by Philip Dwyer
The choices before him were: to march on St Petersburg some 640 kilometres away – the threat was real enough for Alexander’s court to start packing95 – an option that was quickly ruled out as impractical from a supply perspective;96 to move to Velikiye-Luki, about 160 kilometres north-east of Vitebsk, where he would join with his other two corps commanders, Oudinot and Gouvion Saint-Cyr and go into winter quarters, an option also dropped for supply reasons;97 to stay in Moscow for the winter with the danger of being cut off from the rest of the Empire; or to head for the Ukraine, which was what Davout was urging (there were rumours to that effect as early as September).98 Napoleon seems to have been reluctant to engage Kutuzov once again, almost as though he doubted his own abilities or had been dealt a blow to his self-confidence by Borodino.99 A number of senior military figures in Napoleon’s entourage had been urging a withdrawal from Moscow to an area closer to the Empire. They wanted peace, although they do not appear to have confronted Napoleon openly; they included Ney, Murat, Davout, Caulaincourt and Berthier.100 Some time towards the end of the first week in October he must have made up his mind. He ordered the war booty from the Kremlin packed on 9 October, and the wounded evacuated on 10 October.101 On 14 October, orders were issued not to bring any further cavalry or artillery forward to Moscow.102 The treasure and the sick and wounded, an estimated 12,000 men, left on 15, 16 and 17 October.103
When Napoleon woke on the morning of 13 October, the ruins of Moscow were covered with a thin, white blanket of snow.104 It was the first real fall; snow had fallen as early as 27 September, but it had melted almost immediately.105 This is when it appears he made the decision to take the only other option available to him, to retreat to Smolensk (but not to the Russian border because to do so would give the appearance of a military defeat). But not only the weather played on his mind. The previous day, an incident occurred which demonstrated only too clearly just how precarious was the situation. A courier who had been sent from Moscow to Paris was captured by Cossacks at the same time as a courier from Paris en route to Moscow. Napoleon’s line of communications in other words had become tenuous, and he could not tolerate a situation in which he was cut off from Paris. That left only the question of which route to take: he opted to go back the way he had come, though it was problematic to say the least, since the road had been devastated during the advance and the army would find little succour. It was, however, the best road to Smolensk and the most direct route. He could attempt to find a route parallel to but south of the Moscow–Smolensk road, likely to be a source of more supplies than would be available to the north of that road. He could head south for Kaluga on the Oka River 150 kilometres south-west of Moscow, inflict a defeat on Kutuzov – considered an indispensable preliminary move for any retreat to take place106 – and then head east on a relatively good road to Smolensk. He had left it a bit late but things were by no means dire. Smolensk was ten to twelve days’ march from Moscow, and after that Minsk was another ten, Vilnius another fifteen. All of these cities were well stocked and would be able to supply his army with everything it needed. From there, he could draw on reinforcements that were gathering in Prussia and Poland and in the spring march on Petersburg.107
When a French delegation returned to Moscow on 17 October after failing to get to St Petersburg, there was no longer any doubt in Napoleon’s mind. The next day, he issued orders to retreat through a southern route, to begin two days later.108 The lack of orders to prepare men for the coming winter, however, bordered on the criminal. It is possible, but highly unlikely, that Napoleon assumed corps or divisional commanders would take charge of these details. Most of them did not, although a few officers had the foresight to prepare for the bitter winter ahead by finding fur coats, and by making sure they themselves were well provided for.109 Others were less fortunate, unable to pay the inflated prices for winter clothing in the bazaars erected by enterprising troops.110 Few officers, Colonel Marbot was one of them, had the foresight to order their men to acquire winter clothing.
The same day Napoleon issued the order to evacuate Moscow, Kutuzov, under tremendous pressure from his more aggressive generals, decided to approve a plan of attack against Murat and his cavalry situated in the vicinity of Tarutino, some hundred kilometres south-west of Moscow. The battle of Vinkovo, as it is called, is of itself of no importance. Murat and his subordinates were caught napping but managed to extricate themselves in the face of overwhelming odds, although they lost about 5,000 men in the process. What is more important is Napoleon’s reaction. When he heard of it, for some reason he appears to have lost his nerve and ordered that the departure from Moscow be speeded up by twenty-four hours.
The army started marching out of Moscow on 19 October. Sergeant Bourgogne’s regiment started off in the afternoon but it was almost night before they were out of the city.111 He soon found himself amid a great number of carriages driven by men of different nationalities, all swearing in their mother tongue when their carriages broke down, creating ‘such a din as to make your head burst. The turmoil in Moscow at the news of the departure is impossible to describe. One could hardly walk through the streets. Horses, wagon crews, artillery, everything was pell-mell. One cannot imagine what that city contained. The road was covered with wagons for seven or eight leagues.’112 It would appear that many officers had stolen carriages in which they placed booty they were attempting to take with them.113 There was a long line of calashes and small carts around which each company was grouped. ‘Everyone deposited their individual reserves of food and clothing and believed that they would be able to conserve them throughout the retreat.’114
One witness described the hordes leaving Moscow with their plunder as a carnival.115 Most seem to have been in good spirits and to have recuperated from their long march after spending a number of weeks in Moscow doing little but eating and drinking.116 The number of civilians who decided to leave with the army could have been as high as 50,000.117 These were a mixture of men and women who had followed the army into Russia, plus a number of French residents of Moscow, plus female camp followers who had met troops during their stay there, not to mention the prostitutes who decided they were better off following the army than remaining behind, as well as Muscovites employed as domestic servants.118 As a result, the number of non-military vehicles that accompanied the army, anywhere between 15,000 and 40,000 wagons, caused an enormous traffic jam trying to get out of the city.119 The column leaving Moscow was three and four carriages wide and between thirty and fifty kilometres long.120 In one account, the retreating mass covered a width of a few kilometres either side of the road they were following; burning villages indicated the route they had taken.121 Every now and then an explosion was heard as munitions wagons were abandoned by their crews and then set alight. The further they advanced the more frequent became the explosions.122 Often the wounded had to be abandoned with horses dying along the way.
Most of the carriages seem not to have been carrying essential supplies, but rather personal loot, anything from clothing to china to furniture and linen.123 All these things would have been items that one would have found in privileged households, and thus were valuable objects, especially for the common soldier. Almost all the officers of the general staff had ‘dressed in the Russian manner’.124 One group of French women who left Moscow with the army for fear of reprisals were dressed as though they were Parisian bourgeoisie going to a dinner on the lawns of Vincennes or Romainville. Mlle Eléonore, for example, ‘who was sitting next to me in a carriage, had a rose-coloured hat, a white dress trimmed with lace, and finally white satin shoes’.125 One cavalry officer made sure that he was well stocked with provisions, carrying with him rice, flour, sugar, coffee and three big pots of jam.126 The camps that were set up those first nights did not resemble an army so much as a large fair, in which soldiers were metamorphosed into merchants selling the most precious objects at bargain-basement prices.127 Soldiers ate off porcelain and drank out of silver vases.
The conse
quences are easy to foresee in hindsight. Less space was given to vital provisions and the progress of the army was considerably slowed.128 ‘The road was so encumbered with wagons that we sometimes took three hours to do half a league . . . From first light to evening, and into the night, we had been marching and we had hardly gone four leagues . . .’129 Napoleon knew about the excess baggage carried by the army – during the return journey he stopped on two occasions to watch the army pass by and saw for himself the loot taken from Moscow – but appears to have been unable or unwilling to do anything about it.130 It was an apparent abundance that masked a real misery; there was little bread or meat after only days from Moscow.131 What began as a masquerade would end in a massive funeral procession in which the participants would succumb to starvation, disease, the cold and Cossacks.132
Indecision seems to have marked Napoleon’s thinking during the weeks leading up to the order to retreat, but in addition there does not seem to have been a great deal of certainty about just where he was going to retreat to, or how. He decided to move south, towards Kaluga, as though he were going to give battle to Kutuzov, dug in at Tarutino. Prince Eugène was sent ahead with an advance party. But two days out of Moscow, on 21 October, Napoleon seems to have had a change of heart and moved abruptly west towards Fominskoie, ordering Eugène to take the town of Maloyaroslavets.
It was then too that he sent orders to Marshal Edouard Mortier, who had been left behind in Moscow with the seriously wounded and 5,000 surviving members of the Young Guard, to abandon the city. The months of supplies that had been stocked there were burnt. Mortier was also ordered to blow up the Kremlin, which is what he set about doing. It was a vengeful, destructive act devoid of all military or strategic purpose. It shows too that Napoleon had no intention of returning. The orders were carried out by Generals Noury and Berthezène, who placed over 90,000 kilos of charges in the cellars of the Kremlin palaces. Fortunately, many of the fuses, soaked from the rain that poured down on 22 October, failed to ignite, but those that did explode were heard forty kilometres away.133
Maloyaroslavets
At Maloyaroslavets, a town of about 10,000 people, 120 kilometres south-west of Moscow, Eugène ran into about 12,000 men under General Dmitry Sergeyevich Dokhturov, sent by Kutuzov under the mistaken impression that Eugène’s troops were a foraging party – Kutuzov had no idea yet that the French had abandoned Moscow – no doubt hoping to repeat his victory against Murat. When Dokhturov realized what was happening, he dug in and waited for reinforcements to arrive. If Napoleon wanted to push ahead and take Kaluga, he would have to attack. Kutuzov arrived later in the morning but decided to withdraw rather than face the brunt of the Grande Armée. He did so about midday, when he saw that he could no longer hold the town, pulling back to a defensive position on a ridge that dominated the road along which Napoleon would have to march. Napoleon arrived at about 1 p.m. with the bulk of the army, not sure whether he should engage. The French were able to take the town, but at the cost of between 4,000 and 10,000 men killed and wounded. Another victory like that, and Napoleon would not have much of an army left.
Napoleon reconnoitred the next morning, but was again undecided what to do. He had a chance of defeating Kutuzov, again, but he would still have to fall back on Smolensk. Moreover, the battle would no doubt be bloody. If he retreated towards Smolensk, on the other hand, he would have a Russian army intact on his tail the whole way. He discussed his position further with his entourage but without coming to a decision.134 At one stage during the morning, he was almost captured by Cossacks. Berthier and Caulaincourt remained with Napoleon, swords drawn, while a contingent under Rapp went off to deal with the Cossacks.135 We do not know what kind of impression the incident made on Napoleon, but it is possible that he was shaken, having been attacked within such a short distance of his headquarters. That, along with the costly victory at Maloyaroslavets, seems to have undermined his confidence.
A meeting took place that evening (25 October) in Napoleon’s quarters, a little cabin in the village of Gorodnia, during which he consulted his marshals as well as his aides-de-camp about the options before them.136 Most, it seems, were for turning around and going back up the road towards Mozhaisk and then along the highway to Smolensk, the way they had come. It was the shortest route. Davout was one of the few who preferred heading south through Kaluga, and then finding a new road to the Niemen. Napoleon, undecided, asked Mouton for his opinion, and Mouton also suggested the shorter route to the Niemen. There was a third option that does not appear to have been considered, namely, to turn west to Iukhov and then on to Smolensk along smaller country roads. As a result of the meeting Napoleon elected to turn about and head for Smolensk. It was the first time that he had opted not to give battle when he was in a position to do so. It speaks volumes about his state of mind and his situation. The decision to return to Mozhaisk has been described as one of the worst Napoleon ever made.137 Not only did his forces lose time retracing their steps – it had taken them nine days to get this far – but they avoided countryside that might have allowed them to replenish supplies in the course of their retreat. Heading back along a route that had already been devastated twice, once by the retreating Russian army and again by the advancing imperial army, deprived them of any possibility of living off the land. Napoleon seems to have been cowed. This decision, like so many of the mistakes made by him during this campaign, was based upon faulty reconnaissance. If he had bothered to send out proper scouting parties to find out what exactly the enemy was up to he would have discovered that Kutuzov was retreating south along the road to Kaluga.138
‘The Empire of Death’
Morale had been high on the way from Moscow to Maloyaroslavets. But the retreat back towards Mozhaisk changed all that. Discipline, which had probably not been very good up till then, began to break down altogether. It is almost as though the troops sensed that they no longer had a leader, or that they could not count on him to get them out. Small bands began to break away, thinking they would have a better chance of survival than with the army (they were wrong). Part of the problem appears to have been the speed at which Napoleon travelled, possibly motivated by a fear that the army would run out of provisions. One historian has calculated that an army of around 120,000 men and 40,000 horses required 850 carts to carry just one day’s food and forage.139 To feed the French army for any length of time would have required, therefore, many thousands of carts.
On the road to Mozhaisk (27 October), Napoleon had a meeting with General Ferdinand Wintzingerode, a Württemberger in Russian service. He was captured by a patrol as he rode into Moscow to check whether reports about the Grande Armée’s withdrawal were true. One of the most angry scenes Napoleon’s entourage had ever seen followed as he accused Russia, quite irrationally, of being in the pay of the English, and of having taken part in all the plots against him.140 It is not known why he got so upset, but angry he was, to the point where after the encounter he ordered a fine large country house near by to be torched along with every village the army passed through on the way to Smolensk.141 This behaviour is reminiscent of the retreat of the French army from St John of Acre through Palestine, except this time there was an army hard on its heels.142 Countermanding the order a short time later hardly made any difference. Hundreds of towns and villages were destroyed. ‘Under the ashes that were still hot’, wrote one witness, ‘and which the wind blew towards us, were the bodies of several soldiers or peasants. There were also slain children, and young girls massacred in the same place where they had been raped.’143
In the early hours of 29 October, unable to sleep, Napoleon woke and called for Caulaincourt to come into his room, close the door behind him and sit on the bed.144 It was not Napoleon’s habit to allow a member of his staff into close proximity, so it is interesting for what it reveals of his state of mind. At this stage, he was still thinking of winter quarters at Vitebsk, in the belief that the expected arrival of anywhere between 1,500 and 2,000 Polish Cossacks would e
ntirely reverse the situation by fending off the Russian Cossacks, guarding the army and allowing it to rest and feed itself. Whether he was deluding himself or had been misled, or whether he announced this measure in the hope of maintaining morale is impossible to say. In any event, the Polish Cossacks never arrived. Caulaincourt tried to open his eyes to the real state of the army, but his message does not appear to have sunk in. Napoleon took an hour to come around to the thrust of the conversation, which was that he was already thinking of abandoning the army and returning to Paris.
That day, the leading elements of the column crossed the battlefield of Borodino, ‘a field of desolation that was still pulsating with horror’.145 The field was littered with the tell-tale remnants of battle – damaged cannon, broken wagons, helmets, cuirasses, muskets, uniforms in shreds. Thirty thousand dead lay across the field unburied, an ‘empire of death’ as one witness put it,146 who had been lying there for the previous fifty days, while hastily dug mass graves had begun to uncover. Many of the bodies had preserved what might be called a physiognomy; all of them had their eyes wide open, their skin the colour of brick red and Prussian blue.147 According to some accounts, not entirely reliable but which obviously repeated a rumour that was doing the rounds, at least one wounded soldier of the Grande Armée was discovered alive, having lived off horse and human flesh and drunk from a little river filled with cadavers.148 Other wounded Russians had dragged themselves to the road leading to Moscow and had lived off whatever passers-by gave them to eat.149 One can imagine the stench and the psychological impact it must have made on the column of men marching through this open cemetery.