confined himself to a gesture expressive of dissatisfaction and
contempt, to which Berthier replied only by a look of resignation. On
this particular point he had received no orders from the emperor: he
therefore conceived that he was not to blame; for Berthier was a
faithful echo, a mirror, and nothing more. Always ready, clear, and
distinct, he, so to speak, exactly repeated the emperor, reflected him,
but added nothing of his own; and what Napoleon forgot was never
supplied.
After passing the Kologa we marched on, absorbed in thought, when some
of us, raising our eyes, uttered a cry of horror. Each one instantly
looked about him, and there lay stretched before us a plain trampled,
bare, and devastated, all the trees cut down within a few feet from the
surface, and farther off craggy hills, the highest of which appeared
misshapen, and bore a striking resemblance to an extinguished volcano.
The ground around us was everywhere covered with fragments of helmets
and cuirasses, with broken drums, gun-stocks, tatters of uniforms, and
standards dyed with blood.
On this desolate spot[167] lay thirty thousand half-devoured corpses;
while a pile of skeletons on the summit of one of the hills overlooked
the whole. It seemed as though Death had here fixed his throne.
Presently the cry was heard, "It is the field of the great battle!"
forming a long and doleful murmur. The emperor passed quickly by. No one
stopped. Cold, hunger, and the enemy were urging us on: we merely turned
our faces as we marched along to take a last melancholy look at the vast
grave of so many companions in arms, uselessly sacrificed, and whose
remains we were obliged to leave behind, unheeded and uninterred.
Sec. 13. Napoleon reaches Viazma. Battle near that place.
At length the emperor reached Viazma.[168] He here halted to wait for
Prince Eugene and Davoust, and to reconnoitre the road to Medyn and
Yucknow, which at this place unites with the high road to Smolensk. It
was this cross-road which might possibly bring the Russian army from
Malo-jaroslavetz on his passage. But on the first of November, after
waiting thirty-six hours and seeing no indications of that army, he
again set out, wavering between the hope that Kutusoff had fallen
asleep, and the fear lest he might have left Viazma on his right, and
proceeded two marches farther to cut off his retreat. He left Ney,
however, at Viazma to collect the first and fourth corps, and to
relieve, by forming the rear guard, Davoust, whom he judged to be
fatigued.
He complained of the tardiness of the latter, and wrote to reproach him
with being still five marches behind, when he ought to have been no more
than three: the genius of that marshal he considered too methodical to
direct, in a suitable manner, so irregular a march.
But this delay was accounted for by the fact that Davoust had found a
marsh without a bridge, and completely encumbered with wagons. He had
dragged them out of the slough in sight of the enemy, and so near them
that their fires lighted his labors, and the sound of their drums
mingled with that of his own voice. For the marshal and his generals
could not yet resolve on abandoning to the enemy so many trophies; nor
did they make up their minds to it until after fruitless exertions, and
in the last extremity.
The road they were traversing was crossed at short intervals by marshy
hollows. A slope, slippery as glass with the ice, hurried the carriages
into them, and there they stuck fast: to draw them out it was necessary
to climb on the opposite side a similar slope, where the horses, whose
shoes were worn entirely smooth, could obtain no footing, and where
every moment they and their drivers dropped down exhausted together. The
famished soldiers immediately fell upon these luckless animals and tore
them to pieces; then at fires, kindled with the remains of their
carriages, they broiled the yet bleeding flesh, and devoured it.
Meanwhile the artillerymen, a chosen corps, and their officers, all
brought up in the first military school in the world, kept off these
unfortunate wretches whenever they could, and took the horses from their
own carriages and wagons, which they abandoned to save the guns. To
these they harnessed their horses, nay, even themselves; while the
Cossacks, observing their disasters from a distance, though they dared
not attack, with their light pieces mounted on sledges, threw their
balls among these disorderly groups, and increased the confusion.
On the 3d of November, Prince Eugene was advancing towards Viazma,
preceded by his equipages and his artillery, when the first light of day
all at once discovered to him his retreat threatened by an army on his
left, behind him his rear guard cut off, and on his left the plain
covered with stragglers and scattered vehicles, fleeing before the
lances of the enemy. At the same time, towards Viazma he heard Marshal
Ney, who should have assisted him, fighting for his own preservation.
At the same time, Compans, one of Davoust's generals, joined the Italian
rear guard with his division. These cleared a passage for themselves,
and while, united with the viceroy, they were warmly engaged, Davoust
with his column passed rapidly behind them, along the left side of the
high road, then crossing it, as soon as he had got beyond them, he
claimed his place in the order of battle, took the right wing, and found
himself between Viazma and the Russians. Prince Eugene gave up to him
the ground which he had been defending, and crossed to the other side of
the road. The enemy then began to extend himself in front of them, and
endeavored to outflank their wings.
Miloradovitch, the Russian general, left to himself, now tried to break
the French line of battle; but he could penetrate it by his fire alone,
which made dreadful havoc in our ranks. Eugene and Davoust were growing
weak; and, as they heard another action in the rear of their right, they
imagined that the rest of the Russian army was approaching Viazma by the
Yuknof road, the outlet of which Ney was defending.
It was only, however, an advanced guard: but they were alarmed at the
noise of this engagement in the rear of their own, threatening their
retreat. The action had now continued ever since seven in the morning,
and night was approaching: the baggage must by this time have got away,
and the French generals began to retire.
This retrograde movement increased the ardor of the enemy, and but for a
memorable effort of the 25th, 57th, and 85th regiments, and the
protection of a ravine, Davoust's corps would have been broken, turned
by its right, and destroyed. Prince Eugene, who was not so briskly
attacked, was able to effect his retreat more rapidly through Viazma;
but the Russians followed him thither, and had penetrated into the town
at the very time when Davoust, pursued by 20,000 men, and overwhelmed by
eighty pieces of cannon, in his turn attempted to pass.
Morand's division first entered the place: it was marching on with
confidence, under the idea that the action was over, when the Russians,
who were concealed by the windings of the streets, suddenly fell upon
it. The surprise was complete, and the confusion great: Morand
nevertheless rallied and encouraged his men, retrieved matters, and
fought his way through.
It was Compans who put an end to the affair. He closed the march with
his division. Finding himself too closely pressed by the bravest troops
of Miloradovitch, he turned about, dashed in person at the most eager,
overthrew them, and having thus made them fear him, he finished his
retreat without farther molestation. This conflict, glorious to each,
was in its result disastrous to all. It was, unhappily, without unity or
order. There were troops enough to conquer had there not been too many
commanders. It was not till near two o'clock that the latter met to
concert their manoeuvres, and these were even then executed without
harmony.
When at length the river, the town of Viazma, night, mutual fatigue, and
Marshal Ney had established a barrier between them and the enemy, the
danger being adjourned and the bivouacs established, the numbers were
counted. Several pieces of cannon which had been broken, the baggage,
and four thousand killed or wounded were found missing. Many of the
soldiers, too, had dispersed. Their honor had been saved, but there were
immense gaps in their ranks. It was necessary to close them up, to bring
everything within a narrower compass, to form what remained into a more
compact whole. Each regiment scarcely composed a battalion, each
battalion scarcely a platoon. The soldiers remaining had no longer their
accustomed places, comrades, or officers.
This sad reorganization took place by the light of the conflagration of
Viazma, and during the successive discharges of the cannon of Ney and
Miloradovitch, the thunders of which were prolonged amid the double
gloom of the night and of the forests. Several times the remnants of
these brave battalions, conceiving they were attacked, crawled to their
arms. The next morning, when they again fell into their ranks, they were
astonished at the smallness of their numbers.
Sec. 14. Dreadful snow-storm on the 6th of November; its effects upon the
troops.
The spirits of the troops were nevertheless still supported by the
example of their leaders, by the hopes of finding all their wants
supplied at Smolensk, and still more by the aspect of a yet brilliant
sun, that universal source of hope and life, which seemed to contradict
and deny the spectacles of despair and death that already encompassed
us.
But on the 6th of November the heavens changed. Their azure disappeared.
The army marched enveloped in a chilling mist. This mist became thicker,
and presently a blinding storm of snow descended upon it. It seemed as
if the sky itself were falling, and uniting with the earth and our
enemies to complete our destruction. All objects rapidly changed their
appearance, becoming utterly confounded, and not to be recognized any
more: we proceeded without knowing where we were, without perceiving the
point to which we were bound; everything was converted into an obstacle
to stop our progress. While we were struggling with the tempest of wind
and snow, the latter, driven by the storm, lodged and accumulated in
every hollow, concealing unknown abysses, which perfidiously opened
beneath our feet. There the soldiers were ingulfed, and the weakest,
resigning themselves to their fate, found their grave in these
treacherous pits.
Those who followed turned aside; but the tempest, driving into their
faces the snow that was descending from the sky and that which it raised
from the earth, seemed resolved to arrest their farther progress. The
Russian winter, in this new form, attacked them at every point: it
penetrated through their light garments, and their rent and worn-out
shoes. Their wet clothes froze to their bodies: an icy envelope encased
them, and stiffened all their limbs. A piercing and violent wind almost
prevented respiration; and, seizing their breath the moment it was
exhaled, converted it into icicles, which hung from their beards all
about their mouths.
The miserable creatures still crawled shivering along, till the snow,
gathering in balls on the soles of their shoes, or a fragment of some
broken article, a branch of a tree, or the body of one of their
comrades, encountered in the way, caused them to stumble and fall. There
their groans were unheeded; the snow soon covered them; slight hillocks
marked the spots where they lay: there was their only grave. The road,
like a cemetery, was thickly studded with these elevations; the most
intrepid and the most indifferent were affected; they passed quickly on
with averted looks. But before them and around them there was nothing
but snow; this immense and dismal uniformity extended farther than the
eye could reach; the imagination was astounded: it seemed a vast
winding-sheet which Nature had thrown over the army. The only objects
not enveloped by it were some gloomy pines, trees of the tombs, with
their funereal verdure and their gigantic and motionless trunks
completing the solemnity of a general mourning, and of an army dying
amid nature already dead.
Everything, even to their very arms, still offensive at
Malo-jaroslavetz, but since defensive only, now turned against our men.
They seemed to their frozen limbs an insupportable weight. In the falls
they experienced, they dropped almost unperceived from their hands, and
were broken or buried in the snow. If they rose again it was without
them: they had not thrown them away, but hunger and cold had wrested
them from their grasp. The fingers of others were frozen to the muskets
they still held, depriving them of the motion necessary to keep up some
degree of warmth and of life.
We soon met with numbers of men belonging to all the different corps,
sometimes singly, sometimes in troops. They had not basely deserted
their colors: it was cold and exhaustion which had separated them from
them. In this mortal struggle, at once general and individual, they had
parted from each other, and there they were, disarmed, vanquished,
defenceless, without leaders, obeying nothing but the most urgent
instinct of self-preservation.
Most of them, attracted by the sight of by-paths, dispersed themselves
over the country in hopes of finding bread and shelter for the coming
night; but on their first passage all had been laid waste to the extent
of seven or eight leagues: they met only with Cossacks and an armed
population, which gathered around them, wounded and stripped them naked,
and then left them, with bursts of savage laughter, to perish in the
snow. These people, who had risen at the call of Alexander and Kutusoff,
and who had not then learned, as they since have, to avenge nobly a
country which they had been unable to defend, hovered on both flanks of
the army under favor of the woods. Those whom they did not despatch with
their pikes and hatchets, they drove back to the fatal and all-devouring
high road.
Night then came on: a night of sixteen hours! But on that snow, which
covered everything, where were they to halt, where sit, where lie down,
where find even a root to satisfy their hunger, or dry wood to kindle a
fire? Fatigue, darkness, and repeated orders nevertheless stopped those
whom their moral and physical strength and the efforts of their officers
had still kept together. They strove to establish themselves; but the
tempest, not yet subsided, dispersed the first preparations for
bivouacs. The pines, laden with frost, obstinately resisted ignition;
while the snow, which still continued to fall from the sky, and that on
the ground, which melted with the effect of the first heat, extinguished
their kindling fires, and, with them, the strength and spirits of the
men.
When at length the flames gained the ascendancy, the officers and
soldiers around them commenced preparing their wretched repast: it
consisted of lean and ragged pieces of flesh torn from the horses that
had given out, and at most a few spoonfuls of rye flour mixed with
snow-water. The next morning circular ranges of soldiers extended
lifeless marked the sites of the bivouacs, and the ground about them was
strewed with the bodies of several thousand horses.
From that day we began to place less reliance on one another. In that
vivacious army, susceptible of all impressions, and taught to reason by
an advanced civilization, despondency and neglect of discipline rapidly
spread, the imagination knowing no bounds in evil any more than in good.
Henceforward, at every bivouac, at every difficult passage, nay, every
moment, some portion separated from the yet organized lines and fell
into disorder. There were some, however, who were proof against this
widespread contagion of insubordination and despair. These were
officers, non-commissioned officers, and the firmest among the soldiers.
They were extraordinary men; they encouraged one another by repeating
the name of Smolensk, which town they knew they were approaching, and
where they had been promised that all their wants should be supplied.
It was thus, after this deluge of snow, and the increase of cold which
it foreboded, that each one, whether officer or soldier, either
preserved or lost his fortitude, according to his disposition, age, or
constitution; while he who of all our leaders had hitherto been the most
strict in enforcing discipline, now paid but little attention to it.
Thrown out of his established ideas of regularity, order, and method, he
was seized with despair at the sight of such universal confusion: and
conceiving, before the rest, that all was lost, he felt himself ready to
abandon all.
From this point for some distance, nothing remarkable occurred in the
imperial column except that it was found necessary to throw the spoils
of Moscow into the Lake of Semlewo; cannon, Gothic armor, the ornaments
of the Kremlin, and the cross of Ivan the Great, were all buried in its
waters. Trophies, glory, those acquisitions to which we had sacrificed
everything, all now became a burden to us: our object was no longer to
embellish life, but to preserve it. In this vast wreck, the army, which
might be compared to a mighty ship tossed by the most tremendous of
tempests, threw without hesitation into that sea of ice and snow
everything that could burden or impede its progress.
The attitude of Napoleon was the same that he retained throughout the
whole of this dismal retreat. It was grave, silent, and resigned:
suffering much less in body than others, but far more in mind, and
brooding with speechless agony over his misfortunes. At that moment
General Charpentier sent him from Smolensk a convoy of provisions.
Bessieres wished to take possession of them; but the emperor instantly
ordered them to be forwarded to the Prince of Moskwa, saying that "those
who were fighting must eat before the rest." At the same time, he sent
word to Ney "to defend himself long enough to allow him some stay at
Smolensk, where the army should eat, rest, and be reorganized."
The Russians, however, advanced under favor of a wood and of our
forsaken carriages, whence they kept up a fire of musketry on Ney's
troops. Half of the latter, whose icy arms froze their stiffened
fingers, became discouraged; they gave way, excusing themselves by their
want of firmness on the preceding day, and fleeing because they had
before fled, which but for this, they would have considered as
impossible. But Ney, rushing in among them, seized one of their muskets,
and led them back to action, which he was himself the first to renew;
exposing his life like a private soldier, with a firelock in his hand,
the same as though he had been neither possessed of wealth, nor power,
nor consideration; in short, as if he had still everything to gain, when
in fact he had everything to lose. But, though he had again turned
soldier, he ceased not to be general: he took advantage of the ground,
supported himself against a height, and covered his approach by
occupying a palisaded house. His generals and colonels, among whom he
particularly remarked Fezenzac, strenuously seconded him; and the enemy,
who had expected to pursue, was obliged to retreat.
By this action Ney afforded the army a respite of twenty-four hours; and
it profited by it to proceed towards Smolensk. The next day, and every
succeeding day, he displayed the same heroism. Between Viazma and
Smolensk he fought ten whole days.
Sec. 15. Defeat and entire dissolution of Prince Eugene's corps at the
passage of the Wop.
On the 13th of November Ney was approaching that city, which he was not
to enter till the ensuing day, and had faced about to beat off the
enemy, when all at once the hills upon which he intended to support his
left were seen covered with a multitude of fugitives. In their terror,
these unfortunate wretches fell, and rolled down to where he was upon
the frozen snow, which they stained with their blood. A band of
Cossacks, which was soon perceived in the midst of them, sufficiently
accounted for this disorder. The astonished marshal, having caused this
horde of enemies to be dispersed, discovered behind it the army of
Italy, returning completely stripped, without baggage and without
cannon.
Platoff had kept it besieged, as it were, all the way from
Dorogobouje.[169] Near that town Prince Eugene had quitted the high
road, and, in order to proceed towards Witepsk, had taken that which,
two months before, had brought him from Smolensk; but the Wop, which,
when he had crossed it before, was a mere brook, and had scarcely been
noticed, he now found swollen into a river. It ran over a muddy bed, and
was bounded by two steep banks. It was found necessary to cut a passage
in these precipitous and frozen banks, and to give orders for the
demolition of the neighboring houses during the night, for the purpose
of building a bridge with the materials. But those who had taken shelter
in them opposed their being destroyed; and, as the viceroy was more
beloved than feared, his instructions were not obeyed. The
bridge-builders became disheartened, and when daylight, with the
Cossacks, appeared, the bridge, after being twice broken down, was at
last abandoned.
Five or six thousand soldiers still in order, twice the number of
disbanded men, the sick and wounded, upward of a hundred pieces of
cannon, ammunition-wagons, and a multitude of vehicles of every kind,
lined the bank and covered a league of ground. An attempt was made to
ford the river through the floating ice which was carried along by its
current. The first guns that were attempted to be got over reached the
opposite bank; but the water kept rising every moment, while at the same
time the bed of the stream at the place of passage was continually
deepened by the wheels and by the efforts of the horses. One carriage
stuck fast, others did the same, and at length the stoppage became
general.
Meanwhile the day was advancing; the men were exhausting themselves in
vain efforts: hunger, cold, and the Cossacks became pressing, and the
viceroy finally found himself compelled to order his artillery and all
his baggage to be left behind. A distressing spectacle ensued. The
owners were allowed scarcely a moment to part from their effects: while
they were selecting from them such articles as they most needed, and
loading their horses with them, a multitude of soldiers came rushing up:
they fell in preference upon the vehicles of luxury; these they broke in
pieces and rummaged every part, avenging their poverty on the wealth,
and their privations on the superfluities they here found, and snatching
them from the Cossacks, who were in the meantime looking on at a
distance.
But it was provisions of which most of them were in quest. They threw
aside embroidered clothes, pictures, ornaments of every kind, and gilt
bronzes for a few handfuls of flour. In the evening it was a strange
sight to behold the mingled riches of Paris and of Moscow, the luxuries
of two of the largest cities in the world, lying scattered and despised
on the snow of the desert.
At the same time, most of the artillerymen spiked their guns in despair,
and scattered their powder about. Others laid a train with it as far as
some ammunition-wagons, which had been left at a considerable distance
behind our baggage. They waited till the most eager of the Cossacks had
come up to them, and when a great number, greedy of plunder, had
collected about them, they threw a brand from a bivouac upon the train.
The fire ran, and in a moment reached its destination; the wagons were
blown up, the shells exploded, and such of the Cossacks as were not
killed on the spot dispersed in dismay.
The army of Italy, thus completely dismantled, soaked in the waters of
the Wop, without food, without shelter, passed the night on the snow
near a village where its officers expected to find lodgings for
themselves. Their soldiers, however, beset its wooden houses. They
rushed like madmen, and in swarms, on every habitation, profiting by the
darkness, which prevented them from recognizing their officers or being
known by them. They tore down everything, doors, windows, and even the
woodwork of the roofs, feeling but little compunction in compelling
others, be they who they might, to bivouac like themselves.