
had contained only tidings of victory and glory, and people were stunned to read such an admission of failure. But its closing words about ‘His Majesty’s health’ made it clear that the Emperor was not affected by the reverse. And before they could recover from the shock or start drawing conclusions, Napoleon was among them once more, behaving as though nothing had happened. He took the reins of power firmly in his hands and set about raising a new army, to be ready in March. ‘I am very pleased with the mood of the nation,’ he wrote to Murat that very day, addressing the letter to Vilna.
9
By the time Napoleon wrote out that address, Vilna was in Russian hands, and on that very evening Kutuzov was attending a gala at the theatre organised in his honour by the nervous inhabitants. According to Clausewitz, his only contribution to the victory had been the refusal, born of fear, to take on Napoleon, but he was the victor nevertheless. And nobody was more surprised than him. ‘If two or three years ago anyone had told me that fate would choose me to bring down Napoleon, the giant threatening the whole of Europe, I would have spat in his mug,’ Kutuzov confided to Yermolov.
10
Four days later, on 23 December, Alexander himself entered the city. At the gates enthusiastic soldiers unharnessed the horses from his carriage and dragged it up to the archepiscopal palace, where a triumphant Kutuzov was waiting to greet him. The Tsar embraced the Field Marshal graciously, but he was far from satisfied.
At a private meeting on the morning of 26 December Alexander told Wilson that Kutuzov had done ‘nothing he ought to have done’, and that ‘all his successes have been
forced
upon him’. He complained that he could do nothing about it, as the Field Marshal was the darling of the nobility of Moscow. ‘In half an hour I must therefore (and he paused for a minute) decorate this man with the great Order of St George, and by so doing commit a trespass on its institution; for it is the highest honour, and hitherto the purest, of the empire,’ Wilson reports the Tsar as saying.
11
Alexander reproached Kutuzov for losing three days by retreating from Maloyaroslavets, for failing to cut Napoleon off at Krasny and for letting him get across the Berezina. He was annoyed that the French were not being pursued with more vigour. And, like his brother Constantine before him, he was shocked and displeased by the scruffy appearance of the regiments which paraded before him. Kutuzov countered by blaming others for failing to carry out his orders, and stressed his own merit, arrogating all their minor successes to his own credit.
12
He was already dictating legend.
‘I mostly humbly beg you, gracious lady, that the fortifications built near the village of Tarutino, fortifications which put fear into the ranks of the enemy and proved a solid bastion at which the rushing torrent of the destroyers which threatened to flood the whole of Russia was stemmed, that these fortifications remain untouched,’ he wrote to Princess Naryshkin, on whose land the camp of Tarutino was situated. ‘Let time, not the hand of man, destroy them; let the cultivator, working in his peaceful fields around them, not touch them with his plough; let them in later times become for the Russians sacred monuments of their valour; let our successors, gazing upon them, become enflamed with the fire of emulation and say with rapture: this is the place on which the pride of the predators fell before the fearlessness of the sons of the fatherland.’
13
As far as Kutuzov was concerned, the campaign was over; his army was exhausted and needed a long rest. At the beginning of December he had issued an appeal to the German nation, calling on it to rise.
‘The favourable moment has come for you to take revenge for the humiliations you have suffered, and to raise yourself once more to the circle of free nations,’ it ran. ‘Your princes are in chains and they expect you all and each of you individually to free them and avenge them.’ This was followed by a long account of the campaign in German, by a personal address from Kutuzov urging the Prussian forces to leave the Napoleonic camp and join with Russia, and by another appeal to the peoples of Germany.
14
But while he wanted to foment trouble for Napoleon in Germany, he was not about to march out and liberate it. Many Russians felt, like him, that they should take over the whole of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, thereby settling the Polish problem once and for all, and possibly East Prussia with Danzig as well, leaving the Germans to fight it out with Napoleon further west.
Alexander saw things differently. Although he acceded to Rostopchin’s wish for a victory monument to be cast from the bronze of captured French guns, he himself was more interested in building a great church of the Holy Saviour. That his cause had triumphed in spite of all the mistakes he and his commanders had made only confirmed him in the conviction that he was a tool in the hands of the Almighty. ‘It is God who did everything; it is He who has changed everything so suddenly in our favour, by casting down on the head of Napoleon all the calamities which he had meant for us,’ he wrote to his sister Catherine on 20 November.
15