The tragedy of Napoleon in Russia, in the intimate letters of his soldiers: “We walked on the frozen dead”

Letter from Plonsk, a city in northern Poland, May 30, 1812: “Dad, I’ll see you in the cafe shortly, avidly reading the bulletins that will contain the great deeds of the ‘Grande Armée.’ You will rejoice in my victories and say: ‘My son was there.’ God will not abandon me and will watch over me amid the bristling bayonets that will want to tear my chest open, but don’t worry, the war won’t be long. A good fight and we go straight to St. Petersburg. Think that instead of forty thousand Poles that the emperor thought he was going to get here, there are a hundred thousand who have left their homes to serve him ». It was less than a month before Napoleon’s first regiments crossed the Niemen River and Fauvel, just any soldier of the 615,000 who participated in that colossal conquest, was trying to reassure his family thousands of kilometers away. An unknown official who, however, did not know that he was not going to return home, nor to hug his parents again and that, of course, he would not be mentioned in any history book. If he had been able to see the future, he surely would have preferred, even, to be killed before, instead of suffering that slow agony of strenuous marches, torture, hunger, disease and extreme cold. His ignorance helped keep her spirits up. “We will enter Russia and we will have to fight a little to open the way and continue calmly,” a grenadier named Delvau also wrote to his family, confident. They were still well fed, basking in a radiant sun and they knew they were commanded by a 42-year-old Napoleon who was no better than anyone. In the previous decade he had staged a series of dazzling military feats in Italy, France, and Egypt, been crowned at Notre Dame, and continued his astonishing string of victories at Austerlitz, Jena, and Friedland. In the summer of 1812, he ruled the entire continent from the Atlantic to the Neman River… but beyond that, nothing. He resisted the vast region of Russia, until he felt ready to conquer it and extend his rule to Asia. Standard Related News No Napoleon’s Russian nightmare, in the first infographic in history Israel Viana The French engineer Charles Minard entered history with this pioneering graphic on the French emperor’s trip to Moscow that “challenged the pen of historians with his brutal eloquence. His army was so large that it took him eight days at the end of June to cross the river. There were Italians, Poles, Portuguese, Bavarians, Croatians, Dalmatians, Danes, Dutch, Neapolitans, Germans, Saxons, Swiss… In total, twenty nations, each with their uniform and their songs. The French were a third. Not since the time of Xerxes had such a considerable force been seen. It was a huge wandering city that voraciously consumed food and destroyed everything in its path. An episode from Napoleon’s Russian campaign, painted by Philippoteaux mUSÉE DE Ñ’arMÉE Thirty thousand vehicles Each division was followed by a ten-kilometer column of supplies with cattle, wagons laden with wheat, masons building ovens, bakers, twenty-eight million bottles of wine, a thousand cannons and three times as many ammunition wagons. Also ambulances, stretcher-bearers, blood hospitals and teams to erect bridges. The chiefs had their own carriage and sometimes one or two other wagons to transport bedding, books, and maps. They totaled thirty thousand vehicles and fifty thousand horses. In short: it was an untenable army and Bonaparte had been on the march for several weeks when his men realized that he alone had conquered the void. Tsar Alexander I’s brilliant strategy of retreat and scorched earth forced the Corsican to pursue him for thousands of kilometers, desperate, in search of a decisive battle, but nothing. Whenever he arrived at a village, he found it burned down, without inhabitants and with the food buried. On September 7, he finally had his long-awaited and bloody confrontation at Borodino, where his surgeon amputated two hundred limbs with the only help of a napkin and a quick drink of brandy. The Russians had 44,000 casualties and the French 33,000. From an arithmetic point of view, France won, but Napoleon considered it a failure by losing many of his generals. Desktop Code Image for mobile, amp and app Mobile Code AMP Code APP Code Finally, in Moscow On the sunny afternoon of September 14, the ‘Grande Armée’ finally reached the suburbs of Moscow and the Emperor climbed the hill to watch the show. “Here it is, finally! It was about time,” he exclaimed. His joy, however, was short-lived when he realized that no one came out to greet him with the keys to the city on a velvet cushion. Of the 250,000 inhabitants, only 15,000 remained, mainly beggars and criminals released by the tsar and armed with gunpowder to set buildings on fire. “We walked between burning walls,” lamented one of Napoleon’s soldiers. That same day, Brigadier General Jean Louis Chrétien Carrière referred in his correspondence from Moscow to the attitude of Napoleon, who delayed his return for a month, convinced that the tsar would appear asking him to negotiate peace. “My lovely wife, we have been in the same position for eight days. We are confined and the season is already very cold. Winter will be hard.” But Alexander I gave no sign of life and the emperor, frustrated, ordered to return to Paris on October 19, with the temperatures falling. That same day, a commissary employee named Lamy warned his parents that all the land as far as Smolensk was burned and that “the horses will starve.” The most terrible part began, the one that left the most terrifying testimonies in the letters of the 90,000 surviving infantry and 15,000 cavalry, with their ten thousand carts of food for twenty days. Sleep them and slaughter them On November 6th the thermometer plummeted to 22° below zero and the sheepskin jackets were insufficient. The peasants, moreover, received the order to give shelter to the invaders and to serve them a lot of brandy, to slit their throats when they fell asleep. An English observer of Kutuzov saw “sixty naked and dying men, their necks propped against a tree, being beaten with a stick by the Russians to break their heads as they sang.” The struggle to eat and find shelter was now the only thing that mattered. At dusk, the men gutted the dead horses to get inside and get warm. Others ingested the clotted blood and, as soon as a companion died, they took away his boots and the little food he had in his backpack. «Compassion descends to the bottom of our hearts because of the cold. The soldiers know that there is plenty to eat to the left and right of the road, but they are rejected by the Cossacks, who know that all they have to do is let General Winter do the killing,” wrote another soldier. Of the 96,000 men who survived the Battle of Maloyaroslavets on October 24, only 50,000 entered Smolensk nine days later, and that was halfway back. The temperature dropped to 30 degrees below zero and the muskets stuck to the hands. British General Robert Wilson spoke of “thousands of dead, naked dying, cannibals, and skeletons of ten thousand horses cut to pieces before they died.” “When leaving this city,” Captain Rodent added in another letter, “a large crowd of frozen people has remained in the streets. Many have gone to bed so they can freeze. One walks on them with lethargic feelings. Oil on canvas by the painter Adolph Northen, in his painting titled ‘Napoleon’s Retreat from Russia’ “I was wrong” Solidarity and discipline within the army disappeared on the way to Vilnius. In fact, Napoleon abandoned his soldiers in Smorgon to return to Paris as soon as possible and form a new government to stop the coup that was being woven behind his back. His sled set off at full speed on December 5, and as he shivered on the way, he confessed to General Armand de Caulaincourt: ‘I was wrong not to leave Moscow a week after entering. He thought that he would be able to make peace and that the Russians were looking forward to it. They fooled me and I fooled myself.” Of the 600,000 men who crossed the Niemen in June, only a few tens of thousands made it out of Russia alive in December. Less than twenty percent. Fauvel’s parents waited for his son for months, until in May they received a letter signed by Lieutenant Joseph Lemaire: “Sir, I have the honor to announce that I was taken prisoner on December 25 with his son. It is with sadness that I also announce that I saw him die by my side. Lieutenant Colpin seized before the cross of him and this portrait that I send you ».