Other marshals did not love Davoust; they quarrelled with him, said he was slow, and accused him of not maintaining discipline. On the retreat Ney, whom Davoust had left behind, charged him with something like treachery. But Napoleon knew the value of Davoust, and history knows it. To the careful student of this eventful epoch the conclusion comes home, irresistibly, that Napoleon might have remained till his death the mightiest monarch of the world had he listened to two men,—in civil affairs, Cambacérès; in military matters, Davoust.
As to Murat, he fought all along the front with such conspicuous gallantry, superbly mounted and gorgeously dressed, that he extorted the admiration of the Russians themselves. The Cossacks, especially, looked upon him as the bravest, the most martial of men. Murat fought the cavalry till the horses were all dead, and then he spent most of his time in Napoleon’s carriage.
But Ney, rugged, lionlike Ney, surpassed them all, winning in this campaign the Emperor’s proud title, “The brave of the braves.” Such grandeur of courage, such steadiness, such loyalty, the world never surpassed. Separated from Davoust, beset by overwhelming numbers, he seemed a lost man. The Emperor, hard pressed himself, but determined to make a final effort to save his marshals, halted at Krasnoi, facing sixty thousand Russians with six thousand French. Nothing in Napoleon’s own career is finer than this. Russian shells began to fly, screaming through the air and along the snow. Lebrun spoke of it as of something unusually terrible. “Bah!” said the Emperor with contempt; “balls have been whistling about our legs these twenty years.” His desperate courage in standing at bay so impressed Kutusoff that he drew back, and Davoust came through. But Ney was still behind, and in the face of the tremendous odds the French were forced onward. In deep grief for his marshal, the Emperor reproached himself for having exposed Ney too much. From time to time he would inquire if any one had heard from him. On the 20th of November General Gourgand came in haste to announce that Ney was only a few leagues away and would soon join. With a cry of joy, Napoleon exclaimed, “Is it true?” When Gourgand explained how Ney had marched and fought: how he had defied a beleaguring host ten times his own number; how, summoned to surrender, he had replied, “A marshal of France has never surrendered!” and how he had, partly by stratagem, and partly by force, escaped with a small remnant of his command, Napoleon was delighted. “There are 200,000,000 francs in my vaults in the Tuileries, and I would give them all to have Ney at my side!”
When the heroic survivors of this column joined the main army, there were shouts and tears of joy.
It was Ney who held the Cossacks at bay toward the final stages of the retreat; it was Ney who fired the last shot of the war as he recrossed the Niemen: it was Ney who became almost literally the rear-guard of the Grand Army.
Well might the Bourbon Duchess of Angoulême say, in 1815, when told the story of this man’s antique heroism in the Russian campaign, “Had we known all that, we would not have had him shot!”
In the disorder, savagery, elemental chaos of this historic retreat, human nature flew to the extremes. There were soldiers who slew each other in struggles for food, and soldiers who risked starvation to share with others. In some instances comradeship was mocked, in some it was stronger than ever. There were instances where the strong laughed at the weak who pleaded for aid. There were cases where the strong braved all to save the weak. Wounded officers were seen drawn on sledges to which their comrades had harnessed themselves, brother officers taking the place of horses. A child, abandoned by its mother, was saved by Marshal Ney, and escaped all the hardships of the retreat. Another mother drowning in the Beresina held her babe aloft in her arms, the child alive, the mother as good as dead.
One of the most touching and purely unselfish acts of devotion was that of the Hessian contingent in its protection of their hereditary prince. The people of Hesse had little cause to reverence their rulers—petty tyrants who had sold them into military servitude at so much a head to England, and who had misgoverned them with the worst of feudal methods. But on the coldest night of the retreat, when it seemed that the young Prince Emil would freeze to death, the remnant of the Hessians closed around him, “wrapped in their great white cloaks pressed tightly against one another, protecting him from wind and cold. The next morning three-fourths of them were dead, and buried beneath the snow.”
By the time the French came near the Beresina, the two Russian armies, which had been released by the treaties the Czar had made with Turkey and Sweden, had reached the scene of war, and threatened the line of retreat. Kutusoff in overwhelming force in the rear, Wittgenstein and Tchitchagoff in front and flank, the French seemed doomed. When the Russians were driven by Oudinot from Borissow, they burnt the bridge over the Beresina. The ice had melted, the river was swollen, it was wide and deep, and the Russians were on the opposite bank ready to dispute the passage. To bridge and cross the river in the face of these Russians—such was the French necessity: either that or surrender, for Kutusoff was close behind.
Already the Emperor had destroyed his papers and burned his eagles to save them from capture; already had provided himself with poison, resolved to die rather than be taken prisoner.