The Illustrious Dead (9 page)

A second earlier these poor victims of battle had advanced with fixed bayonets and pale faces. Now most of them lay dead or mutilated. Another column soon advanced and, with a hail of bullets, avenged the death of their comrades. Many of our artillerymen were shot.

By that afternoon, Napoleon knew that he wouldn’t get his battle in open ground and ordered the entire front line of his forces to take the city. Two hundred guns erupted into a thunderous barrage, and three corps of troops—under Ney, Davout, and Poniatowski— went shouting toward the walls and their three gates, their peacock uniforms visible for everyone to see.

The topology of Smolensk forms a natural amphitheater, with the action centered between the feet of two facing slopes, as if on a stage. Workers from the Grande Armée’s baggage trains came up to watch the action, calling out to units in danger below their feet and crying “Bravo!” at small acts of bravery. The regimental bands— made up of one piccolo, one high clarinet, sixteen clarinets, two trumpets, one bass trumpet, four bassoons, two military serpents (a distant and fantastically shaped ancestor of the tuba), four horns, three trombones, two snare drums, one bass drum, one triangle, and two pairs of cymbals—played their martial tunes at maximum volume, and observers on the rim of the bowl could hear snatches of the music between the cannon volleys, with the trumpeters playing flourishes and the drummers hoisting their instruments high into the air.

The cavalry moved first, charging at the Russian dragoons and killing scores of them before the remainder fled in panic. The French infantry fell on the troops holding the suburbs and then pushed their way toward the fortress walls. The action was unusually close and vicious. The Russian soldiers seemed to be enraged, and officers had to beat them back with the flat of their swords to stop them from breaking ranks and charging at the enemy without orders.

Stabbing upward with their bayonets and picking off defenders at close range, the French troops marched relentlessly up the far bank. “The drums beat the attack,” remembered one soldier from the 7th Light Infantry. “And everyone dashes forward at the double, driving everything before him.” After three hours of exhausting combat, the French pushed the enemy back to the fortress wall, repelling ferocious counterattacks along the way. Over their heads arched round after round of artillery fire, their trails glowing in the darkening sky, while the Russians lobbed projectiles into the French battalions. One cannonball blasted at the flank of an advancing regiment smashed through the line, killing 22 men.

When the French troops reached the walls, many of the defenders dashed inside. “Everything which doesn’t make haste to follow suit perishes,” reported Captain Karl von Suckow. “Even so, our columns, in mounting to this assault, have left behind them a long broad trail of blood….” The foot of the fortifications became a slaughterhouse, with men slashing at each other with bayonets and French soldiers climbing on top of one another’s shoulders, attempting in vain to gain a hold on the ancient walls. But once they cleared the battlements of enemy troops, stalemate. The French had no ladders to climb the bulwark and no information from spies as to where the breaches and weak points were.

As nightfall approached, the guns on both sides fell silent. The soldiers panted for breath at the foot of the brick fortifications. Startled by the sudden silence, they looked around in wonder, then began to hear through the forty-foot-thick walls the sound of crackling wood. The city was in flames.

The wooden homes of Smolensk had caught fire from the constant shelling and were now burning out of control. The orange flames threw into silhouette the inhabitants searching desperately for shelter and the Russian soldiers rushing up to the walls to repel the latest charge as chunks of the brick wall crumbled and slammed to the ground. Unable to sleep, at two in the morning Caulaincourt was watching the conflagration and listening to its dull roar when a hand slapped him on the shoulder. He found Napoleon next to him, apparently invigorated by the spectacle. “An eruption of Vesuvius!” he cried. “Isn’t that a fine sight?” The diplomat, horrified by the carnage in service of no strategic aim, replied, “Horrible, Sire.” Napoleon waved his hand. “Remember the words of a Roman emperor: ‘A dead enemy always smells sweet.’” He felt victory was near.

Surrounded by hills and open to bombardment, Smolensk wasn’t defensible in the long term, and Barclay, as clear-sighted as ever, knew it. Once he had secured the road to Moscow late on the night of August 17, the Russian commander began shuttling troops out of the city. He wanted to initiate the retreat before Napoleon did the obvious and crossed the Dnieper, cutting off his escape route. With the city’s famous icon placed on a gun carriage and the remaining structures and provisions inside the walls fired by the departing troops, the Russians made their exit. At the point that the armies broke off contact, the French had lost 19,000 men; the Russians, 14,000, including two generals.

The retreat caused a firestorm among the Russian command. Generals rushed up to Barclay and shouted that Smolensk must be defended to the last man. “You German, you sausage-maker, you traitor, you scoundrel, you are selling Russia,” Count Levin August von Benningsen taunted him in one memorable sally that reflected the common soldiers’ distrust of Barclay. But the general, correctly, refused to sacrifice his army for a point of pride and ordered the retreat to continue.

Bagration was beside himself with fury and helplessness. “It is painful and sad and the entire army is in despair, because they gave up the most dangerous place and all for nothing,” he wrote a friend. “Barclay is irresolute, cowardly, senseless, and slow …the army weeps and curses him to death.”

Smolensk’s remaining wooden structures burned over the shoulders of the retreating Russians. “The flames became more intense,” remembered the illustrator and soldier Christian Wilhelm von Faber du Faur, watching from the French side “forming a ball of fire that turned night to day and lit the countryside for miles around.” The reflection of the flames turned the surface of the river orange and the light and shadows played along the surface of the brick walls. But inside the city was a burnt-over slaughterhouse.

It was hardly the smashing victory Napoleon had hoped for. “The mirage of victory,” commented Comte Philippe-Paul de Ségur, the general who would go on to write a popular history of the campaign, “which lured him on, which he seemed so often on the point of grasping, had once more eluded him.”

The French entered Smolensk the next day. Few were ready for what they encountered. One soldier told a friend: “Never can you form an adequate idea of the dreadful scene which the interior of Smolensk presented to my view, and never during the whole course of my life can I forget it. Every street, every square, was covered with the bodies of the Russians, dead or dying. The flames shed over them a horrible glare.” About half of the city’s structures had burned, their copper roofs lying rolled up on the ground. The fire had carbonized the corpses of the Russian soldiers and townspeople, shrinking them to the size of children. Men stepped over the corpses and even the old veterans vomited in the gutters. The dead were no longer recognizably human, the burnt flesh fusing with the iron of muskets and swords into grotesque black concretions. Others had been “literally grilled,” the heat shriveling their lips and burning away their eyeballs until red sockets remained. The French had to step around the wailing survivors, just discovering their dead in the first light.

The memoirist Captain Roeder—sick with dysentery and the first signs of fever, he had missed the battle—toured the battlefields outside the city and wrote almost the only benign thoughts recorded at the site. “And yet, maybe they did not really hate each other so much after all,” he wrote in his diary, “for now Frenchman and Russian lie peacefully side by side.” Nicholas Pisani, an Italian officer who passed through the town days after the battle, came across a French corpse with a book open in his hand. Pisani approached the body and found that the volume was a medical text on the treatment of wounds. The desperate soldier had carried the text with him hundreds of miles, but the instructions had failed to save him at the crucial moment.

The sick and wounded were herded into fifteen makeshift hospitals, many of them stone civic buildings that hadn’t burned. “Here the wounded were lying often on top of each other, without any straw, food, or bandages, whimpering in terrible pain,” wrote the medical historian Wilhelm Ebstein. To a miasmist, the reason for the spreading illness was clear: “terrible deprivations, the excessive heat, and the terrible smell from dead bodies” were the culprit. In fact, the hospitals should bear much of the blame. The wounded would have been better off staying where they were instead of being installed elbow-to-elbow with the infected.

N
APOLEON RODE THROUGH
the city at dawn, then camped out at one of the gates facing the Dnieper, where the black lines of retreating Russian troops were still visible. With his marshals, he sat on mats, intending to review the situation but instead launching into a diatribe against Barclay. “What a disgrace … to have given up without fighting, the key to Old Russia!” he cried. All the time, the bullets from the retreating Russian infantry whipped by the emperor’s head as he stared down at the enemy.

Barclay wasn’t out of danger yet. He still had to make good his escape east along the Moscow road. To do this, he held the northern bank of the Dnieper as long as possible, abandoning it only on August 19 and then sending his men north to avoid further bombardment from French artillery, which could sight anyone retreating along the thoroughfare and target them with ease. His army would then swing south to find the Moscow road again.

The French rushed to cut off the army they had failed to destroy in their best chance of the campaign. As the Russians retreated, the bulldog Ney had a chance to repair the major bridges at Smolensk and hurry his troops across to the Moscow road, followed by Murat and the cavalry. The star-crossed General Junot, who had yet to play a major part in the campaign, crossed the river ahead of him and set off in pursuit.

One column of Russians unfamiliar with the small roads they were forced to march along at night got lost and fell behind. Ney stumbled on them and the Russians turned and attacked. Both armies rushed in reinforcements. Napoleon galloped to the scene and, assuming this was simply a rearguard action designed to cover Barclay’s retreat, ordered Davout to throw a division into the fight. Across the battlefield, Barclay himself appeared on the front lines and, in a rare moment of charismatic leadership, cried out “Victory or death!” and threatened to shoot any commander who retreated. Unlike Napoleon, he knew this was more than a delaying action. His army had struggled to move its artillery over the country roads north of the Moscow road and was now vulnerable to a breakthrough from the rear. Outnumbered two to one, the 20,000 troops fighting Ney had to hold or the army would never reach the capital. The two sides pushed each other up and down the thoroughfare, with neither able to achieve a decisive breakthrough.

The key became Junot, who had crept up behind the Russian forces and was poised to unleash a devastating offensive from a left-rear position. Napoleon sent the attack order, but Junot hesitated. Napoleon had first taken to the young commander because of his fearlessness and his devil-may-care wit. Junot was handsome, sarcastic, an aristocratic nihilist who nevertheless looked up to the Corsican leader as a demigod. But alcohol and cynicism had worn away Junot’s dash, and now when called upon, he froze. Despite Napoleon’s express order, the general simply stared down at the action unfolding in front of him while his Westphalian troops fumed and shouted for orders to march. Furious, the clearly unstable general threatened to have any protesters shot on sight. When the outraged Murat galloped up to find out what was delaying him, the two got into a spit-flying argument, with Junot claiming that he had no orders to attack and that his cavalry was too afraid to go on the offensive. “You are unworthy to be the last dragoon in Napoleon’s army,” Murat shouted at his fellow general, then turned his horse around and charged back into the battle, while Junot sallied off to a nearby house for breakfast. Some of his troops, in his absence, were called into action, but they didn’t fall on the Russians with the devastating weight a unified attack would have carried. The moment passed. Fighting as if Russia itself depended on the outcome, the Russians held the French off and Barclay escaped.

The landscape told the story of the battle. “Amidst the stumps of trees,” remembered the historian-general Ségur, “on ground trampled by the feet of the combatants, furrowed with balls, strewed with the fragments of weapons, tattered uniforms, overturned carriages, and scattered limbs.” The Russians had lost 5,000 men; Napoleon, around 8,700.

Napoleon gave a rousing victory speech to his men and was unusually generous in bestowing decorations and promotions and small gifts of cash, which “rained down like hail.” Wherever he went, Napoleon left deeply grateful troops eager to fight again, a talent he never lost. Men who hadn’t dreamed of an officer’s rank were quickly commissioned: with the dead from the battle and the rising epidemic, this was becoming an army in which one could advance rapidly.

It must be pointed out that the soldiers themselves often had a different attitude toward death—especially death in battle—than prevails today. The men of the Grande Armée felt themselves to be participants in something larger and much older than themselves: a living tradition of personal glory. “Death is nothing,” Napoleon himself had written, in a phrase many of his men would have seconded. “But to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.” Battle swelled their difficult lives with possibility, with historical dimensions, with the possibility of immortal life in the memory of their nations and loved ones. “Even if one had to die, what did it matter?” wrote Alfred de Musset about the Napoleonic campaigns. “Death was beautiful in those days, so great, so splendid in its crimson cloak. It looked so much like hope …the very stuff of youth.”