NAPOLEON'S INVASION OF RUSSIA IN 1812 - PART SIX
NAPOLEON’S INVASION OF RUSSIA IN 1812 – PART SIX
On leaving Moscow Napoleon intended to drive off Field Marshal Kutuzov and then fall back on Smolensk, which by now had been well stocked with rations and ammunition. By 24th October the army had covered seventy-five miles to the south west, less than had been expected due to heavy rain, and was preparing to cross the River Lusha by the only bridge. Kutuzov had no intention of allowing Napoleon to retire unmolested, and a major battle for control of the bridge began. By the morning of 25 October the Russians had withdrawn and the French had managed to cross, but at the considerable cost of 4,000 casualties including seven generals. Even so, had Napoleon continued on this south-westerly route they could have withdrawn through an area that was so far untouched by war and where forage was still to be had. However, Napoleon now decided to abandon any attempt to force Kutuzov into battle and to retire by the same route that they had used during the approach. This made the task of the wretched logisticians even harder, for the scorched earth policy adopted by the Russians retiring before the French advance had made it impossible to live off the country. Rations had to be cut again and again. More and more men were unable to keep up, and the column grew longer and longer as it struggled on, morale not being improved as they passed over the field of Borodino where dead bodies still littered the field making a feast for the packs of wolves that had soon gathered.
Very soon horses began to collapse, shortage of fodder for them and the need for two horses to pull a gun and its limber, normally a task for six, weakening them until they could go no farther. When there were insufficient horses to pull the wagons the wagons were burned and men soon tired of carrying loot themselves, abandoning even the most precious items of gold and silver church plate, and jewellery taken from the empty houses of the rich Muscovites. There would be no more rations until the army reached Smolensk and horsemeat became the standard food, but there was not enough even of that. There were constant attacks on the rear of the column, and the killing and taking prisoner of stragglers, of whom there were more and more, many having thrown away their weapons to lighten their load. The cavalry had hardly any horses left. The discipline of the once proud army began to break down and increasingly it was every man for himself, with those wounded and unable to walk left at the side of the road. On 3 November the first snow fell, and severe frosts at night only increased the misery of the army, where firewood could not be obtained and only abandoned waggons could be used as fuel for cooking.
On 9 November Napoleon and the advance guard reached Smolensk, having assured the corps commanders that here would be stocks of fresh food, ammunition, warm clothing and medical supplies, sufficient to keep the army well supplied for months, time which would allow them either to get back to French soil or to recuperate and turn on the attack once more. It was not to be. The soldiers and civilians of the logistics organisation and the troops deployed to guard the lines of communication had retreated in front of the army and had helped themselves whilst passing through. The stores were severely depleted, but carefully husbanded there was sufficient for the reduced main army of around 42,000 men, including cavalrymen without horses and gunners without guns, to last for two weeks. Even that did not last, for the arriving troops, including the normally imperturbable Imperial Guard, ignoring the pleas of their officers and NCOs, fell to looting what there was and embarked on a mammoth beano that lasted three days, after which everything had gone.
There could now be no question of wintering in and around Smolensk, and in any case more bad news had arrived. The only reinforcement that Napoleon could hope for, a division commanded by the forty-eight year old General Louis Baraguey d'Hilliers, was on its way to the main army. Baraguey was a minor noble who was a lieutenant when the revolution broke out. Arrested and sentenced to death, Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety was overthrown before he was due for the guillotine, and although he was arrested again later, on suspicion of royalist sympathies, he survived and served with Napoleon in Italy and Egypt. Hopes of reinforcement were dashed when one of Baraguey’s brigades was surrounded by the Russians, whereupon he surrendered his entire division. To add to that was the news from Paris that an attempted coup, inspired by a general who had escaped from a lunatic asylum, had been put down. It was essential that the emperor return to Paris as soon as possible, and so the retreat had to go on. The hope was that Minsk, 200 miles away and where the next stores and ration depot was located, could be reached before the army disintegrated completely.
More bad news came when the Russians attacked and captured Minsk with all its stocks of supplies, and the army now had to go south of that city in a race to get across the River Berezina before the Russians could block the route. With the rearguard now commanded by Marshal Ney the French stumbled on, to find Kutuzov had got there before them. In a pitched battle between 24 and 29 November the French did manage to get across, largely due to the engineers, standing chest deep in the freezing water, managing to build two pontoon bridges each 100 yards long, one for wheeled vehicles and cavalry, one for infantry. Get across they did but at fearsome cost: over 20,000 casualties, many drowned when the bridges collapsed due to the weight of men and guns, albeit they were swiftly repaired.
Meanwhile Ney, with the 6,000 men still able to do duty, twelve guns and a cavalry squadron was doing excellent work as the rearguard, holding off the pursuers. With no contact between them Napoleon had written them off as lost, and on one occasion the Russians managed to insert a much larger force across Ney’s route to the main army, and sent an officer under a white flag to demand surrender. Ney’s reply was typical: ‘a marshal of France’, he said, ‘never surrenders’ and he took the wretched emissary prisoner. That night he had his men light copious bivouac fires and, emulating Hannibal’s ruse two thousand years previously, drew his men off to the north, bypassed the Russians who assumed, not unnaturally, that Ney was bedding down for the night, and got away. When he caught up with the main force he had with him but 600 survivors and had lost all his guns, but Napoleon was overjoyed, and bestowed upon him the soubriquet of ‘le plus brave de les braves’.
With constant attacks on the flanks and the rear by mounted Cossacks, Napoleon realised that speed was now of the essence. He ordered all but the most essential baggage wagons to be burned, the same to apply to senior officers’ carriages, with the horses thus released turned over to the artillery. State papers were burned and even the eagles of the regiments were destroyed to prevent them falling into enemy hands. The cavalry of the Guard, most of whom were without horses, were turned into infantry, although many of them were armed only with cavalry carbines, due to a shortage of muskets. Divisional and brigade staff officers whose formations had ceased to exist or which had been amalgamated with other under-strength units, and who were now jobless but who still had horses were formed into a cavalry squadron, where even the troopers might be colonels or majors. It was unfortunate that in the burning of surplus waggons and equipment the pontoon bridge train was also destroyed, something that would come home to roost later on. There was in any case a problem with the horses which had not been shod for icy ground (with calkins screwed into the shoes). Any attempt to gallop could end up with the horse slipping and falling, with at worst a broken leg and having to be put down.
On the morning of 5 December, in the face of worsening weather and intensified attacks by Cossacks, the head of the column reached Smorgoni, and Napoleon informed his staff that he could no longer remain with the army: his presence was sorely needed in Paris, and in any case the army was now only two days march from Vilnius, where there was a well-stocked depot with rations, ammunition, clothing and a large hospital. That same day Napoleon, with a much-reduced staff and a small escort, left the army, ordering the Murat should be in command in his absence. On the 10th he was in Warsaw, on the 14th in Dresden and on the evening of 18 December he reached Paris. Meanwhile the remnants of the army limped on, in temperatures of twenty degrees and more below zero, until on 8 December the advance guard reached Vilnius, with the remainder coming in over the next two days, having lost 20,000 men since Smorgoni. Here was everything the army might want: food, wine, warm clothing and medical supplies. Unfortunately discipline broke down completely. Men rioted, plundering the depots, many of them breaking open the liquor stores and drinking themselves senseless, falling in a drunken stupor and freezing to death. Murat had been intending to allow several days rest and recuperation in Vilnius, but the continuing skirmishes with Cossacks, and the approaching Russian main force persuaded him to march from Vilnius at once, seventy miles to the River Niemen and safety, but abandoning huge numbers of wounded in the Vilnius hospital. Most of what baggage transport remained was burned and even the army’s treasury with ten million francs in ready cash had to be abandoned when the horses puling the waggon could not negotiate the icy slopes. Another smaller depot at Kovno, just short of Polish territory, held six batteries worth of guns, but there were no horses to pull them. At last, on 14 December, the army reached the River Niemen and crossed into friendly territory. Marshal Ney, commanding the rearguard, was the last man to leave Russia. The pursuing Russians stopped at the Polish border.
Effectively, that was the end of the campaign of 1812, although there was still some fighting with French formations out on the flanks of the main body. Of the 600,000 men who had entered Russia, only 93,000 returned, 25,000 in the main body and 68,000 in the flanking formations. Of the 570,000 lost, perhaps 350,000 died in battle, the rest taken prisoner by the Russians, and of those over half died of wounds, or died of starvation or the depredations of the weather. While Napoleon’s return to Paris did much to quieten the discontent caused by news of the disaster, which inevitably leaked back to France, the aura of invincibility was irreparably punctured. Internationally, Prussia felt able to break away again, Austria reneged on the peace treaty, other allies changed sides and Britain was able to form yet another coalition, the Sixth, which defeated the French and brought the war to an end in 1814 and rustication to Elba for Napoleon. A brief rematch in 1815 culminated in the Battle of Waterloo and the end of the Bonaparte dream.
Had Napoleon been content to ignore Russian breaches of the Continental System and not invaded in 1812, he would have retained a large army, could have held onto his allies and need not have removed the best regiments from facing Wellington in Spain. The war might well have petered out, for whatever success the British might achieve in the Iberian Peninsula, and however much the Continental System might be ignored, they could not have invaded French-occupied Europe by themselves. The British might have had to accept French domination of Europe while diverting their attention to continuing control of the seas and consolidating her overseas empire. The decision to invade Russia in 1812 really was a tipping point in world history.