Napoleon didn’t realize he’d been beaten to the choke point by Lambert’s men. The Russians, believing their lines secure, then found shelter and relaxed their guard. Unknown to them, French troops were streaming toward the city, and when they arrived they found the Russians unprepared for an attack. The fighting was savage but one-sided: the Russians lost 9,000 men and in their negligence would have handed Napoleon a golden opportunity to slip over the Berezina unmolested had they not torched the single bridge as they fled to the western bank. The river, packed with mushy, unstable ice, was effectively unfordable. New bridges would have to be built under the guns of the Russians and the old one quickly repaired.
On November 23, the French command received the news while they were just under forty miles from the Berezina. Napoleon briefly considered a thrust northward to surprise Wittgenstein’s army and then a turn west. But the roads were unfamiliar, the terrain was marshy and rough, and his troops were in no condition for the maneuver. Instead he decided to race to Borisov and attempt to rebuild the destroyed span, throw some pontoon bridges across the river, and get away before Kutuzov could smash his forces against the icy water. “The names ‘Chichagov’ and ‘Berezina’ passed from mouth to mouth,” remembered Captain Johann von Borcke. The lead elements of the French forces arrived in Borisov on November 23, with Napoleon a day behind. The engineers tasked with building pontoons for the thousands of troops rushing up behind them gaped at the currents sweeping great tumbling chunks of ice downstream.
But French cavalry units had stumbled on a point in the river seven miles upstream that the army might be able to ford en masse. Their general lobbied Napoleon to change course and head for the crossing point. If the army could ford the Berezina there, Napoleon might be able to squeeze his armies between Chichagov in the south and Wittgenstein in the north instead of fighting his way through.
Bad information and the lack of coordination among the Russian commanders allowed the French this small window of opportunity. As Napoleon made his move northward, Chichagov was receiving contrary reports about the French intentions. His scouts reported sighting enemy units below Borisov, and bulletins from both Kutuzov and Wittgenstein warning him of a possible attack on his southern flank, combined with eyewitness reports from villagers of Frenchmen gathering logs and other bridge-building materials in the area, confirmed the impression that Napoleon intended to ford the river below the town. He stationed 1,500 of his men in Borisov, then led the rest of his troops out of the town and turned due south. The log gatherers were actually cuirassiers sent on a jaunt to trick Chichagov. The ruse worked.
What should have been a classic pincer movement became a trap clattering open, at least momentarily. But it would still be a perilous escape. Knowing this, Napoleon burned the reports from Paris that had reached him on the retreat and created a new personal security detail, the “sacred squadron,” made up of 500 commissioned soldiers, to protect him from the very real possibility of becoming a prisoner of state.
The French troops hurried north and managed to get 750 sappers to the crossing point on November 24 to begin the construction of two bridges, one for the cavalry, wagons, and artillery and the other for the infantry. With them they had six wagons packed with essential materials that were almost abandoned earlier in the retreat: hammers, crowbars, and iron sheets, along with four wagons packed with coal and portable forges to make the nails and cross braces. Wood came from the huts and stables in the village, which were torn apart to provide planks; steel rims from the abandoned wagons were turned into clamps and spikes. Carrying them over their heads, the pontoneers walked out into the dangerously cold river, about a hundred feet wide and six feet deep at this point, their boots slipping over the smooth rocks on the river bottom. Fifteen minutes was all that any soldier could stand in the currents, and many succumbed to hypothermia or stumbled and were carried away by the river. The Dutch soldiers worked knowing that on the elevations across the river, Cossack pickets were patrolling the far banks, and their bobbing heads were easily within Russian cannon range.
The Cossacks spotted the pontoneers at their work, setting trestles in water up to their chins, and sent riders to Chichagov with reports of the suspicious activity. If the messengers returned with Chichagov’s main force, using the heights of the opposite bank to sweep the river with canister and musket fire, the Grande Armée would have been lost. But Chichagov, notorious for refusing to admit his mistakes, took the activity for a feint and stayed where he was, prowling the banks south of Borisov for a sign of Napoleon.
The emperor remained calm as the work progressed. Marshal Ney remarked that if Napoleon got the army out of this fix, he would never doubt the emperor’s luck again. But Murat, more high-strung than his colleague, bent under the strain, bursting in on Napoleon as he worked in a house on the riverbank. “I consider it impossible to cross here,” he burst out. “You must save yourself while there is still time!” The emperor brushed the suggestion aside as beneath him. He was eager to reach Paris, but abandoning the army at a choke point while the enemy lurked all around would have been a black mark on his name.
At dawn on November 26, the French watched the opposite bank, half expecting to see Chichagov’s ranks serried back from the water’s edge. Surely the incessant pounding of the sappers’ hammers and the shouts of the engineers had brought the main body of the general’s forces to the crossing point. But the light revealed only abandoned campfires and a black line of troops curling into the tree line on the road south to Borisov. “It isn’t possible!” Napoleon cried in astonishment. But it was. Chichagov had abandoned the position. The emperor sent 100 chasseurs and Polish lancers to drive off the handful of Cossacks left behind and later secured the bank with 400 troops ferried over on rafts.
By noon, the first bridge was finished. The second, intended for the cavalry and wagons, would take four more hours. Napoleon sent cavalry and infantry units across to cover the retreat’s southern flank, in case Chichagov changed his mind and moved northward. The Guard followed soon after, followed by the “sacred squadron” with Napoleon in its midst, then Davout, Ney, Murat, and Eugène. The men hurried across the rickety bridge, whose planks rested just inches above the water, with the trestles that anchored the bridge sometimes sinking under the weight of the troops, dipping the planks into the frigid water. Horses had to cross at intervals, for fear that their cumulative weight would collapse the “matchbox” structure. From the woods, the thousands of stragglers watched for their chance to make it across, their numbers growing as the hours passed. The wheels of the carriages, artillery pieces, and officers’ wagons rattled along the uneven roadway of the second bridge, scraping off the pine branches and horse dung that had been used as a surfacing material.
Trestles sank or tumbled over on both bridges, planks cracked, and sappers rushed back into the water to improvise a fix and keep the soldiers moving, bashing the ice floes away with their axes. The anxious men fought over their place in line, shoving each other back from the first planks. As the day progressed, a north wind picked up and snow began to fall, at first gently, then in sheets. Napoleon, dressed in his campaign uniform with white breeches and a gray overcoat, his boots freshly shined, watched from the shore.
The bulk of the army had made it to the western bank by evening on November 27. Only a few units and Marshal Victor’s brigades, who were arriving at the Berezina after battling Wittgenstein, remained. The military police who had guarded the entrance to the bridge and controlled the flow over it began letting the stragglers onto the structure, but they weren’t rushing to cross, not yet. There was no sign of a Russian attack and it was safer to cross the bridges, which increasingly sagged and buckled as the crossing went on, during daylight.
On the morning of November 28, the window began to close. A contingent of 30,000 Russian soldiers, sent north by Chichagov, encountered French forces on the western bank of the Berezina. Shells splintered trees and musket fire clipped off pine branches as the Russians pr
essed to close off the escape route toward Vilna. Ney rushed some of his 13,000 men as reinforcements, but Chichagov, now fully convinced that Napoleon had duped him, was sending his entire army north and the volume of enemy fire directed toward the French seemed to increase by the half hour.
The Grande Armée, bone-thin and riddled with disease, turned to stop the attack. Cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” echoed through the forest as Polish, Swiss, Croat, Portuguese, and Dutch troops held off the numerically superior Russians. When the Swiss regiments ran out of ammunition, they leveled their bayonets and plunged through the knee-deep snow, scattering the Russian infantry as they went. One Swiss soldier, Louis de Bourmann, was advancing with his 2nd Regiment when an officer dismounted ahead of him to lead his men on foot. “A Russian musket ball went through his throat,” recalled one of his men. “He gave a cry, stifled by blood, and fell backwards into my arms…. Without losing consciousness, he said these simple words to his fellow-citizen: ‘Bourmann, I’ve died here as a Christian.’” The soldiers’ efforts stood out on one of the Grande Armée’s finest days. The Swiss charged the Russians seven times with only bayonets to defend themselves. The mysterious bond that held Napoleon’s army together despite every incentive to disintegrate held fast.
At the same time, Wittgenstein was descending on Victor’s men on the eastern bank, the long-awaited pincer finally closing on the French. Wittgenstein had already rolled up one of the brigades that had held Borisov until November 27, then blundered north into the Russian lines. Now he concentrated an artillery barrage against the 8,000 remaining troops and the mini-city of stragglers and human flotsam that huddled amidst the gray smoke of the campfires. Rumors had been circulating since three in the morning that an attack on the rear guard was imminent, and the entrance to the first bridge had become jammed with thousands of men, women, and children desperate to avoid being captured and being sent to camps in the frozen North.
The bombardment only increased the frenzy. The mass of people rippled and surged, throwing men into the icy river and packing the crowd so tightly that no one could move forward or back. One was simply carried along, feet never touching the bridge. Karl von Suckow of the Württemburg III Corps found himself “surrounded on all sides, caught in a veritable human vise…. Everyone was shouting, swearing, weeping, and trying to hit out at his neighbors.” The road leading to the bridge became littered with corpses of men and horses, their flesh pulverized under the hordes pressing toward the river. All the while Russian round shot struck the crowd, leaving craters of mud and severed limbs. The stragglers rushed from one bridge to the other, battling crowds headed in the other direction.
Observers on the western bank could hear a constant bellowing, “like the distant roarings of a tempest at sea, cries, yells, wagons exploding, an undefinable uproar which filled us with terror.” The Imperial Guard began directing cannonades at the Russian batteries, and finally Marshal Victor and his IX Corps mounted an attack that pushed the guns out of range. They managed to hold their ground as night fell and the Russian fire lessened. The lanes leading to the bridge were cluttered with piles of cadavers and dead horses; Victor and his men had to cut a route through them with their sabers while military police pushed back the despairing mobs of stragglers who had failed to cross during the day. By six o’clock that night all of his troops were across except for some mounted troops and 200 soldiers bringing up the rear.
Astonishingly, although the bridges were now open, some of the hangers-on elected to spend another night on the eastern bank, despite the entreaties of IX Corps’ Marshal Victor and General Jean-Baptiste Eblé, who even went around the campfires warning the people that the bridge was about to be blown up to slow the Russian pursuit. The hopeless men and women simply looked at Eblé, past comprehension or caring. The general tramped back across the bridge and made ready the cache of combustibles that would destroy the crossing at seven a.m.
The next morning, Eblé waited on the western bank, watching the scene unfold across the river. After sleeping under the falling snow, the remaining soldiers had again rushed to the bridges’ entrances and clogged them as the Russians closed in. Men slashed their way through the mob with bayonets, and the roar resumed. Finally, as the Russian gunners began to find the range of the rear guard waiting to blow the bridge, Eblé ordered the fuses lit, and planks shot into the air as the western reaches of the bridges exploded. One soldier, miles away from the Berezina, remembered hearing a collective scream from the doomed multitudes when they saw the explosives ignite.
The last of the stragglers were tipped into the water and froze to death or were killed by the Russian grapeshot that kicked up sprays of water. The blue-lipped bodies of women and children, some of them newborns, floated downstream, a sight remembered by many of the retreating soldiers, and clotted masses of bodies were grouped along each shore. The Cossacks arrived on the river-bank and began stripping the bodies of the dead and the living. Many of the sick and wounded who had somehow managed to survive the ghastly trip from Borodino or Moscow never made it over the bridge.
Crossing the Berezina cost the Grande Armée and its followers about 25,000 dead, while the Russians lost some 15,000. The Russians took entire regiments prisoner, with Wittgenstein’s units capturing 13,000 men, leaving Napoleon with only about 40,000 men (his ranks having been swelled by garrisons, stragglers who had rejoined the march, and Victor’s and Marshal Gouvion Saint-Cyr’s men). Even with the scenes on the bridge that haunted many survivors’ memories more than any other aspect of the retreat, it’s still remembered as something of a miracle, a late, brilliant flashing-out of Napoleon’s genius. His maneuvering was clever, but it was now his men that were the vessels of his reputation. Without being whipped to it, his soldiers fought for him with something more than the robotic stupor of half-dead men guarding the only route to survival; they performed with an esprit de corps that transcended nationality and the ridiculous piling-on of misfortune. But the fact that such a nightmare is counted as a victory of the campaign shows the perilous state that the Napoleonic enterprise had reached by November 29.
“THE ARMY IS LARGE, but in a state of terrible dissolution,” the emperor wrote on November 29, emphasizing that the troops needed to find plentiful supplies in Vilna in order to have a chance. “Food, food, food! Without that there is no atrocity that this undisciplined mob will not visit upon the city.” Napoleon was still considering some kind of garrison within Russian territory—Vilna was the last possibility—to be reinforced for a spring offensive. He was also beginning to think strategically about how to best present the disaster that had overcome his army to his allies and enemies in western Europe. He ordered all foreign diplomats out of Vilna, so they couldn’t report on the state of his troops, and instructed his commander there to proceed as if the retreat was orderly and the Grande Armée in robust health. But the emperor knew that word of his defeat must be spreading through the capitals of Europe.
On December 3, he issued the 29th Bulletin, the first in almost three weeks. For the first time, he revealed the “frightful calamity” that had occurred, and blamed it mostly on weather and the lack of food. There were hints that the dead had been at fault for dying so easily. “Those men, whom nature had not sufficiently steeled to be above all the chances of fate and fortune, appeared shook, lost their gaiety—their good humor, and dreamed but of misfortunes and catastrophes; those whom she has created superior to everything, preserved their gaiety, and their ordinary manners, and saw fresh glory in the different difficulties to be surmounted.” Napoleon famously ended the dispatch with the assurance that “His Majesty’s health has never been better.”
By December 5, Napoleon had decided to return to Paris. There he would raise a new army of 300,000 men and return to Russia to finish the war. The hardened survivors of 1812 would become the core of the offensive of 1813. He brought his marshals together and gave his final speech of the campaign, for the first time admitting his own culpability to his generals in apologi
zing (according to some present) for leaving Moscow too late. But he was still breathing the last fumes of his Russian dream, believing that the Polish population would rise up and attack the Cossacks besieging the garrison at Vilna, that the French army would triple in size once food and clothing was supplied to the survivors and reinforcements arrived, and that the Russians would find it hard to supply the forces around the city. He told the marshals that he felt he had stayed away from Paris as long as possible; if things turned for the worse, there could be another coup attempt or his fragile alliances with Austria and Prussia could collapse. Then as now, defeat in the military sphere meant a realignment of power elsewhere, especially in political relations with allies whose interests and ambitions ran counter to France’s. Disguised to avoid capture, the emperor departed at ten that night, with his former Russian ambassador, Caulaincourt, in a carriage guarded by mounted Neapolitan and Polish soldiers.
THE ARMY FAILED to realize Napoleon’s vision of a miraculously revived force. Some 20,000 more men died on the road to Vilna, and troops began burning entire houses on the route to stave off the cold, which reached its nadir at -36 degrees. The remainder of the troops, looking like survivors of some medieval famine, surged into the sophisticated city of shops and stylishly dressed merchants, which was quickly looted and trashed by the half-crazed throngs. The thirteen-year-old son of a French surgeon described it as “nothing but a vast hospital, with men arriving sick with typhus and dysentery.” The floors of one hospital were covered with the feces of the soldiers, “dying there in great numbers.”
The Illustrious Dead Page 24
