At Malodeczno, Napoleon suddenly determined to leave the wretched
remnant of his army, and, accompanied by a few faithful officers, to
return to France. Murat was left to command the army, and the greatest
hopes of speedy relief and fresh triumph were excited by the Emperor
before he departed. He journeyed very rapidly, and reached Paris on the
19th of December, two days after his memorable twenty-ninth bulletin had
told France the disasters of the campaign. But the remains of the grand
army—what was their fate?
On the 6th of December, the very day after Napoleon’s departure, the sky
exhibited a more dreadful appearance. Icy particles were seen floating
in the air, and the birds fell stiff and frozen to the earth. The
atmosphere was motionless and silent; it seemed as if every thing in
nature which possessed life and movement, even the wind itself, had been
seized, chained, and, as it were, congealed by a universal death. Not a
word or a murmur was then heard; there was nothing but the gloomy
silence of despair, and the tears which proclaimed it.
“We flitted along,” says Segur, “in the midst of this empire of death
like doomed spirits. The dull and monotonous sound of our steps, the
crackling of the frost and the feeble groans of the dying, were the only
interruptions to this doleful and universal silence. Anger and
imprecations there were none, nor any thing which indicated a remnant of
warmth; scarcely was strength enough left to utter a prayer; and most of
them even fell without complaining, either from weakness or resignation,
or because people complain only when they look for kindness, and fancy
they are pitied.
“Such of our soldiers as had hitherto been the most persevering here
lost heart entirely. Some times the snow sunk beneath their feet, but
more frequently, its glassy surface refusing them support, they slipped
at every step, and tottered along from one fall to another. It seemed as
though this hostile soil were leagued against them; that it
treacherously escaped from under their efforts; that it was constantly
leading them into snares, as if to embarrass and retard their march, and
to deliver them up to the Russians in pursuit of them, or to their
terrible climate.”
And, in truth, whenever, for a moment, they halted from exhaustion, the
winter, laying his icy hand upon them, was ready to seize his victims.
In vain did these unhappy creatures, feeling themselves benumbed, raise
themselves up, and, already deprived of the power of speech, and plunged
into a stupor, proceed a few steps like automatons; their blood froze in
their veins, like water in the current of rivulets, congealing the
heart, and then flying back to the head; and these dying men staggered
as if they had been intoxicated. From their eyes, reddened and inflamed
by the constant glare of the snow, by the want of sleep, and the smoke
of the bivouacs, there flowed real tears of blood; their bosoms heaved
with deep and heavy sighs; they looked towards heaven and on the earth,
with an eye dismayed, fixed, and wild, as expressive of their farewell,
and, it might be, of their reproaches against the barbarous nature which
was tormenting them. It was not long before they fell upon their knees,
and then upon their hands; their heads still slowly moved for a few
minutes alternately to the right and left, and from their open mouth
some sounds of agony escaped; at last, in its turn, it fell upon the
snow, which it reddened with livid blood, and their sufferings were at
an end.
Their comrades passed by them without moving a step out of their way,
that they might not, by the slightest curve, prolong their journey, and
without even turning their heads; for their beards and hair were so
stiffened with ice that every movement was painful. Nor did they even
pity them; for, in fact, what had they lost by dying? who had they left
behind them? They suffered so much, they were still so far from France,
so much divested of all feelings of country by the surrounding prospect
and by misery, that every dear illusion was broken, and hope almost
destroyed. The greater number, therefore, had become careless of dying,
from necessity, from the habit of seeing death constantly around them,
and from fashion, sometimes even treating it with contempt; but more
frequently, on seeing these unfortunates stretched upon the snow, and
instantly stiffened, contenting themselves with the thought that they
had no more wants, that they were at rest, that their sufferings were
over. And, indeed, death, in a situation quiet, certain, and uniform,
may be felt as a strange event, a frightful contrast, a terrible change;
but in this tumult, this violent and ceaseless movement of a life of
action, danger, and suffering, it appeared nothing more than a
transition, a slight alteration, an additional removal, which excited
little alarm.
Such were the last days of the grand army: its last nights were still
more frightful. Those whom they surprised marching together, far from
every habitation, halted on the borders of the woods: there they lighted
their fires, before which they remained the whole night, erect and
motionless, like spectres. They seemed as if they could not possibly
have enough of the heat; they kept so close to it as to burn their
clothes, as well as the frozen parts of their body, which the fire
decomposed. The most dreadful pain then compelled them to stretch
themselves on the ground, and the next day they attempted in vain to
rise.
In the meantime, such as the winter had almost wholly spared, and who
still retained some portion of courage, prepared their melancholy meal.
It had consisted, ever since they left Smolensk, of some slices of
horseflesh broiled, and a little rye meal made into a sort of gruel with
snow water, or kneaded into paste, which they seasoned, for want of
salt, with the powder of their cartridges.
The sight of these fires was constantly attracting fresh spectres, who
were driven back by the first comers. Many of them, destitute of the
means and the strength necessary to cut down the lofty fir trees, made
vain attempts to set fire to them as they were standing; but death
speedily surprised them, and they might be seen in every sort of
attitude, stiff and lifeless about their trunks.
Under the vast pent-houses erected by the sides of the high road in some
parts of the way, scenes of still greater horror were witnessed.
Officers and soldiers all rushed precipitately into them, and crowded
together in heaps. There, like so many cattle, they pressed upon each
other around the fires, and as the living could not remove the dead from
the circle, they laid themselves down upon them, there to expire in
their turn, and serve as a bed of death to some fresh victims. In a
short time additional crowds of stragglers presented themselves, and,
being unable to penetrate into these asylums of suffering, they
completely besieged them.
It frequently happened that they demolished their walls, which were
formed of dry wood, in order to feed their fires; at other times,
repulsed and disheartened, they were contented to use them as shelters
to their bivouacs, the flames of which very soon communicated to the
buildings, and the soldiers who were within them, already half dead with
the cold, perished in the conflagration.
At Youpranoui, the same village where the Emperor only missed by an hour
being taken by the Russian partisan Seslawin, the soldiers burned the
houses as they stood, merely to warm themselves for a few minutes. The
light of these fires attracted some of those miserable wretches, whom
the excessive severity of the cold and their sufferings had rendered
delirious; they ran to them like madmen, they threw themselves into
these furnaces, where they perished in horrible convulsions. Their
famished companions looked on unmoved; and there were some who drew out
these bodies, blackened and broiled by the flames, and, shocking to
relate, they ventured to pollute their mouths with this dreadful food!
This was the same army which had been formed from the most civilized
nation of Europe; that army, formerly so brilliant, which was victorious
over men to its last moment, and whose name still reigned in so many
conquered capitals. Its strongest and bravest warriors, who had recently
been proudly traversing so many scenes of their victories, had lost
their noble bearing; covered with rags, their feet naked and torn, and
supporting themselves with branches of fir, they dragged themselves
painfully along; and the strength and perseverance which they had
hitherto put forth in order to conquer, they now made use of only to
flee.
In this state of physical and moral distress, the remnant of the grand
army reached the city of Wilna, the Mecca of their hopes. There food and
shelter were obtained; but the Russians soon came up and told, in the
thunder of their artillery, that Wilna was not a place of rest for the
French. They were driven from the town, and Ney, with a handful of men,
could scarcely protect their flight. Who can ever do sufficient honor to
the lion-hearted marshal? This was the order of retreat which he
adopted:
Every day, at five o’clock in the evening, he took his position, stopped
the Russians, allowed his soldiers to eat and take some rest, and
resumed his march at ten o’clock. During the whole of the night, he
pushed the mass of the stragglers before him, by dint of cries, of
entreaties, and of blows. At daybreak, which was about seven o’clock, he
halted, again took position, and rested under arms and on guard until
ten o’clock; the enemy then usually made his appearance, and he was
compelled to fight until the evening, gaining as much ground in the rear
as possible. This depended at first on the general order of march, and
at a later period upon circumstances.
For a long time this rear guard did not consist of more than two
thousand, then of one thousand, afterward of about five hundred, and
finally it was reduced to sixty men; and yet Berthier, either
designedly, or from mere routine, made no change in his instructions.
These were always addressed to the commander of a corps of thirty-five
thousand men; in them he coolly detailed all the different positions
which were to be taken up and guarded until the next day, by divisions
and regiments which no longer existed. And every night, when pressed by
Ney’s urgent warnings, he was obliged to go and awake the King of
Naples, and compel him to resume his march, he testified the same
astonishment.
In this manner did Ney support the retreat from Wiazma to Eve, and a few
wersts beyond it. He attempted in vain to rally a few of them; and he
who had hitherto been almost the only one whose commands had been
obeyed, was now compelled to follow it.
He arrived along with it at Kowno, which was the last town of the
Prussian empire. Finally, on the 13th of December, after marching
forty-six days under the most terrible sufferings, they once more came
in sight of a friendly country. Instantly, without halting or looking
behind them, the greater part plunged into, and dispersed themselves in,
the forests of Prussian Poland. Some there were, however, who, on their
arrival on the friendly bank of the Niemen, turned round, and there,
when they cast a last look on that land of horrors from which they were
escaping, and found themselves on the same spot whence, five months
before, their countless legions had taken their victorious flight, tears
gushed from their eyes, and they broke out into exclamations of the most
poignant sorrow.
Two kings, one prince, eight marshals, followed by a few officers,
generals on foot, dispersed, and without attendants; finally, a few
hundred men of the old guard, still armed—these were its remains—these
alone represented the grand army.
The camp-fires of the invaders in Russia were at an end. From Moscow to
the Niemen they could be traced in circles of death. Every bivouac had
its throng of victims, conquered more by the climate than the troops of
Russia. Like a vast stream, which gradually disappears in the ground as
it flows, the grand army of four hundred thousand men had vanished amid
the snows of Russia. Upon the banks of the Niemen, it lived only in
Marshal Ney.
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