Note 32 — Chapter X · IN THE HOUR OF DARKEST DISASTER

Elsewhere are other permanent trophies of the campaign, spoils of another kind. Nine hundred and twenty-nine of Napoleon’s cannon fell into Russian hands, mostly abandoned during the retreat, without attempt at defence. Of these, most are fittingly kept at Moscow; they number 875, and are exhibited in the arsenal, or mounted as trophies in the public squares in the Holy City. As with the flags, they are not all French. Those bearing the French Imperial cypher, the letter “N” surmounted by the Eagle and Napoleonic crown, number less than a half of the total. The French guns number 365; the bulk of the collection being made up of artillery from allied and vassal states: 189 Austrian cannon, 123 Prussian, 70 Italian, 40 Neapolitan, 34 Bavarian, 22 Dutch, 12 Saxon, 8 Spanish, 5 Polish, with 7 Westphalian, Würtemburg, and Hanoverian pieces. The Prussian and Austrian guns, most of them, it is fair to say, were not captured from the contingents serving with the Grand Army in Russia: they formed part of the artillery marching with Napoleon’s main column; they belonged to the French army, and were manned by French gunners, being spoils from the Austerlitz, Wagram, and Jena campaigns, turned to account to form field batteries for the French army. Innumerable other reminders of the fate of the Grand Army are preserved all over Russia: soldiers’ arms and accoutrements, personal belongings and decorations of French officers and men, fragments of uniforms, helmets, swords and lances, pistols and muskets; relics mostly picked up on battlefields or by the wayside along the route of the retreat. The muskets serve to illustrate incidentally, in the variety of the woods used for their stocks, the makeshifts to which, some time before 1812, the demands of Napoleon’s armaments had reduced France: the musket-stocks of oak, chestnut, elm, beech, maple, of even poplar and deal, tell a tale of exhausted supplies of the walnut and ash woods ordinarily used in the manufacture of firearms.

The total of 75 Eagles and other standards is no extravagantly large array of trophies, remembering the overwhelming nature of the catastrophe to the Grand Army in Russia. Of the 600,000 soldiers who mustered round their regimental colours at the crossing of the Niemen at the outset of the campaign, 125,000 were killed in fight, and 193,048, according to the Russian official returns, were taken prisoners. In round numbers 250,000 died on the line of march during the retreat, from cold, hardships, and starvation, or were killed as stragglers by the Cossacks and peasants. The mementoes also of their grim fate exist to-day in Russia. The graves of most of them may be seen all along the railway line from Wilna to Moscow, which follows closely the route of Napoleon and the Grand Army, over country the same in appearance now as then; a dreary, wind-swept, lonesome plain, broken only by vast stretches of dark, monotonous birch and pine forests, with here and there narrow ravines, and strips of hilly ground, amid which wind chill and sluggish rivers. At intervals huge mounds, looking like embankments or ancient barrows of enormous size, rise over the flat expanse of plain. They are the graves of the French dead. It took three months to destroy the remains of the dead soldiers and of some 150,000 horses which perished in the campaign. The ghastly task was carried out locally by the peasantry, under an urgent Government order, so as to prevent the outbreak of pestilence in the spring from the vast numbers of unburied corpses that strewed the track of the ill-fated host. The bodies, when the snow thawed, were dragged together and collected in heaps each “half a verst long and two fathoms high,” over 500 yards long and some 14 feet high. At first, efforts were made to burn them, but the supply of firewood failed, and the stench all over the country was unbearable. The corpses were then hauled into shallow trenches alongside, and quicklime and earth heaped over them, making the mounds now to be seen along the railway, on either side of the old post-road from Wilna to Moscow, the route of Napoleon’s retreat. In the province of Moscow, 50,000 dead soldiers and 29,000 dead horses were so disposed of before the middle of February; in the province of Smolensk, by the end of the month, 72,000 dead soldiers and 52,000 horses; in the province of Minsk, 40,000 human corpses and 28,000 horses; to which, later on, when the ice had melted, 12,000 more dead soldiers were added, the bodies found in the Beresina; in the province of Wilna, also by the end of February, 73,000 dead soldiers, with 10,000 dead horses. There were, in addition, very many never accounted for: dead stragglers who had perished in the forests, their remains being devoured by the wolves; and those who were massacred—beaten to death, or buried alive, or burned alive—by the peasants in places away from the line of march. Such was the appalling loss of life that attended the Moscow campaign, and which the trophies represent. In the circumstances, in proportion, the toll is hardly a large one.