The Story of Moscow

by Wirt Gerrare

Even Napoleon expressed his admiration and delight, and received the warm congratulations of his now enthusiastic generals. It was rumoured that an officer had arrived from the town to discuss terms of surrender: Napoleon halted, but grew uneasy when the expected messenger could not be found and there were no signs of an approaching delegate or of that deputation of gorgeously robed boyards he had fondly hoped would attend his coming to surrender the keys of the Kremlin and sue for his clemency towards the citizens. An hour before he had commanded Count Duronelle to hurry on to Moscow and arrange for the ostentatious performance of the customary ceremony. He was now told that the town had been abandoned by the officials, that the citizens had forsaken it, but Moscow, empty it is true, was at his feet. Murat had found a few stragglers, amongst them a French type-setter, and these wretched fugitives were ordered before the staff, and by their spokesman begged for protection. “Imbecile” was the only word Napoleon trusted himself to answer. His chagrin, his wounded self-love, his mortification at the unexpected turn of affairs unnerved him. One of the Russian prisoners describes the effect of the news thus:—

“Napoleon was thoroughly overcome and completely lost his self-control. His calm and regular step was changed into a quick, uneven tread. He kept looking around him, fidgetted, stood still, trembled all over, looked fierce, tweaked his own nose, pulled a glove off and put it on again, tore another glove out of his pocket, rolled it up into a ball, and, as if in deep thought, put it into his other pocket, again took it out, and again put it back, pulled the other glove from his hand, then quickly drew it on again, and kept repeating this process. This went on for an hour, during which the generals standing behind him remained like statues, not even daring to move.”

Various accounts are given respecting the first entry of the troops into Moscow. Some of the inhabitants who remained, having faith in the assurances of Rostopchin, welcomed the invaders believing them to be some of the foreign allies of the Russian army. An official who had not been able to escape states that he saw some serfs carrying arms from the arsenal, one, who was intoxicated had a musket in one hand and in the other a carbine, for remarking upon the folly of such an armament, the man threw first the musket then the carbine at him, and a crowd of rioters rushed from the arsenal all armed, as the advance-guard of the French approached. The captain begged an interpreter to advise the crowd to throw down their arms and not engage in an unequal struggle, but the ignorant people, excited if not intoxicated, fired a few rounds accidentally, or by design, and the French thereupon made use of their artillery, and a wild fight ensued. After some ten or a dozen had been sabred, the others asked for quarter, and received it. Another story is to the effect that some of the armed citizens mistaking a general for Napoleon, fired at him as he approached the Kremlin and were then charged by his guard and put to flight. When later, Napoleon rode up to the Borovitski Gate, a decrepid soldier, a tottering veteran, too stubborn to forsake his post, resolutely blocked the way and was mercilessly struck down by the advance-guard.

The fires commenced the same evening that the French entered the town; there were no engines available and the soldiers, hungry and joyful, disregarded the danger and attended to their more immediate needs. Rostopchin had ordered that the contents of the “cellars” should be burned, but there was no lack of liquor, and the conquerors were not to be denied. As the “Warriors” sing in Zhukovski’s epic:—

“O, yes!—the ruby stream to drain
Is glory’s pride and pleasure—
Wine! Conqueror thou of care and pain,
Thou art the hero’s treasure.”

So whilst rank and file caroused, the small beginnings of the great conflagration were neglected and men were powerless to cope with the later developments, though some worked like Trojans. The stores of oil, of spirits, the inflammable wares in the Gostinnoi Dvor were ignited, and although Marshal Mortier worked well to extinguish the fires near the Kremlin, the lack of engines and the continuous outbursts of fresh fires, made complete success impossible. The looting of the town commenced at once; soon the greedy soldiers left their partly cooked rations to search for valuables, even the sentinels forsook their posts and they fought with the rabble from the prisons for such goods as seemed most easily removed. In time, not content with such as had been abandoned, they commenced to rob from the person; women were spoiled of head-dresses and gowns, the men fought with each other for the temporary possession of pelf. The only lights for this unholy work were the torches all carried and the fires the looters set ablaze in order that they might see. When Napoleon thought the conflagration was the result of a preconcerted scheme he ordered all incendiaries to be shot, and then none durst carry a light by night without risk of being there and then shot by some predatory soldier on his own initiative, or, not less surely executed in due form after a mock court-martial at dawn of day.

Discipline was lax; among the soldiery of the army of occupation, many bold souls did just as they wished, and of their enormities, their cruelties and shameful orgies, nothing need be written. Others had leave of absence—a licence to pilfer. They not only ransacked the occupied houses, but dragged people from their hiding places, harnessed them to carts, with bayonet and worse urged them on, heavily laden, through burning streets, and saving themselves from the crumbling walls and roofs, saw their miserable captives crushed, buried, or struggling among the burning debris, and abandoned to their fate. In the immediate neighbourhood of the Kremlin the pilfering was official; in the Cathedral of the Assumption, great scales and steelyards were set up, and outside two furnaces, one for gold the other for silver, were kept ever burning to melt down the settings torn from the sacred pictures, the church vessels, the gilt ornaments, aye, even the decorations on the priests’ robes. Horses were stabled in the cathedrals and churches; Marshal Davoust slept in the sanctuary with sentinels on both sides of the “royal doors” of the ikonostas. “Destroy that mosque,” was Napoleon’s peremptory order to one of his generals with reference to the Church of the Protection of the Virgin, but he delayed executing the order finding this cathedral convenient as a stable and storehouse. At first the fire was most severe in the warehouses flanking the Grand Square and along the quays. It spread most rapidly amidst the great stores on the south side of the river. The Balchoog was a sea of flame and the whole of the Zamoskvoretski quarter was practically destroyed. On the other side the burning Gostinnoi Dvor ignited neighbouring stores in the Nikolskaya, Ilyinka and elsewhere on the Kitai Gorod. The gleeds carried by a north wind threatened the palaces in the Kremlin—where, under a cloud of sparks, the buildings glowed red and seemed to many to be also burning. The ammunition had already been brought there and caused the French great anxiety. Napoleon, after a peaceful night in the royal palace, was unwilling to believe that the tires were other than accidental, but as the day waned and the fires increased in number as well as size, he grew agitated and exclaimed, “They are true to themselves these Scythians! It is the work of incendiaries; what men then are they, these Scythians!”

He passed the next night in the Kremlin, but not at rest. It was with the greatest difficulty that the soldiers on the roof of the palace disposed of the burning fragments that at times fell upon the metal like a shower of hail. The heat was intense; the stores of spirits exploded, and blue flames hid the yellow and orange of the burning timbers and darted with lightning rapidity in all directions, a snake-like progress through the denser parts of the town, firing even the logs of wood with which the streets were at that time paved. When the fire reached the hospitals, where 20,000 unfortunate wounded lay almost helpless, scenes of unmitigated horror were witnessed by the invaders unable to succour, and chiefly intent on their own safety. The famous Imperial Guard stationed in the Kremlin was divided into two sections; one was occupied in struggling against the fire, the other held all in readiness for instant flight. At last the Church of the Trinity caught fire, and whilst the Guard at once set about its destruction, Napoleon, with the King of Naples, Murat, Beauharnais, Berthier and his staff, left the Kremlin hurriedly for the Petrovski Palace. The Tverskaya was ablaze, passage by that way impossible; the party crossed for the Nikitskaya but in the neighbourhood of the Arbat lost their way, and after many adventures and near escapes found the suburbs, and by a roundabout route reached the Palace at nightfall. In many places the fire had burned out by September the 5th, and that night a heavy rain, luckily continued during the next day, stopped the spread of the fire, and on Sunday the 8th, Napoleon returned over the still smouldering embers to his old quarters in the Kremlin. Amidst or near by the cinders of the capital, Napoleon remained for more than a month. The remaining inhabitants suffered great hardships; some fraternised with the French soldiers and helped in quenching fires, but parties accused of incendiarism were still led out almost daily to execution. The French residents were in a most pitiable condition; Napoleon could not or would not do anything for them; they, and the rest of the citizens, with many of the soldiers were soon threatened with starvation.

This campaign more than any other undertaking of his life, reveals the despicable character of Napoleon as a man; even as a commander he seemed to have lost grip of the serious situation of his troops: he, who at one time could never make a mistake now only happened on the right thing by accident, and that rarely. In an impoverished province, amidst a famished population, he could not possibly winter his army, but acted as though he intended to do so. He made stupid speeches respecting the career of Peter the Great; read up the proclamations of Pugatchev, hoping to find in them something which would enable him to incite the people to rebel; tried even to make allies of the Tartars, and failed; at the same time he sent again and again to Alexander professing warm personal friendship and readiness to conclude peace. Alexander heard his overtures with silent contempt. The Russian generals were mercilessly harassing the divisions of the Great Army in the provinces, and armed bands of peasants sought revenge on those invaders who had violated women and children, and desecrated the churches.

On October the 6th, Napoleon decided to begin his retreat on the morrow, and that same evening drew up a scheme for the visit of a Parisian theatrical company to Moscow and its installation there. Of precious metal from the churches of the Kremlin, nearly five tons of silver and four and a half hundredweights of gold had been melted into ingots. The great wooden cross, thirty feet in length, which surmounted Ivan Veliki, had been regilt at great cost but the year before, and the French, thinking it solid gold, threw it down. Like all the crosses, it was of worthless material, but contained a small cross of pure gold, which these disgusted pillagers failed to find.