1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. Adam Zamoyski
enemy territory as belonging to tyrants and enemies of the revolution, they lived by looting. With time, they began to buy what they needed, but as they paid with largely worthless paper assignats, it amounted to the same thing. Napoleon disapproved of looting, and brought in administrators who would provide for the army’s needs in a more methodical way. They bought what was needed, paying in real money or receipts that were generally honoured, when peace had been signed, by the government of the defeated country. But the fact remained that French armies lived off the fat of the land they moved through. And as they moved fast, they did not stay long enough to exhaust its resources.
Whenever the administrative machine broke down or failed to provide the necessities, the French reverted to the old system of ‘la maraude’. Every so often a company or similar unit would send out eight or ten men under a corporal into the areas alongside the line of march. These little bands would fan out through local villages and farms, paying for what they took, and rejoin their company a few days later, their carts laden with grain, eggs, chickens, vegetables and other victuals, driving before them a small herd of cattle. From time to time the main force would halt in order to allow the foraging parties to catch up.
As the French armies were conscripted, a company usually contained a baker, a cobbler, a tailor’s apprentice, a cooper, a blacksmith and a wheelwright, so not only could they bake their own bread, but also, given an occasional purchase of cloth, leather, iron and other raw materials, they could mend their uniforms, boots, equipment and wagons.
For everything else, there was the cantinière or suttler-woman, something of an institution, unique to the French army. ‘These ladies usually started out by following a soldier who had inspired tender feelings in them,’ explained Lieutenant Blaze de Bury. ‘You would see them first walking along with a cask of eau-de-vie slung round their neck. A week later, they would be comfortably seated on a horse someone had found, draped, to the right, to the left, in front, behind, with casks, saveloys, cheeses and sausages in precarious equilibrium. A month would not pass that a cart harnessed with a couple of horses and filled with provisions of every kind would not be testifying to the growing prosperity of their enterprise.’31
In camp, the tent of the cantinière became the company café, where officers would come to sit around and play cards or gossip. It was also a bank, lending money and giving credit. On campaign, the cantiniére went to untold lengths to stock up on all the little necessities which could transform a soldier’s life by guaranteeing survival or just relief. She always had a little something for a soldier who had money or whom she trusted to pay her when he got some. She usually had a protector, sometimes a husband but mostly just a temporary mate who was able to provide her with security and help in return for being supplied with victuals, and sometimes a change of protector would entail a financial transaction between the two men involved.
These ladies saw themselves as part of the army, and despised anyone not in uniform. They viewed the dangers of war as part and parcel of their trade. If they fell prey to enemy marauders and lost everything, they would shrug it off as hard luck and start again. Some would even take kegs of brandy onto the battlefield and give free slugs to the men, and not a few were wounded in this act.
When a regiment moved out on campaign, it was followed by the cantinière and her small gang of purveyors, the servants of the officers, a dozen washerwomen and a horse thief or two. As it went, it picked up petty criminals for whom things had got too hot in the locality, young men looking for adventure, stray dogs and the odd whore. ‘While the regiment marched along the road in good order, or wherever it was sent, this mounted rabble – or to give it its proper name, this robber band – swarmed round it to left and to right, in front and behind, and used the regiment as a base,’ wrote Lieutenant von Wedel. ‘They all carried large and small haversacks and bottles in which to hide their plunder, and they were armed with swords, pistols, even carbines if they could lay hands on such a weapon. These bands often roamed far and boldly on the flank, and if they ever got back again, brought supplies for the troops. The work was dangerous and many lost their lives – in agony if they fell into the clutches of the infuriated peasants … This swarm of plunderers also formed a sort of flank patrol for the army, because if ever they bumped into enemy detachments they came flying back with great haste and loud shouts.’32
Such tactics liberated French commanders from the necessity of hauling heavy stores along with them, which gave them the edge of speed over their more traditionally organised enemies. They worked well in the rich, densely populated, fertile and commercially developed areas of northern Italy and southern Germany, where small distances, good roads, frequent towns and an abundance of every kind of resource meant that a comparatively large army could indeed move fast and provision itself as it went. It even worked in the less populous and more arid expanses of Spain. It could not work in Russia, where the distances were huge, the roads primitive, towns few and far between, the countryside thinly populated and poor in resources. Nobody saw this more clearly than Napoleon. ‘One can expect nothing of the country, and we shall have to carry everything with us,’ he warned Davout.33
The commissariat he had founded, under the command of General Matthieu Dumas, was methodically stockpiling arms, munitions, uniforms, shoes, saddles, as well as food rations on a vast scale. But the problem of how to move these supplies about represented a logistical nightmare. ‘The Polish war does not resemble the war in Austria at all; without means of transport, everything becomes worthless,’ Napoleon wrote to Prince Eugène in December.34
The French army’s supply system, such as it was, was in the hands of a transport corps, a military formation called le train, founded in 1807. In the course of 1811 and 1812 Napoleon gradually expanded the size of the train to twenty-six battalions, with 9336 wagons drawn by some 32,500 horses, with six thousand spare horses. He put in hand the construction of heavy ox-drawn wagons which could be used to haul flour to the front line, where the oxen would be consumed along with the flour. He realised that these heavy wagons, capable of carrying one and a half tons, would have difficulty in negotiating all but the best roads. He therefore equipped eight of the battalions with lighter wagons, but he was reluctant to increase the number of these, as that would only increase the number of horses needed: four horses could draw a heavy wagon laden with one and a half tons, but two horses could not manage a lighter wagon laden with three-quarters of a ton. And horses needed to be fed.
This detail was to be the crucial element in the forthcoming campaign. It even decided the timing of its start: as there could be no question of hauling fodder for the horses as well as supplies for the men along with the army, the horses would have to be fed on the new harvest of hay and oats (cavalrymen were issued with sickles for this purpose), and none of these crops would be ripe for harvesting before the end of June at the very earliest. This meant that while he had to begin moving up his troops in the inclement marching conditions of the winter and early spring, Napoleon could not open his campaign until the middle of the summer, which left him with very little time in which to achieve his victory.
On 1 January 1812 François Dumonceau, a Belgian officer in the Lancers of Berg, was on parade in the courtyard of the Tuileries. ‘The Imperial Guard, the Young and the Old, appeared more numerous and imposing than ever,’ he recalled. The band of the Polish Chevau-Légers played, led by a kettle drummer magnificently mounted, caparisoned, uniformed and plumed. There were also two Illyrian infantry regiments, ‘whose fine and robust bearing drew admiring looks’. They had just marched up from the Balkans so that they could see their Emperor before they joined the Grande Armée in Germany, and they were hosted and shown around Paris by the Grenadiers of the Old Guard. A few days later Dumonceau and his men set off from their regimental depot in Versailles, marching through Brussels, Maastricht, Osnabrück, Hanover, Brunswick, Magdeburg and Stettin to Danzig.35
Soon the whole of Germany was covered in troops marching eastwards and northwards. There were files of cavalry: cuirassiers in helmets and breastplates, chasseurs