Voltaire’s History of Charles XII, which Napoleon read while in Moscow, described the Russian winter as so cold that birds froze in mid-air, falling from the skies as if shot.54 The Emperor also read the three-volume Military History of Charles XII by the king’s chamberlain, Gustavus Adlerfeld, published in 1741, which concludes with the disaster of Poltava.55 Adlerfeld attributed the King of Sweden’s defeat to stubborn Russian resistance and the ‘very piercing’ cold of the winter. ‘In one of these marches two thousand men fell down dead with the cold,’ reads a passage in the third volume, and in another Swedish troopers ‘were reduced to warm themselves with the skins of beasts as well they could; they often wanted even bread; they were obliged to sink almost all their cannon in morasses and rivers, for want of horses to draw them. This army, once so flourishing, was . . . ready to die with hunger.’56 Adlerfeld wrote of how the nights were ‘extremely cold . . . many died of the excessive rigour of the cold, and a great number lost the use of their limbs, as their feet and hands.’ From this if nothing else, Napoleon would have keenly understood the severity of the Russian winter. When the army did finally leave Moscow on October 18 he told his staff: ‘Hurry up, we need to be in winter quarters in twenty days.’57 The first major snowfall took place seventeen days later, so he was only three days out. Only military considerations, rather than any insouciance over the weather, forced him to take a different, far longer route to Smolensk than the one originally intended.
The first flurries of snow fell on the 13th. By then the forage situation for the horses had become critical, with teams leaving Moscow at dawn and rarely returning before nightfall, their horses exhausted.58 With no reply from Alexander and winter clearly now approaching, on October 13 Napoleon finally gave the order for an evacuation of the city five days later. This decision was reinforced by Lauriston’s return on the 17th with Kutuzov’s refusal of an armistice. As the Grande Armée, now comprising around 107,000 men, thousands of civilians, 3,000 Russian prisoners, 550 cannon and over 40,000 vehicles loaded with the fruits of over a month’s looting – which people chose to carry in favour of edible provisions – began to evacuate Moscow on the 18th, Kutuzov mounted an impressive surprise attack at Tarutino (also known as Vinkovo), in which Murat lost 2,000 killed and wounded and 1,500 men and 36 guns were captured.59
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Napoleon himself left Moscow in bright sunshine around noon on October 19, 1812, taking the southern road towards Kaluga – which he nicknamed ‘Caligula’, just as he called Glogau ‘Gourgaud’ – 110 miles to the south-west.60 He retained the option of going to Tula, where he hoped to destroy Russia’s arms factories, and reach the fertile Ukraine while drawing in reinforcements from Smolensk, or moving back up to Smolensk and Lithuania if need be. Either way it permitted him to present the retreat from Moscow merely as a strategic withdrawal, the next stage in the campaign to punish Alexander. But his weakened, lumbering army was too slow for the kind of operation he now needed to pull off, and the mud produced by heavy rainfall on the night of October 21 only slowed it down further. Kutuzov didn’t learn of the evacuation for two days, though as the Grande Armée was limping along in a column that extended for 60 miles this was of little consequence. He sent General Dokhturov’s 6th Corps to block Napoleon’s route at Maloyaroslavets. Dokhturov arrived on the 23rd and the next day ran straight into Eugène’s advance guard commanded by General Alexis Delzons.
Napoleon’s order to Mortier to blow up the Kremlin has been denounced as an act of Corsican revenge, but it was actually a means to keep his options open. He told General de Lariboisière, ‘It is possible that I will return to Moscow’, and calculated that he would find it easier to recapture without its formidable defences.61 Mortier laid 180 tons of explosives in the vaults under the Kremlim and Napoleon heard the explosion at 1.30 a.m. on the 20th from 25 miles away. He boasted in a bulletin that ‘The Kremlin, ancient citadel, coeval with the rise of the [Romanov] monarchy, this palace of the tsars, has ceased to exist, but in fact although the arsenal, one of the towers and the Nikolsky Gate were destroyed, and the Ivan bell tower damaged, the rest of the Kremlin survived.62 Napoleon also urged Mortier to take all the wounded from Moscow, drawing from classical precedent to say: ‘The Romans gave civic crowns to those who saved citizens; the Duc de Treviso will be worthy of this as long as he saves soldiers . . . he must make them ride on his horses and those of his men; this is what the Emperor did at Acre.’63 Mortier carried off all the wounded who could be moved, though 4,000 had to be left behind in the Foundlings Hospital. Just before he left, Napoleon had ten Russian prisoners-of-war shot as arsonists.64 It was hardly Jaffa, but it was an inexplicable act of cruelty and unlikely to help the chances of the French wounded he was compelled to abandon.
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The battle of Maloyaroslavets, the third largest of the campaign, fought high above the River Luzha on October 24, had consequences far in excess of its immediate result. The French ultimately captured and held the town and Kutuzov withdrew down the Kaluga road, but the extremely bitter fighting – in which the town changed hands nine times over the course of the day – convinced Napoleon, who arrived only at the very end, that the Russians would contest the southern route bitterly. (‘It’s not enough to kill a Russian,’ went the admiring saying in the Grande Armée, ‘you have to push him over too.’) Although the Emperor described Maloyaroslavets as a victory in his bulletin, the cartographer Captain Eugène Labaume, who was a bitter critic, recalled the men saying: ‘Two such “victories” and Napoleon would have no army left.’65 Maloyaroslavets burned down during the battle – only the stone monastery remains today, complete with bullet holes in its gate – but from the positions of the piles of calcinated corpses the Emperor could tell how obstinately the Russians had fought.
At 11 p.m. Bessières arrived at Napoleon’s quarters in a weaver’s hut near the bridge at Gorodnya, a village some 60 miles south-west of Moscow, telling the Emperor that he believed that Kutuzov’s position further down the road was ‘unassailable’. When Napoleon went out at 4 a.m. the next morning to try to see for himself – one can’t see beyond the town from the hillside on the other side of the ravine – he was almost captured by a large body of Tatar uhlans (light cavalry), who got to within forty yards of him yelling, ‘Houra! Houra!’ (Plunder! Plunder!) before two hundred Guard cavalry dispersed them.66 He later laughed about this close escape to Murat, but thereafter he wore a phial of poison around his neck in case of capture. ‘Things are getting serious,’ he told Caulaincourt an hour before daybreak on the 25th. ‘I beat the Russians every time, and yet never reach an end.’67 (That wasn’t quite true; Murat’s defeat at Tarutino had been a significant reverse, although Napoleon himself hadn’t been present.)
Fain said that Napoleon was ‘shaken’ by the sheer number of wounded at Maloyaroslavets, and moved by their fate; eight generals including Delzons had been killed or wounded.68 Continuing down the Kaluga road would almost certainly lead to another costly battle, whereas a withdrawal northwards towards the supply depots of the Moscow–Smolensk road along which they had come the previous month would avoid that necessity. There was a third possible route, through Medyn and Yelnya, where a fresh division of reinforcements from France awaited them. (Of Yelnya, Napoleon was to write on November 6: ‘The region is said to be beautiful and to have ample supplies.’69) Had they taken that route, though the maps gave no clues to the state of its roads, they might have reached Smolensk before the first major snowfall. Was the fact that the Grande Armée now had a huge tail of wagons, carts, prisoners, camp-followers and booty a factor in Napoleon’s thinking? The record is mute. What did influence his thinking was that 90,000 men under Kutuzov would have been shadowing his left flank all the way to Yelnya, and an army stretched out 60 miles along the road would have been vulnerable at several points. Moving blind across country, a quartermaster’s nightmare, seemed riskier than returning via the Mozhaisk route, where he at least knew that t
here were food depots. However, it would take far longer, effectively tracing a dog-leg of several hundred miles due north just as winter was closing in.
Napoleon didn’t usually convene councils of war – he hadn’t called a single one during the entire campaign against Russia and Prussia in 1806–7 – but he did now. On the night of Sunday, October 25 the weaver’s hut at Gorodnya, whose sole room was divided into the Emperor’s bedroom and study by a single canvas sheet, played host to a galère of marshals and generals whose advice Napoleon sought before making his crucial decision. ‘This mean habitation of a humble workman’, wrote one of his aides-de camp later, ‘contained within it an emperor, two kings and three generals.’70 Napoleon said that the expensive victory at Maloyaroslavets had not compensated for Murat’s outright defeat at Tarutino; he wanted to strike south towards Kaluga, towards the main bulk of the Russian army which was straddling that road. Murat, smarting from the drubbing he had sustained, agreed, and urged an immediate attack towards Kaluga. Davout supported the other, at that point undefended, southern route via Medyn and through the unspoiled fertile fields of north Ukraine and the Dnieper, before regaining the main highway at Smolensk, if it went well, several days march ahead of Kutuzov. The ‘Iron Marshal’ feared that following Kutuzov down the Kaluga road would draw the Grande Armée ever deeper into Russia without achieving a decisive battle before the snows fell in earnest, whereas turning the whole army around to get onto the Mozhaisk–Smolensk road would create delays, congestion and supply problems.
‘Smolensk was the goal,’ recorded Ségur. ‘Should they march thither by Kaluga, Medyn or Mozhaisk? Napoleon was seated at a table, his head supported by his hands, which concealed his features, as well as the anguish which they no doubt expressed.’71 Most of those present thought that because part of the army was already stationed at Borovsk, on the way to Mozhaisk, along with a large number of guns that had not been present at Maloyaroslavets, the Borovsk–Mozhaisk–Smolensk route was the best one. They pointed out ‘how exhausting this change of direction [to follow Kutuzov] would prove to cavalry and artillery already in a state of exhaustion, and that it would lose us any lead we might have over the Russians’. If Kutuzov ‘would not stand and fight in an excellent position such as at Maloyaroslavets’ he was hardly likely to join battle 60 miles further away, they argued. Of this opinion were Eugène, Berthier, Caulaincourt and Bessières. Murat furiously criticized Davout’s plan to head for Medyn because it would present the army’s flank to the enemy; this prompted an ill-tempered exchange of views between the two marshals, who had long been at odds with each other. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ said Napoleon as he concluded the conference that night. ‘I will decide.’72
He chose the northern route back to Smolensk. His only recorded explanation for perhaps the single most fateful decision of his reign is to be found in what he told Berthier to write to Junot about the Russians, ‘We marched on the 26th to attack them, but they were in retreat; [Davout] went in pursuit of them, but the cold and the necessity of offloading the wounded who were with the army made the Emperor decide to go to Mozhaisk and from there to Vyazma.’73 Yet this made no sense; if the enemy was retreating it would have been the ideal time to attack him. It was likely to be much colder to the north, and the needs of the wounded had never decided strategy before. When, years later, Gourgaud tried to blame Murat and Bessières for the route the army took, Napoleon corrected him: ‘No; I was the master, and mine was the fault.’74 Like a Shakespearian tragic hero, he chose the fatal path despite others being available. Ségur later described Maloyaroslavets as ‘This fatal field which put a halt to the conquest of the world, where twenty victories were thrown to the wind, and where our great empire began to crumble to the ground.’ The Russians were plainer yet no less accurate, erecting a small commemorative plaque on the battlefield stating simply: ‘End of offensive. Start of ruin and rout of the enemy.’
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As soon as Kutuzov understood Napoleon was retreating, he turned his army around and adopted a ‘parallel mark’ strategy to harry him out of Russia, marching alongside the French army and attacking when he saw weakness, but refusing Napoleon the opportunity of a decisive counter-attack. Napoleon had retreated from Acre and Aspern-Essling, but neither of those situations even approximated what he now faced, especially once the thermometer plunged to –4°C in late October. In his memoirs, The Crime of 1812, Labaume recalled the continual sound of the rearguard blowing up their own ammunition wagons, ‘which reverberated from afar like the roar of thunder’. The horses that could pull them had died, sometimes as a result of eating tainted straw from thatch torn off cottage roofs. On reaching Ouvaroskoe, Labaume found ‘numerous corpses of soldiers and peasants, as well as infants with their throats cut, and young girls murdered having been ravished’.75 As Labaume was in the same army as the perpetrators, there was no reason for him to have invented these outrages, which began once discipline evaporated.
Men who had kept bread since Moscow now ‘crept off to eat it in secret’.76 On October 29–30 the army tramped – it no longer marched – past the Borodino battlefield, which was full of ‘bones gnawed by famished dogs and birds of prey’. A French soldier was found who had had both his legs broken and for two months had been living off herbs, roots and a few bits of bread he had found on corpses, sleeping at nights inside the bellies of eviscerated horses. Although Napoleon ordered that any survivors be carried on carts, some were unceremoniously pushed off shortly afterwards.77 By late October even generals were eating nothing but horseflesh.78 On November 3 a Russian attempt to encircle Davout was repelled at Vyazma, when Ney, Eugène and Poniatowski (who was wounded) turned back to aid him. The abnormally large number of French prisoners taken there – 3,000 – indicates how close the Grande Armée was to demoralization.
The first heavy snowfall came on November 4, as the French retreated in disorder from Vyazma. ‘Many, suffering far more from the extreme cold than from hunger, abandoned their accoutrements,’ Labaume recalled, ‘and lay down beside a large fire they had lighted, but when the time came for departing these poor wretches had not the strength to get up, and preferred to fall into the hands of the enemy rather than to continue the march.’79 That took courage in itself, as the rumours about what the peasantry and Cossacks were doing to captured Frenchmen easily equalled those of what the Turks, Calabrians and Spanish had done, and included skinning them alive. (Peasants would buy prisoners off the Cossacks at two rubles a head.) The luckiest were merely stripped of their clothing and left naked in the snow, but torture was commonplace (hence the high rate of suicide on the retreat).80 Even surrendering successfully en masse to the Russian regular army was akin to a death sentence: of one column of 3,400 French prisoners-of-war only 400 survived; in another only 16 out of 800. When fifty French soldiers were captured by peasants and buried alive in a pit, ‘a drummer boy bravely led the devoted party and leapt into the grave’.81 There were occasional tales of altruism: Labaume recorded a French soldier sharing his food with a starving Russian woman whom he had found in a cemetery just after she had given birth, for example. But overall the retreat now became reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s depiction of Hades.82
Ney took command of the rearguard on November 5, as the snowfalls obliterated landmarks and iced-up roads. Little thought had been given to fitting ice-resistant horseshoes except by the Poles and some Guard regiments, which led to many horses slipping and falling. By the second week of November, ‘The army utterly lost its morale and its military organization. Soldiers no longer obeyed their officers; officers paid no regard to their generals; shattered regiments marched as best they could. Searching for food, they dispersed over the plain, burning and sacking everything in their way . . . Tormented by hunger, they rushed on every horse as soon as it fell, and like famished wolves fought for the pieces.’83 Meanwhile toes, fingers, noses, ears and sexual organs were lost to frostbite.84 ‘The soldiers fall,’ Castellane recalled of the It
alian Royal Guard, ‘a little blood comes to their lips, and all is over. When they see this sign of an approaching death, their comrades often give them a push, throw them on the ground, and take their clothes before they are quite dead.’85
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At Dorogobuzh on November 6 Napoleon received the extraordinary news in a letter from Cambacérès of a coup d’état that General Claude-François de Malet had attempted in Paris two weeks earlier. Malet had forged a document stating that Napoleon had died under the walls of Moscow as well as a sénatus-consulte that appointed General Moreau as interim president.86 With fewer than twenty co-conspirators, Malet had taken control of 1,200 National Guardsmen at 3 a.m. on October 23. The police minister, Savary, was arrested and taken to La Force prison, and the prefect of police, Pasquier, was chased from his prefecture.87 The governor of Paris, General Hulin, was shot in the jaw, where the bullet remained lodged and gave rise to his nickname, ‘Bouffe-la-balle’ (Bullet-eater).88 François Frochot, the prefect of the Seine and a member of the Conseil, accepted Malet’s story and did nothing to oppose him, for which he was later dismissed.
Cambacérès seems to have kept his head admirably, doubling the sentries protecting Marie Louise and the King of Rome at Saint-Cloud and ordering Marshal Moncey, who commanded the gendarmerie, to rush in troops from nearby departments, release Savary and reinstate Pasquier.89 ‘By 9 a.m. it was all over,’ recalled Lavalette, ‘and the happy inhabitants of Paris, when they awoke, learned of the singular event, and made some tolerably good jokes upon it.’90 Napoleon didn’t find any of it remotely funny. He was infuriated that no one besides Cambacérès seemed to have given any thought to Marie Louise or his son as being the legitimate rulers of France in the event of his demise. ‘Napoleon II,’ the Emperor cried to Fain, ‘nobody thought about him!’91 At his brief court martial, before being shot with a dozen others on October 29, Malet, a former political prisoner and devout republican, replied to a question by saying: ‘Who were my accomplices? Had I been successful, all of you would have been my accomplices!’92 Napoleon feared that this was true. The Malet conspiracy reminded him how much the dynasty he had so recently inaugurated depended upon him alone.
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