by Holub, Josef
To load the musket, the soldier would bite off the end of a cartridge and, keeping the ball in his mouth, sprinkle a little of the powder into a pan in his musket. He would then close the flap on the pan, pour the rest of the powder down the barrel of the gun, and spit the ball in after it. Next, he wadded up the paper and rammed it down on the ball with a special tool, the ramrod. When he fired the musket, the powder in the pan would ignite and set off a charge in the barrel, firing the lead ball. The whole process took about one and a half minutes for a trained soldier.
Unfortunately, even for a trained soldier, the muskets were extremely unreliable and dangerous. It was important to keep the gun barrel as clean as possible, because after about a dozen shots, the gunpowder would have caked up the inside of the barrel so much that it became impossible to load any more balls. The worst defect of the gun was that sometimes the powder in the pan would go off, but not in the barrel. (This is where we get our expression “a flash in the pan.”) In the midst of battle, a soldier might not realize that the gun hadn’t fired — and start loading another ball. If the first one then went off, it would explode in his face.
Sustenance
Soldiers in Napoleon’s army were supposed to receive a daily ration of food. The standard ration included one and a quarter pounds of biscuits, a handful of rice or dried vegetables, about half a pound of salt beef and lard, some salt, half a pint of wine, and a shot of brandy.
At the beginning of the campaign, Napoleon had accumulated rations to support 400,000 men and fodder for 50,000 horses for fifty days. In other words, he had millions of pounds of rice, wheat, oats, wine, and brandy. Meat was supplied by herds of cattle that were driven behind the marching army.
Napoleon realized that the supply train following the Grande Armée would be enormous, and this created a problem: It meant there would be thousands of horses and oxen pulling the wagons laden with food and supplies, and these horses and oxen would have to be fed. The only way to have enough fodder to feed all these animals of burden would be to harvest hay and oats from fields as the army moved through the countryside. And the crops would not be ripe for harvesting until the middle of summer. This meant that Napoleon could not start his campaign until then — and that left him only a few months to achieve victory before the bitter Russian winter began. So he was determined to win the war quickly with a decisive battle.
The March
The Grande Armée had a rigid marching routine. No matter what the weather, the soldiers were expected to march between ten and twenty-two miles a day. If the commanders needed to get somewhere quickly, they might order the soldiers to march even faster, and cover up to thirty-four miles in one day. In ideal circumstances, they would receive a day of rest after five days of marching.
The march to Russia was certainly less than ideal, though. As the Grande Armée massed on the western frontier of Russia in mid-June, 1812, it faced formidable challenges. The roads were much worse in Eastern Europe than in France, Germany, or Italy; the weather was oppressively hot and dry. As these hundreds of thousands of men churned down the narrow dirt roads toward Russia, they created huge plumes of dust. Almost immediately, soldiers and horses began dying of exhaustion and dehydration.
Finally, on the morning of June 24, the whole army crossed the River Niemen, the border of Russia. They had officially invaded. Although conditions were still terrible, most soldiers felt hopeful that they would soon meet the Russian army and fight to a glorious victory. Instead, their first battle would be against Mother Nature.
Four days after the Grande Armée entered Russia, a sudden storm broke out in the evening. Within minutes, the dry and sweltering heat was broken by a torrent of freezing rain. It rained all night and all the next day, and the dust turned into rivers of mud. Wagons were swept away, soaked supplies were rendered useless, and huge numbers of horses drowned or froze to death.
From this point on, the supply system completely broke down. Soldiers no longer received any rations from the military, so they were forced to forage for everything they needed. Foraging meant taking food, drink, and other necessities from the local population. Unfortunately, the Russian countryside was not as fertile as other parts of Europe, and what little there was belonged to the Russian peasants, who hid their cattle in the forest and buried their food underground to protect it. The soldiers soon learned to turn whole villages upside down in their quest for sustenance.
One of the worst hardships of the march was the shortage of water. The soldiers at the head of the army often drank dry the wells along the roadside. To make matters worse, the Russians deliberately polluted wells by dumping dead horses or men into them. As a result, many thousands of soldiers became ill and died from dysentery (a disease that causes severe diarrhea).
The War
Napoleon kept rushing the Grande Armée forward in pursuit of the Russian army. He knew from his scouts that the Russians had a sizable force just ahead of him, and he was baffled and frustrated when they refused to stand and fight. This behavior seemed cowardly according to the military standards of the time. But the longer the Russians could delay, and the farther they could draw back into Russia, the weaker the Grande Armée became.
In mid-August, though, the two armies did collide at the city of Smolensk. Here, Napoleon hoped to deal the Russians the decisive blow he had planned from the beginning of the campaign. Both sides fought fiercely, but the result was inconclusive. The Russians managed to evacuate Smolensk during the middle of the night, and they would not admit defeat.
The Grande Armée continued to pursue the Russian army along the road to Moscow. At the beginning of September, Napoleon was overjoyed to hear that the Russians were preparing battle positions in the town of Borodino, a short distance outside Moscow. On September 7, the two armies were once again facing each other at close range. The battle began at 6 a.m. and raged for twelve hours of intense, often hand-to-hand combat. By the end, at least 73,000 men died on both sides — the most deadly battle in history.
When Napoleon and his surviving army reached the hilltops overlooking Moscow’s golden onion-domes a week later, they waited for a delegation from the city to bring terms of surrender. Instead, nobody appeared. Then, on the evening of September 15, flames appeared on rooftops across Moscow. Soon, the flames turned into a conflagration, and the whole city burned for three days.
Again, the Russians had pursued a strategy Napoleon never would have imagined: They abandoned their capital city and set fire to it, so that the Grande Armée had nothing to conquer. Nonetheless, Napoleon ordered his troops to stay in Moscow while he attempted to convince tsar Alexander I, the ruler of Russia, to sign a peace treaty. He spent four weeks in negotiations with the tsar, who ultimately refused to sign anything.
At the end of those four weeks, it was mid-October. The weather was turning cold and wet. Napoleon had no choice: He had to retreat. On October 19, the Grande Armée assembled once again at the gates of Moscow, this time to march back along the way they had come. They had to travel through countryside that they themselves had devastated, and this time, they had to do it in winter.
The retreat from Moscow was accompanied by even greater suffering than the march there had been. Ice and snow covered the roads; food and shelter were difficult — and sometimes impossible — to find; and many soldiers lacked the heavy boots and furs required to survive in the sub-zero temperatures. Meanwhile, Russian troops and Cossacks (warriors on horseback) continuously harried the retreating army. The soldiers became accustomed to seeing frozen bodies on the side of the road.
Napoleon was marching the remnants of the Grande Armée toward Vilnius, a city in Lithuania held by troops he had left behind. In order to reach Vilnius, though, the army had to cross the Berezina River, and the Russians had burned the only bridge across the river. Ironically, just as the Grande Armée drew close to the Berezina, the weather turned slightly warmer, and the ice that covered the river began to thaw. This meant that crossing the river ice would not be
an option. The only option was to rebuild the bridge.
Napoleon ordered part of his army to distract the Russians a few miles from the river, while his engineers feverishly built two bridges. The first bridge was completed in three hours. Unsurprisingly, a chaotic rush to get across the river to safety ensued. When the Grande Armée’s rear guard could no longer hold off the Russians, they crossed the bridges and then set fire to them — despite the fact that thousands of stragglers remained on the Russian side.
On December 9, most of the remaining Grande Armée arrived at Vilnius, where they found what seemed like unparalleled luxuries: warm food and sleep under a rooftop. Only a day later, though, the Russian army arrived, having pursued Napoleon and his soldiers into non-Russian territory. Some soldiers managed to escape the city, but many were hunted down and imprisoned or killed.
It was not until January and February of 1813 that the last survivors of the Grande Armée hobbled into their home barracks and depots in France, Italy, Holland, Germany, and other countries across Europe. Those who survived had overcome almost insurmountable odds.
Copyright
Cover art by Gregory Manchess
Cover design by Leyah Jensen
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
Arthur A. Levine Books hardcover edition, art directed by Elizabeth B. Parisi, published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., October 2005.
Text copyright © 2002 by Josef Holub
Translation copyright © 2005 by Michael Hofmann
Map illustration copyright © 2005 by Kirk Caldwell
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eISBN 978-0-545-35569-8
First Scholastic paperback printing, February 2007
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