12: Napoleon in Russia, Part III

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On December 10, 1812, as the remnants of his shattered and defeated army straggled back across Eastern Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte reached Warsaw and summoned various Polish ministers to the place he was staying, the Hotel de Angleterre. He said to them, I beat the Russians every time. They don't dare stand up to us. They are no longer the soldiers of Ailao and Friedland. We will hold Vilnius, and I shall be back with 300,000 men.

All that has happened is of no consequence. It was a misfortune. It was an effect of the climate. The enemy had nothing to do with it. I beat them every time. Later that same evening, in his private sleigh with his chief advisor, Armand de Collencourt, he told a different story. To Collencourt, Napoleon said, I made a mistake, not on the aim or the political opportunity of the war,

but in the manner in which I waged it. I should have stopped at Vitebsk. Alexander would now be at my knees. The way the Russian army divided after I crossed the Neiman blinded me. I stayed two weeks too long in Moscow. 200 years ago, in the second decade of the 19th century, the world was a strange, fascinating, and precarious place. It was a time of global conflict. and uneasy peace. A time of great environmental change. A time of disaster and miracles, anomalies and mysteries.

It was a time when our modern world began to emerge and a time like almost no other in history. This podcast is about stories, true stories, of this remarkable era. This is the Second Decade Podcast. My name is Sean Munger. I'm a historian, an author, teacher, and podcaster. You can visit the website for this podcast at seconddecade.net. Second Decade is spelled out, all one word, two D's in the middle. Thanks for joining me on this journey into the past. Episode 12

Napoleon and Russia, Part 3. History, unfortunately, is often subject to being eclipsed by mythology. I've written about this recently on my blog, seanmunger.com. If you're interested, go to the blog and search for an article with the words fake history in the title. Falsehoods or distortions, alternate facts about what happened in the past often become more widely known and believed than the real facts.

What happened to Napoleon and the French army in their invasion of Russia is an example of one of these mythologies. What most people know or think they know about this event is this. Napoleon invaded Russia, but he forgot about or ignored the cold climate of Russia, and he lost the war because his army froze to death. At best, this is a half-truth. Of course, Napoleon knew that Russia had a cold climate.

He thought his men could deal with it, they couldn't, not as well as he expected, but it wasn't that he was ignorant or forgetful. But focusing on the climate in the story of Napoleon and Russia misses the point, and this focus itself distorts the real story.

It presumes that the reason the French lost is because their soldiers froze to death. It isn't. This is the third and final part of my series on Napoleon in Russia. In the first two parts, the two previous episodes of this podcast, I hope I've impressed upon you just how dysfunctional the French Grande Armée was from the outset. The army was too big, it needed too many resources that were too hard to get, or hard to transport to where they needed to go.

The army was falling apart. Men were starving or dying of thirst in June 1812 before they even saw a single Russian soldier. With as bad a shape as they were in, it's amazing the French managed to do as well as they did at the Battle of Borodino in September 1812, which caused the Russian commander, Kutuzov, to decide to abandon Moscow.

The army that eventually occupied Moscow, which promptly burned down, was badly weakened. They didn't have much fight left in them, but there were more battles to fight. Napoleon was ill-equipped for them. But until the end, even after the end, he refused to admit his own mistakes, at least publicly. Yet he had to realize the colossal blunder he'd made.

When the campaign was over, Napoleon himself did what he could do to promote an alternative truth, that is, a lie, about the Russian campaign and why his army was defeated. That lie was remarkably successful in shaping the historical reputation of the French invasion of Russia. But tonight, this show, we're going to get to the truth. Join me now for the final part, part three of Napoleon in Russia.

The Great Fire of Moscow, which began on September 14, 1812, was one of the great man-made disasters in history. We talked about the fire toward the end of the last episode. Despite the insistence of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy in a lengthy and famous aside in his book War and Peace, the fire of Moscow was most likely set deliberately.

The Russians, and especially Fyodor Rostopochin, the military governor of Moscow, wanted to deny Napoleon anything he could use to revitalize his ragged army. The fire unleashed the worst aspects of human nature. For French troops remaining in the flaming city, all semblance of order or discipline broke down. As sheets of flame advanced block by block through the old city, which in 1812 was still mostly made of wood, soldiers looted everything they could.

breaking into cellars and warehouses, even ripping the clothes off Russian civilians looking for jewelry or valuables. Women were raped. It wasn't quite the orgy of organized sexual assault that accompanied the Japanese invasion of Nanking in 1937, but numerous women across the city were attacked and brutally violated by French troops.

Others set their mind on stealing or getting drunk. I'm taken by a story I found from one French army captain who said that he saw three soldiers, completely drunk, drive by in a rich person's carriage. forcing a band of Russians to walk alongside the coach, carrying the stuff the soldiers had stolen from them, including a gilded chamber pot filled with vodka. This was one of the bizarre faces of war in Moscow.

in September 1812. About three-fourths of the buildings in Moscow were destroyed by the fire. A famous map of Moscow drawn in 1817, five years after the war, shows entire neighborhoods still colored in black. scorched lots filled with charred rubble that even then had not yet all been cleaned up. Napoleon returned to the city on September 20th.

The Kremlin had not been burnt, and he reinstalled himself in Tsar Alexander's apartments. He was completely wrong about how and why the fire had happened. He presumed that Rostopochen was just a nutter, a fanatic, who'd gone rogue and burned the capital out of barbarism and panic. It didn't even occur to him that Rostopochen might have been working under orders.

or at least that Tsar Alexander and General Kutuzov weren't too upset at what had happened, as horrible as it was for the people of Moscow. Napoleon sent a message to Tsar Alexander in St. Petersburg. He regretted the destruction of Moscow and said the Tsar could have peace with a single note. The Tsar didn't reply. Napoleon kept sending emissaries and messages. Some of them made it, some of them didn't, but Alexander never replied.

Silence. Crickets. On September 29th, the Russian government issued an official announcement that admitted Moscow had fallen, but insisting it was just a minor setback. The Russian people must rally to expel the invaders. Alexander signed it, but he never communicated directly with Napoleon. The French emperor was baffled. He just couldn't believe it.

He was certain that once Moscow was conquered, the Tsar would ask for peace. He was so convinced of this, he didn't even bother to come up with a plan B. He waited in Moscow for Alexander to reply. And waited. And waited. Not all of Napoleon's army occupied Moscow. Tens of thousands of them were waiting in the rear areas behind Moscow, meaning to the west, and he left tens of thousands more sick and wounded in places the army had already been, like Vilnius, Smolensk, and Borodino.

Napoleon should have started evacuating these people. There were no supplies to support them, but he didn't. Instead, he called for more troops. He issued an order demanding 140,000 more troops from France, 30,000 from Italy, 10,000 from Bavaria, and smaller numbers from other places. He even wrote to his wife, Marie-Louise, telling her to beg her father, the emperor of Austria, for more troops.

In a way, it was a bluff. There weren't that many troops to be had anymore. But Napoleon wanted the newspapers to publish these numbers, in the hopes the Russians would think he had reinforcements coming, and it would spook Alexander into making peace. It didn't work. Alexander, who was ill with a rash on his leg, retreated to Adacha on a little island in the Neva River, read the Bible, and immersed himself in the religious mysticism of the Orthodox Church.

With no reply, Napoleon resigned himself to the possibility, the likelihood even, that he and his army would have to spend the winter in Moscow. It was now October, and soon the weather would turn cold. Even if he had done this if he had stayed in Moscow for the winter it still would have been a death sentence for most of his army. Amazingly Napoleon was pretty oblivious to the real condition of his army.

In Moscow, he was in kind of a bubble. He lived in the Tsar's luxurious apartments. Most of his officers had appropriated the living quarters of various Russian nobles. Those kinds of buildings, made of brick and stone, tended to survive the fire. The looting of Moscow's fine swag gave Napoleon and the higher-ups in the French army a distorted picture of how well the troops were doing. A French officer wrote this telling passage.

Our actual poverty was masked by an apparent abundance. We had neither bread nor meat, and our tables were covered with preserves and sweets. Tea, liqueurs, and wines of every kind, served in fine porcelain or in crystal vessels, showed how close luxury was to poverty in our case. In mid-October, after having been in Moscow about a month, Napoleon started to rethink the idea of spending the winter there. Contrary to that popular mythology, he was quite cognizant of the weather and climate.

In fact, he studied weather and temperature charts pretty intently. He observed it didn't really get cold until the beginning of December, so he thought he still had time to decide what to do. He was also lulled into a false sense of security by a stretch of unusually warm weather in Moscow in the first couple of weeks of October. One of his high officers wrote to his wife, That changed on October 13th.

That day, the first snow of the season fell on Moscow. Napoleon suddenly took notice. This, as well as the capture of several of his messengers by Russian troops. He decided they'd withdraw and find good winter quarters beyond the frontier of Poland. He set October 19th as the day the withdrawal would begin.

In typical Napoleonic fashion, the retreat began with a parade. Outside the Kremlin, Napoleon reviewed a procession of Marshal Ney's army, and he gave out legions of honor to certain accomplished troops. When the parade was over, he returned to the apartments to handle preparations for the retreat. Part of the French army was already on the move, headed back on the roads from Moscow.

General Kutuzov, whose army had been growing with additional reinforcements since Borodino, while Napoleon's was shrinking, attacked a retreating column of the French army a few days earlier. The soldiers trundling out of Moscow were a pretty pathetic sight. Many of them tried to bring with them the loot they'd stolen from the city during and after the fire. So in addition to the soldiers marching,

Horses pulling gun carriages and supplies. There were carts full of stuff. Food, liquor, suitcases, trunks packed with loot. Much of it got abandoned on the side of the road when the troops realized it was unworkable. It was a mess. The troops also brought people with them. Some were Russian civilians who feared getting executed by the Tsar as collaborators. Some were servants or others who'd thrown in with the French. They were dragging all their crap along with them too.

Probably about 95,000 of Napoleon's troops left Moscow, but there may have been 50,000 other people trying to tag along with them. They would suffer and die in the retreat, too. On October 23, 1812, the last French troops evacuated from Moscow. Napoleon was already gone. He'd given orders to set a bunch of explosive charges all over the Kremlin to blow it up. A lot of the fuses failed to go off.

The Kremlin was heavily damaged, but it was by no means destroyed. Overall, Napoleon had done far less damage to Moscow than the Russians themselves had done. The next day, October 24th, the Russians realized the time was perfect to attack him. The decision was made not by Kutuzov, but a junior Russian general named Dokturov, who figured they should attack Napoleon's army before it reached a town called, I'm probably going to butcher this pronunciation, Malo Yaroslavets.

There was a pretty fierce battle that occurred here. The town changed hands between the Russians and the French eight times. When it was over, Napoleon had repulsed the Russian attack, supposedly a victory. Yet he'd lost about 6,000 troops dead and wounded. The Russians suffered heavier casualties, but Kutuzov's army was gradually gaining, not losing troops. Napoleon couldn't replace his losses.

This wasn't a huge set-piece battle like Borodino, but it focused the thinking of both commanders. In the days following Malo Yaroslavets, Both Napoleon and Kutuzov became curiously reluctant to force a decisive battle with one another. Napoleon, in fact, was undecided about which road to take back to Poland. He could go back by one of two roads.

The easiest one was the road they'd taken from Smolensk. The problem with that was that they had already marched down that road, meaning any food or supplies or forage they could have otherwise gotten from it was already gone. or the French army could take a more roundabout route, through fresh territory, for whatever it was worth. The problem with this was that Kutuzov, who now outnumbered the French, could flank Napoleon and there'd be a big battle. If Napoleon lost it,

the whole thing would be over. He was growing increasingly less confident of his ability to win battles, which had been his whole thing previously. After conferring with his generals and reconnoitering the landscape on his own, Napoleon decided they'd go back along the main road, back to Smolensk. There would be no big decisive battle. There could be, and there would still be, plenty of small ones,

but from now on Napoleon's strategy was not to win, but to get the hell out of Russia with as much of his army as he could keep intact. The morale of the French troops plummeted. The army was retreating in waves, with Napoleon leading and various corps following. The whole group got weaker the further it retreated. One of the major problems was the lack of hay to feed the horses.

The horses grew too weak to be able to pull the cannons and supplies, especially over the sticky, muddy roads. Horses were dying all over the place, and their corpses littered the sides of the road. Napoleon was insistent that the army not abandon the cannons, which the Russians would quickly pick up and use against him, so the French started hitching more and more horses together to pull them.

This meant they had to abandon everything else, including cannonballs and powder. So what was the point? The army had a long train of stragglers behind them, which made matters worse. Here's a French officer's account. Quote, Men, horses, and vehicles would pass forward pell-mell, pushing and shoving without any mutual consideration. Woe betide those who allowed themselves to be knocked over. They could not get up, were trodden underfoot,

and caused others to trip and fall on top of them. In this manner, mounds of men and horses, dead and dying, gradually piled up, blocking the way. But the crowd kept coming, banking up and cluttering the approaches to the obstacle. One could hear the cries of the unfortunates who, knocked over, trampled, were caught and crushed beneath the wheels of carriages or other vehicles.

On October 28th, the army reached a grim milestone. They were marching back the way they'd come, and that meant returning to Borodino. where Napoleon's army had fought the largest engagement so far with Russian forces. The battle had happened on September 7th, almost two months before, but the battlefield had not been cleared. Thousands of corpses lay all around.

French and Russians, in the precise places where they'd fallen on the day of the battle. In the intervening months, the bodies had become food for buzzards, wolves, feral pigs, other scavengers, eyeballs pecked out, bones exposed.

flesh-torn, full of holes. Many of the bodies were stiff and well-preserved because of the frosts at night. The place stank horribly. In the faces of those twisted, frost-covered corpses, the men of the Grand Arbet saw not only a chilling reminder of the battle they'd already come through, but, for many of them, a vision of how they themselves would die.

On the night of November 6, 1812, the weather changed. Winter in Russia is notable not just for its harshness, but the suddenness with which it appears. This night was cold and clear. With no clouds to trap the heat, the temperature plunged about 10 degrees. The nights before this had already been cold and frosty, but many, many witnesses in the retreating French army

recalled this night and the next day, November 7th, as the beginning of the truly deep and miserable cold. Clothing was a problem. Armies in 1812 didn't have winter uniforms because generally nobody did military maneuvers in the winter. The Grand Arbet had jumped off at the River Neiman in June, remember, and they had problems carrying all their supplies even then, so very few of them had thought to bring overcoats or cold weather gear.

Even a lot of the troops' own uniforms, those who had uniforms, were pretty thin and shoddy. After it started snowing in early November, freezing to death became a constant threat. Humans weren't the only creatures suffering. The cold affected the army's horses, which were already dying in great numbers, even worse. There's no reason why you'd know this unless you're an equestrian or a blacksmith. I'm neither one, for the record. But in researching this episode...

I found out that horseshoes come in two different kinds, what you might call normal, for usual road and field use, and studded horseshoes, literally snowshoes for horses. Guess which kind the French army had. A few Polish regiments, and incidentally Napoleon's own horses, were fitted out with what they called sharp shoes, but the rest of the horses were just SOL. A non-studded racehorse is useless on compacted ice.

like they started to encounter on the thin Russian roads. Worse than useless, in fact. We're talking about horses pulling heavy loads, slipping and sliding around out there like ice skaters. Horses fell down frequently, breaking their legs.

They couldn't get up again. There was nothing the troops could do for them. They couldn't even shoot them, because a lot of them had thrown away their guns, since they didn't have gloves, and it was so cold, that their skin stuck to the metal parts of their muskets when they touched them. In one cavalry corps in the French army, 1,200 horses died in the space of two days. The elements weren't the only problem.

Little bands of Russian cavalry troops, usually Cossacks, staged hit-and-run raids on retreating columns of the French army. Guess which kind of horseshoes the Russian Cossack troops had? The right kind. Oh, and they also had guns, and swords, and warm clothes, and they'd actually eaten something that month. Pretty much wherever the Cossacks attacked, they'd mowed down French troops like grass. Then there was the problem of food.

The French were rapidly running out of it. Most of the stuff they'd managed to haul out of Moscow was soon gone. With nothing else to eat, a lot of men started resorting to stripping the carcasses of horses that fell down and died along the road. When a horse collapsed, hordes of hungry troops would swarm, knives and bayonets drawn, and pretty much strip it clean, even eating the organs like the liver and heart.

I found an account that men who were revolted by the taste of horse meat would tear open a gun cartridge and sprinkle gunpowder on the meat to disguise it. I have no idea what gunpowder tastes like, but this sounds really disgusting.

And it wasn't just lack of food. What food they could find, horse meat or feral cats cleaned out of ruined villages, or if you were really lucky, a bit of flour left in the bottom of a barrel somewhere. What food they could find, the troops generally didn't have time to cook. They couldn't really stop marching to sit down, build a fire, and cook their horse meat with gunpowder sauce.

Add to that, any food they could get might be stolen by their own comrades, or else they were just so hungry that as soon as they saw a bit of food, gulp, down it went. So when they did eat raw food, often they'd get stomach pains, diarrhea, indigestion. or parasites like worms.

As all this was going on, Napoleon was finally becoming increasingly aware of how his army was falling apart, but at the same time he continued deluding himself, and after a while he just didn't see the suffering that his troops were going through.

He usually traveled far ahead of most of them in a special carriage. Calain Court was often his companion in this carriage, and the long conversations they had in the coach is one of the main sources of Calain Court's reminiscences about being in Napoleon's service. In November, after the weather had turned truly cold, Napoleon reached Smolensk. You remember from the last episode that he'd taken Smolensk after a pretty bitter siege. There wasn't much left of it.

some intact buildings, but a lot of charred ruins. At first, he was hoping to make winter quarters there for a substantial part of his army, but it soon became evident that this was pretty much impossible. There just weren't enough supplies. The temperature fell to 5 degrees Fahrenheit the night before Napoleon entered Smolensk. By now, Napoleon and his army had been marching for three weeks.

He'd lost 60,000 meds since leaving Moscow. 60,000. What he did have left was hardly fighting strength, especially his famous cavalry, which was pretty useless without horses. The army that streamed into Smolensk was hungry, sick, tired, and demoralized.

Napoleon tried to act like everything was peachy. He put on a good face to buck up morale, but the troops interpreted it as him being indifferent to what they were going through. The weather struck again. On November 12th, the temperature fell. Now it was getting down to minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit at night. Realizing there was no hope of making winter quarters here, Napoleon left Smolensk on November 14th. There were signs that the Russians were massing for some sort of attack.

Russian troops were cutting off access to nearby roads to force the French into a single channel where they might be destroyed. In contrast to how confident he was, or pretended to be, at the beginning of the campaign, Napoleon was now afraid of defeat. He had his doctor give him a vial of poison in case he was captured, which he kept in a little black silk bag on his person at all times. As it turned out, Kutuzov was massing for an attack.

He turned out to be mistaken about how much and which parts of the French army were retreating near the town of Krasny. In mid-November, there was a series of skirmishes near this town. This engagement, which has come to be known as the Battle of Krasny, is fabulously complicated. Kind of a boondoggle from military history buffs with...

arrows on maps kind of stuff that I usually skip over. Suffice it to say, the French won a little and lost a lot. The Russians, pretty much the reverse. Kutuzov missed a chance to destroy Napoleon's army once and for all. thus igniting the kind of arcane controversy that military history buffs argue about on obscure internet web forums to this day.

However, the cavalry of Marshal Ney, one of Napoleon's most famous commanders, was badly mauled. Ney himself narrowly escaped having to surrender to Russian troops. The fact that he got away was chiefly why Napoleon hailed Krosny. as at least a sort of victory. Things just got worse. In the next couple of days, the French army, now badly wounded by yet another battle that had gone wrong, straggled out of Smolensk.

Daytime temperatures were 5 degrees above zero. Nighttime, we're talking 13 below Fahrenheit. That's about 25 below Celsius. Here's how one French officer described the scene. Quote, The whole road is covered in abandoned caissons, carriages, and cannon that nobody has even thought of blowing up. Here and there, dying horses, weapons, effects of every sort.

Broken open trunks, disemboweled bags, mark the way taken by those who precede us. We also see trees at the feet of which people have attempted to build fires, and around these trunks... The problems compounded. One, believe it or not, was dehydration. You'd think that wouldn't be a problem if all the snow and ice are out, but that was precisely the problem. In order to get water, you had to stop, build a fire, and belt snow. They didn't get to do this all that often.

horses suffer from dehydration as badly as humans do. I've already told you how the problems for an army spiral out of control when the horses aren't doing well. Troops got frostbite. Many of them didn't know how to deal with it. Their noses or ears or fingers would get gangrene and literally fall off. I read one horrifying account of a French soldier.

settling down to camp one night, unwrapping the rags around his feet, and finding that his toes had frozen to the rags. When he unwrapped them, he literally ripped his toes off. I had the misfortune to read this charming little anecdote right before lunch. When it got too cold, the dead horses would freeze within minutes. You could only get meat from a horse that had just died, otherwise it was too late.

The troops, bundled up in what clothes they had, never took them off. Consequently, their clothes got infested with lice and fleas. So imagine this, just imagine this. You're some poor sap who was cleaned out of a tavern in Germany or northern Italy to go join Napoleon's army. You walked all the way to Russia, fought at least one huge battle, possibly several smaller ones, endured the burning of Moscow,

then retreated. Your shoes are ruined. You're missing toes. You're dehydrated. You've had nothing to eat but horse meat. Your body is one huge mass of filthy, red, itchy skin. If you've made it this far, most of your friends are probably dead. This is what it's like to be in Napoleon's army in November 1812, the largest and grandest army in the world, remember, up until that time.

By the end of November, the end was coming for Napoleon and the Russian campaign. He soon neared the Berezina River, which is in what's now the country of Belarus. Whenever I see that word, I want to call it Belarus. The idea was to get back to the Polish frontier, back to territory he controlled. But this rather big river stood in his way. At first, the plan was to cross the river on foot. It was frozen.

But just when the French could actually have benefited from the freezing temperatures, it thawed a bit. The ice was too thin. And as it happened, Napoleon had ordered the destruction of his last pontoon bridge a couple of days before. Fighting was starting to erupt in the towns all around, including an important junction called Borisov, a town that also had a bridge, which the Russians quite smartly set on fire.

Fortunately for him, Napoleon still had some engineers on hand that had working tools they could use to construct a new pontoon bridge. The French started taking apart wooden houses in a nearby village for materials to build the bridge. As for the Russians, Napoleon fainted. F-E-I-N-T. He sent a general with some units of Swiss troops to draw off the Russians, who were expecting a big battle.

Behind them, the sappers, working in bitterly cold water, risking death from hypothermia, managed to get a small rickety bridge made of pieces of Russian farmhouses across the river. Napoleon started moving his troops across as fast as he could get them. The Swiss troops in the meantime fought a ferocious battle against several Russian units.

The outcome of this battle was one of Napoleon's few lucky breaks in the entire campaign. It was lucky in a strategic sense only, though. In a human sense, the crossing at Berezina was a disaster. Thousands of French troops did get across, but thousands of others, and many civilians who'd been following the retreating army, were trapped on the other side, when Napoleon ordered the pontoon bridge burnt on the morning of November 29th.

The banks of the Berezina were littered with dead bodies, broken carts, dead horses, wounded men, destitute women and children freezing to death, and the same sort of horrific carnage that the Grand Armée had left in its wake all throughout Russia. and all the way back out again. But somehow this maneuver, the crossing of the French of the Berezina River at this place, which is called Studzionka, became a dramatic icon of the war and the retreat. The event is depicted in War and Peace.

Numerous paintings and pictures were made of it throughout the 19th century and afterward. Chances are, if you've ever looked at a history book with pictures of the Russian campaign, at least one of them will depict the crossing of the Beresina.

But the retreat wasn't over. For the men in the French army, the horror continued. And for some of them, it got even more horrible. Reports of cannibalism invariably surface in accounts of the retreat from Moscow. Exactly how widespread it was is open to dispute, but I'm quite sure that at least some instances of cannibalism did happen, especially after November 30th.

when nighttime temperatures were now reaching as low as 22 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Napoleon's next plan involved Vilnius. After the fighting at the Berezina River and the crossing, Even he finally got the message that his army was finished. There was no more hope of pulling them together enough to fight another battle. Just getting back to friendly territory was all he was going to be able to do. On November 29th, 1812,

Napoleon wrote to one of his commanders, The army is numerous, but in a state of terrible dissolution. The cold and hunger have dissolved the army. We will soon be in Vildias, but can we make a stand there? Victuals, victuals, victuals. Without that, there is no horror that this undisciplined mob will not visit upon the city. Look at the change that's occurred since the beginning of the campaign.

Just before he set across the Niemann in June, Napoleon gave a rousing harangue to his troops, praising them as the army of Austerlitz, his most famous victory. Now he admitted they were an undisciplined mob, and he knew he was politically on shaky ground. He'd been out of touch with his toadies in Paris for three weeks.

Now, at Molodecno, when Napoleon finally received a bunch of messages that had been piling up waiting for him, he decided to blow the very depressing popsicle stand that was now his dying, freezing army, and rush back to Paris as quickly as possible. He was already in damage control mode, which is what he'd continue to be in for the rest of his reign as emperor. They outfitted Napoleon's special coach with skis, turning it into a sleigh.

He left Marat in command of the shambling army, and Napoleon himself took off with 200 troops of his personal guard and some of the best horses that were still left alive. on a sleigh with good horses napoleon essentially went into warp speed leaving the rest of his dying army in the dust or more accurately in clouds of snow the horror would continue for them while he was all nice and warm

bundled up in his sleigh, headed for Paris. At 10 o'clock on the night of December 5, 1812, Napoleon and his entourage left their final post at a place called Smorgoni, and they hightailed it west.

During the journey, Napoleon jawboned with his chief adjutant, Collencourt. Their lengthy conversations on the subject of the Russian campaign occupy a lot of the later pages of Collencourt's memoirs. Napoleon asked Kolencourt if he thought Tsar Alexander would finally make peace. Kolencourt said no, he didn't think that the Tsar would be inclined in the slightest to sign a peace treaty with Napoleon.

The French emperor had had what we might call moments of clarity throughout the campaign, especially in its later stages. But now, in the sleigh on the way back to Paris, he couldn't seem to take responsibility for the disaster that he was primarily responsible for. He told Kalaincourt, The burning of the Russian towns, the burning of Moscow, was merely stupid. Why use fire if Alexander relied so much on the winter?

Kutuzov's retreat was inept as it could be. It's the winter that has been our undoing. We're victims of the climate. The fine weather tricked me. If I had set out a fortnight sooner, my army would be at Vitebsk, and I should be laughing at the Russians and your prophet Alexander. He would be regretting that he did not negotiate. All our disasters hinge on that fortnight." At the end of the day,

At the bitter, freezing cold end of this horrible, pointless war that had destroyed so many thousands of lives for nothing, this was the lie that Napoleon finally sold himself. Those two weeks. How do we know that Napoleon convinced himself of this lie? Kellencourt adds a footnote on this very page of his memoirs, page 285, where he says that Napoleon was heard to repeat this lie even when he was imprisoned on the island of St. Helena.

In 1817, under house arrest, out of power, almost at the end of his life, Napoleon was heard to say, My great mistake was in staying too long in that city, meaning Moscow. But for that, my undertaking would have been successful in the end. Napoleon seems to have believed this, but it was a lie. He can't have gone through two, now almost three, podcast episodes on Napoleon and Russia. and believed that those two weeks he stayed too long in Moscow.

would have made any difference in the end. Think about what you've heard, what I've told you. About the supply problems. About the guys who had two thin uniforms and one pair of shoes. About the thousands who dropped from heat stroke even before they crossed into...

Russia. About the soldiers drinking piss from their horses because they couldn't find water. About the mud on the Russian roads, the villages burnt, the lack of hay for the horses, the roads filled with junk and dead bodies as far as the eye could see. All of this happened before those two weeks in Moscow.

History is often unclear, especially when you get into the realm of what-ifs, like what if Napoleon had left Moscow two weeks earlier than he did. In this case, though, given the weight of the historical evidence, I'm going to be pretty unequivocal. If Napoleon believed his own press, his own spin, he was a fool. His army was doomed. He could never have won the Russian campaign. How many died?

Counting the Dead is a favorite parlor game in history. We can throw some numbers at a board, but the more the zeros pile up, the less we remember that these were real people. Men, women, and children. Lots of different nationalities. real people who pay the ultimate price for Napoleon's hubris. I suppose I can't end the episode without throwing around some numbers, but I'm not really enthusiastic about it.

Let's say 400,000 French and French allies, less than a quarter of these, died in battle. Russians, a similar number, but a higher percentage who died in battle. Civilians, mostly Russians. 200,000? More? Probably more. We'll never know. Vast swaths of Russia were devastated wasteland. Villages were destroyed, farm fields burnt, people displaced. Most of Moscow was a smoldering ruin.

Somebody finally cleaned up the battlefield's Borodino. I mean, it's not like you can go there today and still see skeletons laying around. But the physical scars of Russia were slow to heal. The psychological and human scars took much longer. Given how destructive the war truly was, it makes the triumphant bombast of Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture seem a little odd.

In 1869, decades after the war, a French civil engineer named Charles Joseph Minard created a very ingenious chart, one of the world's first and most famous infographics. which depicts Napoleon's Russian campaign. The Grand Armée is represented as a big line, very thick in the upper left-hand corner, as the army, 422,000 strong by Menard's reckoning, steps off across the Neiman River.

The line, colored tan on the way to Moscow, shrinks in width as it goes along. At Moscow, shrunk to 100,000, the line turns black and folds back on itself. As it goes across the page, back towards the Neiman, it gets smaller and smaller and smaller. According to Menard, less than 10,000 troops made it back. This is one of the most famous infographics in history.

I've seen prints of it framed and hanging in the offices of history professors I've worked for. It definitely brings home how lethal and how tragic this war really was, especially if you realize how little of any value it accomplished. After the disastrous retreat, Napoleon, badly wounded politically and militarily, clung to power for another 15 months trying to stave off defeat by his enemies. What happened to Napoleon in these later years will be the subject of future episodes of this podcast.

Tsar Alexander of Russia remained on the throne for another 13 years. He died while on a tour of southern Russia in December 1825. His death gave rise to a famous legend, and something of a conspiracy theory, the suggestion that he didn't really die, but instead faked his death and lived out his remaining days as an orthodox monk named Fyodor Kuzmich. Fortunately, because it happened in the third decade, not the second, getting to the bottom of this controversy is beyond the scope of this show.

If you like this podcast, please share it, tell somebody about it, mention it on your social media, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, whatever is your thing. Leaving a star rating and a review on iTunes is especially helpful because it will help other history buffs, like you, find this podcast. I'd love for you to contribute to my Patreon account. That's patreon.com slash seanmunger.

Pledge an amount, even a dollar, and get access to members-only goodies that no one else gets, including video bonus lectures. In addition to my Patreon account, you can find me on Twitter at Sean Munger. There's an underscore there. And my website, seanmunger.com. My historical sources for this episode include 1812, Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow by Adam Zamoyski, HarperCollins Publishers, London, 2004, and With Napoleon in Russia.

The Memoirs of General Armand de Calincourt, published by William Morrow and Company, New York, 1935. Music credits. The main theme of this podcast is titled String Impromptu Number One by Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech.com, used under Creative Commons by Attribution 3.0 license. Additional music. Selections from the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky from museopen.org public domain. This podcast was written and recorded by me, Sean Booker. Good night.

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