Smolensk was now the thought dearest to every heart; and, buoyed with the hope of rest and food, the army tottered westwards as it had panted eastwards through the fierce summer heats with Moscow as its cynosure. The hope that clung about Smolensk was but a cruel mirage. The wreck of that city offered poor shelter; the stores were exhausted by the vanguard; and, to the horror of Eugène's Italians, men swarmed out of that fancied abode of plenty and pounced on every horse that stumbled to its doom on the slippery banks of the Dnieper. With inconceivable folly, Napoleon, or his staff, had provided no means for roughing the horses' shoes. The Cossacks, when they knew this, exclaimed to Wilson: "God has made Napoleon forget that there was a winter here."
Disasters now thickened about the Grand Army. During his halt at Smolensk (November 9th-14th), Napoleon heard that Victor's force on the Dwina had been worsted by the Russians, and there was ground for fearing that the Muscovite army of the Ukraine would cut into the line of retreat. The halt at Smolensk also gave time for Kutusoff to come up parallel with the main force, and had he pressed on with ordinary speed and showed a tithe of his wonted pugnacity, he might have captured the Grand Army and its leader. As it was, his feeble attack on the rearguard at Krasnoe only gave Ney an opportunity of showing his dauntless courage. The "bravest of the brave" fought his way through clouds[pg.263] of Cossacks, crossed the Dnieper, though with the loss of all his guns, and rejoined the main body. Napoleon was greatly relieved on hearing of the escape of this Launcelot of the Imperial chivalry. He ordered cannon to be fired at suitable intervals so as to forward the news if it were propitious; and on hearing their distant boomings, he exclaimed to his officers: "I have more than 400,000,000 francs in the cellars of the Tuileries, and would gladly have given the whole for the ransom of my faithful companion in arms."[[275]]
Far greater was the danger at the River Beresina. The Russian army of the south had seized the bridge at Borisoff on which Napoleon's safety depended, and Oudinot vainly struggled to wrest it back. The Muscovites burnt it under his eyes. Such was the news which Napoleon heard at Bobr on November 24th. It staggered him; for, with his usual excess of confidence, he had destroyed his pontoons on the banks of the Dnieper; and now there was no means of crossing a river, usually insignificant, but swollen by floods and bridged only by half-thawed ice. Yet French resource was far from vanquished. General Corbineau, finding from some peasants that the river was fordable three leagues above Borisoff, brought the news to Oudinot, who forthwith prepared to cross there. Napoleon, coming up on the 26th, approved the plan, and cheeringly said to his Marshal, "Well, you shall be my locksmith and open that passage for me."[[276]]
To deceive the foe, the Emperor told off a regiment or two southwards with a long tail of camp-followers that were taken to be an army. And this wily move, harmonizing with recent demonstrations of the Austrians on the side of Minsk, convinced the Muscovite leader that Napoleon was minded to clasp hands with them.[[277]] While the Russians patrolled the river on the south, French sappers were working, often neck deep in the water, to throw two light bridges across the stream higher up. By heroic toil,[pg.264] which to most of them brought death, the bridges were speedily finished, and, as the light of November 26th was waning Oudinot's corps of 7,000 men gained a firm footing on the homeward side. But they were observed by Russian scouts, and when on the next day Napoleon and other corps had struggled across, the enemy came up, captured a whole division, and on the morrow strove to hurl the invaders into the river. Victor and the rearguard staunchly kept them at bay; but at one point the Russian army of the Dwina temporarily gained ground and swept the bridges and their approaches with artillery fire.
Then the panic-stricken throngs of wounded and stragglers, women and camp-followers, writhed and fought their way until the frail planks were piled high with living and dead. To add to the horrors, one bridge gave way under the weight of the cannon. The rush for the one remaining bridge became yet more frantic and the day closed amidst scenes of unspeakable woe. Stout swimmers threw themselves into the stream, only to fall victims to the ice floes and the numbing cold. At dawn of the 29th, the French rearguard fired the bridge to cover the retreat. Then a last, loud wail of horror arose from the farther bank, and despair or a loathing of life drove many to end their miseries in the river or in the flames.
Such was the crossing of the Beresina. The ghastly tale was told once more with renewed horrors when the floods of winter abated and laid bare some 12,000 corpses along the course of that fatal stream. It would seem that if Napoleon, or his staff, had hurried on the camp-followers to cross on the night of the 27th to the 28th, those awful scenes would not have happened, for on that night the bridges were not used at all. Grosser carelessness than this cannot be conceived; and yet, even after this shocking blunder, the devotion of the soldiers to their chief found touching expression. When he was suffering from cold in the wretched bivouac west of the river, officers went round calling for dry wood for[pg.265] his fire; and shivering men were seen to offer precious sticks, with the words, "Take it for the Emperor."[[278]]
On that day Napoleon wrote to Maret that possibly he would leave the army and hurry on to Paris. His presence there was certainly needed, if his crown was to be saved. On November 6th, the day of the first snowstorm, he heard of the Quixotic attempt of a French republican, General Malet, to overthrow the Government at Paris. With a handful of followers, but armed with a false report of Napoleon's capture in Russia, this man had apprehended several officials, until the scheme collapsed of sheer inanity.[[279]] "How now, if we were at Moscow," exclaimed the Emperor, on hearing this curious news; and he saw with chagrin that some of his generals merely shrugged their shoulders. After crossing the Beresina, he might hope that the worst was over and that the stores at Vilna and Kovno would suffice for the remnant of his army. The cold for a time had been less rigorous. The behaviour of Prussia and Austria was, in truth, more important than the conduct of the retreat. Unless those Powers were kept to their troth, not a Frenchman would cross the Elbe.
At Smorgoni, then, on December the 5th, he informed his Marshals that he left them in order to raise 300,000 men; and, intrusting the command to Murat, he hurried away. His great care was to prevent the extent of the disaster being speedily known. "Remove all strangers from Vilna," he wrote to Maret: "the army is not fine to look upon just now." The precaution was much needed. Frost set in once more, and now with unending grip. Vilna offered a poor haven of refuge. The stores were soon plundered, and, as the Cossacks drew near, Murat and the remnant of the Grand Army decamped in pitiable panic. Amidst ever deepening misery they struggled on, until, of the 600,000 men who had proudly crossed the Niemen for the conquest of Russia, only 20,000 famished, frost-bitten, unarmed spectres staggered across the bridge of Kovno in the middle of December. The[pg.266] auxiliary corps furnished by Austria and Prussia fell back almost unscathed. But the remainder of that mighty host rotted away in Russian prisons or lay at rest under Nature's winding-sheet of snow.[[280]][pg.267]