Book: History of the Expedition to Russia

C >> Count Philip de Segur >> History of the Expedition to Russia




But on the 6th of November, the heavens declared against us. Their azure
disappeared. The army marched enveloped in cold fogs. These fogs became
thicker, and presently an immense cloud descended upon it in large
flakes of snow. It seemed as if the very sky was falling, and joining
the earth and our enemies to complete our destruction. All objects
changed their appearance, and became confounded, and not to be
recognised again; we proceeded, without knowing where we were, without
perceiving the point to which we were bound; every thing was transformed
into an obstacle. While the soldier was struggling with the tempest of
wind and snow, the flakes, driven by the storm, lodged and accumulated
in every hollow; their surfaces concealed unknown abysses, which
perfidiously opened beneath our feet. There the men were engulphed, and
the weakest, resigning themselves to their fate, found a grave in these
snow-pits.

Those who followed turned aside, but the storm drove into their faces
both the snow that was descending from the sky, and that which it raised
from the ground: it seemed bent on opposing their progress. The Russian
winter, under this new form, attacked them on all sides: it penetrated
through their light garments and their torn shoes and boots. Their wet
clothes froze upon their bodies; an icy envelope encased them and
stiffened all their limbs. A keen and violent wind interrupted
respiration: it seized their breath at the moment when they exhaled it,
and converted it into icicles, which hung from their beards all round
their mouths.

The unfortunate creatures still crawled on, shivering, till the snow,
gathering like balls under their feet, or the fragment of some broken
article, a branch of a tree, or the body of one of their comrades,
caused them to stumble and fall. There they groaned in vain; the snow
soon covered them; slight hillocks marked the spot where they lay: such
was their only grave! The road was studded with these undulations, like
a cemetery: the most intrepid and the most indifferent were affected;
they passed on quickly with averted looks. But before them, around them,
there was nothing but snow: this immense and dreary uniformity extended
farther than the eye could reach; the imagination was astounded; it was
like a vast winding-sheet which Nature had thrown over the army. The
only objects not enveloped by it, were some gloomy pines, trees of the
tombs, with their funeral verdure, the motionless aspect of their
gigantic black trunks and their dismal look, which completed the doleful
appearance of a general mourning, and of an army dying amidst a nature
already dead.

Every thing, even to their very arms, still offensive at
Malo-Yaroslawetz, but since then defensive only, now turned against
them. These seemed to their frozen limbs insupportably heavy, in the
frequent falls which they experienced, they dropped from their hands and
were broken or buried in the snow. If they rose again, it was without
them; for they did not throw them away; hunger and cold wrested them
from their grasp. The fingers of many others were frozen to the musket
which they still held, which deprived them of the motion necessary for
keeping up some degree of warmth and life.

We soon met with numbers of men belonging to all the corps, sometimes
singly, at others in troops. They had not basely deserted their colours;
it was cold and inanition which had separated them from their columns.
In this general and individual struggle, they had parted from one
another, and there they were, disarmed, vanquished, defenceless, without
leaders, obeying nothing but the urgent instinct of self-preservation.

Most of them, attracted by the sight of by-paths, dispersed themselves
over the country, in hopes of finding bread and shelter for the coming
night: but, on their first passage, all had been laid waste to the
extent of seven or eight leagues; they met with nothing but Cossacks,
and an armed population, which encompassed, wounded, and stripped them
naked, and then left them, with ferocious bursts of laughter, to expire
on the snow. These people, who had risen at the call of Alexander and
Kutusoff, and who had not then learned, as they since have, to avenge
nobly a country which they were unable to defend, hovered on both flanks
of the army under favour of the woods. Those whom they did not despatch
with their pikes and hatchets, they brought back to the fatal and
all-devouring high road.

Night then came on--a night of sixteen hours! But on that snow which
covered every thing, they knew not where to halt, where to sit, where to
lie down, where to find some root or other to eat, and dry wood to
kindle a fire! Fatigue, darkness, and repeated orders nevertheless
stopped those whom their moral and physical strength and the efforts of
their officers had kept together. They strove to establish themselves;
but the tempest, still active, dispersed the first preparations for
bivouacs. The pines, laden with frost, obstinately resisted the flames;
their snow, that from the sky which yet continued to fall fast, and that
on the ground, which melted with the efforts of the soldiers, and the
effect of the first fires, extinguished those fires, as well as the
strength and spirits of the men.

When at length the flames gained the ascendancy, the officers and
soldiers around them prepared their wretched repast; it consisted of
lean and bloody pieces of flesh torn from the horses that were knocked
up, and at most a few spoonfuls of rye-flour mixed with snow-water. Next
morning circular ranges of soldiers extended lifeless marked the
bivouacs; and the ground about them was strewed with the bodies of
several thousand horses.

From that day we began to place less reliance on one another. In that
lively army, susceptible of all impressions, and taught to reason by an
advanced civilization, discouragement and neglect of discipline spread
rapidly, the imagination knowing no bounds in evil as in good.
Henceforward, at every bivouac, at every difficult passage, at every
moment, some portion separated from the yet organised troops, and fell
into disorder. There were some, however, who withstood this wide
contagion of indiscipline and despondency. These were officers,
non-commissioned officers, and steady soldiers. These were extraordinary
men: they encouraged one another by repeating the name of Smolensk,
which they knew they were approaching, and where they had been promised
that all their wants should be supplied.

It was in this manner that, after this deluge of snow, and the increase
of cold which it foreboded, each, whether officer or soldier, preserved
or lost his fortitude, according to his disposition, his age, and his
constitution. That one of our leaders who had hitherto been the
strictest in enforcing discipline, now paid little attention to it.
Thrown out of all his fixed ideas of regularity, order, and method, he
was seized with despair at the sight of such universal disorder, and
conceiving, before the others, that all was lost, he felt himself ready
to abandon all.

From Gjatz to Mikalewska, a village between Dorogobouje and Smolensk,
nothing remarkable occurred in the imperial column, unless that it was
found necessary to throw the spoils of Moscow into the lake of Semlewo:
cannon, gothic armour, the ornaments of the Kremlin, and the cross of
Ivan the Great, were buried in its waters; trophies, glory, all those
acquisitions to which we had sacrificed every thing, became a burden to
us; our object was no longer to embellish, to adorn life, but to
preserve it. In this vast wreck, the army, like a great ship tossed by
the most tremendous of tempests, threw without hesitation into that sea
of ice and snow, every thing that could slacken or impede its progress.




CHAP. XII.


During the 3d and 4th of November Napoleon halted at Stakowo. This
repose, and the shame of appearing to flee, inflamed his imagination. He
dictated orders, according to which his rear-guard, by appearing to
retreat in disorder, was to draw the Russians into an ambuscade, where
he should be waiting for them in person; but this vain project passed
off with the pre-occupation which gave it birth. On the 5th he slept at
Dorogobouje. Here he found the hand-mills which were ordered for the
expedition at the time the cantonments of Smolensk were projected; of
these a late and totally useless distribution was made.

Next day, the 6th of November, opposite to Mikalewska, at the moment
when the clouds, laden with sleet and snow, were bursting over our
heads, Count Daru was seen hastening up, and a circle of vedettes
forming around him and the Emperor.

An express, the first that had been able to reach us for ten days, had
just brought intelligence of that strange conspiracy, hatched in Paris
itself, and in the depth of a prison, by an obscure general. He had had
no other accomplices than the false news of our destruction, and forged
orders to some troops to apprehend the Minister, the Prefect of Police,
and the Commandant of Paris. His plan had completely succeeded, from the
impulsion of a first movement, from ignorance and the general
astonishment; but no sooner was a rumour of the affair spread abroad,
than an order was sufficient again to consign the leader, with his
accomplices or his dupes, to a prison.

The Emperor was apprised at the same moment of their crime and their
punishment. Those who at a distance strove to read his thoughts in his
countenance could discover nothing. He repressed his feelings; his first
and only words to Daru were, "How now, if we had remained at Moscow!" He
then hastened into a house surrounded with a palisade, which had served
for a post of correspondence.

The moment he was alone with the most devoted of his officers, all his
emotions burst forth at once in exclamations of astonishment,
humiliation and anger. Presently afterwards he sent for several other
officers, to observe the effect which so extraordinary a piece of
intelligence would produce upon them. He perceived in them a painful
uneasiness and consternation, and their confidence in the stability of
his government completely shaken. He had occasion to know that they
accosted each other with a sigh, and the remark, that it thus appeared
that the great revolution of 1789, which was thought to be finished, was
not yet over. Grown old in struggles to get out of it, were they to be
again plunged into it, and to be thrown once more into the dreadful
career of political convulsions? Thus war was coming upon us in every
quarter, and we were liable to lose every thing at once.

Some rejoiced at this intelligence, in the hope that it would hasten the
return of the Emperor to France, that it would fix him there, and that
he would no longer risk himself abroad, since he was not safe at home.
On the following day, the sufferings of the moment put an end to these
conjectures. As for Napoleon, all his thoughts again flew before him to
Paris, and he was advancing mechanically towards Smolensk, when his
whole attention was recalled to the present place and time, by the
arrival of an aide-de-camp of Ney.

From Wiazma that Marshal had begun to protect this retreat, mortal to so
many others, but immortal for himself. As far as Dorogobouje, it had
been molested only by some bands of Cossacks, troublesome insects
attracted by our dying and by our forsaken carriages, flying away the
moment a hand was lifted, but harassing by their continual return.

They were not the subject of Ney's message. On approaching Dorogobouje
he had met with the traces of the disorder which prevailed in the corps
that preceded him, and which it was not in his power to efface. So far
he had made up his mind to leave the baggage to the enemy; but he
blushed with shame at the sight of the first pieces of cannon abandoned
before Dorogobouje.

The marshal had halted there. After a dreadful night, in which snow,
wind, and famine had driven most of his men from the fires, the dawn,
which is always awaited with such impatience in a bivouac, had brought
him a tempest, the enemy, and the spectacle of an almost general
defection. In vain he had just fought in person at the head of what men
and officers he had left: he had been obliged to retreat precipitately
behind the Dnieper; and of this he sent to apprise the Emperor.

He wished him to know the worst. His aide-de-camp, Colonel Dalbignac,
was instructed to say, that "the first movement of retreat from
Malo-Yaroslawetz, for soldiers who had never yet run away, had
dispirited the army; that the affair at Wiazma had shaken its firmness;
and that lastly, the deluge of snow and the increased cold which it
betokened, had completed its disorganization: that a multitude of
officers, having lost every thing, their platoons, battalions,
regiments, and even divisions, had joined the roving masses: generals,
colonels, and officers of all ranks, were seen mingled with the
privates, and marching at random, sometimes with one column, sometimes
with another: that as order could not exist in the presence of disorder,
this example was seducing even the veteran regiments, which had served
during the whole of the wars of the revolution: that in the ranks, the
best soldiers were heard asking one another, why they alone were
required to fight in order to secure the flight of the rest; and how any
one could expect to keep up their courage, when they heard the cries of
despair issuing from the neighbouring woods, in which large convoys of
their wounded, who had been dragged to no purpose all the way from
Moscow, had just been abandoned? Such then was the fate which awaited
themselves! what had they to gain by remaining by their colours?
Incessant toils and combats by day, and famine at night; no shelter, and
bivouacs still more destructive than battle: famine and cold drove sleep
far away from them, or if fatigue got the better of these for the
moment, that repose which ought to refresh them put a period to their
lives. In short, the eagles had ceased to protect--they destroyed. Why
then remain around them to perish by battalions, by masses? It would be
better to disperse, and since there was no other course than flight, to
try who could run fastest. It would not then be the best that would
fall: the cowards behind them would no longer eat up the relics of the
high road." Lastly, the aide-de-camp was commissioned to explain to the
Emperor all the horrors of his situation, the responsibility of which
Ney absolutely declined.

But Napoleon saw enough around himself to judge of the rest. The
fugitives were passing him; he was sensible that nothing could now be
done but sacrifice the army successively, part by part, beginning at the
extremities, in order to save the head. When, therefore, the
aide-de-camp was beginning, he sharply interrupted him with these words,
"Colonel, I do not ask you for these details." The Colonel was silent,
aware that in this disaster, now irremediable, and in which every one
had occasion for all his energies, the Emperor was afraid of complaints,
which could have no other effect but to discourage both him who indulged
in, and him who listened to them.

He remarked the attitude of Napoleon, the same which he retained
throughout the whole of this retreat. It was grave, silent, and
resigned; suffering much less in body than others, but much more in
mind, and brooding over his misfortunes. At that moment General
Charpentier sent him from Smolensk a convoy of provisions. Bessieres
wished to take possession of them, but the Emperor instantly had them
forwarded to the Prince of the Moskwa, saying, "that those who were
fighting must eat before the others." At the same time he sent word to
Ney "to defend himself long enough to allow him some stay at Smolensk,
where the army should eat, rest, and be re-organized."

But if this hope kept some to their duty, many others abandoned every
thing, to hasten towards that promised term of their sufferings. As for
Ney, he saw that a sacrifice was required, and that he was marked out as
the victim: he resigned himself, ready to meet the whole of a danger
great as his courage: thenceforward he neither attached his honour to
baggage, nor to cannon, which the winter alone wrested from him. A first
bend of the Borysthenes stopped and kept back part of his guns at the
foot of its icy slopes; he sacrificed them without hesitation, passed
that obstacle, faced about, and made the hostile river, which crossed
his route, serve him as the means of defence.

The Russians, however, advanced under favour of a wood and our forsaken
carriages, whence they kept up a fire of musketry on Ney's troops. Half
of the latter, whose icy arms froze their stiffened fingers, got
discouraged; they gave way, justifying themselves by their
faint-heartedness on the preceding day, fleeing because they had fled;
which before they would have considered as impossible. But Ney rushed in
amongst them, snatched one of their muskets, and led them back to the
fire, which he was the first to renew; exposing his life like a private
soldier, with a musket in his hand, the same as when he was neither
husband nor father, neither possessed of wealth, nor power, nor
consideration: in short, as if he had still every thing to gain, when in
fact he had every thing to lose. At the same time that he again turned
soldier, he ceased not to be a general; he took advantage of the ground,
supported himself against a height, and covered himself with a palisaded
house. His generals and his colonels, among whom he himself remarked
Fezenzac, strenuously seconded him; and the enemy, who expected to
pursue, was obliged to retreat.

By this action, Ney gave the army a respite of twenty-four hours; it
profited by it to proceed towards Smolensk. The next day, and all the
succeeding days, he manifested the same heroism. Between Wiazma and
Smolensk he fought ten whole days.




CHAP. XIII.


On the 13th of November he was approaching that city, which he was not
to enter till the ensuing day, and had faced about to keep off the
enemy, when all at once the hills upon which he intended to support his
left were seen covered with a multitude of fugitives. In their fright,
these unfortunate wretches fell and rolled down to where he was, upon
the frozen snow, which they stained with their blood. A band of
Cossacks, which was soon perceived in the midst of them, sufficiently
accounted for this disorder. The astonished marshal, having caused this
flock of enemies to be dispersed, discovered behind it the army of
Italy, returning quite stripped, without baggage, and without cannon.

Platof had kept it besieged, as it were, all the way from Dorogobouje.
Near that town Prince Eugene had left the high-road, and, in order to
proceed towards Witepsk, had taken that which, two months before, had
brought him from Smolensk; but the Wop, which when he crossed before was
a mere brook, and had scarcely been noticed, he now found swelled into a
river. It ran over a bed of mud, and was bounded by two steep banks. It
was found necessary to cut a way in these rough and frozen banks, and to
give orders for the demolition, during the night, of the neighbouring
houses, in order to build a bridge with the materials. But those who had
taken shelter in them opposed their destruction. The Viceroy, more
beloved than feared, was not obeyed. The pontonniers were disheartened,
and when daylight appeared with the Cossacks, the bridge, after being
twice broken down, was abandoned.

Five or six thousand soldiers still in order, twice the number of
disbanded men, sick and wounded, upwards of a hundred pieces of cannon,
ammunition waggons, and a multitude of other vehicles, lined the bank,
and covered a league of ground. An attempt was made to ford through the
ice carried along by the torrent. The first guns that tried to cross
reached the opposite bank; but the water kept rising every moment, while
at the same time the bed of the river at the ford was deepened by the
wheels and the efforts of the horses. A carriage stuck fast; others did
the same; and the stoppage became general.

Meanwhile the day was advancing; the men were exhausting themselves in
vain efforts: hunger, cold, and the Cossacks became pressing, and the
Viceroy at length found himself necessitated to order his artillery and
all his baggage to be left behind. A distressing spectacle ensued. The
owners had scarcely time to part from their effects; while they were
selecting from them the articles which they most needed, and loading
horses with them, a multitude of soldiers hastened up; they fell in
preference upon the vehicles of luxury; they broke in pieces and
rummaged every thing, revenging their destitution on this wealth, their
privations on these superfluities, and snatching them from the Cossacks,
who looked on at a distance.

It was provisions of which most of them were in quest. They threw aside
embroidered clothes, pictures, ornaments of every kind, and gilt
bronzes, for a few handfuls of flour. In the evening it was a singular
sight to behold the riches of Paris and Moscow, the luxuries of two of
the largest cities in the world, lying scattered and despised on the
snow of the desert.

At the same time most of the artillerymen spiked their guns in despair,
and scattered their powder about. Others laid a train with it as far as
some ammunition waggons, which had been left at a considerable distance
behind our baggage. They waited till the most eager of the Cossacks had
come up to them, and when a great number, greedy of plunder, had
collected about them, they threw a brand from a bivouac upon the train.
The fire ran and in a moment reached its destination: the waggons were
blown up, the shells exploded, and such of the Cossacks as were not
killed on the spot dispersed in dismay.

A few hundred men, who were still called the 14th division, were opposed
to these hordes, and sufficed to keep them at a respectful distance till
the next day. All the rest, soldiers, administrators, women and
children, sick and wounded, driven by the enemy's balls, crowded the
bank of the torrent. But at the sight of its swollen current, of the
sharp and massive sheets of ice flowing down it, and the necessity of
aggravating their already intolerable sufferings from cold by plunging
into its chilling waves, they all hesitated.

An Italian, Colonel Delfanti, was obliged to set the example and cross
first. The soldiers then moved and the crowd followed. The weakest, the
least resolute, or the most avaricious, staid behind. Such as could not
make up their minds to part from their booty, and to forsake fortune
which was forsaking them, were surprised in the midst of their
hesitation. Next day the savage Cossacks were seen amid all this wealth,
still covetous of the squalid and tattered garments of the unfortunate
creatures who had become their prisoners: they stripped them, and then
collecting them in troops, drove them along naked on the snow, by hard
blows with the shaft of their lances.

The army of Italy, thus dismantled, thoroughly soaked in the waters of
the Wop, without food, without shelter, passed the night on the snow
near a village, where its officers expected to have found lodging for
themselves. Their soldiers, however, beset its wooden houses. They
rushed like madmen, and in swarms, on each habitation, profiting by the
darkness, which prevented them from recognizing their officers or being
known by them. They tore down every thing, doors, windows and even the
wood-work of the roofs, feeling little compunction to compel others, be
they who they might, to bivouac like themselves.

Their generals strove in vain to drive them off; they took their blows
without murmur or opposition, but without desisting; and even the men of
the royal and imperial guards: for, throughout the whole army, such were
the scenes that occurred every night. The unfortunate fellows remained
silently but actively engaged on the wooden walls, which they pulled in
pieces on every side at once, and which, after vain efforts, their
officers were obliged to relinquish to them, for fear they should fall
upon their own heads. It was an extraordinary mixture of perseverance in
their design, and respect for the anger of their generals.

Having kindled good fires they spent the night in drying themselves,
amid the shouts, imprecations, and groans of those who were still
crossing the torrent, or who, slipping from its banks, were precipitated
into it and drowned.

It is a fact which reflects disgrace on the enemy, that during this
disaster, and in sight of so rich a booty, a few hundred men, left at
the distance of half a league from the Viceroy, on the other side of the
Wop, were sufficient to curb, for twenty hours, not only the courage but
also the cupidity of Platof's Cossacks.

It is possible, indeed, that the Hetman made sure of destroying the
Viceroy on the following day. In fact, all his measures were so well
planned, that at the moment when the army of Italy, after an unquiet and
disorderly march, came in sight of Dukhowtchina, a town yet uninjured,
and was joyfully hastening forward to shelter itself there, several
thousand Cossacks sallied forth from it with cannon, and suddenly
stopped its progress: at the same time Platof, with all his hordes, came
up and attacked its rear-guard and both flanks.

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