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‘The fire of Moscow lit up my soul and the judgement of the Lord which manifested itself on our frozen plains filled my heart with an ardent faith I had never felt before,’ he wrote to another, adding that he realised he must from this moment devote himself to the cause of establishing the kingdom of God on earth.
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And he was by no means alone in seeing things in such spiritual terms. There was something almost biblical about the scale of the events, and many saw the suffering Russia had endured as punishment for her sins and the fire of Moscow as a purifying expiation. ‘Her ruins will be a pledge of our redemption, moral and political, and the glow of the embers of
Moscow, Smolensk etc. will, sooner or later, light our way to Paris,’ A.I. Turgeniev had written to Prince Piotr Viazemsky on 8 October. ‘The war, which has become a national one, has taken such a turn that it must end with the triumph of the north and a brilliant revenge for the gratuitous wickedness and crimes of the southern nations.’
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He was not the only one who felt the war did not end at Vilna.

‘You will place yourself, Sire, at the head of Europe’s powers,’ Stein had written to Alexander on 17 November. ‘The exalted role of benefactor and restorer is yours to play.’ He needed little prompting. He was already determined to carry the war into Germany and beyond. On 30 November he had decreed a fresh draft of recruits, eight out of every five hundred souls, who, along with those drafted in July and August, would provide the troops he would lead in the liberation of Europe. This was not to be a mere political liberation from the tyranny of Napoleon – it was to be a crusade. In between the receptions and balls taking place in Vilna that Christmas, Alexander had several intimate conversations with the young Countess Tiesenhausen, whom he had taken such a liking to back in the spring. ‘The Emperor spoke like a real sage, who only wishes for the happiness of mankind,’ she noted. ‘He seemed to be dreaming only of the means by which to bring back the Golden Age.’
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As Alexander dreamt of bringing heaven to earth and Napoleon laboured at rebuilding his power in Europe, neither spared a thought for the victims of the recent events or those who were still struggling on the fringes of life. While the Tsar and his entourage danced, the final act in the tragedy of Vilna was unfolding beyond the palace windows.

‘There was no mound of snow or heap of rubbish that did not have an arm or a leg protruding from it – in uniform, as the stripping of the dead had ceased,’ wrote Aleksander Fredro. ‘Throughout the winter in the narrow streets one could see corpses crouching with their backs against the walls, and they had not been spared by mockery. This one had been given a bunch of flowers to hold, that one a pole in the guise
of a musket, a third had had a stick resembling a pipe stuck in his mouth.’
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Cossacks roamed the streets selling their booty, which included children they had taken as they harried the retreating French. ‘These poor little wretches, who had been torn from their mother’s breast by their strange new protectors, could only moan, as they could not even say the name of their parents, who had probably died during the retreat,’ wrote Countess Tiesenhausen.
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The wounded and sick lay in the freezing cold, untended and unfed, in improvised ‘hospitals’, of which there were about forty in Vilna and its environs, situated in monasteries and country houses. They were usually staffed by a couple of medical orderlies assisted by cossacks or militia, who meted out regular doses of brutality but little in the way of food or water, let alone medical attention. Many of the men were afflicted by typhus or other fevers as well as their wounds, but all of them suffered above all from hunger and thirst, with the result that while the military stores left by Napoleon still contained victuals in abundance, the men in the hospitals resorted to cannibalism. Tens of thousands, possibly as many as 30,000, died in the space of a couple of weeks.

In the spring, the corpses would be loaded onto wagons, many of them abandoned French ones, to be taken away and buried or burnt. One survivor never forgot the burlesque sight of twenty or so French
fourgons
, some of them inscribed ‘
Equipages de S. M. Empereur et Roi
’, laden with heaps of stiff bodies piled up like logs.
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Conditions were no better elsewhere. Jean Pierre Maillard from Vevey, a sergeant in the 2nd Swiss Regiment and a veteran of the Spanish campaign, was wounded during the battle for Polotsk and found himself lying with hundreds of others in a convent, without food or water. When the Russians arrived, they swarmed into the building and began robbing the wounded men of everything, even unpicking Maillard’s sergeant’s stripes from his arm. A second wave took his uniform. He lay for days without any assistance, dressing his own wound as best he could, squeezing out the pus, and scraping lice
off his skin with a knife. ‘I thought I was with the damned in hell,’ recalled Giuseppe Venturini, who had also been dumped on the floor of a ‘hospital’ in Polotsk, where he lay untended and unfed listening to the screams of his comrades. Of the two hundred sick in one hospital at Polotsk when it fell on 20 October, there were twenty-five left alive on 23 November, and two on 12 January 1813.
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The fate of the French captives was hardly more to be envied. After being stripped, they were rounded up and either parked out in the open or herded into any available building. At Smorgonie, Henri Ducor was thrown into a grange which was already full of men. The cossacks kept bringing more and more, forcing them to push their way in until they had packed some four hundred men into a space measuring twenty feet by twenty. As men fell over or fainted in the crush they were trampled by others, and Ducor soon found himself standing on a heap of corpses. ‘We were so tightly pressed together, particularly at the back of the room, that the dead did not even have the space to drop, and, buffeted this way and that, they looked, with their stiffened arms raised, as though they were struggling along with the others,’ he wrote, ‘but eventually they would be pushed down, trampled and crushed, as the others climbed onto their corpses in order to relieve their lacerated feet with a trace of human warmth.’ At Kovno, the cossacks threw forty officers into a cellar after stripping and beating them, and left them there without food or drink for a couple of days, at the end of which only three came out alive.
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A physician attached to Berthier’s staff, taken at Vilna and sent off in a convoy of three thousand men to Saratov, was subjected to a catalogue of brutality. When he complained to the officer commanding the escort, the latter said he was powerless to do anything, as he feared his own men. Prisoners often had to spend the night out in the open after a long day’s march; some would stand in order to avoid sleeping on the snow, but would freeze as they lent against a tree. ‘Their last sweat would freeze over their emaciated bodies, and they would stand, their eyes open forever, their body fixed in whatever convulsive attitude death had overtaken and congealed them,’ the
doctor wrote. ‘The bodies stood there until someone removed them in order to burn them, and the ankle would come away from the leg more easily than the sole could be prised from the ground.’ It was only out of the war zone, where the inhabitants took pity and gave them food and they were escorted by veteran soldiers, many of whom had themselves been prisoners in France, that conditions improved.
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Colonel Seruzier of the light artillery of Montbrun’s 2nd Cavalry Corps was more fortunate than most. He was taken prisoner by cossacks just as he was about to recross the Niemen. He was wounded, as well as being stripped and robbed, and forced to march through the snow in the intense cold barefoot and naked. He complained of this treatment when he was brought before Platov, but received a supercilious rebuke. Luckily for him, Platov’s son took pity on him, and after having his wounds dressed procured him some scraps of clothing to cover himself with. This would have made little difference once he had been sent off under cossack guard, had it not been for the fact that by a stroke of extraordinary good fortune he came across a Russian colonel whom he had taken prisoner at Austerlitz seven years before and treated with chivalry. The Colonel gave him clothes and money, and recommended him personally, with threats, to the commander of the convoy. A further stroke of luck meant that in Vilna Seruzier saw Grand Duke Constantine, whom he had befriended at Tilsit and Erfürt, and after that he was given privileged treatment.
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Others who managed to avoid the common fate of prisoners were those who had a useful trade: medical skills were especially valued. As soon as it became clear who he was, Dr La Flise was asked to take over the job of the regimental surgeon of the Russian unit which had captured him. Dr Heinrich Roos was also set to work for the Russian army as soon as he was taken. And tailors, cobblers, blacksmiths and others were in many cases taken along by the advancing Russians. A French bugler somehow contrived to charm the cossacks who captured him by playing for them on his clarinet, and they took him with them as their entertainer. Others with some skill were pulled out
of columns of prisoners by the owners of estates they were marched through, who were eager to benefit from free labour.
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Many of the soldiers realised that their nationality might help them in some circumstances. Germans often tried to play on theirs, while Dutchmen pretended to be German, as did Poles, in order to avoid being singled out for particularly rough treatment. Spaniards and Portuguese proclaimed their nationality loudly, with some success, as the Spanish
guerrilla
against the French invaders had become a popular legend in Russia. Don Raphael de Llanza, an officer in the loseph-Napoléon Regiment, called out that he and his men were Spaniards as they surrendered at the Berezina, and they were greeted with enthusiasm by their captors. Their escorting cossacks would shout ‘Spaniards!’ as they passed other Russian units or groups of angry-looking peasants, who in turn hailed them. This did not prevent de Llanza’s jaw being so badly frostbitten that he later had to have a silver implant specially made – which he eventually left, along with his sword and his spurs, to his heirs.
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Sergeant Bénard was surprised at the reception he and his wounded comrades received as their carts trundled into Moscow. ‘I must here do justice to the inhabitants of Moscow that they did not let us hear a single shout of hatred, not a single threat; quite the contrary, I received from them unequivocal marks of sympathy, and my little cart was heaped with provisions which anonymous hands had discreetly slipped in,’ he recorded. But he was saddened to discover when, being well enough to walk, he went to visit the German family with whom he had stayed six months before, that they had been dispossessed and sent into exile for their friendliness to the French.
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The prisoners would eventually be handed over to the civil authorities in some provincial town, where they were at last given the subsistence pay due to them. They were able to take jobs, the officers were allowed out on parole, and most of them were treated reasonably. But there were exceptions. ‘Go to the devil, you French dogs,’ the Governor of Tambov, a Prince Gagarin, thundered when confronted
by some German prisoners who had dared to complain about their conditions. ‘Heaven is very high and the Tsar is very far away.’
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Those who had got across the Niemen with the remnants of the retreating army had thought they would be safe once they had crossed the frontier of the Russian empire. It came as a shock to find that bands of cossacks followed them beyond the boundary, and many were killed or taken on Prussian soil. But eventually the survivors made it to Königsberg, where Murat had set up his headquarters and intended to rally the army, and where they felt they could relax at last.

For years afterwards, Bellot de Kergorre could not forget the luxury of his first bath: ‘I could feel my whole body unwind; it felt as though every part was getting back into its proper place, from which it had been disturbed; all my muscles, all my nerves were shifting and relaxing.’ The joy of shedding and burning their vermin-infested clothes and putting on clean ones shines through many an account. But the process of readjusting to normal life was not always easy. Marie Henry de Lignières sought out the family he had stayed with in Königsberg on the way out, and they welcomed him with open arms. He spent a delightful evening with them, but reduced them all to tears when he began to play the piano with his frost-damaged fingers. One officer, a German aristocrat, was mortified when he caught himself grabbing at food. ‘I tended to use my hands instead of a fork,’ he writes. Some found they could not bear to sit for long in heated rooms, and had to sleep with the window wide open even when it was freezing outside.
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A large number of the survivors were in far worse shape than they realised. Just as many had gone mad in Vilna, some now gave way to ‘nervous fevers’ of one sort or another. Others fell victim to the typhus epidemic that had broken out in the last stages of the retreat. Among them were Inspector General of Artillery Lariboisière and General Eblé, whose pontoneers had saved the army at the Berezina.

Murat held reviews and talked of regrouping, but his abandonment of Vilna, which he had been ordered to hold, and then Kovno, which
he had himself promised to hold, did not inspire confidence. There was no question of his bravery, but there was also no question of his limited intelligence and strength of character. And his efforts at rallying the army were undermined by the wider political situation.

In Prussia the French came up against the full force of popular resentment. In Königsberg, students would sing belligerent songs and recite poems calling on Germany to rise up against the tyranny of France. As they trudged through the countryside, the soldiers, even if they were Germans, were spat upon as they passed, and the locals often refused to sell them food. Many of the isolated or wounded men were set upon and beaten up.
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