THE GREAT FIRE OF MOSCOW 1812

NAPOLEON IN RUSSIA

The Moscow fire was caused by Russians incendiaries let out of prison on the orders of Rostopchin, Governor of the city. He later denied the part he played and Leo Tolstoy gave the impression everything was Napoleon's fault in War and Peace.

Most of the city was devastated and hundreds of buildings were burnt to the ground - their cellars subsequently becoming traps for careless members of the Grand Army who did nor watch where they were putting their feet. It is often stated by many historians that the fire meant Napoleon could never have wintered in the city due to a lack of resources. However, anyone who reads the memoirs of Bourgogne and Coignet will discover that there was ample food for the Army had it been carefully utilized. At the time, a lot of supplies were wasted or squandered for the famished soldiers, seeing the inhabitants burning their own city, took to looting and stealing everything within their grasp. Had the Army retired the following Spring the retreat would have taken place in much milder weather. Then again, it is doubtful if Napoleon could have remained that long away from Paris for political reasons - it was his absence that led to the Malet conspiracy.

Although, as the map shows, some two-thirds of the city was burnt out, there were still plenty of massive mansions and houses for the troops to shelter in. Bourgogne states that: "To last for the winter we had seven large cases of sweet champagne, a large quantity of port wine, five hundred bottles of Jamaica rum, and more than a hundred large packets of sugar. And all this was for six non-commissioned officers, two women, and a cook." He adds: "We had a large number of hams, having found a shop full of them; add to all this a quantity of salt fish, a few sacks of flour, two large barrels filled with suet, which we had taken for butter, and as much beer as we wanted. These constituted our provisions, in case we had to spend the winter in Moscow."

Napoleon stayed far too long in Moscow. He kept hoping the Tsar would sue for peace now that French troops were in the city, but Alexander was determined to have nothing to do with his emissaries - to him it was already total war, even if Napoleon did not realize this. The unusually mild Russian autumn also added to the Emperor's determination to wait it out. But no message came from the Tsar.

The early glut of provisions was bad for the Army's morale. Soldiers set up impromptu markets and bartered for food, furs and valuables.

For Bourgogne, Moscow was the most beautiful city he had ever seen, and this from a man who had been to Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Warsaw and Vienna. On September 14th he got his first sight of the place: "It was a beautiful summer's day; the sun was reflected on all the domes, spires and gilded palaces... the effect was to me - in fact, to everyone - magical." Hence the shock when the inhabitants then set torches to their own buildings.

The religious Muscovites were outraged when they saw horses being stabled in their churches. It made the invading Army seem to them to be little more than a horde of godless savages, even if some did attend mass.

While Marshal Davout did his best to serve Napoleon, Murat seemed hell bent on destroying his own cavalry - posing for any passing Cossack who was near enough to see the glittering uniforms of his own creation. 

AND THEN CAME THE FIRE

The longer he waited, the worse it became for Napoleon and the Grand Army...

C. John Tarttelin FINS 2011

A SOULADREAM PRODUCTION

GREAT NAPOLEONIC PAINTINGS - AT THE BEREZINA RIVER 1812

AT THE BEREZINA RIVER Nov. 28th 1812

One of the most atmospheric and evocative paintings of the Great Retreat of Napoleon's Grand Army in 1812 was painted by the German artist Peter von Hess. What I particularly like about this painting is the fantastic detail and the all-encompassing sweep of the piece. Nothing escapes his masterly eye. Indeed there is so much of interest in this work that I have taken the liberty of enhancing different parts of the painting to demonstrate the wealth of information about the Retreat there is upon the canvas.

The story of the crossing of the Berezina is worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster yet it is a tale most people will never even have heard of. In England one is almost flushed with embarrassment at the constant references to Waterloo. In my country few have heard of Austerlitz - the Emperor's greatest triumph. Wellington defeated Napoleon in 1815 only with the assistance of the Prussians. In December 1805, Napoleon defeated Austria and Russia by himself. The young Tsar Alexander fled the battlefield in tears. Yet only two years later at Tilsit Napoleon treated him indulgently as if he had been his own younger brother.

Similarly, no one here speaks of the Berezina. Able was Eble before he saw this latterday River Styx. As Sergeant Bourgogne says: "We saw the brave pontonniers working hard at the bridges for us to cross. They had worked all night, standing up to their shoulders in ice-cold water, encouraged by their General (Eble). These brave men sacrificed their lives to save the army." When the first bridge was finished Marshal Oudinot crossed with his corps to prevent the Russians blocking the escape route. "On the next day (the 27th)...the Emperor crossed the Berezina with part of the Guard, and about a thousand men belonging to Marshal Ney's corps." 

Now let's immerse ourselves in Hess's wonderful portrayal of these events. In the left centre is a doughty member of the Old Guard his musket levelled at the approaching Russians, his bayonet ready.

Perhaps his dark blue overcoat looks a little too clean because by this time many of the men were dressed in rags as Bourgogne and Coignet attest. However, some of the Old Guard made herculean efforts to present themselves as if on the parade ground no matter what was happening around them, despite the Arctic temperatures and the chaos endemic everywhere. A shattered tree indicates the bombardments that the survivors had to endure at the hand of the pursuing Russians. Around our brave grognard lie his compatriots, some about to expire. An abandoned cannon is close by. At this stage of the Retreat many of the horses that had been pulling the guns had been eaten by the starving troops. At Gara, where he witnessed a terrible barn fire that cremated dozens of men while they were still alive and taking shelter inside the building, Bourgogne reveals the dark secret that other wretched men ate some of the cooked flesh that resulted. He adds that by then many would have eaten the devil himself - had he been cooked.

At the bottom right can be seen a Cossack wearing an orange brown coat on horseback. He is dragging a prisoner along with him, a rope attaching the man to the rider can just be seen. Meanwhile another exhausted victim is rooted out from beneath an overturned cart at the point of his lance. Hess might well have been thinking of Bourgogne himself here because he mentions hiding beneath a cart to escape the terrible long lances of the Cossacks. Abandoned goods are seen strewn all over the battlefield. Many of the soldiers in the Grand Army had left Moscow weighed down with gold, jewels and other trophies. As the snows fell and the temperature plummeted these items were thrown away. Rich precious first editions of rare leather bound books could be seen in the snow, their pages fluttering in the wind. Instead, men fought each other for tiny items of food, stealing from those that only too recently had been their best friends. When a man stumbled and seemed about to face his maker he was stripped of his clothing, sometimes before he had even died.

Frenchmen and their Allies who became prisoners of the Cossacks and irregular troops often faced a dire situation. Some officers in the regular Russian army insisted on proprieties but many others simply refused to take prisoners. Inevitably, those captured were stripped naked and forced to march in the snow until they dropped dead or reached a benighted sanctuary in some makeshift prison camp. If the furious peasants got hold of them the outlook was even worse. Their Holy Mother Russia violated, the peasants had no thought of humanity or compassion. French throats were slit as if they were just more pigs being butchered for the table. The heads of prisoners were bashed in with atavistic glee, the executioners feeling no more compunction than they would have felt in the act of swatting an insect. Many stragglers received over a dozen stabs from Cossack lances and miraculously a few of these survived and managed to get all the way back to France!

In the extreme bottom right of the painting, a group of dying men remain motionless, too exhausted even to attempt to escape their vengeful pursuers. One man lies on the snow with his feet actually in the fire. This reflects awful incidents that actually took place. The men were so cold and frostbitten that they had lost all sense of feeling in their limbs, especially their feet. As a result they often smelt flesh burning without realizing it was their own body that was on fire. Soldiers being soldiers, they drank whatever intoxicating liquor was at hand. Having eaten little, only a few mouthfuls were enough to make them drunk. Despite having got as far as Vilna, far beyond the Berezina, hundreds of men died after imbibing, their bodies cluttering the streets. Boarded-up houses showed that the locals were too afraid to let these famished wraiths inside their homes.

Perhaps the most heart-rending accounts of these terrible days by the river concern ordinary civilians who had been caught up in the war. Many French tutors, musicians and actors who had been working in Moscow thought it best to leave the city with their compatriots - a bad mistake if ever there was one. The 'wives' of the soldiers also accompanied their 'husbands'. And there was a litany of washerwomen, prostitutes and others who swelled the ranks of the fleeing horde. Most would become victims on the long death march out of Russia. 

At the extreme bottom left of the painting we see a young woman sprawled out in front of a fire, the flames of which are dying down and about to go out. In her arms she seems to be holding a baby. Hess had obviously read his Bourgogne, for the brave Sergeant recounted how one of the cantinieres gave birth only to find her infant frozen solid a few days later. A cuirassier stands nearby, his fallen horse at his feet and a comrade begging him for help. During the Retreat, starving women offered their bodies for morsels of food and were usually rejected. In their own eyes they might still have been the beautiful young women they had been before the Retreat. But after weeks  of frozen terror with little to eat, their shrivelled breasts and washboard ribs were far from attractive and sex was the last thing on a dying soldier's mind.

At the Berezina, hundreds of civilians rushed to cross the two flimsy bridges when the Russians attacked. Killed in the crush their bodies piled up to the height of a man. Other unfortunates were heaved into the ice cold river and slowly sank beneath the water. Starving wraiths, mindless freezing automatons, like zombies they each played their part in this infamous horror story until their last breath left their bodies. At the Berezina so many died it was as if the last breath of the Grand Army was being heard before the stillness and silence of the grave. For weeks afterwards their corpses would be eaten by wolves, lynx, foxes and bears, and the omnivorous wild boar. While from the skies came the eagles, owls and crows to peck out their eyes and nibble on their ghastly remains... 

C. John Tarttelin FINS 2011

A SOULADREAM PRODUCTION 

GREAT NAPOLEONIC PAINTINGS - RETREAT FROM MOSCOW

SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI - RETREAT FROM MOSCOW

by RICHARD CATON WOODVILLE (1911)

Richard Caton Woodville was a prolific painter of historical scenes. He was born on January 7th 1856 and grew up when Britain was at the height of Empire. Not surprisingly, his detailed and evocative works became extremely popular. My favourite, a copy of which I am lucky enough to possess, is his Retreat From Moscow.

At the centre of the painting is a thoughtful and troubled Napoleon, watching his famous eagles being destroyed by fire so that the closely pursuing Russians would not be able to snatch them as trophies. Not all the eagles met this fate, a few were taken all the way back to France by the most stalwart members of the Imperial Guard, clutched closely to their hearts, literally in one case.

The scene is the Berezina River after General Eble and his magnificent men had thrown two rickety bridges across the ice choked waters. In the turbulent swell up to their chests, they had gallantly put together the makeshift bridges, some of the men drifting off into oblivion when the freezing waters stilled their noble lifeblood in their veins. Sergeant Bourgogne recounts having heard that the Emperor himself handed them wine as they went about their task. What a disaster it was that the pontoon bridges had been so recently burnt so that their horse teams could be used to pull the last of the cannons!

It was the coldest Russian winter for a hundred years and the water in the Berezina should have been as hard as steel, but a sudden thaw meant it was almost impossible to cross without those bridges, especially for the stragglers in the Grand Army who were at death's door. Bourgogne himself, half-dead with cold and a recent victim of poisoning, dragged himself across one night in a lull amidst the fighting. Hundreds of others, unwilling to leave their fires could have done the same. In the end they were bombarded by Russian cannon fire and they all raced for the bridges at the same time. In the chaos, dozens were crushed and a veritable mountain of bodies soon clogged up the entrances to the bridges. Coignet and Bourgogne both say that the scene was so awful as men women, and even children, plunged into the icy river, they had to turn away. That nightmare vision haunted them both for the rest of their lives.

Although the prospect for the soldiers seem dire in Catin Woodville's painting, it was even worse than he depicted it. Many men had faces blackened by smoke from swirling campfires, the temperatures had been so low that they had to almost sit amongst the flames in order to warm themselves. They had red eyes having been half-blinded by the glare of the snow and the heat of the fires and clothes singed by the flames. Those who could still walk by this stage were very lucky. There was already a trail of corpses leading all the way back to Moscow.

Picart and Bourgogne had been lost amongst the wilds of the Lithuanian forest and only by following a couple of distant figures did they find a peasant hut where they were welcomed. Picart had been shot in the head during a recent episode with some Cossacks and had seemed demented to Adrien Bourgogone as they stumbled together through the thick snow. Cursing Napoleon, Picart seemed to have completely lost it and Bourgogne had been extremely worried for them both. But then Picart said :"If we find the Emperor everything will be all right." The old peasant woman sucked his wound clean after a musket ball fell from out of his makeshift hood. When there was a noise outside, Picart went outside with a firebrand and scared off a pack of wolves that had literally been at the door. By now many packs would have been used to the taste of human flesh and aware of the extreme vulnerability of the stragglers in the Grand Army.

In this desolate forested wilderness the two soldiers were inordinately lucky to find themselves amidst a family of Francophiles. The head of the family, an old man, almost bowed his head to the floor when he heard the name "'Napoleon" and he was over the moon when he was given a commander's cross with the Emperor's portrait upon it. Pressing it to his lips and heart he indicated the reverence with which he viewed the treasured item.

So, more than a thousand miles from Paris, in the furthest back of beyond, a humble peasant had not only heard about Napoleon, he held him in the utmost esteems and venerated even his image. Such was the Emperor's magic, such was his spell.

Behind Napoleon in the painting, as gaudily dressed as usual was Murat, King of Naples, the Emperor's brother-in-law. He has a haughty aspect and he certainly fancied himself. Although he had saved the day at Eylau with a magnificent charge amongst the snow, leading his splendid throng of sabres into the Russian centre and carving them up on the way in and on the way out, he was to prove a disaster for his comrades in 1812. Having married into the Bonaparte clan, he was a 'prince of the blood' in more ways than one and he was given command of the remnants of the Army when Napoleon returned to Paris after the Malet Conspiracy. Already, having been surprised by Kutuzov's Russians at Winkowo, which was the initial  cause of the Retreat, and having proved useless as Commander of the cavalry - he kept his forces bunched together and on the qui vivre all the time so that the troopers could neither rest properly nor forage - he had overseen the destruction of 99% of the cavalry. Only a Doomed Squadron of a few hundred remained with Generals acting as Colonels and Captains acting as troopers. When Bourgogne heard Murat was in charge he had grave forebodings. In the event, Murat fled to Naples and Eugene took command as he ought to have done in the first place.

Caton Woodville indicates all this by placing a cavalryman on foot in the foreground. By now over 50,000 horses had succumbed to the cold, to eating green rye or to the storm back in June which had killed 10,000 of them overnight. The figure still looks like a soldier when in fact most of the survivors in the Grand Army were now dressed in rags. Any old fur or item of apparel, even women's clothing, was wrapped around freezing shoulders or frostbitten feet. Many had lost their shoes or boots and their swollen feet could only be covered by wrapping rags around them. 

In the background  smoke swirls in the leaden sky as if carrying away the greatness of an Empire. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

C. John Tarttelin FINS 2011

A SOULADREAM PRODUCTION 

RUSSIAN COSSACKS - DREADED WOLVES WITH LANCES

Napoleon's Russian Campaign of 1812 was infamous for many reasons, not least for the enormous amount of casualties suffered by the French and their Allies. As well as the abnormally hot conditions that prevailed that summer two centuries ago, after an unseasonally mild autumn, the winter was the coldest in a 100 years. But what the retreating wraiths, shivering in their ragged uniforms worried most about was the sudden appearance of the Cossacks. Only a few dark figures on horseback brandishing their fearsome lances was enough to spook a whole brigade - not that the shabby caricatures of soldiers struggling to survive in temperatures of minus 20 were now travelling in organized bands. Very soon after the Grand Army left Moscow discipline dissolved and it was a question of every man for himself.

From the pictures above it can be seen just how long the Cossack lances were. As he left Vilna and neared Ponari Hill, where freezing French troops and their Russian antagonists momentarily suspended hostilities in order to grab gold napoleons from abandoned pay chests, Sergeant Bourgogne describes how he hid beneath an upturned cart in order to avoid the blade of a would-be assassin. Ravaged by illness, having been poisoned by heartless inhabitants of Vilna, Bourgogne was already half-dead with a frozen foot and frostbitten fingers, so avoiding his tormentor was far from easy.

The lance is a primitive weapon and harks back to the enormous spears carried by a phalanx of Macedonian hoplites. It was only when he saw how efficient his brave Polish warriors were with the weapon that Napoleon decided to add it to his armoury. In the circumstances in which the Grand Army found itself in November 1812, it was an ideal weapon. When firearms failed to fire because it was impossible to keep powder dry, and frozen fingers could no longer pull a trigger, a lance could be brandished under an arm and waved under the noses of any Cossack who got too close. So any soldier who came across one was very wise to pick it up and use it against the fleeting demons that surrounded his wounded and dying comrades.

Cossacks were basically an anachronism, their reputation had been made over the centuries fighting the Turks and but for the very unusual weather conditions in 1812 they would have been little more than an irritant to the practised arms of the Grand Army. Napoleon's forces made mincemeat of the Mamelukes in Egypt and then used their own spears to fish their bodies out of the Nile in order to rob them of their gold. But for a plethora of volcanic eruptions that dogged the last decade of the Little Ice Age (1810-1820) flinging countless tons of fiery dust up into the atmosphere and changing the weather for the worse, making it the coldest decade in the C19th and the Dalton sunspot minimum and a rapid El Nino - La Nina changeover event  that both lowered global temperatures even further, the troops would probably have survived much better in a 'normal' Russian winter. It must be remembered that Kutuzov's Russians suffered almost as much from the cold as Napoleon's men. So if ever the Cossacks were going to get to grips with far superior forces, this was it.

The Cossacks had a well-earnt reputation for butchery. Their usual foes were the denizens of the south, the Turks and Tartars who chopped heads off their victims with casual abandon, so the warriors of the steppes adopted similar tactics themselves. There are many accounts of Russians stripping soldiers of the Grand Army naked and then marching them off in temperatures far below zero until they succumbed to the perishing cold. Or else they sold their prisoners to vindictive peasants who bashed their brains out with staves or whatever else was close at hand. Bourgogne and his best friend Picart witnessed such events when they were lost in the Lithuanian forest and desperately trying to find the Emperor and the remnants of the Guard. Picart was an excellent marksman and when Cossacks attacked him and Bourgogne they got the worst of it. The two Guardsmen then continued their journey on a captured cossack nag, Picart sat in front and Bourgogne sat at the back, facing the wrong way so he could be rearguard!

Cossack mounts were small and scruffy but they were incredibly tough and could survive on very poor fodder. The Grand Army lost thousands of its horses which were unused to the cold and simply could not exist without regular supplies of oats - especially the horses that pulled the cannons. So in the dying days of the Retreat, the last horses pulling the last cannons were sent ahead of the starving troops so when the animals  inevitably collapsed, the troopers could rush upon them and cut off chunks of horseflesh before the carcasses set rock solid in the ice. And even when the horses still walked, men could slit their veins and drain off life-saving blood to sup themselves - the horses plodding on regardless, unable to feel a thing.

The Cossacks were often romanticized. Tolstoy wrote some great stories about them - The Cossacks and The Raid are two examples. He obviously admired their free-living and free-loving nature.

Soldiers in the Grand Army were amazed by the appearance of some of the 'Russian' forces as amongst them were orientals with bows and arrows as well as spears.

The Cossacks certainly caused a stir when they got to Paris in 1814 along with the other soldiers in Tsar Alexander's Army but their effect then was as nothing compared to the terror they instilled in the soldiers of the retreating Grand Army.

C. John Tarttelin 2011

A SOULADREAM PRODUCTION

PARIS IN THE RAIN JULY 18TH 2007 WED