Citizen Emperor (81 page)

Part of the problem was desertion. Rates were high; as many as 90,000 men were roaming the countryside, attacking, raping and pillaging at will.
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It has been estimated that after just three weeks and only 320 kilometres, the army had lost more than 100,000 men through sickness and straggling.
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It would have taken an army to round up these men and enforce military law. Conditions were appalling, even for armies at the time, since they had to sleep outdoors after they had crossed the Niemen. In other campaigns – Italy, Germany, Spain – there was always the possibility of being billeted in villages and of spending the night under a roof. That was not always the case in eastern Europe, not only because of the vast expanses that had to be covered between villages – troops could march seven or eight hours over immense plains without coming across any
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– but also because of their utterly deplorable state: ‘Villages are rare, the houses, built of wood and covered in straw, present the most disagreeable aspect ever seen; the interior is humid and dirty.’
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As one soldier put it, ‘we sighed after towns, like we sighed after a battle’.
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When the memoirs do make mention of finding shelter, the buildings in question were usually convents of one kind or another.
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Caulaincourt lamented that there were ‘no inhabitants to be found, no prisoners to be taken, not a single straggler to be picked up. There were no spies . . . if I may be permitted the comparison, we were like a ship without a compass in the middle of a vast ocean, knowing nothing of what was happening around us.’
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The psychological burden of marching across vast distances also began to take its toll. The anxiety this caused was noted by some of the more literate in the army. There were the habitual suicides, hundreds according to one witness. ‘Each day we would hear isolated shots in the woods near the road.’
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Many were overcome by what contemporaries called ‘nostalgia’, a profound melancholy produced by the constant marching across seemingly endless plains.

Some of the ‘deserters’ were high ranking. Jérôme fell out with Marshal Davout early in the piece. Feeling slighted that Napoleon had given Davout command over the Westphalian troops, Jérôme suddenly decided to leave the army, informing his brother of the decision on 14 July.
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The difficult conditions of the campaign and the volley of reproaches Napoleon had fired at him seem to have resulted in a depression and he thought his only way out was to flee. Napoleon attempted to backpedal a little when he learnt of his brother’s decision, writing to say that Davout’s command was temporary, and pointing out how inexperienced he was compared to the marshal, and ordered him to stay at his post.
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Jérôme ignored him, and left for Kassel.

Once the army had penetrated some distance into Russia, the villages they did come across were devastated, pillaged, burnt to the ground by retreating Russian troops or indeed by advance parties of the Grande Armée.
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‘One would have had to witness it to be aware of all the barbarity and the horror of the spectacle.’
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By the time the army had reached Viasma, some 160 kilometres from Smolensk – what some in the Grande Armée referred to as ‘Schnapps town’ (
ville au schnapps
)
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– at the end of August and the beginning of September, most had been forced to sleep in the open and on the ground for at least a month.
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On balmy summer nights around a campfire, this could be a pleasant enough experience, even if the nights were very short in the northern hemisphere at that time of the year, lasting only a few hours.
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Even on those nights, it was difficult enough sleeping after an exhausting day’s march, but when the weather turned bad, when it rained, which it seems to have done regularly in September,
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or, as we shall see on the army’s return, when it snowed for lengthy periods, the impact on the men was debilitating, even fatal. It is difficult to make fires and dry off when the rains do not let up for days on end, with all the consequences for men’s health. Their physical condition was worsened by the lack of food, the heat of the day followed by often bitterly cold nights, even at that time of the year.
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Much has been written about the retreat from Moscow, but often to the neglect of the long, hot difficult march that preceded the entry into that city, not to mention the sickness caused by the autumn rains.
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Men literally died of the heat, thirst and hunger, especially since the villages, the only places to contain wells, were few and far between, and even then retreating Russians often threw bodies into them to poison the water.
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For those not at the head of the army, and who followed in its wake, the sight of roads covered with dead men and horses could hardly have been good for morale.
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These are the kinds of things the survivors remembered many years later – the hot sun, men reduced to drinking filthy water, the few provisions available, the lack of wine and meat, and the consuming nature of constant pain, fatigue, thirst and hunger.
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Some of those who had campaigned in Egypt or Spain claimed that the heat was more oppressive in Russia.
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Since the roads were made of sand, clouds of dust, like thick fog, were kicked up as soon as the troops set off, eyes, ears, nostrils quickly filling. Some had trouble breathing, while others could not see further than two paces in front of them, and it became impossible to distinguish the colour of uniforms.
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One way around this was to have the drummers beat at the head of the column so that men did not lose their way.
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Some were reduced to drinking horses’ urine from ruts in the road in an attempt to quench their thirst.
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Under those conditions – where dehydration and malnutrition were prevalent – it was only a question of time before illnesses like dysentery and diarrhoea started to make inroads.
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Napoleon’s later campaigns, when compared with his first impressive entry on to the military scene in Italy in 1796, have often been criticized for their lack of flair. This was never more the case than in Russia. Part of the explanation may have to do with age. At forty-three, he could not sustain the same intensity as he had managed in his younger years. Moreover, he was now a profoundly political animal and much of his time was taken up with administrative matters that had not burdened him in his early career. From 28 June 1812, for example, he spent eighteen days in Vilnius sorting out correspondence and reorganizing the army, a necessary thing, but he thereby lost what little initiative he had.
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It has been described by one military theorist as one of the worst mistakes of his career.
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Nevertheless, by the time he reached Vitebsk on 27 July, he assumed that the Russians camped before him would, this time, give battle.
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He awoke the next morning, however, only to find that they had once again slipped away. During the night, Cossacks had kept the campfires burning to give the impression that the army was still there.
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The Russians had retired in such good order that, according to some at least, a general feeling of unease began to grip the French officers who witnessed the skill of troops who retreated without leaving a single cannon, a single weapon or a single man behind. For the first but not the last time, Napoleon considered going no further. He had already lost one-third of his army without so much as engaging the enemy in a battle, and without having yet reached Russia proper. This is not what he had expected, and what to do next obviously preoccupied him to the point where some witnesses recall a perplexed, somewhat indecisive Napoleon. On returning to headquarters (28 July), inside his tents, he is supposed to have taken off his sword and thrown it on a table covered in maps, exclaiming, ‘I am going to stop here, I want to take stock, to rally, to rest my Army and organize Poland. The 1812 campaign is over. That of 1813 will do the rest.’
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According to his valet, he slept particularly poorly during his stay at Vitebsk, while Caulaincourt claimed that he had never seen Napoleon ‘in such a state of irritability’.
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It would have been a good idea to stay put. Most of his generals thought it was time to stop and consolidate.
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Berthier is supposed to have pleaded with tears in his eyes; Murat and possibly Davout seem to have been the only generals eager to push on. This was at least a sign that Napoleon was surrounded by men who were not afraid to speak their minds. How realistic an option stopping was (it was after all only July), or whether their views were born of frustration, exhaustion, depression and the realization that the Russian landscape was like nothing they had ever encountered before, is difficult to tell. Marching ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, the proximity of a village, a creek or a muddy pond determined where they would halt for the night.
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Evenings and nights, however, were spent scouring the countryside for food and water. The army’s strength was nevertheless still reasonably good at this stage. Knowing the supply situation to be disastrous and that the men had suffered as a result, in an astounding piece of theatre Napoleon berated the supply commissioners in front of the men at one parade. It was a show to remind the men how much their Emperor cared for them, and by all accounts it worked.
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Once rested – the following two weeks were spent putting the army back in order, allowing stragglers to catch up and supplying his troops
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– Napoleon seems to have taken on a more positive, even brash tone. But he remained agitated nevertheless and unsure how to proceed. He had never before faced an enemy that refused to stand ground and fight. What seems to have made up his mind was news that the Russian army had halted at Smolensk, and that Bagration’s Second Army had also arrived there in early August. He called a council of war in the first week of August and declared that he was determined to end the war that year. The decisive battle he sought looked as if it was in reach, at Smolensk, and even if the Russians failed to give battle there, he was sure they would do so before Moscow. What he needed was a major victory so that he could, as one general caustically put it, ‘hide so many sacrifices under a heap of laurels’.
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This was a new development. Moscow had only ever been vaguely talked about before but it was now given expression by Napoleon. Some of those present at the war council expressed concern about this change of attitude. Objections about supply issues were raised but brushed aside. Berthier went so far as to bring the head of the commissariat, Pierre Daru, to Napoleon to hammer home the seriousness of the supply situation, which he warned would probably grow worse as the army continued to march east. With the various detachments that had been posted in garrison towns to protect supply lines along the way, the army was reduced to less than half the original size of the invading army.
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However, faced with the choice of bedding down in Vitebsk or returning to the Vistula, more or less an admission of defeat if only in his own mind, Napoleon decided that the only realistic option was to push on, at least to Smolensk where there was the possibility of a battle and victory.

‘The Corpse of a Dead Enemy Always Smells Good’

Smolensk was surrounded by a crenellated brick wall about eighteen metres high and was cut in two by the River Dnieper (the wall can still be seen today). It was not, for all that, a strong defensive position since the city could be easily outflanked. Despite that, Barclay was coming under strong pressure not only from his own generals but also from Alexander to make a stand.
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At a council of war on 6 August, he was therefore forced to go over to the offensive despite strong personal doubts about the wisdom of such a move; he was still convinced that the best approach was not yet to risk the destruction of the First and Second Russian armies.

Napoleon’s army arrived before the walls of Smolensk on 15 August facing a force of probably no more than 15,000 men.
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Rather than take the city, however, as he probably could have the next morning, he dithered. By the morning of 17 August, Barclay’s army of 30,000 men was entrenched in the city, with another 170,000 occupying the hills on the other side of the Dnieper under Bagration. Napoleon and his troops could clearly see the enemy as they took up position. His decision to attack the defences head on, rather than attempt a flanking manoeuvre, forcing Barclay to abandon the city, appears in retrospect to have been a mistake, but seems to have been made out of a desire to engage with the enemy immediately, so that the Russians could not once again avoid battle. Besides, scouts sent out to find a point at which the Dnieper could be crossed returned with conflicting reports.
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