received the bullet he was passing along our front, ordering the men
not to fire. I saw a slight shiver pass through his body; he took two
or three steps, and then began to stagger. We ran to him, holding him
up; he was regardless of his sufferings. Raising his cap in the air, he
cried ‘_Viva l’Italia!_’ I had his poor foot resting on my thigh;
he called out to his assailants, and asked what they were doing with
his people. I felt a shivering in all his limbs; and, reminding him of
his wounds, I implored him to be quiet.”
While the surgeon was dressing his wounds, the sturdy soldier calmly
produced a cigar and began to smoke, inquiring of the doctor whether
he thought amputation would be necessary. Twenty minutes later he had
an interview with his conqueror and captor, General Pallavacini, who
assured him, with tears in his eyes, that this was the most miserable
day of his life. Yet he had received certain orders, and he had no
choice but to obey.
It was the bitterest of all moments for the hero of Italian unity
when, staggering from the effects of his double wound, he fell forward
upon the Italian soil to which he had devoted his whole life. Generals
Cialdini and Pallavacini had been his friends and comrades, their
troops were his compatriots and brothers-in-arms.
Two bullets had thus put an end, sudden and complete, to Garibaldi’s
march on Rome, though he was to live to make another and an equally
unsuccessful attempt upon the Eternal City. Meanwhile, the illustrious
rebel was carried to prison at Spezzia, where he was, however, kept
but a short time, and then removed to Pisa. There Dr. Nélaton, of
Paris, who came all the way for the purpose, succeeded in extracting
the bullet from Garibaldi’s ankle, for which bullet a hero-worshipping
Englishman offered as much as 30,000 francs.
Two years later, when he had recovered from his wounds, he visited
England, a country which had always taken the keenest interest in
his adventures, and even sent him volunteers, as well as a doctor to
attend him in his illness. High and low welcomed him with the warmest
enthusiasm, and the attentions that were rained upon the Hermit of
Caprera culminated in a grand banquet given in his honour by the Lord
Mayor and City of London.
[Illustration: KING VICTOR EMMANUEL.]
[Illustration:
_Napoleon’s Moscow Campaign_
_By D.H. Parry_.]
One must go back through centuries of history to find anything
approaching the horrors of the Russian War of 1812.
Towards the end of June, 610,058 armed men and an enormous multitude of
non-combatants--women and children--crossed the broad Niemen, joined
afterwards by 37,100 more, making a total of 647,158; and on the 13th
December--or rather less than six months later--16,000 alone repassed
that river with weapons in their bruised and frozen hands, almost the
sole remains of a magnificent army whose bones are to this day turned
up by the plough of the Russian peasant.
* * * * *
The Niemen flows between Prussia and Poland; and in the forest of
Pilwisky, behind the rocky heights on the Prussian side, a multitude of
men lay concealed, speaking a score of tongues, and wearing a strange
variety of uniform, many nations having sent their best and bravest to
swell the ranks of the _Grande Armée_.
The famous Imperial Guard was sleeping in the green corn, dreaming of
future conquests, and that mighty host awaited the word of one man to
embark on a campaign whose disasters have had no equal--one little
pale-faced man dressed now in a long grey riding-coat and a Polish
cap--the man who, by the force of his own intellect and the marvellous
power of using men and circumstances to his own ends, had ground the
whole of Europe--England alone excepted--under the heel of his military
boot!
At two o’clock in the morning of June 23rd Napoleon mounted his horse
and rode off to reconnoitre the river, his charger stumbling and
throwing him on to the sandy bank.
A voice exclaimed in the darkness: “That is a bad augury: a Roman would
go back.” But no one knew who had spoken, and, after ordering three
bridges to be constructed for the following night, the little party
returned to its quarters, the words sinking ominously into their hearts.
Next evening some sappers, with their white leather aprons and keen
axes, crossed in a boat, and were met by a Cossack officer, who rode
forward alone to inquire what they wanted in Russia.
“We are Frenchmen,” said one of the sappers, “come to make war upon
you--to take Wilna--to liberate Poland!”
The solitary horseman disappeared without a word, and the sappers fired
their muskets into the silent woods.
For three whole days the tramp of men and the heavy rumble of guns
filled the air as the army filed down to the banks, and poured across
the bridges--Grenadiers, Voltigeurs, Chasseurs, and Dragoons, regiment
succeeding regiment, corps after corps. Now the scarlet and green of
the 8th Hussars; again the heavy squadrons of Sebastiani’s Cuirassiers,
smart Polish Lancers of the Guard and Line, Carabineers with brass
body-armour and snow-white uniforms, long trains of lumbering
artillery, waggons and field-forges, carriages, and caissons, the
sutler’s cart jostling the caleche of the general officer, a sultry sun
overhead, and the river dancing in merry ripples beneath them as the
bridges trembled under the tread of the marching thousands.
Napoleon crossed at Poniemen with his Guard, the corps of Marshals
Davout, Oudinot, and Ney, and Murat’s dashing cavalry; Prince Eugène,
with the army of Italy, passed at Piloni on the 29th; and Jérôme
Bonaparte’s Westphalians advanced upon Grodno which they reached on the
30th.
To the north Macdonald attacked Riga on the Baltic, and Prince
Schwartzenberg marched through Galicia in the south; but it is the army
of the centre, under the Emperor himself, whose fortunes we shall most
closely follow, omitting the marches of the thirteen divisions into
which the invading forces were formed, and not pausing to notice the
minor actions in which they were sooner or later engaged.
Hardly had Napoleon gained the enemy’s side than a black cloud gathered
in the sky, and a furious storm broke over the country for fifty
leagues right and left. The rain descended with surprising violence,
the air grew piercingly cold, and the flat land covered with tall black
pine-trees became a swamp, through which they splashed dismally onward.
Ten thousand horses died, heated by the green corn which formed their
forage, and then chilled by the rain as they stood shivering in their
exposed bivouacs.
The bridge across the Vilia having been destroyed by retreating
Cossacks, Napoleon impatiently ordered a squadron of the Polish Lancers
of the Guard to swim the swollen stream, and, clad in crimson uniforms,
faced with dark blue and laced with silver, they gained the centre,
only to be carried away by the current, and many of them drowned,
crying “_Vive l’Empereur!_” as their heads disappeared under water.
Beyond Wilna, Octave de Ségur (brother of the historian) and his 8th
Hussars drew first blood from the Russians, and were sadly cut up;
but Oudinot drove Witgenstein back at the same moment, and, sending
Murat in pursuit, the Emperor returned to Wilna, to waste twenty
days in raising unsatisfactory levies, and to disgust the Poles with
disappointing hopes of liberty.
[Illustration: ALEXANDER I., CZAR OF RUSSIA.]
Russian proposals of peace were rejected by Napoleon, whose entire
conduct during the campaign has baffled his friends and foes; and
leaving Wilna at half-past eleven at night on the 16th July, he marched
to attack Barclay de Tolly, provided he could find him.
Two hundred and fifty thousand Russians had been formed into three
distinct armies--the First Army of the West under De Tolly; the Second,
under Prince Bagration; and the Third, which was not then completed,
under the cavalry general Tormasoff; 18,000 Cossacks being distributed
among them, those of the Hetman Platoff especially destined to win a
terrible renown.
The infantry wore green, with slate pantaloons and mud-coloured
greatcoats, the officers affecting wasp waists, tremendous curled
whiskers, and gold rings in their ears. The Cossacks of the Line were
dressed for the most part in blue, with fur caps and long lances;
generally swarming with vermin, they were mounted on active little
horses, which they urged on with whips, there being also bands of
wild horsemen called Baskirs, who used _bows and arrows_ with a
precision that caused mourning in many a French home.
The war assumed a curious character: on through the swamps and lonely
forests of Lithuania, interspersed here and there by deserts of choking
sand, the long columns wound; the Russians burning their villages as
they retired, the French in their turn destroying what the Russians had
left, devastation and disorder marking every league of the way; the
roads dotted with the bodies of dead men and horses, who had sunk with
fatigue, and the rear-guard of the enemy disappearing as the French
advance-guard came in sight of it.
Napoleon derided the foe as arrant cowards; but the persistent retreat
was all part of a wise policy, originated by De Tolly, to draw them
into an unknown country, far from their magazines, until hunger, forced
marches, the burning heat of the days followed by nights of intense
cold, and last of all the terrible winter of those latitudes, should
crumble away the army and utterly destroy it.
[Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF THE CITY OF MOSCOW.]
The young blood of Russia naturally revolted at such a course and
wished to fight, but results have justified its adoption, the
significant fact remaining as additional proof of its wisdom, that in
nearly every instance during the advance, where the two forces came
into contact, the French proved victorious.
At Ostrowno the remnants of the 8th Hussars came up with three Russian
cavalry regiments, and routed them in quick succession among the birch
woods; Murat ordering some Poles of the Line to charge, and being
obliged to lead them, although, as commander, he should have kept out
of danger.
The lances were lowered in a glittering row behind him, and the
troopers, gay in blue and yellow, came thundering on. From the nature
of the ground escape was impossible, so, making a virtue of necessity,
the King of Naples flourished his famous riding-switch, galloped at
their head, and the charge was successful: the 106th took the Russians
on one side, Piré’s Hussars and 16th Chasseurs on the other. The French
artillery resumed its fire; and falling back in disorder, the foe
melted away into the forest that hid Witepsk.
At that place De Tolly made a stand, hearing that Bagration was about
to join him; and Napoleon saw the sun glinting on the arms of eighty
thousand men on a bright July morning, as two hundred voltigeurs of the
9th crossed a narrow bridge and formed in front of the Russian horse.
[Illustration:
NAPOLEON’S MARCH
From the Niemen to Moscow.
1812.]
Murat sent the 16th Chasseurs-à-cheval at the enemy, without any
support; but though their sky-blue facings had figured in almost every
campaign since 1793, they had no chance singlehanded on broken ground,
and the Cossacks of the Guard put them to the right-about, pursuing as
far as a hill on which the Emperor stood, and only being driven off by
the carbines of his personal escort. On their way back the Cossacks
attacked the voltigeurs with great fury, the army holding its breath
and regarding them as lost; but the little band took post in some
brushwood, and routed the Lancers in full view of both forces, the
French clapping their hands and cheering their comrades to the echo,
Napoleon sending to inquire to what corps the heroes belonged.
“To the Ninth,” was the reply; “and three-fourths of us are lads of
Paris.”
“Tell them that they are brave fellows,” said the Emperor to his
aide-de-camp, “and that they all deserve the Legion of Honour”--one
account stating that every man received it.
Murat, Eugène, and Lobau rushed on the enemy’s left, and compelled him
to retire behind the Luczissa; but believing that De Tolly meant at
last to stand his ground, Napoleon stopped the conflict, although it
was only eleven o’clock, saying to Murat: “To-morrow at five you will
see the sun of Austerlitz.”
The morrow came; the sun rose redly through the mists; but the wise
Barclay had vanished, having learned during the night that Bagration
had been worsted, the French discovering _one_ Russian asleep in a
thicket, and not a reliable trace of the direction the others had taken.
The expedition had never been popular, either with officers or men, and
they began to grumble with good cause; for an army that had conquered
Prussia in fourteen days, and whose standards were heavy with the
gilded names of a hundred glorious victories, had now penetrated for
more than a month into a land teeming with discomforts. Many of the
regiments were shoeless, the cavalry horses died by dozens every day,
the hospitals were full of sick; extremes of heat and cold, bad food
and little of it, blinding dust, a draught of muddy water to wash it
down--all this and more had been their daily lot since they crossed the
Niemen, and there had been no great battle to revive their drooping
hearts; besides which, the rye bread seriously disagreed with them,
and dysentery and deadly typhus laying its wasting hand upon them, had
already sadly thinned their ranks.
Their pride, too, sustained a shock when news came that the
advance-guard had been repulsed at Aghaponovtchina; and at length
awaking from a lethargic dream, the Emperor sent the various corps into
cantonments on the skirts of Poland, Russia proper still before them;
and returning to Witepsk with his Guard, took off his sword and laid
it on his maps, saying: “Here I halt.... The campaign of 1812 is over;
that of 1813 will do the rest!”
But his ambition gave him no peace. Murat came riding in from the
front, his green surtout all laced and bejewelled, and urged his
brother-in-law to action; and although Napoleon went daily to inspect
the huge ovens, where 39,000 loaves of bread were baked at a time, and
arranged that theatrical companies should come from Paris to enliven
the dreary winter months, his suite soon began to find him bending down
to his maps again, turning his eyes towards Smolensk and Moscow.
Soon afterwards he came across a proclamation calling upon Russia to
rise and exterminate the invaders, and containing some very forcible
hometruths which enraged him; and hearing, to his great chagrin, that
Alexander had made peace with Turkey, he gathered up his legions in
four days, left Witepsk to join them on the 13th of August, and rushed
headlong into difficulties and disaster, from which neither he nor his
army ever recovered.
By one of those masterly movements of his (so conspicuously absent
during the rest of the war), he crossed the front of the Russian army
unknown to them, and two days later fell unexpectedly on their left
flank at Krasnoë.
Ney forced the town, to find General Néwérowskoi beyond it, with 6,000
infantry and Cossacks belonging to Bagration, which formed into a
square of such thickness that the French cavalry sabred its way far
in without being able to break it, and the tall corn, now mellowed by
Autumn’s breath, saw some ghastly work as Néwérowskoi came to a strong
palisade and had to halt; his rear ranks facing round to fire on the
Wurtemberg Horse, while the front-rank tore down the obstacle; the
body succeeding in their escape, although they left 1,200 dead, 1,000
wounded, and eight guns in the hands of the French, who fired a salute
in honour of the victory, which happened to have fallen on Napoleon’s
birthday.
The good folk of Smolensk were coming out of church, where they
had been returning thanks somewhat prematurely, when Néwérowskoi’s
fugitives poured panting into the city, closely followed by Marshal
Ney, who, receiving a ball in the neck, lost his temper, and led a
battalion at the charge against the citadel, under a hail of musketry
that slew two-thirds of them.
Falling back to a hill whence he could reconnoitre, he conducted
Napoleon thither, who exclaimed, “At last I have them!” as several
immense columns of men were seen hastening towards them on the other
side of the Dnieper, being nothing less than Barclay and Bagration with
120,000 troops, coming on at a run, after learning how the Emperor had
outwitted them, and arriving out of breath to succour the threatened
city.
Some sanguinary fighting took place, and a great battle was expected
for the next day; but the wily De Tolly again retreated, his black
columns being discovered on the opposite bank marching swiftly away, to
the mortification of the invaders.
Even the fiery Murat tired of the campaign, and at length urged
Napoleon to stop; but the Emperor persevered, and the King of Naples,
exclaiming prophetically as he strode out of Napoleon’s tent, “Moscow
will be our destruction!” galloped to the front of a Russian battery,
flung himself from his horse, and waited for a ball to kill him.
A violent attack was made on the city; twenty-two men fell by a single
shot from a Russian gun, while Murat, who courted death, was unhurt.
The gorgeous artillery of the Guard pounded unceasingly. An attempt to
storm the place was baffled by the defenders, and when night descended,
Smolensk was seen to be in flames, the army finally entering the city
to find it a heap of smouldering ruins, and the state of the army
itself truly terrible.
General Rapp, who had ridden post to join Napoleon, and who
consequently followed their route, gave a vivid recital of the misery
and devastation he had witnessed in the rear. Sebastiani revealed the
condition of affairs in the heavy cavalry, and the Emperor could close
his eyes no longer.
“It is frightful, I am fully aware,” he said. “I must extort peace from
the enemy, and that can be done only at Moscow.”
At the hill of Valoutina a shocking conflict was waged by the gallant
Ney far into the night, both sides fighting with terrible fury. Junot,
Duke of Abrantes, the Emperor’s old companion-in-arms, showed symptoms
of the insanity that caused him to commit suicide not long after; and
failing to charge at the right moment, the enemy saved his baggage and
wounded. General Gudin was killed, the whole army mourning the loss of
as gallant and good a man as ever fell in action.
Lieutenant Etienne, of the 12th, took the Russian General Toutchkoff,
in the middle of his troops. Napoleon gave eighty-seven crosses to
Gudin’s regiments, and presented an eagle to the 127th with his own
hands; but the misery of the troops outweighed the glory they had
gained: they had seen seven hundred wounded Russians left untended
for three days at Witepsk, and the French surgeons tearing up their
own shirts for bandages; at Smolensk, fifteen large brick buildings
saved from the fire were then full of groaning men, Lariboissiere’s
gun-wadding and the parchments in the city archives being used to dress
their wounds. There, also, a hospital containing a hundred sick was
overlooked for three days, until Rapp discovered it by chance. Eleven
thousand Bavarians had been _marched_ to death without firing a
shot, and discipline was so lax that at Slawkowo the Guard burnt for
firewood the only bridge by which the Emperor could continue his route
next day.
[Illustration: GARDENS OF THE KREMLIN.]
Many Cuirassiers rode on native ponies, regiments straggled along and
pillaged without check, Davout’s corps alone preserving anything like
its usual order: the popular impression that the French disasters began
with the winter’s snow is utterly false; the Army of the Centre alone,
under Napoleon in person, having lost 105,500 in fifty-two days, and
advancing on Moscow with only 182,000, after deducting 13,500 left at
Smolensk.
Everything pointed to a decisive battle to restore the _morale_
of the _Grande Armée_, and Napoleon seemed for the moment to pull
himself together, if we may be permitted a homely phrase. Countless
orders were despatched, every carriage was to be destroyed that was
likely to retard the advance, and meeting with that of his aide-de-camp
Narbonne, he had it burned before his eyes, without allowing the
general to remove a single article.
A change came over the Russian tactics at the same time: all
ranks clamoured for a leader who would fight and not retreat,
and consequently De Tolly was replaced by old Kutusoff, who,
notwithstanding his defeat at Austerlitz, was a Russian, and beloved
by the army for his superstitious practices, and an affectation of
Suvarrow’s eccentricity of manner.
The French advanced in three columns, and troops of Cossacks began
to hover round them threateningly. Beyond Gjatz, Murat became so
annoyed at the hordes of those filthy, unkempt horsemen, that he
rushed forward, and standing in his stirrups, with the very sublimity
of conceit, waved them back with his sword, and they retired in
astonishment and admiration.
But soon the high road debouched on to a natural battle-ground, and
dark masses of troops were seen drawn up in solid bodies, there being
no longer any doubt that the Russians intended fighting to cover “The
Holy City,” Moscow, a large field-work commanding the road itself,
bristling with cannon in a threatening manner.
The army attacked without delay, and drove the foe back to a range of
hills, General Compans leading the 61st, with bayonets fixed, against
the fortification.
Three times they took it, and three times they were dislodged; but at
length, other positions being forced in their rear, the brave garrison
evacuated the blood-stained ramparts, and Compans retained possession.
Among the heaped-up slain inside, a Russian artilleryman, decorated
with several crosses, lay beside his gun, grasping it even in death
with one hand, and clenching the hilt of his broken sword with the
other; while next day, when Napoleon reviewed the survivors of the
61st, he asked, with surprise, what had become of the 3rd Battalion.
“It is in the redoubt,” said the colonel grimly.
A cold drizzle began to fall that night, and Napoleon, through the
striped curtains of his tent, pitched in a square of the “Old Guard,”
saw a great semi-circle of fire from the Russian bivouacs.
He slept little, and went early in his grey riding-coat to reconnoitre
once more, afraid even then that the foe might retreat; but when
morning came the huge force was still in position, extending for six
miles, the flanks retired, and the centre advanced towards him.
Its right was protected by a marsh, its centre strongly entrenched, a
strong redoubt mounting twenty-two guns frowned near the left centre,
and the entire left wing was on lower ground, terminating on the old
Moscow road, with two more redoubts before it. To turn that left
wing, storm the works, and drive the Russians into the marshes on
the opposite flank was the Emperor’s plan, the battle proving one of
the most murderous ever fought by the _Grande Armée_, and known
afterwards by them as the “Battle of the Generals,” from the number
who fell there, or, officially, the Mosqua, from the river flowing
near--the Russians naming it after the village of Borodino, where some
of the hardest fighting took place.
[Illustration: NAPOLEON’S ENTRY INTO MOSCOW.]
Marmont’s aide-de-camp arrived with the news of that marshal’s
defeat at Salamanca, but the disaster was forgotten in another
incident--namely, the unexpected receipt of a portrait of Napoleon’s
little son, the King of Rome, which he showed to the grenadiers at his
tent door.
A proclamation was issued to the army, beginning: “Soldiers! behold
the battle which you have so ardently desired! Victory now depends
on yourselves,” and concluding with the words, “Let it be said of
you--‘he was in the great battle under the walls of Moscow’;” but being
distributed late, many regiments went into action without reading it.
It was the 7th September. A sky of cloudless blue stretched over
the amphitheatre of hills, where the leaves were already falling,
and at six o’clock Count Sorbier opened fire. Pernetty and Compans
were in full march; the Russian processions of priests in glittering
vestments that had chanted hymns and invoked the aid of Heaven retired
precipitately, and an hour later Davout had his first horse killed
under him as the fighting became general.
Compans’ division found itself before one of the enemy’s works, and
Charriere, colonel of the famous 57th, gave the simple command, “To
the redoubt!” the regiment running briskly forward up the slope with a
shout.