The Illustrious Dead

by Stephan Talty

  The upper classes were firmly behind the tsar’s war policy. When Alexander, who remained far back from the front lines throughout the war, traveled to Moscow’s Sloboda Palace in late July to address the assemblies of nobles and merchants, the former pledged men— 10 percent of their serfs for the cause, as well as provisions to feed them, totaling 50,000 men—and the latter contributed huge sums of money. Fresh funds poured in: 2.4 million rubles were donated to the tsar’s coffers. Count Mamonov, whose father had risen rapidly in the military ranks due to his liaison with Catherine the Great, only to betray her with a sixteen-year-old, pledged 800,000 silver rubles and a cache of diamonds.

  ON JULY 29, Napoleon marched into the recently abandoned Vitebsk, an ugly, depressing city partially redeemed by its beautiful churches. He delayed here, unable to make up his mind whether he should keep moving forward or stop for a time, allowing his food trains to catch up, knitting together his lines of communication, and giving his men a much-needed rest and the sick a chance to recover. The diplomat Caulaincourt, along with Murat and his other advisers, urged Napoleon to station the army in the city of Smolensk, sixty miles to the northeast, until the coming spring. His forces were simply too small and run-down after their harrowing in the field, and the prospect of wintering in Moscow, should he conquer it, gave him no strategic advantages against an army that could renew itself over a long winter.

  The condition of the army was one of the main topics of debate, as it would be at each stop during the campaign. “War’s a game you’re good at,” the head of Napoleon’s commissariat snapped at the emperor. “But here we aren’t fighting men, we’re fighting nature.” “Nature” here refers to the lack of food, the weather, and distance—and disease, which emanated from the bogs and swamps.

  With the momentum of the invasion momentarily stilled, Napoleon spent hours reviewing statistics from the various corps, detailing the losses to their ranks and the reinforcements flowing to each division. Many believed his generals were downplaying the deaths to typhus and other causes, hoping to escape charges of neglect or mismanagement (and fearing that, undermanned, they would be left out of coming battles). Dr. Larrey mentioned discrepancies between actual and reported number of sick, and one officer wrote darkly of “the cruel way in which [Napoleon] was being deceived by the reports made to him.”

  The emperor contemplated stopping at several points during the advance. This was as close as he came to addressing the losses to typhus, as part of an overall plan to give his men a chance to recuperate. The lack of a strong response mystifies the modern mind, but Napoleon was ill-informed and his options were vanishingly small. He also knew that even diagnosing the problem as an epidemic would solve nothing. The army had no proven weapons to combat typhus or any other contagious disease.

  For a time the emperor seemed to have settled on a break in the advance. He met with his advisers and unstrapped his sword, clattering it down on a table covered with maps. “The campaign of 1812 is finished,” he told them. “The campaign of 1813 will do the rest.” But soon his mood changed and he lashed out at his coterie, bitterly accusing them of wanting to avoid battle and return to their mistresses in Paris. Napoleon seemed to change his mind by the hour. During one bath, he decided that he must advance at that very moment and dashed out of the water stark naked to give an order. But soon he went back to his maps for further study, countermanding the order.

  The emperor took a tour of the hospitals, talking with the sick and wounded, awarding medals and handing out small gifts to the soldiers. Dr. Larrey was close at hand, but Napoleon didn’t speak a word to him as he walked through the wards, an ominous sign. Napoleon kept up a cheerful banter with his men; still, he was clearly appalled at the conditions and the lack of supplies that forced the surgeons to tear up their own shirts for bandages. At the end of the tour, Napoleon erupted in rage at the doctors. “I shall send you back to Paris to care for the inhabitants of the Palais Royal,” he threatened. “You, whom I have charged with tending to the needs of our soldiers, you want to sleep in white sheets!” He even rounded on Larrey and chastised him for the lack of medical supplies. The surgeon in chief took the abuse, but when he finally spoke up to defend himself, Napoleon turned and left. Larrey was furious. He wrote Napoleon a passionate letter detailing the failures of his own supply administration to get bandages and medicine to the front, and the two soon reconciled.

  But the strain of the huge sick lists was clearly showing. The surplus of men Napoleon had brought with him had provided a kind of insulation against disaster, but the excess was being burned away. He needed a decisive battle and a surrender soon.

  Trying to decide on his next move, Napoleon paced hour after hour, singing snatches of French songs, chatting absentmindedly about the weather, and mumbling questions to aides who happened into his tent. “Well, what are we going to do? …Shall we stay here? …Shall we advance? …How can we stop now on the road to glory?” He was in a dialogue with himself, and one senses that the outcome was never really in doubt. When he finally announced the advance, it was with a sense of fatalism. “The danger pushes us toward Moscow,” he wrote. “The die is cast. Victory will vindicate us.”

  His nature, his career, his philosophy all favored boldness. Napoleon decided to pursue.

  C H A P T E R 7

  The Sound of Flames

  THERE WAS A DRENCHING SERIES OF THUNDERSTORMS ON August 11 as the army marched out of Vitebsk, providing the soldiers with an extra source for drinking water. The supply trains had caught up to the main body of troops in the city, so the men had been able to eat their fill and even stuff a full seven days of rations into their knapsacks for the days ahead. Thirst and hunger fluctuated, but disease had become a constant. One hospital even had a “dying chamber,” where hopeless cases were left on the straw to expire in peace. By mid-August, typhus was exploding in the ranks. “The number of sick people increased overwhelmingly,” wrote de Kerckhove, the Belgian doctor. “They were crawling along on the roads, where many of them died.”

  Caulaincourt, the former Russian ambassador, was sent to inspect the hospitals and pass out money to the wounded. He was genuinely appalled at what he found. “Never was there such a situation more deplorable,” he wrote, “or a spectacle more heartrending for those who could think, and who hadn’t been dazzled by the false glamour of Glory and ambition.” He found most medical and supply officials indifferent to the suffering around them, governed by a “spirit of inexplicable and unpardonable meanness.” Caulaincourt found the emperor was only intermittently in touch with the looming disaster. He would acknowledge the problems and fly into a rage at an official from the commissariat, then be distracted by some report of a minor battle or the arrival of a fresh supply of ammunition, instantly reverting to his “old illusions” of conquering Russia, throwing the tsar out, pushing on to India, and crippling Britain’s mercantile trade. The diplomat had never seen a wider gap between unfolding reality and Napoleon’s grasp of it.

  BUT THE SITUATION on the Russian side was hardly ideal, either. In the face of a seemingly endless retreat, Alexander resorted to propaganda to placate his subjects, churning out a steady stream of bulletins trumpeting imaginary victories against the French and instructing the leaders of the Orthodox Church to rally the faithful to the cause. But news of the French advance got out via soldiers’ letters sent home, from gossip passed east from peasants who had watched the Grande Armée march by unimpeded, and with the arrival of refugees, all of which spread “fear and despair.” The mood of the country darkened whenever the actual facts of the war escaped.

  Finally, on August 2, the Russian First and Second armies met in Smolensk. “This news filled everyone with extraordinary joy,” wrote Nikolai Mitarevsky, a young Russian artillery officer. “We thought there would be no more retreating and the war would take on a different character.” Pressure was by now intense on General Barclay and on the tsar to confront Napoleon. Alexander’s high command, the soldiers themselves, and
average Russian citizens were growing impatient and increasingly suspicious of Alexander’s motives. And rumors about the German-speaking Barclay were already beginning to spread—why didn’t he turn and fight?

  Smolensk was a small town of 12,600 citizens, a site without great strategic interest, but it had acquired a significance for Russians out of proportion to its size, due to the presence of the revered icon of Hodegetria (literally, “she who shows the way”), supposedly painted by Saint Luke in the eleventh century. The miraculous portrait of the Virgin Mary and Jesus made Smolensk one of Russia’s “holy” cities, and the legacy of several battles between the Poles and Russians in the seventeenth century gave the place a nationalist pedigree as well. It was a maxim of Russian military history that “he who has Smolensk also has Moscow.” The city was, all in all, a fitting arena for a showdown with the invader.

  Napoleon, of course, wanted nothing more than a confrontation, and on August 7 he got exciting news. Cossacks had attacked Count Horace Sebastiani’s 3,000 mounted troops at the town of Inkovo, halfway between Vitebsk and Smolensk, and dealt them a serious blow. Finally bowing to the political situation, Barclay sent three columns to attack Ney, “the Bravest of the Brave,” and the dashing Murat, who were believed to be in advance of the main body of troops around the town of Rudnia. During the offensive, scouts reported that the French had been spotted to the north. Barclay turned his troops toward the French forces, but the new orders never got through to his cavalry. They continued advancing along the original lines and at Inkovo ran into the enemy cavalry, still in their tents. The Russians attacked at dawn, sweeping through the camp, spreading chaos, and capturing 200 prisoners.

  The attack had acted as a trip wire. Now Napoleon knew where the Russians were, and he concluded that the main body of troops had gathered at Smolensk. He moved quickly to pin them down for a large-scale battle, moving his corps to the Dnieper River. Believing that the First and Second armies were southeast of him, he was engaging in a classic Napoleonic technique: he would circle around and get behind the Russians at Smolensk, cut off their line of retreat, and then crush them.

  The hoped-for alliance between Bagration and Barclay had never materialized on the ground. Bagration, a Russian hawk to his highly excitable nerve endings, lobbied for a battle, while the careful Barclay was still terrified of being crushed by one of Napoleon’s surprise flank or rearguard attacks. Finally, Barclay agreed that a confrontation with Napoleon was necessary, and he marched northwest from Smolensk to find the French. But a confusing and contradictory series of orders was sent to Bagration, miles to the south, the last of which ordered him to a rendezvous. The Second Army’s leader had grown exasperated by the blizzard of directives and now refused the command to turn around for another pointless march. Instead of joining forces with Barclay, his troops continued toward Smolensk. Barclay was forced to abandon his offensive and turned back toward the city. The rift in the Russian high command was now deep and wide.

  Confusion—and Napoleon’s own reputation—worked against Barclay, denying him the decisive battle he needed. Barclay didn’t believe that his opponent’s tactical skills had deteriorated. The Russians repeatedly suspected a Napoleonic strike would come wheeling in from some unexpected direction, and so they chose again and again to retreat away from the invisible presence they sensed over the next hill.

  On August 14, Napoleon sent Davout rushing to Smolensk from the southwest, followed by Ney and Murat. “At last! I have them!” he cried when Marshal Ney reported back that he had the entire Russian army in sight. The emperor decided on a classic frontal assault against a fortified position, just the kind of warfare he had seemed to make obsolete in victories such as Austerlitz. The time for finesse was gone.

  But now that Napoleon needed the kind of massive army he had assembled in Germany, his numbers were falling fast. He was down to 175,000 effective fighting troops, with 100,000 others on the sick or missing lists. Ney’s corps had been reduced from 39,342 men at the start of the campaign to 16,053 troops fit enough for battle. The medical situation was grim.

  The German foot soldier Jakob Walter saw his company dwindle to 25 men as they marched toward Smolensk. “One man after another stretched himself half-dead upon the ground,” he wrote in his diary. “Most of them died a few hours later; several, however, suddenly fell to the ground dead.” He attributes many of the casualties to thirst but reports no symptoms. It’s likely that typhus and dysentery were killing as many as, if not more than, dehydration was.

  As he approached Smolensk, Napoleon decided against sending an encircling force to block any Russian retreat, allowing the road to Moscow at the Russian forces’ rear to remain clear. Some historians have theorized that he expected a decisive battle in which no retreat would be possible, but it’s also likely that the emperor felt he needed every available man for the assault and couldn’t spare a containment force. He could have bypassed the city and crossed the Dnieper farther down, and the German adviser Carl von Clausewitz for one was astonished and appalled when he failed to do so. But second-tier cities were less important to Napoleon than Russian casualties and prisoners—the key, he felt, to getting Alexander to the negotiating table.

  Smolensk lies in an oval bowl, surrounded by hills in the south (which the French commanded) and the north (held by the Russians). Below their feet spread out thickets of birch and open spaces, slanting down to the dwellings that marked the city’s outer suburbs, bisected by two streams that fed the Dnieper River. The city walls were whitewashed and studded with thirty bastion towers. It was a fortress, decrepit in places, but still a formidable target for a head-on attack. Inside the walls and arrayed through the suburbs were the 17,000 men of Nikolai Raevsky’s VII Corps. Barclay and Bagration were rushing to reinforce them.

  On August 15, the French soldiers cooked their meals and then gathered around their campfires, talking quietly. “The thought of the coming day alternated with fitful sleep,” wrote Jakob Walter, “and in fantasy the many dead men and horses came as a world of spirits before the last judgment.”

  Early on August 16, Marshal Ney and his corps attacked the Russian cavalry, which retired in short order behind the walls. Napoleon rode up at nine in the morning and ordered a light bombardment of the city as he waited for the main body of his troops to arrive. In the meantime, the Second Army under Bagration streamed into the city, bolstering Raevsky’s units and changing the face of the battle. Barclay, after an exhausting thirty-mile march, arrived with the First Army hours later.

  The action resumed in earnest the next day. Napoleon had 140,000 men to throw against the Russians, with Eugène and Junot’s corps still making their way to Smolensk. Ney took up the left position, Davout held the center, and General Józef Poniatowski, with his Polish troops, formed the right along with Murat. The Guard, as always, stood back to act as a reserve.

  The two armies probed each other. French infantrymen went streaming through the suburbs with bayonets fixed and ran straight into the Russian infantry, who counterattacked and drove them back with volleys of case shot, which “shattered great heaps of them to the ground,” leaving the French casualties “weltering in their own blood.” Townspeople, even Russian priests, one of whom sighted an artillery piece, emerged out of the ramparts and fought off the attackers.

  Seeing the stiff resistance, Napoleon eagerly awaited an all-out counteroffensive by the forces inside the city, but Barclay held them back. The emperor stared and stared at the gates, willing the Russians to emerge. Meanwhile, the French artillery was raining shells into the fortress, hoping to kill as many enemy troops as possible and drive the rest outside the forty-foot walls. The Russians fired back, their ball slamming into the French gun carriages, sending shrapnel into the gunners, killing them. Wagons exploded, deafening nearby troops and sending chunks of flesh from the dray horses spinning across the slope. As the Russian barrages rained down, the French noticed they were using a new variety— a triple-vented shell that spewed fire as it
descended.

  From the Russian side, Captain Eduard von Löwenstern watched line after line of French infantrymen charging the guns.

  A second earlier these poor victims of battle had advanced with fixed bayonets and pale faces. Now most of them lay dead or mutilated. Another column soon advanced and, with a hail of bullets, avenged the death of their comrades. Many of our artillerymen were shot.

  By that afternoon, Napoleon knew that he wouldn’t get his battle in open ground and ordered the entire front line of his forces to take the city. Two hundred guns erupted into a thunderous barrage, and three corps of troops—under Ney, Davout, and Poniatowski— went shouting toward the walls and their three gates, their peacock uniforms visible for everyone to see.

  The topology of Smolensk forms a natural amphitheater, with the action centered between the feet of two facing slopes, as if on a stage. Workers from the Grande Armée’s baggage trains came up to watch the action, calling out to units in danger below their feet and crying “Bravo!” at small acts of bravery. The regimental bands— made up of one piccolo, one high clarinet, sixteen clarinets, two trumpets, one bass trumpet, four bassoons, two military serpents (a distant and fantastically shaped ancestor of the tuba), four horns, three trombones, two snare drums, one bass drum, one triangle, and two pairs of cymbals—played their martial tunes at maximum volume, and observers on the rim of the bowl could hear snatches of the music between the cannon volleys, with the trumpeters playing flourishes and the drummers hoisting their instruments high into the air.