by Alan Schom
At about two o’clock in the afternoon, French cavalry followed up this bombardment by sweeping through the remains of that Russian redoubt, supported by Eugène’s infantry, every man of the enemy position exterminated. But still Napoleon would not commit the Old Guard, his only remaining unscathed reserve. When Doctorov and Duke Constantine attempted a counterthrust, they were smashed by a fresh battery of eighty French guns, although the Russians still held fast everywhere else. By now both sides were so utterly exhausted after nearly twelve hours of intensive combat that all firing gradually ceased. “Night alone finally put an end to the fighting,” Caulaincourt summed up. Napoleon had no stomach to continue, nor had Kutuzov. Both armies held in disciplined formations.
That night Napoleon placed his headquarters right in the middle of the battlefield before the great redoubt, amid the cries of the dying. “Never had a battle cost us so many generals and officers,” Caulaincourt commented, without mention of his own brother among their number. “Never had a position been attacked with more vigor and intelligence and so stubbornly defended.” As Napoleon himself attested, “These Russians let themselves be killed as if they were not men, but mere machines, refusing to surrender, and therefore we are taking no prisoners now, and that is not advancing our position one whit.”
Crossing the battlefield that same evening, Caulaincourt summed up the appalling sight, “so cluttered with so many dead. In the village [of Borodino] around which the fighting had centered, the Russian dead were stacked one on top of another. In the plateau behind it, the field was heaped with the dead.” During the night, Caulaincourt continued, “the Russians made such an orderly retreat, such as no enemy has ever made, not leaving a single cart.” When the French passed through the ruins of the village of Mojaisk at noon the next day,
Napoleon was much too preoccupied to talk. His thoughts were as much on the developments in Spain as they were in Russia, and in spite of having won a battle, he was no less anxious than he was before. The condition of our men was appalling, and he was deeply distressed. And all units were badly reduced...To be sure the prospect of entering Moscow now was cheering, but with the Russian Army still out there before us, nothing was finished. Everyone noticed the emperor’s obvious concern, regardless of the meaningless phrases he repeated before them, that the seizure of Moscow meant peace at last, even as Kutuzov was regrouping around that city.
For all his feverish personal intervention on the field, Napoleon had steadfastly refused to commit his reserves, including most of his guard, even most of Eugène’s reserves and Junot’s (Jérôme’s Westphalians, which could possibly have given him a decisive rather than just a nominal victory over the Russians). Even so, the Russian force was left with barely 52,000 effective troops. Napoleon, however, had been so utterly shaken by the fierce wall of fire and human flesh he had encountered that he only left Borodino on September 10 to continue his slow march on Moscow, even then harassed severely by the undaunted Cossacks.
Borodino was technically a French victory. Nevertheless the Russians had withdrawn in remarkably good order and, despite the bloodletting, had strong fresh reserves coming up. Kutuzov was in the heart of his own country, supported by Russians who had seen village after village, city after city, burned and destroyed and looted by the French, these French who were now nearly two thousand miles from their own capital, while Kutuzov was only sixty miles from his own. The French were completely isolated.
As for the casualties, they were catastrophic, the French suffering more than forty thousand dead and wounded, the Russians probably close to fifty thousand.[766] No one kept accurate figures, for the French and Russian “medical corps” were inundated with the vast stream of butchered troops. The French alone lost forty-eight wounded or dead major or lieutenant generals, and with brigadiers that figure probably came closer to seventy, not to mention an additional eighty-six aides-de-camp and thirty-two staff officers. Never had there been such a bloodbath.
It was this slaughter with which Dr. Turiot — writing another of his blunt, gratuitous medical reports from the Galitzine Hospital in Moscow twenty days after the human disaster at Borodino — was so preoccupied. He summed up the entire tragic venture from the time the French had first crossed the Niemen. “The [French] victory at Smolensk merely added to our predicament,” the medical corps lacking everything as they watched the city burn around them. Napoleon had equipped them with neither bandages, medication, clean water, nor even sufficient personnel. The French surgeons as usual lacked a proper field hospital.
The city’s archives building was therefore transformed into a hospital, the documents found were rolled up to serve as splints, cannon plugs and gun cotton replacing bandages and linen, while government files were used as bedding for those operations...Under such conditions it was not without some merit to have carried out all the emergency operations within the first twenty-four hours. Nevertheless almost all the amputees died [due to unsanitary conditions, gangrene and infection setting in on a wide scale]. And as usual for want of a professional and adequate ambulance service the rest of the wounded remained for a long time on the battlefield where they had fallen...complicated by the incessant rainfall, the air infected by the rotting corpses admidst the wounded, and the plunging night temperatures.
The mortality rate was staggering.
Smolensk proved a victory for us because the logistical services brought up five hundred cannon and two thousand five hundred caissons and munitions wagons, [but] as a result of the negligence and incompetence of those same logistical services, they had abandoned far behind our advance route the immense quantities of linen, bandages, and medications we had earlier prepared.
Thus the thousands suffered and died, “that number increased because no lamps were provided for us, limbs amputated and wounds stitched by torchlight, whenever that was available...with the deplorable results as one can readily imagine.” What is more, only forty-five surgeons were available to cope with the casualties, while “the entire corps of nurses deserted us en masse.” Forced to use “untrained surgeons” — that is, men with no medical training or experience — the medical corps “did more harm to our army than all the enemy’s batteries combined.” The French needed at least one hundred more qualified surgeons, “and our losses would then have been less terrible, especially if aided by a properly run medical service.” But corrupt and incompetent army contractors and administrators were largely responsible for many of these woes.
The same situation then recurred many times following Borodino:
My Belgian colleague, Kerckhoven, who had to operate in the church of Borodino, tells me that the wounded lay on the raw ground, for want even of straw bedding...without any sort of medication being available to help their wounds or reduce their pain. Everywhere, therefore, we saw only fright and despair. Several of the wounded trapped in the fire [that swept Borodino] perished in the flames,
while others who somehow survived this “soon died of hunger or as a result of putrefaction.” One soldier badly wounded and abandoned in the field was found two weeks later “half his body buried in the belly of a dead horse, eating its raw flesh like a wild dog.” Those who could be saved were taken to temporary medical quarters in Moscow, at the Galitzine Hospital, the Orphanage, the Paul Hospital, and at the Empress’s Hospital, but still that did not begin to suffice for the tens of thousands without beds. Much of the suffering, Dr. Turiot repeated to Napoleon, was due to French maladministration and to soldiers through their “pillage and waste, and the deliberate pilfering of the immense provisions that would have amply allowed us to bring much physical comfort to the troops. In a word, the army administrators responsible for this débâcle thought only of themselves and of lining their own pockets.” But now the few survivors could not be moved. They had to be be left in Russian cities, in Moscow, for they would never survive the return journey. “To leave Moscow would be to leave the wounded and the healing at the mercy of the army administrators and war contractors, or to
their fate in the hands of ruthless wagon drivers, even the bakers,” who were interested only in loading loot, not human beings. “The taste for loot and blatant venality have transformed those whose job it is to devote themselves entirely to the wounded and the troops into veritable parasites.” Surgeon Turiot prayed for no more great French victories.[767]
Chapter Thirty-Four – Malet’s Malaise
‘I need to make an example of someone in order to prevent this from recurring.’
Not more than five weeks after Borodino, while Napoleon was on the outskirts of Moscow, a new conspiracy to overthrow him and his Empire, one of the most bizarre in the whole of French history, took place in Paris.
It all began on Friday morning, October 23, 1812. General Savary, minister of police since the dismissal of Joseph Fouché two years earlier, had just completed the long daily report for the special courier about to leave for Moscow, where a triumphant Emperor Napoleon was believed to be quartering his troops for the winter. It was tedious, and Savary, despite his mere thirty-eight years, was exhausted by this unending paperwork. Although Fouché’s Police Bulletin had not been continued, the amount of work remained the same if not greater.
After two years in office Savary still was not used to being called a policeman. A soldier by profession, he had passed his entire career in the army, campaigning or at Napoleon’s side as an aide-de-camp, and had even served a short stint as imperial ambassador to St. Petersburg. The only work he had ever done that had anything to do with the police was as commander of the nation’s special troops, known as the élite gendarmerie, which in fact were soldiers called in by the police when needed for maintaining law and order. Louis Dubois was no longer at the prefecture of police, having been replaced in 1810 by the former imperial chancellor, the mild — some thought hopelessly weak — Etienne-Denis, duc de Pasquier. As many saw it, with the removal of both Fouché and Dubois, the police had fallen into a state of lassitude, a feeling that the day’s events were only to reinforce.
As dedicated as Fouché had been to his work, Savary in addition was equally dedicated to Napoleon, and took every task assigned him seriously. It was no doubt because of this unquestioning loyalty that the emperor had entrusted him with this sensitive if irksome portfolio — for which in fact he was not as well suited as his predecessor.
Finishing the night’s work at five o’clock in the morning, the minister signed the report and left it on his desk for his assistant to dispatch. Unlike Fouché, Savary — a bachelor — resided at his ministry and thus simply retired to his bedroom next door. Bolting the door and snuffing the candle, he fell into a deep sleep. Two hours later there was a terrible ruckus in the adjoining apartments, loud enough eventually to awaken the police minister:
I was very tired, and, when I heard the wooden panels of the door to my office crack, splinter, and fall to the floor, at first I tried to ignore it. Then I thought the building was on fire and that they were making all that noise to wake me up. I got up with a jolt, walking across my darkened bedroom, groping for the door to the study. As I unlocked it and entered the office, I saw armed soldiers trying to force the other door, and there were others in the courtyard outside as well...Still standing in my nightshirt, I opened the door and asked who had brought them here.
Instead of answering, the soldiers shouted, “Call the general!” Savary was astonished to see enter his study General Lahorie, his comrade in arms of Revolutionary days and former chief of staff of General Moreau’s Army of the Rhine, but who had since been involved in antigovernment activities resulting in his imprisonment. Not surprisingly there was no smile on Lahorie’s lips, no greeting whatsoever to this former friend.
“You are under arrest,” he said brusquely to the bewildered Police Minister. “Just be grateful that you are in my hands, at least no harm will come to you.” Then he explained: “The Emperor is dead, killed beneath the walls of Moscow on June 8,” adding that in consequence there was a change of government and that he had been ordered by the military governor of Paris to arrest the minister. “You are talking a lot of nonsense.” Savary suddenly smiled. “I have a letter from him here of that same date. I can show it to you.” “But that cannot be, is that possible?” General Lahorie said, genuinely taken aback. “That is not possible,” he said, looking more resolute. Leaving a couple of men behind, he left the room.
Savary grew anxious. He had recently ordered the arrest of General Lahorie for treason and had thrown him into the much-dreaded La Force Prison. Clearly he had broken out: How, When? During Lahorie’s absence, Savary tried to get a few answers: “Who are you?” he asked the officer in command. “I am a captain and adjutant major of the 10th Regiment of the National Guard.” “Very well,” the police minister continued. “These soldiers belong to your troop?” “Yes, sir.” “Then you are not revolting against the government?” he asked. The soldiers looked astonished, protesting, “No, no, we were ordered here by our officers. We were brought here by a general.” “Very well, then, do you know this general?” “No,” they admitted. “In that case, what I see does not surprise me,” Savary continued. “As for me, I know him, and I am therefore going to let you know precisely the dilemma you are in. He is a former aide-de-camp of General Moreau [convicted of treason]...who should have been in prison where I put him. He is a conspirator! And do you know who I am?” Clearly they did not. “Do you know what building you are standing in?” Again they shook their heads. But then one young officer stepped forward, indicating that he knew that Savary was the minister of police. “In that case,” the latter said, “I order you and if needs be, demand, that you arrest General Lahorie immediately.”
Meanwhile the captain and a lieutenant were securely holding both of Savary’s arms, while he tried to extricate himself from this situation, noting that the soldiers’ muskets were not even armed with flints or ammunition and were thus useless. “My dear sir,” Savary said, turning again to the captain, “you are playing at a most deadly game which you dare not lose, and thus prepare to be shot in a quarter of an hour, if I myself am not first. For it will take only that long for the Imperial Guard to get mounted and be on its way, and then you are lost.” In fact the barracks of Napoleon’s guard were located just a few hundred yards away, on the other side of the Seine. Seeing the captain waver, clearly in doubt, Savary pursued his ploy. “If you are a man of honor, do not get involved in this crime, and don’t prevent me from saving all of you. I only ask that you release me.” Savary then reached out and tried to grab the hilt of the captain’s sword, but he was not fast enough. “No, you will march when we tell you to,” said the officer, suddenly reasserting himself.
Through the tall windows Savary saw General Lahorie returning “with a man with a hideous face,” the “sergeant” he had been looking for. “They returned to our room looking quite furious,” Savary later recalled, Lahorie dropping back behind the troops. The “sergeant” then approached, but so drunk he slammed into a heavy table. Stunned for a moment, he stopped to massage his leg; then, cursing, he approached Savary, pointing the tip of his sword at his chest, asking if he recognized him. “I am General Guidal whom you had arrested at Marseilles and brought here to Paris,” he declared defiantly. And then in a flash it all came back to the police minister. This Guidal — whom he had never seen — had been arrested on his orders after having been caught communicating with the British fleet off the coast of Toulon. “Have you come to dishonor yourself by a cowardly murder?” Savary asked boldly. “No, I will not kill you, but you are going to come with me before the Senate.”
Guidal ordered the police minister to get dressed, which he did as slowly as possible, and when one of his secretaries — a former army officer — finally arrived, Savary signaled to him to go back, calling out, “Go tell my neighbor not to worry, no harm has befallen me.” The secretary quickly made his way out before anyone could stop him. Savary’s “neighbor” was in fact one of the senior police directors, the much feared Pierre François Réal, who l
ived just around the corner from the Police Ministry in the Rue des Saints Pères.
Guidal and Lahorie escorted Savary briskly out of the building past the police guards stationed there, who did not even attempt to halt or question the intruders grasping their minister by his arms as they led him to a waiting cabriolet. Although Savary managed to escape as they proceeded along the Quai des Lunettes, he was quickly recaptured by the troops and eventually taken to La Force Prison (not the Senate). What next transpired constitutes one of the most curious tales of conspiracy ever heard.
It all began, as it ended, with Gen. Claude-François de Malet, “one of those men produced by revolutions,” as Réal put it, “but who, lacking the qualities necessary to succeed, finds himself stymied and then succeeded by those more talented than he.”
Malet, born a gentleman and native of the Franche-Comté in 1754, began his career as an army officer, serving in the revolutionary Armies of Italy and the Rhine, and promoted to the rank of brigadier general by 1799. But with the elevation of Bonaparte first to the Consulate and then to the imperial purple — to which Malet vociferously objected — the general’s career was brought to an abrupt halt. He was dismissed from his post in Rome after disagreeing sharply with the French military governor there, General Miolis.[768]
Angered by the injustice of the army authorities, along with the arrogance of Bonaparte, who had the effrontery to crush his beloved First Republic, this genuinely dedicated republican lived in Paris with his wife on half pay. General Malet gradually began meeting other prematurely retired and equally disgruntled army officers — including Generals Lemoyne, Demaillot, Guillaume, Marescot, and Dupont — who made no secret of their own loathing of Bonaparte. It was under such circumstances that one group, meeting daily in a café, first began plotting the overthrow of the Bonaparte regime. This conspiracy differed from most others hatched by the Jacobins and royalists by focusing on one of Napoleon’s many absences from France, preferably on a distant battlefield. The basic formula also differed from others in that it lacked solid organization, funding, and planning. And because for the most part Malet rarely confided in more than one or two senior military officers, he also lacked effective army support in the critically placed garrisons. Nor did he have nationally recognized leaders to take over and administer the new government once the coup had been executed. But none of this seemed to bother the cold, haughty, dreamy Malet, or divert him from his idée fixe.
