The Illustrious Dead

by Stephan Talty

  The results were gruesome. The men sat in their saddles for several hours, serving as gorgeously dressed targets for the enemy gunners. Lieutenant von Schreckenstein, back with his Saxon cavalry brigade, watched as his comrades dropped amid the exploding shells. “For strong, healthy, well-mounted men a cavalry battle is nothing compared with what Napoleon made his cavalry put up with at Borodino …,” he wrote. “There can have been scarcely a man in those ranks and files whose neighbor did not crash to earth with his horse, or die from horrible wounds while screaming for help.” Shattered bits of helmet and iron breastplates came hurtling through the rows of horsemen, along with bits of bone and flesh. One cuirassier remembered that they could actually see the Russian artillerymen sighting their guns at their units. The troops had to remain unmoving as the guns were primed, loaded with ball, and then fired.

  Captain Jean Bréaut des Marlots stood under the barrage with his men. “On every side one saw nothing but the dying and the dead,” he wrote. Twice during the three hours des Marlots reviewed his men, giving them encouragement and trying to judge who was holding up under the strain and who was slowly losing his nerve. He was chatting with one young officer who said all he wanted was a glass of water when the man was cut in two by a cannonball. Des Marlots turned to another officer and had just finished saying how awful it was that their comrade had been killed when the man’s horse was hit by a cannonball, knocking him to the ground. Writing an account for his sister, the captain told her how such random deaths from above gave him a deep sense of fatalism that carried him through. “I said to myself: ‘It is a lottery whether you survive or not. One has to die sometime.’” He vowed to be killed with honor rather than run from the field.

  TRYING TO REGAIN the initiative, Napoleon ordered the artillery of the Guard to be wheeled from their positions forward to the edge of the plateau above Semeonovskoie. He would commit guns, but not the reserve itself. The 12-pounders added their reports to the unceasing roar.

  A few minutes after two o’clock, Napoleon gave the order for a fresh assault against the Raevsky Redoubt in the center, which had become the Russians’ stronghold on the battlefield. He directed a three-pronged assault: three divisions of infantry would attack the structure head-on. From the French left, the III Corps of cavalry would move against the northern end and rear of the fortifications; from the right would come II and IV Corps, attacking the southern end and veering into the rear as well. Napoleon’s orders to General Auguste de Caulaincourt, the younger brother of his former Russian ambassador, were “Do what you did at Arzobispo!,” the 1809 battle where Caulaincourt had executed perfectly a daring encircling maneuver that won the day for the French. Now the general galloped off to lead his cavalry in a very different assignment: a frontal assault into withering artillery fire. Before the general left, he told his brother, “The fighting has become so hot that I don’t suppose I shall see you again. We will win, or I’ll get myself killed.” The elder Caulaincourt, knowing that his brother’s old war wounds caused him so much pain that he often wished for death, was shaken by the words.

  Across the battlefield, General Barclay watched the enemy forces assemble. “I saw they were going to launch a ferocious attack,” he remembered. He called for the 1st Cuirassier Division to be brought up from the second line, a unit he had “intended to hoard for a decisive blow.” But his messenger returned to report that the division had been ordered (by whom, no one knew) to the extreme left flank to support the troops battling Poniatowski. It was symptomatic of a command structure where generals grabbed regiments whenever they could find them and stuck them in to fill holes, without coordination by Kutuzov. All Barclay could find were two regiments of cuirassiers, which he felt would be slaughtered in the first few moments of battle. He held them back until more units could be found.

  As the clock ticked toward three o’clock, the Russians were forced to stand under a ferocious bombardment from the batteries around Semeonovskoie. Finally, the French infantry marched out, but the cavalry swept past them and reached the redoubt first. A squad of Polish and Saxon cuirassiers had been trotting from sector to sector all morning, avoiding the Russian guns and waiting impatiently to be called to action. Now they charged up the steep slope toward the battered earthworks and slipped their horses through the slots cut for the cannon, or wheeled their horses around the palisades and entered from behind, followed by the 5th Cuirassiers. Leading the 5th, General Caulaincourt was killed as he charged the walls, a musket shot cutting through his jugular. The Saxons and Poles smashed through the Russian defenses first, leaping over the bayonets of the defenders and chopping at the gunners with their sabers.

  The first horsemen over the wall were met by musket fire but plunged into the enemy ranks regardless, and were met by bayonets, which the infantrymen stabbed up into the riders, breaking the blades on their iron breastplates or cutting blindly into thighs and groins. A roar went up from the French soldiers watching the action from the rear as they saw the sun wink off the cuirassiers’ helmets inside the distant redoubt. “It would be difficult to convey our feelings as we watched this brilliant feat of arms,” wrote Colonel Charles Griois, a cavalry officer, “perhaps without equal in the military annals of nations.” The Russians cut down the vanguard of cavalry, but more and more mounted troops poured in every available entryway and rushed in from behind, slashing at the enemy with their swords. Hopelessly outnumbered, the Russians fought to the death.

  The body of one Russian gunner was decorated by three medals. “In one hand he held a broken sword, and with the other he was convulsively grasping the carriage of the gun he’d so valiantly fought with,” remembered one of his adversaries. But most of the dead were horribly chopped up and contorted, piled at the entrances, in the wolf pits outside the palisade walls, and trampled by horses or mixed in with dying mounts cut by bayonets and unable to stand. The fort was an abattoir in which the piles of dead told the story of the day like alternating layers of sedimentary soil. One soldier described the action inside as a “frenzy of slaughter,” with men slashing at each other or bludgeoning the enemy with musket stocks.

  Barclay watched the action, rushing troops to fill the gaps the French were gashing in his front line. As the French attack progressed, he was conferring with another general when he looked up to see an enormous cloud of dust rolling over the turf toward the redoubt from the north. The Russians formed squares, with Barclay inside one, and waited for the cuirassiers to come within range. When the French appeared, the Russians fired and then advanced. One Russian general remembered what happened next:

  It was a march into hell. In front of us was a mass of indeterminate depth, even as its front was impressive enough. To the left, a battery …and everywhere, French cavalry, waiting to cut off our way back…. We went straight for the enemy mass, while the huge battery hurled its ball at us.

  The redoubt was taken by three thirty in the afternoon. General Caulaincourt was carried out on a white cloak clotted with blood, soon to be one of the heroes of Borodino. When word reached his brother, the diplomat began to weep silently and Napoleon offered to let him retire from the field. Caulaincourt said nothing but touched his hat in acknowledgment of the gesture.

  The small number of Russian prisoners, only 800, testified to the implacable nature of the defense. Prince Eugène gathered up the remnants of the different cavalry units and sent them at the Russian reserves that Barclay had formed into a line. But again, a lack of manpower doomed the effort and the Russians retreated in good order, managing to take a number of the Raevsky guns with them.

  Napoleon was incredulous that so few prisoners had been taken, even sending orderlies to the redoubts to make sure none were being held there. “These Russians let themselves be killed like automatons,” he complained. The prisoners would suffer terribly in the hands of the French. “Taken to Smolensk,” the illustrator Faber du Faur recalled. “They were dragged toward the Prussian frontier, tormented by hunger and deprived of even the most ba
sic necessities.” Few of the captives would ever see Russia again.

  The last push for a breakthrough occurred on the right. Spurred by the attack on the redoubt, Poniatowski and his Polish regiments renewed their assault on the town of Utitsa, which marked the southernmost point of the advancing French line, pushing around the sides of the hill with combined cavalry and infantry attacks. The Russians, seeing their position grow untenable, retreated from the hill and left it to the triumphant Poles. A last-ditch counterattack of 650 men was cut to pieces by the French and the battle on the extreme left was over. The Poles had managed to expel the Russians from a stronghold but failed again to break through the line or turn the flank.

  The artillery on both sides continued to fire, but when Poniatowski broke off contact with the enemy, the action at Borodino ceased. Finally, at six o’clock, the guns too fell silent.

  THE FIELD OF BATTLE was now a landscape gashed and cratered by artillery shells and covered from nearly one end to the other by corpses, body parts, dead or dying horses, regimental flags, the immense detritus of war. The Würrtemburg lieutenant H. A. Vossler walked across the field and saw men and horses “gashed and maimed in every conceivable way.” Studying the faces, he wrote that one could see the last emotions to pass over their faces before dying. For the French, “desperation, defiance, cold, unbearable pain.” Among the Russians, “passionate fury, apathy, and stupor.”

  Napoleon, too, rode out to survey the landscape and witnessed the carnage firsthand. The men cried out, “In the name of God, take care of the wounded,” but there was little that could be done for the catastrophic injuries that characterized Borodino. One of his officers’ horses stepped on a dying Russian soldier: it was almost impossible to avoid on grounds tightly packed with casualties and body parts. Napoleon erupted in rage, to which one of his staff replied that it was only a Russian. “There are no enemies after a victory, but only men!” he shouted, a reversal of his remark to Caulaincourt at Smolensk. He ordered his men to fan out and assist the wounded in any way they could.

  “They lay one on top of the other,” wrote one Captain von Kurz, “swimming in pools of their own blood, moaning and cursing as they begged for death.” The scene at the Raevsky Redoubt was indelible. “It was horrible to see that enormous mass of riddled soldiers,” wrote the Prussian baron Wolzogen when he came across it. “French and Russians were cast together, and there were many wounded men who were incapable of moving and lay in that wild chaos intermingled with the bodies of horses and the wreckage of shattered cannon.” Even the men who had escaped the Russian bullets looked spectral: their uniforms were ripped here and there by bullets and bayonets; their faces were ashen from the black powder used in their muskets. As miserable as they were, the men called out to the emperor, congratulating him. But the victory was only half-achieved. The Russian army was still visible, massed within musket shot, and the droves of prisoners that usually signaled a great triumph were nowhere to be seen.

  The worst places were near the bottom of the ravines that snaked across the battlefield. Soldiers had been hurled back from cavalry charges or blasted by canister shot and ended up in the streambeds. Others had come crawling in search of water. One soldier, horribly mutilated, whose legs and one arm had been blown away, looked so “full of hope, even gaiety” that officers were moved to try to save him. As they carried him off, he complained of pain in the missing limbs. There is no record of his fate, but it would have been a miracle if he had survived his wounds, especially in the fetid “hospitals” that sprang up after the battle. Men were found living in the shelter of stacked corpses, and one legend of Borodino is that a single Russian soldier crawled into the still-warm carcass of a disemboweled horse and survived by eating its raw flesh.

  The emperor returned to his tent dejected and in physical pain. At ten o’clock, Murat, his gaily colored tunic torn and dirtied by powder and dirt, barged in to request the Imperial Guard once more, claiming that a disorganized and vulnerable Russian army was retreating across the Moskva and that a surprise attack would finish them as a fighting force. Napoleon sharply reprimanded him and never seriously considered the pursuit.

  The German strategist Clausewitz was surprised that Napoleon, having shredded the Russians’ front lines and pushed their reserves into a compact, vulnerable mass against the Moskva River, didn’t deliver the coup de grâce. “It is another question whether Bonaparte, who had time and fresh troops sufficient, should not have made greater exertions on the 7th, and have raised his success to the pitch of a complete victory,” he wrote. “He might have …achieved the utter destruction of the enemy.” The fact that Napoleon had in the past thrown in the reserves and attained dazzling victories made the decision at Borodino even more inscrutable to Clausewitz. He attributed it to the “consumption, rapid beyond all expectation” of the Grande Armée.

  Barclay, too, expected the final blow to fall at any moment: Napoleon had taken the major fortifications and the Russian army was exhausted, its reserves depleted and many of its key officers— from generals down to the regimental commanders—out of action, dead or badly wounded. Murat estimated that he needed only 10,000 infantry soldiers to break the Russian center.

  Napoleon knew that his officers, and historians a hundred years later, would focus on the question of the Imperial Guard. After dinner, he chatted with an officer and his secretary of state. Napoleon asked about medical facilities for the wounded, attended to some other minor matters, and then fell asleep after an exhausting day. Then, suddenly, twenty minutes later, as if prodded by a dream, he woke up and began defending his rationing of the Guard. “People will be surprised that I did not commit my reserves in order to obtain greater results, but I had to keep them for striking a decisive blow in the great battle which the enemy will fight in front of Moscow,” he told his startled aides. “The success of the day was assured, and I had to consider the success of the campaign as a whole.”

  As a chilly night settled on Borodino, and the wounded crawled on their elbows and knees toward the campfires or resigned themselves to a lonely death, the French and Russians began to count their dead. The French had lost 28,000 men, including 49 generals; the Russians, about 45,000, roughly half of their entire front line troops, including 29 generals. It was the deadliest engagement in the annals of warfare to that date. It would take a hundred years, until the Battle of the Somme, for the totals to be exceeded.

  Neither side at the Somme was hampered by a lack of men; each had millions to throw into a futile confrontation. But typhus had stolen precious thousands of troops from Napoleon, and with them, the battle, the war, and the future of his empire. If he’d had the tens of thousands of men who had fallen to Rickettsia, he would most likely have broken the Russian army as a fighting force and put immense pressure on Alexander to reach a settlement—or inspired a pro-peace party to unseat the tsar and negotiate in his stead. Even if he hadn’t gotten a treaty, he would have marched out of Russia at the head of a significant army, by a far more tenable route than he eventually took, and may well have fended off the swarming attacks on his regime that were soon to follow. The pathogen destroyed any chances for that.

  The emperor, fatally wounded, limped away from Borodino toward an utterly different future for himself and for Europe.

  C H A P T E R 11

  The Hospital

  THE WOUNDED ON BOTH SIDES WERE LEFT IN A DESPERATE situation. Dr. Larrey had ordered five of the six light ambulance divisions to remain at Smolensk to care for the thousands of ill and wounded, leaving only a rudimentary medical staff to care for the thousands of patients at Borodino. “There was virtually no sanitary service or activity,” one officer remembered.

  All the villages and houses close to the Moscow road were packed full with wounded in an utterly helpless state. The villages were destroyed by endless fires which ravaged the regions occupied or traversed by the French army. Those wounded who managed to save themselves from the flames crawled in their thousands along the high
road seeking some way to prolong their pitiful existence.

  The Russian soldiers were remarkably stoic. A French colonel who walked through the battlefield after the last guns had fallen silent was surprised to find the enemy troops, even those with terrible wounds, mostly quiet, avoiding the hooves of passing horses. They took the religious medals from their necks and held them in their hands, sometimes praying to them. The most popular was Saint Nicholas, the Miracle Worker of the Orthodox Church, protector of the poor and powerless. The Russian saying “If anything happens to God, we’ve always got Saint Nicholas” was particularly appropriate to the men’s situation as night closed in.

  If one was a soldier unlucky enough to find himself sick or wounded the morning of September 8, he was at the beginning of a searing, uncertain journey. Doctors were scarce, patients uncountable. The dawn was cold, wet, and violently windy, the sun obscured by heavy fog as soldiers picked their way through the battlefield, the heavy mist cloaking most of the carnage but revealing here and there a shattered ammunition wagon, a dead horse with an enormous, bloated stomach, abandoned pistols and muskets, sabers twisted or impaled in the dirt, and the corpses of soldiers missing heads or entrails, pieces of men and animals seemingly thrown violently against the ground, their blood smeared in the dirt. Each small tableau was uncovered and then obscured by the fog.

  The injured soldiers walked toward the field hospitals rumored to have been set up in houses and stone buildings nearby; the medical services were already a shambles and reliable information was hard to come by. The men fell in line with the parade of wounded and healthy trudging on the rutted lanes, their faces blackened by powder and mud, their tunics ripped by ball or streaked with mud and gore. If they had a friend willing to help them, they slung an arm around the other man’s neck. Solitary figures used shattered musket stocks as canes or rifles as crutches.