25

Retreat

‘More battles are lost by loss of hope than loss of blood.’

Attributed to Napoleon

‘Retreats always cost more men and matériel than the bloodiest engagements.’

Napoleon’s Military Maxim No. 6

On the afternoon following Borodino, Napoleon visited the battlefield. ‘Whole lines of Russian regiments, lying on the ground wet with their blood, showed that they preferred death to retiring a single step,’ recalled Bausset. ‘Napoleon collected all possible information on these sorrowful places, he even observed the numbers on the buttons of their uniforms in order . . . to ascertain the nature and positions of the Corps put in motion by the enemy, but what he was chiefly anxious about was the care of the wounded.’¹When his horse trod on a dying Russian, Napoleon reacted by ‘lavishing the attentions of humanity on this unfortunate creature’, and when one of the staff officers pointed out that he was ‘only a Russian’ Napoleon snapped back, ‘After a victory there are no enemies, only men.’²

The Emperor hoped that his taking Moscow might ease the pressure on Macdonald’s and Schwarzenberg’s forces to the north and south, telling the latter on September 10: ‘Now the enemy has been struck at his heart, he is concentrating only on the heart and not thinking about the extremities.’³ Murat began to pursue the retreating Russians, occupying Mozhaisk and capturing 10,000 of their wounded. The next day the main French force resumed its advance after two days’ rest, by which time it was clear that the Russians were not going to fight another major battle in front of Moscow. ‘Napoleon is a torrent,’ Kutuzov said in deciding to surrender the city, ‘but Moscow is the sponge that will soak him up.’⁴ The Russian army marched straight through Moscow on the morning of the 14th; when it became clear that it was being abandoned, virtually the entire population of the city evacuated their homes in a mass exodus, hiding or destroying anything of use to the invader that they couldn’t carry away with them. Of its 250,000 inhabitants, only around 15,000 stayed on, many of them non-Russians, although looters did come in from the surrounding countryside.⁵ On September 13, the president of Moscow University and a delegation of French Muscovites had visited Napoleon’s headquarters to tell him that the city was deserted and no deputation of notables would therefore be coming to offer the traditional gifts of bread and salt and to surrender its keys.⁶ Instead an enterprising old peasant sidled up to offer the Emperor a guided tour of the city’s major places of interest – an opportunity that was politely refused.⁷

When the soldiers saw the city laid out before them from the Salvation Hills they shouted ‘Moscow! Moscow!’ and marched forward with renewed vigour. ‘Moscow had an oriental, or, rather, an enchanted appearance,’ recalled Captain Heinrich von Brandt of the Vistula Legion, ‘with its five hundred domes either gilded or painted in the gaudiest colours and standing out here and there above a veritable sea of houses.’⁸ Napoleon more prosaically said: ‘There, at last, is that famous city; it’s about time!’⁹ Murat arranged a truce with the Russian rearguard and occupied the city. For supply and security reasons, and in the hope that the Grande Armée would not sack it wholesale, only the Imperial Guard and Italian Royal Guard were billeted inside the city; all others remained in the fields outside, though men swiftly made their way through the suburbs for pillage.

Napoleon entered Moscow on the morning of Tuesday the 15th, installed himself in the Kremlin (once it had been checked for mines), and went to bed early.* ‘The city is as big as Paris,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise, ‘provided with everything.’¹⁰ Ségur recalled how ‘Napoleon’s earlier hopes revived at the sight of the palace’, but at dusk that evening fires broke out simultaneously across the city which could not be contained because of a strong north-easterly equinoctal wind and the fact that the city’s governor, Fyodor Rostopchin, had removed or destroyed all the city’s fire-engines and sunk the city’s fleet of fire-boats before leaving.¹¹ ‘I am setting fire to my mansion’, he wrote to the French on a sign on his own estate at Voronovo outside Moscow, ‘rather than let it be sullied by your presence.’¹² (Although he later was fêted for having ordered the burning of Moscow, some of it initiated by criminals he had released from the city’s jails for the purpose, towards the end of his life Rostopchin denied that he had done so, to the bemusement of his friends and family.¹³) That night the fires were so bright that it was possible to read in the Kremlin without the aid of lamps.

No sooner had the French entered Moscow and begun to ransack it, therefore, than they had to try to save it from being razed by its own inhabitants. With no knowledge of its geography and no fire-fighting equipment, they were unequal to the task. They shot around four hundred arsonists, but 6,500 of the 9,000 major buildings in the city were either burned down or ruined.¹⁴ Many of his soldiers, Napoleon remembered, died while ‘endeavouring to pillage in the midst of the flames’.¹⁵ When they cleaned up the city after the French had left, Muscovites found the charred remains of nearly 12,000 humans and over 12,500 horses.¹⁶

Napoleon was fast asleep on his iron camp bed beneath the chandeliers of the Kremlin when he was woken at 4 a.m. on September 16 and told about the fires. ‘What a tremendous spectacle!’ he exclaimed, watching them from a window whose panes were already hot to the touch. ‘It is their own work! So many palaces! What extraordinary resolution! What men! These are indeed Scythians!’¹⁷ (Typically, he reached back to ancient times for an analogy, here to the famously ruthless Persian tribe mentioned by Herodotus who left their Iranian homeland to fight on the Central Eurasian steppes.) He was fortunate not to fall victim to the fires himself, as incompetent guards allowed an artillery convoy – including gunpowder wagons – to draw up under his bedroom window in the Kremlin. If one of the burning brands that were flying around had landed there, Ségur noted, ‘The flower of the army and the Emperor would have been destroyed.’¹⁸ After spending much of the day organizing his soldiers into units of firefighters, pulling down houses in the path of the blaze and interviewing two arsonists, at 5.30 p.m. Napoleon bowed to the exhortations of Berthier, Murat and Eugène to leave the city when flames reached the Kremlin arsenal. As Ségur recalled, ‘We already breathed nothing but smoke and ashes.’¹⁹ The two-hour journey to the imperial palace of Petrovsky, 6 miles outside the city, was dangerous and at times had to be made on foot because of the horses’ terror of the flames. As front entrances of the Kremlin were by then blocked by the fire and debris, Napoleon escaped through a secret postern gate in the rocks above the river.²⁰ ‘With long detours,’ recalled the veteran General Fantin des Odoards, ‘he was out of danger.’²¹ One of the household comptrollers, Guillaume Peyrusse, who was also evacuated, told his brother: ‘We were boiling in our carriages . . . the horses didn’t want to go forward. I had the sharpest worries for the treasure.’²² It survived and was soon augmented when an on-site forge was built to melt down 11,700lbs of gold and 648lbs of silver, much of it taken from palaces and churches.²³

 • • •

Discussing the Russian campaign two years later, Napoleon admitted ‘that when [I] got to Moscow, [I] considered the business as done’.²⁴ He claimed he could have stayed in the well-stocked city throughout the winter had it not been for the burning of Moscow, ‘an event on which I could not calculate, as there is not, I believe, a precedent for it in the history of the world. But by God, one has to admit that showed a hell of a strength of character.’²⁵ Although the part of the city that survived the fire was large enough for winter cantonments, and some supplies were found there in private cellars, it was not remotely capable of wintering an army of over 100,000 men for half a year. There was not enough fodder for the horses, campfires had to be built of mahogany furniture and gilded window-frames, and the army was soon subsisting off rotten horseflesh.²⁶ In retrospect it would have been better for the French had the whole city been razed to the ground, as that would have forced an immediate retreat.

The central striking force of the Grande Armée had shrunk to less than half its original size in the eighty-two days between crossing the Niemen and entering Moscow. According to the figures Napoleon was given at the time, he had lost 92,390 men by the end of the battle of Borodino.²⁷ Yet he did not act like a man whose options were limited. During the two days he spent at the beautiful Petrovsky Palace he considered almost immediately retreating to the Lower Dvina in a circular movement, while sending out Eugène’s corps to make it appear as if he were marching on to St Petersburg.²⁸ He told Fain that he believed he could be between Riga and Smolensk by mid-October. Yet although he started looking at maps and drawing up orders, only Eugène supported the idea. Other senior officers reacted with ‘repugnance’, arguing that the army needed rest, and to go north would ‘look for the winter, as if it wasn’t coming soon enough!’ They urged Napoleon to ask Alexander for peace.²⁹ Army surgeons needed more time to treat the wounded and they argued that Moscow still had resources to offer under the ashes.³⁰ Napoleon told his advisors: ‘Don’t believe that the ones who burnt Moscow are people to make peace a few days later; if the parties who are guilty of this determination dominate today in Alexander’s cabinet, all the hopes with which I see you flatter yourselves are in vain.’³¹

Another plan, to march on Alexander’s court nearly four hundred miles away in St Petersburg itself, was proposed, but Berthier and Bessières quickly convinced Napoleon on logistical grounds ‘that he had neither time, provisions, roads, nor a single requisite for so extensive an expedition’.³² Instead they discussed marching south nearly 100 miles to Kaluga and Tula, the granary and arsenal of Russia respectively, or retreating to Smolensk. Napoleon eventually chose what turned out to be the worst possible option: to return to the Kremlin, which had survived the fire, on September 18 to wait to see whether Alexander would agree to end the war. ‘I ought not to have stayed in Moscow more than two weeks at the utmost,’ Napoleon said later, ‘but I was deceived from day to day.’³³ This was untrue. Alexander didn’t deceive Napoleon into thinking he was interested in peace; he simply refused to reply either positively or negatively. Nor was Napoleon self-deceived; the burning of Moscow confirmed him in his belief that there was no hope of peace, even though he would probably have accepted as little as Russia’s return to the Continental System as the price.³⁴ The reason he stayed in Moscow for so long was that he thought he had plenty of time before he needed to get his army back to winter quarters in Smolensk, and he preferred to live off the enemy’s resources.

On September 18, Napoleon distributed 50,000 plundered rubles to Muscovites who had lost their houses and he visited an orphanage, dispelling the widespread rumour that he was going to eat its inhabitants.³⁵ ‘Moscow was a very beautiful city,’ he wrote to Maret, using the past tense. ‘It will take Russia two hundred years to recover from the loss which she has sustained.’³⁶ He wrote to Alexander on the 20th, as autumnal rains finally quenched the fires, which in some places had burned for six days. (The letter was delivered by the brother of the Russian minister to Cassel, the most senior Russian to be captured in Moscow, which shows how thorough the nobility’s evacuation of the city had been.) ‘If Your Majesty still preserves for me some remnant of your former feelings, you will take this letter in good part,’ he began.

The beautiful and superb city of Moscow no longer exists; Rostopchin had it burnt . . . The administration, the magistrates and the civil guards should have remained. This is what was done twice at Vienna, at Berlin and at Madrid . . . I have waged war on Your Majesty without animosity. A letter from you before or after the last battle would have halted my march, and I should have even liked to have sacrificed the advantage of entering Moscow.³⁷

On receipt of this letter, the Tsar promptly sent for Lord Cathcart, the British ambassador, and told him that twenty such catastrophes as had happened to Moscow would not induce him to abandon the struggle.³⁸ The list of cities Napoleon gave in that letter – and it could have been longer – demonstrates that he knew from experience that capturing the enemy’s capital didn’t lead to his surrender, and Moscow wasn’t even Russia’s government capital. It was the destruction of the enemy’s main army at Marengo, Austerlitz and Friedland that had secured his victory, and Napoleon had failed to achieve that at Borodino.

While waiting for Alexander’s reply, the Emperor made life in Moscow as easy as possible for his troops by organizing entertainments for them, although there were some practices at which he drew the line. ‘Despite repeated warnings,’ read one order, ‘soldiers are continuing to relieve themselves in the courtyard, even under the windows of the Emperor himself; orders are now issued that each unit will set punishment parties to dig latrines and . . . buckets will be placed in the corners of the barracks and these will be emptied twice a day.’³⁹ Napoleon used his time at the Kremlin to rationalize the units of the army and take into account their losses, review them and receive detailed reports on their state, which told him he still had over 100,000 effectives after reinforcement. Meanwhile, cannonballs collected from the field of Borodino started arriving by the cartload.⁴⁰ He liked to cultivate the appearance of constant industry: one of his ushers, Angel, later revealed that he had been ordered to put two candles in Napoleon’s window every evening, ‘so that the troops exclaim “See, the Emperor doesn’t sleep by day or at night. He works continuously!”’⁴¹

When Napoleon discovered the plight of Madame Aurore Bursay’s troupe of fourteen French actors and actresses, who had been robbed by both Russian and French troops, he came to her assistance and asked her to put on eleven plays, mostly comedies and ballets, in the Posniakov Theatre.⁴² He didn’t go himself, but he did listen to Signor Tarquinio, a famous Muscovite singer. He drew up new regulations for the Comédie-Française, and decided that he wanted the gigantic golden cross from the Ivan the Great bell tower to be placed on the dome of Les Invalides.⁴³ (Once they got it down, it turned out to be made only of gilded wood, and it would be thrown into the Berezina on the retreat by General Michel Claparède’s Polish division.⁴⁴)

One way in which Napoleon could have caused severe problems for the Russian governing class would have been by freeing the serfs from their lifetime of bondage to their aristocratic landowners. Emelian Pugachev’s violent serf revolt in the mid-1770s had in some respects presaged the French Revolution, and the Russian elite were terrified that Napoleon might reach back to its ideas.⁴⁵ He certainly ordered the papers covering Pugachev’s revolt to be brought to him from the Kremlin archives and asked Eugène for information about a peasant uprising in Velikiye, and to ‘let me know what kind of decree and proclamation can be made to excite the revolt of the peasants in Russia and rally them’.⁴⁶ Yet despite abolishing feudalism in all the lands he conquered, he did not emancipate the Russian serfs, whom he thought of as ignorant and uncivilized.⁴⁷ It certainly wouldn’t have helped bring Alexander to the negotiating table.

In the first week of October, Napoleon sent his former ambassador to Russia, Jacques de Lauriston, to Kutuzov, who had entrenched himself at Tarutino behind the River Nara, 45 miles south-west of Moscow. According to Ségur, Napoleon’s parting words to his envoy were: ‘I want peace, I must have peace, I absolutely will have peace – only save my honour!’⁴⁸ Kutuzov refused to offer Lauriston safe passage to St Petersburg, saying his message could be taken by Prince Sergei Volkonsky instead. Once again, there was no reply. By this stage Murat was losing forty to fifty men a day to Cossack raiders on the outskirts of Moscow, and Kutuzov’s army had grown to 88,300 regular troops, 13,000 regular Don Cossacks and another 15,000 irregular Cossack and Bashkir cavalry, with 622 guns. By contrast, Napoleon received only 15,000 reinforcements during the thirty-five days he spent in Moscow, while 10,000 died of wounds or disease there.

The fine weather in Moscow, which Napoleon told Marie Louise was ‘as warm as in Paris’ on October 6, made it seem less important that the men had thrown away their winter clothing on the boiling march from the Niemen, although it worried him that he couldn’t buy the shoes, boots and horses they would soon need.⁴⁹ In a second letter to Marie Louise that day he asked her to persuade her father to reinforce Schwarzenberg’s corps, ‘so that it may be a credit to him’.⁵⁰ He could not know that Metternich had given secret undertakings to the Tsar that Austria would do nothing of the kind, and at about this time Schwarzenberg started to behave suspiciously independently, avoiding any engagement with the Russians that he could. ‘Right now,’ Napoleon told Fain in mid-September, acknowledging his other diplomatic failings of that year, ‘Bernadotte should have been in St Petersburg and the Turks in the Crimea.’⁵¹

Napoleon had collected all available almanacs and charts on the Russian winter, which had told him that sub-zero temperatures weren’t to be expected until November. ‘No information was neglected about that subject, no calculation, and all probabilities were reassuring,’ recalled Fain; ‘it’s usually only in December and January that the Russian winter is very rigorous. During November the thermometer doesn’t go much below six degrees.’⁵² Observations made of the previous twenty years’ winters confirmed that the Moskva river didn’t freeze until mid-November, and Napoleon believed this gave him plenty of time to return to Smolensk. It had taken his army less than three weeks to get from Smolensk to Moscow, including the three days at Borodino.⁵³

Voltaire’s History of Charles XII, which Napoleon read while in Moscow, described the Russian winter as so cold that birds froze in mid-air, falling from the skies as if shot.⁵⁴ The Emperor also read the three-volume Military History of Charles XII by the king’s chamberlain, Gustavus Adlerfeld, published in 1741, which concludes with the disaster of Poltava.⁵⁵ Adlerfeld attributed the King of Sweden’s defeat to stubborn Russian resistance and the ‘very piercing’ cold of the winter. ‘In one of these marches two thousand men fell down dead with the cold,’ reads a passage in the third volume, and in another Swedish troopers ‘were reduced to warm themselves with the skins of beasts as well they could; they often wanted even bread; they were obliged to sink almost all their cannon in morasses and rivers, for want of horses to draw them. This army, once so flourishing, was . . . ready to die with hunger.’⁵⁶ Adlerfeld wrote of how the nights were ‘extremely cold . . . many died of the excessive rigour of the cold, and a great number lost the use of their limbs, as their feet and hands.’ From this if nothing else, Napoleon would have keenly understood the severity of the Russian winter. When the army did finally leave Moscow on October 18 he told his staff: ‘Hurry up, we need to be in winter quarters in twenty days.’⁵⁷ The first major snowfall took place seventeen days later, so he was only three days out. Only military considerations, rather than any insouciance over the weather, forced him to take a different, far longer route to Smolensk than the one originally intended.

The first flurries of snow fell on the 13th. By then the forage situation for the horses had become critical, with teams leaving Moscow at dawn and rarely returning before nightfall, their horses exhausted.⁵⁸ With no reply from Alexander and winter clearly now approaching, on October 13 Napoleon finally gave the order for an evacuation of the city five days later. This decision was reinforced by Lauriston’s return on the 17th with Kutuzov’s refusal of an armistice. As the Grande Armée, now comprising around 107,000 men, thousands of civilians, 3,000 Russian prisoners, 550 cannon and over 40,000 vehicles loaded with the fruits of over a month’s looting – which people chose to carry in favour of edible provisions – began to evacuate Moscow on the 18th, Kutuzov mounted an impressive surprise attack at Tarutino (also known as Vinkovo), in which Murat lost 2,000 killed and wounded and 1,500 men and 36 guns were captured.⁵⁹

 • • •

Napoleon himself left Moscow in bright sunshine around noon on October 19, 1812, taking the southern road towards Kaluga – which he nicknamed ‘Caligula’, just as he called Glogau ‘Gourgaud’ – 110 miles to the south-west.⁶⁰ He retained the option of going to Tula, where he hoped to destroy Russia’s arms factories, and reach the fertile Ukraine while drawing in reinforcements from Smolensk, or moving back up to Smolensk and Lithuania if need be. Either way it permitted him to present the retreat from Moscow merely as a strategic withdrawal, the next stage in the campaign to punish Alexander. But his weakened, lumbering army was too slow for the kind of operation he now needed to pull off, and the mud produced by heavy rainfall on the night of October 21 only slowed it down further. Kutuzov didn’t learn of the evacuation for two days, though as the Grande Armée was limping along in a column that extended for 60 miles this was of little consequence. He sent General Dokhturov’s 6th Corps to block Napoleon’s route at Maloyaroslavets. Dokhturov arrived on the 23rd and the next day ran straight into Eugène’s advance guard commanded by General Alexis Delzons.

Napoleon’s order to Mortier to blow up the Kremlin has been denounced as an act of Corsican revenge, but it was actually a means to keep his options open. He told General de Lariboisière, ‘It is possible that I will return to Moscow’, and calculated that he would find it easier to recapture without its formidable defences.⁶¹ Mortier laid 180 tons of explosives in the vaults under the Kremlim and Napoleon heard the explosion at 1.30 a.m. on the 20th from 25 miles away. He boasted in a bulletin that ‘The Kremlin, ancient citadel, coeval with the rise of the [Romanov] monarchy, this palace of the tsars, has ceased to exist, but in fact although the arsenal, one of the towers and the Nikolsky Gate were destroyed, and the Ivan bell tower damaged, the rest of the Kremlin survived.⁶²Napoleon also urged Mortier to take all the wounded from Moscow, drawing from classical precedent to say: ‘The Romans gave civic crowns to those who saved citizens; the Duc de Treviso will be worthy of this as long as he saves soldiers . . . he must make them ride on his horses and those of his men; this is what the Emperor did at Acre.’⁶³ Mortier carried off all the wounded who could be moved, though 4,000 had to be left behind in the Foundlings Hospital. Just before he left, Napoleon had ten Russian prisoners-of-war shot as arsonists.⁶⁴ It was hardly Jaffa, but it was an inexplicable act of cruelty and unlikely to help the chances of the French wounded he was compelled to abandon.

 • • •

The battle of Maloyaroslavets, the third largest of the campaign, fought high above the River Luzha on October 24, had consequences far in excess of its immediate result. The French ultimately captured and held the town and Kutuzov withdrew down the Kaluga road, but the extremely bitter fighting – in which the town changed hands nine times over the course of the day – convinced Napoleon, who arrived only at the very end, that the Russians would contest the southern route bitterly. (‘It’s not enough to kill a Russian,’ went the admiring saying in the Grande Armée, ‘you have to push him over too.’) Although the Emperor described Maloyaroslavets as a victory in his bulletin, the cartographer Captain Eugène Labaume, who was a bitter critic, recalled the men saying: ‘Two such “victories” and Napoleon would have no army left.’⁶⁵ Maloyaroslavets burned down during the battle – only the stone monastery remains today, complete with bullet holes in its gate – but from the positions of the piles of calcinated corpses the Emperor could tell how obstinately the Russians had fought.

At 11 p.m. Bessières arrived at Napoleon’s quarters in a weaver’s hut near the bridge at Gorodnya, a village some 60 miles south-west of Moscow, telling the Emperor that he believed that Kutuzov’s position further down the road was ‘unassailable’. When Napoleon went out at 4 a.m. the next morning to try to see for himself – one can’t see beyond the town from the hillside on the other side of the ravine – he was almost captured by a large body of Tatar uhlans (light cavalry), who got to within forty yards of him yelling, ‘Houra! Houra!’ (Plunder! Plunder!) before two hundred Guard cavalry dispersed them.⁶⁶ He later laughed about this close escape to Murat, but thereafter he wore a phial of poison around his neck in case of capture. ‘Things are getting serious,’ he told Caulaincourt an hour before daybreak on the 25th. ‘I beat the Russians every time, and yet never reach an end.’⁶⁷ (That wasn’t quite true; Murat’s defeat at Tarutino had been a significant reverse, although Napoleon himself hadn’t been present.)

Fain said that Napoleon was ‘shaken’ by the sheer number of wounded at Maloyaroslavets, and moved by their fate; eight generals including Delzons had been killed or wounded.⁶⁸ Continuing down the Kaluga road would almost certainly lead to another costly battle, whereas a withdrawal northwards towards the supply depots of the Moscow–Smolensk road along which they had come the previous month would avoid that necessity. There was a third possible route, through Medyn and Yelnya, where a fresh division of reinforcements from France awaited them. (Of Yelnya, Napoleon was to write on November 6: ‘The region is said to be beautiful and to have ample supplies.’⁶⁹) Had they taken that route, though the maps gave no clues to the state of its roads, they might have reached Smolensk before the first major snowfall. Was the fact that the Grande Armée now had a huge tail of wagons, carts, prisoners, camp-followers and booty a factor in Napoleon’s thinking? The record is mute. What did influence his thinking was that 90,000 men under Kutuzov would have been shadowing his left flank all the way to Yelnya, and an army stretched out 60 miles along the road would have been vulnerable at several points. Moving blind across country, a quartermaster’s nightmare, seemed riskier than returning via the Mozhaisk route, where he at least knew that there were food depots. However, it would take far longer, effectively tracing a dog-leg of several hundred miles due north just as winter was closing in.

Napoleon didn’t usually convene councils of war – he hadn’t called a single one during the entire campaign against Russia and Prussia in 1806–7 – but he did now. On the night of Sunday, October 25 the weaver’s hut at Gorodnya, whose sole room was divided into the Emperor’s bedroom and study by a single canvas sheet, played host to a galère of marshals and generals whose advice Napoleon sought before making his crucial decision. ‘This mean habitation of a humble workman’, wrote one of his aides-de camp later, ‘contained within it an emperor, two kings and three generals.’⁷⁰ Napoleon said that the expensive victory at Maloyaroslavets had not compensated for Murat’s outright defeat at Tarutino; he wanted to strike south towards Kaluga, towards the main bulk of the Russian army which was straddling that road. Murat, smarting from the drubbing he had sustained, agreed, and urged an immediate attack towards Kaluga. Davout supported the other, at that point undefended, southern route via Medyn and through the unspoiled fertile fields of north Ukraine and the Dnieper, before regaining the main highway at Smolensk, if it went well, several days march ahead of Kutuzov. The ‘Iron Marshal’ feared that following Kutuzov down the Kaluga road would draw the Grande Armée ever deeper into Russia without achieving a decisive battle before the snows fell in earnest, whereas turning the whole army around to get onto the Mozhaisk–Smolensk road would create delays, congestion and supply problems.

‘Smolensk was the goal,’ recorded Ségur. ‘Should they march thither by Kaluga, Medyn or Mozhaisk? Napoleon was seated at a table, his head supported by his hands, which concealed his features, as well as the anguish which they no doubt expressed.’⁷¹ Most of those present thought that because part of the army was already stationed at Borovsk, on the way to Mozhaisk, along with a large number of guns that had not been present at Maloyaroslavets, the Borovsk–Mozhaisk–Smolensk route was the best one. They pointed out ‘how exhausting this change of direction [to follow Kutuzov] would prove to cavalry and artillery already in a state of exhaustion, and that it would lose us any lead we might have over the Russians’. If Kutuzov ‘would not stand and fight in an excellent position such as at Maloyaroslavets’ he was hardly likely to join battle 60 miles further away, they argued. Of this opinion were Eugène, Berthier, Caulaincourt and Bessières. Murat furiously criticized Davout’s plan to head for Medyn because it would present the army’s flank to the enemy; this prompted an ill-tempered exchange of views between the two marshals, who had long been at odds with each other. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ said Napoleon as he concluded the conference that night. ‘I will decide.’⁷²

He chose the northern route back to Smolensk. His only recorded explanation for perhaps the single most fateful decision of his reign is to be found in what he told Berthier to write to Junot about the Russians, ‘We marched on the 26th to attack them, but they were in retreat; [Davout] went in pursuit of them, but the cold and the necessity of offloading the wounded who were with the army made the Emperor decide to go to Mozhaisk and from there to Vyazma.’⁷³ Yet this made no sense; if the enemy was retreating it would have been the ideal time to attack him. It was likely to be much colder to the north, and the needs of the wounded had never decided strategy before. When, years later, Gourgaud tried to blame Murat and Bessières for the route the army took, Napoleon corrected him: ‘No; I was the master, and mine was the fault.’⁷⁴ Like a Shakespearian tragic hero, he chose the fatal path despite others being available. Ségur later described Maloyaroslavets as ‘This fatal field which put a halt to the conquest of the world, where twenty victories were thrown to the wind, and where our great empire began to crumble to the ground.’ The Russians were plainer yet no less accurate, erecting a small commemorative plaque on the battlefield stating simply: ‘End of offensive. Start of ruin and rout of the enemy.’

 • • •

As soon as Kutuzov understood Napoleon was retreating, he turned his army around and adopted a ‘parallel mark’ strategy to harry him out of Russia, marching alongside the French army and attacking when he saw weakness, but refusing Napoleon the opportunity of a decisive counter-attack. Napoleon had retreated from Acre and Aspern-Essling, but neither of those situations even approximated what he now faced, especially once the thermometer plunged to –4°C in late October. In his memoirs, The Crime of 1812, Labaume recalled the continual sound of the rearguard blowing up their own ammunition wagons, ‘which reverberated from afar like the roar of thunder’. The horses that could pull them had died, sometimes as a result of eating tainted straw from thatch torn off cottage roofs. On reaching Ouvaroskoe, Labaume found ‘numerous corpses of soldiers and peasants, as well as infants with their throats cut, and young girls murdered having been ravished’.⁷⁵ As Labaume was in the same army as the perpetrators, there was no reason for him to have invented these outrages, which began once discipline evaporated.

Men who had kept bread since Moscow now ‘crept off to eat it in secret’.⁷⁶ On October 29–30 the army tramped – it no longer marched – past the Borodino battlefield, which was full of ‘bones gnawed by famished dogs and birds of prey’. A French soldier was found who had had both his legs broken and for two months had been living off herbs, roots and a few bits of bread he had found on corpses, sleeping at nights inside the bellies of eviscerated horses. Although Napoleon ordered that any survivors be carried on carts, some were unceremoniously pushed off shortly afterwards.⁷⁷ By late October even generals were eating nothing but horseflesh.⁷⁸ On November 3 a Russian attempt to encircle Davout was repelled at Vyazma, when Ney, Eugène and Poniatowski (who was wounded) turned back to aid him. The abnormally large number of French prisoners taken there – 3,000 – indicates how close the Grande Armée was to demoralization.

The first heavy snowfall came on November 4, as the French retreated in disorder from Vyazma. ‘Many, suffering far more from the extreme cold than from hunger, abandoned their accoutrements,’ Labaume recalled, ‘and lay down beside a large fire they had lighted, but when the time came for departing these poor wretches had not the strength to get up, and preferred to fall into the hands of the enemy rather than to continue the march.’⁷⁹ That took courage in itself, as the rumours about what the peasantry and Cossacks were doing to captured Frenchmen easily equalled those of what the Turks, Calabrians and Spanish had done, and included skinning them alive. (Peasants would buy prisoners off the Cossacks at two rubles a head.) The luckiest were merely stripped of their clothing and left naked in the snow, but torture was commonplace (hence the high rate of suicide on the retreat).⁸⁰ Even surrendering successfully en masse to the Russian regular army was akin to a death sentence: of one column of 3,400 French prisoners-of-war only 400 survived; in another only 16 out of 800. When fifty French soldiers were captured by peasants and buried alive in a pit, ‘a drummer boy bravely led the devoted party and leapt into the grave’.⁸¹ There were occasional tales of altruism: Labaume recorded a French soldier sharing his food with a starving Russian woman whom he had found in a cemetery just after she had given birth, for example. But overall the retreat now became reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s depiction of Hades.⁸²

Ney took command of the rearguard on November 5, as the snowfalls obliterated landmarks and iced-up roads. Little thought had been given to fitting ice-resistant horseshoes except by the Poles and some Guard regiments, which led to many horses slipping and falling. By the second week of November, ‘The army utterly lost its morale and its military organization. Soldiers no longer obeyed their officers; officers paid no regard to their generals; shattered regiments marched as best they could. Searching for food, they dispersed over the plain, burning and sacking everything in their way . . . Tormented by hunger, they rushed on every horse as soon as it fell, and like famished wolves fought for the pieces.’⁸³ Meanwhile toes, fingers, noses, ears and sexual organs were lost to frostbite.⁸⁴ ‘The soldiers fall,’ Castellane recalled of the Italian Royal Guard, ‘a little blood comes to their lips, and all is over. When they see this sign of an approaching death, their comrades often give them a push, throw them on the ground, and take their clothes before they are quite dead.’⁸⁵

 • • •

At Dorogobuzh on November 6 Napoleon received the extraordinary news in a letter from Cambacérès of a coup d’état that General Claude-François de Malet had attempted in Paris two weeks earlier. Malet had forged a document stating that Napoleon had died under the walls of Moscow as well as a sénatus-consulte that appointed General Moreau as interim president.⁸⁶ With fewer than twenty co-conspirators, Malet had taken control of 1,200 National Guardsmen at 3 a.m. on October 23. The police minister, Savary, was arrested and taken to La Force prison, and the prefect of police, Pasquier, was chased from his prefecture.⁸⁷ The governor of Paris, General Hulin, was shot in the jaw, where the bullet remained lodged and gave rise to his nickname, ‘Bouffe-la-balle’ (Bullet-eater).⁸⁸François Frochot, the prefect of the Seine and a member of the Conseil, accepted Malet’s story and did nothing to oppose him, for which he was later dismissed.

Cambacérès seems to have kept his head admirably, doubling the sentries protecting Marie Louise and the King of Rome at Saint-Cloud and ordering Marshal Moncey, who commanded the gendarmerie, to rush in troops from nearby departments, release Savary and reinstate Pasquier.⁸⁹ ‘By 9 a.m. it was all over,’ recalled Lavalette, ‘and the happy inhabitants of Paris, when they awoke, learned of the singular event, and made some tolerably good jokes upon it.’⁹⁰ Napoleon didn’t find any of it remotely funny. He was infuriated that no one besides Cambacérès seemed to have given any thought to Marie Louise or his son as being the legitimate rulers of France in the event of his demise. ‘Napoleon II,’ the Emperor cried to Fain, ‘nobody thought about him!’⁹¹ At his brief court martial, before being shot with a dozen others on October 29, Malet, a former political prisoner and devout republican, replied to a question by saying: ‘Who were my accomplices? Had I been successful, all of you would have been my accomplices!’⁹² Napoleon feared that this was true. The Malet conspiracy reminded him how much the dynasty he had so recently inaugurated depended upon him alone.

 • • •

With the thermometer dropping to –30ºC on November 7, and blizzards seemingly continuous, the retreat slowed to a crawl. Some 5,000 horses died in a matter of days. Men’s breath turned to icicles when it left their mouths, their lips stuck together and their nostrils froze up. In an echo of the desert ophthalmia of the Egyptian campaign, men were afflicted with snow-blindness. Comradeship collapsed; men were charged a gold louis to sit by a fire, and declined to share any food or water; they ate the horses’ forage, and drove wagons over men who had slipped in front of them.⁹³ General Comte Louis de Langeron, a French émigré who commanded one of the Russian divisions, saw ‘a dead man, his teeth deep in the haunch of a horse which was still quivering’.⁹⁴ On November 8 Eugène warned Berthier that ‘These three days of suffering so depressed the soldiers’ spirits that I believe they are very unlikely to make any more effort. A lot of men died from cold or hunger and others, desperate, want to be captured by the enemy.’⁹⁵ There were several well-documented instances of cannibalism; Kutuzov’s British liaison officer Sir Robert Wilson saw that when groups of French were captured around a campfire, ‘many in these groups were employed in peeling off with their fingers and making a repast of the charred flesh of their comrades’ remains’.⁹⁶

With the Russian army of the German-born General Peter Wittgenstein coming from the north and that of Admiral Paul Chichagov from the south, both heading for the Berezina river, there was now a possibility that the entire army might be captured. Napoleon reached Smolensk at noon on November 9. He was still nearly 160 miles east of Borisov, where there was a bridge over the Berezina. Between him and the bridge was Kutuzov, who was taking up a blocking position at Krasnoi, ready to give battle. Two days earlier Napoleon had urgently written a coded message to Marshal Victor, ordering him to march south from his position near Vitebsk without delay:

This movement is one of the most important. In a few days your rear could be inundated with Cossacks; the army and the Emperor will be in Smolensk tomorrow, but very tired by a non-stop march of 120 leagues. Take the offensive, the salvation of armies depends on it; every day of delay is a calamity. The cavalry of the army is on foot, the cold has made all the horses die. March, that is the order of the Emperor and of necessity.⁹⁷

The cool and tenacious Victor would arrive just in time.

Napoleon’s force was down to fewer than 60,000 men – though no one was keeping records any more – and much of the artillery had been spiked and ditched along the route for lack of horses to pull it. For more than three miles around the River Vop nothing could be seen but ammunition wagons, cannon, carriages, candelabras, antique bronzes, paintings and porcelain. One wag described it as ‘half artillery-park, half auctioneer’s storeroom’. Meanwhile, as another soldier recalled, wolfhounds ‘bayed as if they had gone mad, and in their fury often fought with the soldiers for the dead horses strewn along the road. The ravens . . . attracted by the stench of the dead bodies, came wheeling in black clouds above us.’⁹⁸

Most of the provisions in Smolensk were eaten on the first day, although it took five days for the whole army to get there, so when Ney’s rearguard arrived it found nothing. Larrey had a thermometer attached to his coat that recorded –16ºF (−26°C), and noted that the extreme cold turned even the lightest of wounds gangrenous.⁹⁹ Over five days between November 14 and November 18, Napoleon fought the desperate battle of Krasnoi as Eugène’s, Davout’s and Ney’s severely depleted corps tried to smash through Kutuzov’s army to reach the Berezina. Some 13,000 of his men were killed and over 26,000 captured, including 7 generals.¹⁰⁰ A total of 112 guns had been spiked at Smolensk, and another 123 were now captured at Krasnoi, leaving Napoleon virtually without artillery as well as cavalry.¹⁰¹ He was nonetheless superbly calm throughout the battle as he struggled to keep the road to Borisov open for as long as possible. Kutuzov, though outnumbering the French by nearly two to one, failed to deliver the coup de grâce he could have achieved by deploying Tormasov at the right moment. The Russians suffered grievously too: at Tarutino Kutuzov had had 105,000 men; by the end of the battle of Krasnoi he was down to 60,000. He was nonetheless still capable of continuing his parallel-mark strategy.

‘It is impossible to express the grief of Napoleon, on learning the desperate situation of one of the bravest of his brave marshals,’ Bausset recalled of the period when Napoleon believed that Ney’s entire corps had been annihilated on the way back from Krasnoi. ‘I heard him several times during the day make use of terms that showed the extreme agitation of his mind.’¹⁰² Ney eventually caught up with the main army at Orsha, almost midway between Smolensk and Borisov, on November 21, albeit with only 800 survivors of a corps which had crossed the Niemen with him in June 40,000 strong. ‘Those who have returned,’ Ney announced, ‘have their balls attached with iron wire.’¹⁰³ On hearing that Ney had survived, Napoleon said: ‘I have more than four hundred million [francs] in the cellars of the Tuileries, and would gladly have given the whole for the ransom of my faithful companion-in-arms.’¹⁰⁴*

 • • •

‘A great many of you have deserted your colours and proceed alone, thus betraying your duty, the honour and safety of the Army,’ Napoleon proclaimed from Orsha on November 19. ‘Offenders will be put under arrest and punished summarily.’ For once his words had little effect. That same day he burned the notes he had been making for his autobiography, about which nothing more is known. On November 21 the first units of the armed rabble formerly dignified with the name ‘Grande Armée’ reached the 300-foot-wide Berezina, its banks deep set with marshes, to find the western side occupied by the Russians under Chichagov, who had captured the Borisov bridge, the only one along that stretch of the river, and had burned it. The French right flank was threatened by Wittgenstein, who was marching down the east bank of the river. Kutuzov was following from behind. In all, some 144,000 Russians were moving in on around 40,000 French effectives (once reinforced by Victor and Oudinot) and several thousand stragglers and camp-followers. Langeron recalled that his Russian troops ‘were smashing the unfortunate stragglers’ heads with their musket butts, calling them “Moscow arsonists”’.¹⁰⁵

What happened next, in this most dangerous part of the retreat from Moscow, was to become another integral part of the Napoleonic epic. Although Napoleon had ordered Éblé to destroy his pontonniers’ six carts of bridging tools to lighten the baggage-train, he had fortunately been disobeyed. Oudinot suggested crossing the Berezina at the village of Studzianka – which means ‘very very cold’ in Byelorussian – and Napoleon agreed to try. Working alongside his four hundred mainly Dutch engineers in the freezing waters of the swollen river, which was ‘thick with large ice-floes’ sometimes 6 feet across, Éblé built two pontoon bridges across the river there, 8 miles north of Borisov.¹⁰⁶ One was for cavalry, guns and baggage, and the second, 180 yards upstream, for infantry.

Oudinot drew Chichagov away to the south in a decoying action, and Victor held off Wittgenstein’s 30,000 men to the north-east in what is called the battle of the Berezina, while Ney, Eugène and Davout got through Bobr to Studzianka.¹⁰⁷ A sign of the desperation of the situation was that the army burned its eagles in the woods near Bobr on November 24, to prevent them becoming trophies.¹⁰⁸ ‘The weather is very cold,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise the same day. ‘My health is very good. Kiss the little King for me and never doubt the sentiments of your faithful husband.’¹⁰⁹

The Dutch engineers began to build the bridges at 5 p.m. the next day, dismantling the wooden village and driving stakes into the 7- or 8-foot-deep riverbed. What Saint-Cyr in his memoirs accurately described as ‘the miraculous crossing of the Berezina’ had begun, in temperatures that plunged to –33ºC.¹¹⁰ François Pils, Oudinot’s batman, recalled that because the operation had to be kept secret from Chichagov’s patrols on the opposite bank, ‘The bridge-builders had been warned not to talk and the troops of all arms were told to keep out of sight. As all the preparatory work and the building of the trestles was done behind a hillock, which formed part of the river bank, the enemy lookout posts were unable to see what our workmen were doing.’¹¹¹

Napoleon arrived at 3 a.m. on Thursday, November 26. By then what was described as ‘fragile scaffolding’ was in evidence.¹¹² He wore a fur-lined coat and a green velvet cap trimmed with fur which came over his eyes and spent the day by the riverside encouraging the pontonniers and handing them wine, ensuring that they were relieved every fifteen minutes and warmed beside fires, and organizing another deception operation further upriver. ‘He’ll get us out of here,’ Fain recalled the men saying, with ‘their eyes fixed on their Emperor’.¹¹³ When Oudinot arrived shortly after 7 a.m., Napoleon took him and Berthier down to the river’s edge. ‘Well,’ he said to Oudinot, ‘you shall be my locksmith to open this passage.’¹¹⁴ From 8 a.m., with the opposite bank now protected by a skeleton force that had crossed unopposed on rafts, the pontonniers were ready to place twenty-three trestles of between 3 and 9 feet in height in the freezing water at equal distances across the river. ‘The men went into the water up to their shoulders,’ recalled an observer, ‘displaying superb courage. Some dropped dead and disappeared with the current.’¹¹⁵

At about 9.30 a.m. the Emperor returned to Berthier’s quarters and was served with a cutlet, which he ate standing up. When his maître d’hôtel presented him with a salt-cellar, consisting of a screw of paper containing old greying salt, Napoleon jested: ‘You’re well equipped; all you lack is white salt.’¹¹⁶ To find any humour at all at a moment like that suggests nerves of steel – or indeed Ney’s balls of wire. But the ravages were unsurprisingly taking a toll on him. One Swiss officer, Captain Louis Bégos in Oudinot’s corps, thought Napoleon looked ‘tired and anxious’, and another, Captain Rey, ‘was struck by the Emperor’s worried expression’.¹¹⁷ He said to Éblé, ‘It’s taking a long time, general. A very long time.’ ‘Sire,’ Éblé replied, ‘you can see that my men are up to their necks in water, and the ice is delaying their work. I have no food or brandy to warm them with.’ ‘That will do,’ replied the Emperor, looking at the ground.¹¹⁸ A few moments later he started complaining again, seeming to have forgotten what Éblé had said.

Just before 11 a.m. the first bridge was in place and Napoleon ordered the 1st Battalion of General Joseph Albert’s 1st Demi-Brigade of the 6th Division over. ‘My star returns!’ he cried as they crossed safely.¹¹⁹ He was also delighted that ‘I’ve fooled the admiral!’ – meaning Chichagov – which indeed he had.¹²⁰ The rest of Oudinot’s corps crossed in the afternoon. The bridges had no guardrails, were almost at the water line, sagged unsteadily and frequently had to be repaired by the freezing pontonniers. The cavalry bridge was quickly covered in manure, and dead horses and debris had to be thrown off it into the river to stop blockages, while the stragglers and camp-followers were held back until the soldiers had crossed.¹²¹ That night Ney and his men couldn’t cross, as three trestles had given way under the weight; they would have to be repaired twice before he could finally make it to the other side.¹²²

According to Jakob Walter’s diary, Napoleon was audibly sworn at by the troops crossing the river. Walter’s unit came to

a place where Napoleon ordered his pack horses to be unharnessed and where he ate. He watched his army pass by in the most wretched condition. What he may have felt in his heart is impossible to surmise. His outward appearance seemed indifferent and unconcerned over the wretchedness of his soldiers . . . and, although the French and Allies shouted into his ears many oaths and curses about his own guilty person, he was still able to listen to them unmoved.¹²³

This was a new experience for Napoleon, who was more used to hearing ‘Vive l’Empereur!’, or at worst, good-natured chaffing. With an army in which there were so many non-French, who didn’t have the same motivation, the murmurs turned to outright dissent. The Swiss, Westphalians, Badeners and Hesse-Darmstadters resented having to fight in what they saw as a French war, but nonetheless distinguished themselves at the Berezina, with the Swiss and Westphalians winning most of the crosses of the Légion d’Honneur in the battles that raged on both sides of the river. (The four Swiss regiments were awarded a total of thirty-four.)¹²⁴

Napoleon crossed the rickety trestle bridge at noon on November 27, sleeping that night in a village hut at Zaniwski. ‘I have just traversed the Berezina,’ he wrote to Maret in Vilnius, ‘but the ice floating down that river makes the bridges very precarious . . . The cold is intense, and the army very tired. I shall not lose a moment in getting to Vilnius in order to recuperate a little.’¹²⁵ In all it is thought that more than 50,000 soldiers and re-formed stragglers crossed the Berezina, over Éblé’s unstable but ultimately effective trestle bridges. On November 28, as Wittgenstein’s men began to approach, Victor destroyed the bridges: around 15,000 stragglers and 8,000 camp-followers and civilians who hadn’t crossed the night before were left to the Russians’ mercy. ‘On the bridge I saw an unfortunate woman sitting,’ recalled the émigré Comte de Rochechouart, ‘her legs dangled outside the bridge and were caught in the ice. For twenty-four hours she had been clasping a frozen child to her breast. She begged me to save this child, unaware that she was holding out a corpse to me!’¹²⁶ A Cossack eventually ‘put an end to her appalling agony’ by blowing her brains out. Abandoned on the east bank of the river were over 10,000 vehicles, including berline, calèche and phaeton carriages that had survived Napoleon’s repeated injunctions that they should be burned. Langeron saw ‘sacred goblets from the churches of Moscow, the gilded cross from the church of St John [Ivan] the Great, collections of engravings, many books from the superb libraries of Counts Buturlin and Razumovsky, silver dishes, even porcelain’.¹²⁷ Ten years later a Prussian officer visiting the scene found that ‘melancholy relics lay . . . in heaps, mingled with the bones of human beings and animals, skulls, tin fittings, bandoliers, bridles, scraps of the bearskins of the Guard’.¹²⁸

General Miloradovich reached Borisov on November 29 and Kutuzov on the 30th. At Studzianka there is a memorial stone that states that this is the place where Kutuzov ‘completed the defeat of Napoleon’s troops’. This is quite untrue, indeed Admiral Chichagov never lived down the shame of not having done so. Napoleon had listened to Oudinot’s advice and changed his plans accordingly, showing his customary flexibility on the field. He acted quickly, used deception to effect a brilliant feint which drew the Russians south, and his whole army had crossed on two makeshift wooden trestle bridges in two days. It had been a miracle of deliverance, although so expensive that one of the common expressions for a disaster in French became une bérézina. ‘Food, food, food,’ he wrote to Maret from the west bank of the river on the morning of the 29th, ‘without it there are no horrors that this undisciplined mass won’t commit at Vilnius. Perhaps the army will not rally before the Niemen. There must be no foreign agents in Vilnius. The army does not look good now.’¹²⁹

 • • •

On December 3, having reached Molodechno (present-day Maladzyechna), 45 miles north-west of Minsk, Napoleon issued the most famous of all his bulletins, his 29th of the 1812 campaign. Entirely blaming the weather – ‘so cruel a season’ – for the disaster, he wrote that, with temperatures unexpectedly down to −27°C, ‘the cavalry, artillery and baggage horses perished every night, not only by hundreds, but by thousands . . . It was necessary to abandon and destroy a good part of our cannon, ammunition and provisions. The Army, so fine on the 6th, was very different on the 14th, almost without cavalry, without artillery and without transport.’ Napoleon gave the Russians no credit for their victory, writing merely that ‘The enemy, who saw upon the roads traces of that frightful calamity which had overtaken the French Army, endeavoured to take advantage of it.’ He wrote off the Cossacks as ‘This contemptible cavalry, which only makes noise and is not capable of penetrating a company of voltigeurs,’ but admitted that General Louis Partouneaux’s entire division, part of Victor’s corps, had been captured near Borisov.

Napoleon acknowledged that the losses were such that ‘it was necessary to collect the officers who still had a horse remaining, in order to form four companies of 150 men each. The generals performed the functions of captains, and the colonels of subalterns.’¹³⁰For the French people, so used to having to read between the lines for the truth, this bulletin – which was three times the normal length – came as a profound shock when it was published in Paris on December 16. Napoleon hadn’t entirely broken with his habit of exaggerating success and minimizing failure: he was now getting his account of the disaster out before worse rumours arrived in his capital, and attempting to create the narrative of a defeat at the hands of Nature. All the figures he gave were wildly inaccurate, although no-one would compute accurate ones until long afterwards.

It was the final sentence – ‘The health of His Majesty has never been better’ – that caused most outrage in France. It has been described as ‘a remarkably brutal expression of imperial self-centredness’, whereas it was in reality little more than the result of habit.¹³¹He had used the phrase ‘My health is good’ thirty times in his letters to Marie Louise before he reached Moscow, and twelve more during his stay there and during the retreat, so it was almost a tic. He would employ it twenty-two times in five months the following year too.¹³² More importantly, in the wake of the Malet conspiracy, any rumours that his health might be less than excellent had to be comprehensively quashed.

On December 5, at the small town of Smorgoniye where, Bausset recalled, there was a ‘veterinary academy for the instruction of Russian dancing bears’, Napoleon informed Eugène, Berthier, Lefebvre, Mortier, Davout and Bessières that he ‘must return to Paris at the earliest possible moment if I am to overawe Europe and tell her to choose between war and peace’.¹³³ He told them he would be leaving at ten o’clock that night, taking Caulaincourt, Duroc, Lobau, Fain and Constant with him.

He chose Murat to assume command of the army. The flamboyant marshal tried to hold the line of the Vistula after Napoleon left as reserves, new drafts and transferred units flowed towards Poland. Yet his task proved impossible in the face of the Russian advance. The Prussian General Johann Yorck von Wartenburg suddenly declared his troops’ neutrality under the terms of the Convention of Tauroggen, a non-aggression pact he concluded with the Russians on December 30 and negotiated in part by Carl von Clausewitz.¹³⁴ Murat had to abandon first Poland, and then the line of the Oder. After secret talks with the Austrians, he suddenly left for Naples to try to save his throne, handing command of the Grande Armée over to Eugène. With Lefebvre, Mortier and Victor back in France, Oudinot and Saint-Cyr recovering from wounds and Ney now hors de combat from fatigue and nervous exhaustion, it was Eugène, Davout and Poniatowski who saved what remained of the Grande Armée. Together these three reorganized the corps, resupplied them and created the kernel of a new fighting force. Although the Moniteur stated that Murat was ill, a furious Napoleon told Eugène: ‘It would take very little for me to have him arrested by way of an example . . . He is a brave man on the field of battle, but he is totally devoid of intelligence and moral courage.’¹³⁵

 • • •

‘The French are like women,’ Napoleon told Caulaincourt on the journey home. ‘You mustn’t stay away from them for too long.’¹³⁶ He was all too aware of the effect that reports of his defeat would have in Vienna and Berlin, and was right to get back to Paris as quickly as possible.¹³⁷ The remnants of the Grande Armée were only a day or two days’ march from Vilnius and relative safety.¹³⁸ Although, as with the Egyptian campaign, many denounced his desertion – Labaume said the troops used ‘all the most vigorous epithets our language can supply, for never had men been more basely betrayed’ – Napoleon needed to be in Paris to deal with the political and diplomatic repercussions of the disaster.¹³⁹ Castellane, who had lost a total of seventeen horses in the campaign, denied that the army felt outrage. ‘I saw nothing of the sort,’ he said. ‘Notwithstanding our disasters, our confidence in him was intact. We feared only that he might be made prisoner on the road.’ He added that the army understood Napoleon’s motives, ‘knowing well that his return alone could stop a revolt in Germany, and that his presence was necessary for the reorganization of an army which could be in a condition to come to our rescue.’¹⁴⁰ After the Berezina crossing there were no clashes with the Russians until mid-February 1813. ‘When they know that I am in Paris,’ Napoleon said of the Austrians and Prussians, ‘and see me at the head of the nation and of 1,200,000 troops which I shall organize, they will look twice before they make war.’¹⁴¹

The celebrated diagram of French losses in Russia published in 1869 by Charles-Joseph Minard, Inspector-General of Roads and Bridges 1830–36. Lighter shading indicates the number of men entering Russia, black indicates those leaving. Minard assumed that the forces of Prince Jérôme and of Marshal Davout which were despatched to Minsk and Mogilev, and which re-joined in the vicinity of Orsha and Vitebsk, continued to march with the army. The parallel diagram below shows the temperature in Fahrenheit on the retreat.

Travelling under the alias of Count Gérard de Reyneval, ostensibly as part of Caulaincourt’s retinue, Napoleon covered the 1,300 miles over the winter roads from Smorgoniye to Paris in thirteen days, going via Vilnius, Warsaw, Dresden and Mainz (where he bought some sugar-plums for his son). In Warsaw he told the Abbé de Pradt, apropos the campaign, ‘There is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous.’¹⁴² He was to repeat the line – which was to become one of his most famous – to Caulaincourt on the journey home. He met the King of Saxony in Leipzig (who exchanged his sleigh for a carriage) and sent his good wishes to Goethe when he passed through Erfurt. As the clock sounded a quarter to midnight on Friday, December 18, he descended from his carriage at the Tuileries.

The following morning he embarked on a full day’s work. He told Cambacérès, Savary, Clarke and Decrès that he had stayed too long in Moscow waiting for a reply to his peace offer. ‘I made a great error,’ he said, ‘but I have the means to repair it.’¹⁴³ When a courtier who had not been on the campaign assumed ‘a very doleful air’ and remarked ‘We have, indeed, sustained a severe loss!’ Napoleon replied, ‘Yes, Madame Barilli is dead.’¹⁴⁴ His reference to the celebrated opera singer mocked his courtier’s obtuse statement of the obvious, but the horrors of the retreat from Moscow had affected Napoleon deeply – no fewer than forty-four of his household servants had died during it.

 • • •

Once it reached safety the Grande Armée was meticulous in its bureaucracy. Typical of the records in the war ministry archives is a neatly written 150-page list of the 1,800 men who served in the 88th Line between 1806 and 1813, which records the name and serial number of each, his date and place of birth, both parents’ names, canton and department of both birth and residence, height, shape of face, size of nose and mouth, colour of eyes, hair and eyebrows, distinguishing features, date of either conscription or volunteering, date of arrival at the depot, profession, number of company and battalion, promotion history, details of all actions, wounds and honours, and date of demobilization or death.¹⁴⁵ For entire demi-brigades that served in Russia, the list states over page after page ‘presumed captured by the enemy’, ‘prisoner-of-war’, ‘wounded’, ‘died’, ‘died of fever in hospital’, ‘dead in hospital of nervous fever’, ‘fell behind’, ‘deserted’, ‘certified absent’ or ‘unknown’. On some rare occasion the list records that one of the very few survivors went on ‘reform leave’, presumably in the hope he would eventually recover from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder.¹⁴⁶

Napoleon had lost some 524,000 men, around 100,000 to 120,000 of whom had been captured. Many of those captured died over the coming years, and virtually none returned to France before Waterloo, although about 20,000 non-French volunteered to fight in the new Russian army that would soon be raised against Napoleon. Macdonald’s corps of 32,300 on the northern flank may have emerged largely unscathed, but half of them were Prussians who would soon be ranged against France, and Schwarzenberg’s 34,000 Austrians were now not to be trusted either. A further 15,000 survivors of the Berezina crossing had been lost on the retreat between there and Vilnius.* Ney was the last man to re-cross the Niemen on December 14, by which point he had barely four hundred infantry and six hundred cavalry with him, along with a grand total of nine cannon.¹⁴⁷ (Although none died, four marshals were wounded during the campaign.) Stragglers returned in small numbers over the next few weeks, though a number of them were quietly murdered by Prussian villagers as they made their way westwards. The entire central force of the Grande Armée was now fewer than 25,000 men, of whom only about 10,000 were capable of combat.¹⁴⁸ Even if one considers the French contingent of Macdonald’s corps and the 60,000 reinforcements coming from France, the army that Napoleon would have in Poland and Germany at the turn of the year was pitifully small, and greatly lacking in artillery and cavalry.¹⁴⁹ Many units were at just 5 per cent of their strength: Davout’s corps of 66,000 was down to 2,200; of the 47,864 original effectives of Oudinot’s corps, only 4,653 remained; the Imperial Guard of 51,000 was left with a little over 2,000; of the 27,397 Italians who crossed the Alps, fewer than a thousand returned (and of the 350 members of the Italian Royal Guard, all but eight perished). Of the Dutch Grenadier Guard, only thirty-six survived out of five hundred.¹⁵⁰ And out of the four hundred brave Dutch pontonniers who saved the army at the Berezina, only fifty ever saw Holland again.

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In late December 1812, Tsar Alexander dined with the Lithuanian novelist and noblewoman Sophie de Tisenhaus in Vilnius, which had been evacuated earlier that month by Murat. He spoke of Napoleon’s ‘light-grey eyes, which gaze at you so piercingly that you cannot withstand them’, and later: ‘What a career he has ruined! Having gained so much glory, he could bestow peace on Europe, and he has not done so. The spell is broken.’¹⁵¹ She noted that he repeated the last phrase several times.