Smolensko was fought—and, after a doubtful contest, the victory was gained.—Gained! When the city could no longer be defended, the Russians fired it, simultaneously, in an hundred quarters; and the fruits of a bloody conflict was a town laid in ashes by the very men who held it so desperately to the last!
On other points, the French arms were equally successful; and here it was believed that Napoleon would pause; organize Roland—hold Riga, Witepsk, and Smolensko,—and wait the return of spring. But, having dictated terms to the conquered, even in the palaces they had occupied—regardless of desert roads and coming winter, without magazines or hospitals, and, leaving the Moldwian army in his rear, he determined to march direct upon “the sacred city.” It was said, that the prudent of those around him, remonstrated strongly against this act of madness; but the Emperor’s resolution was not to be shaken.
On we went; and the Russians, to cover Moscow, received battle on the heights of Borodino. With nearly equal numbers, two hundred and fifty thousand combatants were for twelve hours engaged in murderous conflict. Night ended it. The victors bivouacked on the ground they had gained at a sacrifice that shocks humanity—and the vanquished retired in perfect order, leaving the conquerors a field of battle. O God! such a field as the morning of the 8th disclosed!—sixty thousand dead or dying men, interspersed with five-and-twenty thousand horses.
Well, the road to Moscow was open, but every step we advanced showed the madness of the proceeding. If we reached a town, we found it in a blaze; if we met a village, it was totally deserted. Cattle were driven off; provisions burned or buried; the peasantry had risen en masse and every man’s hand was against us; but still our infatuated leader persevered in his mad career, and recklessly pushed on.
It was fondly supposed, that Moscow once gained, our hardships would terminate, and a winter of repose reward the privations we had undergone. That hope was false; Moscow, like the meanest village we had seen ruined, was also devoted to destruction. We entered it at noon; few inhabitants had remained; and none were seen in the deserted streets but a few felons who had left the jails, and some wretched outcasts of the other sex. Every dwelling, from the palace of the noble to the shop of the meanest artisan, was abandoned. The churches alone contained any living occupants, and they were the wounded only, or those whom age or infancy had rendered incapable of retiring with the remainder of its inhabitants from the doomed city.
Although an army was in the place, still it looked a splendid desert. Every soldier whom you met was loaded with costly plunder. It appeared a city of enchantment. Houses, splendidly furnished, invited the passer to go in; and he might have freely traversed every sumptuous room which the building contained, and met with nothing living. It was, in truth, a fearful picture of deserted magnificence.
Suddenly, an alarm was heard. It was not caused either by secret surprise, nor an approaching enemy. At several points a dense smoke was visible; flames broke out in different quarters of the city; no water was to be procured, nor engines could be found; and a fearful rumour began to prevail, that Moscow had been determinately fired.
It was too true. By an act of desperate devotion, every private feeling had yielded to public necessity—the most extraordinary national sacrifice which history records was decreed and executed—and “the sacred city” was laid in ashes, by the hands of those who regarded it with a holy veneration, approaching to idolatry.
To Napoleon the destruction of Moscow was a blow neither expected nor remediable. The stake, for which he played the wildest game, was at the same moment, won and lost. To reach the city of the Czars was the object for which he cast every prudential consideration to the winds—and what resulted? He dated a few despatches from the ruins of a city, to gain which two hundred thousand soldiers were to form the sad consideration.
The fire momentarily increased—the wind rose, blew in a fatal direction, and the flames spread fearfully. There were quarters which the raging element had not reached, but incendiaries fired the houses, and the whole city was speedily sheeted in one broad blaze, far too irresistible for human agency to arrest. Then followed violence and rapine. Those of the inhabitants who had not removed, secreted themselves in vaulted cellars, or the remoter portions of their houses, most likely to afford concealment; while others remained before shrine and altar, trusting to their sanctity for protection. From all, the angry element obliged those unfortunates to retire. They were forced into streets where bands of drunken soldiers mingled with galley-slaves and robbers, launched by sad accident as a curse upon the world again, and maddened now by intoxication. With all the excesses of plunder, they mingled the most degrading and horrible debauchery. “Neither nobility of blood, the innocence of youth, nor the tears of beauty, were respected. The licentiousness was cruel and boundless; but it was inevitable, in a savage war, in which sixteen different nations, opposite in their manners and their language, thought themselves at liberty to commit every crime.”