by Philip Dwyer
two of the men were standing and appeared drunk, they were reeling so much. The third, who was a German, lay on the horse. The poor wretch, dying of hunger and unable to cut into it, was trying to bite it. He ended up dying in that position of cold and hunger. The other two, Hussars, had their mouths and hands covered in blood. We spoke to them but were unable to obtain any response; they looked at us laughing in a frightening manner and, holding on to each other, they sat next to the man who had just died where, probably, they ended up falling into a fatal sleep.86
Attributed to Francois Fournier-Sarloveze, Coup d’oeil de la route de Moscou depuis la Bérézina jusqu’au Niémen, 1812 (A look at the route from Moscow from the Berezina to the Niemen, 1812), around 1812.
There were nevertheless isolated acts of heroism in all of this, men going out of their way to save comrades and friends, and sometimes strangers, but increasingly they became the exception to the rule.87
Napoleon Decamps
Not everybody blamed Napoleon for this catastrophe. His aura was so great that many officers, no matter what their nationality, believed that as long as he was with the army everything would be all right.88 Napoleon himself realized that if the army did not get at least one week’s rest at Vilnius, then it was doomed. Serious too were the political consequences of the disintegration of the army. Reports were coming out of Petersburg about the French being defeated, so Napoleon had to act to counter these rumours. He did so in his usual fashion, by exaggerating the achievement at the Berezina. He ordered one of Berthier’s aides-de-camp, Anatole de Montesquiou, to travel to Paris with a report stating that over 6,000 prisoners had been taken. Along the way, he was to stop in major towns and spread the news.
This was nothing less than damage control. The most Napoleon could count on was around 40,000 men, all that remained of the once impressive Grande Armée, although there were another 20,000 fresh troops garrisoned at Vilnius. With these men, rested and under competent command, it was reasonable to expect them to hold Vilnius. One should not forget, moreover, that the Russian army was suffering as much from the hardships brought by the cold as the soldiers of the Grande Armée.89 And once Napoleon had slipped through Kutuzov’s fingers at the Berezina, Kutuzov was not inclined to push the pace in pursuit of Napoleon. At this stage, the Russians were hardly in a position to mount a determined attack against Vilnius. If, on the other hand, Napoleon could not hold Vilnius, there was nothing to stop the Russians from moving into Poland and Prussia.
The 29th Bulletin was written on 3 December from Molodechno, about seventy-two kilometres south-east of Vilnius. It blamed the weather for the condition of the army, without however mentioning the horrendous losses it had suffered, except for the horses. It was easy enough for people to read between the lines. Despite mentioning the ‘victory’ at the Berezina, it would have been clear to all that this was a defeat. One hundred and sixty-four days had gone by since the army crossed the Niemen. About a day’s march out of Vilnius, on 5 December, at a small country house outside Smorgonie, Napoleon called his commanders together and told them of his decision to leave for Paris. The fact that he had, once again, almost been captured by Cossacks on the night of 3 December no doubt contributed to his decision to leave. All Russian corps commanders had received the order to try and capture Napoleon, along with a description of him : ‘thick waist, hair black, short and flat, strong black beard, shaved to the top of the ear, eyebrows very arched, but deep into the nose, a passionate but irascible look, aquiline nose with continuous traces of tobacco, the chin very prominent’.90 A hardly flattering but nevertheless reasonably accurate portrait.
Under the circumstances, Napoleon’s entourage considered his immediate return to Paris the correct decision to make. This, the Emperor believed, would allow him to keep in line his unreliable German allies, Prussia and Austria, and raise a new army while in France. He was, as we shall see, able to recruit the soldiers, but the assumption that he could keep a firm grasp over Austria and Prussia was mistaken, and the repercussions of his departure on the morale and discipline of the army were much worse than he could have anticipated. The Malet affair may also have played on his mind. He had, after all, been away from the imperial capital for over seven months. His returning home now, comparable in some respects to what had happened in Egypt thirteen years previously – though then he had left the army in a somewhat better condition – may also have been about giving the impression of taking the initiative.91 ‘I am leaving you,’ he declared to the army, ‘but it is to find three hundred thousand soldiers.’92 It was a political decision, possibly an apt one at the time, but one that was going to have devastating consequences for the remainder of the Grande Armée. There is no doubt they would have been better served by Napoleon’s continued presence.
Napoleon left with a few confidants – Caulaincourt and Duroc among others – on the evening of 5 December in three carriages escorted by a squadron of chasseurs and a squadron of Polish Light Horse of the Old Guard. Officers who still had horses were selected to make up a ‘sacred squadron’ (escadron sacrée) to accompany the Emperor, but the horses were so wretched and the officers so hungry it was dissolved after a few days.93 Berthier begged, tearfully, to be taken with him but the request was declined.94 Napoleon travelled incognito, as Caulaincourt’s secretary, Reyneval. Most senior officers understood his departure as a political decision, even though many in the lower ranks reproached him and a few insults were heard.95 As to whether it was accepted by the army, reports vary. Some maintained that very few people openly criticized Napoleon’s decision to abandon them to return to Paris.96 Before he left, however, he consulted with his marshals and generals about who should replace him as commander-in-chief. There were two possibilities: his brother-in-law Murat, or his stepson Eugène. Neither of them was really up to the job militarily – Davout or Ney would have been a better choice – but Napoleon believed that only a member of the imperial family would be able to keep at bay the petty feuding and jealousies bound to spring up between his marshals and generals once he had gone.97 Besides, Murat was a king and outranked the other marshals. At least that was his reasoning, but he should have known better. The appointment of Joseph as commander-in-chief in Spain certainly had not stopped the bickering between Napoleon’s generals. Since Murat was a king and Eugène only a prince, the mantle fell on to Murat’s shoulders.98
It was a mistake. Almost as soon as Napoleon had left, his marshals were at each other’s throats. Philippe de Ségur recalled, albeit with a good deal of hindsight, the misgivings he felt over Murat’s appointment: ‘In the empty space left by his [Napoleon’s] departure, Murat was hardly visible. We realized then – and only too well – that a great man cannot be replaced.’99 Part of the problem was that the marshals were far too proud to take orders from one of their own, and Napoleon had made sure that he was surrounded by able lieutenants, not leaders.100 On 8 December, Berthier wrote to say that the army was in complete disarray.101
Murat had been unable to impose his views on those under his command so that the councils of war, which he was supposed to chair, often ended up as shouting matches.102 Moreover, he demonstrated an extraordinary lethargy by failing to respond to letters from commanders in the field, thereby creating a leadership vacuum. He had, in fact, fallen into a deep funk, and asked permission of Napoleon to leave.103 Napoleon forbade him to do so. Murat then raged against his brother-in-law, at one point calling him ‘mad’ (insensé), although he was supposedly put in his place by Davout for having done so.104 No longer able to continue in the role, Murat summoned Eugène to his headquarters in Poznan´ . He claimed that he was ill, and that as a result he was leaving the army and going back to Italy where he was going to negotiate with Austria and Britain to keep his throne. In effect, he was abandoning his command and was asking Eugène to take over. It was not yet every man for himself in the face of a crumbling empire, but some of the rats were deserting the imperial ship. On 18 January 1813, Berthier followed Murat, as did
most of the marshals, leaving Eugène no choice but to take over. After Murat’s departure, Eugène took stock of the situation. Murat ‘has left me this great mess’, he complained to his wife.105 Napoleon’s response to Murat was cutting: ‘You are a good soldier on the battlefield, but off it, you have neither vigour nor character.’106 Even Napoleon admitted he had made a mistake in appointing Murat.107 Eugène’s appointment was greeted with great relief in the army.108 It would not have been until he wrote to Napoleon towards the end of January, after Murat had left the army, that the Emperor received a clearer picture of what was going on.109
Vilnius should have been a haven for the retreating army; there were enough supplies stocked there to feed 100,000 men for three months, as well as clothes, boots and muskets. A series of events, however, conspired to transform the town into a nightmare, while all the fresh divisions sent out to cover the retreat quickly disintegrated in the cold – most of them were young and inexperienced and knew nothing about how to cope in the extremely harsh conditions that awaited them.110
For those who arrived at the gates of Vilnius in the first weeks of December 1812, the reports vary from individual to individual. Some recall that the thought of arriving in a large town kept driving them on, but that within sight of the town one could see nothing but confusion.111 Others remembered that the depots were full of supplies but that the distribution was non-existent so that the magazines were looted and pillaged. General Hogendorp, governor of the city, who had initially undertaken measures to welcome the troops by setting up notices directing regiments to various places where they could find food, was accused of having abandoned his post once he saw the bulk of the army arrive on 9 December. (It is not at all clear that he did, but if he remained at his post his command was ineffectual.) Louis Joseph Vionnet de Maringoné, an officer in the Grenadiers of the Guard, managed to buy some wine but his stomach had shrunk so much that he had to drink it as though it were medicine, one spoonful every hour.112 Once inside, Sergeant Bourgogne remembered the curious effect an inhabited house made on him; he had not seen one in almost two months. When the Old Guard arrived, they found a mob of stragglers obstructing the gates: ‘in order to enter, they pushed them out of the way, they walked all over them, trampled them underfoot’.113
In a Sleigh with the Emperor
We are obliged to leave the army struggling on to Vilnius and follow Napoleon and his entourage back to Paris. At Gragow, they left the other carriages and the escort behind in order to forge rapidly ahead, passing through Warsaw, Dresden, Weimar, Leipzig, Erfurt, Mainz, Verdun and Château-Thierry, then Paris. At each stage of the return voyage Napoleon stopped to reassure his allies that he had everything under control. From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. He believed he could still beat the enemy, and in effect he had beaten him in open battle whenever the two armies engaged, but what he did not understand was the consequences of the demands he had placed on so many of his allies over the past years. The first part of the passage, between Vilnius and Kaunas, the coldest according to Caulaincourt, was spent simply huddled together, Napoleon ‘dressed in thick wool and covered with a good rug, with his legs in fur boots and then in a bag made of bearskin’.114 Even that was not enough to keep him warm; Caulaincourt had to share half his own bearskin rug. It was so cold that the cloth work in the carriage froze, while small icicles formed under their noses, around the eyebrows and on the eyelids. It was only after leaving Mariampol that the voyage was comfortable enough for the two men to communicate. Nothing of note happened as Napoleon made his way to Paris, except for one intriguing little incident, mentioned only in passing by Napoleon’s Mameluke servant, Roustam Raza, who wrote his memoirs many years after the event. When Napoleon stopped off at an inn in a little town outside Kaunas on 6 December 1812, and took the time to have a wash and change his clothes, the discarded shirt and stockings were immediately seized on by ‘everyone’ and divided into pieces.115 ‘Holy relics’ to be preserved? The cult, it would appear, had penetrated even the outer reaches of the Empire.
Caulaincourt’s recollections of that ride back to Paris are one of the most intimate and interesting accounts of Napoleon we have. When they halted each evening between five and nine so that Napoleon could rest and the party could dine, and the Emperor dozed off on a chair in front of a fire or on a couch, Caulaincourt would take the time quickly to note down the conversations of that day, or at least what he considered to be important. Alone with him for almost two weeks, sharing the hardships of the road, changing carriages when they either broke down or transferred to a sleigh, stopping at the postmasters’ stations along the way for the evening meal, Napoleon opened up to him, and talked of everything from the state of France, of Spain, Prussia, and his brothers through to Russia and England.116 For Napoleon, talking assuaged his fears, and made the long trip more bearable. Caulaincourt was the sounding board, but whenever he contradicted his imperial master, he invariably received the reply, ‘You are young,’ or ‘You don’t understand affairs.’ Imagine a reader sympathetic to Napoleon who, with the benefit of hindsight, went back in time to persuade him to moderate his foreign policy in the hope of getting him to change direction. It will give one an idea of the tone of the conversations between the two men. It was, as it turned out, a futile endeavour on the part of Caulaincourt. Whenever he got too close to the bone – that is, when he attacked the Emperor’s seemingly unbridled ambition or his passion for war – Napoleon would smile, joke or try to pinch Caulaincourt’s ear, a typical gesture on his part, although he probably had some difficulty finding his interlocutor’s ear under the fur bonnet he was wearing.117
Once the reader cuts through the traditional exculpatory explanations – if it was not for Britain he would have stayed at home; he was tricked by the climate and defeated by winter – the most significant observation worth noting is that he did not, possibly was unable to, recognize the extent of his losses. He was under the illusion that the army would halt at Vilnius for the winter, and that his return to Paris would restore his political ascendancy and would somehow make up for the disasters the army had incurred. It is possible that Napoleon was lost in the past and that he believed, as with his return from Egypt after a very mixed campaign, that his return would simply put everything right again.
Hubris, arrogance and an utter inability to admit his mistakes, which he avoided confronting by expounding on how the enemy could have fought better, were the hallmarks of his monologues. The only mistake he appears capable of acknowledging was to have stayed too long at Moscow. It was not invading Russia in the first place, adopting a Continental System that obliged him to pursue the phantom of economic dominance, fighting a war on two fronts, or being drawn deep into Russia in spite of himself. All those strategic errors he could argue his way out of, as though it were simply a matter of putting up a good argument, rather than dealing with a reality that touched the lives of millions of people. They were abstract ideas in which Napoleon imagined positive outcomes that had little to do with the harsh reality with which he was confronted. Thus the war in Spain, ‘only a matter of guerrilla contests’, would be resolved in a month or two, once the English had been driven out; ‘I can change the face of affairs when I please.’118 Possibly, but he had to get there, and that was unlikely in the immediate future. It was ironic given that even he was aware that ‘in war men could lose in a day what they had spent years in building up’.119
Aftermath
The retreat lasted from about 18 October to 23 December, when advance elements of the Guard entered Königsberg. Even to get to Königsberg, however, was a feat; the remnants of the army were pursued by Cossacks all the way into Prussia. Once there, though, after three months of incredible hardship and deprivation, the survivors could at last rest, eat, sleep, take a bath, change their clothes, tend to their wounds and attempt to come to grips psychologically with the horrors they had lived through. Fantin des Odoards was haunted by the retreat for months afterwards, plagued with bl
ack thoughts and nightmares, and confronted with ‘an ocean of ice that he could not lose from sight’.120
At Königsberg, the inhabitants were so angry with the French that violent confrontations took place.121 For, after weeks of rumour, news of the destruction of the invasion army reached western Europe with a devastating impact. The reaction wherever the French were hated was the same, one of hope. In London, the city went ‘crazy’ in the expectation of what the disaster might bring.122 In Vienna, Napoleon’s defeat elicited general joy, toasts were drunk to the health of the victors, and the ‘Russian faction’ gained increasing ascendancy at court.123 This is not, however, what Metternich had been expecting and it threw him into some confusion. He did not particularly relish the thought of a Russian army marching into central Europe. The 29th Bulletin was published in Paris on 16 December (two days before Napoleon arrived). For the people of France, it was the first indication that things had not gone well. News of the disaster started to trickle in towards the end of the month. The general reaction was revealing. Some spoke of the ‘horror’ and ‘consternation’ into which the people of France were thrown, although there was also a good deal of indignation at the loss of so many men.124 When news of the calamity reached David, he was heard to remark in a brilliant piece of understatement, ‘Ah! ah! That’s not quite what we wanted.’125 In the rest of the country, general indignation is probably the best way to describe how people felt about the fiasco that was Russia, exacerbated by reports coming in from Spain. Soon enough, people hostile to Napoleon felt emboldened by the defeat to express their ire, not only in Paris, but in various towns and regions of France.126 The people had not yet turned away from their Emperor, but that they were less inclined to support him in times of trouble is clear.