Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  ‘A great many of you have deserted your colours and proceed alone, thus betraying your duty, the honour and safety of the Army,’ Napoleon proclaimed from Orsha on November 19. ‘Offenders will be put under arrest and punished summarily.’ For once his words had little effect. That same day he burned the notes he had been making for his autobiography, about which nothing more is known. On November 21 the first units of the armed rabble formerly dignified with the name ‘Grande Armée’ reached the 300-foot-wide Berezina, its banks deep set with marshes, to find the western side occupied by the Russians under Chichagov, who had captured the Borisov bridge, the only one along that stretch of the river, and had burned it. The French right flank was threatened by Wittgenstein, who was marching down the east bank of the river. Kutuzov was following from behind. In all, some 144,000 Russians were moving in on around 40,000 French effectives (once reinforced by Victor and Oudinot) and several thousand stragglers and camp-followers. Langeron recalled that his Russian troops ‘were smashing the unfortunate stragglers’ heads with their musket butts, calling them “Moscow arsonists” ’.105

  What happened next, in this most dangerous part of the retreat from Moscow, was to become another integral part of the Napoleonic epic. Although Napoleon had ordered Éblé to destroy his pontonniers’ six carts of bridging tools to lighten the baggage-train, he had fortunately been disobeyed. Oudinot suggested crossing the Berezina at the village of Studzianka – which means ‘very very cold’ in Byelorussian – and Napoleon agreed to try. Working alongside his four hundred mainly Dutch engineers in the freezing waters of the swollen river, which was ‘thick with large ice-floes’ sometimes 6 feet across, Éblé built two pontoon bridges across the river there, 8 miles north of Borisov.106 One was for cavalry, guns and baggage, and the second, 180 yards upstream, for infantry.

  Oudinot drew Chichagov away to the south in a decoying action, and Victor held off Wittgenstein’s 30,000 men to the north-east in what is called the battle of the Berezina, while Ney, Eugène and Davout got through Bobr to Studzianka.107 A sign of the desperation of the situation was that the army burned its eagles in the woods near Bobr on November 24, to prevent them becoming trophies.108 ‘The weather is very cold,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise the same day. ‘My health is very good. Kiss the little King for me and never doubt the sentiments of your faithful husband.’109

  The Dutch engineers began to build the bridges at 5 p.m. the next day, dismantling the wooden village and driving stakes into the 7- or 8-foot-deep riverbed. What Saint-Cyr in his memoirs accurately described as ‘the miraculous crossing of the Berezina’ had begun, in temperatures that plunged to –33ºC.110 François Pils, Oudinot’s batman, recalled that because the operation had to be kept secret from Chichagov’s patrols on the opposite bank, ‘The bridge-builders had been warned not to talk and the troops of all arms were told to keep out of sight. As all the preparatory work and the building of the trestles was done behind a hillock, which formed part of the river bank, the enemy lookout posts were unable to see what our workmen were doing.’111

  Napoleon arrived at 3 a.m. on Thursday, November 26. By then what was described as ‘fragile scaffolding’ was in evidence.112 He wore a fur-lined coat and a green velvet cap trimmed with fur which came over his eyes and spent the day by the riverside encouraging the pontonniers and handing them wine, ensuring that they were relieved every fifteen minutes and warmed beside fires, and organizing another deception operation further upriver. ‘He’ll get us out of here,’ Fain recalled the men saying, with ‘their eyes fixed on their Emperor’.113 When Oudinot arrived shortly after 7 a.m., Napoleon took him and Berthier down to the river’s edge. ‘Well,’ he said to Oudinot, ‘you shall be my locksmith to open this passage.’114 From 8 a.m., with the opposite bank now protected by a skeleton force that had crossed unopposed on rafts, the pontonniers were ready to place twenty-three trestles of between 3 and 9 feet in height in the freezing water at equal distances across the river. ‘The men went into the water up to their shoulders,’ recalled an observer, ‘displaying superb courage. Some dropped dead and disappeared with the current.’115

  At about 9.30 a.m. the Emperor returned to Berthier’s quarters and was served with a cutlet, which he ate standing up. When his maître d’hôtel presented him with a salt-cellar, consisting of a screw of paper containing old greying salt, Napoleon jested: ‘You’re well equipped; all you lack is white salt.’116 To find any humour at all at a moment like that suggests nerves of steel – or indeed Ney’s balls of wire. But the ravages were unsurprisingly taking a toll on him. One Swiss officer, Captain Louis Bégos in Oudinot’s corps, thought Napoleon looked ‘tired and anxious’, and another, Captain Rey, ‘was struck by the Emperor’s worried expression’.117 He said to Éblé, ‘It’s taking a long time, general. A very long time.’ ‘Sire,’ Éblé replied, ‘you can see that my men are up to their necks in water, and the ice is delaying their work. I have no food or brandy to warm them with.’ ‘That will do,’ replied the Emperor, looking at the ground.118 A few moments later he started complaining again, seeming to have forgotten what Éblé had said.

  Just before 11 a.m. the first bridge was in place and Napoleon ordered the 1st Battalion of General Joseph Albert’s 1st Demi-Brigade of the 6th Division over. ‘My star returns!’ he cried as they crossed safely.119 He was also delighted that ‘I’ve fooled the admiral!’ – meaning Chichagov – which indeed he had.120 The rest of Oudinot’s corps crossed in the afternoon. The bridges had no guardrails, were almost at the water line, sagged unsteadily and frequently had to be repaired by the freezing pontonniers. The cavalry bridge was quickly covered in manure, and dead horses and debris had to be thrown off it into the river to stop blockages, while the stragglers and camp-followers were held back until the soldiers had crossed.121 That night Ney and his men couldn’t cross, as three trestles had given way under the weight; they would have to be repaired twice before he could finally make it to the other side.122

  According to Jakob Walter’s diary, Napoleon was audibly sworn at by the troops crossing the river. Walter’s unit came to

  a place where Napoleon ordered his pack horses to be unharnessed and where he ate. He watched his army pass by in the most wretched condition. What he may have felt in his heart is impossible to surmise. His outward appearance seemed indifferent and unconcerned over the wretchedness of his soldiers … and, although the French and Allies shouted into his ears many oaths and curses about his own guilty person, he was still able to listen to them unmoved.123

  This was a new experience for Napoleon, who was more used to hearing ‘Vive l’Empereur!’, or at worst, good-natured chaffing. With an army in which there were so many non-French, who didn’t have the same motivation, the murmurs turned to outright dissent. The Swiss, Westphalians, Badeners and Hesse-Darmstadters resented having to fight in what they saw as a French war, but nonetheless distinguished themselves at the Berezina, with the Swiss and Westphalians winning most of the crosses of the Légion d’Honneur in the battles that raged on both sides of the river. (The four Swiss regiments were awarded a total of thirty-four.)124

  Napoleon crossed the rickety trestle bridge at noon on November 27, sleeping that night in a village hut at Zaniwski. ‘I have just traversed the Berezina,’ he wrote to Maret in Vilnius, ‘but the ice floating down that river makes the bridges very precarious … The cold is intense, and the army very tired. I shall not lose a moment in getting to Vilnius in order to recuperate a little.’125 In all it is thought that more than 50,000 soldiers and re-formed stragglers crossed the Berezina, over Éblé’s unstable but ultimately effective trestle bridges. On November 28, as Wittgenstein’s men began to approach, Victor destroyed the bridges: around 15,000 stragglers and 8,000 camp-followers and civilians who hadn’t crossed the night before were left to the Russians’ mercy. ‘On the bridge I saw an unfortunate woman sitting,’ recalled the émigré Comte de Rochechouart, ‘her legs dangled outside the bridge and were caught in the ice. For twenty-four
hours she had been clasping a frozen child to her breast. She begged me to save this child, unaware that she was holding out a corpse to me!’126 A Cossack eventually ‘put an end to her appalling agony’ by blowing her brains out. Abandoned on the east bank of the river were over 10,000 vehicles, including berline, calèche and phaeton carriages that had survived Napoleon’s repeated injunctions that they should be burned. Langeron saw ‘sacred goblets from the churches of Moscow, the gilded cross from the church of St John [Ivan] the Great, collections of engravings, many books from the superb libraries of Counts Buturlin and Razumovsky, silver dishes, even porcelain’.127 Ten years later a Prussian officer visiting the scene found that ‘melancholy relics lay … in heaps, mingled with the bones of human beings and animals, skulls, tin fittings, bandoliers, bridles, scraps of the bearskins of the Guard’.128

  General Miloradovich reached Borisov on November 29 and Kutuzov on the 30th. At Studzianka there is a memorial stone that states that this is the place where Kutuzov ‘completed the defeat of Napoleon’s troops’. This is quite untrue, indeed Admiral Chichagov never lived down the shame of not having done so. Napoleon had listened to Oudinot’s advice and changed his plans accordingly, showing his customary flexibility on the field. He acted quickly, used deception to effect a brilliant feint which drew the Russians south, and his whole army had crossed on two makeshift wooden trestle bridges in two days. It had been a miracle of deliverance, although so expensive that one of the common expressions for a disaster in French became une bérézina. ‘Food, food, food,’ he wrote to Maret from the west bank of the river on the morning of the 29th, ‘without it there are no horrors that this undisciplined mass won’t commit at Vilnius. Perhaps the army will not rally before the Niemen. There must be no foreign agents in Vilnius. The army does not look good now.’129

  On December 3, having reached Molodechno (present-day Maladzyechna), 45 miles north-west of Minsk, Napoleon issued the most famous of all his bulletins, his 29th of the 1812 campaign. Entirely blaming the weather – ‘so cruel a season’ – for the disaster, he wrote that, with temperatures unexpectedly down to −27°C, ‘the cavalry, artillery and baggage horses perished every night, not only by hundreds, but by thousands … It was necessary to abandon and destroy a good part of our cannon, ammunition and provisions. The Army, so fine on the 6th, was very different on the 14th, almost without cavalry, without artillery and without transport.’ Napoleon gave the Russians no credit for their victory, writing merely that ‘The enemy, who saw upon the roads traces of that frightful calamity which had overtaken the French Army, endeavoured to take advantage of it.’ He wrote off the Cossacks as ‘This contemptible cavalry, which only makes noise and is not capable of penetrating a company of voltigeurs,’ but admitted that General Louis Partouneaux’s entire division, part of Victor’s corps, had been captured near Borisov.

  Napoleon acknowledged that the losses were such that ‘it was necessary to collect the officers who still had a horse remaining, in order to form four companies of 150 men each. The generals performed the functions of captains, and the colonels of subalterns.’130 For the French people, so used to having to read between the lines for the truth, this bulletin – which was three times the normal length – came as a profound shock when it was published in Paris on December 16. Napoleon hadn’t entirely broken with his habit of exaggerating success and minimizing failure: he was now getting his account of the disaster out before worse rumours arrived in his capital, and attempting to create the narrative of a defeat at the hands of Nature. All the figures he gave were wildly inaccurate, although no-one would compute accurate ones until long afterwards.

  It was the final sentence – ‘The health of His Majesty has never been better’ – that caused most outrage in France. It has been described as ‘a remarkably brutal expression of imperial self-centredness’, whereas it was in reality little more than the result of habit.131 He had used the phrase ‘My health is good’ thirty times in his letters to Marie Louise before he reached Moscow, and twelve more during his stay there and during the retreat, so it was almost a tic. He would employ it twenty-two times in five months the following year too.132 More importantly, in the wake of the Malet conspiracy, any rumours that his health might be less than excellent had to be comprehensively quashed.

  On December 5, at the small town of Smorgoniye where, Bausset recalled, there was a ‘veterinary academy for the instruction of Russian dancing bears’, Napoleon informed Eugène, Berthier, Lefebvre, Mortier, Davout and Bessières that he ‘must return to Paris at the earliest possible moment if I am to overawe Europe and tell her to choose between war and peace’.133 He told them he would be leaving at ten o’clock that night, taking Caulaincourt, Duroc, Lobau, Fain and Constant with him.

  He chose Murat to assume command of the army. The flamboyant marshal tried to hold the line of the Vistula after Napoleon left as reserves, new drafts and transferred units flowed towards Poland. Yet his task proved impossible in the face of the Russian advance. The Prussian General Johann Yorck von Wartenburg suddenly declared his troops’ neutrality under the terms of the Convention of Tauroggen, a non-aggression pact he concluded with the Russians on December 30 and negotiated in part by Carl von Clausewitz.134 Murat had to abandon first Poland, and then the line of the Oder. After secret talks with the Austrians, he suddenly left for Naples to try to save his throne, handing command of the Grande Armée over to Eugène. With Lefebvre, Mortier and Victor back in France, Oudinot and Saint-Cyr recovering from wounds and Ney now hors de combat from fatigue and nervous exhaustion, it was Eugène, Davout and Poniatowski who saved what remained of the Grande Armée. Together these three reorganized the corps, resupplied them and created the kernel of a new fighting force. Although the Moniteur stated that Murat was ill, a furious Napoleon told Eugène: ‘It would take very little for me to have him arrested by way of an example … He is a brave man on the field of battle, but he is totally devoid of intelligence and moral courage.’135

  ‘The French are like women,’ Napoleon told Caulaincourt on the journey home. ‘You mustn’t stay away from them for too long.’136 He was all too aware of the effect that reports of his defeat would have in Vienna and Berlin, and was right to get back to Paris as quickly as possible.137 The remnants of the Grande Armée were only a day or two days’ march from Vilnius and relative safety.138 Although, as with the Egyptian campaign, many denounced his desertion – Labaume said the troops used ‘all the most vigorous epithets our language can supply, for never had men been more basely betrayed’ – Napoleon needed to be in Paris to deal with the political and diplomatic repercussions of the disaster.139 Castellane, who had lost a total of seventeen horses in the campaign, denied that the army felt outrage. ‘I saw nothing of the sort,’ he said. ‘Notwithstanding our disasters, our confidence in him was intact. We feared only that he might be made prisoner on the road.’ He added that the army understood Napoleon’s motives, ‘knowing well that his return alone could stop a revolt in Germany, and that his presence was necessary for the reorganization of an army which could be in a condition to come to our rescue.’140 After the Berezina crossing there were no clashes with the Russians until mid-February 1813. ‘When they know that I am in Paris,’ Napoleon said of the Austrians and Prussians, ‘and see me at the head of the nation and of 1,200,000 troops which I shall organize, they will look twice before they make war.’141

  Travelling under the alias of Count Gérard de Reyneval, ostensibly as part of Caulaincourt’s retinue, Napoleon covered the 1,300 miles over the winter roads from Smorgoniye to Paris in thirteen days, going via Vilnius, Warsaw, Dresden and Mainz (where he bought some sugar-plums for his son). In Warsaw he told the Abbé de Pradt, apropos the campaign, ‘There is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous.’142 He was to repeat the line – which was to become one of his most famous – to Caulaincourt on the journey home. He met the King of Saxony in Leipzig (who exchanged his sleigh for a carriage) and sent his good wishes to Goethe when he passed thr
ough Erfurt. As the clock sounded a quarter to midnight on Friday, December 18, he descended from his carriage at the Tuileries.

  The celebrated diagram of French losses in Russia published in 1869 by Charles-Joseph Minard, Inspector-General of Roads and Bridges 1830–36. Lighter shading indicates the number of men entering Russia, black indicates those leaving. Minard assumed that the forces of Prince Jérôme and of Marshal Davout which were despatched to Minsk and Mogilev, and which re-joined in the vicinity of Orsha and Vitebsk, continued to march with the army. The parallel diagram below shows the temperature in Fahrenheit on the retreat.

  The following morning he embarked on a full day’s work. He told Cambacérès, Savary, Clarke and Decrès that he had stayed too long in Moscow waiting for a reply to his peace offer. ‘I made a great error,’ he said, ‘but I have the means to repair it.’143 When a courtier who had not been on the campaign assumed ‘a very doleful air’ and remarked ‘We have, indeed, sustained a severe loss!’ Napoleon replied, ‘Yes, Madame Barilli is dead.’144 His reference to the celebrated opera singer mocked his courtier’s obtuse statement of the obvious, but the horrors of the retreat from Moscow had affected Napoleon deeply – no fewer than forty-four of his household servants had died during it.

  Once it reached safety the Grande Armée was meticulous in its bureaucracy. Typical of the records in the war ministry archives is a neatly written 150-page list of the 1,800 men who served in the 88th Line between 1806 and 1813, which records the name and serial number of each, his date and place of birth, both parents’ names, canton and department of both birth and residence, height, shape of face, size of nose and mouth, colour of eyes, hair and eyebrows, distinguishing features, date of either conscription or volunteering, date of arrival at the depot, profession, number of company and battalion, promotion history, details of all actions, wounds and honours, and date of demobilization or death.145 For entire demi-brigades that served in Russia, the list states over page after page ‘presumed captured by the enemy’, ‘prisoner-of-war’, ‘wounded’, ‘died’, ‘died of fever in hospital’, ‘dead in hospital of nervous fever’, ‘fell behind’, ‘deserted’, ‘certified absent’ or ‘unknown’. On some rare occasion the list records that one of the very few survivors went on ‘reform leave’, presumably in the hope he would eventually recover from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder.146