Paul Britten Austin - 1812: Napoleon in Moscow

FRONTLINE
BOOKS

Greenhill
Books

First published in Great Britain in 1995 by

Greenhill Books, Lionel Leventhal Limited

www.greenhillbooks.com

This paperback edition published in 2012 by
Frontline Books

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Pen & Sword Books Ltd

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South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright Paul Britten Austin, 1995

The right of Paul Britten Austin to be identified as the author

of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

ISBN 978-1-84832-703-0

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True historians arent those who relate overall facts and limit themselves to general causes; but those who pursue facts down to their most detailed circumstances and reveal their particular causes.

Giambattista Vico

Human life is short and fleeting, and many millions of individuals share in it who are swallowed up by that monster of oblivion which is waiting for them with ever-open jaws. It is thus a very thankworthy task to try to rescue something of the memory of interesting and important events, or the leading features and personages of some episodes from the general shipwreck of the world.

Shopenhauer

To my son THOM

and my grandson BENNY

without whose patient encouragement

and computer expertise this work

would never have been possible.

T his book is the successor to 1812: The March on Moscow. A kind of word-film or drama documentary, its edited, I hope not too inartistically, from the first-hand accounts of well over 100 of the participants, both French and allied, in the vast mass-drama of Napoleons invasion of Russia.

Ive resisted the temptation to comment on or evaluate their narratives. All strike me as authentic if not necessarily accurate, and certainly not impartial. The events, after all, were extraordinary beyond imagining. And allowances must be made for hindsight. Its so easy to be wise after the event!

For reasons of space, Ive seen it all from one side only with a single co-opted witness from the Russian side in the highly critical, not to say caustic, person of General Sir Robert Wilson, the British representative at Kutusovs headquarters.

After the briefest of intermissions I resume in this volume exactly where its forerunner left off: at the gates of Moscow. At the head of his central army, originally some 350,000-strong and made up of Davouts I, Neys III, Prince Eugnes IV, Poniatowskis V, and Junots VIII Corps and the Imperial Guard, and spearheaded by Murats four reserve cavalry corps, Napoleon had crossed the Niemen on Midsummers Day. But the Tsars 1st and 2nd West Armies had refused him the pitched battle which, as twice before, would certainly have crushed them, and retreating separately eastwards, forcing him to follow in search of the resounding victory which was to force Russia back into his Continental System and prime objective of the whole unprecedentedly vast and ever farther-flung campaign compel Britain to make peace. Far away to the south, meanwhile, Schwarzenbergs Austrians and Reyniers Saxons (IX Corps) had quickly got bogged down manoeuvring against Tormassovs 3rd West Army which, if Russia and Turkey hadnt unexpectedly made peace, should have been fighting the hereditary foe in Moravia. To the northwest Macdonalds X Corps, mostly made up of Prussians, had invested Riga; while Oudinots II and St-Cyrs VI Corps had pursued Wittgenstein through the blazing summer heats and, ravaged by sickness, also got bogged down at Polotsk.

On 28 July the main body, under Napoleon himself, had again been refused battle outside Witebsk; and after a ten-day pause there to recuperate, the advance had gone on. Napoleon had manoeuvred to circumvent Barclay de Tollys 1st and Bagrations 2nd West Armies and snatch Smolensk, but failed. There, at last, on 17 August, the pitched battle he had been longing for was fought indecisively. Smolensk, Russias third largest city, had gone up in flames; and again the Russians had withdrawn in almost miraculously excellent order, leaving Napoleon no option (in view of the acute political hazards of staying where he was, so remote from his bases, and of the disastrous likelihoods if after all this marching and fighting he withdrew) but to push on eastwards and strike for Moscow. Once it had been occupied, he was sure, his brother Alexander would have to make peace. On 7 September the Russians had at long last stood and fought at Borodino, one of the bloodiest one-day battles of modern times and of which one could paradoxically say it had neither been won, lost nor drawn. Again the Russian army had retired intact and certainly not beaten. And on 14 September a parley outside the gates of Moscow had led to a brief truce. Under it Murats advance guard at least two-thirds of whose horses were either dead of thirst, hunger, overwork or neglect, or had fallen at Borodino was to follow on at the heels of the Cossacks rearguard through the eerily deserted city.

Its at this for all my protagonists keenly anticipatory moment outside the gates of Moscow a moment when Napoleons face, normally so impassive, showed instantly and unmistakably the mark of his bitter disappointment [Caulaincourt] that they resume, exactly where they finished in the previous volume, their multifarious story.

For the sake of new readers, but I hope without becoming tedious to those whove so patiently read my first volume, Ive tried to re-identify, in passing, at least the most important of my eyewitnesses by italicizing their names at their first reappearance. For bibliographical details of these and other sources, see the Bibliography (which, it should be noted, is supplementary to the fuller one in my first volume, which itemizes them all). As in The March, there is also an Index, by means of which the reader can, if he likes, follow our protagonists individually. At the same time I have of course tried to keep him informed as to the ongoing military situation.

In the interests of narrative pace, while always preserving my narrators exact sense, Ive sometimes taken liberties with the order of their words, phrases and even sentences. A little reflection will show why Ive had to do this. A longish quotation may very well start where I, as film editor, want to cut it into my overall narrative; but very likely it will soon stray off into some other direction than the overall one it is necessary for us to follow. Hence my unorthodox use, made in good faith, of some of these translated passages which none the less form the essence of my tale.