Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [299]
In the end, however, caution came to nothing. Excited by false reports that the Russians were making a stand on the river Ouja, Napoleon urged his men on again. It was from the start a desperate gamble, though, and it was soon clear the emperor’s luck had run out:
The army marched in three columns . . . It was impossible to come up with the enemy’s infantry. Our advanced guard had only to contend with their light cavalry, which defended themselves no longer than was necessary to allow time for the main body to pursue its retreat unmolested . . . The emperor, expecting each day that the Russians would stop their rearward movement and give battle, allowed himself to be thus drawn on towards Moscow without bestowing a thought on the fatigue which his troops underwent, and without considering that he was no longer in communication with the rest of his army.31
The march, in fact, was a nightmare:
The further we advanced the more desolate became the country. Every village had been burned, and there was no longer even the thatch from the cottages for the horses to eat: everything that could be destroyed was reduced to ashes. The men suffered no less than the animals: the heat was intense, and the sand rose in masses of white dust as our columns advanced, choking us and completing our exhaustion. Our misery was intensified by the want of water in these never-ending plains.32
But still there came no request for an armistice, no suggestion of peace talks. All that the grande armée could do, then, was stumble on for mile after mile. Yet every step reduced the striking power that was its only hope of victory. Twenty thousand men had been lost at Smolensk and 16,000 more detached to act as its garrison, and the road east was littered with thousands of corpses. Marching in the rear of the main spearheads was the Württemberg division: ‘From Dorogobuzh onward we met many, sometimes very many, soldiers who had dropped by the roadside from sheer exhaustion and had died where they lay for lack of help . . . The horses were in no better shape than the men . . . We found them lying by the roadside in droves.’33 By early September Napoleon had with him no more than 130,000 men, but then suddenly news arrived that the enemy really had turned at bay. With the grande armée less than eighty miles west of Moscow, at last the fortunes of war seemed to have changed. ‘On 5 September,’ wrote Chlapowski, ‘we . . . arrived before a . . . position fortified by entrenchments: the Russians were accepting battle.’34
What had happened? In brief, Alexander was facing a palace coup. Just as it is often assumed Napoleon was always bent on marching on Moscow, so it is taken for granted that Alexander was bent on drawing Napoleon into the depths of Russia and letting climate, geography and the Cossacks wreak havoc on him. Yet this is simply not true. Alexander had never intended to retreat further than Drissa, and the Russians had only retired as far as they had because the French had come on in such overwhelming numbers. Indeed, for weeks the only concrete objective had been to avoid disaster. But for Alexander as much as Napoleon, his credibility was at stake. To surrender all of Russia’s gains in Poland was bad enough, but to be driven from Smolensk - one of the Orthodox Church’s holiest sites - was to place at risk the estates of some of the greatest families of the Russian