B009YBU18W EBOK (66 page)

Sub-Lieutenant Pierre Auvray of the 22nd Dragoons and four comrades had fallen behind on the march, and were captured by cossacks. ‘First they took my horse, which I had been fortunate enough to preserve from the rigours of the winter and which served to carry the personal effects of myself and my comrades,’ he wrote. ‘They looted our possessions and got hold of my portmanteau, which held some precious underclothes and a small box of jewels I had managed to procure in Moscow. Then they searched us and, finding no money on my person, they presumed that my wound must be concealing things that might satisfy their cupidity. They tore away my dressing with such violence that it caused me horrible pain. But so much suffering did not soften their hearts, and they undressed us and beat us with the wooden staves of their lances; we remained in this dreadful position in the snow, in this icy climate for some time, until the cossacks took fright at the approach of some French troops marching in force.’
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Major Henri Everts of the 33rd Light Infantry in Davout’s corps was taken prisoner at Krasny. He was stripped to the skin on the very battlefield by the Russian infantry to whom he had surrendered, and every single item of value was taken from him – they came to blows over his watch. When he and other officers were brought into the Russian camp they complained to an officer, and General Rosen found him an overcoat and gave him a drink in order to comfort him. The following day he set off in a column of 3400 prisoners, of whom
no more than about four hundred reached the provincial town in which they were to be held. The escorting cossacks did not give them any food, and let the local peasants torment them whenever they stopped for the night.
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Colonel Auguste Breton, one of Ney’s aides-de-camp, was also taken at Krasny, having been wounded, but he was lucky in that he was taken under Milaradovich’s gaze. The Russian General actually bound his wound up himself before sending him off to Kutuzov’s headquarters, where the Field Marshal treated him amiably. But the moment he left headquarters he and his comrades were stripped and robbed by the escorting cossacks, who pocketed the money meant for the prisoners, gave them little food and took pleasure in gratuitous cruelty, such as not allowing them to drink when they reached a stream or not permitting them to make fires at night. Prisoners were force-marched, and if a man stopped to tie up his leggings or answer the call of nature he would be beaten and, if he did not rejoin the column fast enough, killed. They were sometimes given food and clothing by sympathetic landowners and even peasants as soon as they moved out of the area affected by the war, but this would often be taken from them by their escorts. Of one convoy of eight hundred, only sixteen were alive in June 1813.

As a rule, the later they were taken the worse the lot of the prisoners. When the cold became more intense, the cossacks found it amusing to strip prisoners and stragglers to the skin and leave them naked in the snowbound wilderness. The survival rate had never been good, but it grew much worse as the men were now weaker when taken and there was less food, clothing and shelter at the disposal of the Russians. And the further west they were taken, the longer the march back to the place of detention in Russia.

For many, the only hope of salvation was in establishing some connection that would take them out of the regular convoy. L.G. de Puybusque was captured by Platov’s men, not far from Orsha. Platov was impressed by Ney’s daring escape (and secretly delighted that Miloradovich had been made an ass of), and therefore treated him
well. He was sent on to Yermolov’s headquarters, which was a stroke of luck. ‘I had met him in the drawing rooms of Paris,’ recalled Puybusque. ‘And although, by order of our respective sovereigns, we had become enemies, and I found myself among the vanquished, he was the first to remind me of the circumstances in which we had met, which so many others in his position would have pretended to have forgotten. If he allowed me to see the extent of his authority, it was only by giving many orders to ensure that I should enjoy while in his company all the advantages of the most generous hospitality, and that I should have all my needs and those of my companion in misfortune catered for.’

General Pouget, who had been the French military governor of Vitebsk, was fortunate enough to be taken not far from there, so that although he was robbed and beaten up by cossacks in the normal way on capture, he was then sent back into the city, where the inhabitants, to whom he had been fair and kind during his reign, interceded for him and recovered most of his possessions.
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For those remaining with the army the greatest affliction was now the cold, which added to their troubles at every level. Those fortunate enough to own a horse or carriage could not ride for long periods but had to dismount and walk in order to keep their circulation going. The roadway, churned up on a warmer day, turned into a terrifying ankle-twisting obstacle course and a lacerater of feet and worn boots when the ruts froze hard into jagged-edged canyons.

An unexpected consequence of the hard frost was that there was no water. Ice had to be melted over a fire, which meant that the labour involved in getting something to drink could be prodigious, requiring as it did both a fire and a vessel of some sort. Men and horses became dehydrated, which weakened them and contributed to their death – all the more effectively as they did not expect it at such a temperature.

This affected every function, as fingers grew clumsy and troops struggled with leather straps, harnesses and other pieces of equipment,
which were stiff with cold. Even the soles of their boots had to be gradually softened, or they might snap. Men who walked to the side of the road and unbuttoned their pants in order to answer the call of nature, a frequent one since many of them had diarrhoea, would find to their horror that they were unable to button them up again. ‘I saw several soldiers and officers who could not button themselves up,’ wrote Major Claude Le Roy. ‘I myself helped to dress and button up one of these unfortunates, who was weeping like a child.’
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Another consequence of the cold was a plague of frostbite. Most of the men who made up the Grande Armée came from climates where this phenomenon is entirely unknown, and they could therefore neither take elementary precautions, recognise the signs nor react in the appropriate way. They would try to get as warm as possible in a cottage, or heat their hands and faces at a fire, before setting off into the cold, little realising that this only made the exposed parts more vulnerable. When they did feel a numbness or someone pointed out that their nose had gone a telltale white, they would naturally seek the warmth of a house or rush up to a fire. This would induce instant gangrene. The affected part of the body would go a livid hue of purple and snap off as the sufferer tried to rub it. The only way of preventing damage of this sort is by rubbing the afflicted part vigorously with snow until circulation is restored, attended by excruciating pain. But few, apart from the Poles, the Swiss and some of the Germans, knew this, with terrible consequences. ‘To amuse the ladies, you can tell them that very probably half their acquaintances will return without noses or ears,’ Prince Eugène wrote to his wife.
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But it was no laughing matter.

Captain François watched in disbelief as one of his friends unwrapped his feet from his improvised footwear as they settled down for the night. ‘As he took off the cloth and leather in which they were wrapped, three toes came away,’ he wrote. ‘Then, removing the rags from the other foot, he took the big toe, twisted it and tore it off without feeling any pain.’
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Once a man had lost all his toes, he could no longer walk without assistance; once he had lost his fingers, he
was not only incapable of handling weapons, he could not get at any food, other than by tearing at the carcase of a horse with his teeth and sucking its blood.

The freezing temperatures made even this impossible. The horses, which had managed to keep going by eating tree bark and any bush or weed that pierced through the snow and by munching snow where there was no water, could not tear off the frozen bark or crunch the ice, so they died in their thousands. But a dead horse became rock hard in minutes, and its meat could not be cut up. So it was essential to find one that was still alive in order to be able to cut meat out of it.

It was but a short step from there to slicing steaks off a horse’s hindquarters while its owner was not looking. The beasts did not feel the pain on account of the cold, and the blood froze instantly. They could carry on for days with such gashes in their hindquarters, but eventually the wounds would fester and start oozing pus, which itself froze. Another resource was to cut a horse’s vein and suck out the blood, or collect it in a vessel and boil it up with melted snow to add nourishment to some thin gruel. Some would cut out and devour the tongue of the still-living horse. But the best nourishment was to be had by ripping open its belly and tearing out its heart and liver while they were still warm, and this was what increasingly befell those which, unable to go any further, were abandoned by their owners.
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From the moment the retreating army passed Ladi it was in former Polish lands, which meant the towns and villages were inhabited. Even in these dire times the ubiquitous Jewish shopkeepers could be relied on to lay their hands on the necessities of life – but only at a price. And the inhabitants were fearful of accepting anything which, if found in their possession later, might lay them open to reprisals on the part of the Russians.

Most currencies had lost their value. Dr Heinrich Roos remembered seeing a Württemberg soldier sitting by the roadside outside Orsha with a silver ingot in his lap, begging to exchange it for the
slightest scrap of food, but nobody was prepared to part with lifesaving rations in order to acquire a heavy piece of currency which would only have worth once he had got home. The only reaction he elicited from the men shuffling past him was a litany of cruel jokes. Even the last resort of the women – prostitution – was proving worthless in the circumstances. ‘There was no amorous intent in my action,’ Boniface de Castellane noted after having given a woman some chocolate. ‘We are all so tired that everyone is saying they would rather have a bottle of bad Bordeaux than the prettiest woman on earth.’
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Those who did not manage to remain with their colours and had no money were obliged to pilfer. With the loss of so much of the baggage, the scope for this was greatly reduced, so the thieving often turned into violent robbery, and many a man was killed for a horse’s liver, a crust of bread or any other kind of food. An isolated man with something to eat would carefully choose his moment to consume it when nobody was watching, otherwise he might get a bayonet in the back. But by the time Colonel Lubin Griois had found a safe place to consume the wonderful little loaf of white bread he had miraculously managed to acquire, it was frozen rock hard, and he wept as his teeth scraped ineffectually on the crust.
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Outside the units which had stayed together, all sense of camaraderie and solidarity had vanished. The various nationalities grew more resentful of each other, with the Germans cursing the French for having dragged them into the war, and the French cursing the Poles for supposedly being its cause. In the struggle for survival another’s life meant nothing. ‘Many times, the implacable, frenzied rabble would shoot at each other when looting, when foraging, over a place to sleep, over a bowl of milk, over a shirt, over a pair of worn-out shoes,’ wrote Lieutenant Józef Krasinski.
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Anything left unguarded for a moment would vanish. An officer walking along with his horse’s rein passed through his arm would look around to find that the rein had been cut and the horse taken. Men had their hats stolen from under their heads and the cloaks
which covered them purloined as they slept. The length of the retreat and the loss of the baggage meant that their clothing, inadequate from the start, had reached a critical condition.

‘My socks had given out a long time ago; my boots were worn out and all but sole-less; I had swathed them in straw which, with the aid of pieces of string, held the whole thing just about together,’ wrote Julien Combe. ‘My grey trousers and my uniform jacket were holed and worn threadbare, and I had been wearing the same shirt for the past month.’ To ward off the cold, Jean-Michel Chevalier, an officer in the Chasseurs à Cheval of the Guard, wore a flannel vest under his shirt, four waistcoats, one of them of sheepskin, his uniform, a frock-coat and a large cloak, four pairs of trousers or breeches over his underpants, and a bearskin busby.
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But so many layers made walking, let alone fighting, difficult.

Colonel Griois was more sensible. Under his shirt he wore a flannel vest. His uniform consisted of a red woollen waistcoat, woollen trousers with no underwear, a tailcoat of light wool, and a light overcoat. On his feet he wore a pair of calf-high boots and cotton socks. He managed to get hold of an additional overcoat, but this was stolen. He tried to wear the bearskin cloak he had acquired in Moscow, but while this was excellent for sleeping in, it was far too heavy to march in. He therefore let his horse carry it during the day. But he did cut a strip off it to fashion into a muff, which he suspended from his neck by a string. He used another strip of the bearskin as a muffler, attached by string at the back of his head. ‘It is in this singular array, my head barely covered by a hat in shreds, my skin chapped by the cold and blackened by smoke, my hair covered in hoar frost and my moustaches bristling with icicles, that I covered the two or three hundred leagues from Moscow to Königsberg, and, in the crowd which flowed along the road, I stood out as one of those whose costume still conserved something of the uniform; the majority of our unfortunate companions looked more like ghosts dressed up for a masquerade. If they had kept elements of their military dress, one could not see it, covered as they were by the warmest clothing they could find. Some,
lucky enough to have preserved their greatcoat, had turned it into a kind of habit with a hood, tied around their body with a piece of string; others had used woollen blankets or women’s skirts for the same purpose. Many wore on their shoulders women’s pelisses lined with precious furs, relics from Moscow and originally intended for sisters and mistresses. There was nothing at all unusual in seeing a soldier with a blackened and disgusting face dressed in a coat of pink or blue satin, lined with swansdown or Siberian fox, scorched by campfires and covered in grease stains. Most of them had their heads wrapped in filthy kerchiefs under the remains of forage caps, and in place of their worn-out footwear they had strips of cloth, blankets or leather. And it was not only the common soldier whom misery forced to such travesty. Most of the officers, colonels, generals were dressed in ways no less ridiculously beggarly, and one day I saw Colonel Fiéreck wrapped in an old soldier’s greatcoat and wearing on his head, on top of his forage cap, a pair of breeches buttoned under his chin.’
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