The War of Wars (114 page)

Napoleon now had to make a fateful decision, for which he was forever to be criticized, and even lampooned as a coward. Unlike most others in this disastrous, ill-conceived campaign, it was probably the correct one. He decided to abandon his army. His reason was simple: he had to get back to France, protect his position there, and rally his empire. He had done all he could to bring his men to safety out of the disastrous Russian expedition: now there were more pressing matters.

He had lost a campaign, but not a war, still less his mighty empire, which required his attention. He appeared to be a captain leaving a sinking ship; but he was the Emperor of two-thirds of Europe. No one could accuse him of being a coward; he had accompanied the
Grande Armée
through all its rigours. Now that he believed this depleted force was safe from the Russians, he could no longer remain with it. He turned out to be wrong – his army was not yet out of danger; but he can be forgiven for not foreseeing that. He wrestled with the problem of whom to leave in charge, settling eventually for the authoritarian Murat rather than the loyal and able de Beauharnais and leaving behind, against his protests, his chief of staff Berthier to co-ordinate the army. He took with him the loyal Duroc, and his wisest councillor, Louis de Caulaincourt, brother of Auguste who had perished at the Great Redoubt. Napoleon and his entourage left in three carriages into hostile territory, travelling incognito, on 5 December.

As the Emperor departed, the valiant Ney fought a furious action at Moldechno alongside Victor, driving the Russians out of the village. The same day as Napoleon departed, temperatures plunged to
–37.5°C. Ségur described it: ‘The very day after Napoleon’s departure the sky showed a still more dreadful appearance. You might see icy particles floating in the air; birds fell from it quite stiff and frozen. The atmosphere was motionless and silent: it seemed as if everything which possessed life and movement in nature – the wind itself – had been seized, chained and, as it were, frozen by a universal death.’

Heinrich Rossier wrote: ‘Lack of sound and suitable footwear cost thousands of lives. In many cases extremities simply broke off, in others fingers and toes, and often whole arms and legs had to be amputated. Thousands more dropped by the wayside.’ Marbot wrote: ‘One of the stoutest and bravest officers in my regiment was so distracted by what he had seen in the last few days that he laid himself down on the snow and no persuasions being able to make him rise, died there. Many soldiers of all ranks blew out their brains to put an end to their misery.’

The very horses were vivisected. Auguste Thirion wrote: ‘It was too cold to kill and cut up those we destined for our rations; our hands, exposed for so long to the cold air, would have refused to perform this service . . . So we cut a slice from the quarters of the horses still on their feet and walking, and the wretched animals gave not the least sign of pain, proving beyond doubt the degree of numbness . . . caused by the extreme cold.’ When they found a village they simply pulled down the houses and burnt the wood to heat themselves. Soldiers contracted gangrene by standing too close to the fires. To feed themselves the soldiers did not just indulge in cannibalism but cut off their fingers to drink their own blood.

At last the remnants of the
Grande Armée
commanded by Murat covered the miles to Vilnius, reaching it on 9 December. Of the 60,000 altogether that crossed the Berezina, soldier and civilian and the 20,000 that had since joined the march, some 40,000 died in those days of intense cold. Arriving at Vilnius Murat allowed his men to shelter and help themselves to provisions. But he quietly departed, leaving Ney as usual to command the rearguard.

Further atrocities followed. According to Ségur:

It is true that the Lithuanians, although we had compromised them so much and were now abandoning them, received into their houses
and assisted several; but the Jews, whom we had protected, repelled the others. They did even more: the sight of so many sufferers excited their avarice. Had their greed been content with speculating upon our miseries and selling us some meagre supplies for their weight in gold, history would scorn to sully her pages with the disgusting detail; but they enticed our wounded men into their houses, stripped them, and on seeing the Russians, threw the naked bodies of these dying victims from the doors and windows of their houses into the streets and left them to perish of cold.

On 10 December Ney left Vilnius with his rearguard of 2,000 which soon shrank to just 500 men, and then to none at all – Ney having to ride for his life to escape. On 13 December Ney finally reached the borders of the Russian empire to join with the disorganized rabble of what was left of the
Grande Armée
at Kovno. The French had been almost annihilated: the Russians had not fared all that much better during the winter, with Kutuzov’s army reduced from its original 120,000 men to around 35,000 and Wittgenstein’s from 50,000 to 15,000.

Ney was left at this last outpost with just 700 men to face the Russians and on 14 December defended the last parcel of Russian territory before entering Poland. With thirty men he fought his way across the town to the crossing of the Niemen: he was one of the very last to cross. Ségur captured the pathos of the end of the great expedition to Russia:

Some there were, however, who, on their arrival on the Allied bank of the Niemen, turned round: there, when they cast a look on that land of suffering from which they were escaping, when they found themselves on the same spot where, five months previously, their countless eagles had taken their victorious flight, it is said that tears flowed from their eyes and that they uttered cries of grief. This then was the bank which they had studded with their bayonets! This the country which had disappeared only five months before under the steps of an immense united army and seemed to them to be metamorphosed into moving hills and valleys of men and horses! These
were the same valleys from which, under the rays of a burning sun, poured forth the three long columns of dragoons and cuirassiers, resembling three rivers of glittering iron and brass. And now men, arms, horses – the sun itself and even this frontier river, which they had crossed filled with enthusiasm and hope – all have disappeared. The Niemen is now only a long mass of ice, caught and chained by the increasing severity of the winter. Instead of the three French bridges, a Russian bridge is alone standing. Finally, in the place of these innumerable warriors, of their 400,000 comrades who had been so often their partners in victory and who had dashed forward with such joy and pride into the territory of Russia, they saw issuing from these pale and frozen deserts only 1,000 infantry and horsemen still under arms, nine cannon and 20,000 miserable wretches covered with rags. This was the whole of the
Grande Armée!

Murat continued his retreat with around 15,000 men to Gumbinnen, sixty miles to the west of Kovno. Here he summoned a council of war and advocated withdrawal to Königsberg: he was now openly mutinous towards Napoleon, whom he called a madman whom no nation in Europe could rely upon or conclude treaties with.

Murat soon learnt that the army of Marshal MacDonald in the north which had been holding Raga had returned to Tilsit; and that General von Yorck, the Prussian commander, had negotiated a peace agreement with the Russians to extricate his 18,000 men without further difficulty: this excited the Prussian people, chafing under years of French domination. Murat, horrified by Yorck’s defection, continued his withdrawal towards the river Oder, still pursued by some 40,000 troops under Kutuzov. On 17 January he decided to abandon his command, taking fast horses to his capital of Naples, which he reached on 13 January.

Eugène de Beauharnais was left to command the remaining troops on their retreat to the river Elbe, even as Kaiser Frederick William of Prussia chose this moment to join Alexander of Russia in the crusade against Napoleon at the Convention of Kalisch on 28 February. With the crossing of the Elbe the war was over: all but some 10,000 of a total army of more than 400,000 which had crossed into Russia had perished
there, 100,000 of them as Russian prisoners of war. The Russians for their part had lost some 450,000 casualties. It was the highest casualty rate and most horrific loss recorded in human history so far; in a campaign that had lasted only nine months. (Casualties in the Peninsular War extended over a six-year period.) To all intents and purposes, Napoleon’s army had been annihilated.

Napoleon’s Russian war had been the most ironic of all his military adventures. It was the only one which he had entered reluctantly, provoked by the other side. He had been prodded almost beyond measure by Alexander. During its course he had committed a staggering succession of errors entirely atypical of the once great, if far from infallible, general. At every stage he could have extricated himself with fewer losses than he was to suffer as a result of plunging deeper into the mire.

He could have stopped at Vitebsk or Smolensk. He could have saved himself by withdrawing immediately from Moscow after its immolation and returned before the winter set in. Finally and most disastrously, he could have followed up the taking of Maloyaroslavets and moved to Kaluga. He was to display overweening boldness and swagger before the Battle of Borodino – then only caution and timidity. It is fair to say that he exuded none of his old flair for leadership or genius in war either on the way into Russia or on the way out; virtually every decision was a mistake, usually taken against the angry advice of his own marshals. The campaign had been a terrible self-inflicted wound; the heroes of the Russian campaign had been Ney, Caulaincourt, Oudinot, Davout, de Beauharnais and last but not least the bridgebuilders across the Berezina – but not Napoleon. The campaign had been founded on a single mistake: that the Russians would negotiate. He complete underestimated the implacability of the Russian character and the callow Tsar he had flattered and thought he had befriended at Tilsit.

Most historians of the Napoleonic War have traced the downfall of Napoleon from the Russian disaster. But this is mistaken on two counts: first, the Peninsular War, extending over several years, had been possibly an even greater defeat for French arms, although the
personal prestige of the Emperor was not so involved as he wisely kept away. Second, the superman more than forty years old who had apparently gone to seed, become plump and inert and preferred to surround himself with sycophants rather than accept criticism, seemed to rejuvenate himself and return to the almost manic vigour of his earlier years after the Russian campaign had ended.

In adversity, Napoleon was suddenly to recover himself; the impossible legend of infallibility had been destroyed forever. Now he had to show he could recover and that, although merely mortal, he was still a commander of energy and skill. Fight back he did, displaying a ferocity none expected and in a manner that could have protected his throne and extended his domination of Europe for years to come. Russia had dealt him a huge blow, but not a mortal one. The sheer speed of his recovery was to take all his enemies by surprise.

The fightback had begun with his decision to abandon the tattered remnants of the
Grande Armée
and travel to Paris at the fastest possible speed. The journey of 1,400 miles was itself an epic. His three carriages were accompanied at first by an escort of 600 Poles and Neapolitans, almost all of whom perished from cold on the first leg of the journey. He narrowly avoided capture at Osmania, when a Russian force took the town an hour after he had left. Reaching Vilna in temperatures of–37°C, pretending to be the diplomat Louis de Caulaincourt’s secretary, the latter had to bang on the windows of storekeepers to obtain supplies.

The Emperor now had to travel on a sledge alone with Caulaincourt and a few outriders – a far cry from the extravagant splendour of his last visit. Caulaincourt took advantage to lecture the Emperor about his oppressive policies and high taxes: the night before, Napoleon, half frozen, had reminisced erratically and contemplated the possibility that they might be captured by the Prussians and exhibited in an iron cage.

At Dresden on 14 December, where just eight months before this King of Kings had presided over the most glittering convocation of courts ever assembled in homage to him, Caulaincourt had to bang on the door for directions from a local doctor, and was rebuffed. Napoleon remarked: ‘Between the sublime and the ridiculous there is but one step.’ He told Caulaincourt: ‘I am a reasonable being, who does no
more than he thinks will profit him. As for the catastrophic outcome of the campaign, we are victims of the climate. The fine weather tricked me. If I had set out a fortnight sooner, my army would be at Vitebsk and I should be laughing at the Russians and your prophet Alexander . . . Everything turned out badly because I stayed too long at Moscow . . . all will be retrieved within three months.’ They were at last in friendly territory: the King of Saxony let him have a good coach, and it took only five more days to reach Paris at nearly midnight on 18 December.

The wretched-looking Caulaincourt found it impossible to get the guards to admit him into the Tuileries. ‘The porter, who had gone to bed, came out with a lamp in his hand and dressed only in his shirt, to see who was knocking. Our faces looked so strange to him that he called his wife. I had to repeat my name three or four times over before I could persuade them to open the door. Meanwhile, a crowd of footmen and ladies-in-waiting had gathered and proceeded to gape at Napoleon from head to foot, until eventually the penny dropped: “It’s the Emperor!” one of them shouted . . . They could scarcely contain themselves.’

Napoleon’s reaction to disaster was entirely in character: he staged parties to celebrate the Russian expedition as though it had been a triumph; had not the French captured Moscow itself? This was a mistake, for the disaster could not be concealed from the French people.

He was also fully appraised of a comic-opera plot that had taken place in his absence staged by the half-insane General Malet who on the night of 22 October had announced that Napoleon was dead and proclaimed himself ruler. When the commander of the crucial Paris garrison failed to support him, the half-cocked conspiracy quickly collapsed and Malet was executed bravely by firing squad, himself giving the order for his own execution. Napoleon’s two most dangerous civilian rivals, Fouché and Talleyrand, were to his relief not involved nor were any senior generals – most of whom were with him in Russia or in Spain. Napoleon was bitterly disappointed that no one had rallied to his infant son, the King of Rome during that fateful night.