Part 26

At length the emperor reached Viazma. He here halted to wait for Prince Eugene and Davoust, and to reconnoitre the road to Medyn and Yucknow, which at this place unites with the high road to Smolensk. It was this cross-road which might possibly bring the Russian army from Malo-jaroslavetz on his passage. But on the first of November, after waiting thirty-six hours and seeing no indications of that army, he again set out, wavering between the hope that Kutusoff had fallen asleep, and the fear lest he might have left Viazma on his right, and proceeded two marches farther to cut off his retreat. He left Ney, however, at Viazma to collect the first and fourth corps, and to relieve, by forming the rear guard, Davoust, whom he judged to be fatigued.

He complained of the tardiness of the latter, and wrote to reproach him with being still five marches behind, when he ought to have been no more than three: the genius of that marshal he considered too methodical to direct, in a suitable manner, so irregular a march.

But this delay was accounted for by the fact that Davoust had found a marsh without a bridge, and completely encumbered with wagons. He had dragged them out of the slough in sight of the enemy, and so near them that their fires lighted his labors, and the sound of their drums mingled with that of his own voice. For the marshal and his generals could not yet resolve on abandoning to the enemy so many trophies; nor did they make up their minds to it until after fruitless exertions, and in the last extremity.

The road they were traversing was crossed at short intervals by marshy hollows. A slope, slippery as glass with the ice, hurried the carriages into them, and there they stuck fast: to draw them out it was necessary to climb on the opposite side a similar slope, where the horses, whose shoes were worn entirely smooth, could obtain no footing, and where every moment they and their drivers dropped down exhausted together. The famished soldiers immediately fell upon these luckless animals and tore them to pieces; then at fires, kindled with the remains of their carriages, they broiled the yet bleeding flesh, and devoured it.

Meanwhile the artillerymen, a chosen corps, and their officers, all brought up in the first military school in the world, kept off these unfortunate wretches whenever they could, and took the horses from their own carriages and wagons, which they abandoned to save the guns. To these they harnessed their horses, nay, even themselves; while the Cossacks, observing their disasters from a distance, though they dared not attack, with their light pieces mounted on sledges, threw their balls among these disorderly groups, and increased the confusion.

On the 3d of November, Prince Eugene was advancing towards Viazma, preceded by his equipages and his artillery, when the first light of day all at once discovered to him his retreat threatened by an army on his left, behind him his rear guard cut off, and on his left the plain covered with stragglers and scattered vehicles, fleeing before the lances of the enemy. At the same time, towards Viazma he heard Marshal Ney, who should have assisted him, fighting for his own preservation.

At the same time, Compans, one of Davoust's generals, joined the Italian rear guard with his division. These cleared a passage for themselves, and while, united with the viceroy, they were warmly engaged, Davoust with his column passed rapidly behind them, along the left side of the high road, then crossing it, as soon as he had got beyond them, he claimed his place in the order of battle, took the right wing, and found himself between Viazma and the Russians. Prince Eugene gave up to him the ground which he had been defending, and crossed to the other side of the road. The enemy then began to extend himself in front of them, and endeavored to outflank their wings.

Miloradovitch, the Russian general, left to himself, now tried to break the French line of battle; but he could penetrate it by his fire alone, which made dreadful havoc in our ranks. Eugene and Davoust were growing weak; and, as they heard another action in the rear of their right, they imagined that the rest of the Russian army was approaching Viazma by the Yuknof road, the outlet of which Ney was defending.

It was only, however, an advanced guard: but they were alarmed at the noise of this engagement in the rear of their own, threatening their retreat. The action had now continued ever since seven in the morning, and night was approaching: the baggage must by this time have got away, and the French generals began to retire.

This retrograde movement increased the ardor of the enemy, and but for a memorable effort of the 25th, 57th, and 85th regiments, and the protection of a ravine, Davoust's corps would have been broken, turned by its right, and destroyed. Prince Eugene, who was not so briskly attacked, was able to effect his retreat more rapidly through Viazma; but the Russians followed him thither, and had penetrated into the town at the very time when Davoust, pursued by 20,000 men, and overwhelmed by eighty pieces of cannon, in his turn attempted to pass.

Morand's division first entered the place: it was marching on with confidence, under the idea that the action was over, when the Russians, who were concealed by the windings of the streets, suddenly fell upon it. The surprise was complete, and the confusion great: Morand nevertheless rallied and encouraged his men, retrieved matters, and fought his way through.

It was Compans who put an end to the affair. He closed the march with his division. Finding himself too closely pressed by the bravest troops of Miloradovitch, he turned about, dashed in person at the most eager, overthrew them, and having thus made them fear him, he finished his retreat without farther molestation. This conflict, glorious to each, was in its result disastrous to all. It was, unhappily, without unity or order. There were troops enough to conquer had there not been too many commanders. It was not till near two o'clock that the latter met to concert their manoeuvres, and these were even then executed without harmony.

When at length the river, the town of Viazma, night, mutual fatigue, and Marshal Ney had established a barrier between them and the enemy, the danger being adjourned and the bivouacs established, the numbers were counted. Several pieces of cannon which had been broken, the baggage, and four thousand killed or wounded were found missing. Many of the soldiers, too, had dispersed. Their honor had been saved, but there were immense gaps in their ranks. It was necessary to close them up, to bring everything within a narrower compass, to form what remained into a more compact whole. Each regiment scarcely composed a battalion, each battalion scarcely a platoon. The soldiers remaining had no longer their accustomed places, comrades, or officers.

This sad reorganization took place by the light of the conflagration of Viazma, and during the successive discharges of the cannon of Ney and Miloradovitch, the thunders of which were prolonged amid the double gloom of the night and of the forests. Several times the remnants of these brave battalions, conceiving they were attacked, crawled to their arms. The next morning, when they again fell into their ranks, they were astonished at the smallness of their numbers.

§ 14. Dreadful snow-storm on the 6th of November; its effects upon the troops.

The spirits of the troops were nevertheless still supported by the example of their leaders, by the hopes of finding all their wants supplied at Smolensk, and still more by the aspect of a yet brilliant sun, that universal source of hope and life, which seemed to contradict and deny the spectacles of despair and death that already encompassed us.

But on the 6th of November the heavens changed. Their azure disappeared. The army marched enveloped in a chilling mist. This mist became thicker, and presently a blinding storm of snow descended upon it. It seemed as if the sky itself were falling, and uniting with the earth and our enemies to complete our destruction. All objects rapidly changed their appearance, becoming utterly confounded, and not to be recognized any more: we proceeded without knowing where we were, without perceiving the point to which we were bound; everything was converted into an obstacle to stop our progress. While we were struggling with the tempest of wind and snow, the latter, driven by the storm, lodged and accumulated in every hollow, concealing unknown abysses, which perfidiously opened beneath our feet. There the soldiers were ingulfed, and the weakest, resigning themselves to their fate, found their grave in these treacherous pits.

Those who followed turned aside; but the tempest, driving into their faces the snow that was descending from the sky and that which it raised from the earth, seemed resolved to arrest their farther progress. The Russian winter, in this new form, attacked them at every point: it penetrated through their light garments, and their rent and worn-out shoes. Their wet clothes froze to their bodies: an icy envelope encased them, and stiffened all their limbs. A piercing and violent wind almost prevented respiration; and, seizing their breath the moment it was exhaled, converted it into icicles, which hung from their beards all about their mouths.

The miserable creatures still crawled shivering along, till the snow, gathering in balls on the soles of their shoes, or a fragment of some broken article, a branch of a tree, or the body of one of their comrades, encountered in the way, caused them to stumble and fall. There their groans were unheeded; the snow soon covered them; slight hillocks marked the spots where they lay: there was their only grave. The road, like a cemetery, was thickly studded with these elevations; the most intrepid and the most indifferent were affected; they passed quickly on with averted looks. But before them and around them there was nothing but snow; this immense and dismal uniformity extended farther than the eye could reach; the imagination was astounded: it seemed a vast winding-sheet which Nature had thrown over the army. The only objects not enveloped by it were some gloomy pines, trees of the tombs, with their funereal verdure and their gigantic and motionless trunks completing the solemnity of a general mourning, and of an army dying amid nature already dead.

Everything, even to their very arms, still offensive at Malo-jaroslavetz, but since defensive only, now turned against our men. They seemed to their frozen limbs an insupportable weight. In the falls they experienced, they dropped almost unperceived from their hands, and were broken or buried in the snow. If they rose again it was without them: they had not thrown them away, but hunger and cold had wrested them from their grasp. The fingers of others were frozen to the muskets they still held, depriving them of the motion necessary to keep up some degree of warmth and of life.

We soon met with numbers of men belonging to all the different corps, sometimes singly, sometimes in troops. They had not basely deserted their colors: it was cold and exhaustion which had separated them from them. In this mortal struggle, at once general and individual, they had parted from each other, and there they were, disarmed, vanquished, defenceless, without leaders, obeying nothing but the most urgent instinct of self-preservation.

Most of them, attracted by the sight of by-paths, dispersed themselves over the country in hopes of finding bread and shelter for the coming night; but on their first passage all had been laid waste to the extent of seven or eight leagues: they met only with Cossacks and an armed population, which gathered around them, wounded and stripped them naked, and then left them, with bursts of savage laughter, to perish in the snow. These people, who had risen at the call of Alexander and Kutusoff, and who had not then learned, as they since have, to avenge nobly a country which they had been unable to defend, hovered on both flanks of the army under favor of the woods. Those whom they did not despatch with their pikes and hatchets, they drove back to the fatal and all-devouring high road.

Night then came on: a night of sixteen hours! But on that snow, which covered everything, where were they to halt, where sit, where lie down, where find even a root to satisfy their hunger, or dry wood to kindle a fire? Fatigue, darkness, and repeated orders nevertheless stopped those whom their moral and physical strength and the efforts of their officers had still kept together. They strove to establish themselves; but the tempest, not yet subsided, dispersed the first preparations for bivouacs. The pines, laden with frost, obstinately resisted ignition; while the snow, which still continued to fall from the sky, and that on the ground, which melted with the effect of the first heat, extinguished their kindling fires, and, with them, the strength and spirits of the men.

When at length the flames gained the ascendancy, the officers and soldiers around them commenced preparing their wretched repast: it consisted of lean and ragged pieces of flesh torn from the horses that had given out, and at most a few spoonfuls of rye flour mixed with snow-water. The next morning circular ranges of soldiers extended lifeless marked the sites of the bivouacs, and the ground about them was strewed with the bodies of several thousand horses.

From that day we began to place less reliance on one another. In that vivacious army, susceptible of all impressions, and taught to reason by an advanced civilization, despondency and neglect of discipline rapidly spread, the imagination knowing no bounds in evil any more than in good. Henceforward, at every bivouac, at every difficult passage, nay, every moment, some portion separated from the yet organized lines and fell into disorder. There were some, however, who were proof against this widespread contagion of insubordination and despair. These were officers, non-commissioned officers, and the firmest among the soldiers. They were extraordinary men; they encouraged one another by repeating the name of Smolensk, which town they knew they were approaching, and where they had been promised that all their wants should be supplied.

It was thus, after this deluge of snow, and the increase of cold which it foreboded, that each one, whether officer or soldier, either preserved or lost his fortitude, according to his disposition, age, or constitution; while he who of all our leaders had hitherto been the most strict in enforcing discipline, now paid but little attention to it. Thrown out of his established ideas of regularity, order, and method, he was seized with despair at the sight of such universal confusion: and conceiving, before the rest, that all was lost, he felt himself ready to abandon all.

From this point for some distance, nothing remarkable occurred in the imperial column except that it was found necessary to throw the spoils of Moscow into the Lake of Semlewo; cannon, Gothic armor, the ornaments of the Kremlin, and the cross of Ivan the Great, were all buried in its waters. Trophies, glory, those acquisitions to which we had sacrificed everything, all now became a burden to us: our object was no longer to embellish life, but to preserve it. In this vast wreck, the army, which might be compared to a mighty ship tossed by the most tremendous of tempests, threw without hesitation into that sea of ice and snow everything that could burden or impede its progress.

The attitude of Napoleon was the same that he retained throughout the whole of this dismal retreat. It was grave, silent, and resigned: suffering much less in body than others, but far more in mind, and brooding with speechless agony over his misfortunes. At that moment General Charpentier sent him from Smolensk a convoy of provisions. Bessières wished to take possession of them; but the emperor instantly ordered them to be forwarded to the Prince of Moskwa, saying that "those who were fighting must eat before the rest." At the same time, he sent word to Ney "to defend himself long enough to allow him some stay at Smolensk, where the army should eat, rest, and be reorganized."