They chew on raw horse meat and the leather of their own shoes. Often, they ate each other out of hunger. If they were captured by Cossacks or local peasants, they would end their lives impaled, boiled in boiling water, dismembered or buried alive in the forest. Such was the fate of Napoleon's troops returning from Moscow.
In November and December 1812, in the vicinity of Moscow, Smolensk, Minsk and Vilnius, the frost sometimes reached minus 35 degrees. In order to get out of Russia and reach the borders of the Duchy of Warsaw, Napoleon's soldiers had to walk 1,000 kilometers along snow-covered roads strewn with the corpses of people and horses. In addition, they were constantly attacked by Cossack driveways.
On October 29, troops stood near Możajsk. Frost caught on suddenly and without any preamble he came straight to 15 degrees of Réaumur [approximately minus 19 degrees Celsius] . The army suffered from a lack of food, and the soldier's clothing, applied to a mild climate, meant nothing in the country under the zone so to the east - captain Franciszek Gajewski, one of Napoleon's adjutants described the retreat.
Later in his memoirs we read:
I will never forget the sight of these unhappy soldiers, a few weeks ago, full of enthusiasm and energy. (...) Several thousand such unhappy, cold and hungry creatures were walking along. Where the carcass lay, dozens of unfortunate people threw themselves there, they cut the disgusting food into pieces and devoured the raw food .
The road to imminent defeat
The columns of 450,000 people - among them about 100,000 Poles - were pulling over a thousand cannons. From under the black two-horns, Napoleon watched the march of his Grand Army, which on June 25, 1812, crossed the border Nemunas. The six-month Russian campaign ended in a disaster.
Napoleon's soldiers were completely unprepared for the Russian winter.
The sea of blood shed at Borodino in early September, where nearly 30,000 Napoleon's soldiers and 50,000 Russians died, were wasted. The French captured the deserted Moscow on September 14, but they did not force the tsar to surrender. Alexander I took refuge in St. Petersburg and ordered the former capital to be burned down.
Unable to defeat the Russians avoiding the general clash, the emperor of the French ordered a retreat. On October 19, 1812, the Grand Army left Moscow. It only numbered 100,000 soldiers. The rest died in battle, died of disease and exhaustion, or deserted.
Every Napoleonic soldier wanted to return to his homeland with the spoils. In the book "Berezyna. About male friendship, motorcycle journeys and the Napoleon myth ” , French writer and traveler Sylvain Tesson, cites the account of Sergeant Adrien Jean François Bourgogne. In his memoirs, he described the trophies won in Moscow. He took, among other things:"a Chinese silk dress interspersed with gold and silver thread", "a piece of a silver cross from Ivan the Great's belfry", "a light brown ladies' cloak lined with green velvet," as well as two paintings. After a week, the sergeant used the valuable fabrics only to wrap up the chilled members.
A journey in the footsteps of Napoleon's Great Army in Sylvain Tesson's book, Berezina. About male friendship, motorcycle journeys and the myth of Napoleon "(Published by Noir sur Blanc 2017).
Over the dead by Borodino
Nine days after leaving Moscow, the Grand Army reached Borodino and crossed the same field where it had fought the Russians less than two months earlier. Decaying corpses lay everywhere among which swarms of scavengers feasted. They were walking to the Wiaźmy River in the area strewn with bodies, they slept in ditches full of corpses, and the frost clenched their jaws.
The French were also plagued by the "shadow army". Matwiej Iwanowicz Płatow, the ataman of Don Cossacks, turned out to be a master of guerrilla warfare. Suddenly, horse Cossack troops, with bared sabers, fell out of the forests and swamp mists and tugged at exhausted enemies. Local peasants joined the attacks. Within a dozen or so days, the French forces shrank by almost half.
Napoleon's soldiers did not even have time to roast horse meat. On the way, they simply dipped their heads in pots full of animal blood. In their red rags, they fought for a few potatoes, tugging at beards and mustaches covered with red icicles. As the fallen horses froze to the bone, they scraped the hard flesh with their sabers.
In addition to frost and hunger, the real bane for the soldiers of the Grand Army were the Cossacks that harassed them.
Those who had frostbitten their hands and had no blades, like hungry wolves, knelt beside the carcass and bit into the flesh. Sergeant Bourgogne managed to survive by sucking on icy blood. Captain Gajewski wrote:
There were those who had a well-guarded bag of flour, they melted snow over the fire in a cauldron, poured a handful of flour into boiling water, added a few cartridges of powder to it and ate greedily this kind of blackberry. Many others envied that disgusting bagel, and often times 20 francs or more were paid for a portion of this delicacy. I myself paid 20 francs for a small glass of vodka near Krasno, already for Smolensk. I caught the cat under the Więźma, killed it, delayed it, baked it and ate it as the best morsel.
Hunger driving you crazy
When the horse ran out, the soldiers ate the meat of their dead comrades. Philip Paul de Ségur, Napoleon's adjutant recalled:
In Żupranach (...) soldiers set fire to several houses to keep warm. The reflection of the fire drew a dozen or so people mad with cold and pain; gnashing their teeth, with a damn laugh on their contorted lips, they threw themselves into the fire and died in horrible convulsions. The hungry crowd looked at them without fear or fear, and there were even those who pulled a disfigured, charred corpse out of the fire and did not hesitate to lift this hideous food to their mouths!
Napoleon's adjutant Philip Paul de Ségur was one of those who described acts of cannibalism in the ranks of the Grand Army. Portrait by François Gérard.
Dull stragglers toasted the bodies of their dead colleagues on fire - writes Robert Bielecki in his book "Berezyna 1812". Even more drastic details are quoted by Count Adam Zamoyski, British historian of Polish roots, former president of the Princes Czartoryski Foundation, author of the book "1812. War with Russia ”:
Most of the reports [of acts of cannibalism] come from the Russian side, which is not surprising as the Russians following the retreating army saw the French pushed to the bottom of the last resort. They also saw prisoners who did not get anything to eat from the Cossacks escorting them and ate the bodies of their dead colleagues .
Zamoyski mentions a letter to his wife that the Russian general, Nikolai Rajewski, dated November 22. In it, he wrote that one of his colonels saw two French men baking pieces of their colleague's corpse. He also cites the account of General Robert Thomas Wilson, the British representative to the Russian staff. He, in turn, saw a group of wounded soldiers in the remains of an ashen cottage, sitting and lying over the body of a colleague, whom they baked and began to eat .
When horses ran out, acts of cannibalism became commonplace. The illustration shows the painting by Jan Suchodolski "Retreat from Moscow".
The liver is still in the pot…
Another shocking message about cannibalism was penned by Lieutenant Roman Sołtyk, who stayed a bit behind the retreating Great Army and reached the Belarussian Orsza on his own, hungry. He offered money to the soldiers, as long as they gave him some stew from the steaming pot. But as soon as I swallowed the first spoon, I was seized by an irresistible disgust, so I asked them if it was made of horse meat. They replied calmly that it was human flesh and that the liver still in the pot was the tastiest - reported Sołtyk.
You've heard of people tearing their teeth even with their own emaciated bodies - recalled Prussian lieutenant Heinrich August Vossler, a soldier of Napoleon's Great Army. Similar scenes were reported by Raymond Pontier, a surgeon with the French general staff.
Cannibalism was not only the domain of Napoleon's beaten soldiers. I saw (...) Russian prisoners who, brought to an end by the harassing hunger (...) threw themselves on the body of some just dead Bavarian, tore it to pieces with knives and devoured bloody scraps of meat - wrote the French politician and official, Amédée de Pastoret.
A journey in the footsteps of Napoleon's Great Army in Sylvain Tesson's book, Berezina. About male friendship, motorcycle journeys and the myth of Napoleon "(Published by Noir sur Blanc 2017).
The Berezina Massacre
When the remnants of the Grand Army were preparing to cross the Berezina (right tributary of the Dnieper), the field marshal in command of the Russian forces, Mikhail Kutuzov, announced the final defeat of the enemies. Meanwhile, on November 23, a French general, Jean-Baptiste Juvenal Corbineau, found a ford near the village of Studzianka. Two hundred-meter-long wooden bridges were erected there, and the crossing began on November 26.
Thousands of marauders had yet to cross the river when Russian cannonballs fell on the French. It was a mess. People rushed towards the crossing. Some trampled on others. They slipped, fell, and drowned in the icy water. The entrances to the bridges were blocked by piles of corpses, and on the other side you had to wade through a rampart made of dead bodies .
For the French, crossing Berezina is synonymous with a catastrophic situation. The illustration shows crossing the Berezina by Lawrence Alma-Tadema
As Sylvain Tesson writes, in his latest book "Berezina. About male friendship, motorcycle journeys and the Napoleon myth ” after these events, the word "Berezina" entered the French language as a colloquial term for a catastrophic situation. However, Napoleon's forces were not completely destroyed. The emperor saved two thousand officers, 20 thousand soldiers and 40 thousand people from the back of the army. From a statistical point of view - just like at Borodino - the Russians suffered greater losses than the French.
On December 5, in the town of Smorgonie, Belarus, Napoleon left the remnants of the army, leaving them under the command of the Marshal of France and the King of Naples, Joachim Murat. He himself ran madly through Poland and Germany to Paris, to save the imperial power that was slipping out of his hands after six months of absence. On December 18, before midnight, he was at the Tuileries Palace in Paris. His soldiers, who survived the pogrom, did not reach France until the first days of January 1813.
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