By Raffet.
Moscow was entered on the 15th of September. Here the French found at last food and shelter, but only for a few hours. That night Moscow burst into flames, set on fire by the authorities, by whom it had been abandoned. It was three days before the fire was arrested. It would cost Russia two hundred years of time, two hundred millions of money, to repair the loss which she had sustained, Napoleon wrote to France.
Suffering, disorganization, pillage, followed the disaster. But Napoleon would not retreat. He hoped to make peace. Moscow was still smoking when he wrote a long description of the conflagration to Alexander. The closing paragraph ran:
“I wage war against your Majesty without animosity; a note from you before or after the last battle would have stopped my march, and I should even have liked to sacrifice the advantage of entering Moscow. If your Majesty retains some remains of your former sentiments, you will take this letter in good part. At all events, you will thank me for giving you an account of what is passing at Moscow.”
“I will never sign a peace as long as a single foe remains on Russian ground,” the Emperor Alexander had said when he heard that Napoleon had crossed the Nieman. He kept his word in spite of all Napoleon’s overtures. The French position grew worse from day to day. No food, no fresh supplies, the cold increasing, the army disheartened, the number of Russians around Moscow growing larger. Nothing but a retreat could save the remnant of the French. It began on October 19th, one hundred and fifteen thousand men leaving Moscow. They were followed by forty thousand vehicles loaded with the sick and with what supplies they could get hold of. The route was over the fields devastated a month before. The Cossacks harassed them night and day, and the cruel Russian cold dropped from the skies, cutting them down like a storm of scythes. Before Smolensk was reached, thousands of the retreating army were dead.
NAPOLEON AFTER THE RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN.
Napoleon had ordered that provisions and clothing should be collected at Smolensk. When he reached the city he found that his directions had not been obeyed. The army, exasperated beyond endurance by this disappointment, fell into complete and frightful disorganization, and the rest of the retreat was like the falling back of a conquered mob.
There is no space here for the details of this terrible march and of the frightful passage of the Beresina. The terror of the cold and starvation wrung cries from Napoleon himself.
“Provisions, provisions, provisions,” he wrote on November 29th from the right bank of the Beresina. “Without them there is no knowing to what horrors this undisciplined mass will proceed.”