History of the Expedition to Russia Part 35

It was in returning with it towards Smolensk that his stragglers had been driven back on Ney's troops, to whom they communicated their panic; all hurried together towards the Dnieper; here they crowded together at the entrance of the bridge, without thinking of defending themselves, when a charge made by the 4th regiment stopped the advance of the enemy.

Its colonel, young Fezenzac, contrived to infuse fresh life into these men who were half perished with cold. There, as in every thing that can be called action, was manifested the superiority of the sentiments of the soul over the sensations of the body; for every physical sensation tended to encourage despondency and flight; nature advised it with her hundred most urgent voices; and yet a few words of honour were sufficient to produce the most heroic devotedness. The soldiers of the 4th regiment rushed like furies upon the enemy, against the mountain of snow and ice of which he had taken possession, and in the teeth of the northern hurricane, for they had every thing against them. Ney himself was obliged to moderate their impetuosity.

A reproach from their colonel effected this change. These private soldiers devoted themselves, that they might not be wanting to their own characters, from that instinct which requires courage in a man, as well as from habit and the love of glory. A splendid word for so obscure a situation! For, what is the glory of a common soldier, who perishes unseen, who is neither praised, censured, nor regretted, but by his own division of a company! The circle of each, however, is sufficient for him: a small society embraces the same pa.s.sions as a large one. The proportions of the bodies differ; but they are composed of the same elements; it is the same life that animates them, and the looks of a platoon stimulate a soldier, just as those of an army inflame a general.

CHAP. XIV.

At length the army again beheld Smolensk; it approached the term so often held forth to its sufferings. The soldiers pointed it out to each other. There was that land of promise where their famine was to find abundance, their fatigue rest; where bivouacs in a cold of nineteen degrees would be forgotten in houses warmed by good fires. There they should enjoy refreshing sleep; there they might repair their apparel; there they should be furnished with new shoes and garments adapted to the climate.

At this sight, the corps _d'elite_, some soldiers, and the veteran regiments, alone kept their ranks; the rest ran forward with all possible speed. Thousands of men, chiefly unarmed, covered the two steep banks of the Borysthenes: they crowded in ma.s.ses round the lofty walls and gates of the city; but their disorderly mult.i.tude, their haggard faces, begrimed with dirt and smoke, their tattered uniforms and the grotesque habiliments which they had subst.i.tuted for them, in short, their strange, hideous look, and their extreme ardour, excited alarm. It was conceived that if the irruption of this crowd, maddened with hunger, were not repelled, a general pillage would be the consequence, and the gates were closed against it.

It was also hoped that by this rigour these men would be forced to rally. A horrid struggle between order and disorder then commenced in the remnant of that unfortunate army. In vain did some entreat, weep, conjure, threaten, strive to burst the gates, and drop down dead at the feet of their comrades, who had orders to repel them; they found them inexorable: they were forced to await the arrival of the first troops, who were still officered and in order.

These were the old and young guard. It was not till afterwards that the disbanded men were allowed to enter; they and the other corps which arrived in succession, from the 8th to the 14th, believed that their entry had been delayed merely to give more rest and more provisions to this guard. Their sufferings rendered them unjust; they execrated it.

"Were they then to be for ever sacrificed to this privileged cla.s.s, fellows kept for mere parade, who were never foremost but at reviews, festivities, and distributions? Was the army always to put up with their leavings; and in order to obtain them, was it always to wait till they had glutted themselves?" It was impossible to tell them in reply, that to attempt to save all was the way to lose all; that it was necessary to keep at least one corps entire, and to give the preference to that which in the last extremity would be capable of making the most powerful effort.

At last, however, these poor creatures were admitted into that Smolensk for which they had so ardently wished; they had left the banks of the Borysthenes strewed with the dying bodies of the weakest of their number; impatience and several hours' waiting had finished them. They left others on the icy steep which they had to climb to reach the upper town. The rest ran to the magazines, and there more of them expired while they beset the doors; for they were again repulsed. "Who were they? to what corps did they belong? what had they to show for it? The persons who had to distribute the provisions were responsible for them; they had orders to deliver them only to authorized officers, bringing receipts, for which they could exchange the rations committed to their care." Those who applied had no officers; nor could they tell where their regiments were. Two thirds of the army were in this predicament.

These unfortunate men then dispersed through the streets, having no longer any other hope than pillage. But horses dissected to the very bones every where denoted a famine; the doors and windows of the houses had been all broken and torn away to feed the bivouac-fires: they found no shelter in them, no winter-quarters prepared, no wood. The sick and wounded were left in the streets, in the carts which had brought them.

It was again, it was still the fatal high-road, pa.s.sing through an empty name; it was a new bivouac among deceitful ruins; colder even than the forests which they had just quitted.

Then only did these disorganized troops seek their colours; they rejoined them for a moment in order to obtain food; but all the bread that could be baked had been distributed: there was no more biscuit, no butcher's meat, rye-flour, dry vegetables, and spirits were delivered out to them. It required the most strenuous efforts to prevent the detachments of the different corps from murdering one another at the doors of the magazines: and when, after long formalities, their wretched fare was delivered to them, the soldiers refused to carry it to their regiments; they fell upon their sacks, s.n.a.t.c.hed out of them a few pounds of flour, and ran to hide themselves till they had devoured it. The same was the case with the spirits. Next day the houses were found full of the bodies of these unfortunate wretches.

In short, that fatal Smolensk, which the army had looked forward to as the term of its sufferings, marked only their commencement.

Inexpressible hardships awaited us: we had yet to march forty days under that yoke of iron. Some, already overloaded with present miseries, sunk under the alarming prospect of those which awaited them. Others revolted against their destiny; finding they had nothing to rely on but themselves, they resolved to live at any rate.

Henceforward, according as they found themselves the stronger or the weaker, they plundered their dying companions by violence or stealth, of their subsistence, their garments, and even the gold, with which they had filled their knapsacks instead of provisions. These wretches, whom despair had made robbers, then threw away their arms to save their infamous booty, profiting by the general condition, an obscure name, a uniform no longer distinguishable, and night, in short, by all kinds of obscurities, favourable to cowardice and guilt. If works already published had not exaggerated these horrors, I should have pa.s.sed in silence details so disgusting; for these atrocities were rare, and justice was dealt to the most criminal.

The Emperor arrived on the 9th of November, amid this scene of desolation. He shut himself up in one of the houses in the new square, and never quitted it till the 14th, to continue his retreat. He had calculated upon fifteen days' provisions and forage for an army of one hundred thousand men; there was not more than half the quant.i.ty of flour, rice, and spirits, and no meat at all. Cries of rage were set up against one of the persons appointed to provide these supplies. The commissary saved his life only by crawling for a long time on his knees at the feet of Napoleon. Probably the reasons which he a.s.signed did more for him than his supplications.

"When he arrived," he said, "bands of stragglers, whom, when advancing, the army left behind it, had, as it were, involved Smolensk in terror and destruction. The men died there of hunger as upon the road. When some degree of order had been restored, the Jews alone had at first offered to furnish the necessary provisions. More generous motives subsequently engaged the aid of some Lithuanian n.o.blemen. At length the foremost of the long convoys of provisions collected in Germany appeared. These were the carriages called _comtoises_, and were the only ones which had traversed the sands of Lithuania; they brought no more than two hundred quintals of flour and rice; several hundred German and Italian bullocks had also arrived with them.

"Meanwhile the acc.u.mulation of dead bodies in the houses, courts, and gardens, and their unwholesome effluvia, infected the air. The dead were killing the living. The civil officers as well as many of the military were attacked: some had become to all appearance idiots, weeping or fixing their hollow eyes stedfastly on the ground. There were others whose hair had become stiff, erect, and ropy, and who, amidst a torrent of blasphemies, a horrid convulsion, or a still more frightful laugh, had dropped down dead.

"At the same time it had been found necessary to kill without delay the greatest part of the cattle brought from Germany and Italy. These animals would neither walk any farther, nor eat. Their eyes, sunk in their sockets, were dull and motionless. They were killed without seeking to avoid the fatal blow. Other misfortunes followed: several convoys were intercepted, magazines taken, and a drove of eight hundred oxen had just been carried off from Krasnoe."

This man added, that "regard ought also to be had to the great quant.i.ty of detachments which had pa.s.sed through Smolensk; to the stay which Marshal Victor, twenty-eight thousand men, and about fifteen thousand sick, had made there; to the mult.i.tude of posts and marauders whom the insurrection and the approach of the enemy had driven back into the city. All had subsisted upon the magazines; it had been necessary to deliver out nearly sixty thousand rations per day; and lastly, provisions and cattle had been sent forward towards Moscow as far as Mojaisk and towards Kalouga as far as Yelnia."

Many of these allegations were well founded. A chain of other magazines had been formed from Smolensk to Minsk and Wilna. These two towns were in a still greater degree than Smolensk, centres of provisioning, of which the fortresses of the Vistula formed the first line. The total quant.i.ty of provisions distributed over this s.p.a.ce was incalculable; the efforts for transporting them thither gigantic, and the result little better than nothing. They were insufficient in that immensity.

Thus great expeditions are crushed by their own weight. Human limits had been surpa.s.sed; the genius of Napoleon, in attempting to soar above time, climate, and distances, had, as it were, lost itself in s.p.a.ce: great as was its measure, it had been beyond it.

For the rest, he was pa.s.sionate, from necessity. He had not deceived himself in regard to the inadequacy of his supplies. Alexander alone had deceived him. Accustomed to triumph over every thing by the terror of his name, and the astonishment produced by his audacity, he had ventured his army, himself, his fortune, his all, on a first movement of Alexander's. He was still the same man as in Egypt, at Marengo, Ulm, and Esslingen; it was Ferdinand Cortes; it was the Macedonian burning his ships, and above all solicitous, in spite of his troops, to penetrate still farther into unknown Asia; finally, it was Caesar risking his whole fortune in a fragile bark.

BOOK X.

CHAP. I.

The surprise of Vinkowo, however, that unexpected attack of Kutusoff in front of Moscow, was only the spark of a great conflagration. On the same day, at the same hour, the whole of Russia had resumed the offensive. The general plan of the Russians was at once developed. The inspection of the map became truly alarming.

On the 18th of October, at the very moment that the cannon of Kutusoff were destroying Napoleon's illusions of glory and of peace, Wittgenstein, at one hundred leagues in the rear of his left wing, had thrown himself upon Polotsk; Tchitchakof, behind his right, and two hundred leagues farther off, had taken advantage of his superiority over Schwartzenberg; and both of them, one descending from the north, and the other ascending from the south, were endeavouring to unite their forces at Borizof.

This was the most difficult pa.s.sage in our retreat, and both these hostile armies were already close to it, at the time that Napoleon was at the distance of twelve days' journey, with the winter, famine, and the grand Russian army between them.

At Smolensk it was only suspected that Minsk was in danger; the officers who were present at the loss of Polotsk gave the following details respecting it:--

Ever since the battle of the 18th of August, which raised him to the dignity of marshal, Saint Cyr had remained on the Russian bank of the Duna, in possession of Polotsk, and of an entrenched camp in front of its walls. This camp showed how easy it would have been for the whole army to have taken up its winter quarters on the frontiers of Lithuania.

Its barracks, constructed by our soldiers, were more s.p.a.cious than the houses of the Russian peasantry, and equally warm: they were beautiful military villages, properly entrenched, and equally protected from the winter and from the enemy.

For two months the two armies carried on merely a war of partizans. With the French its object was to extend themselves through the country in search of provisions; on the part of the Russians, to strip them of what they found. A war of this sort was entirely in favour of the Russians, as our people, being ignorant of the country as well as of the language, even of the names of the places where they attempted to enter, were incessantly betrayed by the inhabitants, and even by their guides.

In consequence of these checks, and of hunger, and disease, the strength of Saint Cyr's army was diminished one half, while that of Wittgenstein had been more than doubled by the arrival of recruits. By the middle of October, the Russian army at that point amounted to fifty-two thousand men, while ours was only seventeen thousand. In this number must be included the 6th corps, or the Bavarians, reduced from twenty-two thousand to eighteen hundred men, and two thousand cavalry. The latter were then absent; Saint Cyr being without forage, and uneasy respecting the attempts of the enemy upon his flanks, had sent them to a considerable distance up the river, with orders to return by the left bank, in order to procure subsistence and to gain intelligence.

For this marshal was afraid of having his right turned by Wittgenstein and his left by Steingell, who was advancing at the head of two divisions of the army of Finland, which had recently arrived at Riga.

Saint Cyr had sent a very pressing letter to Macdonald, requesting him to use his efforts to stop the march of these Russians, who would have to pa.s.s his army, and to send him a reinforcement of fifteen thousand men; or if he would not do that, to come himself with succours to that amount, and take the command. In the same letter he also submitted to Macdonald all his plans of attack and defence. But Macdonald did not feel himself authorized to operate so important a movement without orders. He distrusted Yorck, whom he perhaps suspected of an intention of allowing the Russians to get possession of his park of besieging artillery. His reply was that he must first of all think of defending that, and he remained stationary.

In this state of affairs, the Russians became daily more and more emboldened; and finally, on the 17th of October, the out-posts of Saint Cyr were driven into his camp, and Wittgenstein possessed himself of all the outlets of the woods which surround Polotsk. He threatened us with a battle, which he did not believe we would venture to accept.

The French marshal, without orders from his Emperor, had been too late in his determination to entrench himself. His works were only marked out as much as was necessary, (not to cover their defenders), but to point out the place where their efforts would be princ.i.p.ally required. Their left, resting on the Duna, and defended by batteries placed on the left bank of the river, was the strongest. Their right was weak. The Polota, a stream which flows into the Duna, separated them.

Wittgenstein sent Yatchwil to threaten the least accessible side, and on the 18th he himself advanced against the other; at first with some rashness, for two French squadrons, the only ones which Saint Cyr had retained, overthrew his column in advance, took its artillery, and made himself prisoner, it is said, without being aware of it; so that they abandoned this general-in-chief, as an insignificant prize, when they were forced by numbers to retreat.

Rushing from their woods, the Russians then exhibited their whole force, and attacked Saint Cyr in the most furious manner. In one of the first discharges of their musketry, the marshal was wounded by a ball. He remained, however, in the midst of the troops, but being unable to support himself, was obliged to be carried about. Wittgenstein's determination to carry this point lasted as long as it was daylight. The redoubts, which were defended by Maison, were taken and retaken seven times. Seven times did Wittgenstein believe himself the conqueror; Saint Cyr finally wore him out. Legrand and Maison remained in possession of their entrenchments, which were bathed with the blood of the Russians.

But while on the right the victory appeared completely gained, on the left every thing seemed to be lost: the eagerness of the Swiss and the Croats was the cause of this reverse. Their rivalry had up to that period wanted an opportunity of showing itself. From a too great anxiety to show themselves worthy of belonging to the grand army, they acted rashly. Having been placed carelessly in front of their position, in order to draw on Yacthwil, they had, instead of abandoning the ground which had been prepared for his destruction, rushed forward to meet his ma.s.ses, and were overwhelmed by numbers. The French artillery, being prevented from firing on this medley, became useless, and our allies were driven back into Polotsk.

It was then that the batteries on the left bank of the Duna discovered, and were able to commence firing on the enemy, but instead of arresting, they only quickened his march. The Russians under Yacthwil, in order to avoid that fire, threw themselves with great rapidity into the ravine of the Polota, by which they were about to penetrate into the town, when at last three cannon, which were hastily directed against the head of their column, and a last effort of the Swiss, succeeded in driving them back.

At five o'clock the battle terminated; the Russians retreated on all sides into their woods, and fourteen thousand men had beat fifty thousand.

The night which followed was perfectly tranquil, even to Saint Cyr. His cavalry were deceived, and brought him wrong intelligence; they a.s.sured him that no enemy had pa.s.sed the Duna either above or below his position: this was incorrect, as Steingell and thirteen thousand Russians had crossed the river at Drissa, and gone up the left bank, with the object of taking the marshal in the rear, and shutting him up in Polotsk, between them, the Duna, and Wittgenstein.

The morning of the 19th exhibited the latter under arms, and making every disposition for an attack, the signal for which he appeared to be afraid of giving. Saint Cyr, however, was not to be deceived by these appearances; he was satisfied that it was not his feeble entrenchments which kept back an enterprising and numerous enemy, but that he was doubtless waiting the effect of some manoeuvre, the signal of an important co-operation, which could only be effected in his rear.

In fact, about ten o'clock in the morning, an aide-de-camp came in full gallop from the other side of the river, with the intelligence, that another hostile army, that of Steingell, was marching rapidly along the Lithuanian side of the river, and that it had defeated the French cavalry. He required immediate a.s.sistance, without which this fresh army would speedily get in the rear of the camp and surround it. The news of this engagement soon reached the army of Wittgenstein, where it excited the greatest joy, while it carried dismay into the French camp. Their position became dreadfully critical. Let any one figure to himself these brave fellows, hemmed in, against a wooden town, by a force treble their number, with a great river behind them, and no other means of retreat but a bridge, the pa.s.sage from which was threatened by another army.

It was in vain that Saint Cyr then weakened his force by three regiments, which he dispatched to the other side to meet Steingell, and whose march he contrived to conceal from Wittgenstein's observation.

Every moment the noise of the former's artillery was approaching nearer and nearer to Polotsk. The batteries, which from the left side protected the French camp, were now turned round, ready to fire upon this new enemy. At sight of this, loud shouts of joy burst out from the whole of Wittgenstein's line; but that officer still remained immoveable. To make him begin it was not merely necessary that he should _hear_ Steingell; he seemed absolutely determined to _see_ him make his appearance.