Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0005/00052.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 15KB | 260 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00052}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Life Of Napoleon Bonaparte And Life Of Josephine
Chapter XIX}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Tarbell, Ida M.}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{army
napoleon
french
moscow
battle
enemy
thousand
cold
day
nieman}
$Date{1906}
$Log{}
Title:       Life Of Napoleon Bonaparte And Life Of Josephine
Book:        Life Of Napoleon Bonaparte
Author:      Tarbell, Ida M.
Date:        1906

Chapter XIX

The Russian Campaign - The Burning Of Moscow - A New Army

     If one draws a triangle, its base stretching along the Nieman from Tilsit
to Grodno, its apex on the Elbe, he will have a rough outline of the "army of
twenty nations" as it lay in June, 1812.  Napoleon, some two hundred and
twenty-five thousand men around him, was at Kowno, hesitating to advance,
reluctant to believe that Alexander would not make peace.

     When he finally moved, it was not with the precision and swiftness
which had characterized his former campaigns.  When he began to fight, it
was against new odds.  He found that his enemies had been studying the
Spanish campaigns, and that they had adopted the tactics which had so
nearly ruined his armies in the Peninsula: they refused to give him a
general battle retreating constantly before him; they harassed his
separate corps with indecisive contests; they wasted the country as they
went.  The people aided their soldiers as the Spaniards had done.  "Tell
us only the moment, and we will set fire to our buildings," said the
peasants.

     By the 12th of August, Napoleon was at Smolensk, the key of Moscow.
At a cost of twelve thousand men killed and wounded, he took the town,
only to find, instead of the well-victualled shelter he hoped, a smoking
ruin.  The French army had suffered frightfully from sickness, from
scarcity of supplies, and from useless fighting on the march from the
Nieman to Smolensk.  They had not had the stimulus of a great victory;
they began to feel that this steady retreat of the enemy was only a fatal
trap into which they were falling.  Every consideration forbade them to
march into Russia so late in the year, yet on they went towards Moscow,
over ruined fields and through empty villages.  This terrible pursuit
lasted until September 7th, when the Russians, to content their soldiers,
who were complaining loudly because they were not allowed to engage the
French, gave battle at Borodino, the battle of the Moskova, as the French
call it.

     At two o'clock in the morning of this engagement, Napoleon issued one
of his stirring bulletins:

          "Soldiers!  Here is the battle which you have so long desired!
     Henceforth the victory depends upon you; it is necessary for us.  It will
     give you abundance, good winter quarters, and a speedy return to your
     country!  Behave as you did at Austerlitz, at Friedland, at Vitebsk, at
     Smolensk, and the most remote posterity will quote with pride your conduct
     on this day; let it say of you: he was at the great battle under the walls
     of Moscow."

     The French gained the battle at Borodino, at a cost of some thirty
thousand men, but they did not destroy the Russian army.  Although the
Russians lost fifty thousand men, they retreated in good order.  Under the
circumstances, a victory which allowed the enemy to retire in order was of
little use.  It was Napoleon's fault, the critics said; he was inactive. But
it was not sluggishness which troubled Napoleon at Borodino.  He had a new
enemy - a headache.  On the day of the battle he suffered so that he was
obliged to retire to a ravine to escape the icy wind.  In this sheltered spot
he paced up and down all day, giving his orders from the reports brought him.

     Moscow was entered on the 15th of September.  Here the French found at
last food and shelter, but only for a few hours.  That night Moscow burst into
flames, set on fire by the authorities, by whom it had been abandoned.  It was
three days before the fire was arrested.  It would cost Russia two hundred
years of time, two hundred millions of money, to repair the loss which she had
sustained, Napoleon wrote to France.

     Suffering, disorganization, pillage, followed the disaster.  But Napoleon
would not retreat.  He hoped to make peace.  Moscow was still smoking when he
wrote a long description of the conflagration to Alexander.  The closing
paragraph ran:

          "I wage war against your Majesty without animosity; a note from you
     before or after the last battle would have stopped my march, and I should
     even have liked to sacrifice the advantage of entering Moscow.  If your
     Majesty retains some remains of your former sentiments, you will take this
     letter in good part.  At all events, you will thank me for giving you an
     account of what is passing at Moscow."

     "I will never sign a peace as long as a single foe remains on Russian
ground," the Emperor Alexander had said when he heard that Napoleon had
crossed the Nieman.  He kept his word in spite of all Napoleon's overtures.
The French position grew worse from day to day.  No food, no fresh supplies,
the cold increasing, the army disheartened, the number of Russians around
Moscow growing larger.  Nothing but a retreat could save the remnant of the
French.  It began on October 19th, one hundred and fifteen thousand men
leaving Moscow.  They were followed by forty thousand vehicles loaded with the
sick and with what supplies they could get hold of.  The route was over the
fields devastated a month before.  The Cossacks harassed them night and day,
and the cruel Russian cold dropped from the skies, cutting them down like a
storm of scythes.  Before Smolensk was reached, thousands of the retreating
army were dead.

     Napoleon had ordered that provisions and clothing should be collected at
Smolensk.  When he reached the city he found that his directions had not been
obeyed.  The army, exasperated beyond endurance by this disappointment, fell
into complete and frightful disorganization, and the rest of the retreat was
like the falling back of a conquered mob.

     There is no space here for the details of this terrible march and of the
frightful passage of the Beresina.  The terror of the cold and starvation
wrung cries from Napoleon himself.

     "Provisions, provisions, provisions," he wrote on November 29th from the
right bank of the Beresina.  "Without them there is no knowing to what horrors
this undisciplined mass will proceed."

     And again: "The army is at its last extremity.  It is impossible for it
to do anything, even if it were a question of defending Paris."

     The army finally reached the Nieman.  The last man over was Marshal Ney.
"Who are you?" he was asked.  "The rear guard of the Grand Army," was the
sombre reply of the noble old soldier.

     Some forty thousand men crossed the river, but of these there were many
who could do nothing but crawl to the hospitals, asking for "the rooms where
people die." It was true, as Desprez said, the Grand Army was dead.

     It was on this horrible retreat that Napoleon received word that a
curious thing had happened in Paris.  A general and an abbe, both political
prisoners, had escaped, and actually had succeeded in the preliminaries of a
coup d'etat overturning the empire, and substituting a provisional government.

     They had carried out their scheme simply by announcing that Napoleon was
dead, and by reading a forged proclamation from the senate to the effect that
the imperial government was at an end and a new one begun. The authorities to
whom these conspirators had gone had with but little hesitation accepted their
orders.  They had secured twelve hundred soldiers, had locked up the prefect
of police, and had taken possession of the Hotel de Ville.

     The foolhardy enterprise went, it is true, only a little way, but far
enough to show Paris that the day of easy revolution had not passed, and that
an announcement of the death of Napoleon did not bring at once a cry of "Long
live the King of Rome!" The news of the Malet conspiracy was an astonishing
revelation to Napoleon himself of the instability of French public sentiment.
He saw that the support on which he had depended most to insure his
institutions, that is, an heir to his throne, was set aside at the word of a
worthless agitator.  The impression made on his generals by the news was one
of consternation and despair.  The emperor read in their faces that they
believed his good fortune was waning.  He decided to go to Paris as soon as
possible.

     On December 5th he left the army, and after a perilous journey of twelve
days reached the French capital.  It took as great courage to face France now
as it had taken audacity to attempt the invasion of Russia. The grandest army
the nation had ever sent out was lying behind him dead. His throne had
tottered for an instant in sight of all France.  Hereafter he could not
believe himself invincible.  Already his enemies were suggesting that since
his good genius had failed him once, it might again.

     No one realized the gravity of the position as Napoleon himself, but he
met his household, his ministers, the Council of State, the Senate, with an
imperial self-confidence and a sang froid which are awe-inspiring under the
circumstances.  The horror of the situation of the army was not known in Paris
on his arrival, but reports came in daily until the truth was clear to
everybody.  But Napoleon never lost countenance.  The explanations necessary
for him to give to the Senate, to his allies, and to his friends, had all the
serenity and the plausibility of a victor - a victor who had suffered, to be
sure, but not through his own rashness or mismanagement.  The following
quotation from a letter to the King of Denmark illustrates well his public
attitude towards the invasion and the retreat from Moscow:

          "The enemy were always beaten, and captured neither an eagle nor a
     gun from my army.  On the 7th of November the cold became intense; all the
     roads were found impracticable; thirty thousand horses perished between
     the 7th and the 16th.  A portion of our baggage and artillery wagons was
     broken and abandoned; our soldiers, little accustomed to such weather,
     could not endure the cold.  They wandered from the ranks in quest of
     shelter for the night, and, having no cavalry to protect them, several
     thousands fell into the hands of the enemy's light troops.  General
     Sanson, chief of the topographic corps, was captured by some Cossacks
     while he was engaged in sketching a position.  Other isolated officers
     shared the same fate.  My losses are severe, but the enemy cannot
     attribute to themselves the honor of having inflicted them.  My army has
     suffered greatly, and suffers still, but this calamity will cease with the
     cold."

     To every one he declared that it was the Russians, not he, who had
suffered.  It was their great city, not his, which was burnt; their fields,
not his, which were devastated.  They did not take an eagle, did not win a
battle.  It was the cold, the Cossacks, which had done the mischief to the
Grand Army; and that mischief?  Why, it would be soon repaired.  "I shall be
back on the Nieman in the spring."

     But the very man who in public and private calmed and reassured the
nation, was sometimes himself so overwhelmed at the thought of the disaster
which he had just witnessed, that he let escape a cry which showed that it was
only his indomitable will which was carrying him through; that his heart was
bleeding.  In the midst of a glowing account to the legislative body of his
success during the invasion, he suddenly stopped.  "In a few nights everything
changed.  I have suffered great losses.  They would have broken my heart if I
had been accessible to any other feelings than the interest, the glory, and
the future of my people."

     In the teeth of the terrible news coming daily to Paris, Napoleon began
preparations for another campaign.  To every one he talked of victory as
certain.  Those who argued against the enterprise he silenced temporarily.
"You should say," he wrote Eugene, "and yourself believe, that in the next
campaign I shall drive the Russians back across the Nieman." With the first
news of the passage of the Beresina chilling them, the Senate voted an army of
three hundred and fifty thousand men; the allies were called upon; even the
marine was obliged to turn men over to the land force.

     But something besides men was necessary.  An army means muskets and
powder and sabres, clothes and boots and headgear, wagons and cannon and
caisson; and all these it was necessary to manufacture afresh.  The task was
gigantic; but before the middle of April it was completed, and the emperor was
ready to join his army.

     The force against which Napoleon went in 1813 was the most formidable, in
many respects, he had ever encountered.  Its strength was greater.  It
included Russia, England, Spain, Prussia, and Sweden, and the allies believed
Austria would soon join them.  An element of this force more powerful than its
numbers was its spirit.  The allied armies fought Napoleon in 1813 as they
would fight an enemy of freedom.  Central Europe had come to feel that further
French interference was intolerable.  The war had become a crusade.  The
extent of this feeling is illustrated by an incident in the Prussian army.  In
the war of 1812 Prussia was an ally of the French, but at the end of the year
General Yorck, who commanded a Prussian division, went over to the enemy.  It
was a dishonorable action from a military point of view, but his explanation
that he deserted as "a patriot acting for the welfare of his country" touched
Prussia; and though the king disavowed the act, the people applauded it.

     Thoughout the German states the feeling against Napoleon was bitter. A
veritable crusade had been undertaken against him by such men as Stein, and
most of the youth of the country were united in the Tagendbund, or League of
Virtue, which had sworn to take arms for German freedom.

     When Alexander followed the French across the Nieman, announcing that he
came bringing "deliverance to Europe," and calling on the people to unite
against the "common enemy," he found them quick to understand and respond.

     Thus, in 1813 Napoleon did not go against kings and armies, but against
peoples.  No one understood this better than he did himself, and he counselled
his allies that it was not against the foreign enemy alone that they had to
protect themselves.  "There is one more dangerous to be feared - the spirit of
revolt and anarchy."