Book: History of Modern Europe 1792 1878

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[Russians intend to fight at Drissa.]

[Russian armies severed, and retreat on Witepsk.]

The head-quarters of the Russian army were at Wilna when Napoleon crossed
the Niemen. It was unknown whether the French intended to advance upon
Moscow or upon St. Petersburg; nor had any systematic plan of the campaign
been adopted by the Czar. The idea of falling back before the enemy was
indeed familiar in Russia since the war between Peter the Great and Charles
XII. of Sweden, and there was no want of good counsel in favour of a
defensive warfare; [173] but neither the Czar nor any one of his generals
understood the simple theory of a retreat in which no battles at all should
be fought. The most that was understood by a defensive system was the
occupation of an entrenched position for battle, and a retreat to a second
line of entrenchments before the engagement was repeated. The actual course
of the campaign was no result of a profound design; it resulted from the
disagreements of the general's plans, and the frustration of them all. It
was intended in the first instance to fight a battle at Drissa, on the
river Dwima. In this position, which was supposed to cover the roads both
to Moscow and St. Petersburg, a great entrenched camp had been formed, and
here the Russian army was to make its first stand against Napoleon.
Accordingly, as soon as the French crossed the Niemen, both Barclay and
Bagration were ordered by the Czar to fall back upon Drissa. But the
movements of the French army were too rapid for the Russian commanders to
effect their junction. Bagration, who lay at some distance to the south,
was cut off from his colleague, and forced to retreat along the eastern
road towards Witepsk. Barclay reached Drissa in safety, but he knew himself
to be unable to hold it alone against 300,000 men. He evacuated the lines
without waiting for the approach of the French, and fell back in the
direction taken by the second army. The first movement of defence had thus
failed, and the Czar now quitted the camp, leaving to Barclay the command
of the whole Russian forces.

[Collapse of the French transport.]

[Barclay and Bagration unite at Smolensko, Aug. 3.]

Napoleon entered Wilna, the capital of Russian Poland, on the 28th of June.
The last Russian detachments had only left it a few hours before; but the
French were in no condition for immediate pursuit. Before the army reached
the Niemen the unparalleled difficulties of the campaign had become only
too clear. The vast waggon-trains broke down on the highways. The stores
were abundant, but the animals which had to transport them died of
exhaustion. No human genius, no perfection of foresight and care, could
have achieved the enormous task which Napoleon had undertaken. In spite of
a year's preparations the French suffered from hunger and thirst from the
moment that they set foot on Russian soil. Thirty thousand stragglers had
left the army before it reached Wilna; twenty-five thousand sick were in
the hospitals; the transports were at an unknown distance in the rear. At
the end of six days' march from the Niemen, Napoleon found himself
compelled to halt for nearly three weeks. The army did not leave Wilna till
the 16th of July, when Barclay had already evacuated the camp at Drissa.
When at length a march became possible, Napoleon moved upon the Upper
Dwina, hoping to intercept Barclay upon the road to Witepsk; but
difficulties of transport again brought him to a halt, and the Russian
commander reached Witepsk before his adversary. Here Barclay drew up for
battle, supposing Bagration's army to be but a short distance to the south.
In the course of the night intelligence arrived that Bagration's army was
nowhere near the rallying-point, but had been driven back towards
Smolensko. Barclay immediately gave up the thought of fighting a battle,
and took the road to Smolensko himself, leaving his watch-fires burning.
His movement was unperceived by the French; the retreat was made in good
order; and the two severed Russian armies at length effected their junction
at a point three hundred miles distant from the frontier.

[The French waste away.]

[French enter Smolensko, Aug. 18.]

[Barclay superseded by Kutusoff.]

Napoleon, disappointed of battle, entered Witepsk on the evening after the
Russians had abandoned it (July 28). Barclay's escape was, for the French,
a disaster of the first magnitude, since it extinguished all hope of
crushing the larger of the two Russian armies by overwhelming numbers in
one great and decisive engagement. The march of the French during the last
twelve days showed at what cost every further step must be made. Since
quitting Wilna the 50,000 sick and stragglers had risen to 100,000. Fever
and disease struck down whole regiments. The provisioning of the army was
beyond all human power. Of the 200,000 men who still remained, it might
almost be calculated in how many weeks the last would perish. So fearful
was the prospect that Napoleon himself thought of abandoning any further
advance until the next year, and of permitting the army to enter into
winter-quarters upon the Dwina. But the conviction that all Russian
resistance would end with the capture of Moscow hurried him on. The army
left Witepsk on the 13th of August, and followed the Russians to Smolensko.
Here the entire Russian army clamoured for battle. Barclay stood alone in
perceiving the necessity for retreat. The generals caballed against him;
the soldiers were on the point of mutiny; the Czar himself wrote to express
his impatience for an attack upon the French. Barclay nevertheless
persisted in his resolution to abandon Smolensko. He so far yielded to the
army as to permit the rearguard to engage in a bloody struggle with the
French when they assaulted the town; but the evacuation was completed under
cover of night; and when the French made their entrance into Smolensko on
the next morning they found it deserted and in rums. The surrender of
Smolensko was the last sacrifice that Barclay could extort from Russian
pride. He no longer opposed the universal cry for battle, and the retreat
was continued only with the intention of halting at the first strong
position. Barclay himself was surveying a battleground when he heard that
the command had been taken out of his hands. The Czar had been forced by
national indignation at the loss of Smolensko to remove this able soldier,
who was a Livonian by birth, and to transfer the command to Kutusotff, a
thorough Russian, whom a life-time spent in victories over the Turk had
made, in spite of his defeat at Austerlitz, the idol of the nation.

[The French advance from Smolensko.]

When Kutusoff reached the camp, the prolonged miseries of the French
advance had already reduced the invaders to the number of the army opposed
to them. As far as Smolensko the French had at least not suffered from the
hostility of the population, who were Poles, not Russians; but on reaching
Smolensko they entered a country where every peasant was a fanatical enemy.
The villages were burnt down by their inhabitants, the corn destroyed, and
the cattle driven into the woods. Every day's march onward from Smolensko
cost the French three thousand men. On reaching the river Moskwa in the
first week of September, a hundred and seventy-five thousand out of
Napoleon's three hundred and eighty thousand soldiers were in the
hospitals, or missing, or dead. About sixty thousand guarded the line of
march. The Russians, on the other hand, had received reinforcements which
covered their losses at Smolensko; and although detachments had been sent
to support the army of Riga, Kutusoff was still able to place over one
hundred thousand men in the field.

[Battle of Borodino, Sept. 7.]

[Evacuation of Moscow. French enter Moscow, Sept. 14.]

On the 5th of September the Russian army drew up for battle at Borodino, on
the Moskwa, seventy miles west of the capital. At early morning on the 7th
the French advanced to the attack. The battle was, in proportion to its
numbers, the most sanguinary of modern times. Forty thousand French, thirty
thousand Russians were struck down. At the close of the day the French were
in possession of the enemy's ground, but the Russians, unbroken in their
order, had only retreated to a second line of defence. Both sides claimed
the victory; neither had won it. It was no catastrophe such as Napoleon
required for the decision of the war, it was no triumph sufficient to save
Russia from the necessity of abandoning its capital. Kutusoff had sustained
too heavy a loss to face the French beneath the walls of Moscow. Peace was
no nearer for the 70,000 men who had been killed or wounded in the fight.
The French steadily advanced; the Russians retreated to Moscow, and
evacuated the capital when their generals decided that they could not
encounter the French assault. The Holy City was left undefended before the
invader. But the departure of the army was the smallest part of the
evacuation. The inhabitants, partly of their own free will, partly under
the compulsion of the Governor, abandoned the city in a mass. No gloomy or
excited crowd, as at Vienna and Berlin, thronged the streets to witness the
entrance of the great conqueror, when on the 14th of September Napoleon
took possession of Moscow. His troops marched through silent and deserted
streets. In the solitude of the Kremlin Napoleon received the homage of a
few foreigners, who alone could be collected by his servants to tender to
him the submission of the city.

[Moscow fired.]

But the worst was yet to come. On the night after Napoleon's entry, fires
broke out in different parts of Moscow. They were ascribed at first to
accident; but when on the next day the French saw the flames gaining ground
in every direction, and found that all the means for extinguishing fire had
been removed from the city, they understood the doom to which Moscow had
been devoted by its own defenders. Count Rostopchin, the governor, had
determined on the destruction of Moscow without the knowledge of the Czar.
The doors of the prisons were thrown open. Rostopchin gave the signal by
setting fire to his own palace, and let loose his bands of incendiaries
over the city. For five days the flames rose and fell; and when, on the
evening of the 20th, the last fires ceased, three-fourths of Moscow lay in
ruins.

[Napoleon at Moscow, Sept. 14-Oct. 19.]

Such was the prize for which Napoleon had sacrificed 200,000 men, and
engulfed the weak remnant of his army six hundred miles deep in an enemy's
country. Throughout all the terrors of the advance Napoleon had held fast
to the belief that Alexander's resistance would end with the fall of his
capital. The events that accompanied the entry of the French into Moscow
shook his confidence; yet even now Napoleon could not believe that the Czar
remained firm against all thoughts of peace. His experience in all earlier
wars had given him confidence in the power of one conspicuous disaster to
unhinge the resolution of kings. His trust in the deepening impression made
by the fall of Moscow was fostered by negotiations begun by Kutusoff for
the very purpose of delaying the French retreat. For five weeks Napoleon
remained at Moscow as if spell-bound, unable to convince himself of his
powerlessness to break Alexander's determination, unable to face a retreat
which would display to all Europe the failure of his arms and the
termination of his career of victory. At length the approach of winter
forced him to action. It was impossible to provision the army at Moscow
during the winter months, even if there had been nothing to fear from the
enemy. Even the mocking overtures of Kutusoff had ceased. The frightful
reality could no longer be concealed. On the 19th of October the order for
retreat was given. It was not the destruction of Moscow, but the departure
of its inhabitants, that had brought the conqueror to ruin. Above two
thousand houses were still standing; but whether the buildings remained or
perished made little difference; the whole value of the capital to Napoleon
was lost when the inhabitants, whom he could have forced to procure
supplies for his army, disappeared. Vienna and Berlin had been of such
incalculable service to Napoleon because the whole native administration
placed itself under his orders, and every rich and important citizen became
a hostage for the activity of the rest. When the French gained Moscow, they
gained nothing beyond the supplies which were at that moment in the city.
All was lost to Napoleon when the class who in other capitals had been his
instruments fled at his approach. The conflagration of Moscow acted upon
all Europe as a signal of inextinguishable national hatred; as a military
operation, it neither accelerated the retreat of Napoleon nor added to the
miseries which his army had to undergo.

[Napoleon leaves Moscow, Oct. 19.]

[Forced to retreat by the same road.]

The French forces which quitted Moscow in October numbered about 100,000
men. Reinforcements had come in during the occupation of the city, and the
health of the soldiers had been in some degree restored by a month's rest.
Everything now depended upon gaining a line of retreat where food could be
found. Though but a fourth part of the army which entered Russia in the
summer, the army which left Moscow was still large enough to protect itself
against the enemy, if allowed to retreat through a fresh country; if forced
back upon the devastated line of its advance it was impossible for it to
escape destruction. Napoleon therefore determined to make for Kaluga, on
the south of Moscow, and to endeavour to gain a road to Smolensko far
distant from that by which he had come. The army moved from Moscow in a
southern direction. But its route had been foreseen by Kutusoff. At the end
of four days' march it was met by a Russian corps at Jaroslavitz. A bloody
struggle left the French in possession of the road: they continued their
advance; but it was only to find that Kutusoff, with his full strength, had
occupied a line of heights farther south, and barred the way to Kaluga. The
effort of an assault was beyond the powers of the French. Napoleon surveyed
the enemy's position, and recognised the fatal necessity of abandoning the
march southwards and returning to the wasted road by which he had advanced.
The meaning of the backward movement was quickly understood by the army.
From the moment of quitting Jaroslavitz, disorder and despair increased
with every march. Thirty thousand men were lost upon the road before a
pursuer appeared in sight. When, on the 2nd of November, the army reached
Wiazma, it numbered no more than 65,000 men.

[Kutusoff follows by parallel road.]

Kutusoff was unadventurous in pursuit. The necessity of moving his army
along a parallel road south of the French, in order to avoid starvation,
diminished the opportunities for attack; but the general himself disliked
risking his forces, and preferred to see the enemy's destruction effected
by the elements. At Wiazma, where, on the 3rd of November, the French were
for the first time attacked in force, Kutusoff's own delay alone saved them
from total ruin. In spite of heavy loss the French kept possession of the
road, and secured their retreat to Smolensko, where stores of food had been
accumulated, and where other and less exhausted French troops were at hand.

[Frost, Nov. 6.]

[French reach Smolensko, Nov. 9.]

Up to the 6th of November the weather had been sunny and dry. On the 6th
the long-delayed terrors of Russian winter broke upon the pursuers and the
pursued. Snow darkened the air and hid the last traces of vegetation from
the starving cavalry trains. The temperature sank at times to forty degrees
of frost. Death came, sometimes in the unfelt release from misery,
sometimes in horrible forms of mutilation and disease. Both armies were
exposed to the same sufferings; but the Russians had at least such succour
as their countrymen could give; where the French sank, they died. The order
of war disappeared under conditions which made life itself the accident of
a meal or of a place by the camp-fire. Though most of the French soldiery
continued to carry their arms, the Guard alone kept its separate formation;
the other regiments marched in confused masses. From the 9th to the 13th of
November these starving bands arrived one after another at Smolensko,
expecting that here their sufferings would end. But the organisation for
distributing the stores accumulated in Smolensko no longer existed. The
perishing crowds were left to find shelter where they could; sacks of corn
were thrown to them for food.

[Russian armies from north and south attempt to cut off French retreat.]

[Krasnoi, Nov. 17.]

It was impossible for Napoleon to give his wearied soldiers rest, for new
Russian armies were advancing from the north and the south to cut off their
retreat. From the Danube and from the Baltic Sea troops were pressing
forward to their meeting-point upon the rear of the invader. Witgenstein,
moving southwards at the head of the army of the Dwina, had overpowered the
French corps stationed upon that river, and made himself master of Witepsk.
The army of Bucharest, which had been toiling northwards ever since the
beginning of August, had advanced to within a few days' march of its
meeting-point with the army of the Dwina upon the line of Napoleon's
communications. Before Napoleon reached Smolensko he sent orders to Victor,
who was at Smolensko with some reserves, to march against Witgenstein and
drive him back upon the Dwina. Victor set out on his mission. During the
short halt of Napoleon in Smolensko, Kutusoff pushed forward to the west of
the French, and took post at Krasnoi, thirty miles farther along the road
by which Napoleon had to pass. The retreat of the French seemed to be
actually cut off. Had the Russian general dared to face Napoleon and his
Guards, he might have held the French in check until the arrival of the two
auxiliary armies from the north and south enabled him to capture Napoleon
and his entire force. Kutusoff, however, preferred a partial and certain
victory to a struggle with Napoleon for life or death. He permitted
Napoleon and the Guard to pass by unattacked, and then fell upon the hinder
divisions of the French army. (Nov. 17.) These unfortunate troops were
successively cut to pieces. Twenty-six thousand were made prisoners. Ney,
with a part of the rear-guard, only escaped by crossing the Dnieper on the
ice. Of the army that had quitted Moscow there now remained but 10,000
combatants and 20,000 followers. Kutusoff himself was brought to such a
state of exhaustion that he could carry the pursuit no further, and entered
into quarters upon the Dnieper.

[Victor joins Napoleon.]

[Passage of the Beresina, Nov. 28th.]

It was a few days after the battle at Krasnoi that the divisions of Victor,
coining from the direction of the Dwina, suddenly encountered the remnant
of Napoleon's army. Though aware that Napoleon was in retreat, they knew
nothing of the calamities that had befallen him, and were struck with
amazement when, in the middle of a forest, they met with what seemed more
like a miserable troop of captives than an army upon the march. Victor's
soldiers of a mere auxiliary corps found themselves more than double the
effective strength of the whole army of Moscow. Their arrival again placed
Napoleon at the head of 30,000 disciplined troops, and gave the French a
gleam of victory in the last and seemingly most hopeless struggle in the
campaign. Admiral Tchitchagoff, in command of the army marching from the
Danube, had at length reached the line of Napoleon's retreat, and
established himself at Borisov, where the road through Poland crosses the
river Beresina. The bridge was destroyed by the Russians, and Tchitchagoff
opened communication with Witgenstein's army, which lay only a few miles to
the north. It appeared as if the retreat of the French was now finally
intercepted, and the surrender of Napoleon inevitable. Yet even in this
hopeless situation the military skill and daring of the French worked with
something of its ancient power. The army reached the Beresina; Napoleon
succeeded in withdrawing the enemy from the real point of passage; bridges
were thrown across the river, and after desperate fighting a great part of
the army made good its footing upon the western bank (Nov. 28). But the
losses even among the effective troops were enormous. The fate of the
miserable crowd that followed them, torn by the cannon-fire of the
Russians, and precipitated into the river by the breaking of one of the
bridges, has made the passage of the Beresina a synonym for the utmost
degree of human woe.

[French reach the Niemen, Dec. 13.]

This was the last engagement fought by the army. The Guards still preserved
their order: Marshal Ney still found soldiers capable of turning upon the
pursuer with his own steady and unflagging courage; but the bulk of the
army struggled forward in confused crowds, harassed by the Cossacks, and
laying down their arms by thousands before the enemy. The frost, which had
broken up on the 19th, returned on the 30th of November with even greater
severity. Twenty thousand fresh troops which joined the army between the
Beresina and Wilna scarcely arrested the process of dissolution. On the 3rd
of December Napoleon quitted the army. Wilna itself was abandoned with all
its stores; and when at length the fugitives reached the Niemen, they
numbered little more than twenty thousand. Here, six months earlier, three
hundred and eighty thousand men had crossed with Napoleon. A hundred
thousand more had joined the army in the course of its retreat. Of all this
host, not the twentieth part reached the Prussian frontier. A hundred and
seventy thousand remained prisoners in the hands of the Russians; a greater
number had perished. Of the twenty thousand men who now beheld the Niemen,
probably not seven thousand had crossed with Napoleon. In the presence of a
catastrophe so overwhelming and so unparalleled the Russian generals might
well be content with their own share in the work of destruction. Yet the
event proved that Kutusoff had done ill in sparing the extremest effort to
capture or annihilate his foe. Not only was Napoleon's own escape the
pledge of continued war, but the remnant that escaped with him possessed a
military value out of all proportion to its insignificant numbers. The best
of the army were the last to succumb. Out of those few thousands who
endured to the end, a very large proportion were veteran officers, who
immediately took their place at the head of Napoleon's newly-raised armies,
and gave to them a military efficiency soon to be bitterly proved by Europe
on many a German battle-field.

[York's convention with the Russians, Dec. 30.]

[York and the Prussian contingent at Riga.]

Four hundred thousand men were lost to a conqueror who could still stake
the lives of half a million more. The material power of Napoleon, though
largely, was not fatally diminished by the Russian campaign; it was through
its moral effect, first proved in the action of Prussia, that the retreat
from Moscow created a new order of things in Europe. The Prussian
contingent, commanded by General von York, lay in front of Riga, where it
formed part of the French subsidiary army-corps led by Marshal Macdonald.
Early in November the Russian governor of Riga addressed himself to York,
assuring him that Napoleon was ruined, and soliciting York himself to take
up arms against Macdonald. [174] York had no evidence, beyond the word of
the Russian commander, of the extent of Napoleon's losses; and even if the
facts were as stated, it was by no means clear that the Czar might not be
inclined to take vengeance on Prussia on account of its alliance with
Napoleon. York returned a guarded answer to the Russian, and sent an
officer to Wilna to ascertain the real state of the French army. On the 8th
of December the officer returned, and described what he had himself seen.
Soon afterwards the Russian commandant produced a letter from the Czar,
declaring his intention to deal with Prussia as a friend, not as an enemy.
On these points all doubt was removed; York's decision was thrown upon
himself. York was a rigid soldier of the old Prussian type, dominated by
the idea of military duty. The act to which the Russian commander invited
him, and which the younger officers were ready to hail as the liberation of
Prussia, might be branded by his sovereign as desertion and treason.
Whatever scruples and perplexity might be felt in such a situation by a
loyal and obedient soldier were felt by York. He nevertheless chose the
course which seemed to be for his country's good; and having chosen it, he
accepted all the consequences which it involved. On the 30th of December a
convention was signed at Tauroggen, which, under the guise of a truce,
practically withdrew the Prussian army from Napoleon, and gave the Russians
possession of Koenigsberg. The momentous character of the act was recognised
by Napoleon as soon as the news reached Paris. York's force was the
strongest military body upon the Russian frontier; united with Macdonald,
it would have forced the Russian pursuit to stop at the Niemen; abandoning
Napoleon, it brought his enemies on to the Vistula, and threatened
incalculable danger by its example to all the rest of Germany. For the
moment, however, Napoleon could count upon the spiritless obedience of King
Frederick William. In the midst of the French regiments that garrisoned
Berlin, the King wrote orders pronouncing York's convention null and void,
and ordering York himself to be tried by court-martial. The news reached
the loyal soldier: he received it with grief, but maintained his resolution
to act for his country's good. "With bleeding heart," he wrote, "I burst
the bond of obedience, and carry on the war upon my own responsibility. The
army desires war with France; the nation desires it; the King himself
desires it, but his will is not free. The army must make his will free."

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