The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  On September 15 Napoleon moved into the Kremlin, and waited for Alexander to sue for peace. On that evening Moscow began to burn.

  V. THE BURNING OF MOSCOW: SEPTEMBER 15–19, 1812

  Napoleon marveled at the beauty of the deserted city. “Under every point of view,” he told Las Cases, “it might bear comparison with any of the capitals of Europe; the greater number of them it surpassed.”45 It was Russia’s largest city, its Holy City or spiritual capital, with 340 churches coloring the sky with their bulging domes. Most of these churches survived the fire, being built of stone. Dwellings were nearly all of wood; 11,000 of these were destroyed, including 6,000 built of “fireproof” materials.

  Some fires were seen by the entering French, who ran to extinguish them, but new fires sprang up, and spread so rapidly that they turned the night of September 15 into day, and wakened by their light the valets who guarded Napoleon’s sleep. They roused him; he ordered the army’s fire brigade into action, then went back to bed. On the morning of the 16th, Murat and Eugène, fearing that a spark might ignite the powder magazines that the army had deposited in the Kremlin, begged Napoleon to leave the city. After much resistance he rode out with them to a suburban palace, followed by wagons bearing records and matériel. The fire subsided on September 18, after destroying two thirds of Moscow, and Napoleon returned to the Kremlin.

  Who was responsible? The city authorities, before departing, had released the prisoners,46 and these may have set the first fires in the course of their looting. Some French soldiers may have been similarly careless in their pillaging.47 Many reports were brought to Napoleon on September 16 that torchbearers were scattering through Moscow, deliberately setting fires; he ordered that captured incendiaries be shot or hanged; these orders were carried out. One arsonist, a Russian military policeman, caught setting a fire in a turret of the Kremlin, alleged that he had acted under orders. He was interviewed by Napoleon, was taken down into the courtyard, and killed.48 Several arrested Russians alleged that the departing governor of the city, Count Rostopchin, had given orders that the city be burned.49

  On September 20 Napoleon wrote to Alexander:

  The proud and beautiful city of Moscow is no more. Rostopchin has had it burned. Four hundred incendiaries were arrested in the very act; they all declared that they set fire to the place by order of the Governor, the Director of the Police. They have been shot. Three houses out of every four have been burned down…. Such a deed is as useless as it is atrocious. Was it intended to deprive us of provisions? These were in cellars that the fire could not reach. Besides, what a trifling object for which to destroy the work of centuries, and one of the most lovely cities in the world! I cannot possibly believe that, with your principles, your feelings, and your ideas of what is right, you can have authorized excesses so unworthy of a just sovereign and a great nation.

  I made war on your Majesty without any hostile feelings. A single letter from you, before or after the last battle, would have stopped any advance, and I would willingly have surrendered the advantage of occupying Moscow. If your Majesty still retains some part of your old feelings for me, you will take this letter in good part. In any case you cannot but agree that I was right in reporting what is happening in Moscow.50

  Alexander did not answer this letter, but he answered the Russian officer who had been assigned to announce to him the burning of Moscow. The Czar asked if the event had hurt the morale of Kutuzov’s army. The officer answered that the only fear of the army was that the Czar would make peace with Napoleon. Alexander, we are told, replied, “Tell my brave men that when I have been reduced to one soldier I shall put myself at the head of my nobility and my peasants. And if it is fated that my dynasty must cease to reign, I shall let my beard grow to my breast, and shall go and eat potatoes in Siberia rather than sign the shame of my country and my good subjects.”51

  The people of Russia applauded his resolution, for the capture and burning of Moscow shocked them to the depths of their religious faith. They reverenced Moscow as the citadel of their creed; they looked upon Napoleon as an unscrupulous atheist, and believed that his imported savages had burned the holy city. They held Alexander guilty for having accepted friendship with such a man. At times they feared that this living devil would take St. Petersburg too, and slaughter millions of them. Some of the nobility, thinking that at any moment Napoleon might summon their serfs to freedom, favored a compromise to get him out of Russia; but the majority of Alexander’s entourage urged him to resistance. The foreign group around him—Stein, Arndt, Mme. de Staël, and a dozen émigrés—daily pleaded with him; as the struggle proceeded he came to see himself as the leader not only of his country but of Europe, Christianity, civilization. He refused to answer any of the three messages sent to him from Moscow by Napoleon offering peace. As the Russian aristocracy saw week after week pass without any further action by Napoleon, they began to understand the wisdom of Kutuzov’s deadly inaction, and adjusted themselves to a long war. Again the palaces of the capital gleamed with countesses in jeweled robes, and officers in proud uniforms, moving confidently in stately dances to music that had never felt the Revolution.

  After the fire had been extinguished Napoleon ordered his men to care for the injured or destitute survivors, of whatever ethnic origin,52 and made arrangements for the storage or orderly consumption of victuals left by the departing citizens. He answered the messages or inquiries brought to him by couriers from his subject lands; later he boasted that during his stay in Moscow not one of his couriers—and they averaged one a day—had been intercepted by the enemy on their route.53 He reorganized and reequipped his army, and tried to keep it fit by frequent drills; but the spirit had gone out of such parades. He had concerts and plays presented by French musicians and actors who had been domiciled in Moscow,54 and found time to draw up a detailed order for the reorganization and operation of the Comédie-Française in Paris.

  A month passed, but no word came from Alexander. “I beat the Russians every time,” Napoleon complained, “but that does not get me anywhere.”55 September cooled into October; soon the Russian winter would come. Finally, having lost hope of any answer from the Czar, or any challenge from Kutuzov, and realizing that every day made his situation worse, he surrendered to the bitter decision: to go back, empty handed, or with a few solacing trophies, to Smolensk, Vilna, Warsaw… Paris. What victory could ever wipe out the shame of this defeat?

  VI. THE WAY BACK: OCTOBER 19 —NOVEMBER 28, 1812

  One hope remained. Kutuzov had accumulated provisions at Kaluga, ninety miles southwest of Moscow. Napoleon thought of marching there, and forcing the wily general to battle for those stores; if the French won decisively the Russian nobles might compel Alexander to sue for peace. Moreover, Kaluga was on another road to Smolensk than that by which the invaders had come; it would spare the pain of passing through Borodino, where so many of their mates had died. The order went out: prepare to evacuate.

  So, on October 19, Napoleon’s army—50,000 soldiers, 50,000 noncombatants—began to file out from Moscow. Baggage carts contained provisions for twenty days; by that time they could reach Smolensk, where fresh supplies had been ordered for them.56 Other wagons bore the sick or wounded, some heavy trophies, and Napoleon’s diminishing supply of gold.

  At Maloyaroslavets, twenty-five miles north of Kaluga, the French made contact with Kutuzov’s army. A sharp action followed (October 24), which forced the Russians to withdraw behind their defenses in Kaluga. Napoleon decided that his army was not equipped for a long siege. Reluctantly he bade his men take the road via Borovsk and Mozhaisk to Borodino. Thence they retraced the route they had followed in the summertime of their hopes. Now, however, that devil of a Kutuzov brought up his army to march on a parallel route to theirs, keeping elusively out of sight, but sending up, now and then, cavalry detachments of wild Cossacks to harass the French flanks; and happy peasants took shots at stragglers who ventured too far from the sixty-mile line of march.57


  Napoleon was well protected, but only from immediate danger. Couriers brought him, en route, news of active dissension threatening his government in Paris, and rising rebellions in his subject lands. On October 26, a week out of Moscow, he asked Caulaincourt should he, Napoleon, leave at once for Paris to face and control the discontent aroused by his defeat, and to raise a new army to defend the French forces left in Prussia and Austria. Caulaincourt advised him to go.58 On November 6 word came that Claude-François de Malet, a general in the French Army, had overthrown the French government on October 22, and had won the support of prominent individuals, but had been deposed and shot (October 29). Napoleon resolved to go.

  As the retreat progressed the weather worsened. Snow fell on October 29; soon it would form a permanent cover, beautiful and blinding, turning, in the cold of the night, to ice on which many dray horses slipped and fell. Some were too exhausted to rise again, and had to be abandoned; farther on the march such victims were eaten by starving troops. Most officers kept their mounts alive by care and covering. The Emperor rode part of the time in his carriage with Marshal Berthier, but two or three times a day, or more often, according to Méneval, he walked with the rest.59

  On November 13 the army, now reduced to a total of fifty thousand men, began to enter Smolensk. They were furious on finding that most of the food and clothing which Napoleon had ordered had been lost through Cossack raids and local peculation; so a thousand oxen marked for the army had been sold to merchants, who had resold them to any buyer.60 The warriors fought for the remaining supplies, and took by force whatever they could lay their hands on in the markets.

  Napoleon had hoped to give his men a long rest at Smolensk, but word came that Kutuzov was approaching with 80,000 Russians who were no longer willing to retreat. Against them Napoleon could find only some 25,000 of his men who were fit to fight.61 On November 14 he led part of his forces out on the road to Krasnoe, by a different route to Vilna than the one they had taken in the summer. Davout was to follow on the 15th, Ney on the 16th. The road was hilly and covered with ice; the horses, not properly shod for a Russian winter, slipped back on the hills; after several such defeats hundreds of them resisted all efforts to get them up, and accepted death as one of life’s mercies; and many of the men took the same exit. “All along our way,” one veteran recalled, “we were forced to step over the dead or dying.”62 In descending those icy hills no one dared to ride, or even to walk; all, including the Emperor, took them sitting down, as a few of them had done in crossing the Alps to Marengo twelve years before. These were days that counted for years in the aging of master and men. It was apparently at this point that Napoleon persuaded Dr. Yvan to give him a vial of poison to carry with him in case he should be captured or for some other reason might wish to end his life.

  They reached Krasnoe on November 15, but could not rest; Kutuzov was approaching with an overwhelming force; Napoleon bade his men to march on to Orsha. Eugène led the way, fighting off desultory bands; the Emperor and Davout followed. They reached Orsha after three more days of marching on the ice; and there they waited anxiously for Ney to bring up the third part of the French forces.

  Ney was the bright star of the army at this time, as he had been at Borodino. As commander of the rear guard he had led his seven thousand men through a dozen battles to protect the retreat from attacks by Kutuzov’s raiders. He and his division entered Smolensk late on November 15, and were shocked to discover that so little food had been left there by the departed divisions under Napoleon and Davout. They managed to survive, and hurried on to Krasnoe. There they found not Napoleon as promised, but Kutuzov, blocking their way with murderous barrages of artillery. Under cover of the night (November 18–19) Ney guided his troops along a frozen stream to the River Dnieper, crossed it at some loss in men and horses, and fought his way through Cossacks and over frozen marshes to reach Orsha on November 20. There Napoleon and the waiting divisions welcomed the famished heroes with praise and food. Napoleon embraced Ney, called him “the bravest of the brave,” and later said: “I have four hundred million in gold in the cellars of the Tuileries; I would gladly have given all of it to see Marshal Ney again.”63

  To distance Kutuzov’s slower masses the French hurried on through four days’ march to face their next hurdle, the River Berezina. When they reached it (November 25) they found that General Chichagov had come up from the south with 24,000 men, and that another Russian force, 34,000 strong, under Marshal Ludwig Wittgenstein, was hurrying down from the north to catch the French between two fires just when they were in such disorder that their leaders despaired of saving them from destruction.

  Not all the news was bad. Napoleon soon learned that two friendly forces had come to help him. A division of Poles under General Jan Henryk Dombrowski, though outnumbered three to one, had challenged Chichagov and delayed the Russian advance; and on November 23 a French force of 8,000 men under Marshal Oudinot had surprised Chichagov, captured one of his battalions, and driven the remainder in flight across a bridge at Borisov to the right, or western, bank of the southward-flowing Berezina. The Russians, however, had destroyed the bridge, the only one that spanned the river in that locality.

  News of these operations reached Napoleon as his weary host—now 25,000 soldiers and 24,000 noncombatants—neared the stream which, they hoped, would deter Kutuzov’s further pursuit. He too had lost men, by desertion, illness, or death; only 27,000 remained of the 97,000 that had started with him from Kaluga; and now they were forty miles behind Napoleon’s rear guard. There was still time to cross the river if it could be crossed.

  Regaining hope, Napoleon sent a detachment under Marshal Victor to go north and stop Wittgenstein, and another under Ney to join Oudinot in preventing Chichagov from recrossing the river. Ever since crossing the Niemen, Napoleon had kept, as part of his staff, the engineers who had built the bridges there in June; now he asked them to find a spot on the Berezina over which they could raise two pontoon bridges. They found such a spot at Studenki, nine miles north of Borisov. They and their assistants worked through two days in the freezing waters. Ice floes battered them, and several of them were drowned; but by one o’clock on the afternoon of the 26th one bridge was ready, and the army began to pass over it; by four o’clock another bridge was carrying over artillery and other heavy loads. Napoleon and his generals waited till most of the soldiers had reached the west bank; then they crossed over, leaving a force under Victor to protect some 8,000 noncombatants who had still to cross. Before that final operation could succeed, the Russians concerted an attack along both sides of the river; they were repulsed by Victor, Oudinot, and Ney. Napoleon organized the crossing and the resistance as well as he could in the confusion of thousands of men struggling to survive. Twice a bridge broke down; hundreds were drowned; meanwhile Wittgenstein’s artillery rained cannon shot upon the final thousands crowding to cross. On November 29, to delay pursuit of his men by the forces of Wittgenstein and the arriving Kutuzov, Napoleon ordered his sappers to destroy both bridges, leaving hundreds of noncombatants still pleading for a chance to cross. All in all, the escape across the Berezina was the most heroic episode in six months of costly fantasies and miscalculations by one of the greatest generals in history.

  The tragedy continued as the survivors resumed their westward march. The temperature again fell below the freezing point, but this had one advantage—it allowed travel over frozen marshes, shortening the distance to Vilna. Fear of Cossacks and hostile peasants having subsided, deserters multiplied, and discipline disappeared.

  Napoleon saw that he was now of little use to the remnant. He listened agreeably to Murat’s advice to return to Paris lest France succumb again to revolution. At the next main stop, Molodechno, he received more details of the Malet affair. This usurper had been snuffed out, but the ease with which he had imposed upon officials indicated a lax government losing faith in a Napoleon so long absent, apparently demolished, perhaps dead. Jacobins and royalists, Fouché and Talleyr
and, were plotting to depose him.

  To reassert himself, and reassure the French people, he dispatched from Smorgonie, on December 5, Bulletin No. 29, which differed from its predecessors in almost telling the truth. The French, it said, had won every battle, had taken every city on their march, had ruled Moscow; however, the merciless Russian winter had ruined the great enterprise, and had inflicted pain and death upon civilized Frenchmen accustomed to a civilized climate. The bulletin admitted the loss of fifty thousand men, but it proudly told the story of Ney’s escape from Kutuzov, and presented the crossing of the Berezina in its heroic rather than its tragic aspect. The message concluded, as if in warning to his enemies: “His Majesty’s health has never been better.”

  Neverthless, he was worried to the core of his pride. He told Caulaincourt, “I can hold my grip on Europe only from the Tuileries.”64 Murat, Eugène, and Davout agreed with him. He transferred his authority over the marching army to King Murat, and told him to expect provisions and reinforcements at Vilna. Late on the evening of December 5 he left Smorgonie for Paris.

  The caravan, reduced to 35,000 troops, departed on the next day for Vilna, forty-six miles away. Now the temperature fell to thirty degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and the wind, said a survivor, cut through flesh and bone.65 Arrived at Vilna (December 8), the famished soldiers rushed in primitive chaos upon the supplies awaiting them, and much food was lost in the confusion. They resumed their march, and on December 13, at Kovno, they crossed, 30,000 in number, the same Niemen which had seen 400,000 of them, there and at Tilsit, cross in June. At Posen, Murat, worried in his turn about his throne, resigned his command to Eugène (January 16, 1813), and hurried across Europe to Naples. Eugène, now thirty years old, young but experienced, took charge of the remnant, and led it patiently, day after day, to the banks of the Elbe, where he awaited his adoptive father’s command.