The Burning of Moscow

by Alexander Mikaberidze

  Napoleon was still in bed at 7am on 16 September when Doctor Mestivier called to treat the cold that had plagued the emperor since the battle of Borodino. ‘He greeted me with his customary question, “What is new?”,’ Mestivier later recalled. ‘His bed was placed so that he could not see the city. I told him about the wide circle of fire that had spread around the Kremlin. ‘Ah, bah,’ Napoleon replied, ‘it is probably a result of the carelessness of some soldiers, who have wanted to make bread, or who have established their campfire too close to wooden houses!’ The Emperor still seems to have been suffering from the dysuria that had pained him from the early days of the campaign – showing an almost full flask of urine, he told the doctor that he was almost clear of the business after he had urinated so abundantly and freely but was concerned by the sediment that filled a third of the vessel. The doctor assured him that ‘it was the result of a crisis’ and would only help him recover his health. Then, fixing his eyes on the ceiling, Napoleon remained silent for several minutes before ‘his face, full of kindness, took on a terrible expression’. He called his valets, Constant and Roustam, and, hastily throwing himself off his bed, shaved and dressed quickly, without uttering a word, and ‘kicking the Mamluk, who had tried to put the right boot on his left foot, so strongly that he landed on his back’.113

  ‘On Wednesday morning [16 September],’ described Ysarn, ‘a hurricane of terrifying strength broke out in the city. This was the start of the great fire.’114 Maxim Nevzorov, the head of the Moscow University’s typography service, confirms that ‘by five o’clock in the afternoon a powerful conflagration had erupted beyond the Moscow river and in numerous other places, prompting the tocsin to be rung in numerous churches. But this was clearly an act of desperation since one could not hope for rescue and help from ringing bells.’115 Muscovites could see the fires taking over the entire Preschistenskaya and Tverskaya districts, then spreading into the Arbatskaya, Yauzskaya and Khamovnicheskaya districts. By then, Dominique Larrey was already troubled that ‘the fires are surrounding the city from all directions and I am very concerned that the city will fall victim to the flames and pillaging’.116 The Russian officer Perovskii, who had been in French captivity for the past few days and was inside the Kremlin during the morning of the 16th, recalled that ‘a powerful wind, strengthened or maybe even caused by the raging fires, made it difficult to remain on one’s feet. While there were no fires inside the Kremlin as of yet, one could see nothing but flames and terrifying black clouds of smoke from across the river. Looking at the city, you would struggle to find roofs of buildings and bell towers that were not on fire. On the right, beyond the Kremlin wall, one could see a thick cloud of black smoke rising high into the sky, and hear the reverberation of crashing walls and roofs.’ The Allied officers were clearly bewildered by this sight and ‘they were far from being kind in their conversations with me. Deceived in their expectations or intentions, they could no longer look indifferently at the Russian.’117

  Napoleon now seemed to be mesmerized by the fires surrounding the Kremlin and it was a moment that he never forgot, for it seemed that ‘this conquest, for which he had sacrificed everything, became a phantom which he had pursued, and which at the moment when he imagined he had grasped it, vanished in a mingled mass of smoke and flame,’ as Ségur aptly put it. In agitation, he rose every moment and paced to and fro, making sudden and vigorous gestures that betrayed his painful uneasiness. He often hastened to the windows where, like his valet Constant, he watched as ‘wooden houses painted in different colours, devoured in a few moments, had already fallen in, some warehouses of oil, brandy and other combustible materials darted forth flames of a livid blue, which communicated themselves to other buildings in the vicinity with lightning-like rapidity. Sparks, a rain of enormous embers, fell on the roofs of the Kremlin.’ Napoleon, facing a situation far beyond his control, walked restlessly about the room, incoherent expressions occasionally bursting from his lips: ‘What a dreadful spectacle! It is their own work! What extraordinary resolution! What men! These are Scythians indeed!’118 Years later, at St Helena, Napoleon himself reminisced about

  the dreadful image which will never be effaced from my memory, the whole of the city was on fire. Large columns of flames of various colours shot up from every quarter, entirely covered the horizon, and diffused a glaring light and a scorching heat to a considerable distance. These masses of fire, driven by the violence of the winds in all directions, were accompanied in their rise and rapid movement by a dreadful whizzing and by thundering explosions, the result of the combustion of gunpowder, saltpetre, oil, resin and brandy, with which the greater part of the houses and shops had been filled. The varnished iron plates with which the buildings were covered were speedily loosened by the heat and whirled far away; large pieces of burning beams and rafters of fir were carried to a great distance, and helped to extend the conflagration to houses that were considered in no danger, on account of their remoteness. Everyone was struck with terror and consternation.119

  At around 9.30am Napoleon left the palace to make a personal evaluation of the situation in the city.120 Just as he left the courtyard of the Kremlin on foot, two supposed incendiaries, wearing police uniforms, were brought in. Interrogated in the presence of Napoleon, they claimed that their commanding officer had ordered them to burn everything, and buildings had been designated to this end. As more detainees were brought in, their depositions seemed to confirm what the others had said: the fires were not accidental but part of a deliberate effort by the Russians to destroy the city rather than see it fall into enemy hands. Alarmed by the presence of wounded Russian soldiers and stragglers, suspecting them of incendiary activities, Napoleon instructed Berthier to issue the draconian declaration that ‘starting from this day on, any Russian soldier discovered in the streets of the city must be shot’.121 He then informed Mortier that he was henceforth granted ‘supreme command in the city of Moscow’ with sufficient troops and staff to control the city’s twenty districts. Mortier was assisted by General Milhaud, Adjutants Commandants Puthon and Thiry and twenty commandants d’armes, each of whom received a city district.122

  Colonel Jean-François Boulart’s artillery company was still deployed near the Dorogomilovskaya bridge, where the fire had not yet reached the great loop formed by the Moscow river. He had billeted his men in ‘a great town house to the right of and not very far from the [Dorogomilovskaya] barrier’, where ‘all was quiet around us, and even this silence had something frightening about it’. The fire was still gaining ground. ‘As a strong north wind had got up, its progress became faster, so that during the night it approached the district I was in. I was extremely worried and never remember spending a more harassed night. No orders reached me, yet it seemed clear that I should eventually be engulfed in the flames.’ So he decided to go in person to the Kremlin and seek instructions from Philibert-Jean-Baptiste Curial, commander of the 3rd Division of the Imperial Guard. While waiting for daybreak, he had ‘hay and straw carried well away from my ammunition wagons. I posted gunners to watch for the fall of sparks, although there was little to fear with wagons as well enclosed as ours were and covered with sheet metal.’ In the morning of 16 September he rode to the Kremlin, not knowing the precise route but simply guiding himself in the general direction of the golden domes of the towers of Ivan [the Great] that dominated that part of the town. Along the way, he experienced ‘the whistling of the wind, the roar of the fire … [that] had devoured everything, flames rising above my head on both sides, the timber and metal sheets that formed the roof of many buildings crumbling down with a loud noise …’ He was soon enveloped in thick smoke, forcing him to close his eyes, while his horse baulked and refused to move. ‘No, I have never experienced anything as horrible,’ Boulart later declared. ‘And I have never again found myself in such distressing circumstances.’123 Clearly less distressed were the French soldiers whom Christian von Martens found ‘carousing cheerfully’ in a large tavern not far from the Kreml
in. Meanwhile, the Guard soldiers were desperately trying to save their quarters by means of wet towels.124

  Across the city, near the Presnenskii Ponds, the residents were alarmed by the fire’s swift progress and fled their houses for the safety of ‘a large field near the ponds, where lilac bushes grew on the slopes of the hill that gently rolled towards the lakes’. Dozens of Muscovites, ‘driven out by the fires or fear’, sat near these bushes, watching as their city burned and silently enduring the pillaging by the Allied soldiers.125 In another part of the town François-Joseph d’Ysarn de Villefort, who had been watching the progress of the fires from the window of his home, saw the flames reach the surrounding wall of his house. He left a remarkable testimony of his experiences during the conflagration that is worth citing here as an example of what it was like to live through the inferno that engulfed the city that day. A few of Ysarn’s neighbours tried to run from their houses but the fire forced them to turn back and seek refuge in his courtyard, where they helped Ysarn knock down the wooden fence that separated his house from the nearby church. ‘The wooden house over the ice cellars caught fire,’ Ysarn recalled, ‘but I did not care very much because in my defence plan I had prepared to sacrifice all the outbuildings made of wood in order to save the main part of the building.’ Yet, as these outbuildings ignited, his tenants took fright and fled, abandoning Ysarn, who was ‘so little aware of it that for a long time I remained in the courtyard lending a hand wherever it was most urgently required’. Eventually he returned indoors to see what his tenants were doing and was shocked to discover just the old man Monsieur de Trassène, ‘infirm and deaf’, who told him ‘everyone has gone but I stayed here so as to live or die with you’. To reach safety, Ysarn led Trassène through ‘smoke-filled rooms towards a little staircase near the well, where I reckoned on being able to shelter in the cellars on that side. I led the way down at the risk of being crushed by sheets of iron which were falling from the roofs on all sides. Imagine my horror when I found the door to the cellar burning! I only had time to climb quickly up again and to take my companion in misfortune back through the same rooms, where the smoke left us little air to breathe.’ They soon realized that it would be impossible to stay inside the house any longer but the blazing buildings in the courtyard seemed to have cut off all possible escape routes. With smoke filling the room and fires heating the air, the two men faced death. But Trassène suddenly ‘had a good idea and made me remove the cover of the stove in order to find some air to breathe in the mouth of this stove’. The fresh air gave them some relief but they now had to deal with the flames that reached their room and were about to scorch them. ‘I sprang to the window,’ Ysarn recalled, ‘broke it down, and threw a mattress onto the sheets of red-hot iron which had fallen from the roof.’ He and Trassène then jumped out of window and landed on the mattress; picking themselves up, they ran towards the thermolamp, the French engineer Philippe Lebon’s invention designed to produce gas for heating and lighting rooms. ‘We soon reached it, built between the garden and the wooden wing in which I was living. We spent nearly an hour there, between the embrasure of two walls, continually moving about to find air to breathe in one direction or another. Our resources diminished every minute.’ Late in the evening Ysarn finally charged through a blazing hedge to seek another shelter. He and Trassène found refuge beyond the hedge on the grass near the pound, where they lay for a while surrounded by burning houses and fences.126

  Many eyewitnesses were astounded by the ferocity of the fire on the 16th. Abbé Surrugues thought that the city had turned into ‘an immense volcano whose crater vomited torrents of flames and smoke’. Napoleon’s secretary Agathon-Jean-François Fain also compared the conflagration to a volcanic eruption spewing out torrents of lava: ‘It felt as if the earth itself had split open and ignited all the fires. While the first furrows of fire continued burning on their dreadful course, new fires appeared and these new torrents, driven by the wind, spread into the suburbs that had not been affected by the earlier fires. The fire spread furiously, and knew no bounds … engulfing that unfortunate town in a sea of flames!’127 Throughout the day, the wind, increasing in violence every moment, spread the fires to the Kremlin as well, so that by noon Gourgaud recalled seeing ‘flames in the stables of the palace, and a tower adjoining the arsenal’. Bourgogne, having breakfast with his friends from the 1st Chasseurs that morning, recalled that ‘it was getting on to mid-day while we sat at breakfast with our friends, our backs against the enormous guns which guard each side of the arsenal, when we heard the cry “To arms!”’128 The alarm was caused by the fire spreading to the Kremlin: the clock face of the Troitskii Gate tower caught fire and firebrands began to fall into the courtyard where the Artillery of the Guard – hundreds of guns with some 400 caissons and about 100,000 pounds of gunpowder – was stationed. There was also a great quantity of tow, left by the Russians, part of which was already in flames. The fear of an explosion threw everyone into confusion, and Napoleon’s valet Constant recalled that ‘we trembled at the thought that a single spark, happening to fall on an ammunition wagon, might produce an explosion that would blow up the Kremlin. By some inconceivable negligence, a whole park of artillery had been established underneath the emperor’s windows.’ Colonel Boulart, who now arrived at the Kremlin in search of General Curial, found everyone ‘dejected and in a remarkable state of consternation. Fear and anxiety stood painted on all faces. Without a word said, everyone seemed to understand everyone else.’129

  According to Caulaincourt, the wind, which had veered slightly to the west, fanned the flames to a terrifying extent and carried large and numerous sparks to a distance, where they fell like a fiery deluge, setting fire to more houses and preventing even the most intrepid from remaining in the neighbourhood in safety. ‘The Kremlin became the epicentre of an immense fiery circle,’ recalled Montesquiou-Fezensac.130 The air was so hot, and the pine-wood sparks so numerous, that the beams supporting the iron plates which formed the roof of the arsenal all caught fire, while some of the windows cracked.131 The roof of the Kremlin kitchens was saved by soldiers deployed there with brooms and buckets to gather up the glowing fragments and moisten the beams. Yet the Kremlin was still in extreme peril. In the afternoon, despite everyone’s efforts, the flames reached the imperial stables located in the western part of the Kremlin, where ‘some of [Napoleon’s] horses were stabled and the coronation coaches of the Tsar were kept’.132 Meanwhile, sparks falling into the courtyard of the arsenal ignited several heaps of wadding (which was used to prime Russian cannon), threatening some 400 of the Grande Armée’s caissons that had been deployed there; in addition, thousands of pounds of gunpowder was stored inside the arsenal building itself. With brooms in hand, some Allied artillerymen on the roof frantically swept off any embers that might cause an explosion. Other soldiers, meanwhile, struggled around the arsenal itself, doing their best to extinguish the burning wadding and remove the caissons to less exposed areas. Using two fire pumps that had been ‘completely dismantled’133 but repaired during the night, the imperial grooms and ostlers did their best to save the Kremlin stables. The conditions, however, were brutal, since the air was seemingly charged with fire. Caulaincourt recalled:

  We breathed nothing but smoke, and the stoutest lungs felt the strain after a time. The bridge to the south of the Kremlin was so heated by the fire and by sparks falling on it that it kept bursting into flames, although the Guard, and the sappers in particular, made it a point of honour to preserve it. I stayed with some generals of the Guard and the aides-de-camp of the emperor, and we were forced to lend a hand and remain in the midst of this fiery deluge in order to motivate these half-roasted men. It was impossible to stand more than a moment in one spot – even the fur on the grenadiers’ caps was singed.134

  Informed of the danger, Napoleon insisted on coming to see it for himself; according to Constant, as he came down from his apartment, ‘the fire had already made such enormous headway on this side that the exte
rnal doors were half-consumed. The horses would not pass them; they reared, and it was with great difficulty that they could be made to cross the thresholds. The Emperor’s grey greatcoat was burned in several places, and so was his hair. A minute later we were marching on hot firebrands.’ Concerned for his safety, some offered to cover the emperor from head to foot with their cloaks and carry him on their arms through this terrible passage. But Napoleon refused and instead proceeded to the arsenal, where he arrived at the moment when General Baston de La Riboisière, inspector general of the Grande Armée’s artillery, was giving orders to have the caissons removed. The gunners and soldiers of the guard were surprised to find Napoleon exposing himself to so great a danger, and many members of the imperial suite were horrified by the threat the fire posed. La Riboisière pleaded with Napoleon to withdraw for his own safety, entreating that the troops, who ‘stood bewildered by his presence’, in the words of Gourgaud, might be permitted to save themselves without having their embarrassment increased by the presence of their Emperor. La Riboisière was joined by Berthier, Bessieres and Lefebvre, who all advised the emperor to leave at once, since there was the imminent danger that the arsenal and the neighbouring buildings might be blown up at any moment. Napoleon, however, refused to leave. He no doubt found it very difficult to reconcile himself to the prospect of abandoning the symbol of Russian imperial authority – Napoleon was the first foreigner to conquer Moscow in 200 years – in the heart of which he had hoped to negotiate a peace with the Russian sovereign. ‘Moscow is gone, and with it I lose the reward that I have promised my brave army,’ he was heard lamenting.135