The Illustrious Dead (19 page)

Napoleon entered the city on September 15 and set up headquarters at the Kremlin. Buoyed by the sight of the Romanov throne and the cross of Ivan the Great, he sat down to write Alexander a peace proposal. But soon news of the fire overwhelmed everything. Dr. Larrey watched the flames sweep toward the Kremlin. “It [would be] difficult, under any circumstances whatever, to present to the eye a more horrific spectacle than that, which it was so melancholy to behold…. The flames, driven in all directions, and propelled by the violence of the winds, were accompanied, in their ascent and rapid progress, by an awful hissing sound and dreadful detonations, resulting from the combustion of powder, salt-petre, oil, resin, and brandy, with which the great part of the houses and shops were filled.” Wooden houses caught fire, and the heat was so intense that beams of fir shot from the structures and set alight buildings several streets away.

The emperor rose from his desk and watched the city burn. To him, the blaze was a symbol of the utter foreignness of the Russian mind. “It was the most grand, the most sublime, and the most terrific sight the world ever beheld!” he would later write. Torching one’s own capital was something no Frenchman, not even Napoleon, could imagine; it was outside their psychological reach. The fact that the Russians had dared to do it elicited a certain horrified respect.

The sparks from the fire fell on the exteriors and roofs of nearby houses and began to smolder while the buildings’ contents were being systematically looted from inside. The pillaging had become frenzied. Thousands of men prowled the streets brandishing Turkish scimitars inside their leather belts or sporting enormous fur hats or bits of Tartar costume. Great heaps of swag made their appearance: a jewel-encrusted spittoon from a prince’s palace, silver candlesticks and icons from the local churches, silk Persian shawls threaded with gold, bracelets thick with emeralds and diamonds, enormous rugs and even embroidered armchairs from the finest salons found their way to the impromptu markets that had sprung up and bartering was soon under way.

On the morning of September 16, the fires began to approach the Kremlin walls. Sparks and burning cinders floated in from the burning districts and landed on the roof of the apartments where Napoleon was staying. The heat pressed against the building until the windowpanes were hot to the touch. Napoleon was uncharacteristically agitated by the inferno, pacing frantically, throwing himself down in an armchair and then springing up to look at the flames again. The fire was no longer “the most sublime …sight” in the world but a threat to his future. When a Moscow police officer who had set the nearby arsenal tower ablaze was interrogated, Napoleon learned that the Kremlin had been targeted for destruction, another indication of Russian resolve. “He was extremely restless,” remembered the Italian general Rossetti, “his gestures short and vehement revealed a cruel distress. He ran at every moment to the windows to observe the progress of the fire. Finally, abrupt and brief exclamations escaped from his overburdened heart: ‘What a frightful sight! They did it to themselves. So many palaces! They are Scythians …’” Napoleon’s staff and his marshals begged him to leave, but he was fixed to the spot.

The fire was now so close that its roar deafened them and the superheated air scorched their faces and lungs. Furious and despairing, Napoleon fled with his staff. Breathing in the ashes, they found the exit blocked by “an ocean of fire” and turned down a narrow passage that enabled them to escape from the golden walls. The conflagration had swept around the Kremlin, engulfing the streets around it. Houses imploded in showers of hot sparks, ceilings and floors collapsed inside the burning facades, and sheets of the metal facing and roofing bounced off the streets. “The flames that were noisily consuming the buildings on both sides of the street rose high above the roofs and were caught by the wind and curled down over our heads,” remembered the general and historian Ségur. “Thus we were walking on a floor of fire, under a sky of fire, between walls of fire.” Finally, the imperial party came across some soldiers pillaging nearby buildings before the fires could claim them, and the looters led them to safety.

The realization that it was “wild-looking women and men in rags with hideous faces” and Russian policemen who had initiated the blaze was a relief to the marshals, who had originally suspected their own troops of starting the fires. But for Napoleon, it was the thing that tipped him into blazing anger and then depression. People who would burn their own city to the ground were clearly not prepared to negotiate. “This forbodes great misfortune for us!” he said while watching the fires burn on September 17 from the safety of the Petrovskie Palace. There would be no delegation of nobles knocking at his door.

The fire raged through the night of the 16th and into the 17th, so bright that it was said one could read a book five miles from Moscow by the light of the flames. Finally, on the 18th, the inferno subsided and Napoleon made his way back to the Kremlin. The four days since they had first looked down on the unearthly city had transformed it utterly: from an Eastern masterpiece of gold turrets and centuries-old wealth to a burned-out, blackened shell where everything and everyone was covered with soot and mud.

T
HERE WERE A VARIETY
of options open to Napoleon at this point: Leave a strong garrison in Moscow and march north toward St. Petersburg to storm the seat of Russian government, freeing the serfs along the route to bring added pressure down on Alexander. Head southwest and confront Kutuzov once again in hopes of demolishing his army, and take the famous arsenal and munitions factories of Tula, near where the Russian army was now positioned. Winter in Moscow and prepare for a spring campaign. Retreat.

Crucial to any offensive plans were the reinforcements pushing across the Moscow road, which should have bolstered the Grande Armée’s strength. But many of them were shirkers, deserters pressed back into the ranks and men marking time until they could make their way back home. And a great many of them were sick.
Rickettsia
fell on the fresh troops as a fire would on old wood. It was now raging out of control. In Moscow’s Foundling Hospital, which had been turned into a sick ward for officers, 40 of the 45 patients died from typhus. Later, during the withdrawal, a contingent of 10,000 German reinforcements joined the main body of troops, only to be infected. Some 3,000 of them died on the return. “Want, sickness, and an enraged peasantry inflicted terrible reprisals and caused a daily fearful reduction of numbers,” wrote Sir Robert Wilson, the British mercenary attached to the Russian imperial staff. “Which successive reinforcements could not adequately meet and replace.” The 6th Chasseurs were an extreme example. They received a contingent of 250 reinforcements from northern Italy, but not a single one of the new men would survive the war. The troops who had been on the campaign from the start and had survived cases of typhus had developed immunity to the disease, but the new recruits had no defenses in their bloodstream to protect them from the pathogen.

The sudden availability of food and decent housing would seem to have held out the promise of better health for the Grande Armée, but the field doctor de Kerckhove reported differently. “During our first days in Moscow,” he wrote, “we observed how harmful it is for health to change physical conditions suddenly…. Typhus and dysentery were very strong within our ranks.” And according to Ebstein, typhus “ripped into” the army at Moscow, at times so intense that it exhibited a “plague-like character.”

A
S HE DEBATED
his next move, the emperor was fast drawing new victims into an epidemiological tempest. In Moscow, although the troops were well fed, the hospitals were packed with victims of typhus, “slow fever,” and diarrhea. “Thousands of sick soldiers took refuge in gutted houses,” reported de Kerckhove. “And many of the big buildings that didn’t burn were turned into hospitals.” Convoys of sick arrived from the units along the route of march and the men were carried into whatever domicile had a space available on the floor.

The diseases awakened by the war had by now spread to the Russian troops and villagers. The partisan leader Denis Davidov met a peasant named Theodore from the town of Tsarevo who left his wife and children hiding in the forest to fight against the French. When he returned two years later to look up his comrade, Davidov found he had died “from contagion, along with many other people who had sought refuge in the woods during the hostilities.” Davidov never identifies the epidemic, and one can never rule out a local, unreported bout of a different illness, but typhus has to be a leading contender.

As for the army, exact numbers are contested, with some authors arguing that Kutuzov’s ranks were only lightly touched by the epidemic. One report detailing casualties between October 20 and December 14 specified that of the 61,964 men missing from the ranks, 48,335 were sick in military hospitals with typhus, and few of those survived. “In 45 days,” writes Bernhardy, “three-fifths of Kutuzov’s army perished.” There was certainly disease in the ranks. Carl von Clausewitz, the strategist attached to the imperial staff, referred to the Russian army in November and December as “decimated by sickness,” and the army melting away in Kutuzov’s hands.

Even though they fought only one major engagement with the French, the Russians lost half their effective troops between Tarutino and the army camps south of Smolensk. Only the fact that he was being constantly reinforced saved Kutuzov from mirroring Napoleon’s fate.

C  H  A  P  T  E  R     13

Decision

A
LEXANDER WAS SHATTERED BY THE NEWS OF WHAT HAD
happened in Moscow. On September 20 came the overdue letter from Kutuzov, which confirmed the handover of the city to the French, and added news of the fires that had engulfed the capital. Despite his horror, he sent Kutuzov’s messenger back to the commander with a message of defiance, swearing that even if every soldier was to be killed, he would organize a citizens’ army of nobles and serfs and march to meet the Grande Armée. In St. Petersburg, the tsar issued a proclamation in which he admitted what the nation already knew: Moscow had been surrendered to the “haughty destroyer of kingdoms.” He called on Russians to redouble their efforts to expel Napoleon and make Moscow a tomb. And he mocked the remnants of the Grande Armée. “Look at the condition of this enemy,” he wrote. “He entered Russia at the head of more than three hundred thousand men, but…half the army is destroyed by Russian valour, by desertion, by want of discipline, by sickness and hunger!”

In the days before Napoleon had entered Moscow, according to General Baron de Marbot, the Cossacks had captured 100 sick French troops, who had been sent to Moscow for treatment. Instead, Governor Rostopchin had paraded them through the city streets, where some of the prisoners had collapsed and died on the spot. As they lay on the pavement, Russian policemen read out a proclamation from the mayor claiming that the entire Grande Armée was as weak and disease-ridden as these pathetic men. As despicable as the gesture was, General de Marbot acknowledged that “our strength diminished daily owing to sickness and the increasing cold.”

Kutuzov ordered a new call-up and men as old as seventy joined the ranks. His devastated units were quickly replenished. In one month, the Russian army had added over 48,000 troops to the 40,000 who had escaped Borodino alive.

Rage at the loss of the capital and the lies told by the tsar’s propaganda machine began to bubble to the surface in St. Petersburg. The Council of Ministers took the unprecedented step of demanding a full accounting of Kutuzov’s decisions, beginning with the sketchy and often inaccurate communiqués that declared victory, only to be followed by reports from other sources of huge losses and retreats. These nobles were simply vocalizing the whispers from the streets and drawing rooms: How could Borodino have been a victory if it had led to the destruction of Moscow?

Napoleon, too, kept a steady stream of cheerful news flowing back to Paris in the famous Bulletins—war dispatches sent under the emperor’s name—packing them with staccato accounts of French victories and Russian weakness. But, unlike Frenchmen 1,500 miles away, the Russian people could see and hear evidence that contradicted their leaders’ rosy visions.

Napoleon’s hope—that Alexander would be dethroned— became for the first time a hotly debated topic. The loss of Moscow convinced many of the ambassadors and foreign observers resident in St. Petersburg that a treaty with Napoleon was inevitable, and they had their counterparts within the Russian nobility. The “French party” counted among its members Alexander’s tempestuous brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, who had for years been an appeaser when it came to Napoleon. After the Battle of Preussisch-Eylau in 1807, Constantine had screamed at Alexander: “If you do not wish to make peace with France, then give a loaded pistol to each of your soldiers and ask them to blow their brains out!” He had warned that antagonizing the emperor would inevitably result in an invasion of Russia by an army “trained for battle and always victorious.” Constantine, an inveterate schemer, had changed sides after the Battle of Smolensk and pushed for a to-the-death battle with the French, but now the burning of Moscow had convinced him that Napoleon was indeed unstoppable. Many others agreed.

Quietly, the same early signals that had forecast the arrival of the Grande Armée at Moscow’s gates began to be seen in St. Petersburg. Carts and wagons were seen at the entrances to the finest mansions, being loaded with trunks filled with silk dressing gowns and fine china. Mansions, libraries, and archives holding the nation’s treasures were slowly emptied of their paintings; anyone looking through the nearly 2,000 windows of Catherine the Great’s Hermitage Palace would have seen empty spaces where the Titians and Raphaels had hung, the masterpieces now packed up and heading north on barges. The glittering nightlife of the capital, the banquets and soirees attended by counts and foreign diplomats, went dark. Those without connections were left to wonder about the strange happenings in their city and to stew in their own anxiety.

As the tension escalated, the neurotic Alexander even began to feel that he might follow in his murdered father’s footsteps. When the anniversary of his coronation arrived, the tsar’s coterie strongly urged him to abandon his plans for arriving at Kazan Cathedral on horseback, something he had always done, and instead suggested the safer confines of the empress’s carriage. Alexander heeded their advice. One noblewoman who was part of the procession to the cathedral remembered the sullen, silent faces of the men and women arrayed along the streets, so different from the usual cheering crowds that had promised Alexander they would die for him. “One could have heard the sound of our footsteps,” wrote Mademoiselle Stourdza, “and I have never doubted that one spark would have been enough, at that moment, to produce a general conflagration.” When she looked over at the anxious face of Alexander, she felt her knees start to give way.

Even the tsar’s own sister chastised him for the loss of Moscow. “It is not just one class that is blaming you,” she wrote him, “but all of them together.” Alexander became so concerned by the change in the people’s mood that he had the police arrest anyone caught spreading rumors about the invincibility of Napoleon or the coming abandonment of St. Petersburg.

Kutuzov kept up a stream of optimistic dispatches, writing the tsar that he was rebuilding the army and keeping watch on Napoleon. “I have taken my stand on the flank of the enemy’s long line of operation, holding it blocked by my detachments. From here I can keep an eye on their movements, protect the resources of the empire, and reform my army.” Alexander no longer trusted the upbeat missives of his commander, and Rostopchin gave him ample reason for doubt: he reported that the army had dissolved into a brawling, drunken mass of thieves and murderers who were preying on the local peasants.

N
APOLEON SPENT
his leisure hours assiduously reading Voltaire’s history of Charles XII’s disastrous invasion of Russia in 1708. The Swedish invader had chosen the coldest winter in living memory to take on his Slavic neighbor; for months, temperatures plunged so low that in the Nordic countries elks were found frozen to death standing in the fields and in Venice the canals were rimed with ice. But the deadly weather that spelled doom for Charles hadn’t arrived until December, and now, as Napoleon waited for a response from Alexander, the air was practically balmy. He joked that Moscow was warmer than Fontainebleau.

Awaiting the emperor’s decision, the French spent their days in a strange holiday in the burned-out shell of a city. It was a grotesque scene:

At every step one trod on dead and scorched people, and the corpses of incendiaries hung from many half-burnt trees. Amid all this horror one could see the wretched inhabitants, who had come back and had no roof over their heads, collecting iron or lead which had once covered the roofs of palaces…. They did this so as to build huts …and they stilled their pangs of hunger with raw vegetables which our soldiers had overlooked.

The soldiers spent their days scrounging for swag, gambling, brawling, robbing peasants who came in from the countryside to sell their produce, and recovering from the rigors of the march. They whored with girls from decent families who had been somehow left behind and who sold their bodies out of sheer hunger. These freshly minted prostitutes took over the mansions of families who had fled, wearing the fine clothing they found, accepting stolen silver baubles and expensive dresses looted from homes down the block. The men slept on altar cloths from the Orthodox churches and drank punch out of porcelain china. The city was lit at night by enormous watch fires in the middle of once elegant avenues, around which the French par-tied and gossiped. Meanwhile, Muscovites cut strips of flesh from the corpses of horses and even dived to the bottom of the Moskva River to retrieve handfuls of the wheat dumped there by retreating Russian forces.

Few soldiers or officers did anything to prepare for the approaching winter. A few caches of furs were found and men could be seen parading through the blackened streets in the latest foxes and minks—men’s or women’s, it didn’t matter—and some enterprising troops had new boots made up out of bearskin. But mass preparations (acquiring heavy winter clothing, reshoeing the remaining horses for icy roads) were largely left for another day. “Nothing was done to guard against the rigors of winter,” confirmed Labaume. Caulaincourt called it a time of “dreaming dreams.” Napoleon quietly acknowledged that his gambit for a quick peace treaty had failed, and he admitted to his intimate advisers that his former enemies, the Austrian and Prussian troops, now forming the rear guard and directly in the line of any retreat, could be easily turned into fresh adversaries “if we met with the slightest reverse.” As in Paris before the invasion, he delayed and delayed and hoped for the best. But days passed without any response to the peace proposal the emperor had sent to Alexander before the firebugs torched the capital.

T
HE LULL IN HOSTILITIES
was broken on September 21. Pressed by his advisers and determined to reenergize his troops’ morale, Kutuzov had turned west on the 16th, onto the road to Tula, the center of the firearms industry. He reached Podolsk, a town along that road, on the 18th. The maneuver was completed under the eyes of a complacent Murat, who had been sending Napoleon reports of the Russian army’s deteriorating condition (when in fact it was gaining men and supplies on a daily basis) and even claimed that the Cossacks were amenable to changing sides and fighting under his banner. Instead, Kutuzov had maneuvered himself to a strong position to jab at Napoleon’s rear guard and strike at his connections to Paris.

The Russians now began to utilize hit-and-run tactics, probing and harassing the outlying French units and communication lines. Cavalry units struck the Moscow-Smolensk road to disrupt Napoleon’s famously efficient couriers, who could do the 1,500 miles of the Paris-Moscow run in an astonishing fourteen days. Supply caravans were attacked as well; a train of munitions wagons was hit outside Moscow and fifteen caissons were wrecked and 200 horses stolen. On September 24, Cossacks and regular troops clashed with 150 French dragoons and cut the key road completely. The major in charge of the dragoons was taken prisoner, along with some of his officers and men. “All certain communication with France was cut off,” the ex-ambassador Caulaincourt noted. “Vilna, Warsaw, Mayence, Paris were no longer in daily receipt of their orders from the Sovereign of the Grand Empire.” Napoleon was in the habit of pouncing on dispatches from his far-flung holdings, and the loss of communications frustrated him intensely. The mail line was soon reestablished, but it was clear Kutuzov had learned how to fight while rebuilding his forces.

As winter approached, Napoleon stirred. On October 3, he presented his marshals with a bold plan: a joint force consisting of four divisions from IX Corps, now garrisoned at Smolensk, and an attack force led by Napoleon departing out of Moscow would converge north of Vitebsk, smash into Kutuzov’s forces (which he contemptuously numbered at around 32,000, when the real figure was tens of thousands higher), and then head north to take Novgorod on their way to the gates of St. Petersburg. The audacity of the plan, of putting the spear point to the administrative heart of Alexander’s empire, excited Napoleon enormously.

After his stepson Prince Eugène read out the details of the plan, the emperor turned his eyes toward his marshals, who were sitting in what must have been shock at the news. “What?!” he cried. “You, you are not inflamed by this idea? Has there ever been a greater military exploit?!” Napoleon taunted them with the idea of capturing the two great northern capitals in the span of three months. Again, he was thinking in terms of places such as Austerlitz, of exploits to be emblazoned on a monument. It was as if he couldn’t conceive of the dirty war of attrition he was now engaged in.

The counterarguments were obvious, and the generals made them. Winter was coming; the terrain was difficult and supplies for men and horses couldn’t be guaranteed. Even if they did take St. Petersburg, there would be no guarantee of a Russian surrender, and the army would be stranded even farther from home than it was now.

Napoleon called Caulaincourt and informed him he was sending the diplomat to St. Petersburg with another proposal for ending the war, his second try at peace while in Moscow. Caulaincourt forcefully declined. “These overtures will be useless,” he told Napoleon. The weather and the condition of the Grande Armée were turning to Russia’s advantage. Napoleon dismissed him and pushed the mission on the Marquis de Lauriston, Caulaincourt’s replacement as ambassador to Russia. He sent him off with a manic last few words: “I want peace, I must have peace, I want it absolutely!” Lauriston sped toward Kutuzov’s camp for permission to proceed but was turned away.