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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 as 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*
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‘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
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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 ne
ar 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.
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