Napoleon depended on the possession of Moscow as a sure means of dictating peace to Russia on his own terms. As formerly at Vienna and Berlin, he expected to give laws in the Kremlin to a conquered nation; and his disappointment in finding this vantage–ground crumble under his feet was extreme. It was lost, however, irrecoverably lost, for the Russians had no longer anything to hope or fear for their capital, and Moscow, ruined and deserted, was no place for the invader to pass a five–months’ winter in. Policy therefore prompted an immediate retreat, sufficient time being allowed to refresh and re–organize the army; but Napoleon still clung with obstinacy to his original plan of dictating a peace to Alexander from his capital, and sacrificed a fortnight of precious time to this deceitful hope. It was frustrated; the Russian monarch refused to listen to any overtures of peace, and the French, who on the 12th of September had hailed Moscow as the goal of their labours, quitted it on the 19th of October, to retrace their steps over a ravaged country through a numerous and exasperated enemy.
We must touch very lightly upon the horrors of the retreat, confining ourselves to a brief statement of the leading facts, and of the results of the whole. Famine, cold, and the sword combined to punish an unjust aggression. When the French left Moscow they numbered one hundred and twenty thousand men under arms, with an immense train of baggage and camp followers: in twenty–six days, from October 19th to November 13th, when the Emperor quitted Smolensk, their organized force was reduced to thirty–six thousand men, and they had lost three hundred cannon. Napoleon’s partisans have tried to shelter him from blame, by alleging the premature rigour of winter as the cause of this wholesale destruction. No doubt cold was the main agent in it, but the nature of a Russian winter was well known, and should have been considered in the scheme of the campaign; and so far was it from being premature, that the frost did not begin till November 7th, only three days before the French van and the Emperor arrived at Smolensk. Other causes aided to produce this result. Napoleon intended to return to the above–named town by the unwasted route of Kalouga and Medyn, but the Russian army barred his way, and, after an obstinate contest,[212] turned him back on the ravaged country through which he had already passed. Here neither food, shelter, nor clothing could be procured, and thousands fell victims rather to the want of all appliances to bear it, than to the intolerable severity of the winter itself. Numbers fell in battle, or were intercepted and slain, or made prisoners by the ever active hostility of the Cossacks who hovered round their march: still the loss sustained in warfare was small in comparison to that which resulted from the combined operation of hunger and cold. The appearance of this new enemy, and its effects, moral and physical, are powerfully, though rather theatrically, described by the Comte de Segur, himself a sharer in the miseries which he describes.
“On the 6th of November the sky declared itself. Its azure disappeared. The army marched enveloped in cold vapours, which soon thickened into a vast cloud, and descended in large flakes of snow upon us. It seemed as if the sky were coming down, and uniting with this hostile land and people to complete our ruin. All things are indistinguishable; while the soldier struggles to force his way through the drifting whirlwind, the driven snow fills up all hollows, and its surface conceals unknown depths which yawn under our feet. The men are swallowed by them, and the weakest, resigning themselves to fate, there find a grave. Those who follow turn aside, but the storm dashes in their faces the snow from heaven and the drift from the earth, and seems to oppose itself rancorously to their march. The Russian winter under this new form attacks them from all sides; it pierces their thin dress and torn shoes. Their wet clothes freeze on them, a sharp and strong wind impedes their breath, which at the instant of expiration forms round the mouth icicles depending from the beard. The wretches, shivering, still drag themselves on, till the snow which clogs their feet, or some chance obstacle, causes them to stumble and fall. There they groan in vain: the snow soon covers them; slight elevations alone distinguish them: behold their graves! Everywhere the road is strewn with these undulations like a burial–ground: the most fearless, the most unfeeling are moved, and turn aside their eyes as they pass in haste. But before, around, every thing is snow—the sight is lost in this immense and sad uniformity; the imagination is astounded: it is like a huge winding–sheet, with which nature envelops the army. The only objects which appear from out it are sombre pines, trees of the tombs, with their funereal verdure; and the gigantic fixedness of their black trunks and their deep gloom complete this desolate aspect of a general mourning, and of an army dying amid the decease of nature.... Then comes the night, a night of sixteen hours! But on that snow which covers all things, one knows not where to stop, where to rest, where to find roots for food, or dry wood for firing. However, fatigue, darkness, and repeated orders stop those whom their own physical and moral force, and the efforts of their officers, have retained together. They seek to establish themselves; but the ever–active storm scatters the first preparations for a bivouac. The pines, laden with hoar–frost, resist the flames; and the snow upon them, mixed with that which falls continually from the sky, and that lying on the earth, which melts with the efforts of the soldier and the first effect of the fires, extinguishes those fires and the strength and courage of the men.
“When the flame at length is raised, officers and soldiers prepare around it their sad meal, composed of lean and bloody fragments of flesh, torn from wornout horses, and, for a very few, some spoonfuls of rye flour diluted with snow–water. The next day soldiers, laid stone–dead in circles, mark the bivouacs, and the ground about them is strewed with the bodies of many thousand horses.
“From this day, men began to reckon less upon each other. In this army, lively, susceptible of all impressions, and inclined to speculate from its advanced civilization, disorder soon gained footing, discouragement and insubordination spread rapidly, the imagination wandering without bounds in evil as well as good. Henceforward at every bivouac, at every difficult passage, some portion of the yet organized troops detached itself, and fell into disorder. Yet there were some who resisted this mighty contagion: they were the officers, subalterns, and seasoned soldiers. These were extraordinary men; they encouraged themselves by repeating the name of Smolensk, which they felt they were approaching, and where everything had been promised to them.
“Thus since this deluge of snow, and the redoubled cold which it announced, all, officers and soldiers alike, preserved or lost their strength of mind, according to their age, their character, and temperament. He of our chiefs, whom till then we had seen the strictest in maintaining discipline, now found himself no longer in his element. Thrown out of all his fixed ideas of regularity and method, he was reduced to despair by so universal a disorder, and judging sooner than others that all was lost, he felt himself ready to abandon all.”[213]
The army quitted Smolensk in four divisions: that under the command of the Emperor, which led the way, marched on the 14th November. Ney, who throughout this long retreat brought up the rear, who distinguished himself amid its horrors by indomitable courage and constancy, and was hailed by the general voice as the hero of the army, remained behind until the 17th. On the 20th all were once more united at Oreza, after seven days of almost continued fighting, in which nothing but the sluggishness of the Russian general saved the French from destruction, and Napoleon from captivity or death. Opposed with fifteen thousand men, half starved and half armed, to a force treble that number, and in good condition, the Russians must have overthrown him by mere physical force, had they ventured upon a vigorous attack; but even in his distresses the presence of Napoleon inspired awe. At no time do the brilliant qualities of the French troops appear more conspicuous than in this disastrous retreat: headed on all sides, inclosed by an overwhelming force, every general outmanœuvred or cut his way through the enemy,[214] fortunate if it cost him but half of his corps to preserve the remainder from the disgrace of surrender. Between Smolensk and Oreza the army was still further reduced to twelve thousand men, who still preserved their arms and their discipline, encumbered with thirty thousand stragglers, who grievously increased its wants and its embarrassments, without adding a single bayonet to its strength.
Hitherto its retreat had been unopposed, the Russian army having been unwilling or unable to head the French and compel them to force a passage by the sword; and being in possession of Oreza, it passed the river Dnieper at that town without opposition. But Admiral Tchitchagoff, the general in command of the Moldavian army, which was opposed to the Austrians on the south–eastern end of the French base of operation, finding them slack and unenterprising in the cause of an ally, or master rather, to whom in truth they owed little good will, left merely a division in the duchy of Warsaw to observe their movements, and himself marched upon Minsk and Borizoff, to cut off Napoleon’s retreat. At the latter town there was a bridge over the Beresina, the place itself being on the eastern bank, and on the possession of the town and command of the bridge depended the means of crossing that river. Tchitchagoff however, owing to some mistake of the French general opposed to him, had taken that town, and though afterwards expelled, had made the bridge impassable in his retreat. It was necessary, therefore, to seek a passage elsewhere, and a place above Borizoff, called Studzianka, was selected, where the river was only fifty–five fathoms across. The chance seemed desperate, for the opposite heights were occupied by six thousand Russians, and bridges were to be built, and the army was to defile across them under their fire; but desperate as it was, this seemed their only hope, and Napoleon quitting the highway plunged into the thick pine–woods which border the Beresina, to conceal his march. The joy of the army may well be imagined, when, in traversing these forests, they met the division of Victor, of fifty thousand men, in good order, which had been employed in checking Wittgenstein upon the western flank. “They were ignorant of our disasters, which had been carefully hidden even from their chiefs. So that when, instead of a grand victorious column returning from Moscow, they saw behind Napoleon nothing but a train of squalid spectres, covered with rags, with women’s pelisses, pieces of carpet, or squalid cloaks scorched red and burnt into holes by the fires, their feet wrapped up in tatters of all sorts, they stopped in terror. They saw with affright these poor fleshless soldiers file past, with faces like the grave, bristled with ghastly beards, without arms, without shame, marching in disorder with downcast heads, eyes fixed on the earth, and silent like a troop of captives.”[215] So contagious was this spectacle, that on the first day two corps of Victor’s army fell into the same state of disorganization.
Among other attempts to deceive Tchitchagoff and make him believe that a passage would be attempted elsewhere, some Jews had been interrogated concerning the passes of the river; and to secure the breach of their faith, they had been sworn to meet the army on the Beresina, below Borizoff, with intelligence of the enemy. The stratagem succeeded; they carried a false report to the Admiral, and he and Napoleon turned their backs on each other, and while the latter marched up the river to Studzianka, the former marched down it to a ford at Oukoholda. All night the French laboured to construct a bridge, expecting momentarily the first salvo of the Russian artillery. Napoleon passed a restless and agitated night in a château near the river, continually repairing to the spot on which his last hope of escape rested. At morning, when all were prepared for a desperate and almost hopeless struggle, they were equally astonished and delighted to see the Russian watch–fires abandoned and the opposing force in full retreat. Napoleon would scarce believe the tidings, and when at last convinced by the evidence of his own eyes, he cried in transport, “Then I have outwitted the Admiral.”[216]
That day, November 26th, two bridges were completed, and the opposite bank was occupied by Ney. Two days and two nights elapsed before the Russians came up, but this valuable respite was lost, owing to the breaking of the bridge for artillery, and the insubordination of the stragglers, which rendered it impossible to force them across. On the night of the 26th they were dispersed among the neighbouring villages; on the 27th men, horses, and carriages rushed in an overwhelming mass, and choked the narrow entrance of the bridges: all efforts to restore order were fruitless, and it was necessary to employ force to clear a passage for the Emperor. A corps of grenadiers of the Guard declined from mere pity to open for themselves a way through these wretches. On the approach of night another simultaneous movement drove them all to seek shelter in the village of Studzianka, which was torn down to furnish materials for fires, from which they could not be moved; and thus another night was lost.