Some Survivors of the Russian Campaign
The crossing of the Beresina alone cost Napoleon more than 20,000 men. But, writes Alan Collis, some fortunate survivors of the terrible retreat from Moscow struggled home to tell the tale.
The road was strewn with dead and dying, the march slow and silent,’ General Marbot wrote in his Mémoires.
‘Every morning we left thousands of dead in the bivouacs we abandoned.’ (The 200 Neapolitans of Murat’s household cavalry) ‘all died on the first night they spent in the snow’.
Accounts of the retreat of the Grande Armée from Russia in 1812 are all so full of the horror of the snow and frost, the moral collapse, the disintegration of the army, the starvation and the cannibalism, that one is amazed that anyone at all survived, but some did, and their stories follow.
Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza, and Master of the Horse, has given a full and well-known account of Napoleon’s survival - the ride in the sled, the narrow escape from the Cossacks, the brow-beating of the Abbé de Pradt in Warsaw, the midnight search for lodging in a deserted Dresden, the almost unrecognized arrival unshaven at the Tuileries.
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