Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  At dawn on July 28, Murat sent word that the Russians had disappeared from Vitebsk and that he was in pursuit. They had taken everything with them, leaving nothing that gave any indication of which direction they had gone. ‘There appeared more order in their defeat than in our victory!’ noted Ségur.51 At a meeting with Murat, Eugène and Berthier, Napoleon had to face the fact that the decisive victory they so wanted ‘had just escaped our grasp, as it had at Vilnius’.52 Victory seemed tantalizingly close, and always just over the next hill or on the other side of the next lake, plain or forest – as, of course, the Russians intended. During the sixteen days he spent in Vitebsk, Napoleon very seriously considered ending the year’s campaigning there, to resume in 1813. He was now on the borders of Old Russia, where the Dvina and Dnieper rivers formed a natural defensive line. He could establish ammunition magazines and hospitals, reorganize Lithuania politically – the Lithuanians had already raised five infantry and four cavalry regiments for him – and build up the numbers for his central force, one-third of whom had by then died or were sick from typhus and dysentery. From Vitebsk he could threaten St Petersburg if need be.53 Murat’s chief-of-staff, General Auguste Belliard, told Napoleon frankly that the cavalry was exhausted and ‘stood in absolute need of rest’ since it could no longer gallop when the charge was sounded. Furthermore, there weren’t enough horseshoe-nails, smiths or even metal suitable for making nails. ‘Here I stop!’ Ségur recalled Napoleon saying on entering Vitebsk on the 28th. ‘Here I must look around me; rally, refresh my army and reorganise Poland. The campaign of 1812 is finished; that of 1813 will do the rest.’54

  Napoleon certainly had a fine line of defence at Vitebsk; his left flank was fixed at Riga on the Baltic, and ran through Dünaborg, Polotsk, fortified Vitebsk with its wooded heights at the centre, then down the Berezina and through the impassable Pripet Marshes, with the fortress town of Bobruisk on his right, 400 miles south-east of Riga. Courland could support Macdonald’s corps for food and supplies, Samogitia would do the same for Oudinot’s, the Klubokoë plains for Napoleon himself, and Schwarzenberg could stop in the fertile southern provinces. There were huge supply depots at Vilnius, Kovno, Danzig and Minsk to see the army through the winter. That he truly considered this option is evident from the fact that he ordered twenty-nine large ovens to be built at Vitebsk, capable of baking 29,000 pounds of bread, and had houses pulled down to improve the appearance of the palace square where he stayed. Yet it was hard thinking of winter quartering when, as Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise, ‘We are having unbearable heat, 27 degrees. This is as hot as in the Midi.’55 Ségur blamed Murat for persuading Napoleon to push on, despite the Emperor supposedly saying, ‘1813 will see us in Moscow, 1814 at Petersburg. The Russian war is a war of three years.’56

  Napoleon chose to continue chasing Barclay for several perfectly rational military reasons. He had advanced 190 miles in a month and suffered fewer than 10,000 battle casualties; July was absurdly early in the campaigning calendar to order a halt for the year; audacity had always served him well up till then and he would cede the initiative if he stopped at Vitebsk so early in the year; the Tsar had called up the 80,000-strong militia in Moscow on July 24 as well as 400,000 serfs, so it made sense to attack before they were trained and deployed; and the only two occasions when he had ever been forced to fight defensively, at Marengo and Aspern-Essling, he had not initially fared well. Murat also pointed out that Russian morale must have been devastated by the constant retreats. How much more of Russia could the Tsar see ravaged before he sued for peace? He couldn’t know that Alexander had declared in St Petersburg that he would never make peace, saying: ‘I would sooner let my beard grow to my waist and eat potatoes in Siberia.’57

  The French learned that Barclay’s army was only 85 miles away at Smolensk, where it was joined by Bagration’s on August 1. Napoleon assumed that the Russians would not surrender one of the greatest cities of Old Russia without a major battle. He therefore decided not to stop in Vitebsk after all, but kept the option open of returning there after fighting the Russians at Smolensk. He was advised by Duroc, Caulaincourt, Daru and Narbonne to remain at Vitebsk, and he also heard similar views from Poniatowski, Berthier and Lefebvre-Desnouettes, with Murat putting the opposing opinion, before deciding on his own course.58 Ségur recalled that the Emperor would occasionally address people with such half-sentences as ‘Well! What shall we do? Shall we stay where we are, or advance?’, but ‘He did not wait for their reply but still kept wandering about, as if he were looking for something or someone to end his indecision.’59 Clues to his thinking can be gleaned from phrases such as that of August 7 to Marie Louise: ‘Here we are only one hundred leagues from Moscow.’60 (In fact Vitebsk is 124 leagues – 322 miles – away.)

  The decision to press on to Smolensk was not taken lightly. ‘Did they take him for a madman?’ Ségur recorded Napoleon saying to Daru and Berthier around the 11th.

  Did they imagine he made war from inclination? Had they not heard him say that the wars of Spain and Russia were two ulcers which ate into the vitals of France and that she could not bear them both at once? He was anxious for peace but in order to treat for it, two persons were necessary and he was only one.61

  Napoleon also pointed out that the Russians would be able to march over frozen rivers in the winter, and at Smolensk he could win either a great fortress or a decisive battle. ‘Blood has not yet been spilled, and Russia is too powerful to yield without fighting. Alexander can only negotiate after a great battle,’ he said.62 This conversation lasted a full eight hours and during it Berthier burst into tears, telling Napoleon that the Continental System and the restoration of Poland weren’t good enough reasons for over-extending French lines of communication. Duroc’s friendship with Napoleon was almost ended by the decision.

  Napoleon stuck nevertheless to his conviction ‘that boldness was the only prudential course’.63 He reasoned that the Austrians and Prussians might rethink their alliances with him if he stagnated, that the only way to shorten the lines of communication was to secure a quick victory and return, and that ‘a stationary and prolonged defence isn’t in the French nature’. He also feared that British military aid to Russia was about to start taking effect. He concluded, as recorded by Fain, ‘Why stop here for eight months when twenty days might suffice for us to reach our goal? … We have to strike promptly, otherwise everything will be compromised … In war, chance is half of everything. If we were always waiting for a favourable gathering of circumstances, we’d never finish anything. In summary, my campaign plan is a battle, and all my politics is success.’64*

  On August 11 Napoleon gave orders to move on Smolensk, leaving Vitebsk himself at 2 a.m. on the 13th. ‘His Majesty rides much less quickly these days,’ noted Castellane, who was deputed to accompany him,

  he has put on a good deal of weight, and rides a horse with more difficulty than before. The grand equerry [Caulaincourt] has to give him a hand in mounting. When the Emperor travels, he goes most of the journey by carriage. It is very tiring for the officers who have to follow, because His Majesty is rested by the time he has to mount … When His Majesty is on the move, one cannot expect a moment’s rest in twenty-four hours. When [General Jean-Baptiste] Éblé spoke to the Emperor about the lack of horses, His Majesty replied: ‘We shall find some fine carriage horses in Moscow.’65

  When Napoleon was moving at top speed, water had to be poured on the wheels of his carriage to prevent them overheating.

  The situation on both Napoleon’s flanks looked promising in mid-August, with Macdonald protecting his north successfully, Schwarzenberg in the south dealing a serious blow to Tormasov’s Third Army of the West at Gorodeczna on the 12th (for which Napoleon asked Francis to promote him to field marshal), and Oudinot and Saint-Cyr holding off General Peter Wittgenstein’s Army of Finland at Polotsk four days later. Napoleon was therefore able to launch the ‘Smolensk Manoeuvre’, a huge operation intended to pin the Russian army north of the Dniepe
r while swiftly moving most of the Grande Armée to the south bank, thanks to impressive bridge-building from Éblé’s engineers. Yet this rush for Smolensk was frustrated by the heroic sacrificial rearguard action of General Neverovski’s 27th Division at Krasnoi on the 14th, a fighting withdrawal that bought time for the First and Second Armies to reach Smolensk and defend it.

  At 6 a.m. on the 16th Murat’s cavalry drove in the Russian outposts on the approaches to Smolensk. ‘At last I have them!’ Napoleon said, as he and Berthier reconnoitred the position at 1 p.m., coming to within 200 yards – some sources say closer – of the city walls.66 At the battle of Smolensk on August 17, Napoleon hoped to turn the Russians’ left flank, cut them off from Moscow and drive them back to the Lower Dvina. But a stout defence of the city, protected by its strong wall and deep ravines, gave Barclay the opportunity to retreat eastwards after suffering losses of around 6,000, while Ney’s and Poniatowski’s corps lost over 8,500. Under Lobau’s shelling Smolensk caught fire, which Napoleon watched with his staff from his headquarters. Ségur states that ‘The Emperor contemplated in silence this awful spectacle’, but Caulaincourt recalled Napoleon saying, ‘Isn’t that a fine sight, my Master of Horse?’ ‘Horrible, Sire!’ ‘Bah!’ Napoleon replied. ‘Gentlemen, remember the words of a Roman emperor: a dead enemy always smells sweet!’67*

  French troops entered the smouldering city at dawn on August 18, stepping over rubble and corpses to find it deserted. When he heard that the Russians sang a Te Deum in St Petersburg to celebrate their supposed victory, Napoleon said wryly: ‘They lie to God as well as to men.’68 He inspected the battlefield and Ségur said ‘The pain felt by the Emperor might be judged by the contraction of his features and his irritation.’ At the gates of the citadel near the Dnieper he held a very rare council of war, with Murat, Berthier, Ney, Davout, Caulaincourt (and possibly also Mortier, Duroc and Lobau), who were seated on some mats that had been found. ‘The scoundrels!’ he said. ‘Fancy abandoning such a position! Come on, we must march on Moscow.’69 This led to ‘a lively discussion’ which lasted over an hour. Rossetti, Murat’s aide-de-camp, heard that everyone but Davout had been in favour of stopping at Smolensk, ‘but that Davout, with his usual tenacity, had maintained that it was only at Moscow that we could sign a peace treaty’.70 This was also thought to be Murat’s view, and it was certainly a line that Napoleon was to repeat often thereafter. Years later he would admit ‘I should have put my soldiers into barracks at Smolensk for the winter.’

  Napoleon’s hopes for a close pursuit of the Russians were dashed the very next day when they successfully withdrew yet again after dealing Ney a heavy blow at the battle of Valutina-Gora (also known as Lubino), where the talented divisional commander General Gudin was killed when a cannonball skimmed along the ground and broke both his legs. After the battle medical shortages were so bad that surgeons tore up their own shirts to dress wounds, and then used hay and afterwards paper taken from documents in Smolensk’s archives. Yet those wounded in this part of the campaign were the lucky ones; statistically they had a far better survival rate than the healthy men who marched on eastwards.

  Ney’s hopes to pincer the Russians at Valutina had been wrecked by Junot’s failure to advance his troops in time, to Napoleon’s understandable fury. ‘Junot has lost for ever his marshal’s baton,’ he said, after which he gave the command of the Westphalians to Rapp. ‘This affair will, perhaps, hinder me from going to Moscow.’ When Rapp said the army didn’t know that Moscow was now the ultimate destination, Napoleon replied: ‘The glass is full; I must drink it off.’71 Junot, who hadn’t won a victory since the Acre campaign, should have been disgraced after the loss of Portugal at the Convention of Cintra but Napoleon kept him on for friendship’s sake.*

  The day after Valutina, ‘well aware that it is more especially amidst such destruction that men think of immortality’, Napoleon distributed no fewer than eighty-seven decorations and promotions among Gudin’s 7th Légère and 12th, 21st and 127th Line.72 Gudin’s division was surrounded by ‘the corpses of their companions and of the Russians, amidst the stumps of broken trees, on ground trampled by the feet of the combatants, furrowed with balls, strewn with the fragments of weapons, tattered uniforms, overturned carriages and scattered limbs’.73 By then disease, starvation, desertion and death in battle had brought Napoleon’s central army down to 124,000 infantry and 32,000 cavalry, with 40,000 left to protect his supply routes.74

  Despite the fact that Barclay had escaped yet again, this time towards Dorogobuzh – or perhaps because of it, since the policy of withdrawal was so unpopular in the Russian army – on August 20 the Tsar replaced him as commander-in-chief with the sixty-seven-year-old Field Marshal Prince Mikhail Kutuzov, who had been defeated at Austerlitz. Napoleon was delighted, assuming that ‘He has been summoned to command the army on condition that he fights.’75 In fact, for the first two weeks after his appointment Kutuzov continued to fall back towards Moscow, carefully reconnoitring for the place to take his stand. He chose a village 65 miles to the west of Moscow, just south-west of the River Moskva, called Borodino. Despite his supply difficulties, Napoleon decided, on August 24, to press on after him.

  He left Smolensk at 1 p.m. the next day, arriving at Dorogobuzh at 5 p.m. ‘Peace is in front of us,’ he told his staff, genuinely believing that Kutuzov couldn’t surrender the holy city of Moscow, the venerable previous capital of the Empire, without a major battle, and that afterwards the Tsar would have to sue for peace.76 Napoleon marched on Moscow to force the Russians to give battle, and his mind was already turning to the terms of surrender he could impose. He told Decrès that under any peace terms that were concluded he would try to secure trees in the Dorogobuzh area for ships’ masts.77 Murat’s aide-de-camp Charles de Flahaut wrote from Vyazma to his mother of his own certainty of ‘a victory which will finish the war’. While soldiers are not on oath when writing to their mothers from the front line, his assumption that the Tsar ‘will certainly now ask for peace’ was widespread in the high command.78

  ‘The heat was excessive; I never experienced worse in Spain,’ wrote Captain Girod de l’Ain, General Joseph Dessaix’s aide-de-camp after it hadn’t rained for a month. ‘This heat and dust make us extremely thirsty and water was scarce … I saw men lying on their bellies to drink horses’ urine in the gutter!’79 He also noticed that Napoleon’s orders were being disobeyed for the first time. Having ordered that a private carriage, which he saw as an unnecessary luxury, should be burned, the Emperor ‘had barely gone a hundred yards before people hastened to put out the flames and the carriage joined the column, bowling along as before’.

  On August 26 Napoleon wrote to Maret to say that he had heard that ‘the enemy is resolved to wait for us in Vyazma. We will be there in a few days, and then we will be halfway between Smolensk and Moscow, and, I believe, forty leagues from Moscow. If the enemy is beaten there, and nothing can secure this great capital, then I will be there on the 5th of September.’80 Yet the Russians weren’t in Vyazma either. The Grande Armée entered the city on the 29th, and found it empty of its 15,000 inhabitants. When told that a local priest had died of shock at his approach, Napoleon had him buried with full military honours. The priest may have been overcome by the official declaration by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church that Napoleon was in fact the Anti-Christ from the Book of Revelation.81

  On September 2 Napoleon received Marmont’s report of his defeat at the hands of Wellington at the battle of Salamanca on July 22. ‘It’s impossible to read anything more unimpressive,’ Napoleon told Clarke; ‘there’s more noise and clatter in it than in a clock, and not a word to explain the real state of affairs.’ He could read between the lines well enough to work out, however, that Marmont had left the well-protected Salamanca and given Wellington battle without waiting for Joseph’s reinforcements. ‘At the proper time you must let Marshal Marmont know how indignant I am with his inexplicable conduct,’ the Emperor told his war minister.82 Napol
eon could nevertheless later take solace from the fact that Wellington had been forced out of Madrid by converging French forces in October and made to retreat back to Portugal. Joseph was back in his palace by November 2.

  The food shortages brought with them other dangers besides those simply of hunger. When men went foraging too far from the main body of the army, they were sometimes captured by Russian irregulars, commanded by regular officers, operating well away from the main roads. This happened to Ségur’s brother Octave. By September 3 Napoleon told Berthier that Ney was ‘losing more men than if we gave battle’ because of the practice of sending out small foraging parties, and that ‘the number of prisoners being taken by the enemy is increasing by several hundred every day’. This needed to stop, through better co-ordination and protection.83 Napoleon was indignant about the incompetence and negligence he saw everywhere, especially in the treatment of the sick and wounded. ‘In the twenty years that I have commanded French armies,’ he wrote to Lacuée that day,

  I’ve never seen military administration to be so useless … the people who’ve been sent here have neither capability nor knowledge. The inexperience of the surgeons is doing worse harm to the army than enemy batteries. The four organizing officers accompanying the Quartermaster-General have no experience. The health committee is extremely culpable to have sent such ignorant surgeons … The organization of nursing companies has, like all the war operations administration, entirely failed. Once we give them guns and military uniforms, they no longer want to serve in the hospitals.84