awaited him; for Russian dead, still warm, and with their brains
battered out in a peculiar manner, were met with at every few yards.
The escort of Poles, Portuguese, and Spaniards told off to guard the
prisoners had chosen that method of ridding themselves of the weakly
ones who lagged behind.
A stringent order went forth, and the murders ceased; but every night
the miserable captives were herded together like cattle, without fire,
on the bare ground, a meagre ration of raw horseflesh served out to
them, and when that failed the frantic wretches _turned cannibals and
devoured each other_.
The 4th Corps, under Eugène, meanwhile followed the Imperial column,
and Davout commanded the rear-guard, five days’ march behind.
Intense cold had now set in, and the land was icebound; violent winds
fluttered the ragged uniforms, the fifteen days’ rations brought from
Moscow were exhausted, and the depth of misery seemed to have been
reached. Yet all this was as nothing to the sufferings in store.
Napoleon waited thirty-six hours at Wiazma for the rear-guard to
come up, and seeing no sign of it, left Ney there to relieve it,
and marched for Dorogobouje on the 1st November; while Eugène and
Davout, arriving at Wiazma on the 3rd, found Ney hotly engaged with
Miloradowitch, the Russian Murat, who opposed further advance.
A battle ensued, lasting many hours. Great heroism was displayed,
especially by the 25th, 57th, and 85th Regiments, and at length Eugène
got away through the town; Davout, in his turn, retiring step by step
before 20,000 men and the crashing fire of twenty-four guns, was met by
another force in the winding streets, and only extricated himself after
tremendous loss, the bulk of the Russians under old Kutusoff remaining
motionless within earshot, in spite of all the efforts of Sir Robert
Wilson to induce him to attack.
During the fourteen days since the _Grande Armée_ left Moscow it
had lost 43,000 men, reducing its numbers to 60,000; and its condition
may be understood from the fact that the day after Wiazma a little
flour, carefully measured out in a spoon, formed the only food of the
officers of the 4th Corps.
The dogs howled round the tail of the straggling columns, croaking
ravens followed in black flocks. When a horse fell the hungry soldiers
rushed upon it and tore it to pieces before life was extinct; and
on the 6th November the sun disappeared, a grey fog enveloped the
troops, the wind dashed them one against the other as they stumbled
mechanically along, AND IT BEGAN TO SNOW!
Whirled on the storm wind, the flakes shut out the country on either
hand. No sooner had a waggon--a gun carriage--a decimated regiment gone
by than it was instantly lost to sight. The road vanished, the hollows
were filled up; one could pass within twenty yards of a log hut and not
see it. Everything became white--a pitiless, monotonous, dead level of
snow, and strong men sobbed struggling onward--as they hoped--towards
that _Belle France_ that not a third of their number were destined
to reach again.
Napoleon was on the heights above Mikelewska when the snow began, and
news of the most serious import reached him at the same moment, Count
Daru arriving with the account of General Mallet’s attempted conspiracy
in Paris.
Surrounded by a circle of his Chasseurs, shivering in their scarlet
pelisses, the Emperor listened to the startling narrative, the storm
howling round him as he bent over the neck of his horse; and even when
he retired into a posthouse to digest the alarming intelligence his
cup of bitterness was not full, for Colonel Dalbignac came from the
rear-guard, which Ney had taken over, with a terrible report of the
disorder that the marshal had discovered at Dorogobouje.
“I do not ask you for these details, colonel,” said Napoleon; but
some waggons arriving from Smolensk laden with provisions, he waved
Bessières, who wished to keep them for the Guard, aside, and sent them
on to Ney, saying, “Those who fight shall eat before the rest,” begging
him, if possible, to check the foe, and allow the main body some time
to reorganise at Smolensk.
The bulk of the Russian spoil, including the great Cross of Ivan,
had been sunk in the lake of Semlewo, and cannon were abandoned at
every mile. Generals and staff officers marched in bands, without
men, without thought of anything but their own preservation. Twelve
to sixteen horses were required to draw a single gun up the slightest
hill, slippery as glass, and, with the thermometer registering
twenty-eight and thirty degrees of frost, 10,000 wretched animals died
in a single night--the terrible night of sixteen hours of darkness. In
some Italian villages they still speak with horror of “the night of the
fifteen hundred frozen”--that being the number of Italians that died on
one occasion between sunset and sunrise.
Even the Russian Miloradowitch suffered from a frozen eye, and men who
sat to rest a moment on the snow fell back in a stupor, a little blood
gushed from mouth and nose, and their earthly woes were over.
Horrible the fate of those who straggled from the track and fell in
with the villagers. Sir Robert Wilson at one place saw sixty naked
Frenchmen laid in a row, their necks on a felled tree, while men _and
women_ hopped round them, singing in wild chorus, and battering out
their brains in succession with faggot sticks.
At Wiazma fifty were _burned alive_; at Selino the same number,
still breathing, were _buried_, the dog belonging to one of them
returning daily to the graveside for a fortnight before the peasants
slew it.
Yet amid all this misery, his men wearing bed quilts, pieces of carpet,
women’s clothes from the baggage waggons which they began to pillage
on the 7th November, and existing too often on the bodies of their
comrades roasted by the flames of a burning log hut. Marshal Ney, well
styled “the bravest of the brave,” set his face to the foe, and fought
for ten days and nights against Cossacks--artillery, horse, foot,
and dragoons--and, worst of all, the terrible _Général Morizov_,
as the Russians called the frost. Holding each wood, contesting every
hill, knowing that he was virtually sacrificed to save the wreck of the
army, his men deserting, despairing, dying, he fought on foot to give
them courage, his face livid with the cold, and almost unrecognisable
from the long red beard he had allowed to grow.
Some idea of the stubborn character of those wild Cossacks may be
formed from one little incident. One of them came into the Russian
camp, having ridden twenty miles after being hit by a cannon shot. His
arm was taken out at the shoulder-joint by the famous Doctor Wiley, who
afterwards amputated Moreau’s legs at Dresden. During the operation,
which lasted four minutes, the man never spoke, the next morning walked
about his room, and drank tea, and, getting into a cart which jolted
him fourteen miles over a Russian road, was afterwards heard of, many
hundreds of miles on his journey homeward to the Don, doing well!
Small wonder, then, that the hoarse _hourra_ struck terror into
the fugitives, and that half a dozen of the barbarians would send
a battalion of bleeding conscripts flying for their lives down the
glittering aisles of drooping birches, whose fairy-like branches
glistened with magic beauty in the wintry sunshine.
Eugène was attacked as his corps crossed the Wop with five or six
thousand soldiers under arms, double that number of stragglers and
wounded, and more than a hundred guns. The ford became blocked, the
current was very rapid, and the river only partially frozen. A shameful
pillage of the waggons took place, gold, silver, and costly plunder
being scattered in the mud; and it was not until a brave Italian
colonel named Delfanti crossed up to his waist in the floating ice that
the others took heart and followed him.
Colonel Labaume tells us that he picked up a magnificent cup of
splendid workmanship, drank some muddy water out of it, and flung it
aside with indifference; but others, thinking only of gain, exchanged
silver money for gold at a great sacrifice, secretly laughing at their
comrades, who soon sank under the weight, while they escaped with the
lesser bulk.
One officer, apparently lifeless, felt a man pulling off his boots, and
exclaimed, “Ah, rascal, I have still need of them. I am not quite dead.”
“_Eh bien, mon général_,” said the soldier, coolly sitting down
beside him, “_I can wait_.”
Napoleon rested five days at Smolensk; but so neglected had been
his orders that no meat was found there--only rye flour, rice, and
brandy--and the army fought desperately at the doors of the magazines,
killing many men, raging at the Guard, whom they accused, with great
reason, of being unduly favoured, and breaking out into excesses of
every kind.
On the 14th November, at four o’clock in the morning, the main column
left for Krasnoë, leaving little or nothing behind them for Eugène,
Davout, and the valiant Ney, who had instructions to evacuate the city
with a day’s interval between each corps, Ney to blow up the place when
he took his departure.
Out of 37,000 dashing cavalry who had crossed the Niemen only
_eight hundred_ remained mounted at Smolensk, the 20th Chasseurs
being credited with a hundred; and this remnant was collected under
Latour-Maubourg, a brave and very popular officer, who, on losing a leg
at Leipzig the following year, said to his weeping servant, “_Mon
ami_, why do you grieve? In future there’s only one boot to clean.”
The army was now 42,000 strong, having lost 18,000 in the previous
eight days; but it was estimated that 60,000 unarmed stragglers still
impeded the march. Before leaving Smolensk, however, a reinforcement
brought the force up to 47,000, to meet _four_ Russian armies, one
of them with 90,000, under Kutusoff, another commanded by Miloradowitch
with 20,000 men.
The artillery of the Guard took twenty-two hours to do the first five
leagues out of Smolensk. One company of sturdy Wurtembergers mustered
_four_ men, and when Eugène reached the abandoned city in a
furious gale his men had to mount the slippery hill literally _on
their knees_.
Beyond Korythnia Miloradowitch opened on the Imperial column, and
Napoleon rode in the centre of the Grenadiers of the Old Guard. He
seemed to bear a charmed life, for three times a certain Captain
Finkein had penetrated Moscow to kill him, and he was often under fire
during the retreat. This time, however, he had to pass a hill bristling
with cannon, and the band struck up a then well-known air, “Where can
one be happier than in the bosom of his family?”
“Stop,” cried Napoleon, fearful of the memories it might raise in the
minds of the men. “Rather play, ‘Let us watch over the safety of the
Empire.’” And to that air they marched past the batteries, soon leaving
the danger behind them.
When the column had gone, Miloradowitch descended from the hills, drew
across the road, and cut off the rear corps, who had to fight their way
through with terrible loss.
[Illustration:
NAPOLEON’S RETREAT
from Moscow.
1812.]
Eugène tried to force a passage, but failed; and leaving his fires
burning--and what miserable fires they were!--turned the flank of the
Russians, and got by in the night.
At the critical moment the moon shone out, and the wretched band was
challenged.
“Hist, fool,” whispered a Polish officer named Klisby in Russian. “Do
you not see that we belong to Suvarow, bound on a secret mission?” And
so, without interruption save from the Cossacks, the Viceroy joined
his stepfather at Krasnoë, where Napoleon made a retrograde march to
succour Davout, who came in, his baggage gone, his marshal’s baton
taken, his men reduced to a few platoons, and with no news of Ney, who
was reluctantly left to his fate, the army moving on Orcha, Mortier and
the wreck of the Young Guard retiring slowly in the rear, after holding
Krasnoë as long as possible, Laborde saying to the troops, “The marshal
orders the ordinary time--do you hear?--the ordinary time, soldiers,”
although under a heavy fire of balls and grape shot.
At Orcha Napoleon destroyed his papers. At Lubna the twenty-one
staff officers of the 4th Corps crouched round a miserable fire in a
cart-shed, with their horses behind them. At Krasnoë the brave Delfanti
limped along on the arm of Villeblanche. A round shot struck him
between the shoulder blades, carried off Villeblanche’s head, and they
fell dead on the snow. Wherever one turned it was horror upon horror.
Delicate women and little children lay by the roadside. The Cossacks
stripped everyone they found.
Wilson has some dreadful details in his interesting diary. At one
place a number of naked men sat round a burning hut, their backs quite
frozen, when, turning to warm them, the fire caught the congealed flesh
and roasted it in his presence.
Again, he saw four wretches huddled together, hands and limbs
immovable, _but minds yet vigorous_, with two dogs snarling and
tearing at their frozen feet; while nearly all the dead he came across
seemed to have been “writhing with some agony at the moment their
heart’s blood congealed.”
Woe to the man who lost his bivouac, and strayed to another fire. He
was driven away with blows and curses from one after another until he
sank and died. If anyone fell on the march, and implored a helping
hand, the passers-by shook their heads and passed on, although many
were still laden with plunder.
An awful thing occurred as Ney left Smolensk, showing the depths to
which human nature can sink, a female sutler being seen to throw her
little five-year-old boy off her heavily-laden sledge and leave him.
Twice the marshal had him placed in her arms, and twice she flung the
child from her, saying, “He had never seen France, and would never
regret it, while she was resolved to see it again.” The soldiers could
stand it no longer, They carried the boy safely through the rest of the
march, and left the unnatural woman to perish in the snow!
Ney’s retreat with the rear-guard was one of the great events in French
history, and has never been exceeded by any general for courage,
determination, and self-reliance.
With barely 6,000 men, twelve guns, and 300 crawling skeletons--which
it is a mockery to call horses--and burdened with 7,000 stragglers,
whose wants and selfishness added greatly to the difficulties, he
followed the traces of the _Grande Armée_, easily recognisable by
the burnt-out bivouacs with their circles of dead--the white mounds
that indicated where a cuirassier, a dragoon, a barefooted voltigeur,
slept his last sleep, and the patches of trampled, blood-stained snow
strewn with helmets and corpses, over which the dogs wrangled and the
ravens croaked in the dull light that showed a battle-ground.
[Illustration: “THE ENGINEER SET FIRE TO THEIR SOLE MEANS
OF ESCAPE” (_p._ 327).]
Beyond the plain of Katova, where, three months before, they had driven
Newerowskoi through the cornfields, they were summoned by an officer
in the name of Kutusoff; but while he was speaking forty guns opened
on the French, and Ney exclaimed, “A marshal never surrenders--you are
my prisoner,” the astonished Russian marching with them for twenty-six
days without attempting to break his parole.
Ney boldly attacked the _eighty thousand_ men, heading his feeble
band in person. They broke the first line, and were rushing on the
second when the guns began again, sweeping the columns and killing some
women in the waggons.
The French fell back in confusion, but Ney rallied them again, replying
with his _six_ remaining guns, and showing his teeth with the
_two thousand_ ragged wretches who kept their ranks. If Kutusoff
had sent a single corps against them, not a man would have survived to
tell the tale. As it was, when night fell Ney turned his back on them,
and retreated towards Smolensk.
After an hour’s dreary march they halted, Ney, as usual, in the rear;
and breaking the ice on a streamlet to find which way the current ran,
followed its course through the silent forests until they reached the
Dnieper.
Guided by a lame peasant, they found a spot where the ice would bear
them, although a thaw was setting in; and, after lighting fires to
deceive the hovering Cossacks, the intrepid marshal rolled himself in
his cloak and slept on the river bank for three hours.
At midnight they began to cross, the ice parting and letting many of
them in as they crept in single file. An attempt was made to get the
wounded over in the waggons, but the treacherous blocks gave way, and
they were drowned with heartrending screams, Ney himself rescuing one
survivor, an officer named Brigueville.
Using the cowardly stragglers as a shield, by placing them between his
men and the foe, he pursued his way, taking advantage of the woods,
surrounded by 6,000 Cossacks, and repeatedly played upon by cannon;
lying in the forests by day, and marching when darkness had set in,
until, with 1,500 men under arms, most of the stragglers slain or
taken, and all his guns and baggage gone, he rejoined the wreck of the
army at Orcha on the 20th November, Napoleon well saying before his
arrival, “I have two hundred millions (francs) in the cellars of the
Tuileries, and I would have given them all to save Marshal Ney.”
Oudinot and Victor also joined the wreck about this time, bringing
up the total number to 30,000 or thereabouts, the Emperor’s column
mustering only _seven_ thousand men and _forty_ thousand
stragglers, mingled with the enormous baggage train of the 2nd
and 9th Corps that had escaped much of the previous disaster; and
closely pressed on each flank by the immense armies of Kutusoff and
Witgenstein, the doomed men prepared to cross the Berezina in the face
of Admiral Tchitchakof, who lined the opposite bank.
Latour-Maubourg had only 150 horsemen left, and Napoleon formed 500
mounted cavalry officers into what he called his Sacred Squadron,
Grouchy and Sebastiani commanding it, and generals of division serving
in it as captains; but in a few days this last romantic idea had
crumbled away.
Corbineau, with the remains of the 8th Lancers and 20th Chasseurs, saw
a peasant riding a wet horse, and compelled him to show them the ford
opposite to Studzianka; and while the French made all the parade they
could lower down the river to attract Tchitchakof’s attention, the
brave engineer Eblé arrived at Studzianka in the dark winter evening
of the 25th November with two field forges, six chests of tools, some
clamps made from waggon tyres, and a few companies of pontoniers, and
began to make a bridge, the water rising, the ice floating in blocks,
and the men working up to their necks without even a draught of brandy
to protect them from the cold.
As the grey dawn broke, the first pile was driven; eight hours’ work
was required before the bridge would be practicable, and the haggard
fugitives waited with agonised hearts for the cannonade that would
destroy their last hope; but to the astonishment of all, the admiral
was seen in full retreat on the farther bank, disappearing into the
woods with all his guns.
A caricature exists, showing Kutusoff and Witgenstein tying Napoleon
up in a sack, while Tchitchakof is cutting a hole in the bottom of it;
clearly indicating the Russian view of that individual’s conduct.
Napoleon wished to question a prisoner, and two officers swam their
horses across, through the ice, Jacqueminot, Oudinot’s aide-de-camp,
seizing a Russian, holding him on his saddle-bow, and _swimming back
with him_.
When an old man he mounted to the top of Strasbourg Cathedral, and hung
fearlessly from an arm of the cross with hundreds of feet of space
beneath him: it was natures like his alone that survived the retreat.
_Chef d’escadron_ Sourd, with fifty men of the 7th Chasseurs,
carried some infantry over behind them, and two rafts conveyed four
hundred more across to defend the bridge head. A second bridge for
artillery and baggage was finished at four o’clock; it broke twice
during the night, and again the following evening: all was confusion
and disorder. The Russians were expected any moment on the heights that
commanded the low-lying snow-covered shore, yet the stragglers waited
fatuously until the morning of the 27th, and then all attempted to
cross at the same time.
[Illustration: “WHEN THE REMNANT OF THE GUARD WAS SEEN
CLEARING A WAY FOR THE EMPEROR, THERE WAS A RUSH”
(_p._ 326).]
When the remnant of the Guard was seen clearing a way for the Emperor,
there was a rush; the bridges were blocked--men, women, and children
were crushed to death and many drowned. Yet that night--the panic
over--thousands returned to the bivouacs of Studzianka, and the bridges
were deserted again.
Victor, with 6,000 men, kept Witgenstein in check; Tchitchakof, a
martyr to the cold, who had by that time warmed his toes thoroughly,
returned to the opposite shore and began firing, and another terrible
rush was made for the frail structures on the 28th, while Ney, across
the river, was repulsing the admiral, and Victor fought all day long to
give the wretches time.
The waggons and carriages were more than could have crossed in six
days, said Eblé--who died soon after from exposure. Ney wished them
burned, but Berthier, who was little better than a writer of reports
and a species of machine actuated by Napoleon himself, opposed it
on his own responsibility, and caused the death of a multitude of
sufferers in consequence; for when the shot and shell began to fall
in the river and splinter the ice, the drivers charged down on the
bridges, tearing their way remorselessly through the living obstacle.
Sword in hand, single horsemen cut a passage for themselves; women,
waistdeep in the water alongside, were frozen with their arms raised to
preserve their children, who were too often left to freeze there by the
passers-by.
The Countess Alesio--a young Italian bride of eighteen, who had
accompanied her husband on that ghastly wedding-trip--survived all
these horrors, and _lives_, as I write these lines, full of
terrible memories of the retreat.
Selfishness and heroism went hand in hand. An artilleryman jumped from
the bridge to save a mother and her two little ones, succeeding in
rescuing one boy; others pushed their comrades off to find room for
themselves. And even when the early night settled down, the Russians
knew where to point their guns by the screams and curses that rang over
the waste amid a fearful snowstorm.
When the 4th Corps reached the other side, their only fire was a
miserable blaze lighted for Eugène, of wood begged from some Bavarians,
and his officers ran about _all night_ to keep warm.
The artillery bridge had long since broken down--hundreds being
engulfed--and only one remained, leading into a marsh choked with
carriages, guns, waggons, wounded, dead and dying; across which, at
nine o’clock, Victor’s shattered battalions had to force their way over
with their bayonets.
One instance of remarkable coolness is recorded of an artillery officer
named Brechtel, whose wooden leg was smashed by a cannon ball. “Look
for another leg in waggon No. 5,” he said to a gunner; and when it was
brought, he screwed it on, and calmly continued his firing.
Ney’s pay-waggons were crossing at the same time under the care of
Nicolas Savin, a hussar who had been at Toulon in 1793, in Egypt with
Bonaparte, at Austerlitz, Iena, and in the Peninsula; but through
a breakage of the bridge he and his gold were taken by Platoff’s
Cossacks, and marvellous to relate, the veteran died in Russia, during
the winter of 1894, at the extraordinary age of 127.
In vain Eblé urged the fugitives to fly--many still lingering on, until
at half-past eight on the morning of the 29th, the engineer set fire to
their sole means of escape on the approach of the enemy.
Heartrending was the scene; language fails to describe it, though many
men of many nations have poured forth all their eloquence upon the
theme.
Snow, flames, round shot and shells; the half-frozen river, the army
already passed on its way; France, friends, home, _everything_
gone. A father on one bank, a mother on the other, never to meet again
in this world; brothers, children, old men and young girls, the bridges
blazing, and the hoarse “Hourra!” of the Cossacks as they tore down the
bank among the forsaken crowd like vultures on a carcass.