"Throughout all those operations, the emperor has always marched in the midst of his guard; the cavalry under the Duke of Istria, and the infantry under the Duke of Dantzig. Our cavalry was deprived of horses to such an extent that the officers who were still mounted had to be collected, to form four companies of 150 men each. Their generals acted as captains; the colonels as under-officers. This sacred squadron, commanded by General Grouchy, and under the orders of the King of Naples, did not lose sight of the emperor in all his movements. The health of his Majesty has never been better."
It was always a part of Napoleon's cunning to mix truth with falsehood, and conceal his lies with an appearance of honor. The "twenty-ninth bulletin of the great army" contained facts which were partly true. He admitted the hardships, and palliated the faults; but he neither gave, nor wished to give, a true idea of the disasters, or a candid statement of the frightful miseries which had ravaged the French battalions, and reduced our army as snow is melted under the sun of summer. There were still too many who had seen those catastrophes, and undertaken to establish the truth of the facts. In Napoleon's mind the evils he had seen, and that he himself had caused, were to leave less permanent impressions. He regretted the destruction of his armies, without wishing to state all their losses. "We left 300,000 men in Russia," said Marshal St. Cyr, in Germany. "No, no!" replied Napoleon; "not so many as that." Then, after a moment's reflection, "Ah! 30,000 at the Moskwa; 7000 here, 10,000 there; and all those who strayed on the marches and have not returned. Possibly you are not far wrong. But then there were so many Germans!" The Germans did not forget it!
The solitary consolation left to the army was that which the emperor had himself presented to Europe—the presence of Napoleon; his physical and mental energy and vigor. His flight from Smorgoni deprived the soldiers of this last resource of their confidence; from that day, as soon as the report spread, despair seized upon the strongest hearts. Nothing is more enduring than the instinctive courage which resists pain and death, because it becomes a man to strive to the last. All the ties of discipline, military fraternity, and ordinary humanity were broken together. I borrow from the recollections of the Duke Fezensac, then colonel of the 4th of the line, the following picture of the horrors which he saw, and of which he has given the story with a touching and manly simplicity:—"It is useless at the present day to tell the details of every day's march; it would merely be a repetition of the same misfortunes. The cold, which seemed to have become milder only to make the passage of the Dnieper and the Berezina more difficult, again set in more keenly than ever. The thermometer sank, first, to from 15 to 18 degrees, then from 20 to 25 degrees (Réaumur), and the severity of the season completed the exhaustion of men who were already half dead with hunger and fatigue. I shall not undertake to depict the spectacle which we looked upon. You must imagine plains as far as the horizon covered with snow, long forests of pines, villages half-burnt and deserted; and through those pitiful districts an endless column of wretches, nearly all without arms, marching in disorder, and falling at every step on the ice, near the carcasses of horses and the bodies of their companions. Their faces bore the impress of utter exhaustion or despair, their eyes were lifeless, their features convulsed, and quite black with dirt and smoke. Sheepskins and pieces of cloth served them for shoes; their heads were wrapped with rags; their shoulders covered with horse-cloths, women's petticoats, and half-burnt skins. Also, when one fell from fatigue, his comrades stripped him before he was dead, in order to clothe themselves with his rags. Each bivouac seemed next day like a battle-field, and men found dead at their side those beside whom they had gone to sleep the night before. An officer of the Russian advance-guard, who was a witness of those scenes of horror —which the rapidity of our flight prevented us from carefully observing— has given a description of them to which nothing need be added: 'The road which we followed,' says he, 'was covered with prisoners who required no watching, and who underwent hardships till then unheard of. Several still dragged themselves mechanically along the road, with their feet naked and half frozen; some had lost the power of speech, others had fallen into a kind of savage stupidity, and wished, in spite of us, to roast dead bodies in order to eat them. Those who were too weak to go to fetch wood stopped near the first fire which they found, and sitting upon one another they crowded closely round the fire, the feeble heat of which still sustained them, the little life left in them going out at the same time as it did. The houses and farms which the wretches had set on fire were surrounded with dead bodies, for those who went near had not the power to escape the flames which reached them; and soon others were seen, with a convulsive laugh rushing voluntarily into the midst of the burning, so that they were consumed also.'"
I hasten to avoid the spectacle of so many sufferings. Yet it is right and proper that children should know what was endured by their fathers. In proportion as the last survivors of the generations who saw and suffered so many evils disappear; we who have in our turn undergone other disasters owe it to them to recount both their glory and their misery. The time will soon come when our descendants in their turn will include in the annals of history the great epochs through which we have lived, struggled, and suffered.
Napoleon crossed Germany like an unknown fugitive, and his generals also made haste to escape. They had at last reached Wilna, alarming Lithuania by their rout, and themselves terror-struck during the halt on ascertaining the actual numbers of their losses, and the state of the disorderly battalions which were being again formed in the streets of the hospitable town. For a long time the crowd of disbanded soldiers, deserters, and those who had fallen behind, were collected together at the gates of Wilna in so dense a throng that they could not enter. Scarcely had the hungry wretches begun to take some food and taste a moment's rest, when the Russian cannon was heard, and Platow's Cossacks appeared at the gates. The King of Naples, heroic on the battle-field, but incapable of efficient command in a rout, took refuge in a suburb, in order to set out from it at break of day. Marshal Ney, the old Marshal Lefebvre, and General Loyson, with the remains of the division which he recently brought back from Poland, kept back the Cossacks for some time, and left the army time to resume its deplorable flight. A large number of exhausted men fell into the hands of the enemy; the fragments of our ruined regiments disappeared piecemeal. At Ponare, where the road between Wilna and Kowno rises, the baggage which they had with great difficulty dragged so far, the flags taken from the enemy, the army-chest, the trophies carried off from Moscow, all remained scattered at the foot of the icy hill, neither horses nor men being able to take them further. The pillagers quarrelled over the gold and silver in the broken coffers, on the snow, in the ditches. Then the Cossacks coming upon them, some of the French fired in defence of treasures which they were no longer able to carry.
When the ruins of the main army at last reached Kowno, where they found supplies of food and ammunition, they were no longer able to make use of it, or to resist the pursuit of the Russians, still keenly determined to drive us from their territory. The generals held a council. In their weariness and despair some gave vent to complaints against Napoleon, and Murat's words were susceptible of a more sinister meaning. Marshal Davout, honorable and unconquerable though still strongly prejudiced against the King of Naples, boldly expressed his indignation against the falling off of the lieutenants whom the emperor had made kings. All with one accord handed over to Ney the command of the rear-guard, and that defence of Kowno which was for a few minutes longer to protect the retreat. General Gerard alone remained faithful to this last despairing effort. When at last he crossed the Niemen with General Ney, on the 114th December, 1812, they were abandoned by all: their soldiers had fled, either scattering before the enemy or stealing away during the night from a useless resistance. When, in Koenigsberg, he overtook the remnant of the staff, Marshal Ney, with haggard looks and clad in rags, entered alone into their room. "Here comes the rear-guard of the great army!" said he bitterly.
The Prussian General York had abandoned Marshal Macdonald, making a capitulation with his forces in presence of the Russians, whose friendly intentions he had been long conscious of. Being disarmed by this neutrality of York's, Macdonald in his turn fell back upon Koenigsberg, pursued by the Russians. The hospitals were ravaged by disease: men who had resisted all fatigues and hardships, such as Generals Lariboisière and Eblé, at last succumbing. Murat withdrew to Elbing, to start soon after for Naples, leaving Prince Eugène in command of the remains of the army. From Paris, where he was already preparing for other battles, the Emperor Napoleon sought for his army in vain. The old guard itself only amounted at Koenigsberg to 1500 men, of whom not more than 500 could carry a musket. When the scattered fragments of the regiments left this last place of refuge, 10,000 sick men were still left in the hospitals.