1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. Adam Zamoyski
at the emptiness of the landscape and the flocks of storks. Henri Pierre Everts, a native of Rotterdam and a major in the 33rd Light Infantry regiment in Davout’s corps, could hardly believe his eyes when he beheld a Polish village for the first time. ‘I stopped in astonishment, and remained for some time sitting still on my horse observing those miserable wooden cottages of a type unknown to me, the small low church, also made of planks, and at the squalid appearance, the dirty beards and hair of the inhabitants, amongst whom the Jews seemed extraordinarily repulsive; all of this engendered some bitter reflections on the war which we were about to wage in such a country.’15
The meat and potatoes washed down with beer or wine which they had got used to on the march through France and Germany were replaced by buckwheat gruel, and the best they could find to drink was bad vodka, mead or kwas, made of fermented bread. Even these had to be purchased, mostly at inflated prices, from the Jews who swarmed round them in every town and village. Communication took place in a variety of pidgin French, German and Latin. ‘Up to that point, our march had been no more than a pleasant promenade,’ wrote a rueful Julien Combe, a lieutenant in the 8th Chasseurs à Cheval.16 From now on, it was to be an ordeal.
East Prussia and Poland were neither as rich nor as intensely cultivated as most of western Europe. The Continental System had diminished the amount of land under cultivation, since much of the produce had previously been exported, and had lost its markets as a result of the blockade. The traditional exports such as timber, potash, hemp and so on had also been cut off from their markets. To make matters worse, the previous year had seen a serious drought and the harvest had failed. This meant that landowners had been obliged to use up all their reserves of grain and fodder just to keep themselves and their peasants alive, so much so that there was a shortage of grain for sowing in the spring of 1812. The poorest peasants were eating bread made of acorns and birch bark, and pulling thatch off roofs in order to feed their horses and cattle.17
The need to raise an army almost twice as large as the territory and the population could realistically furnish or support put a terrible strain on the economy and the administration. The government of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw was insolvent, and no official had been paid for eight months. ‘The hardships we were suffering seemed so bad that things could not get much worse,’ wrote the wife of the Prefect of Warsaw to a friend at the end of March 1812, ‘but it turns out that things can get worse, and worse without limit.’18 Things did indeed get much worse as hundreds of thousands of hungry men and horses flooded into the area.
As there were no stores, military or otherwise, the troops took what they needed where they could find it. Giuseppe Venturini, a Piedmontese lieutenant in the 11th Light Infantry, bemoaned the fact that when he was ordered to go out and requisition supplies, he ‘reduced two or three hundred families to beggary’. As the locals were unwilling to sell or give away the little that stood between them and hunger, the troops took it by force. The French system of provisioning effortlessly turned into looting.19 And matters quickly degenerated from there.
‘The French destroy more than they take or even want to take,’ noted an eighteen-year-old captain in the 5th Polish Mounted Rifles. ‘In the houses, they smash everything they can. They set fire to barns. Wherever there is a field of corn, they ride into the middle of it, trampling more than they feed on, without a thought for the fact that in a couple of hours their own army will come up looking for forage.’ The situation was aggravated by the multinational make-up of the army, as there was no sense of national pride or responsibility to restrain men who marched under a foreign flag. Everyone blamed another nationality, and even Polish troops looted their compatriots.20
A Polish officer travelling to join the army found himself moving though a scene of devastation: every window was smashed, every fence had been ripped up for firewood, many houses were half demolished; horse carcases as well as the heads and skins of slaughtered cattle lay by the roadside being gnawed by dogs and pecked at by carrion birds; people fled at the sight of a rider in uniform. ‘One felt that one was following a fleeing rather than an advancing army,’ wrote a Bavarian officer following in the wake of Prince Eugène’s corps, astonished at the numbers of dead horses and abandoned wagons littering the road.21
The situation was no better in East Prussia, where violent national animosities also came into play. Even troops from other parts of Germany found the atmosphere hostile, and stragglers were attacked by locals. The soldiers responded in kind. The Dutchman Jef Abbeel and his comrades took full advantage of their position to show what they thought of the Prussians. ‘We would force them to slaughter all the livestock we judged we needed for our sustenance,’ he writes. ‘Cows, sheep, geese, chickens, all of it! We demanded spirits, beer, liqueurs. We were billeted in villages, and, since only the towns were provided with shops, we would sometimes demand the locals to drive three or four leagues to satisfy our needs. And they would be thanked on their return with blows if they failed to procure everything we demanded. They had to dance as we sang, or they would be beaten!’22
A cold start to the year meant that the harvest was late. ‘We were obliged to cut the grass of the meadows, and, when there was none, reap corn, barley and oats which were only just sprouting,’ wrote Colonel Boulart of the artillery of the Guard. ‘In doing so we both destroyed the harvest and prepared the death of our horses, by giving them the worst possible nourishment for the forced marches and labours to which we were subjecting them day after day.’23 Fed on unripe barley and oats, the horses blew up with colic and died in large numbers.
Without bread, meat or vegetables, the men, particularly the younger recruits, fell ill and perished in alarming numbers. Many sought salvation in desertion and a dash for home. Others, preferring quick release to the long-drawn-out pangs of hunger and the uncertainties that lay ahead, put their muskets to their heads and shot themselves. One major in the 85th Line Infantry of Davout’s corps complained he had lost a fifth of his young recruits by the time he reached his position on the Russian border.24
Napoleon did not see the worst of this as he rushed ahead. Before leaving Poznan he had written to Marie-Louise that he would be back in three months; either the Tsar’s nerve would break when he saw the Grande Armée come up to the border or he would be knocked out in a quick battle. Napoleon was now in a hurry to bring things to a head. He raced to Danzig, moving so fast that he left most of his household behind, arriving there on 8 June. He inspected troops and supplies, accompanied by the military governor, General Rapp. At Danzig he also met up with Marshal Davout, commander of the 1st Corps, and with his brother-in-law Joachim Murat, King of Naples.
It would be hard to bring together two more different characters. Louis-Nicolas Davout was a year younger than Napoleon. He came from an old Burgundian family with roots in the Crusades, and was the most devoted as well as the ablest of Napoleon’s marshals. He was strict and demanding, a hard taskmaster to those serving under him, feared and disliked by most of his peers, but loved by his soldiers because, in order to get the most out of them, he made sure they had everything they needed and were not tired out with unnecessary duties.
Joachim Murat, who was three years Davout’s senior, was of a different cut in every way. The son of a Gascon innkeeper from Cahors, he had studied for the priesthood at a seminary in Toulouse before running away to join the army. Although not without a certain cunning, he was stupid, which allowed him to be absurdly and recklessly brave even though he lacked real courage. He was, in Napoleon’s words, ‘an imbecille [sic] without judgement’. But he was an instinctively brilliant cavalry commander in battle. He was also devoted to Napoleon. He had married the Emperor’s sister Caroline, and in 1808 he was made King of Naples.25
In