Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  At 11 p.m. Bessières arrived at Napoleon’s quarters in a weaver’s hut near the bridge at Gorodnya, a village some 60 miles south-west of Moscow, telling the Emperor that he believed that Kutuzov’s position further down the road was ‘unassailable’. When Napoleon went out at 4 a.m. the next morning to try to see for himself – one can’t see beyond the town from the hillside on the other side of the ravine – he was almost captured by a large body of Tatar uhlans (light cavalry), who got to within forty yards of him yelling, ‘Houra! Houra!’ (Plunder! Plunder!) before two hundred Guard cavalry dispersed them.66 He later laughed about this close escape to Murat, but thereafter he wore a phial of poison around his neck in case of capture. ‘Things are getting serious,’ he told Caulaincourt an hour before daybreak on the 25th. ‘I beat the Russians every time, and yet never reach an end.’67 (That wasn’t quite true; Murat’s defeat at Tarutino had been a significant reverse, although Napoleon himself hadn’t been present.)

  Fain said that Napoleon was ‘shaken’ by the sheer number of wounded at Maloyaroslavets, and moved by their fate; eight generals including Delzons had been killed or wounded.68 Continuing down the Kaluga road would almost certainly lead to another costly battle, whereas a withdrawal northwards towards the supply depots of the Moscow–Smolensk road along which they had come the previous month would avoid that necessity. There was a third possible route, through Medyn and Yelnya, where a fresh division of reinforcements from France awaited them. (Of Yelnya, Napoleon was to write on November 6: ‘The region is said to be beautiful and to have ample supplies.’69) Had they taken that route, though the maps gave no clues to the state of its roads, they might have reached Smolensk before the first major snowfall. Was the fact that the Grande Armée now had a huge tail of wagons, carts, prisoners, camp-followers and booty a factor in Napoleon’s thinking? The record is mute. What did influence his thinking was that 90,000 men under Kutuzov would have been shadowing his left flank all the way to Yelnya, and an army stretched out 60 miles along the road would have been vulnerable at several points. Moving blind across country, a quartermaster’s nightmare, seemed riskier than returning via the Mozhaisk route, where he at least knew that there were food depots. However, it would take far longer, effectively tracing a dog-leg of several hundred miles due north just as winter was closing in.

  Napoleon didn’t usually convene councils of war – he hadn’t called a single one during the entire campaign against Russia and Prussia in 1806–7 – but he did now. On the night of Sunday, October 25 the weaver’s hut at Gorodnya, whose sole room was divided into the Emperor’s bedroom and study by a single canvas sheet, played host to a galère of marshals and generals whose advice Napoleon sought before making his crucial decision. ‘This mean habitation of a humble workman’, wrote one of his aides-de camp later, ‘contained within it an emperor, two kings and three generals.’70 Napoleon said that the expensive victory at Maloyaroslavets had not compensated for Murat’s outright defeat at Tarutino; he wanted to strike south towards Kaluga, towards the main bulk of the Russian army which was straddling that road. Murat, smarting from the drubbing he had sustained, agreed, and urged an immediate attack towards Kaluga. Davout supported the other, at that point undefended, southern route via Medyn and through the unspoiled fertile fields of north Ukraine and the Dnieper, before regaining the main highway at Smolensk, if it went well, several days march ahead of Kutuzov. The ‘Iron Marshal’ feared that following Kutuzov down the Kaluga road would draw the Grande Armée ever deeper into Russia without achieving a decisive battle before the snows fell in earnest, whereas turning the whole army around to get onto the Mozhaisk–Smolensk road would create delays, congestion and supply problems.

  ‘Smolensk was the goal,’ recorded Ségur. ‘Should they march thither by Kaluga, Medyn or Mozhaisk? Napoleon was seated at a table, his head supported by his hands, which concealed his features, as well as the anguish which they no doubt expressed.’71 Most of those present thought that because part of the army was already stationed at Borovsk, on the way to Mozhaisk, along with a large number of guns that had not been present at Maloyaroslavets, the Borovsk–Mozhaisk–Smolensk route was the best one. They pointed out ‘how exhausting this change of direction [to follow Kutuzov] would prove to cavalry and artillery already in a state of exhaustion, and that it would lose us any lead we might have over the Russians’. If Kutuzov ‘would not stand and fight in an excellent position such as at Maloyaroslavets’ he was hardly likely to join battle 60 miles further away, they argued. Of this opinion were Eugène, Berthier, Caulaincourt and Bessières. Murat furiously criticized Davout’s plan to head for Medyn because it would present the army’s flank to the enemy; this prompted an ill-tempered exchange of views between the two marshals, who had long been at odds with each other. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ said Napoleon as he concluded the conference that night. ‘I will decide.’72

  He chose the northern route back to Smolensk. His only recorded explanation for perhaps the single most fateful decision of his reign is to be found in what he told Berthier to write to Junot about the Russians, ‘We marched on the 26th to attack them, but they were in retreat; [Davout] went in pursuit of them, but the cold and the necessity of offloading the wounded who were with the army made the Emperor decide to go to Mozhaisk and from there to Vyazma.’73 Yet this made no sense; if the enemy was retreating it would have been the ideal time to attack him. It was likely to be much colder to the north, and the needs of the wounded had never decided strategy before. When, years later, Gourgaud tried to blame Murat and Bessières for the route the army took, Napoleon corrected him: ‘No; I was the master, and mine was the fault.’74 Like a Shakespearian tragic hero, he chose the fatal path despite others being available. Ségur later described Maloyaroslavets as ‘This fatal field which put a halt to the conquest of the world, where twenty victories were thrown to the wind, and where our great empire began to crumble to the ground.’ The Russians were plainer yet no less accurate, erecting a small commemorative plaque on the battlefield stating simply: ‘End of offensive. Start of ruin and rout of the enemy.’

  As soon as Kutuzov understood Napoleon was retreating, he turned his army around and adopted a ‘parallel mark’ strategy to harry him out of Russia, marching alongside the French army and attacking when he saw weakness, but refusing Napoleon the opportunity of a decisive counter-attack. Napoleon had retreated from Acre and Aspern-Essling, but neither of those situations even approximated what he now faced, especially once the thermometer plunged to –4°C in late October. In his memoirs, The Crime of 1812, Labaume recalled the continual sound of the rearguard blowing up their own ammunition wagons, ‘which reverberated from afar like the roar of thunder’. The horses that could pull them had died, sometimes as a result of eating tainted straw from thatch torn off cottage roofs. On reaching Ouvaroskoe, Labaume found ‘numerous corpses of soldiers and peasants, as well as infants with their throats cut, and young girls murdered having been ravished’.75 As Labaume was in the same army as the perpetrators, there was no reason for him to have invented these outrages, which began once discipline evaporated.

  Men who had kept bread since Moscow now ‘crept off to eat it in secret’.76 On October 29–30 the army tramped – it no longer marched – past the Borodino battlefield, which was full of ‘bones gnawed by famished dogs and birds of prey’. A French soldier was found who had had both his legs broken and for two months had been living off herbs, roots and a few bits of bread he had found on corpses, sleeping at nights inside the bellies of eviscerated horses. Although Napoleon ordered that any survivors be carried on carts, some were unceremoniously pushed off shortly afterwards.77 By late October even generals were eating nothing but horseflesh.78 On November 3 a Russian attempt to encircle Davout was repelled at Vyazma, when Ney, Eugène and Poniatowski (who was wounded) turned back to aid him. The abnormally large number of French prisoners taken there – 3,000 – indicates how close the Grande Armée was to demoralization.

  The first hea
vy snowfall came on November 4, as the French retreated in disorder from Vyazma. ‘Many, suffering far more from the extreme cold than from hunger, abandoned their accoutrements,’ Labaume recalled, ‘and lay down beside a large fire they had lighted, but when the time came for departing these poor wretches had not the strength to get up, and preferred to fall into the hands of the enemy rather than to continue the march.’79 That took courage in itself, as the rumours about what the peasantry and Cossacks were doing to captured Frenchmen easily equalled those of what the Turks, Calabrians and Spanish had done, and included skinning them alive. (Peasants would buy prisoners off the Cossacks at two rubles a head.) The luckiest were merely stripped of their clothing and left naked in the snow, but torture was commonplace (hence the high rate of suicide on the retreat).80 Even surrendering successfully en masse to the Russian regular army was akin to a death sentence: of one column of 3,400 French prisoners-of-war only 400 survived; in another only 16 out of 800. When fifty French soldiers were captured by peasants and buried alive in a pit, ‘a drummer boy bravely led the devoted party and leapt into the grave’.81 There were occasional tales of altruism: Labaume recorded a French soldier sharing his food with a starving Russian woman whom he had found in a cemetery just after she had given birth, for example. But overall the retreat now became reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s depiction of Hades.82

  Ney took command of the rearguard on November 5, as the snowfalls obliterated landmarks and iced-up roads. Little thought had been given to fitting ice-resistant horseshoes except by the Poles and some Guard regiments, which led to many horses slipping and falling. By the second week of November, ‘The army utterly lost its morale and its military organization. Soldiers no longer obeyed their officers; officers paid no regard to their generals; shattered regiments marched as best they could. Searching for food, they dispersed over the plain, burning and sacking everything in their way … Tormented by hunger, they rushed on every horse as soon as it fell, and like famished wolves fought for the pieces.’83 Meanwhile toes, fingers, noses, ears and sexual organs were lost to frostbite.84 ‘The soldiers fall,’ Castellane recalled of the Italian Royal Guard, ‘a little blood comes to their lips, and all is over. When they see this sign of an approaching death, their comrades often give them a push, throw them on the ground, and take their clothes before they are quite dead.’85

  At Dorogobuzh on November 6 Napoleon received the extraordinary news in a letter from Cambacérès of a coup d’état that General Claude-François de Malet had attempted in Paris two weeks earlier. Malet had forged a document stating that Napoleon had died under the walls of Moscow as well as a sénatus-consulte that appointed General Moreau as interim president.86 With fewer than twenty co-conspirators, Malet had taken control of 1,200 National Guardsmen at 3 a.m. on October 23. The police minister, Savary, was arrested and taken to La Force prison, and the prefect of police, Pasquier, was chased from his prefecture.87 The governor of Paris, General Hulin, was shot in the jaw, where the bullet remained lodged and gave rise to his nickname, ‘Bouffe-la-balle’ (Bullet-eater).88 François Frochot, the prefect of the Seine and a member of the Conseil, accepted Malet’s story and did nothing to oppose him, for which he was later dismissed.

  Cambacérès seems to have kept his head admirably, doubling the sentries protecting Marie Louise and the King of Rome at Saint-Cloud and ordering Marshal Moncey, who commanded the gendarmerie, to rush in troops from nearby departments, release Savary and reinstate Pasquier.89 ‘By 9 a.m. it was all over,’ recalled Lavalette, ‘and the happy inhabitants of Paris, when they awoke, learned of the singular event, and made some tolerably good jokes upon it.’90 Napoleon didn’t find any of it remotely funny. He was infuriated that no one besides Cambacérès seemed to have given any thought to Marie Louise or his son as being the legitimate rulers of France in the event of his demise. ‘Napoleon II,’ the Emperor cried to Fain, ‘nobody thought about him!’91 At his brief court martial, before being shot with a dozen others on October 29, Malet, a former political prisoner and devout republican, replied to a question by saying: ‘Who were my accomplices? Had I been successful, all of you would have been my accomplices!’92 Napoleon feared that this was true. The Malet conspiracy reminded him how much the dynasty he had so recently inaugurated depended upon him alone.

  With the thermometer dropping to –30ºC on November 7, and blizzards seemingly continuous, the retreat slowed to a crawl. Some 5,000 horses died in a matter of days. Men’s breath turned to icicles when it left their mouths, their lips stuck together and their nostrils froze up. In an echo of the desert ophthalmia of the Egyptian campaign, men were afflicted with snow-blindness. Comradeship collapsed; men were charged a gold louis to sit by a fire, and declined to share any food or water; they ate the horses’ forage, and drove wagons over men who had slipped in front of them.93 General Comte Louis de Langeron, a French émigré who commanded one of the Russian divisions, saw ‘a dead man, his teeth deep in the haunch of a horse which was still quivering’.94 On November 8 Eugène warned Berthier that ‘These three days of suffering so depressed the soldiers’ spirits that I believe they are very unlikely to make any more effort. A lot of men died from cold or hunger and others, desperate, want to be captured by the enemy.’95 There were several well-documented instances of cannibalism; Kutuzov’s British liaison officer Sir Robert Wilson saw that when groups of French were captured around a campfire, ‘many in these groups were employed in peeling off with their fingers and making a repast of the charred flesh of their comrades’ remains’.96

  With the Russian army of the German-born General Peter Wittgenstein coming from the north and that of Admiral Paul Chichagov from the south, both heading for the Berezina river, there was now a possibility that the entire army might be captured. Napoleon reached Smolensk at noon on November 9. He was still nearly 160 miles east of Borisov, where there was a bridge over the Berezina. Between him and the bridge was Kutuzov, who was taking up a blocking position at Krasnoi, ready to give battle. Two days earlier Napoleon had urgently written a coded message to Marshal Victor, ordering him to march south from his position near Vitebsk without delay:

  This movement is one of the most important. In a few days your rear could be inundated with Cossacks; the army and the Emperor will be in Smolensk tomorrow, but very tired by a non-stop march of 120 leagues. Take the offensive, the salvation of armies depends on it; every day of delay is a calamity. The cavalry of the army is on foot, the cold has made all the horses die. March, that is the order of the Emperor and of necessity.97

  The cool and tenacious Victor would arrive just in time.

  Napoleon’s force was down to fewer than 60,000 men – though no one was keeping records any more – and much of the artillery had been spiked and ditched along the route for lack of horses to pull it. For more than three miles around the River Vop nothing could be seen but ammunition wagons, cannon, carriages, candelabras, antique bronzes, paintings and porcelain. One wag described it as ‘half artillery-park, half auctioneer’s storeroom’. Meanwhile, as another soldier recalled, wolfhounds ‘bayed as if they had gone mad, and in their fury often fought with the soldiers for the dead horses strewn along the road. The ravens … attracted by the stench of the dead bodies, came wheeling in black clouds above us.’98

  Most of the provisions in Smolensk were eaten on the first day, although it took five days for the whole army to get there, so when Ney’s rearguard arrived it found nothing. Larrey had a thermometer attached to his coat that recorded –16ºF (−26°C), and noted that the extreme cold turned even the lightest of wounds gangrenous.99 Over five days between November 14 and November 18, Napoleon fought the desperate battle of Krasnoi as Eugène’s, Davout’s and Ney’s severely depleted corps tried to smash through Kutuzov’s army to reach the Berezina. Some 13,000 of his men were killed and over 26,000 captured, including 7 generals.100 A total of 112 guns had been spiked at Smolensk, and another 123 were now captured at Krasnoi, leaving Napoleon virtually without artillery a
s well as cavalry.101 He was nonetheless superbly calm throughout the battle as he struggled to keep the road to Borisov open for as long as possible. Kutuzov, though outnumbering the French by nearly two to one, failed to deliver the coup de grâce he could have achieved by deploying Tormasov at the right moment. The Russians suffered grievously too: at Tarutino Kutuzov had had 105,000 men; by the end of the battle of Krasnoi he was down to 60,000. He was nonetheless still capable of continuing his parallel-mark strategy.

  ‘It is impossible to express the grief of Napoleon, on learning the desperate situation of one of the bravest of his brave marshals,’ Bausset recalled of the period when Napoleon believed that Ney’s entire corps had been annihilated on the way back from Krasnoi. ‘I heard him several times during the day make use of terms that showed the extreme agitation of his mind.’102 Ney eventually caught up with the main army at Orsha, almost midway between Smolensk and Borisov, on November 21, albeit with only 800 survivors of a corps which had crossed the Niemen with him in June 40,000 strong. ‘Those who have returned,’ Ney announced, ‘have their balls attached with iron wire.’103 On hearing that Ney had survived, Napoleon said: ‘I have more than four hundred million [francs] in the cellars of the Tuileries, and would gladly have given the whole for the ransom of my faithful companion-in-arms.’104*