1812, page 2
After a second night in the weaver’s cabin Napoleon rides out again toward Malojaroslavetz. Looks out over its smoking ruins and, through the smoke-haze, to the plain beyond. Has Kutusov really retired? The reports are confirmed. And this, his Second Secretary A.-J.-F. Fain notices, removes his final objections to a retreat via the main Mojaisk-Smolensk highway. At least Kutusov’s withdrawal will give the army a chance to get clear away. And at 9 a.m. 26 October, ‘beside a fire lit at the roadside, he sends the order to everything left at Gorodnia to retire on Borowsk,’ a dozen or so miles to the rear; and at 11 a.m. himself turns his back on this foe who has so long and so successfully eluded him.
Only once before has he ever retreated. It is an operation of which he has little or no experience. Everyone knows instinctively what it means. And is depressed by the insight. Hadn’t he sworn he’d never retire by the route he’d come by – through ‘the desert we ourselves created’?
Between Moscow and Smolensk, as the self-appointed war artist Albrecht Adam, who’s had his bellyful of campaigning and gone off home, already knows,
‘everything was devastated for more than 300 miles. The villages were ruins. The towns were starving hospitals. The few barns or houses were filled with corpses of men and domestic animals, some half-rotted. You only had to follow the cadaverous stench to be sure you were on your right road.’
The few men the ex-cakemaker and his travelling companions had encountered, ‘stragglers following the army and lacking all nourishment, were straying hither and thither in utmost distress’ in a countryside ‘infested with Cossacks and peasants’. Several times they’d ‘only escaped them by a miracle’.1
Morale is low. Everyone knows how the Emperor, in that hut at Gorodnia, had ‘sat for a whole hour pondering his fateful decision’; and how, at dawn yesterday, he’d blundered into a swarm of Cossacks,2 and could easily have been captured. Though IHQ has done its best to hush up the shocking episode ‘by evening next day the whole army knew about it, and was retrospectively trembling with fright’. Also at a rumour that Platov, the Cossacks’ supreme hetman, has been
‘seized with such violent hatred of the French after his son had been killed in an affray between Cossacks and Polish Uhlans at Vereia that he’d ordered all short fat Frenchmen to be brought before him for special viewing, and even promised his daughter’s hand in marriage to anyone – be he only a simple Cossack – who brings Napoleon before him, dead or alive.’
This rumour the Dutch ex-diplomat and general of brigade Dedem van der Gelder, who’d incurred Berthier’s dislike for the way he’d stood up for foreigners and been told curtly at the Kremlin ‘if you aren’t satisfied you can go home’, is sure ‘disquieted Bonaparte’. Though how he knows it he doesn’t say. At all events the word ‘retreat’, which this scathing critic of military behaviour had been told at Witebsk in July ‘didn’t exist in the French army’, has become the grim reality.
Hardly have the units about-faced and marched off one after another down the Borowsk road than it seems to Major A. A. Pion des Loches, of the Guard Artillery, that ‘everyone seemed seized with indifference’. The newly promoted major, too, is a chronic dissident and a considerable know-all. And to him the ‘indifference’ already seems to be ‘turning our retreat into a rout’. In charge of the Guard Foot Artillery’s 1st Company, the 2nd of the Young Guard’s and a part of the Train, he’s deeply shocked when the Guard Artillery’s chief-of-staff General Lallemand comes riding up and orders him
‘to abandon the ammunition wagons by preference and destroy the ammunition as I lost horses. In vain I put it to him that it was useless to keep the guns without their supplies: “The Emperor”, he said imperiously, “doesn’t want a single gun abandoned.” What wisdom! Did that man think the guns falling into the enemy’s hands would be the only witnesses of his retreat? But his order was carried out.’3
As it is, they’re already ‘abandoning the ammunition wagons, and this without any formal instructions. Each of us was following his own whims.’ It doesn’t occur to Pion des Loches that while Napoleon will be able to replenish his ammunition at Smolensk, with its immense stocks of everything, cannon are another matter. Lallemand’s order will be almost the last he’ll receive in Russia.
Naturally not everyone loses heart. Colonel Lubin Griois is filled with admiration for the ‘rare cool-headedness and courage’ of his corps commander General Grouchy, whose 3rd Cavalry Corps is covering the army’s rearguard, formed by Davout’s I Corps. Griois’ horse artillery was the last to cross the bridge over the Luja Gorge:
‘Present everywhere, with a serene calm air, he inspired so much confidence, so much assurance in such mounted troops as still remained that the enemy, despite reiterated attempts, could neither overcome nor discourage him. It was the retreat of the wounded lion.’ Yet he has hardly recovered from the wound he received at Borodino.
And of his cavalry, after starving for a month at the Winkovo camp,4 all too little’s left. It’s a brilliant sunny day. Griois’ horse-gunners are having incessant brushes with ever-growing numbers of Cossacks:
‘They came and caracoled around us, at times even to within pistol range. Whenever they put too much liveliness into their attack, we halted; and several discharges or a charge by a few platoons sufficed to drive them off. But this meant slowing down, and did them too great an honour. So we limited ourselves to making them respect us by sending them some grape and musket shots as we went on marching.’
Easy enough to identify, even from afar, ‘from the disorderliness of their masses, the obscure colour of their horsemen’s clothing and the motley of their piebald horses’, the Cossacks too have artillery:
‘They were crowning all rises in the ground, debouching from all roads, and advancing in all directions. So we faced to all sides. Our guns replied to theirs. And at all points a minor war commenced between our light cavalry and theirs.’
No one’s the least bit intimidated by these ‘barbarians’, whom the troops scornfully refer to as ‘les hourrassiers’ (cf. cuirassiers) on account of their ‘hurrahs’5 as they brandished their lances.
‘Now and again some of our platoons charged through these clouds of horsemen, who dispersed in front of them, to return at a gallop at some other point to recommence their howlings and provocations.’
There are even single-handed combats,6
‘a veritable jousting. Each combatant tried to show off his brilliant courage and skill in the eyes of his comrades. Above all our Poles distinguished themselves. Their way of fighting and their shouts, very much the same as their adversaries’, added something more lively and picturesque to the noise of the cannon or exploding shells. Alternately pursuing and pursued, depending on whether some comrades came to join them or they had to do with new assailants, they caracoled in little troops between the two armies,’
a truly superb spectacle, Griois thinks, which recalls what he’s read about ancient wars. But some of his men are wounded. And these, the first to fall, he puts on to his ammunition wagons:
‘But the more gravely wounded, who couldn’t keep up with us with their comrades’ aid, them we had to leave behind to the Cossacks. Their entreaties, their cries, pierced my heart. But there was nothing else we could do, short of carrying them on our shoulders.’
Cossacks are indeed everywhere. Dedem van der Gelder, relieved of his command since Moscow and attached to Imperial Headquarters, is remembering how, as he’d galloped along this same road ‘carrying the Emperor’s orders to the Viceroy’ during the Malojaroslavetz action, they’d ‘put paid to two of my hussar orderlies and I’d only owed it to my horse’s swiftness that I hadn’t suffered the same fate’. Now he hears they’ve even surprised Dufour’s (ex-Friant’s) division and ‘taken some cannon’.
Autumn days in Russia aren’t meant to last. By and by the sky clouds over, and the weather turns to a depressing drizzle. Through a rain-sodden, heavily wooded countryside of oaks, ashes and silver birches almost stripped of their last leaves and a sombre background of conifers deep green against all these tones of brown and grey, the army rides, trundles or trudges back along the Borowsk road it has just advanced by. Soon the leading units run head on into its grossly swollen baggage train,
‘a disorderly caravan of every kind of vehicle, military carriages, little cars, calèches, kibitkas, droshkis, most of them attached to little Russian horses … most opulent and elegant carriages, sutler carts, wagons, barouches, diligences, coaches of every variety, including state coaches,’
that until yesterday had brought up the rear, but now are forced to turn their horses’ heads and become its van. Already, en route for the unattainable Ukraine, some 20,000 of its vehicles have either broken down, tangled their spokes with one another’s wheelhubs, lost their horses or, getting in the way of the guns, have had to be burned. Whereupon their
‘precious objects, pictures, candelabras, whole libraries, gold and silver crucifixes, ciboria or chalices, beautiful carpets, tapestries and wall-hangings and cloths embroidered with gold and silver, pieces of silk of every colour, embroidered and brilliant clothes, both men and women’s, such as are only seen in the courts of princes … precious stones, cases filled with diamonds or rolls of ducats’
in a word, all the fantastic loot of Moscow – have been tipped into ditches.7 Yet there are still masses of vehicles jamming up the road.
If there’s one man who’s utterly furious with Kutusov for missing out on the ‘glorious golden opportunity’ he’d been offered at Malojaroslavetz and, in general, for the one-eyed Field Marshal’s sloth and fainéantise, it’s the British government’s special envoy and liaison officer at his headquarters, General Sir Robert Wilson. The Russian army, he’s noting in his Journal, so far from being weakened, has actually ‘been reinforced by numerous militia and all had fought with determination’. And now here’s its senile, or perhaps even treacherous commander letting Bonaparte, that enemy of mankind, give him the slip!
It’s enough to drive any right-thinking man mad.
To the retreating army, however, more important by far than its booty are the foodstuffs also stored in its baggage train. And many a foreseeing officer has his well-stocked wagon jolting along with the regimental ones. En route for Moscow, as a mere captain, Pion des Loches had had to share one ‘half-filled with my company’s effects and reserve shoes’ with his lieutenant. Now, promoted major, he’s entitled to one of his own, ‘smaller, it’s true, but sufficient for my victuals for a retreat of 3 to 4 months’. Among other things it also contains a singularly fine Chinese porcelain dinner set which had taken his fancy, and,
‘against the eventuality (which I regarded as inevitable) of a winter cantonment on the left bank of the Niemen, a case containing a rather fine edition of Voltaire and Rousseau; Clerc and Levesque’s History of Russia; Molière’s plays, the works of Piron; Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois and several other works such as Raynal’s Philosophical History, bound in white calf and gilded on the spine.’
His no less ample larder consists of
‘100 cakes of biscuit a foot in diameter, a sack holding a quintal of flour, more than 300 bottles of wine, 20–30 bottles of rum and brandy, more than 10 pounds of tea and as much again of coffee, 50–60 pounds of sugar, 3–4 pounds of chocolate, some pounds of candles.’
For 80 francs he’s also bought himself ‘one of the most beautiful furs that have been brought back from Moscow’. This chilly day his foresight is seeing itself rewarded: ‘I was keeping open house. We were rarely fewer than seven or eight at dinner.’ One of his subalterns even has a tent,8 to which he has access in exchange for sharing his provisions:
‘Before leaving we had copious boiling hot soup. I’d put some bread and sugar in my pocket. On me I had a bottle of rum. At the midday halt some glasses of wine; in the course of the day some bits of chocolate, of biscuit, to keep our strength up.’
Surgeon Louis-Vincent Lagneau of the Fusiliers-Grenadiers of the Young Guard, too, has a tent, ‘very likely’, he thinks (erroneously) ‘the only one in the army’. He’d had it made at Moscow of striped canvas and got his men to make its pegs and poles:
‘My ambulance wagon was big and very heavy. We’d loaded it with wine, rice, biscuits, sugar, coffee and many other supplies, either in small casks of the kind carried by our cantinières or else in large sacks. This was to be our viaticum for the retreat.’
Neither has I Corps’ paymaster, Captain P. T. Duverger, forgotten to look after Number One:
‘I had a fortune in furs and paintings. I had any number of cases of figs, of coffee, of liqueurs, of macaroni, of salted fish and meats. But white bread, fresh meat and vin ordinaire I had none.’
He too can give a dinner for sixteen of his comrades, among them a general: ‘We solemnly toasted the success of the coming campaign and our entry into St Petersburg.’
All this is in crude contrast to the plight of the ordinary ranker. Unless he’s a free-enterpriser who’s ‘hired a retinue of others to care for themselves and their horses and the handling of as many as four carriages in their train’, all he has is what he can carry on his back.9 And Smolensk, with its huge magazines, filled with supplies brought up from the distant rear, is at least ten days, perhaps a fortnight away. Yet even the ranker is to be envied, compared with the sick and wounded. After his narrow escape during yesterday’s Cossack flurry – where Napoleon could so easily have been captured – General Pajol’s normally healthy ADC Captain Hubert-François Biot had been overcome with faintness and collapsed in a ditch. Luckily Pajol had found him there and had him put into ‘a wagon driven by the wife of one of his orderlies, a trumpeter of the 11th Chasseurs’. And now Biot’s jolting along on top of some sacks of flour.
Even this is to be preferred to the fate of the 2,000 or so Italians, Spaniards, Croats and Frenchmen who’d been wounded at Malojaroslavetz. For, General Armand de Caulaincourt, Master of the Horse, sees there’s no longer any medical service, except perhaps residually in the Guard. Dr Réné Bourgeois, also of 3rd Cavalry Corps, had seen the wounded being
‘hastily laden on to ambulance wagons and their belongings passed to the vivandières. Deprived of all help or food they painfully followed the army.’
Still worse is the plight of the Russian prisoners, of whom several hundreds, too, are being herded along. Yet not quite so brutally, perhaps, as are the tens of thousands of French and allied prisoners who are being herded eastwards: those of them, that is, who’ve been lucky enough not to have been sold off ‘at 2 frs a head’ to be tortured and killed by enraged peasants. Of the 1,400 sick and wounded Marshal Mortier’s had to leave behind in the three Moscow hospitals as ‘too weak to have been transported with their comrades’, some have been
‘thrown on to wagons to be taken to Twer. All perished from cold and misery, or were assassinated by the peasants charged with driving them who cut their throats to take their coats. The rest were left in the hospitals with the French surgeons who’d stayed to look after them, but were given neither food nor medicines.’10
At least one Frenchman, however, is glad he’s fallen into British hands. For a mixture of family and political reasons, Wilson has offered to get the nephew of Napoleon’s war minister Clarke exchanged. But the young man, realising what would be in store for him, has declined
‘until the French were out of their present embarrassments, as he’d “had enough of horse-flesh and Cossack iron”. I then despatched him, with a very strong letter of recommendation to all Russians, a good cloak and two hundred roubles.’
Few prisoners have either. Fezensac’s dictum about how ‘for a prisoner the difference in the way officers and the rank and file are treated can be the difference between life and death’ is applying in all its rigour. A few miles away to the south-east Surgeon M. R. Faure of the 1st Cavalry Corps, captured in the desperate mêlée at Winkovo,11 is noticing – with winter coming on any day now – how sure his guards are that the Grand Army’s hated sabacky franzusky are doomed. At first the officers, at least, aren’t being too badly treated:
‘A prisoner chief-of-staff came and brought each officer of his corps [the 2nd Cavalry Corps] six ducats from Prince Kutusov, who was acting towards the prisoners with all the generosity and all the greatness of soul to be expected of a man of superior merit. Among all the Russian officers we saw a kind of fraternity reigned that witnessed to a good spirit in an army, and which should be conducive to beautiful actions on campaign.’
Faure’s party had left the Winkovo battlefield ‘satisfied with the Russians’ conduct, under the orders of an officer we had no reason to complain of.’ En route southward for Kaluga they’d found the roads congested with transport vehicles making for the Russian army:
‘All day on the third or fourth day we’d heard a cannonade which lasted until ten or twelve that night. It was the Malojaroslavetz affair, three or four leagues [9–12 miles] distance from us.’12
They also see masses of peasants who’ve been forced to evacuate their villages. Reaching Kaluga, 35 miles beyond Malojaroslavetz, Faure sees all its well-to-do inhabitants have fled, just as they’d done at Moscow:
‘Those merchants who hadn’t yet left were ready to do the same. The governor had made all preparations, in the event of our army threatening it, to set it on fire. He came to feast his eyes on the prey being brought to him. He complained loudly that we wore an air of being in good health. He’d been told the French army lacked victuals, and to have satisfied him we’d have had to be as thin as he was.’
