When the time came for Napoleon to leave Moscow he was unwilling that any should know his intention. “Perhaps I shall return to Moscow,” he said to one of his company, but as he had already given orders to Lariboisiere, the chief of artillery, to destroy the Kremlin, he doubtless, better than anyone else, knew that this could not be. Napoleon thought to destroy everything of value left standing in the town; walls, towers, palaces, churches, convents, monasteries—all were ruined. “The defeat of Murat at Tarutin forced Napoleon to hurry away earlier than he intended, and to Marshal Mortier was left the task of destruction. He having made the requisite preparations left during the night of the 11-12th October, and, not far from Fili, gave the signal by cannon for the firing of the mines. It was a terrible explosion in the darkness and stillness of night; it killed some and wounded many, and was followed quickly by minor explosions at different points.”
Napoleon failed even in this attempt; the damage done was trifling—the tower over the Nikolski Gate fell, so did one at the corner of the Kremlin wall. There were breaches here and there, but churches and other buildings remained intact. It is said that the heavy rain destroyed the trains of gunpowder to the mines, from which subsequently sixty tons of the explosive were taken. Fesanzac states Mortier intentionally used powder of bad quality, not wishing to destroy the buildings; it is more probable that he used the best he could get and that the director of artillery was unwilling to waste serviceable munitions of war he might require later.
The story of the retreat of the Grande Armée is well known and need not be recapitulated here. If the French and their allies suffered, the peasants also endured terrible hardships. Shot down for defending the honour of their wives and daughters; for protecting their property; for refusing to honour the false hundred rouble notes Napoleon had ordered to be printed in order to reward his soldiers; on any and every other pretence whatever, they yet accomplished a terrible revenge, harassing the invaders to the last. The French slew and destroyed; wrecked old walls, desecrated churches, and in sheer spite threw the spoil they could not carry further into the rivers and lakes. Wilson urged Kutuzov to engage the refugees, whom he termed ghosts roaming too far from their graves, but Kutuzov trusted to the cold and the distance to wear out the remnant of the great army. He underestimated the powers of human endurance, some 70,000 escaped of the half million or more that had invaded Russia. Napoleon, that “incomparable military genius,” does not appear on this occasion to have possessed the astuteness even of the mediæval Tartar Khans, who on their invasions withdrew “without ostensible cause” at the end of the season. More selfish than they, he saved himself by deserting his men. They died like flies on the approach of winter; some were burned during their sleep by outraged peasants; more were slipped through holes in the ice; many reached Vilna only to be entrapped by the Russian soldiers, or, if still more unfortunate, tossed from the upper windows of the Ghetto and kicked to death by old polish Jewesses in the streets. Piteous? Yes, but it is the pity one feels for the burglarious murderer who falls on the spikes of the area railings. The invasion of the twenty nations had even such inglorious ending; its effect upon the Muscovites was similar to that which followed a great Tartar raid; it was unexpected—disastrous, and, as long as remembered, engendered in the Russ that same distrust of the west it had previously entertained of the east.
In Moscow there are now few traces of the French invasion, for its effect was general rather than particular. The palace occupied by Napoleon has been destroyed; in its place the Tsar Nicholas built his new Imperial residence, from the windows of which may still be seen the old Borovitski Gate, by which Napoleon first entered and last left the Kremlin. Beyond that gate there is now an immense and stately pile, the magnificent new Cathedral of Our Saviour, built by the people in gratitude for their deliverance from the invaders. A monument that furnishes conclusive evidence that the spirit of earnestness which actuated the old cathedral builders is not yet extinct in Russia.
One other memorial of the times will attract the attention of visitors to the Kremlin: arranged along the front of the arsenal, opposite the Senate House, are ranged the cannon captured from, or abandoned by, the Grande Armée. The inscriptions, one in French the other in Russian, on the plates to the
