Napoleon Bonaparte

by Alan Schom

  In fact by October 3 Napoleon was already secretly preparing to leave. On that date, even before Lauriston’s next return from St. Petersburg, he ordered his men to be able to move out of the city by the fifteenth or sixteenth. The news, which still continued to arrive from Paris almost daily, was bad, and worse from Spain, where Wellington was undoing everything Napoleon had achieved. But Napoleon’s courier service had broken down twice again, and his messengers had been seized or killed. Then followed the czar’s final rejection.

  With the few reinforcements that got through, counting troops in the outlying areas, Napoleon had entered Russia with nearly 450,000 men. Now he had a total immediate effective force in Moscow of 102,260, including 14,760 cavalry, while his 41,500-man Imperial Guard was reduced to 21,500 at most. He also had 533 pieces of artillery of the original 1,372, but lacked horses to haul even that number and their caissons. There were also some ten to fifteen thousand French wounded and ill in hospitals, as the wretched Dr. Turiot kept reminding him. How was he to move them?’

  But nonetheless the decision was made. Horses, wagons, carts, and anything else with wheels were loaded with the wounded and staggering mountains of loot, including gigantic statues and paintings, huge pieces of furniture, and even enormous Persian carpets. And then the orders that Napoleon had so long refused to give came from his lips. At noon on October 19, thirty-five days after their triumphant arrival, Bonaparte, his coaches, and the Imperial Guard at the head of an enormous column slowly, cumbersomely marched through the gates of the Kremlin and Moscow for the last time, leaving behind Marshal Mortier with some 7,000 or so troops with orders to protect their rear and blow up the entire Kremlin on October 23. The order was never executed.

  The plan was to take the southern route via the well-provisioned French army warehouses in the ruins of Smolensk, Napoleon hoping to defeat Kutuzov in one final battle at Kaluga and thus clear the way for the rest of this ignominious withdrawal. While the Cossacks continued to harry the French lines, already dozens of miles long, snapping at their heels like enormous packs of jackals, Murat was caught napping by the Russians. General Sébastiani’s corps was defeated at Vinkovo, as Kutuzov attempted in vain to capture Murat’s entire cavalry. But feeding more than one hundred thousand men and tens of thousands of horses was difficult at the best of times. With the first heavy frosts setting in with a vengeance, and with some forty thousand carts, wagons, carriages, caissons and limbers, it was a mad scheme at best. But off they went down the old Kaluga Road, via Desna in the direction of Maloyaroslavets. Junot’s corps was on the Borodino Road at Mozajsk, where they were to meet. But Junot, who had ultimately replaced Jérôme Bonaparte, was by now clearly mentally unbalanced, failing to follow orders or to appear on schedule and arguing violently with every other senior commanding officer and marshal. Having been stripped first of his prestigious post as Napoleon’s senior aide-de-camp, next of his title military governor of Paris, then of his appointment as commander in chief of the French invasion of Portugal (where he had been defeated by Wellington, losing Portugal in the process), Junot had ever since been going downhill precipitously. Yet with the loss of well over sixty generals at Borodino alone, Napoleon had no choice but to keep a man of Junot’s field experience.

  The first two days of the march from Moscow alternated from chilly downpours to warm weather, followed by frigid nights, Méneval — himself shortly to suffer from severe frostbite and the loss of the use of one leg — recorded in his Memoirs. On October 22 Doctorov’s corps set off from Tarutino, hoping to block the head of Napoleon’s army, then led by Prince Eugène, at Maloyaroslavets, while Kutuzov headed north of Kaluga. On the twenty-fourth a fierce battle began at Maloyaroslavets between Doctorov’s troops and one of Eugène’s divisions, Eugène remaining in control, as Napoleon’s army moved up along the north bank. Although Doctorov retreated, the French had lost seven more generals. On October 25, during one of his usual reconnaissance tours, Napoleon, with just a handful of the Imperial Guard as an escort, was nearly captured. He just barely escaped, his staff officers drawing sabers to defend him, he then declining to discontinue his march on Kaluga, returning instead via Oshigovo to Mozajsk. The unwieldy army now straggled in a column some fifty miles long, accompanied by fresh skirmishes and casualties.

  French horses were dropping by the thousands, as wounded troops, baggage, cannon, and loot were abandoned along the route. Colonel Marbot now referred to the vast land of Russia that was swallowing them up as “this enormous tomb,” they leaving behind some “30,000 corpses half eaten by wolves.” They reached Gzhatsk and then Viasma, in the direction of Smolensk, even as Prince von Schwarzenberg abandoned the French army for Warsaw. To the north, a Russian Army now under General Tschashniki, was keeping the combined II and IX French Corps off balance, endangering Napoleon’s approach to the critical Berezina River crossing, while Admiral Chitchagov was barring the route between Brest-Litovsk and Slonim.

  Napoleon literally had only the garrison of Smolensk upon which to depend, as Kutuzov’s advance guard under Miloradovich pressed on. “The [French] regiments began to dissolve and collapse,” one French officer recorded, with tens of thousands of horses littering the wayside, their wagons and munitions burned. And all along the road, Russian civilians who had suffered so brutally at French hands during the initial invasion of the country were now carrying out atrocities against these same French troops and stragglers as they retraced their steps. While Napoleon was at Slavkoyvo, Miloradovich’s army finally reached and attacked Napoleon’s rear guard. Davout found himself surrounded, saved at the last minute only by the valiant intervention of Prince Eugène. Ney’s III Corps was ordered to take over the rear guard from Davout, though by now Ney himself was fighting off pretty savage attacks by the Russians. The French cavalry was down to just a few thousand men from the nearly fifteen thousand that had set out from Moscow. They could not be protected and were incapable of protecting themselves. In the first week of November, as the entire French army disintegrated, large packs of wolves moved in, and Cossacks and regular cavalry units ravaged the haggard French line, the snow began to fall, burying the dead in some cases for the next 154 years. “I must inform Your Highness that the past three days of suffering have so dispirited my men that as of this moment I believe they are no longer capable even of defending themselves,” Prince Eugène de Beauharnais reluctantly reported on November 8. Similar reports were reaching Berthier and Napoleon from every unit of the French army.

  That same week Napoleon received news of further setbacks in Spain, and more immediately, of Savary’s crushing of General Malet’s attempted coup d’état which, though thwarted, had unsettled Paris and even the staunchest of Napoleonic governmental institutions. Meanwhile, ahead of him, Wittgenstein’s and Chitchagov’s armies, totaling seventy thousand Russian troops, were closing in on Minsk and the Berezina River crossing.

  Napoleon finally reached Smolensk on November 9, even his Imperial Guard refusing to obey orders, going amok, killing, destroying, raping, and looting warehouses and homes, as the temperature continued to drop. Then came news of General Baraguey d’Hillier’s surrender to the Russians not far from Smolensk. There were to be no new reinforcements for Napoleon.

  As the Grande Armée gradually straggled into Smolensk over the next four days, Napoleon was already setting out for the next depots at Vitebsk and Minsk. The French army had lost some sixty thousand men just since leaving Moscow a little less than a month before. The guard still maintained fourteen thousand men, but they were out of control and, what was worse, the most powerful corps of the entire army, under Davout, had dwindled to ten thousand, while Ney was down to three thousand and the VI and VIII Corps combined totaled only fifteen hundred. Napoleon’s only hope, and it was not much of one, lay in the twenty-five thousand men awaiting him at Orsha, that is the IX and II Corps under Marshals Victor and Oudinot.

  But instead of heading northwest toward Vitebsk, on November 12 the head of the French column set
off southwest for Krasnoe, Borisov, on the Berezina, and Minsk, with Kutuzov’s army and cavalry harrying them every step of the way, and Platov’s ever vigorous cavalry and Miloradovich’s main force pressing respectively from the north and south. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s army of perhaps twenty-five to thirty thousand troops, in control of Vitebsk and Polotsk, already further to the north were moving westward as well, while General Chitchagov’s army of thirty-four thousand were coming straight at Napoleon’s “army,” head on from the direction of Minsk, where the French had been hoping to find a refuge. Bonaparte still appeared to have no idea just how completely he was surrounded, with Macdonald’s force of twenty thousand isolated at Riga, on the Baltic, well out of the picture, while the Bavarian Count von Wrede, commanding Napoleon’s VI Corps west of Polotsk, was abandoning his army. Only Oudinot’s eight thousand men, now to the northwest of Minsk, seemed to offer any real hope, along with Victor’s reported eleven thousand.

  Reaching Krasnoye on November 15, Napoleon waited for two entire days for his army to catch up with him, while the Imperial Guard smashed through Kutuzov’s forces barring the road to Minsk, sending 35,000 Russians fleeing (an encounter sometimes referred to as the battle of Krasnoye).

  But the situation was still desperate. With Russian forces literally surrounding him on all sides, Napoleon could wait no longer. Taking advantage of this minor victory, he ordered the French army to push on brutally, abandoning Ney’s rear guard in the process, for he had just learned that Chitchagov had seized Minsk from the French garrison that had been under Schwarzenberg, at one fell blow cutting off his last major supply center and escape route. As for Schwarzenberg, he was falling back to Warsaw.

  Napoleon drove hard, passing Orsha toward the Berezina before Chitchagov and Kutuzov could block that exodus as well. With Minsk fallen, and the road cut to Warsaw, where there was heavy fighting, Napoleon was left with only one immediate option, to move to the northwest, past the Dnieper and Dvina and Ulle, in the direction of Smorgon and Kovno, retracing his steps over the Niemen, to the French-held bastions of Königsberg and Danzig (still held by Rapp’s 30,000 men).

  Much to his surprise, Napoleon’s abandoned rear guard, Ney’s III corps given up as lost, now appeared through the driving snow from Smolensk, where Napoleon had in fact forgotten to give Ney the order to retreat. (Ney, who had 10,000 men at the beginning of September, was now down to 1,000.) Meanwhile the snow, which had begun on November 3, continued, perhaps aiding Ney in his escape, which took place also thanks to Prince Eugène’s courage in sending a detachment to help them through.

  Now with the news that General Dombrowski’s much reduced French cavalry had lost the bridgehead it was holding for Napoleon over the Berezina defeated by Chitchagov’s much larger force of thirty-four thousand men, came the dreaded confirmation that Wittgenstein’s thirty-thousand-man army — larger than Junot’s, Poniatowski’s, Murat’s, Ney’s, Eugène’s, and Davout’s combined — was nearing Borisov, on the Berezina. That escape route, too, would now be cut. The French could never reach Kovno or Königsberg, it seemed — until once again Napoleon’s fabled good fortune saved the situation: Brigadier General Corbineau had managed to find a suitable ford upriver of Borisov.

  Laying an elaborate trap, Napoleon sent in Oudinot’s reinforced II Corps to carry out a feinted fording of the Berezina, even threatening to take Borisov, to draw off the Russians opposite Corbineau’s ford at Studenkia. Oudinot’s men set to their task noisily enough at a river crossing near Uchlodi, and the Russians immediately withdrew all his forces from Studenkia, to oppose Oudinot’s effective diversion. A delighted Bonaparte threw up two makeshift bridges over the Berezina at Studenkia.

  Despite the snowfall, the land was not yet frozen, nor was the river, which made the going hard, but Napoleon’s artillery and engineers managed to achieve their task, permitting what remained of the French army to cross to the west bank on November 26-29. Napoleon had escaped an elaborate trap, though Marbot admitted that the size of the Berezina at this point was in reality “no wider than the Rue Royale” in Paris.

  Scarcely had most of Napoleon’s forces crossed the river, trudging through marshland while Victor IX’s Corps held the tenuous bridgehead, than they were finally attacked in force, Oudinot and Ney holding the enemy off. Nevertheless, with Platov’s Cossacks descending from the north, and Wittgenstein’s army corps closing in on the eastern shore, not quite all the French escaped, and by December some four thousand men of Marshal Victor’s valiant rear-guard divisions were captured before they could make their escape from the Russian pincer movement. They never returned to France.

  Napoleon had most of his remaining effective troops on the west bank now (less some 36,000 French stragglers who had reached the burning bridges too late and also fallen prisoner to the Russians). There weren’t many left: nearly 40,000 men, a large percentage of them officers and senior noncoms, though only 14,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry, and perhaps 200 cannon. The once fabulous French Imperial Guard was reduced to 6,000 men, while the combined corps of Napoleon’s, Davout’s, and Eugène’s forces totaled no more than 3,600.

  The escape across the Berezina may have been a partial success, but the winter Caulaincourt had been so anxious about now set in with a vengeance, temperatures dropping from minus four degrees Fahrenheit to minus twenty-nine. In the first half of December the French lost another 36,000 prisoners to the Russians as well as 311 pieces of heavy artillery. Indeed, three days after Napoleon’s crossing of the Berezina, the famed Grande Armée had dwindled to 8,823 men.

  After reaching Molodesczo, on December 5, a very depressed Napoleon drafted the famous 29th Army Bulletin and issued decrees for the raising of another 300,000 men. That same day at Smorgoni he gathered together his senior commanders for the last time, placing an unhappy Joachim Murat in command of the remnant of his army, another grave error, for Murat too would shortly be abandoning them.

  At 10 P.M. precisely, we climbed into our carriages, the Emperor and myself [Caulaincourt] in his enormous sleeping coach, with the brave Wonsowicz riding alongside on his horse, along with Roustam and a couple of others. The Duc de Frioul [Duroc] and the Comte de Lobau followed us in the next caleche, and behind them the Baron Fain and Louis Constant in the other. All measures were so carefully prepared, and the secret so well guarded, that no one had the least idea what we were about.[770]

  Setting out from Smorgoni accompanied by a two-hundred-man guard, they reached Oschmiana at midnight. After Napoleon ordered everyone to change into heavy sheepskin coats and boots, and even equipped with bearskin rugs, they set out for Vilna and Kovno, crossing the frozen Niemen into the frozen wastes of Poland. Progress through the snow soon became impossible, forcing them to change into sleighs over the next several hours until they reached Warsaw. Thence on to Dresden, where the formerly gaily-lit, chandeliered state reception rooms of the Saxon palace were dark and cold. Napoleon dictated to Méneval’s replacement, Baron Fain, orders calling forth another 40,000 Austrian and Prussian troops to come to his aid. The balls, the glittering uniforms of the bevy of kings, and the ravishing gowns of their queens, duchesses, and princesses, which had so filled these vast rooms just a few months earlier, now haunted them, as Napoleon, disguised as Caulaincourt’s secretary, scuttled back into his sleigh and headed for Erfurt, Fulda, Mainz, Metz, and Meaux, where his last relay of exhausted horses gave out. He had to ask the head of that posting house for his personal chaise and a fresh team of horses for the last leg of the journey. The postilion was sent on ahead in the December darkness, “passing at a full gallop beneath the half-finished Arc de Triomphe” to announce their arrival. By now Napoleon’s large escort had been reduced to a few cavaliers as they finally pulled into the cobbled courtyard of the Tuileries.

  [Napoleon] descended safe and sound...just as the clock was striking the last quarter before midnight. The concierges took us for some officers bearing dispatches and let us pass as we reached the entrance to the gallery opening
into the garden. The Swiss Guard, who had been asleep, came to the door in his nightshirt, a lantern in his hand, to see who was knocking. He was bewildered by our appearance [Napoleon still in disguise] and called his wife. I had to give my name several times before they agreed to open the door for us. He had to rub his eyes before he finally recognized us.

  Meanwhile, back in eastern and central Europe, nature and the Russian forces had taken their toll of the remainder of the Grande Armée. Divisional General Loison left Vilna with his remaining garrison of 14,000 men, which now was down to some 4,000. Murat, Macdonald and Schwarzenberg had also withdrawn, abandoning 141 more guns and tens of thousands of men unable to continue to Tilsit and Bialystok. In vain the valiant Ney held Kovno until December 14. Pursued by Russians across nearly six hundred miles of desolate frozen land, the last remnants of the French army, approximately 43,000, recrossed the Niemen. The famed Napoleonic Imperial Guard was down to fewer than 1,000 men. The final tally was stark. Of 612,000 French and allied soldiers, 400,000 had died and 100,000 were left behind as Russian POWs. According to official records, the Russians burned or buried 243,612 men of the Grande Armée. On New Year’s Day, 1813, the Russian army, still in pursuit, crossed the frozen Niemen, heading for the Rhine, while in Prussia Baron Karl von Stein was reminding his people of the necessity of “restoring the independence of Germany.”

  Caulaincourt may have regretted being one of the survivors during the two-week ride from Smorgoni to Paris. He was a captive audience for endless diatribes and denunciations by a defeated Bonaparte who blamed all his woes on Murat, Eugène, Berthier, Lefebvre, Bessières, Mortier, Ney, Davout, Poniatowski and his faithless Poles, the Russians, the weather, and of course the English, for in the final analysis, it had all been the fault of the English. As for the French, how they had betrayed him! But he would show them.