The Age of Elegance (7 page)

"On the
Second
night,
an encounter with a herd o
f swine in a forest provided an unexpected dinner for several
thousands. But the greater part of the army remained without rations for four days. As
a
result more than three thousand
men fell
by the way out of sheer exhaustion
and were
gathered up by the French.

¹
Bell, I,
66-7,
73-4; Kincaid, 186-7, 192. See also Goram, 290; Grattan, 291-4, 304-6; Larpent, I, 20,29, 42; Bessborough, 231; Kincaid, 187-8,194; Simmons, 255-6,265; Costello, 142; Oman, VI, 143-8, 159
.

Yet, though in some regiments, especially those fresh from England, discipline momentarily failed, there was little grumbling. Famished, with bleeding feet, racked with ague and dysentery, the men still had the heart to make light of their lot. Courage, pride and comradeship kept the army together. In the rearguard, formed by the Light Division, the rough veterans of the 95th offered their precious biscuits to the eighteen-year-old son of Lord Spencer as he sat pale and shivering over the acorns he had gathered: in such times, wrote Rifleman Costello, lords found they were men and men that they were comrades.
¹

There was one incident of the retreat that deserves to be recorded, for it belongs to the heritage of the British race. It was taken down by a subaltern of the 34th—to-da
y the Border Regiment—from the li
ps of his laundress, the wife of one of his Irish soldiers.
²
"Yer honour minds," she said, "how we were all kilt and destroyed on the long march last winter, and the French at our heels, an' all our men droppin' an dyin' on the roadside, waitin' to be killed over again by them vagabones comin' after us. Well, I don't know if you seed him, sir, but down drops poor Dan, to be murdered like all the rest, and says he, 'Biddy dear, I can't go no furder one yard to save me life.' 'O, Dan jewel,' sis I, Til help you on a bit; tak' a hould av me, an' throw away your knapsack.' Til niver part wid my knapsack,' says he, 'nor my firelock, while I'm a soger.' 'Dogs then,' sis I, 'you 'ont live long, for the French are comin' up quick upon us.' Thinkin', ye see, sir, to give him
sperret
to move, but the poor
crather
hadn't power to stir a lim'; an' now I heerd the firin' behind, and saw them killin' Dan, as if it was! So I draws him up on the bank and coaxed him to get on me back, for, sis I, 'the French will have ye in half an hour, an' me too, the pagans'; in thruth I was just thinkm' they had hould av us both, when I draws him up on me back, knapsack an' all. 'Throw away your gun,' sis I. 'I won't,' says he, 'Biddy, I'll shoot the first vagabone lays hould av your tail,' says he. He was always a
conthrary crather
when anyone
invaded
his firelock. Well, sir, I went away wid him on me back, knapsack, firelock, and all, as strong as Samson for the fear I was in; an' fegs, I carried him half a league after the regiment into the bivwack; an' me back was bruck entirely from that time to this, an
¹
it'll never get strait till I go to the Holy Well in Ireland, and have Father McShane's blessin', an' his

¹
Costello, 142; Grattan, 293.
²
Bell, I, 182.

hands laid over me!" She had saved, as her auditor told her, a good man for herself and the army.

To Wellington—and to England when the news of the retreat and its sufferings arrived—it seemed like a defeat. Those four days of famine and cold had temporarily reduced a victorious army to an assemblage of famished tramps. Though food in plenty was waiting on the Agueda, it was long before the hospitals could restore to the ranks the thousands laid low by typhus, enteric and ague. Until the end of January the death-rate averaged five hundred a week, and a third of Wellington's force was on the sick-list. So shaken was he by the transformation of his army that he drafted an impatient Order denouncing the failure of regimental officers to maintain discipline. When this document, addressed to senior officers, became known, it caused deep resentment; it was even whispered that the strain of the past few weeks had been too much for the Commander-in-Chief's mind. "The officers asked each other," one of them wrote, "how or in what manner they were to blame for the privations the army had endured. Their business was to keep their men together and, if possible, to keep up with their men on the march. Many were mere lads, badly clothed and without a boot to their feet, some attacked with dysentery, others with ague, others with a burning fever raging through their system; they had scarcely strength to hobble on in company with their more hardy comrades, the soldiers. Nothing but a high sense of honour could have sustained them."
¹

Wellington was not alone that November in having to retreat across a desert. After waiting five weeks in a burnt-out Moscow for a Russian surrender that never came, Napoleon had set out on October 18th for Kaluga and the warmer lands of the Ukraine with 115,000 fighting troops, 20,000 sick in wagons and 40,000 camp-followers. But the Russian army under Kutusof, heartened by the news of Wellington's liberation of Madrid,
²
had barred his way at Malo-Jaroslavitz, and, after a bitter fight, had forced him back on the more northerly route by which he had come. Here the countryside had been completely stripped by his advance—one of the most destructive even in the annals of Revolutionary war—and partisans

¹
Grattan, 307. See
idem
311-12; Simmons, 265; Bell, I, 73-4, 77; Costello, 144; Fortescue, IX, 100; Larpent, I, 6, 19, 54, 74, 127; Oman, VI, 181.

²
Chambray, 303-7.

from the forests were already harrying the long lines of communication. Apart from what it carried, there was nothing for the
Grande Armee
to eat until it reached its advance magazines at Smolensk, two hundred miles to the west.

As the starving host retraced its steps through charred villages, the immensity and savage gloom of the Russian landscape struck a chill in every heart. The germs of typhus were already in men's veins; near the battlefields of Borodino, where thousands of corpses lay un-buried, gangrenous cripples from the hospitals, fearful of Russian vengeance, fought for places on the plunder-laden wagons. Vast numbers, unable to obtain food, fell by the wayside; hundreds of baggage-carts and ammunition wagons were left abandoned with the horses dead at the shafts.

On November 5th, when they were still a few days short of Smolensk, the first cold set in. Prisoners had warned the French that when it came their nails would drop from their fingers and the muskets from their hands. A deadening and penetrating fog rose from the ground; then out of the darkness the snow began to fall. As it did so a terrible wind swept out of the north, howling through the forests and piling the snow in the path of the blinded invaders. Famished and exhausted, the vast predatory army lost hope and cohesion, began to disintegrate and dissolve.

From November 9th to 14th, while Wellington was awaiting the French attack at Salamanca, Napoleon was at Smolensk. He had already lost 40,000 men since leaving Moscow. But he was forced to resume the retreat, for the supplies in the town were insufficient to feed the survivors. On the 14th, with 40,000 fighting men and 30,000 followers, he set out westwards. In the next four days, while the British were retreating to the Agueda, the Grand Army suffered an unparalleled disaster. As the long procession of famished ghosts struggled through the snow, the Russians, almost as severely decimated by the rigours of that terrible climate, took the offensive at Krasnoi. In three days' fighting, 10,000 of the invaders were killed, 26,000 taken prisoner and more than two hundred guns captured. Only the Emperor's resolution and the discipline of the Imperial Guard prevented the destruction of the entire army.
By
the 19th scarcely 12,000 men remained with the colours.

The dying agony of the great host lasted another three weeks. The dwindling column struggling to reach Europe was joined by division after division summoned from the lines of communications and rear areas. All suffered the same fate. On the Beresina in the last days of November two Russian armies, closing in from north and south, barred the retreat. The Emperor broke through, but left another 12,000 drowned in the river and 18,000 more in Russian hands. On December 5th he abandoned the survivors and set out by sleigh for Warsaw. "All that has happened is nothing," he explained on his arrival, "it is the effect of the climate, and that is all. From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.
...
I am going to raise 300,000 men. In six months I shall be again on the Niemen." A week later he reached France for the second time in his career without the army with which he had set out to conquer the east. About the same time ten thousand typhus-ridden cripples—all that remained of half a million men—staggered across the bridge at Konigsberg into Prussia.

CHAPTER
THREE

Neptune's General

"He rode a knowing-looking thorough-bred horse, and wore a grey overcoat, Hessian boots and a large cocked hat."

Gronow

T

he
news from Russia did not begin to reach England until the second week of December. There had always been a few far-sighted Britons, as well as some very romantic ones like the Prince Regent and Walter Scott, who had seen in their adversary's eastern adventure a chance that he might get himself into a scrape. Among the former was the commissariat-minded Wellington, who had written that, if the Czar was prudent and his Russians would fight, Bonaparte could not succeed.
¹
But most Englishmen had seen too many countries succumb to believe it. The Government, while rejecting a peace offer that would have enabled Napoleon to concentrate his entire force in the east, had so little faith in Russia that it refused her a loan and warned the Czar that, if he chose to resist, it must be at his own risk. "I cannot have one particle of hope for Russia,
^”
wrote the Secretary of War as late as August
31st.
The long Russian retreat, the news of the French victories at Smolensk and Borodino, the capture of Moscow, had had the usual effect. The average British reaction was typified by David Wilkie's remark: "Ah! but he has got there!"

For it had become almost impossible for Britons not to despair of the Continent. The difficulties from which they suffered as a result of its enforced unification under Napoleon were too great. The last two years had been the worst of the war: as the tyrant's grip on the European ports tightened, British warehouses and quays became bogged with unexportable goods. The social economy

¹
Gurwood, July 25th, 1812. "I trust in God," wrote Walter Scott in August, "that all will go well and Europe will yet see peace before the present generation are in their graves." Scott, III, 153. See also Dudley, 159; Ashton, I, 143-4;
Two Duchesses,
349-50'

of the industrial districts had momentarily been disrupted. Those whom the demand for British goods and the paper money created to finance their manufacture had drawn into the factory towns found themselves without livelihood or alternative employment.

Early in
1811
the United States struck Britain a further blow. By an act forbidding commercial intercourse with her to prevent incidents arising from the Continental Blockade, she deprived the Lancashire mills of raw cotton, reduced British exports to North America from .£11,000,000 to under .£2,000,000 and forced the British Government—since it could no longer pay with goods—to expend its dwindling reserves of bullion on American corn for Wellington's army. This harsh measure of the young Republic did not even have the preventative effect intended. In the summer of
1812
popular clamour against the blockade and the seizure of British naval deserters from American vessels and, above all, the American backwoodsman's desire for the fertile, empty country beyond the Canadian frontier, tempted Congress, hopeful of a quick victory, into declaring war against England. It did so at the very moment that the Foreign Secretary was announcing in Parliament the repeal of the Orders in Council to appease American opinion.

The effect on industry was calamitous. In Glasgow the average weekly wage of hand-loom weavers fell from 17s. 6d. to 7s. 6d. All but six of Manchester's thirty-eight mills had to close, and a fifth of the population of urban Lancashire was driven on to the rates.
¹
The rise of the latter further aggravated the deflationary situation. By the beginning of
1812,
in part of Nottinghamshire alone 15,000 frame-workers were in receipt of poor relief. The most alarming feature was that, while wages fell and unemployment increased, the price of food —which could not be multiplied by machinery—tended to rise. In
1811
after a wet summer the harvest failed and a famine was only averted by a purchase of French, Italian and Polish corn which Napoleon allowed to be exported in order to drain England of bullion, on the assumption that a hungry nation needed gold more than corn. Even with this aid from the enemy, food-prices in
1812
were 87 per cent above pre-war level. The cost of potatoes and oatmeal, the staple food of many workers, was almost trebled.
²

¹
Leeds Mercury,
Feb. 22nd, 1812.

²
Mathieson, 135-6; Porter, II, 188; Felk
in, 231; Lilian Knowles, 336; D
arvall, 20-46, 53-6; Colchester, II, 408.