Napoleon

by Andrew Roberts

  25

  Retreat

  ‘More battles are lost by loss of hope than loss of blood.’

  Attributed to Napoleon

  ‘Retreats always cost more men and matériel than the bloodiest engagements.’

  Napoleon’s Military Maxim No. 6

  On the afternoon following Borodino, Napoleon visited the battlefield. ‘Whole lines of Russian regiments, lying on the ground wet with their blood, showed that they preferred death to retiring a single step,’ recalled Bausset. ‘Napoleon collected all possible information on these sorrowful places, he even observed the numbers on the buttons of their uniforms in order . . . to ascertain the nature and positions of the Corps put in motion by the enemy, but what he was chiefly anxious about was the care of the wounded.’1 When his horse trod on a dying Russian, Napoleon reacted by ‘lavishing the attentions of humanity on this unfortunate creature’, and when one of the staff officers pointed out that he was ‘only a Russian’ Napoleon snapped back, ‘After a victory there are no enemies, only men.’2

  The Emperor hoped that his taking Moscow might ease the pressure on Macdonald’s and Schwarzenberg’s forces to the north and south, telling the latter on September 10: ‘Now the enemy has been struck at his heart, he is concentrating only on the heart and not thinking about the extremities.’3 Murat began to pursue the retreating Russians, occupying Mozhaisk and capturing 10,000 of their wounded. The next day the main French force resumed its advance after two days’ rest, by which time it was clear that the Russians were not going to fight another major battle in front of Moscow. ‘Napoleon is a torrent,’ Kutuzov said in deciding to surrender the city, ‘but Moscow is the sponge that will soak him up.’4 The Russian army marched straight through Moscow on the morning of the 14th; when it became clear that it was being abandoned, virtually the entire population of the city evacuated their homes in a mass exodus, hiding or destroying anything of use to the invader that they couldn’t carry away with them. Of its 250,000 inhabitants, only around 15,000 stayed on, many of them non-Russians, although looters did come in from the surrounding countryside.5 On September 13, the president of Moscow University and a delegation of French Muscovites had visited Napoleon’s headquarters to tell him that the city was deserted and no deputation of notables would therefore be coming to offer the traditional gifts of bread and salt and to surrender its keys.6 Instead an enterprising old peasant sidled up to offer the Emperor a guided tour of the city’s major places of interest – an opportunity that was politely refused.7

  When the soldiers saw the city laid out before them from the Salvation Hills they shouted ‘Moscow! Moscow!’ and marched forward with renewed vigour. ‘Moscow had an oriental, or, rather, an enchanted appearance,’ recalled Captain Heinrich von Brandt of the Vistula Legion, ‘with its five hundred domes either gilded or painted in the gaudiest colours and standing out here and there above a veritable sea of houses.’8 Napoleon more prosaically said: ‘There, at last, is that famous city; it’s about time!’9 Murat arranged a truce with the Russian rearguard and occupied the city. For supply and security reasons, and in the hope that the Grande Armée would not sack it wholesale, only the Imperial Guard and Italian Royal Guard were billeted inside the city; all others remained in the fields outside, though men swiftly made their way through the suburbs for pillage.

  Napoleon entered Moscow on the morning of Tuesday the 15th, installed himself in the Kremlin (once it had been checked for mines), and went to bed early.* ‘The city is as big as Paris,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise, ‘provided with everything.’10 Ségur recalled how ‘Napoleon’s earlier hopes revived at the sight of the palace’, but at dusk that evening fires broke out simultaneously across the city which could not be contained because of a strong north-easterly equinoctal wind and the fact that the city’s governor, Fyodor Rostopchin, had removed or destroyed all the city’s fire-engines and sunk the city’s fleet of fire-boats before leaving.11 ‘I am setting fire to my mansion’, he wrote to the French on a sign on his own estate at Voronovo outside Moscow, ‘rather than let it be sullied by your presence.’12 (Although he later was fêted for having ordered the burning of Moscow, some of it initiated by criminals he had released from the city’s jails for the purpose, towards the end of his life Rostopchin denied that he had done so, to the bemusement of his friends and family.13) That night the fires were so bright that it was possible to read in the Kremlin without the aid of lamps.

  No sooner had the French entered Moscow and begun to ransack it, therefore, than they had to try to save it from being razed by its own inhabitants. With no knowledge of its geography and no fire-fighting equipment, they were unequal to the task. They shot around four hundred arsonists, but 6,500 of the 9,000 major buildings in the city were either burned down or ruined.14 Many of his soldiers, Napoleon remembered, died while ‘endeavouring to pillage in the midst of the flames’.15 When they cleaned up the city after the French had left, Muscovites found the charred remains of nearly 12,000 humans and over 12,500 horses.16

  Napoleon was fast asleep on his iron camp bed beneath the chandeliers of the Kremlin when he was woken at 4 a.m. on September 16 and told about the fires. ‘What a tremendous spectacle!’ he exclaimed, watching them from a window whose panes were already hot to the touch. ‘It is their own work! So many palaces! What extraordinary resolution! What men! These are indeed Scythians!’17 (Typically, he reached back to ancient times for an analogy, here to the famously ruthless Persian tribe mentioned by Herodotus who left their Iranian homeland to fight on the Central Eurasian steppes.) He was fortunate not to fall victim to the fires himself, as incompetent guards allowed an artillery convoy – including gunpowder wagons – to draw up under his bedroom window in the Kremlin. If one of the burning brands that were flying around had landed there, Ségur noted, ‘The flower of the army and the Emperor would have been destroyed.’18 After spending much of the day organizing his soldiers into units of firefighters, pulling down houses in the path of the blaze and interviewing two arsonists, at 5.30 p.m. Napoleon bowed to the exhortations of Berthier, Murat and Eugène to leave the city when flames reached the Kremlin arsenal. As Ségur recalled, ‘We already breathed nothing but smoke and ashes.’19 The two-hour journey to the imperial palace of Petrovsky, 6 miles outside the city, was dangerous and at times had to be made on foot because of the horses’ terror of the flames. As front entrances of the Kremlin were by then blocked by the fire and debris, Napoleon escaped through a secret postern gate in the rocks above the river.20 ‘With long detours,’ recalled the veteran General Fantin des Odoards, ‘he was out of danger.’21 One of the household comptrollers, Guillaume Peyrusse, who was also evacuated, told his brother: ‘We were boiling in our carriages . . . the horses didn’t want to go forward. I had the sharpest worries for the treasure.’22 It survived and was soon augmented when an on-site forge was built to melt down 11,700lbs of gold and 648lbs of silver, much of it taken from palaces and churches.23

  • • •

  Discussing the Russian campaign two years later, Napoleon admitted ‘that when [I] got to Moscow, [I] considered the business as done’.24 He claimed he could have stayed in the well-stocked city throughout the winter had it not been for the burning of Moscow, ‘an event on which I could not calculate, as there is not, I believe, a precedent for it in the history of the world. But by God, one has to admit that showed a hell of a strength of character.’25 Although the part of the city that survived the fire was large enough for winter cantonments, and some supplies were found there in private cellars, it was not remotely capable of wintering an army of over 100,000 men for half a year. There was not enough fodder for the horses, campfires had to be built of mahogany furniture and gilded window-frames, and the army was soon subsisting off rotten horseflesh.26 In retrospect it would have been better for the French had the whole city been razed to the ground, as that would have forced an immediate retreat.

  The central striking force of the Grande
Armée had shrunk to less than half its original size in the eighty-two days between crossing the Niemen and entering Moscow. According to the figures Napoleon was given at the time, he had lost 92,390 men by the end of the battle of Borodino.27 Yet he did not act like a man whose options were limited. During the two days he spent at the beautiful Petrovsky Palace he considered almost immediately retreating to the Lower Dvina in a circular movement, while sending out Eugène’s corps to make it appear as if he were marching on to St Petersburg.28 He told Fain that he believed he could be between Riga and Smolensk by mid-October. Yet although he started looking at maps and drawing up orders, only Eugène supported the idea. Other senior officers reacted with ‘repugnance’, arguing that the army needed rest, and to go north would ‘look for the winter, as if it wasn’t coming soon enough!’ They urged Napoleon to ask Alexander for peace.29 Army surgeons needed more time to treat the wounded and they argued that Moscow still had resources to offer under the ashes.30 Napoleon told his advisors: ‘Don’t believe that the ones who burnt Moscow are people to make peace a few days later; if the parties who are guilty of this determination dominate today in Alexander’s cabinet, all the hopes with which I see you flatter yourselves are in vain.’31

  Another plan, to march on Alexander’s court nearly four hundred miles away in St Petersburg itself, was proposed, but Berthier and Bessières quickly convinced Napoleon on logistical grounds ‘that he had neither time, provisions, roads, nor a single requisite for so extensive an expedition’.32 Instead they discussed marching south nearly 100 miles to Kaluga and Tula, the granary and arsenal of Russia respectively, or retreating to Smolensk. Napoleon eventually chose what turned out to be the worst possible option: to return to the Kremlin, which had survived the fire, on September 18 to wait to see whether Alexander would agree to end the war. ‘I ought not to have stayed in Moscow more than two weeks at the utmost,’ Napoleon said later, ‘but I was deceived from day to day.’33 This was untrue. Alexander didn’t deceive Napoleon into thinking he was interested in peace; he simply refused to reply either positively or negatively. Nor was Napoleon self-deceived; the burning of Moscow confirmed him in his belief that there was no hope of peace, even though he would probably have accepted as little as Russia’s return to the Continental System as the price.34 The reason he stayed in Moscow for so long was that he thought he had plenty of time before he needed to get his army back to winter quarters in Smolensk, and he preferred to live off the enemy’s resources.

  On September 18, Napoleon distributed 50,000 plundered rubles to Muscovites who had lost their houses and he visited an orphanage, dispelling the widespread rumour that he was going to eat its inhabitants.35 ‘Moscow was a very beautiful city,’ he wrote to Maret, using the past tense. ‘It will take Russia two hundred years to recover from the loss which she has sustained.’36 He wrote to Alexander on the 20th, as autumnal rains finally quenched the fires, which in some places had burned for six days. (The letter was delivered by the brother of the Russian minister to Cassel, the most senior Russian to be captured in Moscow, which shows how thorough the nobility’s evacuation of the city had been.) ‘If Your Majesty still preserves for me some remnant of your former feelings, you will take this letter in good part,’ he began.

  The beautiful and superb city of Moscow no longer exists; Rostopchin had it burnt . . . The administration, the magistrates and the civil guards should have remained. This is what was done twice at Vienna, at Berlin and at Madrid . . . I have waged war on Your Majesty without animosity. A letter from you before or after the last battle would have halted my march, and I should have even liked to have sacrificed the advantage of entering Moscow.37

  On receipt of this letter, the Tsar promptly sent for Lord Cathcart, the British ambassador, and told him that twenty such catastrophes as had happened to Moscow would not induce him to abandon the struggle.38 The list of cities Napoleon gave in that letter – and it could have been longer – demonstrates that he knew from experience that capturing the enemy’s capital didn’t lead to his surrender, and Moscow wasn’t even Russia’s government capital. It was the destruction of the enemy’s main army at Marengo, Austerlitz and Friedland that had secured his victory, and Napoleon had failed to achieve that at Borodino.

  While waiting for Alexander’s reply, the Emperor made life in Moscow as easy as possible for his troops by organizing entertainments for them, although there were some practices at which he drew the line. ‘Despite repeated warnings,’ read one order, ‘soldiers are continuing to relieve themselves in the courtyard, even under the windows of the Emperor himself; orders are now issued that each unit will set punishment parties to dig latrines and . . . buckets will be placed in the corners of the barracks and these will be emptied twice a day.’39 Napoleon used his time at the Kremlin to rationalize the units of the army and take into account their losses, review them and receive detailed reports on their state, which told him he still had over 100,000 effectives after reinforcement. Meanwhile, cannonballs collected from the field of Borodino started arriving by the cartload.40 He liked to cultivate the appearance of constant industry: one of his ushers, Angel, later revealed that he had been ordered to put two candles in Napoleon’s window every evening, ‘so that the troops exclaim “See, the Emperor doesn’t sleep by day or at night. He works continuously!”’41

  When Napoleon discovered the plight of Madame Aurore Bursay’s troupe of fourteen French actors and actresses, who had been robbed by both Russian and French troops, he came to her assistance and asked her to put on eleven plays, mostly comedies and ballets, in the Posniakov Theatre.42 He didn’t go himself, but he did listen to Signor Tarquinio, a famous Muscovite singer. He drew up new regulations for the Comédie-Française, and decided that he wanted the gigantic golden cross from the Ivan the Great bell tower to be placed on the dome of Les Invalides.43 (Once they got it down, it turned out to be made only of gilded wood, and it would be thrown into the Berezina on the retreat by General Michel Claparède’s Polish division.44)

  One way in which Napoleon could have caused severe problems for the Russian governing class would have been by freeing the serfs from their lifetime of bondage to their aristocratic landowners. Emelian Pugachev’s violent serf revolt in the mid-1770s had in some respects presaged the French Revolution, and the Russian elite were terrified that Napoleon might reach back to its ideas.45 He certainly ordered the papers covering Pugachev’s revolt to be brought to him from the Kremlin archives and asked Eugène for information about a peasant uprising in Velikiye, and to ‘let me know what kind of decree and proclamation can be made to excite the revolt of the peasants in Russia and rally them’.46 Yet despite abolishing feudalism in all the lands he conquered, he did not emancipate the Russian serfs, whom he thought of as ignorant and uncivilized.47 It certainly wouldn’t have helped bring Alexander to the negotiating table.

  In the first week of October, Napoleon sent his former ambassador to Russia, Jacques de Lauriston, to Kutuzov, who had entrenched himself at Tarutino behind the River Nara, 45 miles south-west of Moscow. According to Ségur, Napoleon’s parting words to his envoy were: ‘I want peace, I must have peace, I absolutely will have peace – only save my honour!’48 Kutuzov refused to offer Lauriston safe passage to St Petersburg, saying his message could be taken by Prince Sergei Volkonsky instead. Once again, there was no reply. By this stage Murat was losing forty to fifty men a day to Cossack raiders on the outskirts of Moscow, and Kutuzov’s army had grown to 88,300 regular troops, 13,000 regular Don Cossacks and another 15,000 irregular Cossack and Bashkir cavalry, with 622 guns. By contrast, Napoleon received only 15,000 reinforcements during the thirty-five days he spent in Moscow, while 10,000 died of wounds or disease there.

  The fine weather in Moscow, which Napoleon told Marie Louise was ‘as warm as in Paris’ on October 6, made it seem less important that the men had thrown away their winter clothing on the boiling march from the Niemen, although it worried him that he couldn’t buy the
shoes, boots and horses they would soon need.49 In a second letter to Marie Louise that day he asked her to persuade her father to reinforce Schwarzenberg’s corps, ‘so that it may be a credit to him’.50 He could not know that Metternich had given secret undertakings to the Tsar that Austria would do nothing of the kind, and at about this time Schwarzenberg started to behave suspiciously independently, avoiding any engagement with the Russians that he could. ‘Right now,’ Napoleon told Fain in mid-September, acknowledging his other diplomatic failings of that year, ‘Bernadotte should have been in St Petersburg and the Turks in the Crimea.’51

  Napoleon had collected all available almanacs and charts on the Russian winter, which had told him that sub-zero temperatures weren’t to be expected until November. ‘No information was neglected about that subject, no calculation, and all probabilities were reassuring,’ recalled Fain; ‘it’s usually only in December and January that the Russian winter is very rigorous. During November the thermometer doesn’t go much below six degrees.’52 Observations made of the previous twenty years’ winters confirmed that the Moskva river didn’t freeze until mid-November, and Napoleon believed this gave him plenty of time to return to Smolensk. It had taken his army less than three weeks to get from Smolensk to Moscow, including the three days at Borodino.53