1812, page 44
Beulay’s account becomes more and more tragic:
‘We’d had nothing to eat since yesterday, our clothes were in shreds and the temperature was so cruel that those who escaped the bullets were succumbing to the cold if they remained immobile even a few instants. Marvelling at such courage, the Russian general lost no time in sending us a second flag of truce. Since we were as incredulous as St Thomas, this officer invited us to send one of our own people to assure himself that M. Partonneaux had in fact been taken prisoner. It was my friend M. Taillefer, the lieutenant of grenadiers who’d been promoted at the same as myself, who was charged with this mission. He went to the Russian headquarters, where in fact he found General Partonneaux in a state of utter despondency. When he asked him for orders, the general replied that he had no more orders to give, he left it up to us what to do. Then Wittgenstein summoned M. Taillefer to him and told him that if we didn’t surrender instantly he’d kill the whole lot of us to the last man. He declared we’d violated the laws of warfare, that it was inadmissable that 200,000 men [sic] should be held up in their pursuit by the shadow of a brigade, that such a thing was folly on our part to attempt, and a culpable weakness on his own part to tolerate.’
Taillefer comes back. A new council of war is held. And it’s generally agreed that Wittgenstein’s right:
‘Only eight or ten men were left per company. Even so, we decided to temporise, wait for daylight. We couldn’t believe that the Emperor, who’d been so concerned over the fate of some miserable stragglers, should have allowed Marshal Victor to consent to sacrifice a whole division without trying to do something to save it from the trap they’d sent it into.’
The Russians, sure of their prey, also cease firing. Many of Partonneaux’s men die of despair and inanition the moment they’ve nothing more to do. Beulay himself, stumbling about among the corpses and wounded, only survives by resisting a longing for sleep. Meanwhile his enterprising batman is determined to make him some breakfast. Rifling a nearby abandoned wagon, he finds in it
‘something more precious than all the gold we’d seen glittering yesterday: a superb loaf of delicious barley bread, which we shared secretly with a few intimate friends’.
The batman also roasts some horse steaks over a fire made of the butts of the muskets everywhere littering the ground. One of the muskets is loaded, goes off as he breaks it, and the ball passes so close to Beulay’s ear that it begins to bleed:
‘Then the dawn appeared on the frozen horizon. Soon reveille’s sounding on all sides in the enemy camp. A great movement begins. In the front rank we see the mouths of the guns of the [Russian] Imperial Guard trained at us. The gunners were lighting their matches, ready for the first order. Instinctively the few brave survivors form square. But while they’re feeling for ammunition in their empty pouches the Russians fling themselves on us from both sides. We’re prisoners!’5
At Zaniwki, meanwhile. Castellane – like other staff officers – isn’t being allowed a moment’s rest. ‘Since no one foresaw this fight,’ he’ll jot down in his diary eventually, ‘several officers of our staff have gone on ahead.’ All the time, this horrible night, he’s being sent on mission to the various corps. Lots of IHQ’s horses have been stolen – including six of Lobau’s and his wagon:
‘Our men have [got into] a horrible way of stealing things. At our bivouac someone steals Chabot’s hat. He had his head lying on it. A fur’s been taken from one of my horses. More than one officer, believing his horse is following him, is getting here with only its cut reins around his arm. If he turns round, it’s to see his horse already killed, cut up and shared out.’
At ‘the Palace’ Napoleon never ceases ‘asking each officer arriving from Studianka whether the poor people and baggage were still crossing’. And is told, correctly, that the bridges are free, but that few if any of the estimated 20,0006 wounded, cantinières, women, camp followers and refugees from Moscow huddled there around their campfires are in a hurry to profit from it. ‘All night and until daybreak,’ says Lejeune,
‘the army’s passage over the bridges had been going on without too much disorder, and I myself had been able to cross to and fro several times to place those things which were most in the army’s interests in safety on the right bank’.
Marbot, going back to fetch ‘the horse which carried the war squadrons’ little cash box and accounts’ is utterly critical of the general staff’s failure to exploit these night hours:
‘Having well and truly established my regiment at the Zaniwki bivouac, I galloped back. And imagine my amazement when I find the bridges completely deserted! Just at that moment no one was crossing over! Yet only a hundred yards away, in beautiful moonlight, I see more than 50,000 [sic] stragglers or isolated men of the kind we called roasters [rôtisseurs] seated in front of immense fires, calmly grilling horseflesh, as if unaware they’ve a river in front of them they could cross in a few minutes and finish preparing their supper on the other bank.’
It’s his first sight of the debris of the Moscow army, and it comes as a terrible shock:
‘Not one officer of the Imperial Household, not an ADC of the army’s Major-General [Berthier] nor any Marshal was there to forewarn these unfortunates and, if need be, drive them toward the bridges.’
What Marbot evidently doesn’t notice is the heroic Eblé going about in the moonlight among the torpid stragglers, trying to get them to bestir themselves while there’s still time.7 Another officer who, half-dead from hunger, crosses unhindered is the Polish Captain Boris von Turno:
‘A vague instinct, one of those prophetic impulses one has in one’s youth, turned my thoughts to General Dombrowski’s division. His troops, who had come from Molihew, might have some provisions. By giving me hope this idea gave me courage. I went to the bridge, where all I heard was the monotonous bumping together of the ice-floes being carried along by the Berezina. No one was going over it’
Reaching the other side Turno finds he’s in luck. Turning left toward the Brill Wood, where little voltigeur Jean-Marc Bussy and his colleagues of the Swiss infantry are doing ‘nothing but run about in the forest, in the snow, to pick up firewood and keep our fires alight for the sake of the poor wounded, who’ve all been attended to by our surgeon,’ Turno chances upon
‘four Polish artillery officers gathered around a big fire. The captain, who recognised me, exclaimed: “My dear friend, you’re in luck! He offered me his water-bottle, whose contents I swallowed at a single gulp. Galvanised by this dose of alcohol, like a man waking up, I looked around me. In front of their hut a really nice-looking duck was turning on the spit, the bubbling of two saucepans emitted to my ears a culinary harmony which was making our eyes shine with savage brilliance.’
And he quotes to his ‘Amphytrion’ the words of Sancho Panza, ‘greatest of philosophers: “It’s not the man who makes the stomach, but the stomach that makes the man.”’ But not very far away Brandt and the Vistula Legion’s other wounded have heard
‘late into the night the cannon thundering on the other bank. It was the fighting that was deciding the fate of Partonneaux’s division.’
CHAPTER 18
HOLOCAUST AT THE BEREZINA
‘Throughout this horrible day we saw the human heart laid bare. We saw infamous actions and sublime ones, according to differences in character.’ (Rossetti) – ‘Napoleon was never better served by his generals than he was that day.’ (Caulaincourt)
Some time after midnight, Fain has noted in his journal:
‘The day now beginning is likely to be a tough one. But we hold the passage.’
And Napoleon has sent off the devoted Abramovitch to Vilna, to tell Maret the army’s across the Berezina; though not all of it is. ‘More than 60,000 men,’ Rossetti realises,
‘properly clad, well-nourished and fully armed, are about to attack 18,000 half-naked, ill-armed ones, dying of hunger and cold, divided by a swampy river and embarrassed by more than 50,000 stragglers, sick or wounded and an enormous mass of baggage.’
Already on his feet at 5 a.m., Oudinot, wearing a ‘brown fur witschoura and an astrakhan bonnet turned down over his ears’, shares some onion soup with his staff, Pils among them:
‘Each of these gentlemen were placed under contribution so that the cook could do his business. One supplied the bread, another the onion, a third the fat. It didn’t take long to share it out.’
Pils, no doubt savouring his share, is thinking that if his patron’s
‘two motley legs sticking out of the witschoura weren’t sheathed in a special pair of boots, well-lined with fur on the inside but on the outside only revealing striped blue and white feather-lined drill, he’d look like a well brought up bear’.
Tchitchakov’s attack is expected at dawn. And sure enough, at 7 a.m. the ‘the sound of the guns in the direction of Borissow’ tells Fain he’s ‘attacking II Corps in the woods. The Emperor mounted his horse and galloped off.’ Castellane, in his suite as it passes ‘in front of Razout’s division in reserve behind III Corps’, sees that it amounts to perhaps half a battalion; Fezensac’s regiment to a platoon. And that Ney’s been ‘reinforced by Claparède’s division, by 12,000 men of the 15th Polish Division and by some other troops of Zayoncek’s.’
A moment later Wittgenstein’s guns too begin firing from the direction of Staroï-Borissow. ‘At about 7 a.m.’ Pils, at the shack which has been Oudinot’s headquarters, sees
‘Captain Cramayel arrive at a gallop to warn us that the enemy’s attacking and that the Cossacks are already at blows with the outposts. This officer has hardly said what he had to when a shell, passing through the pine branches, falls noisily on the shack and shatters it. At once M. le Maréchal mounts his horse and orders Merle’s division to advance. The 2nd Swiss Line marches at its head; a second shell carries off eleven of its men. The 11th Light and 124th Line follow on.’
‘Around 10 a.m. the cavalry and artillery bridge caved in under the latter’s weight. A number of men sank with it, and most of them perished. This led to a rush for the other, infantry bridge’, seen in the background. Nineteenth-century steel engraving.
The Berezina’s flood waters, swept by ice floes, had effectively increased the passage to ‘well over 200 yards’ and doubled its normal depth of 3½ feet in midstream – which made all the difference. V. Adam’s famous lithograph of the scene from the high ground where Lieutenant-Colonel Le Roy woke up on the morning of 27 November, considerably exaggerates the overall effect.
The heroic General Eblé vainly exhorting stragglers to bestir themselves in the night of 27 November and cross the remaining bridge before it is too late. Pils’ untutored watercolour brush captures all the drama of the scene. On 30 December the middle-aged Eblé, ‘no more than a shadow of himself and ‘in a state of utter dejection and exhaustion’, would die at Koenigsberg.
Standing up to the Cossacks ‘in the outskirts of Ochmiana, 4 December 1812’. By now almost everyone had several weeks’ growth of beard. Like thousands of others, the dying man in the foreground has already been stripped of his shoes and greatcoat. Engraving by Faber du Faur.
At Zaniwki hamlet, Napoleon’s headquarters on the Berezina’s right bank, III Corps headquarters staff assembled for the night of 27/28 November. Note the infantrymen stripping the three houses’ roof timbers: ‘Next day Zaniwki had almost wholly vanished, having been taken away for the bivouac fires.’ Faber du Faur.
5 December at Smorgoni. Of the 266 troopers of the prestigious Polish Guard Lancers who escorted Napoleon’s ‘hermetically sealed’ carriage on runners as he left the army, only 36 would reach the first staging post; and only 8 of Murat’s Neapolitan Guard Lancers who took over from them would get as far as Vilna. Staff captain Eugène Labaume would see their bodies littering the route, ‘showing Napoleon had passed that way’.
Vilna’s ‘long, low and narrow’ Medyn Gate where thousands of survivors trampled each other to death on 9 December and ‘for ten hours on end and in −28° of frost thousands of soldiers who’d thought they were saved fell frozen or stifled while other entrances were completely free’ – Cesare de Laugier. The gate still exists. Sepia drawing, 1785.
Governor Hogendorp’s placards – or were they Roch-Godart’s? – tried ineffectually to direct each corps to one of Vilna’s huge monasteries, which had all been earlier converted into hospitals. ‘No one could stay in those halls without fumigating them,’ writes the 13-year-old son of artillery surgeon Déchy who died of the typhus while heroically tending his patients there, ‘so fetid was the air. There was no bedding’. Reaching this ‘Tartar hell’ on 12 December, Rochechouart would try to save some of his compatriots from being thrown out of the windows to make room for Russian sick and wounded. Nineteenth-century engraving.
Lieutenant-Colonel C. F. M. Le Roy’s new shoes hindered him from keeping up with the scanty remnants of the 85th Line as he slithered along this road out to Ponari Hill. It was here the Fusiliers-Grenadiers’ ‘handsome poodle’ Mouton stood up to a Russian cuirassier and Sergeant Bourgogne admired Ney’s adroit handling of the rearguard. Ninetenth-century lithograph.
Vilna’s Lichtenstein Coffee House, invaded by famished survivors. During the night of 9 December the Württemberger Captain Karl von Suckow was aroused by a violent kick in the ribs ‘from Monsieur Lichtenstein in person, who’d earnt so much money from us and who’d always received us with the deepest and humblest bows. Now he shouted at me: “Get up, you dog of a German! And get the hell out of here!”’
‘From all the town’s streets and alleyways people were already crowding across the square en route for Kovno.’ A nineteenth-century artist’s impression of the chaos outside Vilna town hall in the evening of 10 December, after Murat had given orders fur the retreat to go on. Captain Josef Zalusky of the Polish Guard Lancers (left), assuming it to be at an end, had even donned his new parade uniform. But had to take it off again. Lithograph by J. Damelis. By kind permission of Vilnius Museum.
Ponari Hill, about 5 km long and 2 km wide, rises some 160–180 metres to the plateau leading to Kovno and the Niemen. The road’s gradient in those days was much steeper than it is today and nothing that moved on wheels could get up its ‘icy slope… polished like marble’. At its foot, friend and foe together pillaged the Imperial Treasure’s gold millions, and all the remaining guns were lost. No one mentions the chapel at its base. Sepia drawing, 1786.
The news reaches Paris. Having crossed Europe with unprecedented speed in the company of his Master of the Horse, Armand de Caulaincourt, Napoleon got there only two days after the publication of his ever famous and unusually truthful XXIXth Bulletin. Engraving by Opiz, 1814, Bibliothèque Nationale.
Without exaggerating the length (about 72 feet) or fragility of the improvised Berezina bridges – their tables were hardly a foot above the water – this anonymous artist’s picture of the troops crossing the infantry bridge shows the appalling crush on the eastern bank.
Napoleon and Caulaincourt walked out along the long timber bridge over the Berezina at Borissow to within 50 paces of the Russian sentry. Not all Marcelline Marbot’s dash had been able to prevent the Russians from firing it in three places – his 23rd Chasseurs had been too busy looting Count Pahlen’s 300 carts, filled with provisions taken from the immense stores captured by Tchitchakov at Minsk. Copper engraving from Lieutenant Honoré de Beulay’s memoirs.
So begins the Battle of the Berezina.
Thomas Legler is noticing that ‘a little snow was falling’, and at about 7.30 he and his Commandant Blattmann are strolling to and fro on the road and Blattmann reminds him of ‘a favourite song of mine, “Our Life is like a Journey”’ and asks him to sing it for him. ‘I started to at once, and when I’d finished it, he heaved a deep sigh. ‘Yes, Legler, that’s how it is. What splendid words!”’ Other officers join them and spend ‘the morning’s early hours singing and chatting’.
Evidently Tschaplitz’s attack is taking some time to materialise. Because it’s already ‘9 a.m. when suddenly a roundshot passes overhead with a horrible loud noise’ startling Legler’s colleagues:
‘We couldn’t understand how we could have been standing so near the enemy without any outposts. Now we heard heavy cannon fire in the distance; and to our right musketry seemed to be coming closer. An orderly officer came galloping up from that direction: “Our line’s been attacked!”’
Hardly have the group of Swiss infantry officers taken 100 paces to their right than ‘to our great astonishment an enemy came forward’. The Swiss scouts ‘quickly spread out backwards and sideways’, keeping the enemy at a distance by a well-nourished fire until the regiment has rejoined ‘the division that united us to our brigade’s two other divisions, which we’d lost sight of. On the road both sides’ artillery were facing each other, but the enemy’s so much aslant it we could now and again trace the damage their roundshot were doing.’
The Croat Regiment having been stationed elsewhere, Merle’s four Swiss infantry regiments, ‘these four units together perhaps amounting at most to 2,500 men’, only have the French 123rd Line to support them. ‘Behind us a few small Polish infantry units, a squadron of chasseurs and one of lancers formed a second line.’
