WHEN THE COSSACKS GOT TO WORK
The Cossacks redoubled their attacks on the retreating army after Wiasma. They had harassed the French incessantly from the day after Napoleon passed Mojaisk, but after Wiasma their audacity increased a hundredfold. They captured prisoners hourly, from among the stragglers mostly; in droves, by fifties and hundreds at a time. Day after day they hung on the flanks, swooping down with loud shouts on the unfortunate wretches, rounding them up like sheep, and driving them before them towards their own camps at the points of their long lances. Many they killed on the spot, or stripped naked to perish in the snow. Others they drove along to the nearest camp of Kutusoff’s regulars for the sake of the money reward offered for prisoners brought in alive. Others again, to save themselves the trouble of driving them all the way to the army camp, they handed over to peasants in the villages, selling them at a rouble a head, for the peasants to make sport of and maltreat or kill. The brutalities and ruthless devastations that the French army had committed in its advance to Moscow had infuriated the Russian peasantry. Intent on vengeance they now made use of their opportunity to the full. They burned alive some of their captives, by tossing them into pits half filled with blazing pine-logs. Seventy were done to death in this horrible way in one village. Others they buried up to their necks in the ground and left to die; or else tied them to trees for the wolves to tear to pieces.[33] Others they clubbed or flogged to death, tying down the wretched Frenchmen to logs on the ground, hounding on the women and children to hammer their heads to pieces with thick sticks. A common method of Cossacks and peasants alike for making prisoners was to light great watch-fires at night, a little way off from the retreating column, and as the frozen and starving stragglers came crowding up to the blaze they surrounded them and carried them off wholesale.
After the snow set in, guns and baggage-wagons were abandoned to the Cossacks at almost every hundred yards. It was impossible for the weakened and dying horses to drag them along; even to keep their footing on the frozen ground. Within the first week after Wiasma the appalling number of 30,000 horses either died of starvation, there being no way of getting fodder for them because of the snow, or were frozen to death.
THE EAGLES OF NEY’S CORPS
In spite of everything, some of the regiments still kept together and marched in military formation, with their Eagles at their head; those in particular of Marshal Ney’s corps. They formed the rearguard and chief protection to the army from Wiasma onwards; held together by the heroic example and personality of their indefatigable leader, ever present where there was fighting, ever calm and confident, and ready with words of encouragement. Not an Eagle was lost along the line of march between Moscow and Smolensk by Ney’s men; rallying round them to beat off the Cossack attacks time and again with the cry, “Aux Aigles! Voici les Cosaques!”
This incident, not unlike the cuirassier ride to recover the Eagle left on the field at Borodino, is said to have taken place between Wiasma and Smolensk. One regiment of Ney’s cavalry missed its Eagle after a sharp fight on the road, the Eagle-bearer having apparently fallen during the encounter, unseen by the survivors. That night round the bivouac fire lots were drawn, and two officers rode back amid blinding snow squalls to try to find the Eagle. They successfully evaded the Cossacks and made their way ten miles back to the scene of the combat, where, after scaring off some wolves, they searched in the snow and found the dead officer’s body with the Eagle by its side. They brought it back safely to the regiment and restored it to their comrades. Their limbs were frost-bitten and rigid from cold, so that they had to be lifted off their horses, but the brave men were content—they had saved their Eagle.
Photo Alinari.
MARSHAL NEY WITH THE REARGUARD IN THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW.
From a picture by A. Ivon, at Versailles.