Opinion in the Russian high command was split between the aristocratic generals who supported Bagration’s counter-offensive strategy and the ‘foreigners’ (often Baltic Germans) who supported Barclay de Tolly’s strategy of withdrawal, essentially that of Bennigsen in 1807 except across a far wider area. By the time Napoleon crossed the Niemen the latter had won, partly because the sheer size of the Grande Armée made a counter-offensive unthinkable. Having a smaller army would therefore paradoxically have helped Napoleon by tempting the Russians into the early battle he logistically needed to fight, and would also have allowed him (because of its lesser supply needs) more time to fight it. Had Alexander appointed the Russian-born Bagration as war minister and commander of the First Army of the West instead of Barclay – an appointment that would have been popular in the Russian officer corps – Napoleon might have destroyed the Russian army at, or even before, Vilnius. Instead he picked the less flamboyant, more incisive Barclay and stuck by Barclay’s plan to lure the Grande Armée deep into Russian territory, stretching its supply lines away from the huge military depots in Mainz, Danzig, Königsberg and elsewhere.
Napoleon entered Vilnius, the capital of Polish Lithuania, on June 28 and turned it into a massive supply centre, the Russians having removed or burned all theirs before they left. He told Marie Louise that he had chosen for his headquarters ‘a rather fine mansion where the Emperor Alexander was living a few days ago, very far from thinking at the time that I was so soon to enter here’.4 Half an hour before Napoleon made his entry into the city, he ordered a Polish artillery officer on his staff, Count Roman Soltyk, to fetch Jan Sniadecki, the renowned astronomer, mathematician and physicist, and rector of Vilnius University, to talk to him there. When Sniadecki insisted on putting on silk stockings before leaving his house, Soltyk expostulated: ‘Rector, it doesn’t matter. The Emperor attaches no importance to exterior things which only impress the common people . . . Let’s be off.’5
‘Our entry into the city was triumphal,’ wrote another Polish officer. ‘The streets . . . were full of people, all the windows were garnished with ladies who displayed the wildest enthusiasm.’6 Napoleon showed characteristic sensitivity to public opinion by having himself preceded and followed by Polish units in the procession. He set up a provisional government for the Lithuanian Poles there, and Lithuania was ceremonially reunited with Poland in a ceremony at Vilnius cathedral. At Grodno French troops were met by processions with icons, candles and choirs blessing them for the ‘liberation’ from Russian rule.* A Te Deum was sung in Minsk, where General Grouchy handed around the collection plate, but once the rural population heard that the French troops were requisitioning food, as they always did on campaign, they herded their livestock into the forests. ‘The Frenchman came to remove our fetters,’ said the Polish peasants in western Russia that summer, ‘but he took our boots too.’7
‘I love your nation,’ Napoleon told the representatives of the Polish nation at Vilnius. ‘For the last sixteen years I have seen your soldiers at my side in the battles in Italy and Spain.’ He offered Poland ‘my esteem and protection’. With Schwarzenberg protecting his southern flank, however, he needed to add: ‘I’ve guaranteed to Austria the integrity of her states, and I cannot authorize anything that will tend to trouble her in the peaceful possession of what remains to her of her Polish provinces.’8 He was having to perform a delicate balancing act.
He stayed ten days in Vilnius to allow much of the army to rest, regroup and allow that part of the right wing of the army that was under the untried and untested Jérôme – comprising two of Davout’s divisions, Schwarzenberg’s Austrians, Poniatowski’s Poles and Reynier’s Saxons, 80,000 men in all – to advance towards the lower Berezina river and try to pincer Bagration’s army. The vanguards moved on and on June 29 the broiling heat broke in a great hailstorm and deluge of rain, after which Sergeant Jean-Roch Coignet of the Imperial Guard noted that ‘in the cavalry camp nearby, the ground was covered with horses which had died of cold’, including three of his own.9 The rain also made the ground boggy and roads muddy, causing supply problems and slowing down the vanguards in pursuit of the Russians. In some marshes and swamps men waded up to their chins.10
Berthier wrote to Jérôme from Vilnius on June 26, the 29th and the 30th encouraging him to keep in close proximity to Bagration and to capture Minsk.11 ‘If Jérôme pushes strongly ahead,’ Napoleon told Fain, ‘Bagration is deeply compromised.’12 With Jérôme moving in from the west and Davout from the north, Bagration ought to have been crushed between them at Bobruisk, but Jérôme’s bad generalship, as well as Bagration’s skill at withdrawal, meant that the Russian Second Army escaped. By July 13 it was clear that Jérôme had failed. ‘If it had been more rapid and better concerted between the Corps of the army,’ General Dumas, the intendant-general, later opined, ‘the object would have been obtained and the success of the campaign decided at the very opening.’13 When Napoleon learned of the failure he appointed Davout to command Jérôme’s army. His outraged youngest brother resigned his command and flounced back to Westphalia only three weeks into the campaign.14
‘The weather is very rainy,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise from Vilnius on July 1, ‘the storms in this country are terrible.’15 Although we don’t have her letters to him, the Empress wrote one every other day that month. ‘God grant I may soon meet the Emperor,’ she told her father at this time, ‘for this separation weighs much too heavily upon me.’16 As well as mentioning his state of health – almost always positively – Napoleon asked after his son in every letter he wrote, begging for news about ‘whether he is beginning to talk, whether he is walking’ and so on.
• • •
On July 1, Napoleon received Alexander’s aide-de-camp, General Alexander Balashov, who told him somewhat belatedly that Napoleon could still withdraw from Russia and avoid war. He wrote Alexander a very long letter reminding the Tsar of his anti-British remarks at Tilsit, and pointing out that at Erfurt he had accommodated Alexander’s needs with regard to Moldavia, Wallachia and the Danube. Since 1810, he said, the Tsar had ‘rearmed on a large scale, declined the path of negotiations’ and demanded modifications to the European settlement. He recalled ‘the personal esteem which you have sometimes shown to me’ but said that the ultimatum of April 8 to withdraw from Germany had been designed ‘clearly to place me between war and dishonour’.17 Even though ‘for eighteen months you have refused to explain anything’, Napoleon wrote, ‘My ear will always be open to peace negotiations . . . you will always find in me the same feelings and true friendship.’ He blamed the Tsar’s bad advisors and Kurakin’s arrogance for the war, using a phrase he had employed in writing to the Pope, the Emperor of Austria and others in the past: ‘I pity the wickedness of those who gave Your Majesty such bad advice.’ Napoleon then argued that if he had not had to fight Austria in 1809, ‘the Spanish business would have been ended in 1811, and probably peace would have been brokered with England at that time.’ In conclusion, Napoleon offered:
a truce on the most liberal grounds, such as not considering men in hospital as prisoners – so that neither side has to hurry evacuations, which involves heavy losses – such as the return every two weeks of prisoners made by either side, using a rank-for-rank exchange system, and all the other stipulations that the custom of war between civilized nations has allowed: Your Majesty will find me ready for anything.18
He ended by repeating that, notwithstanding the war between them, ‘the private feelings that I bear for you are not in the least affected by these events . . . [I remain] full of affection and esteem for your fine and great qualities and desirous of proving it to you.’*
Alexander took up none of Napoleon’s proposals. The Russians were retreating steadily before the Grande Armée – the first clash to cost either side more than a thousand casualties didn’t come for four weeks – but that didn’t mean they were offering no resistance. Recognizing that this war was going t
o be as much about logistics as battles, they systematically destroyed anything that couldn’t be removed. Crops, windmills, bridges, livestock, depots, fodder, shelter, grain – everything that could be of any use whatever to the oncoming French was either taken away or burned, for many miles on both sides of the road. Napoleon had done the same thing on his retreat from Acre, and had admired Wellington’s skilful execution of a similar scorched-earth policy while withdrawing to the Lines of Torres Vedras, for, as Chaptal recorded: ‘It was on traits like these that he judged the skill of generals.’19
Because eastern Poland and Byelorussia were grindingly poor and sparsely populated regions where malnutrition was common even in peacetime – unlike the lush and fertile grounds of northern Italy and Austria – there would always have been a serious supply problem when its backward agrarian economy was suddenly called upon to feed hundreds of thousands of extra mouths. Yet with entire villages set ablaze by the retreating Russians, the situation quickly became dire. Worse, there were squadrons of light Russian cavalry operating deep behind French lines, including a famously daring one led by Alexander Chernyshev, which threatened Napoleon’s lengthening lines of communication.20
No sooner was the violently wet weather of late June over than the baking sun returned; fresh water was in short supply and recruits fainted from exhaustion. The heat threw up a choking dust so thick that drummers had to be stationed at the head of battalions so that the men marching behind wouldn’t get lost. By July 5, because of bottlenecks of wagons on the pontoon bridges across rivers, the Grande Armée was facing severe food shortages. ‘Difficulties over food remain,’ noted the Comte de Lobau’s aide-de-camp Boniface de Castellane, ‘soldiers are without food and horses without oats.’21 When Mortier told Napoleon that several members of the Young Guard had actually died of hunger, the Emperor said: ‘It’s impossible! Where are their twenty days’ rations? Soldiers well commanded never die of hunger!’22 Their commander was brought, and stated, ‘either from weakness or uncertainty’, that in fact the men had died from intoxication, upon which Napoleon concluded that ‘One great victory would make amends for all!’23
An average of 1,000 horses were to die for every day of the 175 days that the Grande Armée spent in Russia. Ségur recalled that the more than 10,000 horses that died from dehydration and heat exhaustion, when unripe rye had been their only fodder, ‘sent forth a stench impossible to breathe’.24 Caulaincourt, Napoleon’s master of horse, was devastated. ‘The rapidity of the forced marches, the shortage of harness and spare parts, the dearth of provisions, the want of care, all helped to kill the horses,’ he recorded.
The men, lacking everything to supply their own needs, were little inclined to pay heed to their horses, and watched them perish without regret, for their death meant the breakdown of the service on which the men were employed, and thus the end of their personal privations. There you have the secret and cause of our earlier disasters and of our final reverse.25
As early as July 8 Napoleon had to write to Clarke in Paris to say that it wasn’t necessary to increase cavalry recruitment ‘since we are losing so many horses in this country that we will have great difficulty, with all the resources of France and Germany, in keeping the current number of men in the regiments mounted’.26
That same day Napoleon learned that the main Russian force, the First Army of the West, was at Drissa, a powerful fortress that was badly situated strategically. Filled with hope, he sent his advance guard there, but by the time they arrived there on the 17th they found it abandoned. On July 16 he was told that although Davout had captured Minsk, Bagration had managed to slip away again. Just before he left Vilnius, Napoleon dined with General de Jomini; they spoke of how close Moscow was – it was actually 500 miles away – and Jomini asked if he intended to march there. Napoleon burst out laughing, saying:
I much prefer to get there in two years’ time . . . If M. Barclay thinks that I want to run after him all the way to the Volga, he is very much mistaken. We shall follow him as far as Smolensk and the Dvina, where a good battle will allow us to go into cantonments. I shall return here, to Vilnius, with my headquarters to spend the winter. I shall send for an opera company and actors from the Théâtre-Français. Then, next May, we shall finish the job, if we do not make peace during the winter. That is better, I think, than running to Moscow. What do you say, Monsieur Tactician?27
Jomini agreed.
• • •
By then Napoleon was facing a devastating new threat for which no army of the day was prepared. Typhus fever is a disease of dirt; its causative organism, Rickettsia prowazekii, lies midway between the relatively large bacteria that cause syphilis and tuberculosis and the microscopic smallpox and measles viruses. Carried by lice which infest unwashed bodies in the seams of dirty clothing, the organism is not transferred by the louse’s bite but through its excrement and corpse.28 It had been endemic in Poland and western Russia for years.
Heat, lack of water for washing, troops packed together in large numbers at night, the hovels in which they sheltered, scratching irritable areas, not changing clothes: all were ideal conditions for spreading typhus. In the first week of the campaign alone, 6,000 men fell ill with it every day. By the third week of July over 80,000 men had either died or were sick, at least 50,000 of them from typhus. Within a month of the start of the invasion, Napoleon had lost one-fifth of the men in his central army group.29 Larrey, the Grande Armée’s surgeon-general, was a fine doctor, but typhus had not yet been medically linked to lice, which were thought of as an unpleasant pest but no killer, and he was at a loss to know how to respond. Dysentery and enteric fever were dealt with in hospitals in Danzig, Königsberg and Thorn, but typhus was different. Napoleon supported vaccination, especially for smallpox – he had had his son vaccinated at two months – but there was none to be had against typhus. Recent research on the DNA taken from the teeth of 2,000 corpses in a mass grave in Vilnius shows that they almost all carried the typhus exanthematicus pathogen, known as ‘war plague’. Ironically, Napoleon insisted that hospitalized men be made to bathe, but it wasn’t known that healthy men needed to as well.30 Even the Emperor caught lice on the retreat from Moscow, when it was too cold to remove any of his clothes for days on end.31 The way to defeat them was to boil undergarments and iron outer garments with a hot iron, neither of which could be done in the sub-zero temperatures that first arrived on November 4.32
Typhus (which is quite different from typhoid fever, dysentery and the other ‘diseases of the poor’) had been a growing problem in France itself as the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars progressed, with outbreaks prevalent in villages situated along the major roads. In the Seine-et-Marne, outbreaks were almost uninterrupted after 1806, as well as in the eastern Parisian communes where the troops arrived back from the Rhine. Mortality was heavy in 1810–12 and, when asked to explain this, the medical officers of Melun and Nemours agreed that the principal cause was ‘continual war’.33 Typhus returned when the Allied armies invaded France in 1814 and 1815. The most eminent physicians of the day assumed that it could break out spontaneously given ‘great hardship, colds, lack of the necessaries of life, and the consequent consumption of spoiled foodstuffs’.34 Even twenty years after the end of the wars, J. R. L. de Kerckhove, a former chief of French hospitals in 1812, understood the cause of typhus incorrectly, writing: ‘The typhus that had so decimated the French army had its origin in privation, fatigue and the polluted air that one breathes in places overflowing with the sick and the exhausted. Then it spread by contagion.’35 The connection between lice and typhus was not made until 1911. De Kerckhove got the symptoms absolutely right, however:
The infection manifested itself through general malaise, accompanied most often by a state of languor; a weak, slow or irregular pulse; an alteration in facial traits; a difficulty executing movements . . . extreme fatigue, difficulty standing, lack of appetite; vertigo, ringing in the ear, nausea, headaches were very
frequent; sometimes he suffered from vomiting; sometimes the tongue was covered in a white or yellow mucus.
After about four days a fever developed which ‘was evident firstly in shaking followed by an irregular feeling of heat . . . the fever developed and became continual, the skin was dry . . . congestions of the brain and sometimes the lung’.36 In most cases, death followed. Up to 140,000 of Napoleon’s soldiers died of disease in 1812, the majority of them from typhus but a significant number from dysentery and related illnesses.
Napoleon could not allow disease to derail the entire invasion, and pressed on eastwards in the hope of keeping the Russian First and Second Armies of the West separate. He himself was, in the estimation of the ordnance officer attached to his staff, Captain Gaspard Gourgaud, ‘in excellent health’ during the campaign, spending hours a day on horseback with no serious illnesses reported.37 The speed of the Grande Armée’s advance and the rawness of the young recruits meant that many could not keep up. ‘Stragglers are committing awful horrors,’ wrote Castellane, ‘they are sacking and pillaging: mobile columns are organized.’38 On July 10 Napoleon ordered Berthier to send a column of gendarmes to Vorovno ‘to arrest the pillagers of the 33rd, who are committing horrible devastation in that country’.39 By mid-July troops were also deserting in bands.
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