The Illustrious Dead

by Stephan Talty

  After a soldier died, the parasite had three and a half days (the longest a louse can survive without feeding) to find another host. The fact that fellow soldiers and Cossacks stripped dead men for their clothes, providing a fresh meal for the louse, meant that it was one of the creatures on the retreat best equipped to survive the intense cold.

  REMARKABLY, FEW OF THE soldiers cursed Napoleon for the situation they now found themselves in. Cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” were now rarely heard, but the luster earned at Austerlitz still held. “No one among us dreamed of reproaching him for our setbacks,” wrote Captain François Dumonceau of the 2nd Guard Lancers, “and in our eyes he still retained the prestige of a supreme arbiter.”

  One can only marvel at the generosity of the soldiers. It wasn’t so much the hazy political motives behind the Russian invasion or the dead left scattered all over the line of march that gives rise to a suspicion that Napoleon had broken faith with his troops. Members of the Grande Armée weren’t primarily concerned with whether wars were just or unjust, whether the empire was truly threatened by Alexander or not. They didn’t evaluate the worth of their sacrifice by the political goals of the campaign. It was in the fighting itself, in the personal camaraderie and the opportunity to perform heroically that they sought meaning and even joy, and in this arena Napoleon had always been exemplary: He maneuvered his soldiers brilliantly for victory, rewarded valor with immediate promotions, and fought close to his men, consumed by the intricacies of the battle, his body and spirit given over to the engagement. His men were content, even proud, to starve and suffer and march hundreds of miles over impossible terrain to die in legendary battles for a man like that. But in Russia, he had been intellectually lazy, negligent in the basic things that allowed the men to get to the battlefield for their chance at honor, and instead had allowed them to die ingloriously of cold, want, and Rickettsia, the afflictions of criminals. And yet most of the men never abandoned their idea of him as a great commander.

  On November 9, Napoleon entered Smolensk, now covered in layers of snow. He had expected his commissariat to have assembled enough supplies here to last for months, giving him the option of wintering in the city while receiving reinforcements from Paris and his allies. But he found that the enormous stores that had been stockpiled in the city had been eaten away by the stragglers left behind on the advance, by the 15,000 sick and wounded who had been installed in the city’s bursting hospitals, and by reinforcements on their way to Moscow. Cattle had died on the way, caravans had been intercepted, and the surrounding countryside hadn’t yielded nearly as much wheat and beef as Napoleon had estimated it would. In short, there were enough supplies at Smolensk for a brief break in the march, but nowhere near enough to sustain an army for an entire season.

  More bad news arrived at a dizzying pace: An infantry brigade filled with new reinforcements from France had been intercepted on the Medyn road and forced to surrender. Vitebsk, where another massive supply of food had been directed, had fallen to the Russians. When Berthier, Napoleon’s chief of staff, heard the news, he muttered over and over again, “Not possible, not possible.”

  The emperor’s reaction was considerably more pointed. He burst out in a tirade against his commanders, especially Davout and Marshal Claude Victor, who had been stationed with his IX Corps in Smolensk as an emergency reserve force: “See how they sacrifice the safety of my armies to themselves! All of them, do you see? Davout’s half-mad and of no further use. Victor comes to Smolensk to destroy to no purpose the stores prepared here…. No, no, there isn’t one of them one can entrust with anything…. If I dared to, I’d have them all shot.”

  The soldiers’ hopes of an end to their suffering had been dashed and disappointment quickly turned to rage. Troops turned bandit and forced commissary officials to hand over food at gunpoint. Units squabbled over sides of beef and bags of flour and stragglers banded together to rob fellow soldiers of supplies. General Rossetti noted in his diary: “This city where we thought to find the end of our sorrows cruelly deceived our most dear expectations, and became, on the contrary, the witness to all our disgrace and despondency.”

  Typhus and dysentery victims had willed themselves to the city, freezing on top of open wagons or hobbling through miles of mud for a chance at a bed and a doctor. But they were turned away. “The hospitals, the churches, and other buildings couldn’t hold the sick who showed up in the thousands,” wrote Rossetti. “These unfortunate ones, exposed to the rigor of a freezing night, remained on carts, in caissons, or died looking in vain for refuge.” Corpses piled up in the streets. Disease was spreading even more quickly now that troops were pouring into the city. Lamurzier reported that patients suffering from exhaustion were “stuck together with contagious patients,” and some were even lying among the dead bodies. Infected lice would have been pouring off those bodies in the thousands, looking for new homes. “A horrible, death-dealing stench …was poisoning the air,” wrote a French commissary. “The dead were killing the living.”

  If Mozhaisk was the generally acknowledged beginning of the intense suffering experienced on the march, Smolensk was the gateway to disorder and a rising panic. The Imperial Guard grabbed much of the remaining supplies for themselves, increasing the bitterness of the regular troops. As more and more regiments poured into the outskirts of Smolensk and set up camp around the burned-over city, temperatures plunged to -10 and lower. Men sold their last remaining pieces of loot from Moscow in a thronging bazaar that sprang up, bartering necklaces and bracelets studded with gems for bread or a small cut of meat. Those without anything to trade broke into food depots, which had to be guarded around the clock.

  Napoleon spent five days in Smolensk, a delay that was more a function of his continuing indecision than an effort to allow his men to find what sustenance and rest they could. He was still thinking of finding a secure place to winter and assemble his forces for a spring campaign. On November 14, the vanguard marched out toward Borisov. Marshal Ney had now taken up the rearguard position, just behind Davout and Prince Eugène. But the road was clogged with the flotsam of Napoleon’s mammoth army: he had brought so many troops to Russia that he now had to drive through the sickened remainder. The bedraggled mix of unit-assigned soldiers, stragglers, troops-turned-bandits, riffraff from Moscow, hangers-on, wives, girlfriends, streetwalkers, French refugees, and servants began the next leg of their journey without a beacon like the promise of Smolensk.

  One well-born French soldier from Breton dying of “fever,” most likely typhus, begged his mate to carry a note back to his family in France. It was an elegy reduced to the barest details.

  Farewell, good mother,

  My friend;

  Farewell, my dear,

  My good Sophie!

  Farewell Nantes, where I was born;

  Farewell, beautiful France, my fatherland;

  Farewell, dear mother:

  I am going to die—

  Farewell!

  The ranks grew thinner every morning. On November 12, the Hessian memoirist Captain Roeder took a count of his company (which had marched into Russia with 442 men and 26 officers) and recorded the results: “Missing: 1 drummer, 2 schutzen [infantrymen], 43 guardsmen. Absent sick: 31 guardsmen, 1 sergeant, 2 bandsmen. Present sick: 10 guardsmen, 2 sergeants. To march out: 8 sergeants, 1 drummer, 7 schutzen, 42 guardsmen.” The final numbers included men who had fallen in with his company from other units; of his original contingent of 468 men, only 34 troops were left.

  On November 15, as he led the vanguard to the next major town on the Smolensk road, Krasny, Napoleon and the Guard had to batter their way through Russian forces, who had cut the route ahead of him. The Guard were now like a bullet shot into water: the Russians would give way to the irresistible momentum of a superior fighting force, but once the corps was through, the surrounding forces would immediately close up behind them as if nothing had happened.

  Prince Eugène was caught in one such attack: the Russians cut off his
units from the main line of troops. Facing certain extermination, he followed the advice of a Polish colonel and, starting at ten o’clock at night, led his men off the road and through the nearby woods to circle around the enemy. Marching through deep snow in silence interrupted by the muffled exclamations of men tumbling into hidden ravines and the metallic snick of gunmetal scraping across belt buckles, the survivors expected at any moment to be ambushed. When a Russian scout challenged the half-visible unit that loomed toward him in the blackness, the Polish colonel barked, “Shut up, you fool. Can’t you see we’re Ouvarov’s corps and that we’re off on a secret expedition?” Miraculously, the ruse worked and the men made it to safety.

  Only Ney, who had taken on the suicidal mission of guarding the extreme French rear, remained separated from the rest of the army. Eager to reach the supplies and protection of Orsha, seventy-five miles away, Napoleon marched on, leaving Ney and the rear guard to fend for themselves. Ney was apoplectic when he realized that he had been abandoned, left with 6,000 men and six cannon to face 80,000 Russian infantry and a robust artillery. Ordered to surrender, Ney drove his men at the center of the Russian formation, with artillery shells tearing through the ranks. “At each step, death was becoming more inevitable,” wrote Colonel Fezensac, who was leading the 4th Line into battle. “Yet our march wasn’t slowed down for a single instant.” Entire divisions such as the 2nd disappeared as the Russians raked the charging men with canister and grapeshot.

  As night fell, Ney was in danger of being wiped out the following day. The road to France was blocked by a force he couldn’t hope to outfight. Napoleon, days ahead in Orsha on the Dnieper River, waited for news of his rear guard, sending messenger after messenger inquiring about the marshal and telling his advisers that he would give the 300 million francs in his treasury to have Ney with him again. For four days there was no word. The men of the Grande Armée, which had found enough food and shelter in the river town to stave off hunger, now brooded on the fate of III Corps. “The wreck of the army …,” Ségur wrote, “shared Napoleon’s grief.”

  Like Prince Eugène, Ney had decided to use the darkness in a last-gasp effort to escape almost certain annihilation. The marshal aimed for the Dnieper River, taking a substantial risk that his men would be able to find the right road in the darkness and that, once arrived at the riverbank, they’d find the water frozen and fordable. Marching out as dusk was falling and temperatures plunged, Ney luckily happened on a lame peasant who directed the French to a riverside town. Camped out in the frigid cold, they could hear the river ice creak and snap. In the morning, there was a rush for the other bank. Scrambling down the icy incline, the men searched in the diffuse morning light for routes where the ice seemed thick enough to support them. Horses and their riders plunged into the icy water and were never seen again. Others who had broken through the ice cried out to their comrades. “Their complaints tore at our hearts, already overwhelmed by our own perils,” remembered General Jean-David Freytag. Water splashed on the men immediately began to freeze, and when they reached the opposite bank, the soldiers found it was twelve feet high and coated with ice. Many tried to make the climb but, exhausted, slipped down to the foot of the slope and waited for death.

  The next day and night the French troops who survived the crossing picked their way across the Russian countryside and endured terrifying raids by Cossacks and barrages of grapeshot from pursuing Russian units. The ranks were winnowed down and the Russians who swept past their flanks called out for them to surrender. The column was twice surrounded by Russians, but Ney marched them out through gaps in the line before the enemy had a chance to fall on them. Trapped at one point with their backs to a thickly wooded forest, low on cartridges, the French saw a messenger advancing under a white flag. The envoy brought a message, saying the French were surrounded by 100,000 men and faced only death. To the request to lay down their arms, Ney replied, “Go and tell your general a Marshal of France never surrenders.” The men had not eaten for days, their boots were waterlogged, and they were racked by illness, but Ney got them through the Russian lines by sheer force of will.

  Finally, on November 20, they reached Orsha, completing one of the most intrepid marches in military history, a feat achievable only through Ney’s indefatigable leadership. Prince Eugène rushed to Ney and threw his arms around the marshal, while his soldiers broke ranks and rushed to embrace the spectral men. “In this moment we forgot past ills, men’s egoism, the cruelty of fate and future perils,” wrote Césare de Laugier, the adjutant major in IV Corps. Napoleon’s regiments were thrilled with the news, “drunk with delight,” as the diplomat Caulaincourt wrote, and the emperor himself was visibly moved by Ney’s feat.

  But the relief was only momentary. Even Napoleon now saw clearly the suffering of his men. “The misery of my poor soldiers breaks my heart!” he said at Orsha. “But where can we rest, without ammunition, food, or artillery? I am not strong enough to stay here.”

  SERGEANT BOURGOGNE OF Napoleon’s elite Guards was one of those poor soldiers who had fallen ill. On arriving at the Berezina, approximately sixty miles west of Orsha, he collapsed on the river-bank and found that he was feverish. His body shook and his mind began to travel far from the grim scene around him. “I was delirious for a long time,” he remembered. “I fancied I was at my father’s house, eating potatoes, bread and butter à la flamande, and drinking beer.” Near to the campfire was another soldier who had put on his full dress uniform as if he were going on parade. Bourgogne asked him what he was doing, but the man laughed and said nothing. “That laugh was the laugh of death, as he succumbed during the night.”

  Bourgogne was now traveling with two regiments, down from a force fifteen times that size only two weeks before. To their ailments was now added snow blindness and eye problems caused by men sitting too close to smoky fires for hours on end. The sightless men had companions guiding them along the road, or if they had no friends to be their eyes, they were left to blunder off into the drifts.

  Dr. Larrey, now stumbling along on foot with the rest of the troops, still had no real idea of what was killing them. His latest theory was ice water: “The snow and icy water that the soldiers swallowed, hoping thereby to allay their hunger, or to quench their thirst,” he wrote, “produced by irritation of the mucous membrane of the stomach, largely contributed to the death of these individuals, since the little heat left in the viscera was absorbed.” It was certainly possible to lower one’s core temperature by gulping large amounts of frigid water, but that can hardly account for the mass dying-off that had occurred in the ranks. The doctor did offer up some contrarian sociophysiological thoughts on who lived and who died: “I noticed that people with dark hair and an emotional, labile temperament, mostly from the countries of southern Europe, stood up better to the severe cold than did fair-haired men of phlegmatic temperament and coming for the most part from northern countries,” he wrote. “The circulation of the first group is no doubt more active; their vital forces have more energy; it is likely, too, that, even in conditions of extreme cold, their blood retains much better the principles of animal warmth identified with their pigmentation.” The Mediterranean temperament also allowed the men to remain more cheerful than their dark-browed brothers from the north, according to the doctor’s observations. But if there were significant differences between the survival rates of different racial groups, it’s more likely it had to do with the preparation and resourcefulness of their officers, the thickness of their coats, and the fitness of the soldiers.

  Heinrich von Brandt and his Polish regiment, which would be reduced from 2,000 to just 60 after the retreat, reached the city of Borisov on the banks of the Berezina River on November 15, ahead of Napoleon and the Imperial Guard. They were marooned there for five days as they waited for the word to advance. Rumors flew that the Russians controlled the other bank of the river. The town was filled with refugees, terrified civilians, troops that had become separated from their units or whose units h
ad ceased to exist, and “a clutter of scoundrels who filled the cafés and bars and did nothing but drink and play at cards.” There was no rule of law, no command structure, and the town had degenerated into the kind of frontier anarchy in which von Brandt and his companions occasionally had to draw their weapons in order to survive. Von Brandt and his troops fled the town before the French expatriate general Count Charles de Lambert and the Russians took it on November 20, and they found themselves in Bobr, which was filled with deserters and stragglers, “marauders of the most dangerous kind.” The Grande Armée, he concluded, “to all intents and purposes, no longer existed.”

  As he approached Borisov, unaware that it had been taken by the Russians, Napoleon turned his thoughts toward the Berezina. It was the last river to ford, and one of the last choke points, before reaching Vilna and then, seventy-five miles on, the Niemen, where all his troubles had begun. When he studied the maps, a familiar name jarred his memory: Poltava, where the Swedish army had been massacred in 1709. “Ah yes!” he cried. “Poltava! …Like Charles XII!” It was black humor, but he had read Voltaire’s account of the Swede’s disaster intently and knew how close he was to sharing that fate.

  The various Russian armies—the headstrong Admiral Pavel Chichagov in the southwest, Wittgenstein in the north, and remains of the First and Second armies along with the Cossacks tailing Napoleon—were all poised to converge at Borisov. The depots at Minsk had already fallen to Chichagov’s 60,000 men. All signs pointed toward a Russian pincer movement at the river, where Kutuzov would spring his long-delayed trap and annihilate the French army before it could escape to Lithuania and the Niemen.

  “Kutuzov is leaving me alone now in order to head me off and attack me,” Napoleon said. “We must hurry.” He knew there was only a single bridge at Borisov, guarded by a single Polish division. If the Grande Armée didn’t reach it in time, they could find their way blocked and their escape thwarted. In one of the statements that give the measure of Napoleon’s sangfroid, he remarked, “This is beginning to be very serious.” It had, of course, been serious for many weeks, but Kutuzov’s incompetence as a strategist and as a fighter gave the emperor some hope of outmaneuvering the Russians. Still, the numbers and the terrain were wholly in favor of the enemy.