He marched out of Vitebsk on 13 August, meaning to cross the Dnieper and take Smolensk from the south before the Russians could prepare a defence, and then use its bridges to recross the river into Barclay’s rear. As a result of confused manoeuvring caused by differences between Barclay and Bagration, who had now joined forces, Smolensk was full of Russian troops. There was no value in taking this thickly-walled fortress, and Napoleon could have recrossed the river further east and forced Barclay to give battle by coming between him and Moscow. He nevertheless decided to storm it. The murderous battle cost him 7,000 casualties and reduced Smolensk to a scorched charnel house strewn with the corpses of the defenders and citizens who had died in the bombardment and fire that engulfed it.
Barclay resumed his retreat, with Ney in pursuit. Napoleon had sent Junot to cross the river further east, and he was in a position to cut the Russian line of retreat, but Junot had a mental blackout and his generals could not get an order out of him, and since Napoleon did not bother to ride out to see what was going on, the manoeuvre came to nothing. Ney, supported by Davout and Murat, fought hard but could not stop the Russians from making good their retreat.
The following morning Napoleon rode out to the scene. ‘The sight of the battlefield was one of the bloodiest the veterans could remember,’ according to a lancer of his escort. The troops paraded on the field of battle, and he awarded the coveted eagle that topped the colours of regiments which had earned it to the 127th of the Line, made up largely of Italians, which had distinguished itself the previous day. ‘This ceremony, imposing in itself, took on a truly epic character in this place,’ in the words of one witness. Napoleon took the eagle from the hands of Berthier and, holding it aloft, told the men, their faces still smeared with blood and blackened by smoke, that it should be their rallying point, and they must swear never to abandon it. When they had sworn the oath, he handed the eagle to the colonel, who passed it to the ensign, who in turn took it to the elite company, while the drummers delivered a deafening roll. Napoleon dismounted and walked over to the front rank. In a loud voice, he asked the men to name those who had distinguished themselves in the fighting. He promoted those who were named and gave the Legion of Honour to others, dubbing them with his sword and giving them the ritual embrace. ‘Like a good father surrounded by his children, he personally bestowed the recompense on those who had been deemed worthy, while their comrades acclaimed them,’ in the words of one officer. ‘Watching this scene,’ wrote another, ‘I understood and experienced that irresistible fascination which Napoleon exerted when he wished to.’ By this means he managed to turn the bloody battlefield into one of glory, consigning those who had died to immortality and caressing those who had survived with words and rewards. But many asked what, if anything, had been achieved by the past four days of bloodletting.20
Napoleon had beaten the Russians and taken a major city, but while he had inflicted heavy losses, he had lost as many as 18,000 men in the two engagements, with nothing to show for it. According to Caulaincourt, over the next few days he behaved like a child who needs reassurance. ‘In abandoning Smolensk, one of their holy cities, the Russian generals have dishonoured their arms in the sight of their own people,’ he claimed. He fantasised about turning it into a base, from which he would attack either Moscow or St Petersburg the following year. But the burnt-out city represented no military value. Yet to retreat now was politically unthinkable. He had walked into a trap from which he could see no viable issue.21
He vented his frustration on anything that came to hand. He blamed the Lithuanians for failing to raise enough troops and supplies, he reprimanded the corps commanders, and when he came across some soldiers looting one day, he attacked them with his riding crop, yelling obscenities. In his desperation to find a way out, he tried to persuade a captured Russian general to write to the tsar. ‘Alexander can see that his generals are making a mess of things and that he is losing territory, but he has fallen into the grip of the English, and the London cabinet is whipping up the nobility and preventing him from coming to terms,’ he lectured Caulaincourt. ‘They have convinced him that I want to take away all his Polish provinces, and that he will only get peace at that price, which he could not accept, as within a year all the Russians who have lands in Poland would strangle him like they did his father. It is wrong of him not to turn to me in confidence, for I wish him no ill: I would even be prepared to make some sacrifices in order to help him out of his difficulty.’22
Most of his entourage begged him to go no further, but he felt he could not return home without a victory. Moscow was only just over two weeks’ march away, and the Russians would surely make a stand in its defence. ‘The wine has been poured, it has to be drunk,’ he told Rapp. When Berthier nagged him once too often on the subject, he turned on him. ‘Go, then, I do not need you; you’re nothing but a … Go back to France; I do not force anyone,’ he snapped, adding a few lewd remarks about what Berthier was longing to get up to with his mistress in Paris. The horrified Berthier swore he would not dream of abandoning his emperor, but the atmosphere between them remained frosty, and Berthier was not invited to the imperial table for several days.23
While senior officers shook their heads, the younger ones were excited by the prospect of a march on Moscow. ‘The whole army, the French and our foreign auxiliaries, was still full of ardour and confidence,’ according to the twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant de Bourgoing. ‘If we had been ordered to march to conquer the moon, we would have answered: “Forward!”’ recalled Heinrich Brandt of the Legion of the Vistula. ‘Our older colleagues could deride our enthusiasm, call us fanatics or madmen as much as they liked, but we could think only of battles and victories. We only feared one thing – that the Russians might be in too much of a hurry to make peace.’24
As they penetrated Russia proper, the character of the war changed. The retreating Russians adopted a scorched-earth policy, forcing the population out of their homes and burning them, along with standing crops and anything that might provide shelter or provender to the advancing army. ‘At night, the whole horizon was on fire,’ in the words of one soldier. They poisoned wells with dead animals. They felled trees and left overturned carts in the road, and, as their retreat grew less orderly, corpses of men and horses, which rotted in the sweltering heat. Yet the men marched on, confident in what one soldier called ‘the vast genius’ of their ‘father, hero, demi-god’.25
Napoleon was uneasy at the sight of the burning villages, but concealed his feelings by heaping ridicule on the Russians and calling them cowards. ‘He sought to avoid the serious reflections which this terrible measure raised as to the consequences and duration of a war in which the enemy was prepared to make, from the very outset, sacrifices of this magnitude,’ explains Caulaincourt. He nevertheless continued to clutch at every straw; on 28 August he seized an opportunity to write to Barclay, hoping to open up a channel of communication with Alexander.26
Two days later, when he and his entourage stopped for lunch by the roadside, Napoleon walked up and down in front of them, holding forth about the nature of greatness. ‘Real greatness has nothing to do with wearing the purple or a grey coat, it consists in being able to rise above one’s condition,’ he declaimed. ‘I, for instance, have a good position in life. I am emperor, I could live surrounded by the delights of the great capital, and give myself over to the pleasures of life and to idleness. Instead of which I am making war, for the glory of France, for the future happiness of humanity; I am here with you, at a bivouac, in battle, where I can be struck, like any other, by a cannonball … I have risen above my condition …’ But the following day an estafette from Paris brought news that in Spain Marmont had been defeated by Wellington at Salamanca on 22 July. ‘Anxiety was clearly visible on his usually serene brow,’ according to General Roguet, who lunched with him that day.27
The Russians were as desperate as Napoleon for a battle, but the speed of the French advance had prevented Barclay from getting his troops int
o position. Under pressure from public opinion Alexander replaced him with the popular Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov, a sly, gout-ridden, fat sixty-six-year-old with a talent to rival Napoleon’s for falsifying facts to build up his image. It was not until 3 September that Kutuzov chose a defensive position in which to stand and fight, in front of the village of Borodino.
Napoleon reached the scene two days later. He ordered an exposed Russian redoubt to be captured, then spent a day reconnoitring and preparing for battle. Kutuzov had built a formidable earthwork redoubt on a slight rise at the centre of his line, covered on his left with three flèches, earthworks in the shape of chevrons. Napoleon decided to deliver a frontal assault on the redoubt while Ney, Davout and Junot took the flèches and penetrated into the Russian rear, and Poniatowski made a deeper flanking movement in support. Davout suggested that his corps be added to the Polish one so as to drive deeper into the Russian rear, but Napoleon feared engaging such a large force too deep. He had between 125,000 and 130,000 men, so he was outnumbered by the Russians with their 155,000 (about 30,000 of whom were poorly trained militia), and he was outgunned, in calibre as well as in numbers, by the 640 Russian guns to his 584.28
Napoleon was unwell. He was suffering from an attack of dysuria, an affliction of the bladder which made it almost impossible for him to urinate, and when he did only a few dark drops came out, heavy with sediment. He may also have had a fever, as he was coughing, shivering and breathing with difficulty. His spirits were lifted by the arrival of Bausset with a case containing a portrait of the King of Rome just painted by Gérard, which he immediately had unpacked. ‘I cannot express the pleasure which the sight gave him,’ noted Bausset. The proud father had the picture displayed outside his tent so his generals and soldiers could come up and admire it, and wrote a tender note to Marie-Louise thanking her for it.29
A less welcome arrival was Colonel Fabvier, who had come from Spain with details of Wellington’s victory over Marmont at Salamanca and of the worsening military position of the French in the Peninsula. News of the French defeat would give heart to all Napoleon’s enemies – not just those facing him, but, more alarmingly, those at his back. He slept badly, waking several times. At three in the morning he got up and drank a glass of punch with Rapp, who was on duty and had spent the night in his tent. ‘Fortune is a fickle courtesan,’ Napoleon suddenly said. ‘I have always said so and now I am beginning to feel it.’ After a while he added, sighing, ‘Poor army, it is much reduced, but what is left is good, and my Guard is intact.’ He then rode out to show himself to the troops.30
The army had spent the previous day buffing up, and some said it looked as fine as on a parade before the Tuileries. The men were read a proclamation which exhorted them to fight and assured them that victory would lead to a prompt return home. It contained a reference to Austerlitz, which was not out of place, since that was the last time the Grande Armée had faced Kutuzov, and when the sun came up Napoleon exclaimed, ‘Voilà le soleil d’Austerlitz!’ He then rode up to a vantage point from which he could see almost the whole field of battle, where a tent had been pitched for him, surrounded by his Guard in formation. He took the folding chair that had been set out for him, turned it back to front and sat down heavily, his arms on its back.31
At six o’clock the French guns opened up and the attack began. Assault followed assault as the Russian positions fell, only to be retaken in fierce hand-to hand fighting. The flèches were murderous traps for the troops who took them, as their only escape was forward, into the next Russian line of defence. Napoleon listened impassively as officers rode up to report. He refused all offers of food, only taking a glass of punch at around ten o’clock. He watched two assaults on the great redoubt at the centre, but failed to reinforce the successful one, while his cavalry stood idle. ‘We were all surprised not to see the active man of Marengo, Austerlitz, etc.,’ noted Louis Lejeune, an officer on Berthier’s staff. Napoleon appeared curiously remote.32
His state of health undoubtedly played a part, but so did his state of mind; unsettled by an unexpected sortie by Russian cavalry on his left wing and afraid of playing his last card so far from home, he would not commit the Guard when Davout reported that the way was open for it to sweep into the rear of the Russian army and destroy it completely. He hesitated for a couple of hours before ordering the general assault. When he did, his cavalry, which was being gradually shot to pieces by the Russian guns, surged forward and, charging up the hill, swarmed into the great redoubt, and the Russian line crumpled. Napoleon then rode over the battlefield, which presented what one of his generals describes as ‘the most disgusting sight’ he had ever seen. Russian casualties were around 45,000, including twenty-nine generals, the French 28,000 and forty-eight generals. The bodies of nearly 40,000 horses littered the ground.33
The French victory was complete; Russian losses were such that most of the units had ceased to be operational, and nothing stood between the French and Moscow. But there had been no trace of Napoleonic genius in evidence in what had been little more than a slogging match. The Russians did not flee, and there was no pursuit, as the French cavalry was exhausted. At dinner that evening with Berthier and Davout Napoleon said little and ate less. He did not sleep that night.
Kutuzov badly needed to get the remnants of his army out of the path of the French and to fall back to the south, where he could be fed and resupplied. Instead of doing so directly, he cleverly retreated to Moscow and out the other side, guessing that the city would act as a ‘sponge’ which would absorb the French and permit him to get away. He was right. Napoleon followed, and on the afternoon of 14 September from the Poklonnaia Hill he surveyed his prize – a huge and beautiful city glittering with its many gilded onion-shaped domes. But it was empty, and no delegation came out to submit to him. ‘The barbarians,’ he exclaimed. ‘They really mean to abandon all this? It is not possible.’34
38
Nemesis
The following morning, 15 September, Napoleon rode into Moscow and took up residence in the Kremlin. ‘We were surprised not to see anyone, not even one lady, come to listen to our band, which was playing La Victoire est à Nous!’ a disappointed Sergeant Bourgogne noted as they marched in. Some two-thirds of the city’s inhabitants had left, and the remainder, including many foreign tradesmen, servants and artisans, cowered in their homes. Even members of the several-hundred-strong French colony kept out of the way. The shops were closed, and what little traffic there was in the streets was mainly Russian stragglers.1
The surrender of a city was normally negotiated so that the authorities assigned the occupying troops billets and made arrangements for feeding them, but in this case there was a free-for-all to obtain the necessities of life. Generals and groups of officers selected aristocrats’ palaces and noblemen’s townhouses, while their men settled in as best they could in the surrounding houses, stables and gardens. Napoleon had appointed Marshal Mortier governor, with orders to prevent looting, and the occupation began in a relatively civilised manner. But as the shops were closed and most of the houses abandoned, the men helped themselves to whatever they needed, and chaos ensued, aggravated by the action of the Russian governor of the city, Count Rostopchin, who had ordered it to be put to the torch and removed the fire pumps before leaving. By nightfall large parts of it were on fire, and as a significant proportion of the houses were made of wood, it proved impossible to bring under control. By the following morning the flames came dangerously close to the Kremlin, and Napoleon thought it prudent to leave the city with his Guard and move to the nearby palace of Petrovskoe. The city turned into an inferno in which French looters were joined by local criminals, Russian deserters and others eager to save something for themselves from the flames. A drunken bacchanalia accompanied the pillage, rape and murder, shattering the bonds of military discipline.
Once the fire had abated, on 18 September Napoleon rode back into Moscow, but the smouldering remains of the city no longer represented much of a priz
e, and he began to make plans to leave. The question was where to go. A withdrawal to Vilna would mean losing face and admitting that all the exertions since crossing the Niemen and the deaths of Borodino had been in vain. He considered leaving the main body of his army in Moscow and marching on St Petersburg with Eugène’s corps and a few other units, which might persuade Alexander to treat. Eugène was apparently keen on the plan, but others raised objections, and according to Fain, ‘they managed for the first time to make him doubt the superiority of his own judgement’. Some wanted to fall back and take winter quarters in Smolensk, others suggested a march south on the industrial cities of Tula and Kaluga, followed by a foray through the Ukraine. But that would mean abandoning his bases at Minsk and Vilna.2
Napoleon tried to make contact with Alexander, in the hope that the fall of Moscow might have made him more amenable. In his letter, sent through a Russian gentleman who had remained in the city, he castigated Rostopchin’s burning of Moscow as an act of barbarism; in Vienna, Berlin, Madrid and every other city he had occupied the civil administration had been left in place, which had safeguarded life and property. ‘I have made war on Your Majesty without animosity,’ he assured him, saying that a single note from him would put an end to hostilities. He sent another letter through a minor civil servant, and on 3 October suggested sending Caulaincourt to St Petersburg. Caulaincourt excused himself, on the grounds that Alexander would not receive him. Napoleon then decided to send Lauriston. ‘I want peace, I need peace, I must have peace!’ Napoleon told him as he set off two days later. ‘Just save my honour!’3
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