B009YBU18W EBOK (79 page)

A more alarming development was taking place to the north, where Macdonald’s 10th Corps was falling back to link up with Murat’s remaining forces. Macdonald still had nearly 30,000 men in good shape, which was quite enough to hold East Prussia and discourage the Russians from crossing the Niemen. Half of this corps consisted of Prussians under General Hans David Yorck von Wartenburg, a choleric Prussian patriot who bore no love for the French.

At the beginning of November, Yorck had received a letter from General Essen, the Russian commander in Riga, informing him that Napoleon was in full flight and suggesting that Yorck change sides and kidnap Macdonald. Yorck refused to contemplate such a proposal, but after more overtures on the Russian side, he replied that if the Tsar wished to communicate with the King of Prussia, he would be prepared to pass on his letters. Macdonald had noted a ‘
refroidissement
’ taking place, but, confident in the military honour of the Prussian officers under his command, did not fear anything more than a lack of enthusiasm in carrying out his orders.
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As Macdonald withdrew at the beginning of December, Yorck and his Prussians fell behind. Macdonald paused in his retreat and sent Yorck orders to catch up before he was cut off, repeating them when he received no response. His entourage began to mutter about treason, but he refused to believe a soldier of Yorck’s standing capable of such a thing.

On 20 December the division of General Diebitsch, another Prussian in Russian service, came between Yorck and Macdonald, effectively cutting off the Prussians. There followed a stand-off between the Russians and the Prussians while Major Clausewitz, who was now on Diebitsch’s staff, conducted negotiations. Despite a certain amount of suspicion on both sides, they rapidly reached an agreement which, after referral back to the Tsar, was signed as the Convention of Tauroggen on 30 December. By this act, Yorck undertook to cease fighting the Russians, while they granted his corps neutral status.
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When news of the Prussian defection reached him, Murat realised that the line of the Niemen could no longer be held and proceeded to evacuate Königsberg. Schwarzenberg also understood that the game was up. He withdrew from his positions in Poland and made for Austria, obliging Reynier and his Saxons to fall back as well so as not to be cut off from Saxony. The whole of East Prussia and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw were now wide open to the cossacks, and thousands more stragglers were taken or killed.

The French held on at Danzig and fortresses such as Küstrin, Torun and Glogau, and Poniatowski was doing his best to scrape together enough men for a defence of Warsaw. The city presented a curious spectacle, for as emaciated stragglers drifted in from the north and east, a fine new regiment of Italian Vélites marched up from the other direction. ‘While the heroes were being found places in hospitals, the young Italian gentlemen, beautifully uniformed and groomed, went into society, where they sang with their melodious voices and tasted every kind of pleasure,’ wrote one Varsavian.
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It was only as the French retreat finally came to a stop towards the end of January and the remnants of the Grande Armée reached the towns designated as assembly-points for the various units that a picture of the scale of the disaster began to emerge.

It is impossible to establish with any precision the number of those who perished, since the original figures for the Grande Armée are
probably too high, while it was continuously reinforced during the operations in Russia. But one can be fairly confident that the total number of French and allied troops operating beyond the Niemen at some time between June and December 1812 was somewhere between 550,000 and 600,000. Only about 120,000 of these came out in December. Possibly as many as 30,000 had come out earlier, either as lightly wounded, sick, or as cadres sent to form new units in France or Italy. It is also probable that a hefty proportion of the 50,000 or so deserters at the start of the campaign got out while the going was good. The Russians took about 100,000 prisoners, but certainly no more than 20,000 of those survived to be sent home after 1814. Thus it can safely be assumed that as many as 400,000 French and allied troops died, less than a quarter of them in battle. One can only guess at how many more tens of thousands of French and allied civilians, from among those who followed the army into Russia and those who chose to follow it back from Moscow, also perished. And of those, both military and civilians, who did get out, a large number died within a month or two, of typhus, tuberculosis or the nervous after-effects of the campaign.

Losses on the Russian side are no easier to ascertain with any precision. It is now thought that up to 400,000 soldiers and militia perished, around 110,000 of them in battle. The number of civilians who were killed, at the sieges of Polotsk and Smolensk, in the fire of Moscow, in thousands of raids by marauders, or simply of hunger and cold as a result of having to flee their homes, can only be guessed at. But it is safe to say that all in all, between the Grande Armée’s crossing of the Niemen at the end of June 1812 and the end of February 1813, about a million people died, fairly equally divided between the two sides.
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As far as Napoleon was concerned, the losses were even more serious than they might appear from these figures. Of the 120,000 who had come out of Russia in December, 50,000 were Austrians and Prussians, the former shaky allies, the latter about to become enemies. Of the remaining 70,000, over 20,000 were Poles. If one were
to strip away the other allied survivors, one would probably find that no more than about 35,000 Frenchmen had survived, many of them unfit for service. To this must also be added the loss of at least 160,000 horses taken from stock within the Napoleonic empire, and over a thousand cannon.

The extent of the damage varied a great deal from unit to unit. The Austrian contingent had survived largely because, being on its own under Schwarzenberg, it was able to avoid battle on all but one occasion. The Prussians under Macdonald were only involved in light skirmishes, and showed a similar lack of enthusiasm for fighting the Russians – their sector was so peaceful for long stretches of the summer that the officers used to go bathing in the Baltic sea.

Of the 96,000 Poles who took part, as many as 24,000 came out of Russia, a survival rate of 25 per cent. Of the 32,700 Bavarians who crossed the Niemen, the most General Wrede could muster on 1 January 1813 was four thousand, or 12 per cent of the total. The two Illyrian regiments, which had numbered 3518 men of all ranks, were down to 211, about 6 per cent. Of the 52,000 men of the Army of Italy, only 2637 men and 207 officers reassembled at Marienwerder in January, representing just over 5 per cent. And of the 27,397 Italians who crossed the Alps in the early summer of 1812, only about a thousand returned home, not much more than 3 per cent.
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As might be expected, regiments of the Guard came out comparatively well. Lieutenant Marie Henry de Lignières’ company of Chasseurs mustered fifty-two men out of 245 at Königsberg. The roll-call in the Lancers of Berg on 3 January 1813 was answered by 370 men out of an original complement of 1109. The Polish Chevau-Légers, who had crossed the Niemen 915 strong and shed officers and men as cadres for the Lithuanian regiments being raised, still numbered 422 when they recrossed into the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in December.
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Line regiments fared less well. According to Sergeant Bertrand, the 7th Light Infantry in Davout’s corps opened the campaign with 3342 men, and numbered only 192 when the roll was called at Torun on
31 December. Of the eight hundred horsemen of the 8th Chasseurs à Cheval who marched out of Brescia on 6 February 1812 on their way to war, only seventy-five gathered at Glogau a year later. The 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the Spanish Joseph-Napoléon Regiment, which had fought at Borodino and Maloyaroslavets in Prince Eugène’s corps, recrossed the Niemen with only fourteen officers and fifty other ranks, but Colonel Lopez did manage to carry the standard back with him. Of the company of four hundred pontoneers who built the bridges over the Berezina, only Captain Benthien, Sergeant-Major Schroder and six men returned to Holland. And the only man of the 8th Westphalian Infantry to make it back to Cassel was one lone sergeant.
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The impact of such losses on the countries involved is difficult to grasp. For France, the most populous country in Europe, the loss of over 300,000 men out of a population of twenty-seven million would he comparable to a loss of nearly 700,000 today, and that figure does not include the large number of civilians. For the Grand Duchy of Warsaw to lose over 70,000 men was, proportionally, like present-day Poland losing three-quarters of a million, and that does not take into account the civilians who died as a result of the armies moving over its territory. The equivalent figures for Germany would be approximately 400,000, for northern Italy 200,000, and for Belgium and Holland 80,000. And behind these figures lurk thousands of personal tragedies, many of them aggravated by the fact that so little information was available on what had happened to people.

A French peasant wrote to his son on 22 February 1813, addressing his letter to ‘Captain Flamant of the 129th of the Line, lost in the region of Wilna’. The family had not heard a word from him since August, but the fact that he was not a great letter-writer gave them hope. ‘I like to think that you are a prisoner, that is the only idea that can console us at the moment,’ he wrote. ‘Your poor mother is very sick from anxiety, and a single word in your hand would give her back her health.’ Although all prisoners were set free on the signature of peace in 1814, many were not immediately released, and survivors
kept trickling out of Russia for years afterwards. This allowed those who had heard nothing to go on hoping for years, even decades. One peasant woman in Mecklemburg was still making enquiries about her betrothed in 1849.
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There were miraculous survivals, and in one case a resurrection. An officer in Debrowski’s division, Ignacy Debowski, was wounded and so badly concussed in the fighting outside Borisov that his comrades believed he had been killed. They laid him out on his cloak and buried him under a heap of snow, since the earth was too hard to dig, with full military honours. Debowski revived after they had marched on, and was taken by the Russians. Like many captured Polish officers, he was pressed into the Russian army and sent to fight as a common soldier in the Caucasus. Years later, having earned his discharge, he reappeared in Warsaw, where he would dine out on stories of his funeral at Borisov.
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Some did not return because, having been taken prisoner, they were farmed out to local landowners as cheap labour or took service in order to survive, and never heard of the amnesty or did not have the means to go home. Others did not return because they did not choose to, and made a new life for themselves. They were offered favourable conditions to settle in underpopulated parts of Russia, and even given wives. According to official figures, by 31 December 1814, fifteen senior officers, two medical officers and 1968 other ranks had sworn the oath to become subjects of the Tsar, and another 253 Austrian soldiers were waiting to do so.
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In the 1890s a Russian historian discovered Lieutenant Nicolas Savin of the 2nd Hussars, who had been taken at the Berezina, living on the outskirts of Saratov in a small cottage surrounded by flowers which he watered every day. In his study was a bronze statuette of Napoleon and a watercolour portrait of the Emperor done from memory by himself. He lived on, proudly wearing his Légion d’Honneur, until 1894, when he died, apparently aged 127. The reason he had not gone back to France was that he could not bear to see it not ruled by Napoleon.
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Guillaume Olive was more pragmatic. He had been born in the United States of America, the son of an émigré, but took service in the French army at an early age. He was taken prisoner during the retreat and decided to remain in Russia. By 1821 he was aide-de-camp to Grand Duke Constantine, and a decade later marshal of the nobility in the province where he had acquired an estate. His son rose to the rank of general of cavalry, married the daughter of a Tolstoy and became a member of the State Council. His grandsons were officers in the Chevaliergardes and gentlemen of the bedchamber, his granddaughters were maids of honour to the Empress. But most did not find it so easy to change their allegiance.

The Russians had hoped to recruit from among the Germans serving with the Grande Armée, many of them unwillingly, and began forming a German Legion to absorb them. In the event, few prisoners volunteered for this, even though it meant immediate release from the dreadful conditions in which they were kept. Astonishingly, most of the German officers and men who had served under Napoleon seem to have remained devoted to him in adversity, and German prisoners throughout Russia solemnly celebrated the Emperor’s birthday on 15 August 1813.
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