Authors: Mary McGrigor
On 7 September 1812 the two armies fought at Borodino, a village about seventy miles west of Moscow, and near the town of Moskva. Napoleon’s force of 130,000 men outnumbered the Russian troops, which were 120,000 strong. Kutuzov had ordered hastily built fortifications, mostly in the form of fleches, or trenches, built in the shape of arrows, on the idea of Prince Pyotr Bagration, who was in command of the Russian rearguard.
Doctor James Wylie was also prepared. Tents for field hospitals were in readiness, piled onto bullock carts, the drivers waiting for his instructions, relayed through orderlies, as to where they should be placed.
The battle began at six o’clock in the morning along a three-mile front. For six hours, until midday, the deadly thunder of cannons (the Russians had the advantage of 600 as opposed to the enemy’s 500 guns) literally shook the ground. The French gained a slight advantage but, because Napoleon refused to send in the 20,000 men of his Imperial Guard, no decisive victory was gained.
Afterwards some of those involved in the battle remembered that it had been a beautiful day. An early-morning mist had cleared and the sun shone on the meadows on both sides of the River Kolocha. As the heat increased, the air became sweet with the scent of freshly mown hay.
Wylie, however, was not aware of it, as he and his team of surgeons began a battle of their own. Stretcher followed stretcher bearing men writhing in pain. Most had limbs or torsos shattered by cannon balls, grapeshot, or the deadly splinters of grenades. The work of amputation was exhausting for even the strongest of men. Survival of patients, operated on without anaesthetic, depended greatly on the speed with which it was performed. As the work went on the doctor’s surgical aprons, however frequently changed, became saturated with blood. Canvas gave little relief from the sun so that, as the heat of the day increased, the stench within the tents became almost impossible to bear.
On the day of Borodino Wylie is known to have achieved the almost incredible feat of carrying out operations on at least 200 men. It is claimed that he made no distinction between friend and enemy, some of the wounded being French. Tolstoy pictured him in his novel
War and Peace
, calling him Villier, the Russian version of his name. As the mortally wounded Prince Andrey is carried to the dressing station, a doctor wearing a bloodstained apron, comes out of the tent, holding a cigar between the thumb and little finger of one of his bloodstained hands.
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Exhausted as he must have been, on the night after the battle, Wylie rode with General Platoff deep into the enemy lines. Only a
man like Platoff, ‘Hetman of the Cossacks of the Don’, as Alexander named the commander of his legendary force, would have dared to have done what he did only hours after the guns had ceased to fire. But danger was an elixir to Platoff. Moreover, he knew that the mere sight of him and his men, swarthy, moustached and armed with deadly sabres, was enough stop any Frenchman from even trying to grab a rein.
Waiting until dusk was falling, with Wylie centred among them, the Cossacks rode into a field of carnage such as few of even the most hardened soldiers had ever before seen. On ground churned into mud, French soldiers, many of them wounded, their faces black with gun-smoke, thinking only of survival, were struggling to light camp fires. The guttering light showed what lay around them, dead and wounded men and horses, in a vision of hell.
The story, too grim to be forgotten even when many years had passed, was told by Wylie to his great-niece, who also affirmed that, while serving as a military surgeon throughout the Franco–Russian War, he had taken part in twenty battles and was wounded no fewer than three times. It is known that, on his own estimation, he had travelled with the army on foot or on horseback, in a carriage or on a sledge, more than 150,000 miles during the whole campaign.
The Russian losses at Borodino are claimed to have amounted to at least 44,000 men. Following the battle General Kutuzov, although not entirely defeated, resolved to adopt a strategy to conserve his remaining strength. At a conference in the village of Fili, knowing that the winter was coming and how severe it was likely to be, he laid down the policy that, as is now well known, would lure Napoleon to his doom. Under his leadership the fateful decision was reached that while with what remained of the army he would withdraw towards Moscow, he would not attempt to defend the city against Napoleon’s overwhelming strength.
The strategy, so brilliant in conception, would nonetheless prove horrendous to achieve when it is remembered that within the city itself were thousands of wounded men. This must be called Wylie’s greatest moment, for, as director of the medical department of the Ministry of War, he managed the near impossible feat of evacuating an estimated 30,000 casualties. His feat in doing so is all the more remarkable in view of the chaos that existed in the city as people tried to flee with their possessions through the crowded streets. Hundreds of horse-drawn vehicles, from carriages to the roughest farm carts, would have conveyed wounded men from the city to makeshift hospitals that had been erected beyond what was estimated to be the range of enemy guns.
Napoleon entered Moscow on 15 September to find the city on fire. Such was the destruction that, after only thirty-five days, with much sickness in his near-starving army, he gave the order to withdraw. His troops returned westward, following the way they had come, where the ravaged land and buildings gave neither food nor shelter to ill and exhausted men. From Smolensk they continued towards the frontiers of Poland and Prussia, struggling through snow as the winter set in with devastating, bone-biting cold.
The Grand Army of Napoleon, which had swept so triumphantly into Russia, returned across the wastelands of that huge country to be virtually destroyed by sickness and starvation induced by the appalling weather of those winter months.
Wylie soon returned to St Petersburg as word reached him that the tsar himself was ill. He was suffering from erysipelas, a streptococcal infection which produces painful inflammation and a deep red colouring of the skin. The disease, which affected his leg, was thought to be aggravated by the mental stress and exhaustion induced by the news of Moscow’s destruction, for which Alexander was thought to be much to blame.
The strength of anti-imperial feeling in St Petersburg became obvious when, on 27 September, the eleventh anniversary of his coronation fell due. As he drove through the streets with the Empress Elizabeth to attend a service of celebration in the Kazan Cathedral, there was ominous silence in the streets, the atmosphere tense with resentment. Yet these same people, who with sullen faces now lined the streets, were the ones who had so ecstatically welcomed their ‘little father’ on his return from the defeat of Austerlitz.
As the royal party entered the cathedral there was not a single cheer. ‘I happened to glance at the tsar and, seeing the agony of spirit he was undergoing, I felt my knees begin to tremble beneath me’ wrote a lady-in-waiting to the empress, remembering the humiliation that Alexander was forced to endure.
Two days later the official news reached St Petersburg that Moscow, burned and ruined, was now occupied by the French. The tsar, in a state of mental anguish, spent the next month almost entirely in the enchanting imperial villa on Kammionyi Island, lying at the mouth of the Neva in the Gulf of Finland.
Wylie, in constant attendance to the tsar, did all that was possible to help him as he wrestled with self-recrimination over the loss of life and honour to himself and his country and for the deaths of thousands of soldiers for which he was being held responsible by his subjects.
It did not help that while Alexander struggled with the demons in his mind, his sister Catherine chose that moment to harangue him, telling him in a letter that he was openly blamed. ‘You broke faith with Moscow, which awaited your coming with desperate longing . . . but I leave you to judge the state of affairs in a country whose ruler is despised.’
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Alexander answered her carefully, pointing out that he had not gone back to Moscow because of the vital importance of a meeting with the Swedish Count Bernadotte, with whom he had made an alliance only six months before. Also, by his presence, he had not wanted to undermine the authority of General Kutuzov as his commander-in-chief.
‘Perhaps I am even bound to lose friends on whom I have most counted,’ he wrote sadly, but assured her that, in spite of all the vindictive words she had written, as he rightly guessed in a burst of uncontrollable temper, his undying love for her remained unchanged.
Around this time, as he struggled with depression, and inspired by his wife’s Christian faith, he found comfort in the books of the Old Testament, particularly in the Psalms. ‘I simply devoured the Bible,’ was how he put it, ‘finding that its words poured an unknown peace into my heart and quenched the thirst of my soul.’
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Peace offerings came from Napoleon, but Alexander, with all the stubbornness of his nature, refused even to countenance the idea of making any form of compromise ‘with the modern Attila’, which was how he had come to view the French emperor.
On 18 October a detachment of the Russian army attacked and defeated the French, who were under the command of Marshal Murat, at Tarutino. The next day Napoleon left Moscow with the main body of his army.
Word then reached St Petersburg that General Kutuzov was driving back Marshal Murat’s vanguard south-west of Moscow and soon it was known that the city itself was once more in Russian hands. Cannons fired and bells rang out in jubilation in St Petersburg as the tsar, along with all his family, the members of his government and the diplomatic corps, went to the Kazan Cathedral to give thanks for the deliverance of the former capital of the country from the invading foe.
This time, as the tsar left the cathedral, the watching onlookers spontaneously burst into shouts of applause. Their little father had been vindicated. He was their hero once more.
On 23 October Napoleon’s advance guard, having crossed the River Luzha, entered the old town of Maloyaroslavets where, the next day, in a fierce battle, both sides lost an estimated 7,000 men.
Winter that year came early. The Neva froze over in the second week of November. Both Russian and French armies were by then struggling over roads made almost impassable by drifts of freezing snow. On 3 November the Russians defeated the French at Vyazma and on the 17th Marshal Ney left the town of Smolensk. On 5 December Napoleon himself left Russia to return to France, deserting all that remained of his army to retreat in what proved to be the cruellest period of a winter that killed more surely than bullets or cannon fire.
Roads, particularly in the more remote parts of the country, became so blocked with snow that the doctors and surgeons of the Russian medical units, on the long front greatly undermanned, found it almost impossible to procure medicines. Also, as the Russian army advanced, the problem of finding adequate housing for temporary hospitals became increasingly acute.
On 13 December old General Kutuzov, exhausted by the weather and by the great responsibility of command, reached Vilna, the city now ruined by fighting with most of its finest buildings either destroyed or damaged by bombardment and fire. Kutuzov, in dispatches, complained that his army was exhausted. He wished to end – or at least call a truce to – the campaign. But Alexander would have none of it. He gave orders that fighting must continue until every Frenchman had left Russian soil. Excitement fuelling his energy, he determined to return to the front. Wylie of course would have to go with him. Nothing would hold him back.
And so, once more, they were off, both dressed in uniform as they raced in
droskys
(open four-wheeled light carriages) to the south-west. Leaving in darkness on 19 December, and constantly changing horses, they travelled over 400 miles in the space of only four days. Reaching Vilna just before dawn, Alexander laughingly proclaimed that the biting cold of the journey had cost him the end of his nose.
There, although welcomed with fireworks and much rejoicing, they soon found appalling conditions within the largely ruined town. The Russian army had been decimated by typhus fever, a disease endemic among men living at close quarters, being transmitted by fleas. Alexander is also known to have visited the French hospitals and Wylie, who on his own word accompanied him throughout the campaign, must also have witnessed horrors. In one vaulted building, by a flickering light, they saw corpses piled against the walls, living men still among them.
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Leaving Vilna on 9 January, Alexander, based at temporary headquarters at Meritz on the Niemen, ordered the army to cross the river into Prussia. Meanwhile he sent a secret message to Frederick William, suggesting a new alliance. Subsequently both Prussia and Sweden joined in the war against France. Meanwhile Napoleon’s stepson, Eugène Beauharnais, left in command of the French army, retreated across the same ground over which Napoleon had advanced only five months before.
The tsar himself saw the deliverance of his country entirely as an act of Providence. ‘Placing myself firmly in the hands of God I submit blindly to his will,’
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he wrote to his friend Prince Golitsyn, a reformed libertine now pious as the tsar himself. Again and again he reread the eleventh chapter of the Book of Daniel, which prophesises how the invincible King of the South will be defeated by the King of the North.
The tsar’s aides found it difficult to understand him. Wylie alone came closest to identifying the cause of his moods of elation and depression as being linked to the enormous weight of responsibility that, since the death of his father, he had been forced to bear.
In mid-March Alexander travelled still further west to meet Frederick William at Breslau. The Prussian king was now a widower, his lovely wife Louise, with whom Alexander had enjoyed such a happy flirtation, having died nearly three years before, in July 1810.