On the 6th and 7th the weather, which had hitherto been by day comparatively mild, changed for the worse, with violent gales and heavy snowstorms. After this the destruction of the army proceeded apace. The horses were the first to suffer; it was impossible to obtain any forage with the ground covered deep with snow. No provision had been made for rough-shoeing the horses, except by the Polish cavalry; and on the slippery surface of the trodden snow they fell in hundreds, to be preyed upon by the starving troops. Vehicles of every kind had to be abandoned; and each was instantly plundered by a group of wolfish stragglers, often to the accompaniment of murder. The number of disbanded men rapidly increased, and their lawlessness and savagery grew even more quickly. Had it been possible to maintain better discipline the state of the army might have been less intolerable. Terrible as the conditions were, they could have been somewhat ameliorated had there been a better sense of comradeship among the troops, which might have prevented so many of them from disbanding and degenerating into veritable wild beasts.
But in truth the misery was so great that the finest loyalty and steadiness could not greatly have alleviated it. Had there been a sufficiency of even the coarsest food, the troops might have withstood the cold. But almost the only resource remaining was the unwholesome flesh of the worn-down horses. Even the officers were often little better off as regards meat, though they could still procure small quantities of biscuit or flour. The troops as a whole were insufficiently clad and, above all, ill-shod; those who succeeded in obtaining a little food were often disabled by frost-bite or injuries to their ill-protected feet. In the hope of guarding against the deadly cold the men overloaded themselves with clothing of every kind and quality, often filthy rags torn from the dead and dying. In their fear of taking a fatal chill they never removed them even for necessary purposes, and dared not wash. In their ravening hunger they ate like wild beasts, tearing the raw or half-cooked horse-flesh with their teeth, and covering themselves and their wretched garments with blood and offal. Their appearance soon became indescribably hideous, and the result of their panic-born neglect was, of course, loathsome disease. Selfishness increased with misery; men thrust their weaker comrades from the bivouac fires, and fought for the wretched carrion on which they strove to maintain their existence; while those who fell were robbed and stripped by passers-by.
THE RETREAT OF THE FRENCH FROM MOSCOW
From the painting by Adam
Amid all this misery and lack of self-respect there was much that redounds to the credit of human nature. Many soldiers added to their hardships by endeavouring to assist the women and children who followed the army. Officers who possessed private carriages gave them up to these unhappy fugitives; those attached to the head-quarters, which was better provided than the rest of the army, succeeded in saving many. Unhappily the most necessary requisite was food, and this the chivalrous protectors could not often give their charges. The hardy female followers could protect and provide for themselves to some extent, but too many of the officers’ wives or connections were utterly helpless, and their fate was a piteous one.
One of the most awful incidents of the retreat was the fate of the Russian prisoners, of whom some 2000—stragglers, convalescents, and civilians—were dragged with the army, under a guard made up of fragments and detachments of every nation. From the first the captives were treated with gross cruelty and neglect. The weakly ones who fell behind were done to death without mercy. Every night the survivors were huddled together, fireless, on the bare ground, without food save a little raw horse-flesh. Before long even this was not forthcoming, and the miserable prisoners, driven along and herded together like wild beasts by men who were losing the traces of humanity, perished amid horrible misery. Cannibalism is said to have raged among them. There is no darker stain on the escutcheon of Napoleon (who must be held ultimately responsible) than this treatment of men who were at any rate open enemies, and some of whom were not even combatants.
Day by day the number of men in the ranks dwindled. Every bivouac was the graveyard of hundreds of men and thousands of horses; the line of march resembled a long battlefield. The roads were strewn with dead or dying men and horses, abandoned guns and vehicles, and wreckage of every kind. Amid this streamed westward in wild confusion the endless procession of disbanded men and male and female camp-followers, accompanied by vehicles of all kinds, through which the troops still with the colours could scarcely force their way. Many men were already so weak that they could hardly stumble along. Some became idiotic with privation and the spectacle of the misery about them. The plight of the troops in the ranks was no better; their devotion to duty only prolonged their sufferings. Ill-clad, starving, stricken with cold and disease, often half-blind from the effects of the glaring snow by day and the smoke of the fires at night, it is wonderful that they ever managed, as they did, to make some kind of fight. Their duties, when they had strength to carry them out, were confined to beating off the hovering Cossacks, and to destroying guns and waggons that would otherwise have been abandoned.
From Dorogobuzh Eugène’s corps was diverted towards Dukhovchina with the intention of directing it thence upon Vitebsk to relieve the pressure upon Victor by Wittgenstein. The result was its practical destruction.
On November 7th Eugen of Württemberg attacked Razout’s division before Dorogobuzh and after some obstinate fighting, partly owing to the indecision of its short-sighted commander, forced it to retreat through the town with a loss of several hundred men and 4 guns. Ney, who had hoped to delay Miloradovich for a day, was obliged to fall back towards Smolensk. Dorogobuzh was choked with disbanded men, who were ruthlessly murdered or stripped by the exasperated inhabitants. A watchmaker boasted of having killed 11 Frenchmen with a knife which he had concealed for the purpose! Miloradovich, however, was then obliged to draw off his infantry towards the south for the sake of food and shelter against the cold. He left the pursuit of Ney to Major-General Yurkovski with a brigade of dragoons and some Cossacks, while Platov followed Eugène towards Dukhovchina.