The Illustrious Dead (22 page)

One of the few instances of mercy came when the Cossacks captured an officer of the Imperial Guard. They immediately stripped him of his fur coat and were about to take his uniform as well when, “to his boundless astonishment,” they stopped, staring at one of the medals pinned to his jacket. Others were summoned, and seeing his awards nodded in confirmation. The Cossacks satisfied themselves with a little money and a few pages from his diary and then let him go. They had mistaken the Hessian Order of Merit for the Tsar’s Order of Vladimir, a highly prized award created by Catherine II in 1782, which featured identically colored ribbons. A bit of silk had saved the man’s life. Even Napoleon feared capture by the peasants. After a close encounter with Cossacks near Maloyaroslavets, he carried a small bag of poison around his neck.

The nights were growing frigid, and men slept around roaring campfires, those farthest from the flames waking with hoarfrost coating their capes and mustaches. Mozhaisk is generally regarded as the turning point, where suffering overwhelmed all human and regimental bonds. The soldiers now barely resembled human beings. Captain Charles François painted a portrait of his mates: “Our heads were hideous, our faces yellow and smoke-begrimed, filthy with the soil of our bivouacs, blackened by the greasy smoke from conifers; eyes hollow, our beards covered with snot and ice.” The sound of corpses being “ground to pieces under the horses’ feet” became the routine music of the retreat, as did the voices of the unfortunate. “On all sides we heard the cries and groans of those who’d fallen and were struggling in the most terrifying death-throes,” wrote one soldier, “dying a thousand times while waiting to die.”

The Imperial Guard’s Sergeant Bourgogne came across a family led by a grizzled soldier and his wife who had lost everything, including two of their children. The wife was sitting in the snow with her dying husband’s head resting in her lap. “She didn’t cry, her grief was beyond that,” he recorded and then passed on. As the mercury plunged even further, to 30 below, in addition to the almost benign sight of typhus victims lying by the road were added more hideous ones: Naked men gathered around a burning hut, the flesh on their backs roasted when they attempted to warm them; men feasted on strips of meat cut from the body of a dead comrade they had cooked over a fire. A newborn child was ripped from her mother’s hands and thrown into the snow. Men staggered into campfires, thinking they would get warm, and were immolated.

On October 29, Napoleon arrived in the town of Gzhatsk, the roads leading to it littered with dead Russian prisoners. These men had been taken by the Grande Armée at Borodino and Moscow and either used to pull wagons or carry enormous packs, or simply treated as traditional POWs. The alternative was letting the captives starve to death. If they had been set free, they would have become spies reporting how desperate, ill-nourished, and ripe for attack the French forces were.

The Grande Armée was strung out along the Smolensk road, with Napoleon traveling quickly at the head of the retreat, followed by the Imperial Guard, Junot’s VIII Corps, III Corps, and Prince Eugène and his IV Corps, with Davout and I Corps bringing up the rear. The route was icy and filled with hollows that the horses slid down and then were unable to climb out of, finally sinking dejectedly into the cold mud at the bottom. This was the signal for the soldiers following the convoy to fall on the animals and slash them with their knives and bayonets, tearing off chunks of flesh to be roasted over open fires. Napoleon, who had begun his career as an artillery officer, insisted that the remaining guns not be abandoned, even though dragging them through pits of mud and up and down icy hills slowed the retreat. He maintained the illusion that he was leading a conquering army instead of a desperate rabble, and so the gunners would find other horses, sometimes unhitched from the officers’ own wagons, and fasten them to the heavy guns. Troops harnessed themselves to the iron pieces and pulled alongside the horses, even as the Cossacks— their cannon loaded onto sleds—lobbed shot onto the roadway.

On October 28, elements from the vanguard had marched past Borodino, where thousands of rotting bodies were still strewn across the field of battle. The Polish officer Heinrich von Brandt noted not only “this cursed place, still covered in corpses” but the mass graves that looked like “an immense flock of giant sheep.” Lieutenant Mailly-Nesle of the 2nd Carabiniers, who was traveling with the imperial staff, passed close enough to see the faces of the cadavers, remarkably preserved. “Almost all had their eyes fixedly open,” he remembered. “Their beards had grown out of all measure for this epoch. And a bricklike and Prussian-blue color, marbling their cheeks, gave them an abominably filthy and messy aspect.” The wounded from the Battle of Borodino who had been installed at the abbey of Kolotskoe “let out lugubrious and heartbreaking screams” or threw themselves at the wheels of the caravans as their comrades passed them by.

There was a spectrum of illnesses and chronic maladies now competing on the return march: acute rheumatism, “lung catarrh” and tuberculosis, enteritis, pneumonia, and even scurvy. Snow blindness caused the men’s eyes to bleed and often led to their wandering off the road. But typhus remained the dominant killer.

The diary of the Belgian surgeon de Kerckhove reads like a report from a plague year. “Typhus strongly advancing. We left behind a huge crowd of sick and dying men…. Typhus and dysentery making the most murderous ravages…. Ney had with him …seventeen thousand sick, wounded, and lonely men.” In the frigid weather, he noticed a new development. Typhus victims who were exposed to very cold temperatures looked fully recovered. All the symptoms seemed to retreat except for dryness of tongue and the zombie-like stupor that marked so many cases. It was only when the sufferer found shelter and a warm fire that “fever appeared violently, along with all the symptoms of the disease.” The men would topple over and die.

Intriguingly, there is strong evidence that the common soldiers suffered a worse fate than officers: many of Napoleon’s top generals and majors escaped the epidemic, and there are anecdotal accounts of officers surviving while their men perished from disease. There are several reasons why this might have been true: The officers had better access to food, lodging, and medical services, which helped them remain healthy. And officers often traveled and slept separately from their men: they had their own carriages and their own tents during bivouacs, meaning that infected lice had far fewer opportunities to find their way into their clothing.

O
N OCTOBER 31, AS HE
reached Viazma, Napoleon was greeted with more bad news. To the north, battles had been ongoing between his Bavarian VI Corps and Russian forces under General Wittgenstein. The duel had spun off into a small, almost separate war. Now the Bavarians had been whittled down by hunger and disease to just 5,000 soldiers and along with II Corps had been pushed out of the city by Wittgenstein in a ferocious battle. The Russians had paid dearly for the victory—12,000 of their soldiers had been killed—while the French had lost only 6,000. But now Wittgenstein was free to descend from the north and cut off the retreat at any number of choke points.

Napoleon was quite literally losing the army itself. Headcounts were disastrously low. “You want to fight,” Marshal Ney told him in exasperation, “yet you have no army!” Napoleon had 40,000 men left. He would pick up more from garrisons and detached forces as he headed west, but they couldn’t come near to replacing the lost soldiers.

Smolensk, as Moscow had before it, now took on an oversize importance in the mind of Napoleon and his men. It was to be their salvation, and the sick and wounded, especially, made “superhuman efforts” to reach it. Napoleon abandoned the idea of a confrontation with Kutuzov and raced toward the city that would harbor the survivors of a rapidly unfolding debacle.

C  H  A  P  T  E  R     15

Graveyard Trees

O
N
J
ULY 8, 1941, THE
F
OURTH
P
ANZER
A
RMY OF THE
T
HIRD
Reich rolled into the town of Borisov, in what was then the Soviet Union. One of its commanders, General Gunther Blumentritt, found himself on the road to Moscow, without a Soviet soldier in sight to oppose his tanks. With some other staff officers, the general strolled down to the banks of the Berezina River and stared meditatively at the surging waters, remembering their history and what had happened here. One of his underlings pointed out something in the clear water, what appeared to be wooden struts sunk below the surface. They puzzled over what the structure could be, until it came to them that these were the remnants of bridges built by Napoleon’s engineers a hundred and thirty years earlier.

A chill must have run down Blumentritt’s back; he knew the story of Napoleon’s campaign. He had been opposed to the invasion of the Soviet Union from the beginning and here was a reminder of a leader far more brilliant than Hitler who had poured out the lifeblood of his army on a nearly identical campaign. Armies had been marching back and forth across these lands for hundreds of years, leaving their detritus—bones, medals, buttons—in layers of soil beneath Blumentritt’s feet.

The path seemed almost fated to destroy armies. One reason was
Rickettsia.
The other was winter.

T
HE BUGBEAR OF
the campaign’s critics, the Russian winter, arrived in force on November 6. Soldiers noticing a change in the quality of light tilted their faces to the sky and found it changing from cerulean blue to menacing gray-black as a cold mist swept in from the marshes. The mist grew thicker and suddenly snowflakes were falling, at first lightly and then in driving sheets. The carts bogged down in the wet snow and the landscape changed, the hollows soon covered by deep drifts. Men wandered off the road and fell through the crisp white surface and were lost. The icy wind picked up and drove the snow horizontally, until the men had to turn and march backward, their thin uniforms freezing on their bodies from sweat and melted snow. Many of the soldiers were still dressed in light summer trousers, with no gloves to protect their hands and shoes that were falling apart.

Landscape became destiny. Writer after writer in their memoirs recalled the bleak, elemental scenery against which the disaster unfolded, as if designed for the purpose. The historian Ségur saw the snow as “an immense winding sheet” slowly enveloping the army, while Captain Eugène Labaume of IV Corps wrote that “the farther we advanced the more the earth seemed to be in mourning.” Other soldiers used to the well-cultivated French countryside, where one always seemed to find evidence of humankind’s hand or a tolerant nature, remarked on how the world itself seemed drained of color and life, a bled-out corpse. Snow covered the ground in drifts whose distance it was impossible to gauge, the line between earth and sky disappeared, the line of sight pierced only by black-trunked firs, which the men called “graveyard trees.” The last touch was the swarms of crows circling overhead, swooping down to feast on fallen men, staining the snow with blood flecked from their beaks.

With the snows came the end of command structure for many of the men on the Smolensk road. Many never received an order after November 6; for all intents and purposes, they were no longer members of an army but individuals trying to return home on their own. Carbines lined the route, tossed away by soldiers who couldn’t bother to carry them anymore. “A great number of sick or wounded or men too feeble to keep up with their units are just throwing away first their packs, then their muskets,” reported Césare de Laugier, an adjutant major with IV Corps. Doctors were rarely sighted and food wagons and depots were raided by the troops in the advance guard, leaving nothing for the rest. Men shot and smothered each other for food, stole at will, and even impersonated Russians, calling out the Cossack war cry of “Hurrah!” to scare competitors away from homes that might contain a bit of grain or the promise of shelter for a night.

This became the iconic image of the 1812 campaign: ragged soldiers wandering through the snowy wastes of the Russian hinterland. But by the time winter arrived, Napoleon had lost 85 percent of his frontline soldiers. The snow would cover a multitude of sins and mistakes; it was a white mantle drawn over the final act of a tragedy. The retreat now had as much in common with disastrous expeditions such as Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic adventure as it did a military exploit. Ice, hypothermia, starvation, and disease stalked the men; at times, the enemy was an afterthought.

The other piece of bad news that arrived with the blast of arctic air was a bulletin from Paris. There had been a coup attempt led by a half-mad general and ex-governor of Rome named Claude de Malet. He and a coterie of republicans had attempted to seize control of the government in a coup that often resembled opéra bouffe. He had managed only to arrest two of Napoleon’s ministers and the prefect of police before being himself clapped in chains, but the rumors of the emperor’s death that were regularly sweeping through Paris and letters home from soldiers detailing the unfolding disaster had given the conspirators enough momentum to challenge Napoleon’s rule.

The ditches beside the Smolensk road began to fill with the booty of Moscow. Men desperate to reduce the amount of calories they were burning tossed away the things that once were going to ensure a comfortable retirement. Along the road one saw silver candelabra, gold crucifixes, the
Complete Works of Voltaire
bound in Moroccan leather, wall hangings laced with silver thread, “cases filled with diamonds or rolls of ducats.” Carts and droshkies stuffed to the roof with swag were abandoned or pushed off the road by military police to speed up the march. Lieutenant Nicolas-Louis Planat de la Faye recalled one sutler’s wagon being overturned, out of which a beautiful set of books and a magnificent harp spilled out, “to a great burst of laughter from all present.” The enormous harp had represented the lifestyle the men had expected to sink into once they reached home; now, tumbling into a snowbank, it was a token of present realities. An even more outrageous artifact was lost by Davout when his wagon was commandeered by a band of Cossacks. Tucked inside was a map of India, which had been a possible next stop after the conquest of Moscow.

The men were thin from hunger. They slept rough in the open air or built flimsy huts made of sticks and tree branches. They marched like automatons, the tips of their noses growing marble white with frostbite. “We resemble our lackeys,” wrote the novelist Stendhal, an officer in the commissariat, who was still among the luckiest men on the retreat, having preserved his carriage. “We are far removed from Parisian elegance.” And they had donned whatever relic of the Moscow bazaar they had left. Gaunt soldiers wore silk dresses over their uniforms; fur capes and throws; chartreuse, lilac, or white satin capes. “If the circumstances hadn’t been so sad,” wrote Louise Fusil, a famous French actress who had fled her Moscow theater, laughter would have greeted the sight of an “old grenadier, with his mustache and bearskin, covered in a pink satin fur.” Some wore remnants of carpets stolen from glossy Muscovite floors. Many of the greatcoats were singed by the campfires or sported black-edged holes where embers had fallen on sleeping soldiers and burned through.

Soldiers who had only weeks before been eating caviar and reclining on fur cloaks in Moscow were now turned into omnivores, “starving lunatics.” Everything went into the cooking pot. One colonel had managed to corral eighty head of cattle and his regiment marched with them and butchered them as needed, but the vast majority of the troops were reduced to a meager diet consisting of anything that fell into their path: Russian dogs, the native white bears, cats, rock-hard cabbages and roots, leather dipped in water to soften it, even human flesh. The men ate their own fingers that had been amputated because of frostbite, and drank their own blood. Horse meat was the staple, and sometimes men who had no knives and whose hands had become frozen solid would kneel at the side of a fallen steed and tear at the flesh with their teeth “like famished wolves.”

“I have never suffered so much,” Dr. Larrey wrote his wife. “The campaigns in Egypt and Spain were nothing when compared to this one; and we are by no means at the end of our troubles.” As he approached a small town late in November, the Russian partisan leader Denis Davidov saw “mountains of dead men and horses …piles of enemy soldiers, barely alive, lay in the snow or sought shelter in the carts.” One could hear the impact as the runners of his sleigh snapped arm bones and crushed the skulls of the French lying in the road. Later, wagoners would stuff corpses into ruts and potholes in the road, paving the road with carcasses. The dead were used as tables, chairs, road-building material, and insulation. Doctors stuffed cadavers into cracks in hospital walls and across windows whose panes were broken, to keep out the wind.

The only things that seemed to thrive in the subfreezing temperatures were lice. As the temperatures plunged, the parasites burrowed closer to the skin, invading the armpits and the groin, and then emerging at night by the thousands. “As long as we were out in the cold and walking, nothing stirred,” wrote one lieutenant, Karl von Suckow, “but in the evening, when we huddled round the campfires life would return to these insects which would then inflict intolerable tortures on us.” The body louse was demonstrating what a brilliant choice
Rickettsia
had made in selecting it as a vector. It was able to thrive when even the famously hardy black rat would have perished.

After a soldier died, the parasite had three and a half days (the longest a louse can survive without feeding) to find another host. The fact that fellow soldiers and Cossacks stripped dead men for their clothes, providing a fresh meal for the louse, meant that it was one of the creatures on the retreat best equipped to survive the intense cold.

R
EMARKABLY, FEW OF THE
soldiers cursed Napoleon for the situation they now found themselves in. Cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” were now rarely heard, but the luster earned at Austerlitz still held. “No one among us dreamed of reproaching him for our setbacks,” wrote Captain François Dumonceau of the 2nd Guard Lancers, “and in our eyes he still retained the prestige of a supreme arbiter.”

One can only marvel at the generosity of the soldiers. It wasn’t so much the hazy political motives behind the Russian invasion or the dead left scattered all over the line of march that gives rise to a suspicion that Napoleon had broken faith with his troops. Members of the Grande Armée weren’t primarily concerned with whether wars were just or unjust, whether the empire was truly threatened by Alexander or not. They didn’t evaluate the worth of their sacrifice by the political goals of the campaign. It was in the fighting itself, in the personal camaraderie and the opportunity to perform heroically that they sought meaning and even joy, and in this arena Napoleon had always been exemplary: He maneuvered his soldiers brilliantly for victory, rewarded valor with immediate promotions, and fought close to his men, consumed by the intricacies of the battle, his body and spirit given over to the engagement. His men were content, even proud, to starve and suffer and march hundreds of miles over impossible terrain to die in legendary battles for a man like that. But in Russia, he had been intellectually lazy, negligent in the basic things that allowed the men to get to the battlefield for their chance at honor, and instead had allowed them to die ingloriously of cold, want, and
Rickettsia
, the afflictions of criminals. And yet most of the men never abandoned their idea of him as a great commander.

On November 9, Napoleon entered Smolensk, now covered in layers of snow. He had expected his commissariat to have assembled enough supplies here to last for months, giving him the option of wintering in the city while receiving reinforcements from Paris and his allies. But he found that the enormous stores that had been stockpiled in the city had been eaten away by the stragglers left behind on the advance, by the 15,000 sick and wounded who had been installed in the city’s bursting hospitals, and by reinforcements on their way to Moscow. Cattle had died on the way, caravans had been intercepted, and the surrounding countryside hadn’t yielded nearly as much wheat and beef as Napoleon had estimated it would. In short, there were enough supplies at Smolensk for a brief break in the march, but nowhere near enough to sustain an army for an entire season.

More bad news arrived at a dizzying pace: An infantry brigade filled with new reinforcements from France had been intercepted on the Medyn road and forced to surrender. Vitebsk, where another massive supply of food had been directed, had fallen to the Russians. When Berthier, Napoleon’s chief of staff, heard the news, he muttered over and over again, “Not possible, not possible.”