Citizen Emperor (91 page)

Vilnius should have been a haven for the retreating army; there were enough supplies stocked there to feed 100,000 men for three months, as well as clothes, boots and muskets. A series of events, however, conspired to transform the town into a nightmare, while all the fresh divisions sent out to cover the retreat quickly disintegrated in the cold – most of them were young and inexperienced and knew nothing about how to cope in the extremely harsh conditions that awaited them.
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For those who arrived at the gates of Vilnius in the first weeks of December 1812, the reports vary from individual to individual. Some recall that the thought of arriving in a large town kept driving them on, but that within sight of the town one could see nothing but confusion.
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Others remembered that the depots were full of supplies but that the distribution was non-existent so that the magazines were looted and pillaged. General Hogendorp, governor of the city, who had initially undertaken measures to welcome the troops by setting up notices directing regiments to various places where they could find food, was accused of having abandoned his post once he saw the bulk of the army arrive on 9 December. (It is not at all clear that he did, but if he remained at his post his command was ineffectual.) Louis Joseph Vionnet de Maringoné, an officer in the Grenadiers of the Guard, managed to buy some wine but his stomach had shrunk so much that he had to drink it as though it were medicine, one spoonful every hour.
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Once inside, Sergeant Bourgogne remembered the curious effect an inhabited house made on him; he had not seen one in almost two months. When the Old Guard arrived, they found a mob of stragglers obstructing the gates: ‘in order to enter, they pushed them out of the way, they walked all over them, trampled them underfoot’.
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In a Sleigh with the Emperor

We are obliged to leave the army struggling on to Vilnius and follow Napoleon and his entourage back to Paris. At Gragow, they left the other carriages and the escort behind in order to forge rapidly ahead, passing through Warsaw, Dresden, Weimar, Leipzig, Erfurt, Mainz, Verdun and Château-Thierry, then Paris. At each stage of the return voyage Napoleon stopped to reassure his allies that he had everything under control. From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. He believed he could still beat the enemy, and in effect he had beaten him in open battle whenever the two armies engaged, but what he did not understand was the consequences of the demands he had placed on so many of his allies over the past years. The first part of the passage, between Vilnius and Kaunas, the coldest according to Caulaincourt, was spent simply huddled together, Napoleon ‘dressed in thick wool and covered with a good rug, with his legs in fur boots and then in a bag made of bearskin’.
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Even that was not enough to keep him warm; Caulaincourt had to share half his own bearskin rug. It was so cold that the cloth work in the carriage froze, while small icicles formed under their noses, around the eyebrows and on the eyelids. It was only after leaving Mariampol that the voyage was comfortable enough for the two men to communicate. Nothing of note happened as Napoleon made his way to Paris, except for one intriguing little incident, mentioned only in passing by Napoleon’s Mameluke servant, Roustam Raza, who wrote his memoirs many years after the event. When Napoleon stopped off at an inn in a little town outside Kaunas on 6 December 1812, and took the time to have a wash and change his clothes, the discarded shirt and stockings were immediately seized on by ‘everyone’ and divided into pieces.
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‘Holy relics’ to be preserved? The cult, it would appear, had penetrated even the outer reaches of the Empire.

Caulaincourt’s recollections of that ride back to Paris are one of the most intimate and interesting accounts of Napoleon we have. When they halted each evening between five and nine so that Napoleon could rest and the party could dine, and the Emperor dozed off on a chair in front of a fire or on a couch, Caulaincourt would take the time quickly to note down the conversations of that day, or at least what he considered to be important. Alone with him for almost two weeks, sharing the hardships of the road, changing carriages when they either broke down or transferred to a sleigh, stopping at the postmasters’ stations along the way for the evening meal, Napoleon opened up to him, and talked of everything from the state of France, of Spain, Prussia, and his brothers through to Russia and England.
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For Napoleon, talking assuaged his fears, and made the long trip more bearable. Caulaincourt was the sounding board, but whenever he contradicted his imperial master, he invariably received the reply, ‘You are young,’ or ‘You don’t understand affairs.’ Imagine a reader sympathetic to Napoleon who, with the benefit of hindsight, went back in time to persuade him to moderate his foreign policy in the hope of getting him to change direction. It will give one an idea of the tone of the conversations between the two men. It was, as it turned out, a futile endeavour on the part of Caulaincourt. Whenever he got too close to the bone – that is, when he attacked the Emperor’s seemingly unbridled ambition or his passion for war – Napoleon would smile, joke or try to pinch Caulaincourt’s ear, a typical gesture on his part, although he probably had some difficulty finding his interlocutor’s ear under the fur bonnet he was wearing.
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Once the reader cuts through the traditional exculpatory explanations – if it was not for Britain he would have stayed at home; he was tricked by the climate and defeated by winter – the most significant observation worth noting is that he did not, possibly was unable to, recognize the extent of his losses. He was under the illusion that the army would halt at Vilnius for the winter, and that his return to Paris would restore his political ascendancy and would somehow make up for the disasters the army had incurred. It is possible that Napoleon was lost in the past and that he believed, as with his return from Egypt after a very mixed campaign, that his return would simply put everything right again.

Hubris, arrogance and an utter inability to admit his mistakes, which he avoided confronting by expounding on how the enemy could have fought better, were the hallmarks of his monologues. The only mistake he appears capable of acknowledging was to have stayed too long at Moscow. It was not invading Russia in the first place, adopting a Continental System that obliged him to pursue the phantom of economic dominance, fighting a war on two fronts, or being drawn deep into Russia in spite of himself. All those strategic errors he could argue his way out of, as though it were simply a matter of putting up a good argument, rather than dealing with a reality that touched the lives of millions of people. They were abstract ideas in which Napoleon imagined positive outcomes that had little to do with the harsh reality with which he was confronted. Thus the war in Spain, ‘only a matter of guerrilla contests’, would be resolved in a month or two, once the English had been driven out; ‘I can change the face of affairs when I please.’
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Possibly, but he had to get there, and that was unlikely in the immediate future. It was ironic given that even he was aware that ‘in war men could lose in a day what they had spent years in building up’.
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Aftermath

The retreat lasted from about 18 October to 23 December, when advance elements of the Guard entered Königsberg. Even to get to Königsberg, however, was a feat; the remnants of the army were pursued by Cossacks all the way into Prussia. Once there, though, after three months of incredible hardship and deprivation, the survivors could at last rest, eat, sleep, take a bath, change their clothes, tend to their wounds and attempt to come to grips psychologically with the horrors they had lived through. Fantin des Odoards was haunted by the retreat for months afterwards, plagued with black thoughts and nightmares, and confronted with ‘an ocean of ice that he could not lose from sight’.
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At Königsberg, the inhabitants were so angry with the French that violent confrontations took place.
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For, after weeks of rumour, news of the destruction of the invasion army reached western Europe with a devastating impact. The reaction wherever the French were hated was the same, one of hope. In London, the city went ‘crazy’ in the expectation of what the disaster might bring.
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In Vienna, Napoleon’s defeat elicited general joy, toasts were drunk to the health of the victors, and the ‘Russian faction’ gained increasing ascendancy at court.
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This is not, however, what Metternich had been expecting and it threw him into some confusion. He did not particularly relish the thought of a Russian army marching into central Europe. The 29th Bulletin was published in Paris on 16 December (two days before Napoleon arrived). For the people of France, it was the first indication that things had not gone well. News of the disaster started to trickle in towards the end of the month. The general reaction was revealing. Some spoke of the ‘horror’ and ‘consternation’ into which the people of France were thrown, although there was also a good deal of indignation at the loss of so many men.
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When news of the calamity reached David, he was heard to remark in a brilliant piece of understatement, ‘Ah! ah! That’s not quite what we wanted.’
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In the rest of the country, general indignation is probably the best way to describe how people felt about the fiasco that was Russia, exacerbated by reports coming in from Spain. Soon enough, people hostile to Napoleon felt emboldened by the defeat to express their ire, not only in Paris, but in various towns and regions of France.
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The people had not yet turned away from their Emperor, but that they were less inclined to support him in times of trouble is clear.

Almost immediately, in the first days and weeks of 1813, anti-Napoleonic pamphlets, newspaper articles and caricatures began to appear, galvanizing public opinion against Napoleon.
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The Russians had been at work on this for some time already, printing their own bulletins that were distributed to the army and, more importantly, printing calls to revolt in the main languages of the Grande Armée, aimed at both troops and officers.
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Napoleon was personally held responsible for the suffering that had befallen Europe. Poems published as pamphlets informed people about the French disasters, and explained that Moscow had burnt.
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Moreover, proclamations issued by both Alexander and Kutuzov – Kutuzov issued a proclamation in January 1813 to his ‘children’: ‘We will make Europe exclaim with astonishment. The Russian army is invincible’
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– did the rounds of just about every inn in Europe.
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It is obvious that people reacted differently to the news in different parts of Europe but what seems clear is that Napoleon’s setback helped fuel the hatred of those suffering under French occupation. The conclusion people drew from all this was that, if there were ever to be peace on the Continent, Napoleon would first have to go. In the north of Germany, in the Hanseatic ports where the Continental Blockade had done so much to ruin their commercial life, Napoleon and the French were particularly hated. News of the defeat in Russia, which had occurred so suddenly and so unpredictably, seemed like a miracle to those who opposed the French. Rumour exaggerated, if that were possible, the extent of the defeat and filled the opponents of the Empire with hope: the army had been completely destroyed (more or less true); Napoleon had fled by himself or disguised as a peasant; Prussia and Austria had joined forces with Russia (not yet true); the whole of Germany had risen in revolt (some regions would eventually do so, but not all). The rumours, no matter how absurd, were enough to cause a ‘general ferment’.

None of this, however, prepared the people of Prussia for the sight that greeted them as the remnants of the Grande Armée marched back through their territory – the pestilential stench, the rotting flesh in the rotting uniforms. ‘Their clothing consisted of rags, straw mats, old women’s clothing, sheepskins, or whatever else they could lay their hands on. None had the proper headgear; instead they bound their heads with old cloths or pieces of shirt; instead of shoes and leggings, their feet were wrapped with straw, fur or rags.’
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The French subsequently felt the full hatred of the Prussian people who no longer bothered to hide their contempt. ‘The ass’s kick’, as one soldier put it.
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Rumours of the difficulties the French army had been facing had been filtering back to Prussia since October. When, on 12 November, there were newspaper reports that Napoleon had retreated from Moscow people assumed he had been defeated and openly vented their rage in street riots.
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The Westphalian legation secretary in Berlin wrote that never had he seen ‘such intense hatred’.
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When the 29th Bulletin was published in Berlin on 14 December, there could no longer be any doubt – Napoleon was defeated. The remnants of the army were greeted with insulting songs,
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and, much worse than this, armed groups of peasants began attacking stragglers.
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