Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [298]
Closely connected with these thoughts was the idea that the grande armée might dictate peace to Alexander from Moscow. Napoleon had vaguely mentioned such a prospect at various times but it was only at Vitebsk that the idea of reaching that city became prominent in his conversation. The emperor was clearly excited by the idea but there was no clear decision to march on Moscow. When the 182,000 men who remained available to Napoleon in the vicinity of Vitebsk set off on
12 August, the objective of the grande armée remained the defeat of the Russian army. Striking south to the river Dnieper, Napoleon got his men across the river, and then turned east towards Smolensk. Once again, the aim was to trap Bagration and Barclay, whose troops were mostly scattered to the west and north-west of the city, but a gallant fight on the part of an isolated Russian division caught at Krasnoye held up the encirclement while Napoleon also wasted some time on a grand review held in honour of his birthday on 15 August. Not until 17 August did the grande armée mount a full-scale attack, and by then the two Russian generals had managed to concentrate all their troops around the city. Moreover, still more fumbling on the part of the French - and especially, Napoleon himself - allowed the Russians to escape yet again after two days’ fighting. With them there probably went the emperor’s last chance of victory. At all events, he was visibly angered: ‘At around five in the evening [of 19 August] we caught sight of the emperor riding along the Moscow road. He seemed much displeased and galloped past the soldiers without seeming to notice their acclamations.’27
Smolensk, it will be recalled, had been the furthest point Napoleon had considered advancing to at the start of the campaign, and even now the way was open to him to revert to the defensive strategy that had been considered at Vitebsk: so far as this was concerned, indeed, the capture of the fortified bastion Smolensk represented could be considered an important gain. The march on Smolensk, meanwhile, had been accompanied by the same difficulties as before. ‘At this time,’ wrote an officer, François, ‘the army was much diminished . . . by dysentery, by which many of the soldiers were attacked. This disease was caused by the scarcity of bread, which obliged the soldiers to live chiefly on meat . . . The stagnant marsh water we drank also contributed to spread the disease. Few of the men, or even of the generals were exempt from it. The hospitals were full of sick, who had but little medical aid, for the ambulances and medicines remained in the rear.’28 After a brief let-up in the wake of the departure from Vitebsk, the heat was again, as Napoleon himself put it, ‘frightful’.29 As for Smolensk, it had been a terrible fight, and the sights and sounds of the battlefield seem for a moment to have given even Napoleon pause. Nor did it help that the grande armée’s communications and foraging parties were beginning to be plagued by bands of desperate peasants who, if they were in fact motivated by nothing more than hunger and a visceral desire for revenge, none the less were a source of considerable concern. As Yermolev remembered, ‘We had previously passed through Lithuania where the nobility, keeping the hopes of restoring Poland alive, agitated the feeble minds of the peasants against us. In Byelorussia, too, the oppressive authority of the landlords forced the peasants to desire change. However, here, around Smolensk, people