AN ARMY IN RETREAT: WHEN NAPOLEON INVADED RUSSIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 121, 17 October 1941, Unnumbered Page

AN ARMY IN RETREAT:

WHEN NAPOLEON INVADED

RUSSIA

To Moscow And Back With Sergeant Bourgogne

be choked with corpses. Across the forest and plains through which Napoleon made his rapid and triumphant advance and his slow and calamitous withdrawal between the June of 1812 and the January of 1813 rushes a tide, incomparably more gigantic, of blood and fear and suffering. Yet about the story of the retreat from Moscow there is a kind of dramatic completeness that still commands attention, and no record is more vivid than that of Sergeant Bourgogne, ex-Grenadier Vélite of the Imperial Guard, who endured the worst horrors of the retreat, and emerged with his belief in the Emperor’s genius and his devotion to his leader’s memory yet unshaken. His fascinating, at times appalling, narrative (now reprinted in a convenient cheap edition), is a masterpiece of untutored straightforward reporting, comparable to Diaz’s story of the conquest of Mexico from which Prescott drew much of his most interesting material. The little we learn of his character we learn in spite of himself. Bourgogne was neither vain-glorious mor sentimental. He did not sentimentalise his own sufferings or the sufferings of his comrades; he did not revolt against a world in which such catastrophes were possible, or against the imperial system to which they owed their immediate () NCE again the Beresina may

origin; he was content, quietly and simply, to chart the course of his adventures. Thus it had happened; thus his friends had died, frozen, burnt to death, sabred or speared by pursuing Cossacks, thus he had struggled home, with his scars and his loot, out of the Russian wilderness. He was delighted to remember; he did not attempt to analyse. Much Curious Evidence On one point he produces much curious evidence. The army that broke up along the road to Germany was already disorganised and demoralised before it had said good-bye to Moscow. Bourgogne was a good soldier and experienced campaigner, proud of his regiment, proud of the Grand Armée, proud of the splendiferous and resounding legend of which he felt he fotmed a part. But, in spite of the strict imperial order that forbade all plundering, he had begun to loot during his first day in the conquered city. Long before the ban was raised (as the conflagration caused by Russian incendiaries grew more extensive), the quarters he occupied were full of plunder and embellished by the’ presence of two female captives whose services he retained until they were borrowed from him good-humour-edly, but peremptorily, by AdjutantMajor Roustan. Life for non-commis-sioned officers of the guard was a continual festivity; and every evening they would gather in a deserted palace, there

to recline "like pashas on ermine, sable, lion and bear skins, smoking costly tobacco in magnificent pipes,’ an

enormous silver bowl before them filled with punch, above which slowly melted a-huge loaf of sugar, held in place by a pair of captured Russian bayonets. Laden With Booty No effort seems to have been made to save the army from the perils of this Capuan_ existence; and, when. the Emperor decided to abandon the halfburnt but still habitable city, his troops were permitted to set forth in broken ranks, laden down with their booty, having many of them exchanged their uniforms, and even their arms and cartridge belts, for the silks and velvets they had picked up from Muscovite wardrobes. Bourgogne himself threw away his white full-dress trousers, "feeling pretty certain I should not want them again just yet," and carried a mere 16

cartridges. Into his knapsack he had stuffed an amazing collection of objects, both perishable and precious: BS a pg Several pounds of sugar, some rice, some biscuit, half a bottle of liqueur, a woman’s Chinese silk dress, embroidered in gold and silver, several gold and silver ornaments, and amongst them a little bit of the cross of Ivan the Great .. . A woman’s Yarge riding-cloak (hazel colour, lined with green velvet; as I could not guess how it was worn, I imagined its late owner to be more than six feet high), then two silver pictures in relief, a foot long and eight inches high; one of them represented the Judgment of Paris on Mount Ida, the other showed Neptune on a chariot formed by a shell, and drawn by sea-horses, all in the finest workmanship. I had, besides, several lockets, and a Russian prince’s spittoon set with brilliants. But that was not all: I wore over my shirt. (writes Bourgogne), a yellow silk waistcoat, wadded inside, which I had made myself out (Continued on next page)

T is expecting too much of the Russian winter to suppose that it will deal with Hitler’s armies as it did with Napoleon's. Those who are waiting for a second retreat from Moscow are therefore indulging foolish hopes. But it is impossible not to think of Napoleon’s armies as to-day’s fighting surges over his old halting places, and there will never be a better account of a retreat than the "Memoirs of Sergeart Bourgogne,’ recently re-issued in a cheap edition by Jonathan Cape. Here are some notes on the book based on an article in the "New Statesman," by Peter Quenrell.

(Continued from previous page) of a woman’s skirt; above that a large cape lined with ermine, and a large pouch hung at my side... by a silver cord. This was full of various things — amongst them a crucifix in gold and a little Chinese porcelain vase... His spirits were high. Confusedly, Bourgogne and his friends would appear to have imagined that the Emperor’s plans still included the conquest of the Orient; and, as he left Moscow, he was already looking forward to the "Mongol, Chinese and Indian" mistresses whom he would undoubtedly acquire. On the 19th of October, the long garish circus train got under way. There was rain on the 22nd, thick fog on the 25th; during the night of the 27th it began to freeze. Thereafter, the main outlines of the tragedy need no retelling. Bourgogne’s story is memorable, because it depicts the fortitude, the despair, the misery; the eventual triumph of a single isolated and often frightened man. In addition to quick eyes, Bourgogne had that gift of cursory self-expression- of pinning down an episode in a line or a sentence -which is the despair of more practised and more ambitious writers. He saw much of pain-few men have seen so much in so brief a period — and his descriptions of human agony are as sympathetic as they are observant. The shapes assumed by death never ceased to horrify and interest him, Before the army had reached the Dnieper, dying men were being plundered as they lay in the snow: I was walking now in a narrow footpath in the wood ..., and with me was one of my friends, a sergeant in the same regiment. We suddenly came upon a gunner of the Guard lying right across the path. By him was another gunner stripping his clothes from him. We could see now that the man was not dead, as his legs moved, and every now and then he struck the ground with his fists. Incident Near Smolensk So violent and so continuous was the pressure of self-interest that some of the results it produced were almost comic. Near Smolensk a huge barn crammed with 800 men suddenly caught fire. The doors were barricaded against latecomers: "cries and shrieks of rage were heard, the fire becoming a vast, tossing mass, through the convulsive efforts the wretches made to escape." Meanwhile, from all around came running a horde of ragged, frozen and starving men, Some rifled the corpses that they dragged from the blaze. Others observed cheerfully: "It serves them right . . ." "Others again, stretched out their hands to the warmth saying, ‘What a beautiful HOOT a ucane Yet although the retreat from Moscow had its grotesque and fantastic sidemen with cracked lips and frost-bitten fingers fighting for the half-cooked flesh of broken-down horses; men devouring a few stolen potatoes in fearful stealththrough the squalor ran frequently a strain of splendour. With awe Bourgogne witnessed the devotion of the hundred and fifty dragoons, who, the whole of one hideous winter night, stood massed in their long white cloaks around their

hereditary chief, the young Prince Emile of Hesse-Cassel, "pressed tightly one against the other, protecting him from wind and cold. The next morning threequarters of them were dead and buri beneath the snow. .. ." Ba The examples of disinterestedness that he encountered were as startling, if not so numerous, as the instances of abject greed and ‘savagery. There was the cavalryman whose first thought was always for the mount that had carried him in a dozen major actions; and there was the old sergeant of Bourgogne’s regiment named Daubenton who, league after league, supported on his back the regimental dog when poor Mouton’s paws were frostbitten on the road to Wilna. Memorable Pictures His method of narration is sometimes chaotic and fragmentary; but Bourgogne has an astonishing aptitude for evoking a broad panorama in very few words: . . « We were roused by an extraordinary noise. This was the north wind travelling over the forests, bringing with it heavy snow and 27 degrees of frost, so that it became quite impossible for the men to stay where they had camped. We heard them shouting as they ran about towards any fire they saw; but the heavy snowstorms caught them, and they could soon run no more, or if they tried to do so they fell and never rose again. F Bourgogne himself survived, not much the worse for wear till 1867, and, in his last years, in a placid provincial hotel he’ would sometimes recognise beneath the traits of a stout commercant the comrade who had suffered with him in the snows of Russia. Then wives and families would be forgotten; wine would be drawn; and the elderly pair would sit up far into the night talking of this incident and that, and of how with their own eyes they had seen the Emperor in fur-lined cloak and purple velvet cap trudging, baton in hand, among the marshals and princes of the Empire. The Emperor — ah, what a mighty genius! How good to think and talk of him in the reign of the citizen king!