Citizen Emperor (87 page)

In the early hours of 29 October, unable to sleep, Napoleon woke and called for Caulaincourt to come into his room, close the door behind him and sit on the bed.
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It was not Napoleon’s habit to allow a member of his staff into close proximity, so it is interesting for what it reveals of his state of mind. At this stage, he was still thinking of winter quarters at Vitebsk, in the belief that the expected arrival of anywhere between 1,500 and 2,000 Polish Cossacks would entirely reverse the situation by fending off the Russian Cossacks, guarding the army and allowing it to rest and feed itself. Whether he was deluding himself or had been misled, or whether he announced this measure in the hope of maintaining morale is impossible to say. In any event, the Polish Cossacks never arrived. Caulaincourt tried to open his eyes to the real state of the army, but his message does not appear to have sunk in. Napoleon took an hour to come around to the thrust of the conversation, which was that he was already thinking of abandoning the army and returning to Paris.

That day, the leading elements of the column crossed the battlefield of Borodino, ‘a field of desolation that was still pulsating with horror’.
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The field was littered with the tell-tale remnants of battle – damaged cannon, broken wagons, helmets, cuirasses, muskets, uniforms in shreds. Thirty thousand dead lay across the field unburied, an ‘empire of death’ as one witness put it,
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who had been lying there for the previous fifty days, while hastily dug mass graves had begun to uncover. Many of the bodies had preserved what might be called a physiognomy; all of them had their eyes wide open, their skin the colour of brick red and Prussian blue.
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According to some accounts, not entirely reliable but which obviously repeated a rumour that was doing the rounds, at least one wounded soldier of the Grande Armée was discovered alive, having lived off horse and human flesh and drunk from a little river filled with cadavers.
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Other wounded Russians had dragged themselves to the road leading to Moscow and had lived off whatever passers-by gave them to eat.
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One can imagine the stench and the psychological impact it must have made on the column of men marching through this open cemetery.

Shortly afterwards the first wave of real cold hit (this was around 26 October), so that wherever wood could be found it was burnt, including the barns and houses used by commanding officers for shelter, while men stood around, looking like ghosts, not moving all night in front of those immense fires.
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‘It is difficult to describe the effect of the first cold snaps on the army,’ wrote Lieutenant Ducque.
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With the onset of winter, the army quickly started to fall apart, and the officers lost control over their men. The cold played a part, combined with the same difficulties they had faced on the way to Moscow, but one should not exaggerate its impact at this stage of the retreat.
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The Emperor was still with the army; his presence was enough to reassure those present and to prevent a complete breakdown of discipline. Some, however, began to doubt. They were no longer marching as conquerors, but with ‘reserve and hesitation’, surrounded by Cossacks and hostile peasants, and they lacked everything.
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Conditions were grim. Most marched from six in the morning till about seven in the evening, some of that in the dark because of the time of the year.
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The hardest thing seems to have been the lack of sleep for those who had equipment or carriages to prepare. If the troops marched till six or seven, they would try to warm themselves and eat; they might get to sleep around ten, and would then have to wake up at two or three in the morning to get ready to leave. One officer complained that since leaving Moscow he had averaged about four hours’ sleep a night.
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To make matters worse, Cossacks would come skulking round the stragglers like crows.
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By 28 October, the road was ‘cluttered with a multitude of footsoldiers, some armed, others without arms, the wounded in large numbers, servants, women, and an unprecedented congestion of horses and wagons. There were also among that number fugitives, French families who were fleeing Moscow after having lived there for many years before our arrival.’
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The wounded were loaded on to carts, but the attempt to help them soon turned sour. ‘They fell into the hands of coarse drivers, insolent servants, brutal sutlers, women enriched and arrogant, brothers-in-arms without pity, and all the sequel [a colloquial term of contempt] of wagon drivers. All these people had only one idea: get rid of their wounded.’
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It was not uncommon for wagon drivers deliberately to drive their horses at speed over rough ground so that a jolt would free them of their charges. When the wounded fell, if they were unable to get up they were driven over by the carriages following whose drivers would fear stopping and thus losing their place in line.
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To make matters worse, Russian prisoners marched with the retreating army, guarded by a regiment made up of French, Spanish and Portuguese troops. As they fell by the wayside through sickness or lack of food they were killed by a blow to the head with the butt of a musket, or a shot to the back of the neck.
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The same order was given to a regiment of grenadiers from Baden, to shoot any prisoners who fell by the wayside too weak to continue.
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The order supposedly came from Napoleon himself, although it is impossible to verify and may very well be part of the black legend. We know of several massacres of prisoners, including one in which 1,200 Russians were shot in the head by their Portuguese guards.
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One account has 3,000 Russian prisoners taken out of Moscow and ‘parked like sheep’ whenever the army stopped. They slept on the ice and snow and were not given any food, as a result of which they resorted to cannibalism.
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What did Napoleon think of all this? Did he understand how decimated the army was by the cold and hunger? We know that at one stage he is said to have told Rapp, ‘Those poor soldiers make my heart bleed, but there is nothing I can do about it.’
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But this kind of statement, written many years after the event, was an attempt to portray Napoleon as someone who cared for his men. Some scepticism is called for, especially since there are no contemporary accounts of how he felt. One can argue that as emperor and military leader, he could not give way to ‘outpourings of grief or remorse’,
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but the lack of public posturing should not have prevented him from expressing his feelings in private. As far as one can tell, despite the fact that he had the opportunity to take in the full extent of the army’s suffering,
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he does not appear to have cared terribly much, or it did not register.

Napoleon reached Mikhailovska, three days out from Smolensk, on the afternoon of 6 November where he found a courier from Paris informing him of the Malet affair.

In Paris, during the night of 22–23 October, at four o’clock in the morning, an officer calling himself General Lamotte, accompanied by his aide-de-camp, appeared before the door of the Popincourt barracks in east Paris, declaring that the Emperor had died under the walls of Moscow. The Senate, the general declared, had abolished the imperial regime and formed a new, provisional government. The officer in question was General Malet, who had just escaped from prison where he had been incarcerated for plotting to overthrow the regime in 1808.
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For another twenty-four hours, the conspirators, disorganized though they were, were able to hold Paris by taking charge of the main ministries. The state structures that controlled and directed the Empire remained inert. It was only the cool-headedness of the commander of Paris, General Pierre-Augustin Hulin, that saved the day, but the Council of State remained inactive, as did the Senate. Nor were there any demonstrations in favour of the Empire among the people. The plot was never a serious threat to the regime, but what it demonstrated was that people’s loyalties remained with Napoleon, not with the Empire – that is, it had apparently not occurred to anyone that Napoleon’s son, the King of Rome, was waiting to take his place.
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By the time Napoleon received news of the affair, on 6 November, Malet and his accomplices had been stood against a wall and shot. They were the only generals to be executed during the Consulate and the Empire.
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Napoleon could not tell from the reports that he was sent whether this was the work of one man or whether it was a widespread conspiracy. The minister of war, Clarke, was saying the latter while his minister of police, Savary, was saying the former.
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The doubt floating around Paris would soon bring Napoleon to make a decision about his presence with the army.

20

Destiny Forsaken

‘A Starving Multitude’

To some, the sight of the walls of Smolensk, given that the snow hid the disastrous consequences of the fire, caused as much pleasure as if it were home.
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The lead columns reached the city on 9 November; it had taken twenty days of uninterrupted marching to get this far. The accounts of the retreat up to that point vary enormously, depending on who is writing them. People lived through different experiences and in different conditions. Some wrote that they arrived ‘exhausted with fatigue’, and that in twenty years of service they had never been through such a tough campaign.
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Larrey, the surgeon-in-chief, agreed; on reaching Smolensk he wrote to his wife to say that he had never suffered as much, and he had campaigned in Egypt and Spain.
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Others wrote that they had not ‘suffered too much’ before arriving at Smolensk, and that if bread was lacking, there was horsemeat, and even cats in abundance.
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A sapper by the name of Laurencin (who was to die at Frankfurt-am-Oder in February 1813) had enough money to buy bread, and had with him seven or eight pounds of rice which he would cook in a bit of fat or in water with sugar, so that he was able to continue on his way without too much trouble. Others again were more tongue in cheek, proving that, for some, their sense of humour had survived. Stendhal, ironized, for example, ‘that he had just been on a charming trip; three or four times a day I would go from extreme boredom to extreme pleasure’, the pleasure triggered by such events as finding a few potatoes.
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Another quipped about the lovely weather and the lovely camp fires, and about how much he prayed to God for it to start all over again.
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Smolensk should have been the end of their suffering. Instead, those organizing the supplies there could not cope with the unruly hordes pressing to get something into their bellies. There was such confusion that just getting into the town through the main gates took hours.
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Once inside, there were enormous difficulties finding shelter and food.
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Stores were apparently lower than expected, but there was certainly enough to supply the men for about two weeks. No arrangements were made, however, either to guard or to distribute the provisions. The end result was that they were looted within days. Those who arrived in Smolensk a little later went without. The town, nevertheless, gave the men a few days’ rest, as well as food, and even oats for their horses, and the opportunity to prepare for the march ahead.
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Most naively thought that the worst was behind them and even looked forward to the march to Vilnius.
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Those who had survived the leg from Moscow now knew what to expect, so they clothed and outfitted themselves more or less appropriately, replaced old boots with new, and abandoned anything that was not of use to them, including much of the precious booty they had dragged from Moscow.
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Some, however, could continue no longer. One officer, who had made it to Smolensk with one leg, took a pistol and attempted to shoot himself in the head. His first attempt failed. He dragged himself along the ground until he could find another cartouche. He succeeded the second time around.
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This had happened often enough during the retreat; men preferred to shoot themselves rather than prolong the suffering.