French invasion of Russia 1812

Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812 represents the first phase of the Sixth Coalition War, in which France and Russia faced each other with their respective allies. After initial French successes, the campaign ended in one of the greatest military disasters in history. After the complete expulsion of the Grande Armée from Russian territory, the campaign culminated in the second phase of the war at the beginning of 1813: in the wars of liberation, first Prussia, then Austria and later the French-dominated German Rhine Confederation states were transferred to the anti-Napoleonic side, which defeated France in 1814 and forced Napoleon to abdicate.

Political background

Before the Russian campaign, France had already been at war practically without interruption for 19 years. Napoleon Bonaparte and the Russian Tsar Alexander I became allies through the Peace of Tilsit in July 1807. A connection to the Tsar’s family planned by Napoleon by marrying Katharina Pavlovna, a sister of Alexander, was prevented by her marriage to Prince George of Oldenburg in 1809. Her younger sister Anna, who had suggested Napoleon as an alternative, was only 15 years old, so he was put off until a later date. This news reached Napoleon only after he had already decided on Marie-Louise of Habsburg, a daughter of the Austrian Emperor. As it was not unusual at that time to marry fifteen-year-olds, Napoleon regarded this as a rejection. In fact, the Tsar’s mother did not like Napoleon and did not want any of her daughters to marry him.

In the year 1809, there was a war between France and Austria. At the same time there were uprisings in Tyrol, Prussia and the Kingdom of Westphalia. As an ally of France, Russia intervened in Austria’s campaign against the Duchy of Warsaw. But the Russian army only led a sham campaign, in which there was no battle with the Austrians. There were also good contacts to Prussia, with whom Russia was allied until 1807. There was a close friendly relationship between Alexander I and the Prussian Queen. To Napoleon’s displeasure, the Tsar received the Prussian royal couple in January 1808 for a friendly visit of several weeks in St. Petersburg.

In 1810 Napoleon relaxed the continental barrier against Great Britain, which, apart from a one-year interruption due to the Peace of Amiens, had put it in a state of war for French ships since 1793. French merchants were allowed to trade with Great Britain again under certain conditions. On the other hand, in October, he demanded that the Tsar confiscate even neutral ships intending to call at Russian ports, provided they had goods of English origin on board. In August Alexander I had learned that three French divisions were to be transferred from southern Germany to near the Russian border. In Warsaw, 50,000 new rifles had arrived for the Polish brigades. At the end of the year France annexed the Duchy of Oldenburg and attacked the Czar’s brother-in-law. Alexander I no longer took part in the Continental Blockade, which had become an economic burden. Russia was not allowed to export raw materials like wood, flax or pitch to Great Britain. Textiles, coffee, tea, tobacco or sugar could not be imported from Great Britain. The tax revenues from these transactions were missing from the state treasury, but smugglers made big profits from them. Companies that depended on import or export had gone bankrupt. The value of paper rubles had fallen dramatically. Because of the negative trade balance, the Tsar banned the import of luxury goods on 31 December. France was particularly affected, exporting large quantities of silk, wine and perfume to Russia. Other goods were subject to such high customs duties that they were hardly ever imported. This only applied to goods that came to Russia by land. Imports that came by sea were duty-free. This benefited the English and the neutral states, whose ships carried English goods for the most part. Russia occupied large parts of the former Kingdom of Poland. These territories were traditionally important suppliers of timber for the construction of British war and merchant ships. Since Russia had occupied wooded Finland, it was the largest timber supplier in Europe and vital for British shipbuilding.

In 1811 France and Russia began preparations for war. As early as February, five additional Russian divisions were moved to the border with Poland, and the troops at the border were reinforced with 180 cannons. The armament factories in Tula and Alexandrovsk were instructed to work even on high holidays. The tsar expected an invasion and also thought of a war of aggression. For this he needed the support of Poland, Prussia and Austria. On February 12 he wrote to Adam Czartoryski and suggested that he proclaim a Kingdom of Poland. In return, the most important politicians and military leaders of the Duchy of Warsaw should guarantee him in writing that they would support him. At the end of February he wrote to the Prussian king and the Austrian emperor, partially informing them of his plans. Napoleon found out about it and put his army on alert. Both sides repeatedly assured him that they did not want war. The Russian military attaché Alexander Ivanovich Chernyshev travelled several times from St. Petersburg to Paris for negotiations. Already in April he wrote from Paris that, in his opinion, the war was a done deal for Napoleon. Statements to the contrary were only intended to gain time. Prince Alexander Kurakin, the Russian envoy in Paris, had to listen to a loud speech by Napoleon on August 15th, at a reception for Napoleon’s birthday, in which he claimed that Russia was planning a war. On 17 October, Gerhard von Scharnhorst signed an alliance treaty between Prussia and Russia in St Petersburg, which remained meaningless, as it was only valid in the event of a French attack on Prussia. In this case, the Prussian army was to retreat to Russian territory to unite with the Russian army.

In November, Napoleon requested topographic maps of Russia from the Imperial Library, with Lithuania being of particular interest to him. In December he informed his allies to prepare for war. At the end of 1811 a printer producing Russian banknotes was arrested in Paris. He allegedly did so on behalf of the French police minister and was released. Louis-Philippe de Ségur, a close confidant of Napoleon, confirmed the arrest. According to his account, Napoleon saw the counterfeit money only with clear reluctance and most of the money was burned on the retreat in Vilnius on Napoleon’s orders. What happened to the rest of the money Ségur kept silent. On behalf of the Prussian King, Scharnhorst travelled to Vienna to conduct exploratory talks. On 26 December, the Austrian chancellor Metternich rejected an alliance.

Napoleon was well aware of the particularities of the theatre of war and the measures to be derived from it. The “stumbling” into the “Russian venture” – as often found in literature – definitely did not take place. Thus he was familiar with the experiences during the winter campaign of 1806/07 east of the Vistula and in Poland; furthermore, already in the spring of 1811 he was already familiar with the most important literary works about the Russian and Austrian campaigns that had taken place; he was also familiar with depictions of Charles XII’s operations against Russia in the Great Northern War in 1708/09. In addition, immediately before the conflict, Polish and French officers had been commissioned to explore the route beyond Nyemen (German: Memel).

In February 1812 French troops occupied Swedish West Pomerania and the then Swedish island of Rügen. An employee of the Paris War Ministry, who had regularly sold information to Chernyschow, was arrested in the same month. Napoleon also had his spies. On this way he came into possession of Russian printing plates for maps. In March the Vossische Zeitung in Berlin reported on the deployment of French troops in Germany. John Quincy Adams, American envoy in St. Petersburg and later President of the USA, noted the departure of Russian troops from St. Petersburg in his diary at the same time. Sweden concluded an alliance with Russia on 5 April, renouncing Russian-occupied Finland. In return, after a victory over Napoleon, it was to receive Norway, which belonged to Denmark. On 8 April, Alexander I demanded the withdrawal of all French troops as a precondition for further negotiations. This letter was delivered in Paris on 30 April. Already on 18 April Napoleon had made a peace proposal to England, which was rejected, as the offer was that Napoleon’s brother Joseph should remain king of Spain. On 21 April Alexander left Saint Petersburg and travelled to Vilnius to take command of the army. A news blackout had already been imposed in Lithuania. Countess Tiesenhausen, who lived in Vilnius, wrote: “We didn’t even know that the French were marching through Germany […]. On May 9, Napoleon left Paris. Louis de Narbonne presented Alexander with a letter from Napoleon on May 18, in which he confirmed his willingness to make peace. In return, he demanded that Russia should again participate in the continental blockade. Narbonne also told Alexander about the strength of the Grande Armée, which he did on Napoleon’s express order. Alexander was not impressed. When Narbonne handed over a letter of reply to Napoleon six days later, he declared “So that’s how all conciliation proposals came to an end! The spirit that reigns in the Russian camp drives us into war. There is no time to waste on fruitless negotiations. With the Peace of Bucharest, Russia ended the war with the Ottoman Empire on 28 May, freeing up more troops for a war against Napoleon. Under the treaties with Sweden and the Ottoman Empire, 90,000 Russian soldiers marched towards the Russian-Polish border as reinforcements. The Russian envoy in Paris, Kurakin, had repeatedly demanded his passports for a departure. From Napoleon’s point of view this was a break off of diplomatic relations, which he presented years later as a Russian declaration of war. Kurakin received his passports on 12 June and left Paris. On 22 June Napoleon wrote a daily order in Wilkowiszki, in which he announced the Second Polish War. The next day Napoleon rode to Nyemen, camouflaged in the cloak of a Polish ulanian. He was accompanied by Armand de Caulaincourt, who reported that Napoleon’s horse shied away from a jumping hare and that the emperor fell from his horse. The war began with a bad omen, Caulaincourt said.

War Logistics

In earlier wars, the French army had supplied itself almost exclusively from the country it had passed through. Most of the time, French revolutionary troops, like Napoleon’s troops later on, did not have a militarily organized retinue like other armies and were therefore faster and more mobile, but were dependent on constant supplies from the farmers and merchants of the occupied country. This strategy had worked well in densely populated Central Europe, but in the vastness of Russia with its thinly populated areas and poor road network this method was doomed to failure. For the war against Russia, Emperor Napoleon had more extensive logistics than previously planned, and many warehouses in Prussia and Poland were filled with supplies. On the rivers in Prussia and Poland, a large number of barges were used, which took over the supply by water. The timing of the invasion was also determined by logistical considerations. Napoleon assumed that the army would be able to supply itself with Russian grain at this time of year, and there should be enough food for horses and cattle. Medical care was exemplary for the time. The French army was one of the first to have ambulance vehicles. The doctor Dominique Jean Larrey, who had introduced the mobile hospitals, accompanied the army in Russia as head of the medical corps.

Due to this claim, the retinue that followed the Great Army was very large. Napoleon’s personal retinue alone consisted of 18 supply wagons, a cloakroom cart, two butlers, three cooks, six servants and eight grooms. He himself rode in a six-horse carriage, a further 52 carriages were needed for his staff alone, and an enormous number of carriages just for his supplies. To build bridges, several carriages carried pontoons and carriages with material and tools for pioneers. Field smithies and a mobile printing shop were part of the wagon train. The artillery had more than 3,000 carriages with their gun mountings for the cannons and the corresponding ammunition wagons alone. Tailors, shoemakers and other craftsmen accompanied the army. More than 50 cash vans with money for the soldiers’ pay and other expenses accompanied the troops. Each staff of each corps had a huge fleet of vehicles, including many carriages for the personal comfort of the higher officers. This often hindered the carriages which were important for the supply of the army. The doctor Heinrich von Roos reported that when he reached Vilnius, his ambulances had not even crossed Nyemen.

In addition to the fleet of vehicles already available in the units, Napoleon had 26 battalions of equipment with over 6,000 vehicles provided for military transport. The army was to be followed by herds of cattle for slaughter, which, driven forward without pause, quickly became emaciated and died for the most part by the roadside. In addition, some of the 26 battalions of equipe were covered with oxen intended for later consumption; these animals died after a short time due to the lack of supply. The carriages of the 26 Equipagen-Bataillons, which together had a transport capacity of barely 8000 tons, were not remotely sufficient to supply the approximately 600,000 men of the Grande Armée (the occupying troops in Prussia and Poland as well as the numerous military officials who followed the army also had to be fed, after all). For this reason, the French units – just like the “revolutionary troops” before them – requisitioned countless horse-drawn carts in Prussia, Poland and Lithuania. According to an official report from the government in Königsberg, 1,629 carts and 7,546 horses were formally requisitioned by the French army in the Prussian province of East Prussia alone in 1812. In addition, the passing troops of the Grande Armée from the province took another 26,579 carts and 79,161 horses by force. Similar numbers were reported from the other Prussian provinces and the Duchy of Warsaw. The Marquis de Chambray described these countless private carriages, which accompanied the troops without order, as “a real plague”, as they constantly blocked the roads, thus tearing apart the marching units. The horses and people forced by the army to come along had to provide for themselves, as they did not belong to the army. They were ruthlessly exploited for a short time, so that many of them perished miserably and never returned home. At the end of August, the Great Army spread out over an area of about 350,000 square kilometres. Of the well-filled large magazines in Gdansk, the convoys only had to cover 900 kilometres to Smolensk. A transport battalion (there and back) needed more than 80 days for this route. Therefore, in January and February 1813, many of the French magazines in Prussia, Poland or Lithuania were still filled with food, clothing, medicine and other supplies when they were captured by Russian and Prussian troops, while at the same time many French soldiers were starving. In Vilnius alone, Russian troops captured 4 million portions of bread and rusks, 3.6 million portions of meat and 9 million portions of brandy, wine and beer, as well as several thousand tons of clothing and other military supplies. In Minsk, despite attempts to burn them during the occupation of the city, they captured 2 million portions of bread and rusk. The claim of the Grande Armée to be “faster and more agile” than other armies meant that the militarily completely unorganised troop was unable to follow the combat units from the outset, so that many units began to go hungry even before they had crossed the Nyemen or reached Grodno. Therefore, from the beginning many soldiers were looking for food and drink. They often left their units to search for food in more distant villages (as numerous diaries and letters from soldiers prove). Not least because of this, the Grande Armée lost around 50,000 soldiers through desertion in the first six weeks alone.

The units had carts for food, but no carts for the feed of the approximately 150,000 horses. The animals, which had to work hard every day and thus had an increased energy requirement, were largely dependent on the green fodder they could graze during the night. For this reason, about 10,000 horses were already left behind on the way to Vilnius. By the time of the battle of Smolensk, tens of thousands of horses had already died. Despite the constant forced requisitioning of horses on the way, a large part of the French cavalry had to go on foot on the retreat from Moscow to cover wagons and guns. Nevertheless, after a short time, numerous ammunition wagons and cannons had to be burned or left standing on the retreat due to a lack of draught animals. The same applies to the temporary transport wagons for the sick and wounded.

The logistics of the “Great Army” of 1812 were thus designed for a very short campaign at most. The “revolutionary” system, based on requisitioning, was already inadequate in Poland and Lithuania, given the sparsely populated country. It finally failed when the army crossed the border into (“Old”) Russia on the Dnieper (just before Smolensk) and from there on found almost only abandoned villages and large forests. Since the Grande Armée did not carry tents for the soldiers, they had to bivouac outside even in snowdrifts and freezing frost. The extensive renunciation of a militarily organised troop took its revenge in Russia. As a result, the invaders lost far more people to hunger, disease and desertion than to enemy action.

The armies

Composition and troops of the allies

The Grande Armée did not even consist half of Frenchmen during the campaign against Russia. Even these were, according to today’s understanding, to a considerable extent Italians, Germans, Dutch, Belgians or Croats, because France had annexed large parts of Italy, the Netherlands, the German territories west of the Rhine including the later Belgium and large parts of northern Germany up to Lübeck as well as Dalmatian territories. In addition, from 1796 onwards, the French army included the Polish Vistula Legion and other individual Polish units, an Irish and a Portuguese legion and a North African cavalry troop, as well as several regiments that had been forcibly recruited in Spain in 1807.

Swiss Grenadiers of the Grande Armée

The states of the Confederation of the Rhine brought their entire armed forces with about 120,000 soldiers for the campaign against Russia, including more than 30,000 men from the Kingdom of Bavaria, over 27,000 men from the Kingdom of Westphalia and 20,000 from Saxony. These states had their own corps, commanded by French generals, while the contingents of the smaller Rhine Confederation members were integrated into the French army.

Westphalian troops, 1812

The Poles in the Duchy of Warsaw saw the Russian campaign as an opportunity to restore Poland by reconquering the territories annexed by Russia. In a national tour de force, the duchy provided the third largest share of the Grande Armée after France and the Confederation of the Rhine with 96,000 men. In the first weeks of the war Napoleon established further Polish and Lithuanian units in the conquered territories. Together with those serving in the French army and those serving in the newly formed units of the duchy since the beginning of 1813, around 100,000 Poles fought for Napoleon in the Sixth Coalition War. Troops of the Napoleonic satellite states Kingdom of Italy and Switzerland were also deployed in Russia for Napoleon.

Under political pressure, Austria and Prussia had to commit themselves to providing relief corps for Napoleon. Austria had pledged to provide an army corps of 30,000 men, about a fifth of its armed forces, and Prussia had to provide 20,000 men, almost half of its mobile forces. Unlike the Austrian corps, whose commander, Prince Schwarzenberg, was directly subordinate to Napoleon, the Prussian contingent was incorporated as a division into the corps of the French Marshals MacDonald (10th Army Corps). The combat value of these two corps, which had fought against France some years earlier, was not very high. They lacked the motivation to fight for Napoleon against a former ally. After Prussia had committed itself to providing an auxiliary corps, the Prussian king wrote to the Russian Tsar: “Complain against me, but do not condemn me. Perhaps the time will soon come when we will act in close alliance.” The Russian envoy in Vienna, Count Stakelberg, reported to St. Petersburg that the Austrian corps’ deployment would be limited to what was necessary.

Light Polish lancer

At the same time, Napoleon waged war in Spain, where 250,000 soldiers fought on the French side. After a regiment from Nassau had defected to the enemy there, he regarded some troops of the Rhine Confederation with suspicion. In Braunschweig, there had been clashes between French and Westphalian soldiers in early 1812, in which several Frenchmen were killed or wounded. The situation escalated and there were downright street battles. Two Westphalian soldiers were sentenced and shot. A citizen of the town was beheaded. He had nothing to do with the actual incident, he had killed a French officer before. Instead of in Wolfenbüttel as planned, he was demonstratively beheaded in Braunschweig. Napoleon’s suspicion was not unjustified. Saxony, Bavaria and Prussia had to hand over cavalry to the main army, which weakened the corps in which their main forces were located. Not only militarily, but also logistically, since the cavalry had a much larger radius of action when it came to requisitioning food. The cavalry of all corps, including the guards, had about 95,000 horses. In addition, there were draught horses for the artillery and the convoy. At the time of the invasion of Russia the army had a total of almost 200,000 horses. The quality of the French cavalry horses was often inferior to the Russian ones. During the French Revolution the nobility had been expropriated and the stud farms had been dissolved. Also in the following wars many horses had been killed.

On the strength of the French “Grande Armée

Since there are multiple publication of inventory lists of the Grande Armée, letters and dispatches from Emperor Napoleon and the French headquarters, the structure and strength of the Grande Armée of 1812 has been largely clarified. Since the strength of the units, as can be seen from the weekly inventory lists of the Grand Headquarters, changed practically daily due to departures and new arrivals, the figures in this short summary are rounded off. According to the inventory lists, the field army with which Emperor Napoleon crossed the Russian border on June 24, 1812, was just over 420,000 men. It consisted of the Grand Headquarters, the 1st to 8th and 10th Army Corps, the Cavalry Reserve (with just over 40,000 horsemen) with the 1st to 4th Cavalry Corps and the Imperial Guard (with the strength of an army corps). Together with the Austrian auxiliary corps of 30,000 men and the associated “large parks”, the large army fleets of artillery, train (the supply system) and genius troops (pioneers), with all the associated support troops of over 22,000 men, the army of the first line comprised about 475,000 men and almost 200,000 horses.

Behind this army followed other support and supply troops, which included a siege park (planned for Riga) and other bridge trains. These troops also included the Intendant’s offices, the field justice, the field post offices, the gendarmerie and various craftsmen’s companies, as well as the troops newly recruited in Lithuania (mainly deserters from the Russian army). Together these troops numbered about 35,000 to 40,000 men. The second and third line troops followed in the course of the next few weeks: the 9th and 11th army corps, which – together with replacement troops from the homeland – were about 95,000 to 100,000 men. Their main task was to secure the long supply routes for the front troops and to set up new magazines in the occupied territories and protect them against possible attacks. Together this makes an army of more than 610,000 men. This figure does not include the remaining rear troops and fortress garrisons in northern Germany, Prussia, Danzig and Warsaw (about 70,000 men). Deviating figures, which can be found in the literature, are mostly explained by the fact that in some brief descriptions of the campaign the extensive auxiliary and supply troops are either completely or partially ignored or are merely hinted at in a subordinate clause without further figures.

Until mid-December 1812, several units of the succeeding 11th Army Corps “only” reached East Prussia and the Duchy of Warsaw. Since these troops did not cross the Russian border, they are also not counted in some depictions of the campaign. Apart from the fact that these troops were undoubtedly part of the “Grande Armée”, they took over the cover of the soldiers who had returned via the Beresina in December 1812 and thus, together with the also remaining occupants of the fortresses in Prussia and Warsaw, secured the remains of the defeated army against the advancing Russian army, thus enabling them to regroup and reorganise themselves in a makeshift manner. The fact alone that they temporarily halted the advance of the Russian army from mid-December 1812 onwards, which subsequently dragged them into the maelstrom of destruction, made them participants in the Russian campaign.

The Russian Army

The strength of the Russian army was to be 600,000 men, for which the Tsar paid. In fact, at the beginning of the war, there were only about 420,000 men. This was not unusual for that time, in 1806 Prussia had 250,000 soldiers on paper and only got 120,000 together at the beginning. Due to the size of the Russian Empire, the 420,000 soldiers were spread over a wide area. In many respects the army was still behind other armies, therefore foreign officers were gladly accepted. German, Austrian, Swedish and French officers served in the Russian army. When Alexander I. demanded that Napoleon should dismiss the Poles in his guard, he countered that the Tsar should first dismiss the many French in his army. As Napoleon’s only serious opponent, Russia was a melting pot for many of his opponents. General Langeron, a Frenchman, had been fighting in the Russian army for years. The high percentage of foreign officers was not appreciated by everyone, because they were often better paid and hired at a higher rank.

The common soldiers were Russians and men from the Russian occupied territories. In terms of communication, the Russian army therefore had an advantage over the Grande Armée, where many different languages were spoken and there were conflicts between the various nationalities. In the hope of defectors, the Russian-German Legion was formed. 10,000 copies of an appeal to join the Legion were smuggled into Germany and into the German troops. This did not bring the desired success. Since Prussia was occupied by France, the Prussians were considered one of the morally weakest points of the Grande Armée. Therefore, former Prussian officers in Russian service tried to persuade the soldiers directly at the front to defect; Lieutenant Colonel Tiedemann was shot in the process. As early as July 1812, 30 men of the Dutch Second Guard Uhlanian Regiment joined the Legion. Later, 50 Prussian infantrymen and 40 hussars who had been captured in the Riga area followed. On August 22, after the battle at Dahlenkirchen, a Prussian hunter battalion defected almost completely. All in all, the legion was meaningless in 1812 and was not deployed until 1813.

The Russian army is often associated with two things – the planned retreat strategy and the tactics of scorched earth. There was neither one nor the other. The retreat was born out of necessity. According to Carl von Clausewitz, “this is how the war has made itself”. There were indeed corresponding considerations and proposals, but Clausewitz denied that it was planned in this form.

At the beginning of the war, the Russian army was spread over a wide front and too weak against the Grande Armée. As far as scorched earth tactics are concerned, there are no reports of major fires until Smolensk, and Smolensk was set ablaze mainly by the battle itself. Vilnius, Minsk and Vitebsk fell into the hands of the French largely unscathed, as did many other places. The Russian army burned its own supplies, which it could not take with it. It did not burn the supplies of the civilian population or their houses. This only happened after Napoleon left Smolensk, and here it cannot be ruled out that some fires were caused by the French army. There are reports of soldiers looting houses, which in this case must still have been intact. The reports of burnt villages are often from soldiers in the French rearguard, who blamed the Russians. Just before Moscow, the town of Moschaisk fell almost undamaged into the hands of the French army, which set up its military hospital and garrison there. Wounded Russian soldiers who were in the houses were thrown out into the streets.

The advance of the French Army

The invasion of Russia by the Grande Armée

On the night of 24 June 1812, Emperor Napoleon ordered the construction of three ship bridges near Kowno (Kaunas) and the crossing of his Grande Armée over the Nemen. At the same time he crossed the border and launched an attack on Russia. In the following days until June 30th, an army of about 475,000 men (including the Austrian Hilfskorps and the “Great Parks”; see above on the strength of the French “Grande Armée”) followed. The Emperor expected a quick victory, his strategic goal was to put the main Russian forces into battle and to defeat them as early as possible, so his troops followed the Russian forces in rapid marches. This pursuit had disastrous consequences:

Immediately after the invasion, thunderstorms began for days, turning the country into swamp and mire. While trying to cross the swollen Wilia, most of the soldiers of a Polish cavalry squadron drowned. The army moved further and further away from their supply vehicles, which got stuck in the mud. The Saxon general Ferdinand von Funck reported that bread was being towed for four to five days on more than 1200 farm wagons. Nevertheless, the soldiers were starving because the bread did not reach them. Every soldier had an emergency ration of rusk with him, but it was strictly forbidden to attack them. The sparsely populated country could not feed the great mass of the army, and besides, the Russian army had already supplied itself from the country. Due to unclean water, drawn from rivers and swamps, many soldiers fell ill with dysentery. The brandy, with which the water was usually made edible, had run out. Ferdinand von Funck wrote: “The Ruhr literally raged among the regiments and when we stopped on the way, the side to which the people were to go to satisfy natural needs had to be determined according to the wind, because the air was polluted almost within a few minutes. Thousands of soldiers died in the first few weeks from disease or debilitation, many deserted and some soldiers took their own lives in desperation. Deserters, recaptured, were mostly shot. Others roamed the country in small or large gangs and terrorized the population. The losses of horses were enormous, more than 20,000 died in the first days alone, and the feed situation for the huge number of horses was dramatic. They fed the straw from the roofs of the houses, if they had not burned down yet. Hay and oats were rare, unripe grain led to diseases and the constant advance did not provide sufficient rest for the horses.

Through letters from the soldiers, these conditions became known very quickly in Germany, which led to disturbances. As early as August 2, King Frederick of Württemberg therefore banned his soldiers who were in Russia from spreading bad news in their homeland: “Allerhöchstdieselben therefore want to have every distant written statement of this kind banned in the most serious manner, with the serious addition that if such things should again be allowed, the authors should be punished with the most severe penalties”.

Tsar Alexander I had already been in the Russian army since the end of April and was in command. Militarily he had little experience and relied on his advisors, such as the Prussian general Karl Ludwig von Phull. The 1st Russian Western Army under Barclay de Tolly was far inferior in numbers to the French, it consisted of about 118,000 men. It was more than three times as strong as the French. More than 150 km south was the 2nd Western Army under Bagration with 35,000 men. The reserve army of Alexander Tormassow with 30-35.000 men was located even further south and could not intervene in the fight against Napoleon’s main army for the time being. East of it were the huge Pripyet swamps, which made a retreat in this direction impossible. Only the Austrian relief corps in the area of Brest-Litowsk was facing it. Napoleon reinforced it with the 7th Corps, which consisted of Saxon troops. The army of Tschitschagow, which returned from the war against the Ottoman Empire, was still far away, as well as reinforcements from Finland under General Steinheil. Barclay de Tolly and Bagration had to retreat. The first battle between Russian and French troops took place at Deweltowo on 28 June. During a heavy thunderstorm Napoleon entered Vilnius in the afternoon of the same day. One week later, on July 5th, the first artillery duel took place at the Duna, three days later Marshal Davout occupied Minsk.

General von Phull’s retreat was not fast enough, several times he sent Lieutenant Colonel Clausewitz to Barclay de Tolly to get him to retreat faster. He feared that Napoleon would be in Drissa before the Russian army. There, Russia had already begun months earlier to expand its positions and the army wanted to line up for battle, according to Phull’s plan. At the same time Bagration was to take the offensive at the back of Napoleon’s army. When the army arrived in Drissa, the prepared terrain proved to be unsuitable. It was located directly on the dune, which was not very deep at this point. Parts of the French army could have fallen behind the Russian army after a bypass. There were no bridges, so in case of a retreat the cannons would have had to be left behind. A defeat would have resulted in the destruction of the army and thus the defeat of Russia. On July 10, the vanguard of the 4th French Cavalry Corps Latour-Maubourg, under the Polish General Rosnietzky, was ambushed near Mir and was beaten by Cossacks under General Platow. On July 14, the Russian army left Drissa. On the same day there was another battle between Cossacks and Polish cavalry under Rosnietzky at Romanovo.

After the rains of the first days a heat wave had started, which caused problems for both sides. Clausewitz reported that he had never in his life suffered so much from thirst. On the French side, the supply situation was still catastrophic, dust and heat gave the soldiers additional trouble. The losses of the army increased, already in the first two weeks it had lost 135,000 men without any major combat operations. Thousands of horse carcasses lay along the marching paths. Medical care did not work because the ambulance vehicles were left behind. There was a lack of vinegar, which was used for disinfection, as well as of medicines and bandages. As Larrey reported, shirts, later paper, canvas or hay were used to bandage the wounded. There was no substitute for the medicines, nor for the vinegar.

Barclay de Tolly takes command

After the army arrived in Polotsk on 18 July, the Tsar handed over command to Barclay de Tolly and travelled via Moscow to St Petersburg. In a manifesto of the same day, the Tsar called on the Russian nobility to provide soldiers and declared that a commander-in-chief for the army would be appointed later. Barclay de Tolly left 25,000 men under General Wittgenstein in Polotsk to secure the way to St. Petersburg, the 2nd and 6th corps of Napoleon’s army marched towards Polotsk. Barclay de Tolly moved on with his army to Vitebsk, where he wanted to unite with the 2nd West Army. Napoleon tried to prevent the union of the two armies. On July 23rd, General Nikolaï Raïevski, ordered by Bagration with his corps to Mogiljow, was able to hold up the troops of Marshal Davout in battle for only one day and had to retreat. As a result, a march northwards to Vitebsk was no longer possible. Bagration had to move towards Smolensk. In the meantime Barclay de Tolly had reached Vitebsk and sent the corps of General Ostermann to Ostrowno for protection. After three days of fighting Ostermann was defeated on July 27. On the same day there was a Russian success, more than 2,100 Saxons under General Klengel capitulated to units of Tormassow’s army after the Battle of Kobrin.

In order to still unite the two armies, Barclay de Tolly also had to move towards Smolensk and left Vitebsk. Napoleon reached Vitebsk on July 28 and stopped the advance of his army. He announced that he would spend the winter here and the war would continue the following year. Due to the catastrophic supply situation this was hardly possible. The Russian supply camps were destroyed, the own supply camps in Prussia and Poland were far away. The distance from the newly built depot in Wilna to Witebsk was more than 300 kilometres. Napoleon had overstretched his supply line. Due to the poor road conditions, an adequate supply was not guaranteed in winter and the following snowmelt. He had two alternatives: retreating the entire army to a realistic supply line or continuing his march to more fertile areas between Smolensk and Moscow.

Davout and Bagration, however, moved along parallel routes towards Smolensk. Wittgenstein defeated French troops near Klyastitsy on 31 July. In the ensuing pursuit, Russian General Kulnev was mortally wounded the following day. Barclay de Tolly reached Smolensk on August 2nd, Bagration two days later. A few days later the fighting for Polotsk began between the Wittgenstein corps and the two French corps.

With regard to Bagration, the Tsar had not established clear conditions. Bagration was the senior general and was not explicitly subordinated to Barclay de Tolly. Since he was also the Minister of War, he took over the command. Bagration did not agree with the warfare of Barclay de Tolly, he was especially supported by General Jermolow, chief of the general staff of Barclay de Tolly. In several letters to Jermolow and General Arakchev, Bagration had been complaining for weeks about Barclay de Tolly’s retreat tactics. For many Russians he was a German as a Livonian. In fact he preferred to speak German and only poorly Russian, so he liked to surround himself with German officers. When he appointed Clausewitz to the General Staff without consulting Jermolow, there was a dispute between Jermolow and Colonel Wolzogen, who had mediated this. Before that, Barclay de Tolly had already, under similar circumstances, hired Leopold von Lützow. Eugen von Württemberg and the Russian colonel Toll also supported Bagration and wanted him to take over the supreme command. General Bennigsen himself had ambitions for the supreme command and also advocated a replacement of Barclay de Tolly. These intrigues and the fear of the Russian nobility for their possessions led to the appointment of Kutuzov as commander-in-chief.

On August 7, the two Russian armies advanced from Smolensk towards Rudnia. The following day at Inkovo there was a skirmish between cavalry units of General Sebastiani and Cossacks under Platov, Sebastiani withdrew. Sebastiani’s documents fell into the hands of the Russian army. Wolzogen, who evaluated them, found a letter in which Marshal Murat had warned Sebastiani of an attack. According to Wolzogen, the text read as follows:

“I have just learned that the Russians are planning a violent reconnaissance in the direction of Rudnia; be on your guard and retreat as far as the infantry that is assigned to support you…”

Barclay de Tolly also confirmed that the Russian plan had been betrayed. Among others, Woldemar von Löwenstern, on the staff of Barclay de Tolly, came under suspicion. He wrote in his “Denkwürdigkeiten eines Livländers” that he was sent to Moscow as a courier and unsuspectingly delivered a letter ordering him to be arrested. Three other officers of Polish origin and Prince Lubomirsky had suffered the same fate. Lieutenant Colonel Count de Lezair, a Frenchman by birth and adjutant of Bagration, arrived in Moscow shortly afterwards and unsuspectingly delivered his own arrest warrant. Löwenstern was released soon afterwards, Lezair only in 1815, and as Wolzogen later wrote, Lubomirsky, an adjutant of the Czar, was the guilty party. He had overheard the conversation of some generals in Smolensk by chance and had warned his mother in a letter, who was at her castle in Ljadui in the intended battle area. In this castle Murat had his headquarters, which Lubomirsky of course did not know. After the defeat of Inkovo, Napoleon set his troops in motion again and left Vitebsk. His army gathered in the Smolensk area, Barclay de Tolly and Bagration had to retreat. The Russian rearguard under General Neverovsky became involved in a battle with the 3rd Corps of the French army at Krasnoi on 15 August, in which it suffered considerable losses and lost nine cannons. It was Napoleon’s 43rd birthday, and in the evening the captured cannons were presented to him.

The fortifications of Smolensk were in poor condition and could not be maintained for long. Barclay de Tolly therefore only wanted to defend the town with part of his troops, while the army of Bagration was to retreat eastwards to Dorogobush. The rest of the 1st Army of the West should take over the flank protection. The defense of the city was only to secure the retreat of the two armies. On August 17th, the Battle of Smolensk took place. Napoleon’s main army had only 175,000 men before the battle. All in all he had already lost more than a third of his army, mainly through disease, debilitation and desertion. The Russian army had also suffered losses through desertion on the way to Smolensk, mainly soldiers from the Russian-occupied Polish territories. In addition, there were losses due to disease, from which the Russian army was not spared. After two days of fighting, the Russian army withdrew from Smolensk, and Wittgenstein also had to withdraw in Polotsk. The commander of the Bavarians, General Deroy, was mortally wounded in the battles for Polotsk, as was General Justus Siebein. Marshal Oudinot was wounded, as were the Bavarian generals Karl von Vincenti and Clemens von Raglovich.

On the retreat, Barclay de Tolly managed to repel French troops on August 19 near Walutino. General Junot’s corps did not intervene in the fighting, thus preventing a possible French victory. The French General Gudin was mortally wounded and the Russian General Tutschkow was seriously wounded and captured.

Kutuzov as commander-in-chief

After the Battle of Smolensk, 67-year-old Kutuzov replaced Barclay de Tolly, who was later accused of the destruction of Smolensk. In fact, the town had been set on fire by artillery fire, and soldiers from both sides had set fires during the fighting to secure their retreat or prevent the enemy’s advance. Barclay de Tolly had given the order to burn the warehouses. Since the city was largely made up of wooden houses, these fires had devastating consequences. On August 20, the Tsar appointed Kutuzov as commander-in-chief. The decision in favour of Kutuzov had been made three days earlier, a committee of six generals convened by the Tsar had made this proposal. The Czar had delayed the appointment of Kutuzov because he did not like him. As a native Russian and experienced general, Kutuzov had the support of the Russian population and nobility.

Barclay de Tolly had reached Zarjowo-Saimishche with his troops on August 29th and had started to build up positions for a battle there. On the same day Kutuzov joined the army and ordered to accelerate the expansion of the positions. In the afternoon of the next day he gave the order to retreat. On August 31st the army reached Gchatsk (today Gagarin) and started again with the construction of fortifications. This time General Bennigsen, meanwhile General Chief of Staff of Kutuzov, did not like the position, and again Kutuzov ordered the retreat. According to Barclay de Tolly, the only reason the two positions were not chosen for battle was because he had chosen them. This would have diminished Kutuzov’s success in case of victory. On the further course of events, he wrote to the Tsar: “The two armies, like the Children of Israel in the Arabian Desert, moved from place to place, without rule nor order, until at last fate led them to the position of Borodino.”

Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Church had called for resistance against the “Antichrist” Napoleon. He would desecrate the churches, kidnap women and children, and even the serfs would lead a worse life under Napoleon than under the Russian nobility, the priests declared. The Russian people had a strong faith, and the call did not fail to have an effect, the resistance of the civilian population increased. Some peasants had already fought against plundering before, but then it was a question of their own property and the protection of their families, now it was also a question of faith and the fatherland. Accordingly Kutuzov formulated his order of the day before the battle of Borodino: “In trust in God we will either win or die. Napoleon is his enemy. He will desecrate his churches. Think of your wives and children who count on your protection. Think of your emperor who is with you. Before the sun sets tomorrow, you will have written on this field with the blood of the enemy the testimony of your faith and love for your country.”

On September 7th, the battle of Borodino was fought. The Grande Armée lost less than 30,000 men. The Russian army lost more than 50,000 men. The battle was led on the Russian side by Bagration and Barclay de Tolly, who both intervened at the head of their troops. Bagration was shot in the lower leg and died 17 days later. Kutuzov had his headquarters at Gorky, from where he could hardly follow the fighting. When he learned of the defeat he threw a tantrum and refused to believe it. Afterwards he announced a Russian victory, and even today it is often claimed that it was at least a draw. The facts speak against it. Kutuzov had to retreat and reached Moscow with only about 70,000 operational soldiers from previously 128,000. Napoleon reached Moscow with about 100,000 soldiers from previously less than 130,000. Compared to the original strength he had already lost more than two thirds of his main army at this point, in addition to the high loss of horses, which was to have dramatic consequences later on. In the Battle of Borodino, a large part of Napoleon’s remaining cavalry was destroyed. Due to a lack of horses, cavalry units were formed on foot.

In the battle Württemberger, Saxons, Bavarians and Westphalians suffered heavy losses. The Westphalian losses alone amounted to about 3,000 men, the Westphalian generals Tharreau, Damas and von Lepel were killed, the generals Hammerstein and von Borstel were wounded. The Wuerttemberg generals von Breuning, von Scheeler and the Bavarian General Dommanget were wounded.

The occupation of Moscow

Since Kutuzov had announced a victory at Borodino, Moscow initially saw no reason to leave the city. The decision to clear the city was not taken until the afternoon of September 13. When Marshal Murat wanted to enter Moscow on September 14, the city had not yet been completely cleared, and many Moscow citizens and soldiers of the Russian army were still in the city. After negotiations, Murat agreed to wait a few hours. In the afternoon he marched into Moscow. The Russian army had to leave almost 10,000 wounded or sick soldiers behind. Several thousand Russian stragglers were captured, some of whom had preferred to take part in the plundering of Moscow, losing their connection to the army. Moscow merchants had ordered them to loot, because they did not want their goods to fall into French hands. Heinrich von Brandt, an officer in the Vistula Legion, reported that entire wagon trains with flour, groats, meat and schnapps were found when they invaded. On the same day, the victory of Borodino was proclaimed in Saint Petersburg. For days the victory was celebrated, Kutuzov was appointed marshal and prince.

On the evening of September 14th, the first fires, possibly caused by drunken French soldiers through careless handling of fire, occurred in Moscow. These fires were largely under control the next morning. The following night, new fires broke out in many places in Moscow. A storm on 16 September caused the fire to spread rapidly. 75% of the city, two-thirds of which consisted of wooden houses, was destroyed. Many people died in the flames, including wounded or sick Russian soldiers. Looting by the French army had been officially banned, but in the face of the fire, anything of value that could be moved was removed from the houses. In a letter to the Tsar on September 20, Napoleon blamed the governor of Moscow, Count Rostopchin, for the fires. According to him, 400 arsonists had been caught in the act. They had named Rostopchin as their employer and were shot. The city’s fire extinguishers had been removed from the city or destroyed on Rostopchin’s orders. After the fire 11,959 dead and 12,456 horse carcasses were counted. Out of 9,158 houses, 6,532 were destroyed, 127 of the 290 churches were affected.

John Quincy Adams wrote that the first rumours that Moscow was occupied were circulating in St Petersburg on 21 September. But he also mentioned that there were other rumours: the French army had been defeated and Napoleon mortally wounded. Official silence was maintained. It was not until 27 September that it was announced that Moscow had to be evacuated. According to Adams, presented as an event of no importance, it was irrelevant to the outcome of the war.

No real decisive importance can be attributed to the fire in Moscow, as nevertheless significant amounts of material could still be found to supply at least the infantry. The status of the French army increased further during the stay due to the arrival of stragglers. Nevertheless, enormous lack of discipline in the form of uncontrolled looting and requisitioning had a negative effect on the supply situation. Found stocks of spirits led to devastating excesses of the French soldiers. Napoleon himself resided in the Kremlin, which had remained unharmed. The majority of the army was, less comfortably, accommodated outside the city. Napoleon waited in vain for the Czar to offer him negotiations. Several times he sent negotiators to Kutuzov to offer negotiations. The Czar was not willing to negotiate and on October 4 he forbade Kutuzov to conduct further talks. Alexander I was annoyed; he had already informed Kutuzov in August, before his departure for the army, that all talks and negotiations with the enemy that could lead to peace were to be avoided. His letter was a clear rebuke to Kutuzov: “Now, after what has happened, I must repeat with the same firmness that I wish to see this principle, which I have adopted, observed by you in its greatest extension and in the strictest and most unbending manner. With the exception of a few outpost skirmishes, there was a kind of tacit ceasefire until this ban was imposed, because Napoleon initially waited for offers to negotiate and, when these failed to materialise, he himself offered to negotiate. The Russian army was able to take advantage of this and brought in reinforcements. Twice Napoleon had sent General Lauriston to Kutuzov as a negotiator. When Lauriston returned on October 13 without result, Napoleon decided to withdraw.

In the meantime, Great Britain had participated in the war with considerable funds and arms deliveries to Russia. The only soldier to take part in the campaign was initially the British General Sir Robert Wilson. Later his adjutant, Captain Dawson Damer, followed. In Saint Petersburg there were certainly demands for peace, even from the mother of the Tsar and his brother, the Grand Duke Constantine. Freiherr vom Stein, an advisor to the Tsar, wrote that many in the Tsar’s entourage wanted peace, including General Arakcheyev. On the other hand, there were many nobles who would not have supported a peace treaty.

Napoleon’s retreat

In early October Barclay de Tolly left the army after further intrigues against him; Tormassow took command of the 1st Western Army. On 17 October Wittgenstein, who had received reinforcements from Finland, attacked the French troops at Klyastizy and one day later Polotsk. The Russian plan was for Wittgenstein to repel the French in the north and later unite with the Russian southern army under Chitschagow. This would block the retreat route for Napoleon’s main army. The 2nd and 6th corps of the Grande Armée had to retreat from Polotsk. On 18 October Murat was defeated by Russian troops at the battle of Tarutino, one day later Napoleon left Moscow. Despite the lack of horses, a large number of carts were used to transport the booty from Moscow. Especially high officers had supplied themselves with paintings, wine, furs and other valuable objects from the palaces in Moscow (Napoleon had the cross on the bell tower of Ivan the Great removed to take it to Paris). Many wounded and sick people, however, had to walk, a large number were simply left behind in Moscow. Many inhabitants, including French, followed the army because they were afraid of reprisals when the Russians returned. Moscow was a European metropolis where many foreigners lived and where there was a French theatre.

A French officer described the withdrawal:

“Behind a miserable artillery and an even more miserable cavalry, a disorderly, bizarre crowd was moving along, reminiscent of long-forgotten images – the terrible hordes of Mongolians who had carried belongings and booty. A large convoy of carriages and wagons moved; there were long columns loaded with so-called trophies; bearded Russian men marched on, breathing heavily under the weight of the collected booty; there other prisoners, together with the soldiers, drove whole herds of emaciated cows and sheep; there thousands of women, wounded soldiers, officer’s lads, servants and all sorts of riffraff, rode on the wagons, loaded with all kinds of treasures.”

As rearguard, the Young Guards under Marshal Mortier remained in the city until October 23. Cossacks invaded the city, the Russian General Wintzingerode was captured. Because he was born in Hessen, he was for Napoleon a member of a Rhine federation state and therefore a traitor, why he demanded his execution. Weeks later Wintzingerode could be freed from Cossacks. With the departure of the Young Guard parts of the Kremlin were set on fire or blown up. One had found there large quantities of weapons, ammunition and powder. A strong rain prevented a larger disaster, the Kremlin remained largely intact.

When Moscow was again occupied by the Russians, there were massacres of stragglers, wounded or sick French soldiers by Cossacks, inhabitants of Moscow and armed farmers. In their eyes, the French were responsible for the fire and, moreover, they were the devil’s helpers (the Russian Church had declared Napoleon to be the Antichrist and thus the devil). Collaborators or people who were considered to be collaborators were also killed. Revenge also played a role, as riots and atrocities had previously been committed by French soldiers.

The French army, after leaving Moscow, moved southwest. The Russian General Dochturov defended Maloyaroslavets against the corps of Eugène de Beauharnais on 24 October, but had to withdraw in the afternoon. In the course of the day, the town had changed hands several times. Kutuzov avoided a decisive battle and ordered the retreat towards Kaluga. Napoleon did not want to accept a persecution of Kutuzov and withdrew on October 26. His return march took place on the looted route to Smolensk, where there was not enough food either for men or horses.

In the meantime General Bennigsen had also left the army, after there had been intrigues against him and differences with Kutuzov. This got rid of this one troublesome competitor. Bennigsen was not entirely innocent; in letters to the Tsar he had belittled Kutuzov. Among other things he tried to denounce him by saying that a woman disguised as a man would serve on Kutuzov’s staff. This was probably Nadezhda Andreyevna Durova, who confirmed in her autobiography that she had been on Kutuzov’s staff for a short time. Her presence in the army was known to the Tsar and in this respect Bennigsen had thus placed himself on the sidelines.

The hesitant and timid Kutuzov was not an equal opponent for Napoleon. On November 3rd there was the Battle of Vyazma. Russian troops under General Miloradovich initially faced a superiority of the French. In the course of the morning the division of Eugen von Württemberg joined them. Kutuzov, in the morning with most of the army only a few kilometers from the battlefield, did not intervene. His troops camped near Binkovo. Only in the afternoon did he send 3,000 men of cavalry to support them. They reached the battlefield only shortly before nightfall.

Napoleon reached Smolensk on November 9th, was able to gather his troops there, and did not leave the city until five days later. For the return march Napoleon had planned the route via Minsk. It was shorter, and in the French-occupied city one million daily rations for his soldiers were stored. Also in Krasnoi Kutuzov could not stop Napoleon despite his strong superiority. Later he allowed the two French corps from Polotsk to unite with Napoleon’s main army, which made the crossing over the Berezina possible.

Transition over the Beresina

With three Russian armies, Kutuzov did not succeed in preventing the passage of 28,000 soldiers of the Grande Armée across the Berezina, although Russian troops were present on both banks. The partly separately operating armies of Chichagov and Wittgenstein, each with about 30,000 men, were not strong enough against only 50,000 poorly supplied soldiers of the Grande Armée. Chichagov, who had previously taken Minsk and thus frustrated Napoleon’s plan, was distracted by a feigned crossing elsewhere. Wittgenstein was able to capture the stragglers on the eastern bank of the Berezina and was distinguished by the fact that a French division under General Partouneaux had to capitulate to his troops. It had lost touch with its army. Kutuzov himself was far behind with more than 50,000 men and had not taken part in the battle on the Berezina. This meant that a political solution was missed after Napoleon had capitulated or been captured. Chichagov was retired for his alleged failure. At Kutuzov, the tsar limited himself to accusations because Napoleon had escaped.

The end of the campaign

In France, an attempted coup d’état under General Malet had taken place at the end of October. Malet had announced that Napoleon was dead. Napoleon left the army on 5 December 1812, although he had already learned of the attempted coup at Smolensk in early November, and travelled to Paris. An earlier departure was too risky, as he was still in Russian-controlled territory. He handed over the command to Murat. More important than Malet’s coup attempt was the fact that Napoleon had to build up a new army.

Vilnius

The Napoleonic troops suffered particularly heavy losses on the retreat to Vilnius, where from 7 to 9 December 1812 soldiers froze to death in the open, unprovided for at temperatures as low as -39 degrees Celsius, and stragglers were killed by pursuing Cossacks. Leaving behind the sick, wounded and exhausted, the French army left Vilnius on 10 December. When the Cossacks moved in, there was a massacre in which the civilian population took part. “About 20,000 wounded, sick and exhausted were left in Vilnius. With them, the enemy got hold of enormous supplies.”

Wurttemberg’s Lieutenant Karl Kurz wrote about the fate of the soldiers left behind in Vilnius: “Halls and rooms … were full of dead and dying people who, in a rage of hunger, gnawed at their dead comrades. … The misery of the poor prisoners was indescribable in the days of December 11-15, when the weapons of the enemy, maltreatment of all kinds, cold and hunger destroyed more than 1,000 officers and 12,000 commoners of all nations. The massacre ended only when the regular Russian army arrived – the Cossacks were not in the regular army.

Those left behind in Vilnius after the withdrawal of the troops on December 10 were given a false accommodation by parts of the population, then robbed, tortured and cast out. In the hospitals the living lay next to the dead. In the first 6 to 8 days the hospitals remained unsupplied. After that the dead were thrown out of the windows or dragged down the stairs by their legs. In April 1813 the surviving officers and soldiers were “taken away to the interior of Russia”.

On 21 December the Tsar arrived in Vilnius and again took command of the army. “The old guy should be satisfied. The cold weather has done him a great service,” he said about Kutuzov. Whether Napoleon would have given himself up as a prisoner is questionable. Larrey had supplied him with a capsule of poison, which he took in April 1814, after his abdication. The poison had lost its lethal effect and only caused severe stomach pains.

The disintegration of the Grande Armée

On 14 December, remnants of the Grande Armée crossed the frozen Nyemen and reached Poland. Murat wrote to Napoleon: “I report 4,300 French and 850 auxiliary troops to the Emperor as soldiers ready for action”. Later a handful of stragglers followed. The 10th Corps, which included the Prussian Auxiliary Corps, was still in Russia and marched towards Prussia. The Grandjean Division of the Corps reached Prussia with 6,000 men, mostly Poles, Bavarians and Westphalians. The Prussian corps still had 15,000 soldiers from the previous 20,000 men. By the convention of Tauroggen on December 30th it became neutral and did not intervene in the fighting any more. The Austrian Corps stopped fighting on January 5th. It originally consisted of 33,000 men and at the end of the campaign it still counted 20,000 men, to which were added remnants of the 7th Corps. 100,000 soldiers of Napoleon’s army had been captured, many of them died of their wounds, diseases or froze to death on the march into captivity, those who remained behind were mostly killed. The same fate was suffered by Russian soldiers who had fallen into French captivity. The surviving prisoners were released by Russia until 1814. As soon as their home country joined the fight against Napoleon, they were released. According to Holzhausen, 2,000 to 3,000 of the German prisoners returned. Some of them stayed in Russia, such as Heinrich von Roos, a regimental doctor from Württemberg. He was captured at the Beresina and later practiced in Saint Petersburg.

In the lists of the Hanoverian lieutenant Heinrich Meyer there are names of other soldiers who stayed in Russia. Meyer was sent to Russia by the Prussian government to clarify the fate of missing soldiers. It was mainly about soldiers from the areas that fell to Prussia after the war. The reason was legal. It was about inheritances, remarriage wishes of wives of missing soldiers and the like. In cooperation with Russian authorities, Meyer was able to determine the fate of about 6,000 soldiers, most of whom had died. Quite a few had joined the Russian army. This obviously does not refer to the Russian-German Legion, as Meyer distinguishes between them in his records. German soldiers who joined the Russian army were entitled to a piece of land in Russia after the war.

The Grande Armée was accompanied by tens of thousands of civilians, including craftsmen, administrative officials and scribes. Those who could afford it had servants or cooks with them. It was not unusual for wives and children to accompany the army. Even soldiers of fortune and criminals followed it in order to enrich themselves from the war. Most of these also perished. In the spring of 1813, along the retreat route of the Grande Armée, more than 240,000 dead were burnt or buried in mass graves, including the dead of Borodino, who were left behind after the battle. 130,000 horse carcasses were burned or buried.

The influence of “General Winter” on the French defeat

Winter is often blamed for Napoleon’s defeat, but the Russian soldiers fought under the same weather conditions, but were more familiar with winter hardnesses than the French. The snowfalls began on 6 November. An analysis of the French officer losses mentioned at Martinien for that month shows that almost 90% are due to combat operations, both in terms of time and geography. For a few days it got a little warmer, so the Beresina was not frozen.

The lowest temperatures reached the winter only after the transition. Before that, Napoleon’s army was repeatedly involved in battles. They had too few horses and had to burn many of their carts, cannons were rendered useless and left behind. Even the pontoons that had been carried to build bridges were burned a few days before the army reached the Beresina.

In fact, Napoleon was as unprepared for a winter war as the German Wehrmacht was 129 years later off Moscow. There was a lack of warm clothing, and the horses were shod wrong for these temperatures. This often led to accidents with the carriages. Only the Polish and Prussian cavalry had shod their horses sharply and were thus prepared for the winter conditions.

The Arrière-Garde (rearguard) suffered heavy losses during the retreat to Vilnius due to the rearguard action, the loss of rations and on December 6, 1812 due to the extreme cold of “some 20 degrees”. The cold had risen “to the highest” on 7 December. Many people died in the bivouac at Oszmiana during the night from 6 to 7 December. The remnants of the troops were hardly usable as Arrière guards and arrived at the gates of Vilnius on the evening of 8 December.

A major problem was the hygienic conditions. Most of the soldiers had lice, from which diseases like typhus or Wolhynia fever were transmitted. If someone collapsed exhausted, his clothes were taken over and with them the lice. Epidemics had already broken out in Russia in the summer, which were spread throughout the country by the marching troops and the fleeing population. The armies later dragged these diseases to Poland and Germany. Thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians on both sides died of diseases. A census in Russia in 1816 showed a population decrease of one million people.

Prisoners

Only a few prisoners have survived on both sides. Russian soldiers who fell into French captivity hardly got anything to eat, especially on the retreat, as the guards themselves did not have enough to live on. Now and then the prisoners received parts of horse carcasses. Those who were so physically weakened that they were left behind along the way were killed. With the exception of the officers, wounded Russians were usually not cared for, because one was already hopelessly overtaxed with the care of one’s own wounded. They were looted – desired were filled bread bags, alcohol, money and valuables – and simply left lying around. In most cases this was their death sentence. According to Baumbach, eleven days after the Battle of Borodino, living Russian wounded were found, suffering great hunger and need.

French soldiers who were captured by the Russians did not have it much better. Many were looted by Cossacks, often including their clothes, shoes or boots, and had to march barefoot and almost naked in the freezing cold. Only a few survived; those who remained lying down were killed. The tsar was forced to offer a reward for every prisoner who was delivered alive. The Cossacks were mostly used for reconnaissance and for surprise raids. By the regular Russian army the prisoners were mostly treated properly against the circumstances. Löwenstern reported about French stragglers who saw the fire of his soldiers and joined them. Russians and Frenchmen sat together around the fire and the next morning the Russian soldiers moved on. Prisoners would only have hindered them. But Löwenstern also reported a massacre by the civilian population. When he and his soldiers entered a village and the inhabitants recognized their Russian uniforms, they attacked unarmed French stragglers. There are a number of reports of torture and murder of French prisoners by the Russian civilian population.

Most soldiers of the Grande Armée who were captured in Russia died of disease. Ordinary soldiers, often malnourished, sometimes wounded and without adequate medical care, had little chance of survival in case of illness. The Bavarian sergeant Josef Schraefel survived captivity, although he became ill. He reported that the dead were piled up in the woods during the winter. His wife Walburga, who had accompanied the army as a sutler and remained with him after his capture, died in Russia.

Victims

By December 1812 there are said to have been 81,000 returnees, but hardly 1,500 Frenchmen were still able to fight.

It is not possible to determine the amount of the losses clearly, as there are many contradictory figures. For western historians, the war ended in mid-December with the crossing of Nyemen. In Russia, the Patriotic War has a different timeframe and was only ended later. As a result, the number of troops, the number of losses, the number of prisoners and the number of survivors differ. Troops that did not intervene in the fighting until 1813 and have never been in Russia itself are counted. On the other hand, often only those units were considered as returnees that were still in possession of weapons and were fit for combat. The Prussian military scientist Clausewitz wrote immediately after the war that of 610,000 soldiers of the Grande Armée only 23,000 reached the western bank of the Vistula. According to the Soviet historian Yevgeny Viktorovich Tarle, about 30,000 men returned via Nyemen. Other historians of the GDR’s Military Publishing House, later assumed a total of 81,000 returnees and scattered people, who dragged themselves across the border again by December 1812.

Many documents were lost during the war or later, which is why the extent of the losses will only be illustrated by means of a few examples. Of the 9,000 Swiss, 300 men from the Beresina crossed the border after the crossing, a large proportion of them were wounded. This was followed by the lowest temperatures of the winter of 1812, and only some of these soldiers survived. Meyer’s Konversationslexikon, however, put the losses of the 16,000-strong Swiss relief corps at the end of the 19th century at 6,000 men. Henry Vallotton wrote that only 300 of 12,000 Swiss survived the campaign. Later research, however, showed that fewer Swiss soldiers were in Russia. In today’s literature, the strength of the relief corps is sometimes only given as 7,000 men.

Out of 30,000 men of the Bavarian VI Corps, 68 soldiers were still able to fight on 13 December. Of more than 27,000 Westphalians only 800 returned. Of 15,800 Württembergers there were still 387 men after the retreat. The Baden division, initially about 7,000 men, still consisted of 40 combat-capable soldiers and 100 sick soldiers on December 30. The Saxon Cavalry Brigade Thielmann was almost completely destroyed near Borodino, 55 men returned. Of 2,000 Mecklenburgers, 59 returned. Only the two relief corps from Austria and Prussia, which never penetrated far into Russian territory and therefore had shorter supply and retreat routes, showed lower loss figures.

After the retreat, the Bavarians received reinforcements of 4,200 men by 29 December. These troops did not march out of Bavaria until October and are an example of how the figures can be interpreted differently in relation to the Patriotic War.

On 26 June 1813 the Austrian Chancellor Metternich had a meeting with Napoleon, which he recorded. Among other things, he wrote: “Napoleon was calm and said to me in a calm tone the following words […]: The French cannot complain about me; to spare them, I sacrificed the Poles and the Germans. I lost 300,000 men in the campaign in Moscow; there were not even 30,000 French among them. You forget, sire, I exclaimed, “You are speaking to a German.”

The number of prisoners in the western Russian governorates on February 28, 1813, according to the Russian War Ministry, was 11,754 men, including 4,508 French, 1,845 Polish, 1,834 Spanish, 1,805 German, 659 Italian, 617 Austrian and 218 Swiss. Tarlé, on the other hand, assumed that there were up to 100,000 Frenchmen who were in Russian captivity at the end of 1812. Added to this were soldiers who had joined the Russian-German Legion, whose strength, according to Clausewitz, was about 4,000 men in December 1812, and is said to have been 5,000 men the following May. As chief of the legion’s general quartermaster’s staff he was informed about their strength. The first report on the strength of the Legion dated December 10, 1812, however, records only 1,667 men and two horses. The discrepancies between the strength report and Clausewitz’s figures can be explained by the high level of illness caused by epidemics. According to Helmert/Usczeck, however, the legion of officers and teams at the beginning of 1813 was 8,800 men. Freiherr vom Stein had put the strength at 8,773 men, although it is unclear where he got this figure, since the legion did not reach a strength of over 8,500 men until November 1814. It did not only consist of Germans: Allegedly, Dutchmen volunteered in droves and Italians pretended to be German in order to be admitted. Unlike often in captivity, service in the Legion meant regular supplies, clothing and decent accommodation. Compared to the contingent provided by Spain, the number of prisoners was very high. Most of them belonged to the Durutte Division, which was not deployed until November. They were mainly prisoners of war, who were more or less volunteers. Many soldiers deserted.

There are few sources about the Russian losses, they amounted to about 210,000 men. General Wilson reported that in the four weeks before reaching Vilniusov, the Kutuzov army had lost half of its soldiers. Out of 10,000 recruits sent to Vilnius only 1,500 soldiers reached the city, many of them sick.

Aftermath of the war

After the defeat of the Grande Armée in Russia, the wars of liberation began, which put an end to Napoleon’s rule over Europe. In early 1813, Prussia was the first German country to break the alliance with France and allied itself with Russia and Sweden. In the summer, Austria joined this alliance; and so Napoleon’s army suffered a decisive defeat in the Battle of Nations at Leipzig from 16 to 19 October 1813. After that, Napoleon’s last German allies also changed sides. After the Allied invasion of France in March 1814, he was forced to abdicate and go into exile on the island of Elba. After his return and the reign of 100 days he was finally defeated in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Meanwhile, at the Congress of Vienna, the victors had already set about reorganising Europe, which Russia, Austria and Prussia intended to guarantee by establishing the Holy Alliance. In France, which received the borders of 1792, the Bourbons returned to the throne with Louis XVIII. Russia and Prussia shared the Polish Duchy of Warsaw. Prussia also received territories in western Germany, which it later merged into the Rhine Province. Lithuania and other formerly Polish territories remained Russian, as did Finland. Sweden was compensated for its loss by the annexation of Norway. In Congress Poland, a liberal constitution was initially introduced under Russian rule. However, the Polish-Russian opposition intensified further and led to an uprising in 1830, which Russia put down. The constitution was repealed and Poland was declared a Russian province.