The losses suffered by the Grande Armee were enormous, but they have been exaggerated. I have already said that I have seen a situation report, covered with notes in Napoleon's hand, which gives the figure of those who crossed the Nieman as 325,000, of whom 155,000 were French. Reports issued in February 1813 gave the number of French who returned across the Nieman as 60,000, added to this figure can be that of 30,000 prisoners returned by the Russians after the peace of 1814. Giving a total loss of French lives of 65,000.
The loss inflicted on my regiment was, in proportion, much smaller. At the beginning of the campaign we had 1018 men in the ranks and we received 30 reinforcements at Polotsk, so that I took into Russia 1048 troopers. Of this number I had 109 killed, 77 taken prisoner, 65 injured and 104 missing. This amounted to a loss of 355 men, so that after the return of the men whom I had sent to Warsaw, the regiment, which from the bank of the Vistula had been sent beyond the Elbe to the principality of Dessau, had in the saddle 693 men, all of whom had fought in the Russian campaign.
When he saw this figure, the Emperor, who from Paris was supervising the reorganising of his army, thought it was a mistake, and sent the report back to me with an order to produce a corrected version. When I returned the same figure once more, he ordered General Sebastiani to go and inspect my regiment and give him a nominal roll of the men present. This operation having removed all doubt, and confirmed my report, I received a few days later a letter from the Major-general couched in the most flattering terms and addressed to all officers and N.C.O.s and particularly to me, in which Prince Berthier stated that he had been directed by the Emperor to express his Majesty's satisfaction at the care we had taken of our men's lives, and his praise for the conduct of all our officers and N.C.O.s.
After having had this letter read out before all the squadrons, I had intended to keep it as a precious memento for my family, but on further consideration, I decided that it would not be right to deprive the regiment of a document in which was expressed the Emperor's satisfaction with all its members, so I sent it to be included in the regimental archive. I have frequently repented of this, for scarcely a year had passed before the government of Louis XVIII was substituted for that of the Emperor, and the 23rd Chasseurs was combined with the 3rd. The archives of the two regiments were collected together, badly cared for, and after the total disbanding of the army in 1815, they disappeared into the yawning gulf of the war office. I tried in vain, after the revolution of 1830, to recover this letter, which was so flattering to my old regiment and to me, but it could not be found.
Chap. 22.
The year 1813 began very badly for France. The remains of our army, returning from Russia, had scarcely crossed the Vistula and started to reorganise,when the treachery of General York and the troops under his command forced us to retire beyond the Elbe, and shortly to abandon Berlin and all of Prussia, which rose against us, helped by the units which Napoleon had imprudently left there. The Russians speeded up their march as much as possible, and came to join the Prussians, whose King now declared war on the French Emperor.
Napoleon had in northern Germany no more than two divisions, commanded, it is true, by Augereau, but consisting mainly of conscripts. As for those French troops who had fought in Russia, once they were well fed and no longer slept on the snow, they recovered their strength, and could have been used oppose the enemy; but our cavalry were almost all without horses, very few infantrymen had kept their weapons, we had no artillery, the majority of the soldiers had no footwear, and their uniform was in rags. The government had employed part of the year 1812 in making equipment of all sorts, but owing to the negligence of the war department, then in the hands of M. Lacuee, Comte de Cessac, no regiment received the clothing allotted to it. The conduct of the administration in these circumstances deserves some comment.
When a regimental depot had got together, at great expense, the numerous items required by its active battalions or squadrons, the administration arranged with forwarding agents the transport of the supplies as far as Mainz, which was then part of the Empire. These goods were in no danger while crossing France to the bank of the Rhine; however, M. de Cessac ordered a detachment of troops to escort them as far as Mainz. There they were handed over to foreign agents, who were supposed to forward them to Magdeberg, Berlin, and the Vistula, without any French supervision. This undertaking was carried out with so much bad faith and delay that the packages containing the supplies of clothing and footwear took six to eight months to go from Mainz to the Vistula, a distance they should have covered in forty days.
This had been no more than a serious inconvenience when the French armies were in peaceful occupation of Germany and Poland, but it became a calamity after the Russian campaign. More than two hundred barges laden with supplies for our regiments were ice-bound in the Bromberg canal, near Nackel, when we passed this point in January 1813, but as there was, in this immense convoy, no French agent, and as the Prussian bargees already considered us as enemies, no one told us that these vessels were loaded with goods. The next day the Prussians took possession of this huge quantity of clothing and footwear and used it to equip several of the regiments they sent against us. Although the result of this was that the increasing cold killed a large number of French soldiers, there are those who boast of our efficient administration!
The lack of order in the French army's line of march as it went through Prussia was due principally to the ineptitude of Murat, who had assumed command after the departure of the Emperor, and later to the feebleness of Prince Eugene de Beauharnais, the Vice-Roi of Italy.