The Great White Army

by Max Pemberton

You must depict us at this time as a rabble rather than an army. There were few regiments save those of the Guard which maintained even a semblance of order. Men fell out at a whim. We had nothing upon either side of us but the frozen steppes and the woods in which the wolves howled. Our own people had burned the villages through which we straggled towards a distant horizon of our salvation. The road itself was black with the bodies of the dying and dead. I shall not dwell upon such pitiful scenes, but recall only those which seem to me of interest to my fellow countrymen.

Often have I been asked how the Emperor carried himself during these days, and that is a question which I have made some attempt already to answer.

Chiefly he walked with the grenadiers. There were occasions when he entered his famous travelling carriage, and passed some hours in it; but no one was more ready than he to share the hardships of the journey, and certainly none faced peril with a greater sang-froid. How it came about that His Majesty escaped disaster, I cannot tell you. There were many occasions when a little courage upon the part of the Cossacks would have destroyed the hope of France for ever. So often were we who guarded him but a palsied band of nondescripts, that I wonder to this day at that hesitation which allowed the greatest of our soldiers to slip through Russian hands.

Let me give you an instance to show what I mean.

It was the morning of November 25th. We had passed a forlorn village some miles beyond Krasnoë. The column was headed by a bevy of generals, few of whom were mounted. Behind them there marched a miserable company of officers, all dragging themselves along painfully, and not a few of them having their feet frozen, and wrapped in rugs or bits of sheepskin. The Emperor himself marched in the midst of the cavalry of the Guard. He went on foot, and carried a baton. His cloak was large and lined with fur, and upon his head he wore a dark red velvet cap with a trimming of black fox. Prince Murat walked on his right-hand side, and on his left Prince Eugène, while behind him came the Marshals Berthier, Ney, Mortier, and Lefebvre, with others whose regiments had been almost annihilated in the recent battles.

Behind these again were the officers and non-commissioned officers of the Guard. There were seven or eight hundred of them walking in perfect silence, and carrying the eagles of their different regiments. The scene itself was an open plain glistening with frost, and often broken by those dismal clumps of pines with which we were so familiar. A village lay ahead of us, a ravine and a river upon our right hand. We knew that the Cossacks were sheltered by the distant woods, and that any moment might bring them down upon us. And yet we went as stolidly as men who are marching from a field of victory.

Is it to be wondered at that the Russians were perplexed by these tactics, and that even the boldest of them had no heart for a venture which would have destroyed the hope of France in a twinkling?

This is not to tell you that they did not attack us. Hardly had we come up to the outskirts of the village when we perceived a battery drawn up by the river and another before the very gates of the hamlet. We had no guns with us at the moment, and we stood there like sheep while the Russians pounded us and their shells decimated our tottering ranks. Lame and helpless and weary, weakened by hunger and the perils of the march, who would have said that so pitiful a force could have withstood the assault even of five thousand brave men? Yet, as I say, they were content to pound us with their artillery, and although we saw great masses of their cavalry about the village, never once did they charge us as we expected them to do.

Presently our own guns came up, and we were able to meet the enemy on better terms. Marshal Ney now put himself at the head of the chasseurs, and boldly charged the Cossacks to the left of the village. His troops suffered severely in this onset, and when he returned to us the frozen plain was dotted with the writhing forms of our countrymen who had been shot down. These poor fellows had suffered so much during recent days that for the most part they died without a struggle. Such as survived were left to the mercy of the Russians, for we were in no position to help them, and we had to suffer the mortifying spectacle of seeing the wounded stripped bare and left upon the snows by the fiends who came out of the woods.

I thought surely that His Majesty was lost this day, and when I saw him standing in the very path of the shells, surrounded by no more than forty Fusiliers of the Guard, it seemed indeed to me that the end had come. The Cossacks had but to charge and their booty would have been sure. That they did not do so must be set down to those motives of prudence which animated their General Kutusoff to the end. He knew that the Grand Army was perishing before his eyes, and that the elements would do what the Russians themselves had left undone. When he retired that day we must have lost at least three thousand men, who were left in the hands of his butchers.