Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  Berthier wrote to Jérôme from Vilnius on June 26, the 29th and the 30th encouraging him to keep in close proximity to Bagration and to capture Minsk.11 ‘If Jérôme pushes strongly ahead,’ Napoleon told Fain, ‘Bagration is deeply compromised.’12 With Jérôme moving in from the west and Davout from the north, Bagration ought to have been crushed between them at Bobruisk, but Jérôme’s bad generalship, as well as Bagration’s skill at withdrawal, meant that the Russian Second Army escaped. By July 13 it was clear that Jérôme had failed. ‘If it had been more rapid and better concerted between the Corps of the army,’ General Dumas, the intendant-general, later opined, ‘the object would have been obtained and the success of the campaign decided at the very opening.’13 When Napoleon learned of the failure he appointed Davout to command Jérôme’s army. His outraged youngest brother resigned his command and flounced back to Westphalia only three weeks into the campaign.14

  ‘The weather is very rainy,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise from Vilnius on July 1, ‘the storms in this country are terrible.’15 Although we don’t have her letters to him, the Empress wrote one every other day that month. ‘God grant I may soon meet the Emperor,’ she told her father at this time, ‘for this separation weighs much too heavily upon me.’16 As well as mentioning his state of health – almost always positively – Napoleon asked after his son in every letter he wrote, begging for news about ‘whether he is beginning to talk, whether he is walking’ and so on.

  On July 1, Napoleon received Alexander’s aide-de-camp, General Alexander Balashov, who told him somewhat belatedly that Napoleon could still withdraw from Russia and avoid war. He wrote Alexander a very long letter reminding the Tsar of his anti-British remarks at Tilsit, and pointing out that at Erfurt he had accommodated Alexander’s needs with regard to Moldavia, Wallachia and the Danube. Since 1810, he said, the Tsar had ‘rearmed on a large scale, declined the path of negotiations’ and demanded modifications to the European settlement. He recalled ‘the personal esteem which you have sometimes shown to me’ but said that the ultimatum of April 8 to withdraw from Germany had been designed ‘clearly to place me between war and dishonour’.17 Even though ‘for eighteen months you have refused to explain anything’, Napoleon wrote, ‘My ear will always be open to peace negotiations … you will always find in me the same feelings and true friendship.’ He blamed the Tsar’s bad advisors and Kurakin’s arrogance for the war, using a phrase he had employed in writing to the Pope, the Emperor of Austria and others in the past: ‘I pity the wickedness of those who gave Your Majesty such bad advice.’ Napoleon then argued that if he had not had to fight Austria in 1809, ‘the Spanish business would have been ended in 1811, and probably peace would have been brokered with England at that time.’ In conclusion, Napoleon offered:

  a truce on the most liberal grounds, such as not considering men in hospital as prisoners – so that neither side has to hurry evacuations, which involves heavy losses – such as the return every two weeks of prisoners made by either side, using a rank-for-rank exchange system, and all the other stipulations that the custom of war between civilized nations has allowed: Your Majesty will find me ready for anything.18

  He ended by repeating that, notwithstanding the war between them, ‘the private feelings that I bear for you are not in the least affected by these events … [I remain] full of affection and esteem for your fine and great qualities and desirous of proving it to you.’*

  Alexander took up none of Napoleon’s proposals. The Russians were retreating steadily before the Grande Armée – the first clash to cost either side more than a thousand casualties didn’t come for four weeks – but that didn’t mean they were offering no resistance. Recognizing that this war was going to be as much about logistics as battles, they systematically destroyed anything that couldn’t be removed. Crops, windmills, bridges, livestock, depots, fodder, shelter, grain – everything that could be of any use whatever to the oncoming French was either taken away or burned, for many miles on both sides of the road. Napoleon had done the same thing on his retreat from Acre, and had admired Wellington’s skilful execution of a similar scorched-earth policy while withdrawing to the Lines of Torres Vedras, for, as Chaptal recorded: ‘It was on traits like these that he judged the skill of generals.’19

  Because eastern Poland and Byelorussia were grindingly poor and sparsely populated regions where malnutrition was common even in peacetime – unlike the lush and fertile grounds of northern Italy and Austria – there would always have been a serious supply problem when its backward agrarian economy was suddenly called upon to feed hundreds of thousands of extra mouths. Yet with entire villages set ablaze by the retreating Russians, the situation quickly became dire. Worse, there were squadrons of light Russian cavalry operating deep behind French lines, including a famously daring one led by Alexander Chernyshev, which threatened Napoleon’s lengthening lines of communication.20

  No sooner was the violently wet weather of late June over than the baking sun returned; fresh water was in short supply and recruits fainted from exhaustion. The heat threw up a choking dust so thick that drummers had to be stationed at the head of battalions so that the men marching behind wouldn’t get lost. By July 5, because of bottlenecks of wagons on the pontoon bridges across rivers, the Grande Armée was facing severe food shortages. ‘Difficulties over food remain,’ noted the Comte de Lobau’s aide-de-camp Boniface de Castellane, ‘soldiers are without food and horses without oats.’21 When Mortier told Napoleon that several members of the Young Guard had actually died of hunger, the Emperor said: ‘It’s impossible! Where are their twenty days’ rations? Soldiers well commanded never die of hunger!’22 Their commander was brought, and stated, ‘either from weakness or uncertainty’, that in fact the men had died from intoxication, upon which Napoleon concluded that ‘One great victory would make amends for all!’23

  An average of 1,000 horses were to die for every day of the 175 days that the Grande Armée spent in Russia. Ségur recalled that the more than 10,000 horses that died from dehydration and heat exhaustion, when unripe rye had been their only fodder, ‘sent forth a stench impossible to breathe’.24 Caulaincourt, Napoleon’s master of horse, was devastated. ‘The rapidity of the forced marches, the shortage of harness and spare parts, the dearth of provisions, the want of care, all helped to kill the horses,’ he recorded.

  The men, lacking everything to supply their own needs, were little inclined to pay heed to their horses, and watched them perish without regret, for their death meant the breakdown of the service on which the men were employed, and thus the end of their personal privations. There you have the secret and cause of our earlier disasters and of our final reverse.25

  As early as July 8 Napoleon had to write to Clarke in Paris to say that it wasn’t necessary to increase cavalry recruitment ‘since we are losing so many horses in this country that we will have great difficulty, with all the resources of France and Germany, in keeping the current number of men in the regiments mounted’.26

  That same day Napoleon learned that the main Russian force, the First Army of the West, was at Drissa, a powerful fortress that was badly situated strategically. Filled with hope, he sent his advance guard there, but by the time they arrived there on the 17th they found it abandoned. On July 16 he was told that although Davout had captured Minsk, Bagration had managed to slip away again. Just before he left Vilnius, Napoleon dined with General de Jomini; they spoke of how close Moscow was – it was actually 500 miles away – and Jomini asked if he intended to march there. Napoleon burst out laughing, saying:

  I much prefer to get there in two years’ time … If M. Barclay thinks that I want to run after him all the way to the Volga, he is very much mistaken. We shall follow him as far as Smolensk and the Dvina, where a good battle will allow us to go into cantonments. I shall return here, to Vilnius, with my headquarters to spend the winter. I shall send for an opera company and actors from the Théâtre-Français. Then, next May, we shall finish the job, if we do n
ot make peace during the winter. That is better, I think, than running to Moscow. What do you say, Monsieur Tactician?27

  Jomini agreed.

  By then Napoleon was facing a devastating new threat for which no army of the day was prepared. Typhus fever is a disease of dirt; its causative organism, Rickettsia prowazekii, lies midway between the relatively large bacteria that cause syphilis and tuberculosis and the microscopic smallpox and measles viruses. Carried by lice which infest unwashed bodies in the seams of dirty clothing, the organism is not transferred by the louse’s bite but through its excrement and corpse.28 It had been endemic in Poland and western Russia for years.

  Heat, lack of water for washing, troops packed together in large numbers at night, the hovels in which they sheltered, scratching irritable areas, not changing clothes: all were ideal conditions for spreading typhus. In the first week of the campaign alone, 6,000 men fell ill with it every day. By the third week of July over 80,000 men had either died or were sick, at least 50,000 of them from typhus. Within a month of the start of the invasion, Napoleon had lost one-fifth of the men in his central army group.29 Larrey, the Grande Armée’s surgeon-general, was a fine doctor, but typhus had not yet been medically linked to lice, which were thought of as an unpleasant pest but no killer, and he was at a loss to know how to respond. Dysentery and enteric fever were dealt with in hospitals in Danzig, Königsberg and Thorn, but typhus was different. Napoleon supported vaccination, especially for smallpox – he had had his son vaccinated at two months – but there was none to be had against typhus. Recent research on the DNA taken from the teeth of 2,000 corpses in a mass grave in Vilnius shows that they almost all carried the typhus exanthematicus pathogen, known as ‘war plague’. Ironically, Napoleon insisted that hospitalized men be made to bathe, but it wasn’t known that healthy men needed to as well.30 Even the Emperor caught lice on the retreat from Moscow, when it was too cold to remove any of his clothes for days on end.31 The way to defeat them was to boil undergarments and iron outer garments with a hot iron, neither of which could be done in the sub-zero temperatures that first arrived on November 4.32

  Typhus (which is quite different from typhoid fever, dysentery and the other ‘diseases of the poor’) had been a growing problem in France itself as the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars progressed, with outbreaks prevalent in villages situated along the major roads. In the Seine-et-Marne, outbreaks were almost uninterrupted after 1806, as well as in the eastern Parisian communes where the troops arrived back from the Rhine. Mortality was heavy in 1810–12 and, when asked to explain this, the medical officers of Melun and Nemours agreed that the principal cause was ‘continual war’.33 Typhus returned when the Allied armies invaded France in 1814 and 1815. The most eminent physicians of the day assumed that it could break out spontaneously given ‘great hardship, colds, lack of the necessaries of life, and the consequent consumption of spoiled foodstuffs’.34 Even twenty years after the end of the wars, J. R. L. de Kerckhove, a former chief of French hospitals in 1812, understood the cause of typhus incorrectly, writing: ‘The typhus that had so decimated the French army had its origin in privation, fatigue and the polluted air that one breathes in places overflowing with the sick and the exhausted. Then it spread by contagion.’35 The connection between lice and typhus was not made until 1911. De Kerckhove got the symptoms absolutely right, however:

  The infection manifested itself through general malaise, accompanied most often by a state of languor; a weak, slow or irregular pulse; an alteration in facial traits; a difficulty executing movements … extreme fatigue, difficulty standing, lack of appetite; vertigo, ringing in the ear, nausea, headaches were very frequent; sometimes he suffered from vomiting; sometimes the tongue was covered in a white or yellow mucus.

  After about four days a fever developed which ‘was evident firstly in shaking followed by an irregular feeling of heat … the fever developed and became continual, the skin was dry … congestions of the brain and sometimes the lung’.36 In most cases, death followed. Up to 140,000 of Napoleon’s soldiers died of disease in 1812, the majority of them from typhus but a significant number from dysentery and related illnesses.

  Napoleon could not allow disease to derail the entire invasion, and pressed on eastwards in the hope of keeping the Russian First and Second Armies of the West separate. He himself was, in the estimation of the ordnance officer attached to his staff, Captain Gaspard Gourgaud, ‘in excellent health’ during the campaign, spending hours a day on horseback with no serious illnesses reported.37 The speed of the Grande Armée’s advance and the rawness of the young recruits meant that many could not keep up. ‘Stragglers are committing awful horrors,’ wrote Castellane, ‘they are sacking and pillaging: mobile columns are organized.’38 On July 10 Napoleon ordered Berthier to send a column of gendarmes to Vorovno ‘to arrest the pillagers of the 33rd, who are committing horrible devastation in that country’.39 By mid-July troops were also deserting in bands.

  On July 18 Napoleon arrived at Gloubokoïé, where he stayed for four days in the Carmelite convent, attending Mass, setting up a hospital, inspecting the Guard and hearing reports about the severe problems the army was facing as a result of the constant marching. ‘Hundreds killed themselves,’ recalled Lieutenant Karl von Suckow, a Mecklenburger serving with the Württemberg Guard, ‘feeling no longer able to endure such hardship. Every day one heard isolated shots ring out in the woods near the road.’40 Medicine had become almost unobtainable, except with cash. The Bavarian General von Scheler reported to his king that even as early as crossing the Vistula ‘all regular food supply and orderly distribution ceased, and from there as far as Moscow not a pound of meat or bread, not a glass of brandy was taken through legal distribution or regular requisition’.41 It was an exaggeration, but a pardonable one.

  There is evidence to suggest that Napoleon was being misled about both food supplies and the number of healthy soldiers in his army. Units that Napoleon was told had food for ten days had actually run out of it altogether, and General Dumas recalled that Davout’s brother-in-law, General Louis Friant, the commander of two Guard grenadier demi-brigades, ‘wanted me to produce a report on the 33rd Line to say it amounted to 3,200 men, whilst I knew that in reality no more than 2,500 men, at most, were left. Friant, who was under Murat’s orders, said Napoleon would be angry with his chief. He preferred to introduce an error, and Colonel Pouchelon provided the mendacious report required.’42 That single deception, therefore, involved three senior officers (and possibly Murat too), or at least required them to be compliant. Somehow the culture of the army had changed, so that Napoleon, who used to be so close to his men, was now regularly lied to by his senior commanders. He continued his personal inspections, but the sheer size of the Grande Armée and the breadth of its advance meant that he relied far more on his commanders than in any previous campaign. Another of his bodyguards also recalled in his memoirs that during the retreat in December Napoleon asked Bessières about the condition of the Guard. ‘Very comfortable, Sire,’ came the reply. ‘The spit is turning at a number of fires; there are chicken and legs of mutton, etc.’ The bodyguard stated: ‘If the marshal had looked with both eyes he would have found that these poor devils had little to eat. Most of them had heavy colds, all were very weary, and their number had greatly decreased.’43

  When on July 19 Napoleon heard from Murat’s aide-de-camp Major Marie-Joseph Rossetti that the Russians had abandoned Drissa, ‘he could not contain himself for joy’.44 Writing to Maret from Gloubokoïé, he said: ‘The enemy has evacuated its fortified camp at Drissa and burnt all its bridges and a huge quantity of stores, sacrificing work and provisions that were the focus of their work over many months.’45* According to Rossetti’s journal, the Emperor, ‘striding quickly up and down’, said to Berthier: ‘You see, the Russians don’t know how to make either war or peace. They are a degenerate nation. They give up their palladium without firing a shot! Come along, one more real effort on our part and my brother [that is, the
Tsar] will repent of having taken the advice of my enemies.’46 He quizzed Rossetti closely about the morale of the cavalry and the condition of the horses, getting favourable responses and making Rossetti a colonel on the spot. Yet in fact Murat was asking far too much of the cavalry, wrecking the horses’ constitutions with the constant work he demanded from them. ‘Always at the forefront of the skirmishers,’ Caulaincourt complained, ‘he succeeded in ruining the cavalry, ending by causing the loss of the army, and brought France and the Emperor to the brink of an abyss.’47

  On July 23 Barclay arrived at Vitebsk, 200 miles east of Vilnius, ready to make a stand if Bagration joined him. But that same day, in the first major engagement of the campaign, Davout blocked Bagration’s drive northward at the battle of Saltanovka (also called Mogilev), albeit at a loss of 4,100 killed, wounded and missing. Bagration was forced to head towards Smolensk instead. Two days later, Murat’s advance guard skirmished with Barclay’s rearguard under Count Ostermann-Tolstoy at Ostrovno, west of Vitebsk. Napoleon hoped that a major battle might be joined. As ever, he wildly exaggerated the facts in his bulletin (his tenth), claiming that Murat had fought against ‘15,000 cavalry and 60,000 infantry’ (in fact the Russians had totalled 14,000) and that they had suffered 7,000 killed, wounded and captured against the true total of 2,500. He put the French losses as 200 killed, 900 wounded and 50 captured, whereas the best modern estimates are 3,000 killed and wounded and 300 captured.48

  Napoleon had high hopes that the Russians might fight rather than surrender the city of Vitebsk, writing to Eugène on the 26th: ‘If the enemy wants to fight, then that’s very fortunate for us.’49 That same day, Jomini’s question about the possibility of marching on Moscow seems to have entered his strategic thinking as a serious possibility for the first time. On July 22 he had told General Reynier that the enemy would not dare attack Warsaw ‘at a time when Petersburg and Moscow are menaced so closely’. Four days later he wrote to Maret: ‘I am inclined to think that the regular divisions will want to take Moscow.’50 His plans to stop at Vitebsk or Smolensk if the enemy didn’t give battle were now morphing into something altogether grander and more ambitious. He was allowing himself to be drawn into Barclay de Tolly’s trap.