Authors: Adam Zamoyski
Some officers treated their captured counterparts with courtesy. The partisan leader Denis Davidov went to great pains to trace and return the lover’s ring, locket and love letters taken from a young Westphalian Hussar lieutenant who had been stripped of them on being taken by the cossacks. But his colleague Alexandr Samoilovich Figner took sadistic pleasure in slaughtering his prisoners, often when they least expected it. General Yermolov also ill-treated prisoners, particularly Poles, whom he despised as traitors to the Slav cause. After Vinkovo he spat in Count Plater’s face and instructed the cossack escorting him to feed him only with lashes of his whip. Yermolov’s attitude was not unusual. ‘Our soldiers took some prisoners among the French,’ noted a young Russian officer after the fighting at
Smolensk, ‘but all the Poles fell victim to vengefulness and contempt.’ When one officer reported in after a patrol in the course of which he had taken some French soldiers who were looting a church, he was told by his senior officer that he should not have bothered to bring them back. So he went out and told his men to bayonet them to death.
51
The Tsar himself wrote to Kutuzov complaining of reports of ill-treatment of prisoners and insisting that all captured men must be treated humanely, fed and clothed. But the example set by his own brother undermined any chance of his complaints being heeded. General Wilson was riding along with other senior officers behind Grand Duke Constantine when they passed a column of prisoners. Their attention was attracted by one of them, a distinguished-looking young officer, and Constantine asked him if he would not rather be dead. ‘I would, if I cannot be rescued, for I know I must in a few hours perish by inanition, or by the cossack lance, as I have seen so many hundred comrades do, on being unable from cold, hunger, and fatigue to keep up,’ he answered. ‘There are those in France who will lament my fate – for their sake I should wish to return; but if that be impossible, the sooner the ignominy and suffering are over the better.’ To Wilson’s horror, the Grand Duke drew his sabre and killed the man.
52
There was a set of regulations in existence which laid down not only where prisoners should be held, but how much they were to receive for their sustenance. But it was a dead letter in the reality of this campaign. Sergeant Bartolomeo Bertolini, who had been taken while foraging on the eve of Borodino, could hardly believe the treatment he and his companions were subjected to. They were forcibly relieved of everything, even their uniforms and their boots. ‘Our misery was so great that I could never adequately convey it in words,’ he wrote. ‘They gave us no pay, as happens normally with prisoners among civilised nations, nor did they give us any rations to keep us alive.’ They were marched quickly, beaten, and killed if they strayed off the path to pick up a rotten potato or scrap of food.
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Dr Raymond Faure was taken at Vinkovo. He and other captured officers were brought before Kutuzov, who treated them with chivalry, giving them clothes and some money. The same treatment was not accorded to rank-and-file prisoners, who were robbed, stripped and beaten. And as soon as the convoy of prisoners left the Tarutino camp, under the escort of militia levies, the officers began to suffer the same fate, being robbed by the militia officers of everything Kutuzov had given them.
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By the time the retreat started the war had grown more vicious, and captives had become an unwelcome encumbrance: with food and clothing scarce on both sides, there was none to spare for them. As the Russian prisoners being goaded down the road by the French weakened and fell behind, they would be despatched with a bullet to the head. The Russians were no less brutal. Most of the prisoners were taken by cossacks, whose first action was invariably to strip them and take not only all valuables but also all serviceable items of clothing. They would then hand them over, or preferably sell them, to local peasants, who would massacre them with varying degrees of sadism.
Some would be buried alive, others would be tied to trees and used for target practice, others would have their ears, noses, tongues and genitalia cut off, and so on. General Wilson saw ‘sixty dying naked men, whose necks were laid upon a felled tree, while Russian men and women with large faggot-sticks, singing in chorus and hopping around, with repeated blows struck out their brains in succession’. In one village the priest told his flock to be humane and drown the thirty prisoners under the ice of a lake rather than torture them. At Dorogobuzh, Woldemar von Löwenstern was horrified to see Russian troops stand by while the locals massacred unarmed camp followers with axes, pitchforks and clubs. ‘It was a ghastly spectacle,’ he wrote, ‘they looked like cannibals and a fierce joy lit up their faces.’
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Common humanity did occasionally triumph in the midst of all this savagery, as in the case of Lieutenant Wachsmuth, a Westphalian wounded in the hip at Borodino. He was in the process of relieving himself by the roadside when some cossacks overran the group he
was travelling in. Seeing him squatting helplessly with his trousers around his ankles, they burst out laughing and subsequently treated him well. Julien Combe had strayed off the main road with five other officers in search of fodder for their starving mounts, and got lost. After spending a cheerless night during which they were nearly buried under the snow, they found a hamlet where the peasants gave them shelter and food. ‘The snow was falling in thick flakes, and the aspect of this miserable countryside, seen through the small panes of dull yellow glass, the danger of our position, the uncertainty of our future, all seemed to conspire to plunge us into the most sombre reflections,’ he wrote. ‘But I was suddenly awakened from my musings by an exclamation of
Mama! Mama!
distinctly uttered by a child, whose cradle, suspended like a hammock by four ropes from the roof beams and hanging in a dark corner, had escaped our notice.
‘Nothing could convey the impression that this word, almost a French one, made on us,’ he continued. ‘It brought everything back to us; it seemed to contain in itself all our memories of family, of happiness and of home.’ He took the child in his arms and wept. The mother was so touched that she looked after them and alerted them when cossacks were signalled in the area, giving them directions on how to escape and food for the journey.
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At Viazma, Lieutenant Radozhitsky, who was following the retreating French, came across a Russian woman who had been hired by a French colonel and his wife as a wetnurse for their baby. They had been killed in the fighting, but she had saved herself and the child. ‘He’s only a little Frenchman, why bother with him?’ the Lieutenant asked. ‘Oh, if you only knew how good and kind these masters were,’ she replied. ‘I lived with them as with my own family. How can I not love their poor orphan? I will not abandon him, and only death can separate us!’
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*
Eugène Labaume, an officer on the staff of Prince Eugène, was the first to print the story that as they were passing the battlefield they heard a man call out and discovered a soldier who had lost both legs during the battle and been left for dead but managed to survive by finding shelter in the belly of a dead horse and feeding off scraps found in the pockets of dead men. This story, incredible and almost certainly untrue, was subsequently repeated by countless other chroniclers, some of whom claimed to have seen or spoken to the man, and provides a good example of how strong the power of suggestion can be when old men try to remember.
5
O
n 18 October, as Napoleon was setting out from Moscow, Marshal Gouvion St Cyr, who had taken over command of the 2nd Corps from the wounded Oudinot, was attacked outside Polotsk by overwhelming Russian forces under General Peter von Wittgenstein. In a fierce battle lasting two days his emaciated force of 27,000 French, Bavarian, Swiss, Italians, Poles and Croats held off Wittgenstein’s 50,000 Russians, inflicting heavy losses. But when the city was set alight by the Russian artillery bombardment, it became indefensible. ‘No battle has ever appeared more awful,’ wrote Captain Drujon de Bealieu of the 8th Lancers. ‘It made me think of the fall of Troy, as it is recounted in the
Aeneid.
’ Fearing encirclement, St Cyr abandoned Polotsk and fell back to the river Ula, along which he took up defensive positions.
1
Napoleon did not hear of this until he reached Viazma on 2 November, but he was confident that Victor, who was marching to St Cyr’s support, would assist him in retaking the city. He was more preoccupied with the slowness of Davout’s retreat, complaining that he was deploying for battle every time a few cossacks appeared on the horizon, and himself marched briskly on towards Smolensk. But when he heard of the fighting outside Viazma and realised that Kutuzov was hovering a couple of miles to the south, he decided to give battle himself.
As he began to muster his forces on 4 November, he became aware of just how disorganised they were. ‘You want to fight, yet you have no army!’ protested Ney, who had replaced Davout in the rearguard. Since Davout had now got free of Miloradovich and joined up with the preceding echelons, Napoleon decided to make for Smolensk and take winter quarters. He ordered Junot and Poniatowski to head for Smolensk itself, Davout to take up positions outside the city in the Yelnia area – ‘They say the country is rich and abundant in victuals,’ he assured him – and Prince Eugène to march to Vitebsk and take winter quarters there. He dictated these orders at Dorogobuzh on 5 and early on 6 November, before setting off towards Smolensk.
2
He soon found himself driving through a blizzard, and as the temperature dropped he was forced to accept that he had got his timing dangerously wrong. That was not the only disagreeable reality he had to face that day. When he reached Mikhailovka that afternoon, he found an
estafette
from Paris waiting for him with the astonishing news that a couple of obscure officers, headed by General Malet, had attempted to seize power in a
coup d’état
. Napoleon could hardly believe it. The plot had been far-fetched in the extreme, but the very fact that it had got off the ground at all raised alarming questions about the solidity of Napoleonic rule in France. ‘With the French,’ he quipped to Caulaincourt, ‘as with women, one should never stay away too long.’ But he was shaken by this revelation of the fragility of his authority.
3
The following morning he wrote to Victor, instructing him to join up with St Cyr and retake Polotsk. A note of real alarm is detectable in the letter. ‘Take the offensive, the salvation of the army depends on it,’ he wrote. ‘Every day of delay is a calamity. The army’s cavalry is on foot, the cold has killed all the horses. Advance, it is the order of the Emperor and of necessity.’
4
He himself made for Smolensk with all possible speed.
The cold had become so intense that Napoleon abandoned the traditional grey overcoat and small tricorn which made him instantly recognisable to all at a distance, and from now on wore a Polish-style
fur-lined green velvet frock-coat and cap. He had also taken to warming himself by getting out of his carriage at intervals and tramping alongside his grenadiers, with Berthier and Caulaincourt at his elbow. It was while he was walking unsteadily on the slippery ice at noon on 9 November, with a temperature of – 15°C (5°F) accentuated by a bitter north wind, that he caught sight of Smolensk. The thick blanket of snow that lay across the city, concealing the charred ruins, allowed him to forget what it had looked like when he had left it, and to entertain for a while the feeling that he had reached a safe haven.
As soon as he had set up quarters in the city he began dictating orders detailing the reorganisation of the cavalry into two divisions, one of light cavalry and one of cuirassiers and dragoons, each of which was to be divided up into picket regiments which were to cover the Grande Armée’s winter quarters. He then ordered every unit to concentrate at specified assembly points in order to allow stragglers and detached elements to rejoin. But within a few hours grim reality had begun to bring home to him the futility of his plans, with a succession of painful blows.
Napoleon had given orders for large stores of food and equipment to be built up at Smolensk. But those who tried to implement them found that obtaining food and forage from the surrounding countryside was an unrewarding struggle, while supplies coming up the road from Vilna had to be sent on to Mozhaisk and Moscow. There were some 15,000 sick and wounded soldiers left over from the storming of the city and from Valutina Gora who had to be fed, while a constant stream of reinforcement echelons moving through on their way to Moscow, as well as Marshal Victor’s 9th Corps which had been operating in the area, had been drawing on the stores as well.
5
At the beginning of October Napoleon had issued urgent orders for the magazines to be restocked. One of those entrusted with carrying out these orders was Stendhal. ‘They expect miracles,’ he complained to a colleague as he set about the business, adding that he wished he could be sent to Italy.
6
Substantial stores were in fact built up, and there was certainly enough there to feed the Grande Armée for some
time. But not enough to last through the winter for more than a division, and the idea of even a single corps taking winter quarters in the city was out of the question.
A more serious blow to Napoleon’s plans was the news brought by Amédée de Pastoret, whom he had named intendant of White Russia, based at Vitebsk. Pastoret had built up a magazine there which could have fed one corps through the winter, and Napoleon had already assigned it to Prince Eugène’s 4th Corps. But following the fall of Polotsk the Russians had moved down the Dvina and thrown Pastoret and his insignificant garrison out.