1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow

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On the whole, the German contingents were loyal to Napoleon. Many of the troops were fired by the idea of rolling the Russians back out of Europe, and felt a strong urge to prove the valour of German arms. Even if they had no love for the French, they tended to be more antagonistic to Germans from other parts of the country, with most of the troops from the Confederation of the Rhine showing a marked dislike of the Prussians. Finally there was military honour. ‘I know that the war we are fighting is contrary to the interests of Prussia,’ Colonel Ziethen of the Prussian Hussars said to a Polish officer, ‘but I will, if necessary, let myself be hacked to pieces at your side, for military honour commands it.’

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The Prussians were brought into the Grande Armée under the terms of the treaty signed between Napoleon and Frederick William on 24 February 1812, and made up an auxiliary corps of 20,000 men. There was also an Austrian contingent, under Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg, made up of 35,000 men. Most of them had last seen action against the French and the Poles, and while soldiers fight when and whom they are ordered to, they were not enthusiastic allies. Because of the political stance of their ruler and their commander, they were to play an insignificant part in the campaign.

Amongst the lesser contingents the four Swiss regiments should be singled out as being of very high quality and well tempered by a couple of years’ service in Spain and Portugal. There were two battalions of Spanish volunteers from the Joseph-Napoléon Regiment, in distinctive white uniforms with green facings, which had spent the past year under Davout in Germany. They were commanded by Colonel Doreille, a Provençal who did not speak French. There were also many Spaniards, some three thousand of them, in the ranks of the second and third regiments of General d’Alorna’s Portuguese Legion, which numbered around five thousand men in total, uniformed in brown with red facings and English-style shakos. ‘The men, who are highly motivated, make up a fine unit, on which I believe we can count,’ General Clarke, Napoleon’s Minister of War reported. And finally there were two regiments of Croats, numbering just over 3500 men.

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The worth of all these troops was hugely enhanced by the presence of Napoleon. Not only because he lent them the value of his reputation as a military genius, but also because he had the gift of drawing the best out of them. He was masterly in his treatment of soldiers, whom he captivated with his bonhomie and his sometimes brusque lack of ceremony. He always knew which regiments had fought where, and when he reviewed them, he would walk up to older rankers and ask them if they remembered the Pyramids, Marengo, Austerlitz, or wherever it was that particular unit had distinguished itself. They would swell with pride, feeling that he had recognised them, and they could feel the envy of the younger men all around them. With the younger soldiers Napoleon adopted a solicitous manner. He would enquire if they were eating enough, whether their equipment was up to scratch, sometimes asking to see the contents of their haversacks and engaging them in conversation. He was well known for tasting the soldiers’ stew and bread whenever he passed a camp kitchen, so they felt his interest was genuine.

During a review shortly before the campaign, Napoleon stopped in front of Lieutenant Calosso, a Piedmontese serving in the 24th Chasseurs à Cheval, and said a few words to him. ‘Before that, I admired Napoleon as the whole army admired him,’ he wrote. ‘From that day on, I devoted my life to him with a fanaticism which time has not weakened. I had only one regret, which was that I only had one life to place at his service.’ Such a level of devotion was by no means rare, and transcended nationality. But Napoleon could not be everywhere, and the larger the army, the more diluted his presence would be.

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Napoleon’s determination to assemble such a vast force was bound to have a negative effect on its quality. Louis François Lejeune, a senior officer on Berthier’s staff, was detailed to inspect the troops already on the Oder and the Vistula in March 1812, and was bombarded with complaints from the commanders of the units he visited that half of the recruits they were receiving were useless.

He mentioned this to General Dejean, who was organising the cavalry in the area. Dejean told him that up to a third of the horses he had been sent were too weak to carry their burden, while nearly half of the men were too puny to wield a sabre. ‘I was not happy with the way the cavalry was being organised,’ echoed Colonel de Saint-Chamans, commanding the 7th Chasseurs à Cheval. ‘Young recruits who had been sent from depots in France before they had learnt to ride a horse or any of the duties of a horseman on the march or on campaign, were mounted on arrival in Hanover on very fine horses which they were not capable of managing.’ The result was that by the time they reached Berlin, the majority of the horses were suffering from lameness or saddle sores induced by the riders’ bad posture or their failure to take care in saddling up. More than one officer noted that recruits were not taught about checking whether their saddle was rubbing or how to detect the early signs of saddle sores.

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Sergeant Auguste Thirion of the 2nd Cuirassiers had a rosier view. ‘Such fine cavalry has never been seen, never had regiments reached such high complements, and never had horsemen been so well mounted,’ he wrote, adding that their leisurely march through Germany had actually hardened the horses and men. But the cuirassiers were the élite of the French cavalry. And good horses could be a problem in themselves, according to Captain Antoine Augustin Pion des Loches of the Foot Artillery of the Guard. ‘Our teams were of the best, and the equipment left nothing to be desired, but everyone was agreed that the horses were too tall and too strongly built, and unsuited to supporting hardship and lack of abundant nourishment,’ he wrote on leaving the depot at La Fère on 2 March 1812.

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Napoleon was not particularly bothered by such a state of affairs. ‘When I put 40,000 men on horseback I know very well that I cannot hope for that number of good horsemen, but I am playing on the morale of the enemy, who learns through his spies, by rumour or through the newspapers that I have 40,000 cavalry,’ he told Dejean when the latter reported his findings. ‘Passing from mouth to mouth, this number and the supposed quality of my regiments, whose reputation is well known, are both rather exaggerated than diminished; and the day I launch my campaign I am preceded by a psychological force which supplements the actual force that I have been able to furnish for myself.’

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The real strength of the French army was that all the men, even the lower ranks, were free citizens with a strongly patriotic education in the new public schools behind them. They could think as well as fight, and if they showed initiative as well as bravery they could gain promotion and rise very high. But Napoleon’s habit of rewarding mere bravery with promotion eventually led to units being commanded by men who lacked the necessary competence. ‘Among the generals of rapid promotion,’ wrote Karl von Funck, ‘there were only a few who had the gift of leadership; many lacked even the most elementary military knowledge … In the madness of daring they had learnt how to fling their intrepid forces against the foe, but they had no notion of judging a position, of even the first principles of operations, of withdrawing in good order if the first onset should fail …’ There was also a multitude of young officers drawn from the Parisian jeunesse dorée who had obtained promotion through string-pulling, who had mostly joined cavalry regiments because they liked the uniforms or the staff because they wanted to be close to Napoleon. Many were clearly not up to the job.

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Much of the revolutionary ardour that had fired the French armies of the 1790s and early 1800s had been quenched by 1812. ‘As the uniforms grew more embroidered and gathered decorations the hearts they covered grew less generous,’ as one observer put it. Napoleon himself sensed a lack of enthusiasm for the forthcoming campaign. ‘People have always followed him with excitement; he is surprised that they are not prepared to end their careers with the same dash with which they embarked on them,’ noted his secretary Baron Fain.

(#litres_trial_promo) But it was he who had turned his commanders into what they were.

‘From the moment that Napoleon came to power, military mores changed rapidly, the union of hearts disappeared along with poverty and the taste for material well-being and the comforts of life crept into our camps, which filled up with unnecessary mouths and with numerous carriages,’ in the words of General Berthézène. ‘Forgetting the fortunate experiences of his immortal campaigns in Italy, of the immense superiority gained by habituation to privation and contempt for superfluity, the Emperor believed it to be to his advantage to encourage this corruption.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He gave his marshals and his generals titles, lands and pensions on the civil list. He demanded of them that they keep palaces in Paris in which they were to entertain at the appropriate level. As members of his court, they must maintain a glittering entourage, as he increasingly did himself. This high living softened them up, and they became less and less willing to give up their warm beds and fine palaces in fashionable parts of Paris, not to mention their wives and mistresses, for the rigours of the bivouac and the uncertainties of war. This was particularly true of the marshals.

‘They were most of them between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five when, after a stormy youth, a man begins to look for a settled domesticity,’ wrote von Funck. ‘They could hardly expect to win a higher degree of fame, but might well jeopardise the reputations they had made.’ A good example was Napoleon’s chief of staff Marshal Berthier, Prince de Neuchâtel, a plump man of settled tastes in his mid-fifties with a magnificent apanage and an adored and adoring mistress in Paris.

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At the same time the lavish rewards given to those who distinguished themselves in battle were an irresistible incentive to soldiers and officers right up to the rank of general, who all saw in war the possibility of making their fortune. A simple soldier might obtain promotion, which would give him a higher salary and status, or the Légion d’Honneur, which meant pension rights. A general might obtain the coveted marshal’s baton, which signified fame and fortune, and a ducal title to boot.

There was also the opportunity of making some money on the side through the more or less legitimate acquisition of precious items. Looting as such was not countenanced, but in the course of campaigns in distant lands it was possible to purchase things at knockdown prices and bring them home without paying any duties. Valuables found on the field of battle or in the enemy camp were fair game, as was anything that might be left masterless through the fortunes of war. As this great campaign to end all campaigns was being prepared, a good many felt that it would be their last opportunity to get rich.

There were also a great many for whom war furnished the prospect of adventure, the opportunity to distinguish themselves or a last chance to share in the glory. ‘At last I was going to find myself at some of those battles which are destined to change the course of history; I was going to fight under the eyes of so many of the illustrious warriors who filled the world with their renown, Murat, Ney, Davout, Prince Eugène, and so many others, and under the eyes of the greatest of them all, under the eyes of Napoleon!’ remembered a Creole from Saint-Domingue. ‘There I would have my chance to distinguish myself, there I would be able to obtain decorations and promotion of which I would be proud and which I could hold up to the world! Before a year was out I would be chef de bataillon; I would be colonel by the end of the campaign, and after that …’

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Most of Napoleon’s entourage, beginning with Caulaincourt and including close friends and collaborators such as General Duroc, repeatedly beseeched him not to go down the road of war. Many of them warned that Russia could not be defeated in conventional ways. Napoleon had read the accounts of Charles XII’s disastrous foray into Russia almost exactly a hundred years before, beginning with the famous one by Voltaire, who wrote that ‘there is no ruler who, in reading the life of Charles XII, should not be cured of the folly of conquest’. Napoleon dismissed such arguments with annoyance. ‘His capitals are as accessible as any others, and when I have the capitals, I hold everything,’ he snapped at one of his diplomats who had been pointing out the perils of going to war with Alexander. But he had a habit of making statements he did not believe in, as though he were trying to convince himself by convincing others. And the special nature of the forthcoming campaign was not lost on him. ‘If people think that I am going to make war in the old way, they are very much mistaken,’ he is alleged to have declared.

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He certainly prepared himself for the forthcoming campaign as he had prepared for no other. For one thing, realising that he would be operating in detached corps at some distance from each other, he decided to make an example of General Dupont, whose capitulation at Bailén had been such a humiliation. Before setting off for Russia, Napoleon had him retried and given a harsher sentence.

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He had officers who spoke German and Polish or Russian attached to every unit, while others were made to take Russian lessons so they could interrogate prisoners and gather intelligence, and he set up a network of intelligence agents fanning out from Poland into Russia’s western provinces. He ordered his librarian to supply him with books on the Russian army, and on the topography of Lithuania and Russia, which he studied, paying particular attention to roads, rivers, bogs and forests. As early as April 1811 he commissioned the Dépot de la Guerre to engrave a series of large-scale maps of western Russia.

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Not the least daunting aspect of this campaign was that the enemy frontier, on the river Niemen, lay about 1500 kilometres from Paris. Thus a length of time and a huge effort were required to move up men and supplies before the campaign could begin. And the Russian capital cities of St Petersburg and Moscow lay another 650 and 950 kilometres respectively beyond that. An army marching from Paris to Moscow without fighting would take up to six months to cover the distance. To make matters worse, the last three hundred of the 1500 kilometres up to the Niemen lay through poor, infertile areas of Prussia and Poland, while the first five hundred of the next 950 kilometres were in even less abundant country. It was, moreover, criss-crossed by rivers, mottled with bogs and forests, and contained large areas of wilderness.

Napoleon’s tactic had always been to move fast, concentrate large numbers of men at the right point before the enemy knew what was happening, knock out their army with a decisive blow and force them to make peace on his terms. But he would have to work hard to achieve it in this theatre of operations.

His armies had in the past been able to move fast because they travelled light, a tradition originally forged of necessity. The French revolutionary armies of the 1790s had been hurriedly improvised and had not possessed a proper commissariat. Since they regarded 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.’

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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.’

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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.

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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.

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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.