The residents who had stayed in Moscow and vowed to fight were horrified by the order to abandon the city. Rostopchin had pledged that Muscovites would form citizens’ brigades armed with pitchforks and old muskets at the back of the Russian army, but now burghers and peasants alike raced for the city gates.
The city’s population during peacetime fluctuated between 250,000 and 350,000 people, the latter number accounting for the aristocrats and their households returning to the city after their summers in the countryside. Now entire blocks emptied within hours. Soldiers weeping from shame and anger marched through the streets, abandoning the half-dug entrenchments they had been constructing to meet the French, while families rushed from sector to sector looking for loved ones who had been off on an errand when the news arrived. Criminals, easily recognizable by their half-shaven heads, were let out of their prison cells and joined the crowds, and the walking wounded streamed out of the hospitals, leaving their bedridden comrades behind, while inmates of the local insane asylums wandered about or gibbered on street corners. Looters broke the locks on basements and cellars and got drunk on the wine and vodka inside, even going as far as licking the paving stones dry of the liquor that had spilled from the vats. All joined in a roiling scrum, vengeful, despairing, and as eager for scapegoats as they were to reach safety.
Louise Fusil, a French actress and performer, was holed up with a collection of artists in a palace belonging to a prince on the eastern edge of the city. “We kept on climbing to the top of the house,” she remembered, “where we could get a long view, and one evening we spotted bivouac fires. Our servants came into our rooms in great alarm to announce that the police had been knocking at every door to urge the occupants to leave, as the city was going to be set on fire, and the fire-pumps had been taken away.”
It was dangerous to be French, rich, or insufficiently patriotic in the city now. The poor threw stones at gaudy carriages as they flew by, and nativist mobs roamed the boulevards looking for traitors. One political agitator released from prison was quickly surrounded by an enraged crowd and literally torn limb from limb.
The memoirist and general Philippe Ségur records one scene from the lower depths of Moscow. A French citizen who called Moscow home had gone into hiding as Napoleon approached. Early in September, she’d come out of her sanctuary and wandered through the empty streets, puzzled as to where everyone had gone. Then a “far-off mournful wailing fell on her terrified ears.” Frozen with fear, she watched as a great wave of poor men and women approached, dragging whatever of their ragged possessions they could carry. They held up icons to bless their escape and led their children away, following the priests who headed the procession. The rich had contacts and mansions in other towns, salable treasures. But it was these poor people on whom the burden of Napoleon’s invasion fell. The woman watched as this biblical river of misery passed her by, pausing only to look back once “and seeming to bid farewell to their holy city.”
Hidden in various quarters of the metropolis, the firebugs waited for word to begin their work. Napoleon would be allowed to occupy the city, but Rostopchin hoped the city walls would become a trap in which to consume him.
TO GIVE THE RUSSIAN army and the remaining citizens time to traverse the approximately six-mile breadth of the city, General Mikhail Miloradovich, who was in charge of the rear guard, sent a messenger to Murat under a white flag. He asked for twenty-four hours to arrange his troops for surrender and threatened stiff resistance if he didn’t get it. Murat agreed; he could use the time to rest his men and bring up any available matériel, as his men’s pouches contained only enough musket cartridges for one day’s fighting. The temporary truce granted, Murat waited for the peaceable surrender to be finished. No one among Napoleon’s marshals could yet imagine the lengths that the enemy were willing to go to defend the homeland.
Two of Kutuzov’s battalions decided to play their way out of the city, marching past the Kremlin with their band in full voice. General Miloradovich, an unflappable soldier known for his dry wit under the direst conditions, rode up and snapped at their commander, “What blackguard gave you orders that the band should play?” The lieutenant general replied that it was tradition since the time of Peter the Great that a garrison surrendering a fortress marched out with accompaniment. “But where in the regulations of Peter the Great,” Miloradovich replied acidly, “does it say anything about the surrender of Moscow?”
Nearly four hundred miles away, Alexander got the news from Moscow in small, agonizing doses. With Kutuzov having mysteriously cut off communication, Rostopchin dashed off a note to the tsar on September 13 announcing the plans for the abandonment of the capital. “Moscow has been taken,” it read. “There are some things beyond comprehension.”
The ordinary Russian soldier left his capital full of bitterness and regret. Cries of “Where are we being led?” and “Where has he brought us?” murmured in the ranks. The savior’s glow around Kutuzov had dissipated in the minds of his men, and soldiers pestered by fleeing civilians about the military state of affairs could only shrug. They knew nothing except that they were retreating and that mother Russia had again been betrayed by a coterie of rich generals. Rostopchin told his son, age sixteen, who had seen action at Borodino, “Salute Moscow for the last time. Within an hour it will be in flames.”
NAPOLEON REMAINED AT MOZHAISK, still unable to speak and racked by fever. (Although it’s possible that the emperor had caught a light case of typhus, there were many types of fever present in the Grande Armée, and he developed no other symptoms of the disease.) The emperor kept seven secretaries busy with his orders and dispatches. His main concern at this point was manpower. He instructed his chief of staff to write urgently to the duke of Belluno, who was stationed in Poland with reinforcements guarding against any Russian attack on the territory. “The enemy, struck to the heart, no longer busy themselves with extremities…. Tell the Duke to send everything, battalions, squadrons, artillery, and detached men to Smolensk, whence they can come to Moscow.” Regiments were called up from all over Europe: 140,000 from France, 30,000 from Italy, and more from Poland, Bavaria, Lithuania, and Prussia. “Not only do I want to have reinforcements sent from all quarters,” Napoleon wrote, “I also want those reinforcements to be exaggerated, I want the various sovereigns sending me reinforcements to publish the fact in the papers, doubling the numbers they are sending.” He ordered the French, German, and Polish troops of IX Corps from Germany to Moscow and sent dispatches to many of the detachments strung out behind him to make their way to the front line. Knowing that the Russians had almost inexhaustible resources of men to draw from, the emperor was desperate to get as many bodies as possible.
On September 12, he set out to catch up with the leading elements of his army. He rode slowly toward the city, still anticipating a fierce battle. Napoleon could see evidence of abandoned earthworks, and as he approached his advance units he expected to find the Russian army around each turn. Scouts and guards combed through the forest ahead of him, looking for the first line of jaegers that would signal the Russian position. But they passed through without encountering a single enemy soldier.
Finally, on September 14, his entourage came to Poklonnaya Hill, the same outcropping where Kutuzov had proposed to site a last defense of the city. Riding up, Napoleon and his men crested the top and pulled up to find Moscow spread out before them like a gleaming carpet embroidered with gold and silver. It wasn’t the slate-and brick-colored cities of Germany or even the darkly romantic skyline of Paris. It was a riot of colors and shapes, a city of turrets and steeples and cupolas in shades of blood red, sky blue, and the dominant jade green. The men had marched for months through raw provinces and filthy little villages, but here was a great city, delighting the men with its richness and alien forms. They ran forward and broke out in spontaneous applause, calling out “Moscow! Moscow!”
“It was two o’clock,” wrote General Ségur, the soldier-memoirist. “And the sun made the magnifi
cent city twinkle and shine with a thousand colors…. At the sight of this gilded city, this brilliant capital uniting Europe and Asia, this majestic meeting place of the opulent, the customs, and the arts of the two fairest divisions of the earth, we stood still in proud contemplation.” Napoleon rode up and the men swarmed around him. The capture of this place, many felt, made their sacrifice worthwhile. For a moment, before the pillaging began, the soldiers of the Grande Armée felt that the bestial campaign had been transformed by this exquisite prize.
Napoleon was expecting a procession of the city’s notables to greet him with the keys to the city and the opening gambits of a peace negotiation. He scanned the city’s gates for signs of them, and scoffed at reports from scouts who said that the mansions and streets were empty. They couldn’t find a single Russian official to bring to the emperor. The troops had seen graffiti scribbled on the walls that made them wonder: “Good-bye,” and “Farewell, delightful haunts that I leave with so much sadness!” The emperor studied a large map laid out on the grass as he questioned each returning scout or prisoner and interrogated them about what they had witnessed and in which sector: the bazaar district, Chinatown (where the long caravans from the Orient deposited their exotic wares for sale), the white town, the German suburb, and the “earth town” (named for the earthworks built there in the late 1500s). Only the French expatriates who had hidden from the mobs came out to greet them, eager to tell stories of terror and the city’s rapid abandonment.
The men looking down on the capital grew increasingly nervous. “They will wait a long time,” said one soldier. “All those Russians will emigrate to Siberia rather than surrender.” Napoleon studied the streets through a telescope balanced on one of his aide’s shoulders. “The barbarians!” he shouted. “They are leaving all of this to us! It isn’t possible!” Finally, the emperor ordered Count Daru, the head of his commissariat, to search the city and bring him the boyars.
Meanwhile, Murat’s cavalry penetrated farther into the city and found only silence. The men, spooked by the empty districts, rode quietly ahead, hearing only hoofbeats echoing back to them off the stone buildings. When they did find Russians, they were looters breaking into the Moscow arsenal or soldiers hurrying for the eastern gates. There was scattered resistance at the Kremlin walls, accompanied by drunken curses from the men and women who baited the French, but it was obviously unorganized and quickly put down with a cannonade.
Every scout returned with the same message: the Russian army had withdrawn under the cover of the truce, along with the city’s notables and most of the citizenry, leaving only the lowest of the low. Napoleon was intensely frustrated. “It would be difficult to describe the impression made on the Emperor by this news,” wrote the diplomat Caulaincourt. “Never have I seen him so deeply impressed…. His face, normally so impassive, showed instantly and unmistakably the mark of his bitter disappointment.”
Napoleon appointed Édouard Mortier, commander of the Young Guards, governor of Moscow and told him if the army looted the capital, he would pay with his life. The emperor, now thoroughly depressed, settled for the night in a local inn outside the city’s gold-colored walls. Squads of Young Guards were sent in to secure the city, and they were accosted by sad remnants of Rostopchin’s citizen army: one old man with a flowing beard appeared on the Dorogomilov Bridge as the Guard marched over it, thrusting his pitchfork at a drum major, who avoided the prongs and sent the elderly defender tumbling into the river with a well-timed kick. There was no enemy worthy of the name to stop the French advance.
THE LOOTING BEGAN almost immediately, out of necessity. Some of the men hadn’t eaten in days. Sergeant Adrien Bourgogne of the Imperial Guard, along with his squad mates, battered down the doors of the local mansions and helped themselves to whatever had been left behind: flour, vodka, jarred fruit, which they quickly consumed or bartered away. Once their hunger had been satisfied, the proper sack began, the kind of bacchanal that the men had dreamt of since first signing up. Silks, leather boots (a real find for many of the men who had been shoeless for weeks), paintings of boyars and their ancestors all started to come out of the homes and into the streets. Sergeant Bourgogne found “a small machine for gauging the force of powder,” an obscure luxury that he pocketed anyway. Dressing as “Russian boyars, Chinamen, or French marquis,” the men draped women’s clothes across their chests to the laughter of their friends, but these capes and heavy cassocks made for the Russian winter would later become fiercely guarded valuables once the bitterly cold weather arrived. “Even the gallery slaves concealed their rags under the most splendid court dresses,” remembered Eugène Labaume of IV Corps. Prostitutes, criminals, and serfs joined in the scramble for loot.
The strict hierarchy of Moscow housing—where mansions inhabited by counts and princes were surrounded by modest houses and hovels occupied by their servants—was re-created as the Grande Armée’s officers took possession of the finer accommodations, the mansions with silk tapestries still on the wall, and the ordinary soldiers pitched their rucksacks in the homely coach houses and stables. There was, at last, plenty of food, both in the larders of the abandoned homes and in the fields surrounding the city. One soldier remembered finding beets “as round and large as bowling balls,” but there were ample supplies of pork, mutton, and other meats as well. The Grande Armée hadn’t been so well fed since leaving Germany.
As the French advance guard secured the main squares, the firebugs were prowling the outer districts. Led by the police superintendent, Voronenko, they began setting fire to shops and houses. The first sighting of flames came around noon, in the commercial district of Kitai-Gorod, and was confined to a few paint and upholstery stores. Hours later, more pillars of dark smoke appeared in the same district, and then in the early evening, near the governor’s palace. Troops were sent to extinguish the flames.
Napoleon had been hearing stories of a coming conflagration from expatriates who had emerged from cellars and attics, but he had refused to believe them. Now as the night progressed, “sinister reports” flowed in: fires were sprouting at points around the city, and mobs of thugs had appeared on the streets, burning everything in their path. Near midnight, a tremendous boom echoed through the darkness as a munitions dump exploded in the east, near the Yaouza River. One Swiss officer was strolling through the dark city when a French officer charged at him. “Run for it!” the man shouted. “There’s a band of brigands behind me.” The Swiss soldier peeked around the next corner to find a terrifying sight: a gang of arsonists, 50 to 60 strong, flaming torches in their hands.
The emperor gave the order to shoot firebugs on sight. Sergeant Bourgogne and his unit nabbed one in the act, fired a bullet into his side, and left him to die. Hours later, some of his fellow troops reported that they had returned to the scene of the “dreadful execution” and found a young woman sitting beside the body, cradling the young man’s head in her lap, gently stroking his face and kissing him. She told the French soldiers she planned to stay with the body for three days, supposedly fulfilling a Russian tradition.
Napoleon entered the city on September 15 and set up headquarters at the Kremlin. Buoyed by the sight of the Romanov throne and the cross of Ivan the Great, he sat down to write Alexander a peace proposal. But soon news of the fire overwhelmed everything. Dr. Larrey watched the flames sweep toward the Kremlin. “It [would be] difficult, under any circumstances whatever, to present to the eye a more horrific spectacle than that, which it was so melancholy to behold…. The flames, driven in all directions, and propelled by the violence of the winds, were accompanied, in their ascent and rapid progress, by an awful hissing sound and dreadful detonations, resulting from the combustion of powder, salt-petre, oil, resin, and brandy, with which the great part of the houses and shops were filled.” Wooden houses caught fire, and the heat was so intense that beams of fir shot from the structures and set alight buildings several streets away.
The emperor rose from his desk and watched the city burn. To
him, the blaze was a symbol of the utter foreignness of the Russian mind. “It was the most grand, the most sublime, and the most terrific sight the world ever beheld!” he would later write. Torching one’s own capital was something no Frenchman, not even Napoleon, could imagine; it was outside their psychological reach. The fact that the Russians had dared to do it elicited a certain horrified respect.
The sparks from the fire fell on the exteriors and roofs of nearby houses and began to smolder while the buildings’ contents were being systematically looted from inside. The pillaging had become frenzied. Thousands of men prowled the streets brandishing Turkish scimitars inside their leather belts or sporting enormous fur hats or bits of Tartar costume. Great heaps of swag made their appearance: a jewel-encrusted spittoon from a prince’s palace, silver candlesticks and icons from the local churches, silk Persian shawls threaded with gold, bracelets thick with emeralds and diamonds, enormous rugs and even embroidered armchairs from the finest salons found their way to the impromptu markets that had sprung up and bartering was soon under way.
On the morning of September 16, the fires began to approach the Kremlin walls. Sparks and burning cinders floated in from the burning districts and landed on the roof of the apartments where Napoleon was staying. The heat pressed against the building until the windowpanes were hot to the touch. Napoleon was uncharacteristically agitated by the inferno, pacing frantically, throwing himself down in an armchair and then springing up to look at the flames again. The fire was no longer “the most sublime …sight” in the world but a threat to his future. When a Moscow police officer who had set the nearby arsenal tower ablaze was interrogated, Napoleon learned that the Kremlin had been targeted for destruction, another indication of Russian resolve. “He was extremely restless,” remembered the Italian general Rossetti, “his gestures short and vehement revealed a cruel distress. He ran at every moment to the windows to observe the progress of the fire. Finally, abrupt and brief exclamations escaped from his overburdened heart: ‘What a frightful sight! They did it to themselves. So many palaces! They are Scythians …’” Napoleon’s staff and his marshals begged him to leave, but he was fixed to the spot.
The Illustrious Dead Page 18
