The Powers of Europe and Fall of Sebastopol

by A British officer

The French were, however, victorious, and reached Moscow on the 14th. The Holy City was found to be evacuated, not only by the Russian army, but by the inhabitants, and as the French hosts defiled through the silent streets, it was like entering a city of the dead.

Not a sound was to be heard in its vast circumference! the dwellings of three hundred thousand persons seemed as silent as the wilderness.

Evening came on! With increasing wonder the French troops traversed the central parts of the city, recently so crowded with passengers, but not a living creature was to be seen to explain the universal desolation. Night approached! an unclouded moon illuminated those beautiful palaces, those vast hotels, those deserted streets—all was still!

The officers broke open the doors of some of the principal mansions in search of sleeping quarters. They found every thing in perfect order; the bedrooms were fully furnished as if guests were expected; the drawing-rooms bore the marks of having been recently inhabited; even the work of the ladies was on the tables, the keys in the wardrobes—but still not an inmate was to be seen. By degrees a few of the lowest slaves emerged pale and trembling from the cellars, and showed the way to the sleeping apartments, and laid open every thing which these sumptuous mansions contained; but the only account they could give was that the whole of the inhabitants had fled, and that they alone were left. The persons intrusted with the duty of setting fire to the city, only awaited the retreat of their countrymen to commence the work of destruction. The terrible catastrophe soon commenced. On the night of the 13th a fire broke out in the bourse, and spread to the streets in the vicinity. At midnight, on the 15th, a bright light was seen to illuminate the northern and western parts of the city; fresh fires were then seen breaking out every instant in all directions, and Moscow soon exhibited the spectacle of a sea of flame agitated by the wind. But it was chiefly during the nights of the 18th and 19th that the conflagration attained its greatest violence. At that time the whole city was wrapped in flames, and volumes of fire of various colors ascended to the heavens in many places, diffusing a prodigious light on all sides, and attended by an intolerable heat. These balloons of flame were accompanied in their ascent by a frightful hissing noise, and loud explosions, the result of the vast stores of oil, tar, rosin, spirits, and other combustible materials, with which the greater part of the shops were filled. The wind, naturally high, was raised by the sudden rarefaction of the air to a perfect hurricane. The howling of the tempest drowned even the roar of the conflagration; the whole heavens were filled with the whirl of the burning volumes of smoke, which rose on all sides, and made midnight as bright as day, while even the bravest hearts, subdued by the sublimity of the scene, and the feeling of human impotence in the midst of such elemental strife, sank and trembled in silence. Imagination cannot conceive the horrors into which the remnant of the people who could not abandon their homes were plunged. Bereft of every thing, they wandered amid the ruins eagerly searching for a parent or a child: pillage became universal, and the wrecks of former magnificence were ransacked alike by the licentious soldiery and the suffering multitude.

In addition to the whole French army, numbers flocked in from the country to share in the general license; furniture of the most precious description, splendid jewellery, Indian and Turkish stuffs, stores of wine and brandy, gold and silver plate, rich furs, gorgeous trappings of silk and satin were spread about in promiscuous confusion, and became the prey of the least intoxicated among the multitude. A frightful tumult succeeded to the stillness which had reigned in the city when the troops first entered. The French soldiers, tormented by hunger and thirst, and loosened from all discipline by the horrors which surrounded them, often rushed headlong into the burning edifices to ransack their cellars for wines and spirits, and beneath the ruins great numbers miserably perished, the victims of intemperance and the surrounding fire. Napoleon abandoned the Kremlin on the evening of the 16th. Early on the following morning, casting a melancholy look to the burning city, which now filled half the heavens with its flames, he exclaimed after a long silence, “This sad event is the presage of a long train of disasters.”

Thus vanished the hopes of those indefatigable soldiers who had endured so much, and fought so well. To reach the fabulous city whose domes and minarets were now fallen—had been the dream of their ambition—the goal which once attained, would give rest and food to their weariness and hunger.

Thus Napoleon found himself possessed of a heap of burning ruins without food for his famishing soldiers and horses.

All negotiations with the Russian authorities having failed, a retreat was decided upon, and the Emperor left Moscow on the 19th of October, at the head of 105,000 combatants. The disasters of that retreat are too well known to require recapitulation.

Suffice it to say that the survivors of the French army, who entered Russia 500,000 strong, were but 20,000. The total loss of the campaign, in killed, prisoners, died from cold, fatigue, and famine, was over 450,000. And on the 13th of December, the wretched remnant of the French army passed the bridge of the Niemen. The losses of the Russians were also so great that at the end of the campaign not above 30,000 men could be assembled around the head-quarters of the Emperor Alexander.

On the 10th Dec., early in the morning, a travelling carriage in great haste drove into the Hotel d’Angleterre, at Warsaw. It was a small travelling britschka placed without wheels on a coarse sledge, made of four pieces of rough fir-wood, which had been almost dashed to pieces in entering the gateway. The travellers were ushered into a small dark apartment, with the windows half-shut, and in a corner of which a servant girl strove in vain to light a fire with green damp billets of wood, which, after kindling for a moment, gradually went out, leaving those in the apartment to shiver with cold during three hours of earnest conversation.