Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [292]
Once the frontier had been crossed, things grew even worse. The forces led by Napoleon himself were immediately struck by violent thunderstorms and even freak blizzards, which caused havoc. Present with the Imperial Guard was Captain Coignet. ‘I was half-dead with the cold: not being able to stand it any longer, I opened one of my wagons and crept inside. Next morning a heart-rending sight met our gaze: in the cavalry camp nearby, the ground was covered with horses frozen to death.’5 Given the quagmires which the appalling roads quickly became, the wagon trains could not keep up with the troops. Yet the troops only had sufficient biscuit for four days. Present with the Württemberg contingent was a twenty-four-year-old infantryman named Jakob Walter:
We . . . believed that, once in Russia, we need do nothing but forage - which, however, proved to be an illusion. The town of Poniemon was already stripped before we could enter and so were all the villages. Here and there a hog ran around and then was beaten with clubs, chopped with sabres, and, often still living, it would be cut and torn to pieces. Several times I succeeded in cutting off something, but I had to chew it and eat it uncooked, since my hunger could not wait for a chance to boil the meat . . . Meanwhile, it rained ceaselessly for several days, and the rain was cold. It was all the more disagreeable because nothing could be dried . . . During the third night a halt was made in a field which was trampled into a swamp . . . You can imagine in what a half-numbed condition everyone stood here . . . There was nothing that we could do but stack the [muskets] in pyramids and keep moving in order not to freeze.6
Things were not much better in any other unit, and the roads, such as they were, were soon littered with the corpses of men and horses. Dysentery struck many units, and huge numbers of horses - 10,000 in the main army alone, according to Caulaincourt - literally dropped dead from overwork and undernourishment. Desperate to make progress, French commanders made extreme demands of their men all along the line. The vanguard of the main army, for example, covered the seventy miles from Kovno to Vilna in just two days. But this only made things worse, and by the time the Lithuanian capital was taken the number of dead and missing may already have amounted to 25,000 men. And, finally, for all the grande armée’s forced marches, both Barclay de Tolly and Bagration had successfully evaded the French spearheads and got away into the interior: indeed, hardly a shot had yet been fired.
It might be thought that such difficulties would have been sufficient to persuade Napoleon that a political settlement was essential, particularly as it was at Vilna that news reached him of Russia’s peace settlement with Turkey. Yet Alexander’s last-minute peace proposals were, as we have seen, simply scorned, and that despite the fact that a major pillar of Napoleon’s strategy was falling apart around the very doors of his headquarters. We come here to the question of the invaders’ relationship with the local populace. The war had been billed as one of liberation, and it was Napoleon’s intention at the very least to set up some form of political base for his operations in Lithuania. Winning over the populace was not very high on the agenda of the grande armée, however. Major Faber du Faur, an artillery officer, like Walter a member of the Württemberg division, wrote:
There has never been a campaign in which the troops have relied so much on living off the land, but it was the way in which it was done in Russia that caused such universal suffering - for the soldiers of the army as well as the inhabitants. Because of its rapid marches and its enormous size, the army faced a dearth of everything and it was impossible to procure the barest