How immense would be the value to the intimate history of the army under the First Empire, had he but left behind really complete memoirs, as foreshadowed in one passage of his book![2] The remarkable fragment or portion now issued raises a great expectation of the completion.
M. de Ségur's account of the Russian campaign needs no eulogy. In one respect it is lacking. It has not, and could not have, the personal accent of the experience that has been lived. M. de Ségur was on the staff, and had not to endure such sufferings as the private soldiers and the company officers—the sufferings which we now want to know in their minutest details. They make real the immense interest of Bourgogne's memoirs—for he was not only a keen observer, he was a man who could see and put what he saw in a telling way; he ranks with the Captain Coignet revived for us by Loredan Larchey. His notes are classics in their kind, and have set the example of a new sort of military memoirs, that of the simple and obscure, who come from the people and represent them in the ordinary man. An accurate rendering of their impressions is likely to be valuable and interesting.
There is no need for us to insist on the dramatic worth of the pictures Bourgogne has drawn. We need only mention the orgie in the church at Smolensk, strewn with more dead than it held already, the unfortunate men stumbling over the snow-covered heaps to reach the sanctuary, guided by music they believed to be from heaven, actually produced by drunken men at the organ; the organ itself half burnt, on the point of crashing down into the nave below. All this is unforgettable.
These Memoirs are equally valuable for their psychology of the soldier depressed by a succession of reverses. The army of 1870 will read their own miseries again. Here, too, is the drama of hunger. Where shall we find a scene to compare with that of the garrison of Wilna flying at the sight of the spectre army, ready to devour everything before it? Moreover, we cannot help seeing that Bourgogne was a kind-hearted man; his bursts of egotism are contrary to his real nature, and are followed instantly by remorse. He helped his comrades to the utmost, and risked a great deal so that a prisoner whose father had aroused his sympathy might escape. He was deeply influenced by the horrors he witnessed. He saw men stripped and robbed before the breath was out of their bodies; he saw Croats pull corpses out of the flames and devour them; he saw wounded men left by the roadside for want of means of transport, begging for help with out-stretched hands, and dragging themselves across snow reddened by their blood, while those who passed by looked on silently, wondering how soon their turn might come. Bourgogne himself fell into a ditch covered with ice near the Niémen, and begged for help in vain from the men who passed. One old Grenadier came up to him. 'I have not got any,' he said, raising two stumps to show that he had no helping hands to offer. Near the towns, where the troops thought their sufferings would come to an end, the return of hope made them more pitiful. Their tongues were loosed, they inquired for their comrades, they carried the sick on their muskets. Bourgogne saw soldiers carry their wounded officers on their shoulders for miles. Nor must we forget the Hessians, who stood all night close round their young Prince in twenty-eight[3] degrees of frost, as a fence protects a young plant. However, the effects of fatigue, fever, frost-bite, and badly-healed wounds, the undermining of his constitution by an attempted poisoning, were more than enough to make our sergeant drop behind and lose his regiment, as had happened to so many others.
He advanced, therefore, slowly and painfully quite alone, often sinking in the snow up to his shoulders, thinking himself lucky if he escaped the Cossacks, and found hiding-places in the woods; finally he recognised the road his column had taken by the corpses strewn along the way.
On a pitch-dark night he reached the scene of a battle, and in stumbling over heaped-up bodies, found one which feebly cried 'Help!' He searched and found an old friend, Grenadier Picart, a shrewd type of old soldier, and a thoroughly good fellow, whose happy nature carried him through everything.
Hearing, however, from a Russian officer that the Emperor and his Guard had all been made prisoners, Picart was suddenly seized with a mad fit, presented arms, and shouted 'Vive l'Empereur!' as if he were being reviewed.
This fact is most noteworthy, that the soldier, in spite of all his sufferings, never accused the sole cause of his misfortunes. He remained loyal and devoted, soul and body, convinced that Napoleon would know how to save the army and take his revenge. It was the soldiers' religion. 'Picart, like all the Emperor's old soldiers, thought that as soon as they were with him, everything would be well, all would succeed; that, in fact, nothing was impossible.' Up to a certain point, Bourgogne shared this view. And yet, when they returned to France, his regiment was reduced to twenty-six men!
Their god always moved them deeply. When Picart saw him at the crossing of the Bérézina, 'wrapped in a great fur-lined cloak, a purple velvet cap on his head, and a stick in his hand,' he wept, saying, 'Look at our Emperor on foot! So great as he is, so proud as we always were of him!'
At last, in March, 1813, Bourgogne was once more in his own country, and promoted (receiving the epaulette of a Sub-Lieutenant of the 145th of the Line). He then set off again for Prussia. He was wounded at the Battle of Dessau (October 12th, 1813), and made prisoner.