Читать книгу 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow - Adam Zamoyski - Страница 13

Narbonne’s post-chaise, almost white from a thick coating of dust, rolled into the courtyard of the Royal Palace in Dresden on the afternoon of 26 May. He was shown upstairs and promptly summoned into the imperial presence. He gave a full account of his conversations with Alexander, laying stress on the Tsar’s determination and on his parting words. ‘Tell the Emperor that I will not be the aggressor,’ Alexander had told him. ‘He can cross the Niemen; but never will I sign a peace dictated on Russian territory.’¹

It is difficult to know what Alexander expected Napoleon to make of this message. He had stipulated that he would not enter into any talks unless Napoleon evacuated all his troops from the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and Prussia, while he was himself poised with his army on the borders of those states. Napoleon had only two options: to disband his huge army and go home, exposing himself to attack as he did so, and leaving the whole of Poland and Germany open to invasion; or he could invade himself. He could only have taken Alexander’s message as a taunt, ‘a sullen challenge’ as the British historian William Hazlitt put it.² But he thought it was prompted by bravado rather than conviction. He therefore sent a courier to Lauriston in St Petersburg instructing him to go to the Tsar’s headquarters at Vilna, as a last resort.

Napoleon was not afraid of war with Russia. ‘Never has an expedition against them been more certain of success,’ he said to Fain, pointing out that all his former enemies were now allied to him. It was true that he had just received a somewhat disheartening reply to his last proposal for an alliance with Sweden. But it had only been a verbal one, and he assumed that in the event of his invading Russia Sweden would be unable to resist the opportunity of recovering Finland. ‘Never again will such a favourable concourse of circumstances present itself; I feel it drawing me in, and if the Emperor Alexander persists in refusing my proposals, I shall cross the Niemen!’³

He adopted a confident, even a blustering tone. ‘Before two months are out, Alexander will sue for peace,’ he declared, ‘the great landowners will force him to.’ He brushed aside Narbonne’s warnings that this campaign would be difficult to win on account of the special nature of the nation and the terrain. ‘Barbarian peoples are simpleminded and superstitious,’ he asserted. ‘A shattering blow dealt at the heart of the empire on Moscow the great, Moscow the holy, will deliver to me in one instant that whole blind and helpless mass.’⁴

But his plans were still dangerously confused, as he had come no closer to defining his goals. ‘My enterprise is one of those to which patience is the key,’ he explained to Metternich. ‘The more patient will triumph. I will open the campaign by crossing the Niemen, and it will end at Smolensk and Minsk. That is where I shall stop. I will fortify those two points, and at Vilna, where I shall make my headquarters during the coming winter, I shall apply myself to the organisation of Lithuania, which is burning to be delivered from the Russian yoke. I shall wait, and we shall see which of us will grow tired first – I of making my army live at the expense of Russia, or Alexander of nourishing my army at the expense of his country. I may well myself go and spend the harshest months of the winter in Paris.’ And if Alexander did not sue for peace that year, Napoleon would mount another campaign in 1813 into the heart of the empire. ‘It is, as I have already told you, only a question of time,’ he assured Metternich.⁵

He seemed to produce a different plan for every interlocutor. ‘If I invade Russia, I will perhaps go as far as Moscow,’ he wrote in his instructions to one of his diplomats. ‘One or two battles will open the road for me. Moscow is the real capital of the empire. Having seized that, I will find peace there.’ He added that if the war were to drag on, he would leave the job to the Poles, reinforced by 50,000 French and a large subsidy.⁶

He still refused to see Alexander as an enemy to be defeated, thinking of him rather as a wayward ally. Had it not been so, he would have declared the restoration of the Kingdom of Poland with its 1772 frontiers, thereby launching a national insurrection in the rear of the Russian armies. He could also have proclaimed the liberation of the serfs in Russia, which would have ignited unrest all over the country. This would have reduced the Russian empire to such a state of chaos that Alexander would have been in no position to mount a serious defence and Napoleon could have marched his troops about the country as he chose. But he wanted to bring Alexander back to heel with as little unpleasantness as possible and a minimum of damage. ‘I will make war on Alexander in all courtesy, with two thousand guns and 500,000 soldiers, without starting an insurrection,’ he had said to Narbonne back in March.⁷

Narbonne and Maret repeatedly put the case for creating a strong Polish state which would become a French satellite and a bulwark against Russian expansion. Napoleon did not rule this out. He did have to keep the Poles on his side, and he needed to prime, even if he did not need to fire it, the weapon of Polish national insurrection in Russia. In a word, he had to manipulate and deceive the Poles. And in order to do this, he must send a clever man to Warsaw as an unofficial personal ambassador.⁸

He had originally selected Talleyrand for this purpose, but for a number of diplomatic reasons his choice now fell on the Abbé de Pradt, Archbishop of Malines, ‘a priest more ambitious than cunning, and more vain than ambitious’, as one contemporary described him. Pradt had made himself useful to Napoleon in the past, but he inspired neither confidence nor respect, and lacked the qualities necessary for the job in hand. He was described by one of the Poles with whom he would be working as ‘a nonentity, without a trace of dignity’ who loved intrigue and gave the impression that he despised Napoleon. But whether anyone else could have done a better job in the circumstances is another question. Napoleon made it clear that Pradt was to encourage the Poles to announce their intention of resurrecting a Polish state and to start a national insurrection, without committing himself or his imperial master to backing it up.⁹

Napoleon even gave some thought to the question of whom to put on the Polish throne if he did decide to restore the kingdom. It would be too important a place for the volatile Murat or the inexperienced Prince Eugène, both of whom believed themselves to be in line for the job. He did consider Marshal Davout, who was a good soldier and administrator, and popular with the Poles, but the example of Bernadotte raised questions as to his future loyalty. One of his brothers might be a better bet in the circumstances. ‘I’ll put Jérôme on it, I’ll create a fine kingdom for him,’ he told Caulaincourt, ‘but he must achieve something, for the Poles like glory.’ He duly put Jérôme in command of an army corps and directed him to Warsaw, where he was supposed to win the love of the Poles. Napoleon could hardly have made a worse choice.

Jérôme made a regal entry into the Polish capital and announced that he had come to spill his blood for the Polish cause in the spirit of the crusaders of old. The Poles found him overbearing and ridiculous, and it was not long before all sorts of malicious stories were circulating about him, including one that he took a bath in rum every morning and one in milk every evening. His army corps, composed of German troops, behaved abominably, as did its French commander General Vandamme, who demonstrated his contempt for the locals by, among other things, putting his muddy-booted and spurred feet up on fine silk upholstery as he lounged in Warsaw drawing rooms. The Poles longed to be rid of Jérôme and his unruly soldiers.

‘In truth, the king of Poland should have been Poniatowski,’ Napoleon admitted later, during his exile on St Helena. ‘He had every title to it and he had all the necessary talents.’ But at the time, the thought did not cross his mind, which was beset by more pressing considerations. ¹⁰

His armies were now reaching their prescribed positions, and he needed to take charge. So, after thirteen days in Dresden, where he had settled nothing, he climbed into his travelling carriage, a yellow coupé drawn by six horses. His mameluke Roustam climbed onto the box next to the coachman, and Berthier installed himself inside with Napoleon.

The vehicle was fashioned to suit his every need and fitted out to allow him to make the best use of his time. It could be turned into a makeshift study, with a tabletop equipped with inkwells, paper and quills, drawers for storing papers and maps, shelves for books, and a light by which he could read at night. It could also be turned into a couchette, with a mattress on which he could stretch out, a washbasin, mirrors and soap-holders so he could attend to his toilette and waste no time on arrival, and, naturally, a chamberpot.

One of the outriders from the Chasseurs à Cheval of the Guard noted that the Emperor took a long time over his farewells to Marie-Louise, and that there were tears in his eyes as he got into the carriage. But feelings of tenderness were quickly dispelled by unpleasant realities.¹¹

Napoleon drove through Glogau in Silesia to the Polish city of Poznan, which he entered on horseback, riding under an arch inscribed with the words Heroi Invincibili. The whole town was illuminated and festooned with flags and garlands. He reviewed units of the Legion of the Vistula fresh from Spain, but was vexed at the sight of the recruits. ‘These people are too young,’ he complained to Marshal Mortier. ‘I want people capable of standing up to hardship; young people like this only fill up the hospitals.’ It was true. Teenagers made poor soldiers, not only because they were puny and prone to exhaustion and illness, but also because they could not stand up for themselves, and were easily bullied and pushed around, which led to demoralisation.¹²

After criticising the recruits he attended a ball in his honour at which he made a poor impression on the inhabitants, telling them he wanted to see them booted and spurred, not in dancing pumps. But it was not the attitude of the Poles that lay at the root of Napoleon’s displeasure. On his arrival in Poznan he had sat down with the head of the commissariat, Pierre Daru, to review the provisioning of his troops, only to discover severe shortcomings. Matters only got worse as he progressed on his journey. By the time he reached Torun, he was furious. He complained bitterly to General Mathieu Dumas, Intendant General in charge of supplies, that none of his orders had been carried out.¹³

The supply machine he had devoted so much time and thought to had never quite materialised. ‘The means of transport, whether supplied by the military teams belonging to the army or by auxiliary means, were almost everywhere insufficient,’ admitted Dumas. ‘This immense army, which crossed the Prussian lands like a torrent, consumed all the resources of the land, and supplies from the reserve could not follow it with enough speed.’ There was a shortage of draught horses from the outset, and the consequences grew serious as the army began massing in Poland.¹⁴

The troops had already been subjected to a rude awakening. For those who had not taken part in the 1807 campaign, there was an element of surprise at the exoticism and the backwardness of many of the areas east of the Oder. They marvelled at the emptiness of the landscape and the flocks of storks. Henri Pierre Everts, a native of Rotterdam and a major in the 33rd Light Infantry regiment in Davout’s corps, could hardly believe his eyes when he beheld a Polish village for the first time. ‘I stopped in astonishment, and remained for some time sitting still on my horse observing those miserable wooden cottages of a type unknown to me, the small low church, also made of planks, and at the squalid appearance, the dirty beards and hair of the inhabitants, amongst whom the Jews seemed extraordinarily repulsive; all of this engendered some bitter reflections on the war which we were about to wage in such a country.’¹⁵

The meat and potatoes washed down with beer or wine which they had got used to on the march through France and Germany were replaced by buckwheat gruel, and the best they could find to drink was bad vodka, mead or kwas, made of fermented bread. Even these had to be purchased, mostly at inflated prices, from the Jews who swarmed round them in every town and village. Communication took place in a variety of pidgin French, German and Latin. ‘Up to that point, our march had been no more than a pleasant promenade,’ wrote a rueful Julien Combe, a lieutenant in the 8th Chasseurs à Cheval.¹⁶ From now on, it was to be an ordeal.

East Prussia and Poland were neither as rich nor as intensely cultivated as most of western Europe. The Continental System had diminished the amount of land under cultivation, since much of the produce had previously been exported, and had lost its markets as a result of the blockade. The traditional exports such as timber, potash, hemp and so on had also been cut off from their markets. To make matters worse, the previous year had seen a serious drought and the harvest had failed. This meant that landowners had been obliged to use up all their reserves of grain and fodder just to keep themselves and their peasants alive, so much so that there was a shortage of grain for sowing in the spring of 1812. The poorest peasants were eating bread made of acorns and birch bark, and pulling thatch off roofs in order to feed their horses and cattle.¹⁷

The need to raise an army almost twice as large as the territory and the population could realistically furnish or support put a terrible strain on the economy and the administration. The government of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw was insolvent, and no official had been paid for eight months. ‘The hardships we were suffering seemed so bad that things could not get much worse,’ wrote the wife of the Prefect of Warsaw to a friend at the end of March 1812, ‘but it turns out that things can get worse, and worse without limit.’¹⁸ Things did indeed get much worse as hundreds of thousands of hungry men and horses flooded into the area.

As there were no stores, military or otherwise, the troops took what they needed where they could find it. Giuseppe Venturini, a Piedmontese lieutenant in the 11th Light Infantry, bemoaned the fact that when he was ordered to go out and requisition supplies, he ‘reduced two or three hundred families to beggary’. As the locals were unwilling to sell or give away the little that stood between them and hunger, the troops took it by force. The French system of provisioning effortlessly turned into looting.¹⁹ And matters quickly degenerated from there.

‘The French destroy more than they take or even want to take,’ noted an eighteen-year-old captain in the 5th Polish Mounted Rifles. ‘In the houses, they smash everything they can. They set fire to barns. Wherever there is a field of corn, they ride into the middle of it, trampling more than they feed on, without a thought for the fact that in a couple of hours their own army will come up looking for forage.’ The situation was aggravated by the multinational make-up of the army, as there was no sense of national pride or responsibility to restrain men who marched under a foreign flag. Everyone blamed another nationality, and even Polish troops looted their compatriots.²⁰

A Polish officer travelling to join the army found himself moving though a scene of devastation: every window was smashed, every fence had been ripped up for firewood, many houses were half demolished; horse carcases as well as the heads and skins of slaughtered cattle lay by the roadside being gnawed by dogs and pecked at by carrion birds; people fled at the sight of a rider in uniform. ‘One felt that one was following a fleeing rather than an advancing army,’ wrote a Bavarian officer following in the wake of Prince Eugène’s corps, astonished at the numbers of dead horses and abandoned wagons littering the road.²¹

The situation was no better in East Prussia, where violent national animosities also came into play. Even troops from other parts of Germany found the atmosphere hostile, and stragglers were attacked by locals. The soldiers responded in kind. The Dutchman Jef Abbeel and his comrades took full advantage of their position to show what they thought of the Prussians. ‘We would force them to slaughter all the livestock we judged we needed for our sustenance,’ he writes. ‘Cows, sheep, geese, chickens, all of it! We demanded spirits, beer, liqueurs. We were billeted in villages, and, since only the towns were provided with shops, we would sometimes demand the locals to drive three or four leagues to satisfy our needs. And they would be thanked on their return with blows if they failed to procure everything we demanded. They had to dance as we sang, or they would be beaten!’²²

A cold start to the year meant that the harvest was late. ‘We were obliged to cut the grass of the meadows, and, when there was none, reap corn, barley and oats which were only just sprouting,’ wrote Colonel Boulart of the artillery of the Guard. ‘In doing so we both destroyed the harvest and prepared the death of our horses, by giving them the worst possible nourishment for the forced marches and labours to which we were subjecting them day after day.’²³ Fed on unripe barley and oats, the horses blew up with colic and died in large numbers.

Without bread, meat or vegetables, the men, particularly the younger recruits, fell ill and perished in alarming numbers. Many sought salvation in desertion and a dash for home. Others, preferring quick release to the long-drawn-out pangs of hunger and the uncertainties that lay ahead, put their muskets to their heads and shot themselves. One major in the 85th Line Infantry of Davout’s corps complained he had lost a fifth of his young recruits by the time he reached his position on the Russian border.²⁴

Napoleon did not see the worst of this as he rushed ahead. Before leaving Poznan he had written to Marie-Louise that he would be back in three months; either the Tsar’s nerve would break when he saw the Grande Armée come up to the border or he would be knocked out in a quick battle. Napoleon was now in a hurry to bring things to a head. He raced to Danzig, moving so fast that he left most of his household behind, arriving there on 8 June. He inspected troops and supplies, accompanied by the military governor, General Rapp. At Danzig he also met up with Marshal Davout, commander of the 1st Corps, and with his brother-in-law Joachim Murat, King of Naples.

It would be hard to bring together two more different characters. Louis-Nicolas Davout was a year younger than Napoleon. He came from an old Burgundian family with roots in the Crusades, and was the most devoted as well as the ablest of Napoleon’s marshals. He was strict and demanding, a hard taskmaster to those serving under him, feared and disliked by most of his peers, but loved by his soldiers because, in order to get the most out of them, he made sure they had everything they needed and were not tired out with unnecessary duties.

Joachim Murat, who was three years Davout’s senior, was of a different cut in every way. The son of a Gascon innkeeper from Cahors, he had studied for the priesthood at a seminary in Toulouse before running away to join the army. Although not without a certain cunning, he was stupid, which allowed him to be absurdly and recklessly brave even though he lacked real courage. He was, in Napoleon’s words, ‘an imbecille [sic] without judgement’. But he was an instinctively brilliant cavalry commander in battle. He was also devoted to Napoleon. He had married the Emperor’s sister Caroline, and in 1808 he was made King of Naples.²⁵

In Danzig, Napoleon explained to Davout and Murat what part they were to play in his plans. Murat would command the huge body of cavalry, a great battering ram of four divisions, with a nominal strength of 40,000, which was to spearhead the attack. Napoleon wanted to fight and defeat the Russians as quickly as possible, so he decided to strike them at the point where they might feel strong enough to make a stand, which meant a frontal attack at Vilna. He would attack Barclay’s First Army, using Davout’s 1st Corps of 70,000 men, flanked by Ney’s 3rd Corps of 40,000 to the north and backed up by the Guard, numbering some 40,000. Prince Eugène’s 4th and St Cyr’s 6th Corps, totalling 67,000 Italians, Bavarians and Croats as well as Frenchmen, would advance to the south of this thrust, driving a wedge between Barclay and Bagration. Further south, Jérôme was to advance against Bagration with three other army corps (5th Polish, 7th Saxon and 8th Westphalian), altogether some 60,000 men. In the north, Marshal Macdonald’s 10th Corps, made up of Prussians as well as Frenchmen, would cross the Niemen at Tilsit and advance on Riga, while Oudinot’s 2nd Corps supported both him and the main strike force by attacking Barclay’s right wing. South of the Pripet, Schwarzenberg’s Austrians were to mark Tormasov’s Third Army.

It is impossible to be precise about the numbers involved. On paper, the overall strength of the forces poised for invasion was 590,687 men and 157,878 horses, while the total number of French and allied troops in the whole theatre of operations, including Poland and Germany, was 678,000. But these figures beg many questions.²⁶

The strength of an army which has taken up positions, as the Russian had done over the months, can be established fairly accurately, as the units are concentrated in one place, and there is little reason or scope for anyone to absent themselves for more than the few hours it might take to report to headquarters or pick up some stores. But an army on the move is far more volatile.

Whatever the technical strength of any unit on campaign, it is never concentrated in a single place, or even area, at one time. It always leaves a skeleton force, sometimes a whole battalion, at its depot. It does not move, lock stock and barrel, from one place to another: its head races ahead, leaving its body and tail to catch up, which they occasionally do, only to be left behind once more, in the manner of a huge centipede. It is constantly leaving behind platoons or smaller clusters of men to hold, defend or police areas. Numbers vary, almost always downwards, with every day.

A company of 140 men marches out from town A on its way to town B. On the morning they are setting off, it turns out that three of the men are too ill to march, so they are left behind, in the care of a corporal and two orderlies. In addition, one of the captain’s four horses is lame, and a second is out of condition, so they remain behind, in the care of an orderly. One of the company’s ammunition caissons or luggage wagons has a broken axle, and remains in town A while it is being repaired, in the care of two men. One man failed to report for roll call before the company marched out. This means that only 130 men actually set off. Along the way, eight men are detailed to find supplies, and they set off into the countryside with a couple of wagons. Another ten men fall behind in the course of the day’s twenty-five-kilometre trek, and, another of the wagons having broken a wheel, two more are detailed to look after it until it can be fixed. By that evening, the company with a technical strength of 140 men can only assemble 110 men in a single place. And that diminution took place without the intervention of disease, bad weather or the enemy. It would probably have been more drastic in the case of a cavalry squadron, where lameness and saddle sores played their part. And there has been no account taken of desertion, which is far easier on the march than in a fixed position, and which increases the further an army is from its home ground.^* Some of the men left behind catch up, but the faster and further an army moves, the fewer do, and so the gap between those catching up and those falling away widens. If that same company had to make a forced march over three days and then fight on the fourth, its captain would be lucky to lead much more than half its paper strength into battle – less than a week after setting out.

Numbers arrived at by means of adding up the paper strength of the units present in an army can therefore serve only as a rough guide to the situation on the ground. It is generally accepted that the strength of the Grande Armée as it invaded Russia was about 450,000, but this has been arrived at by computing theoretical data, and the reality was certainly very different.

On 14 June Napoleon issued a circular to the commanders of every corps insisting that they must provide honest figures on the numbers of the able-bodied, the sick and deserters, as well as the dead and the wounded. ‘It has to be made clear to the individual corps that they must regard it as a duty towards the Emperor to provide him with the simple truth,’ ran the order.²⁷

This admonition was ignored. ‘He was led astray in the most outrageous way,’ wrote General Berthézène of the Young Guard. ‘From the marshal to the captain, it was as if everyone had come together to hide the truth from him, and, although it was tacit, this conspiracy really did exist; for it was bound together by self-interest.’ Napoleon was always angry when provided with dwindling figures, particularly if these could not be explained by battle casualties, so those responsible simply hid the losses from him. Berthézène went on to say that the Guard, which was usually written up as being nearly 50,000 strong, never exceeded 25,000 during the whole campaign; that the Bavarian contingent, given as 24,000, was never stronger than 11,000; and that the whole Grande Armée was no larger than 235,000 when it crossed the Niemen. One can quibble with his estimates, but not with his argument, which is supported by others.²⁸

Russian estimates of the French forces at this stage were much lower than the generally accepted figures (and intriguingly close to Berthézène’s), which has surprised historians and led them to believe that they must have had very poor intelligence. But it may simply be that while French figures were based on paper computations, the Russians based their estimates on reports from spies, and those reports may have been more accurate as to the numbers of troops actually present than the paper calculations.

It would be rash to try to be precise, but a sensible guess would be that no more than three-quarters and possibly as little as two-thirds of the 450,000 crossed the Niemen in the first wave, and that the remainder, if and when they caught up with the main body, were only plugging gaps left by men dropping away. At the same time, it would be difficult to overestimate the number of civilians following in the wake of the army, and a figure of 50,000 would certainly be on the conservative side.

Having fixed his plan, Napoleon applied himself to putting it into action. Speed was of the essence. He wanted to get at the Russian army before it had time to withdraw or concentrate. Speed was also essential for logistical reasons: with the shortage of supplies available, the ground was burning the feet of the Grande Armée. He was counting on being able to confront and defeat the Russian army inside three weeks, as he could not possibly take with him supplies for any longer.

From Danzig, he raced on to Marienburg, Elbing and Königsberg. At every point along his frantic journey he inspected troops, artillery parks and supply depots. During the four days he spent at Königsberg he inspected the stores and boatyards as, having seen for himself the state of the local roads and appreciated the shortage of draught animals, he had decided to despatch as many supplies as possible up the Niemen and its tributary the Vilia to reach him once he had occupied Vilna.

As there would be scant possibility of finding provisions along the way, he had given orders that every soldier should carry with him four days’ ration of bread and biscuit in his knapsack, and every regiment a twenty-day ration of flour in its wagons. But his orders could only ever be as productive of results as the land was fertile in the necessary means, and they were meaningless where there was nothing to be had.

On 22 June General Deroy, a splendid warrior in his eighties who had more than sixty years’ military service behind him and would soon die in battle commanding one of the Bavarian divisions, reported to his monarch that he did not see how they were going to survive at all. ‘I am looking forward to getting killed,’ one young soldier wrote home to his parents in France, ‘for I am dying as I march.’²⁹

When he saw for himself the poverty of the surroundings, Napoleon gave the order for the units in the principal strike force under his personal command to make a last-minute requisition and seize whatever they could in the way of provisions before marching out. Thus the unfortunate inhabitants of East Prussia suddenly found that their every cart was taken and filled with anything that came to hand. Napoleon brushed aside the complaints reaching him from all quarters about shortage of supplies and dwindling forces. There was nothing he could do about it anyway – except defeat the Russians as quickly as possible. And he trusted in his extraordinary ability to achieve what he wanted in the face of insuperable obstacles.

On 16 June he wrote to ‘Quiouquiou’, as the King of Rome’s governess the Comtesse de Montesquiou had been dubbed by her charge, thanking her for informing him that his son’s teething was nearly over. Two days later he heard from Marie-Louise that she was not pregnant, as he had been led to believe by a hint from one of his courtiers. He registered his disappointment and his hope that they would have a chance to put that right in the autumn. He wrote to her daily, in short, scribbled, mis-spelt notes of remarkable banality. ‘I am often on horseback, and it is doing me good,’ he informed her on 19 June.³⁰

The following day, at Gumbinnen, he was reached by a courier from the French embassy in St Petersburg who informed him that Lauriston had been refused an audience with the Tsar and forbidden to travel to Vilna. He and the diplomatic representatives of the various allied states had been instructed to call for their passports, which amounted to a declaration of hostilities.

Napoleon’s propaganda machine, the Bulletins de la Grande Armée, which presented his troops and the world with his version of events, swung into action. The first Bulletin of the campaign detailed his long and painstaking efforts to keep the peace, and reminded the world of the generosity with which he had treated the defeated Russians in 1807, all to no avail. ‘The vanquished have adopted the tone of conquerors,’ the Bulletin announced, ‘they are tempting fate; let destiny then take its course.’ He announced to his soldiers that they would be required to fight soon. ‘I promise and give you my imperial word on it that it will be for the last time, and that you will then be able to return to the bosom of your families.’³¹

The three corps – Davout’s, Ney’s and Oudinot’s – which were to cross the Niemen first, along with Murat’s cavalry, were massing in the low-lying ground between Wyłkowyszki and Skrawdzen, concealed from view behind the high left bank of the river. The summer heat was intense, made more unbearable for the marching men by the clouds of dust kicked up by the hundreds of thousands of feet and hooves. On 22 June Napoleon set out from Wylkowyszki, passing the marching columns, and reached Skrawdzen at dusk. He had supper in the garden of the parish priest’s house, and asked the priest whether he prayed for him or for Alexander, to which the man replied: ‘For Your Majesty.’ ‘And so you should, as a Pole and as a Catholic,’ replied Napoleon, delighted by the answer.³²

At about eleven o’clock he climbed back into his carriage, which drove off in the direction of the Niemen, past large encampments of Davout’s infantry and Murat’s cavalry, which had been instructed to remain out of sight of the river. He did not want the Russians patrolling the other bank to see a single French uniform, and only Polish patrols, which were a familiar sight, were allowed to show themselves.

It was well past midnight when Napoleon’s carriage rolled up to the bivouac of the 6th Polish Lancers. He got out, proceeded to swap his famous hat and overcoat for the cap and coat of a Polish lancer, and made General Haxo of the Engineers, Berthier and Caulaincourt do the same before they mounted horses and set off, escorted by a platoon of lancers. Napoleon rode into a village, from one of whose houses he and Haxo could, unnoticed, survey the city of Kovno on the other side of the river through their telescopes. He then rode up and down the bank, looking for the best place for a crossing. As he was riding along at full gallop a hare started just in front of his horse, causing it to shy abruptly, and Napoleon was thrown. He jumped up immediately and remounted without a word.

Caulaincourt and others of his entourage were astonished: normally Napoleon would have launched into a string of curses directed at his horse, the hare and the terrain, but this time he acted as though nothing had happened. ‘We would do well not to cross the Niemen,’ Berthier said to Caulaincourt. ‘This fall was a bad omen.’ Napoleon himself must have felt the same. ‘The Emperor, who was ordinarily so gay and so full of ardour at times when his troops were executing a major manoeuvre, remained very serious and preoccupied for the rest of the day,’ wrote Caulaincourt.³³

Napoleon spent most of that day, 23 June, working in the tent that had been pitched for him. He seemed in sombre mood, and his entourage reflected this by maintaining a silence that many later interpreted as being full of foreboding. But this may have been hindsight. ‘Despite the uncertain future, there was enthusiasm, a great deal of it,’ recalled Colonel Jean Boulart of the artillery of the Guard. ‘The army’s confidence in the genius of the Emperor was such that nobody even dreamed that the campaign could turn out badly.’³⁴

Amongst other things, Napoleon was working on a proclamation to be read out to his troops the following morning:

Soldiers! The Second Polish War has begun. The first ended at Friedland and Tilsit: at Tilsit Russia swore an eternal alliance with France and war on England. She is now violating her promises. She refuses to give an explanation of her strange behaviour unless the French eagles retire beyond the Rhine, thereby leaving our allies at her mercy. Russia is tempting fate! And she will meet her destiny. Does she think that we have become degenerate? Are we no longer the soldiers of Austerlitz? She has forced us into a choice between dishonour and war. There can be no question as to which we choose, so let us advance! Let us cross the Niemen! Let us take the war onto her territory. The Second Polish War will be glorious for French arms, as was the first; but the peace that we will conclude will be a lasting one, and will put an end to that arrogant influence which Russia has been exerting on the affairs of Europe over the past fifty years.35

The proclamation would be greeted with enthusiastic shouts of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ when it was read out the following morning. Some were left cold, but according to Étienne Labaume, an officer on Prince Eugène’s staff who hated Napoleon, it ‘excited the ardour of our soldiers, always ready to listen to anything that flattered their courage’. ‘His words,’ affirmed Boulart, ‘acted mightily on the imagination of all and awakened all the ambitions.’ ‘It was so fine, that I almost had it by heart,’ recalled an eighteen-year-old military surgeon.³⁶

At six o’clock that evening, Napoleon mounted up and rode over to the riverbank once again. He spent the next six hours reconnoitring and then watching as, at ten o’clock, three companies of the 13th Light Infantry crossed the river silently in boats and fanned out on the other side, while General Jean-Baptiste Eblé and his men began putting in place three pontoon bridges. A patrol of Russian Hussars rode up to the infantrymen, and its officer challenged them with the regulation French ‘Qui vive?’ It was not a particularly dark night, but uniforms were hard to make out. ‘France!’ came the answer. ‘What are you doing here?’ the Russian shouted, again in French. ‘F—k,^* we’ll show you!’ they shouted back, letting off a volley of shots which scattered the Hussars.

Napoleon was annoyed by the sound of musketry, as he had hoped to keep the Russians in ignorance of his movements for as long as possible. He rode back to his tent to snatch a couple of hours’ sleep, but at three o’clock in the morning he was back in the saddle, riding a horse named ‘Friedland’ after his last victory over the Russians. By dawn the three bridges were in place, and General Morand’s division, the first of Davout’s corps, was on the other side, ready to cover the crossing of Murat’s cavalry.

Napoleon took up his position on a knoll on which the sappers of the Guard had built him a small bower and a seat out of branches. From here he surveyed the scene, sometimes using the telescope which he held in his right hand, while his left was folded behind his back. There was no trace of the previous day’s preoccupation, and he seemed happy, occasionally humming military marches to himself as he looked down on what one witness termed ‘the most extraordinary, the most grandiose, the most imposing spectacle one could imagine, a sight capable of intoxicating a conqueror’.³⁷

‘The army was in full dress, and from the top of the hill on which the Emperor stood, one could see it file across the three bridges on the Niemen in perfect order,’ recalled Nicolas Louis Planat de la Faye, an aide-de-camp standing close by. The units marched up, one after the other, converging from different directions, on the heights that dominated the left bank of the Niemen. They then descended to cross one of the three bridges over the river, and deployed on the flat right bank. ‘Each regiment marched behind its band, which played fanfares that mingled with cries of “Vive l’Empereur.