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

LAUNCH OF VIVE L'EMPEREUR MAGAZINE

I am absolutely delighted to be able to announce the first edition of VIVE L'EMPEREUR magazine in France. Edited by my great friend and esteemed FINS colleague Pascal Cazottes, it is a very welcome addition to the literature concerning Napoleon - much of which is very biased against him, particularly in the British Press.

Setting up a new publication, especially an academic one, is a massive undertaking and Pascal has made immense efforts to get the magazine out in time for the October 22nd deadline. Not only that, Pascal himself translated an article of mine that appears in the first edition - The Eruption of Tambora and Waterloo.

Here is the first cover. I am certain the magazine is destined to be a major player in the Great Napoleonic Debate.

What else is there to add but VIVE L'EMPEREUR!

NAPOLEON BY SOULADREAM: IMPORTANT RUSSIANS AT THE TIME OF NAPOLEON

NAPOLEON BY SOULADREAM: IMPORTANT RUSSIANS AT THE TIME OF NAPOLEON: Even though I have been studying the Napoleonic era for many years, I still did not know what certain important historical characters actual...

IMPORTANT RUSSIANS AT THE TIME OF NAPOLEON

Even though I have been studying the Napoleonic era for many years, I still did not know what certain important historical characters actually looked like - hence I decided to do a little research. Most of the pictures below come from the fantastic Hermitage collection which is free to peruse to your heart's content. I recommend it unreservedly. I've found images from many different periods of history that are absolutely fascinating.

1812 PART TWO ANGELA

I have just published Part Two of my historical novel 1812 on AMAZON KINDLE.  There are seven chapters, nearly 30,000 words in this section. Angela is the cantiniere to the 30th Regiment, the supplier of extra food and materials that the soldiers needed during an extensive campaign. She is feisty and strong-willed and this often gets her into trouble!