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Ney (Napoleon himself fled by sleigh on 5 December), but they were forced to leave behind almost all the remaining guns and baggage and were eventually reduced to barely 20,000 men. Behind them the road was strewn with sights that moved even the oncoming Russians to pity. ‘I cannot leave out a description of the scene on the Berezina . . . The bridges had collapsed in places and guns and various heavy transports had fallen into the river. Crowds of people, many of them women with infants and children, had come down to the ice-covered banks. Nobody had escaped the severity of the frost . . . Fate, our avenger, presented us with scenes of all kinds of desperation and death. The river was covered with ice transparent as glass: there were numerous corpses visible underneath it for its entire width.’41 It was an experience that imprinted itself indelibly upon the memories of all those involved. One such was Franz Roeder, an officer in the Lifeguard of the Grand Duke of Hesse, who made it all the way from Moscow to Vilna before finally being taken prisoner by the Russians:

There is confusion in my brain as though everything were tumbled together . . . I am at present in a state which I find incomprehensible, inexplicable . . . God! What appalling misery . . . What a multitude have perished in this retreat . . . My temples throb to bursting, my head swims and the tears pour from my eyes when I try to recall the scenes through which I have passed . . . Dull and unfeeling, caring for myself alone, I [have] walked over living men, over brothers, who perhaps might have been saved with a little help, with one mouthful of food, with a hand to help them from the slippery ground where they had fallen . . . How I myself must have suffered to be reduced to that! Am I also destined to endure as they did before I leave this earth?42

French losses amounted to perhaps half a million men. Nor were the disasters of 1812 limited to the horrors that had occurred in the east. In Spain, as we have seen, the Russian war had also led to catastrophe: having captured Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz, shattered the French at Salamanca and forced them to evacuate Andalucía, Wellington enjoyed the strategic initiative on the Portuguese frontier, while, particularly in Navarre and Aragón, much of the territory that was theoretically under French control had been overrun by the guerrillas. While the allied triumph was marred by disputes between the British and the Spaniards, it was clear that the days of French success were over. In diplomatic terms, too, the situation was now very different. A conference between Alexander and Bernadotte at Åbo in Finland in August had not persuaded Sweden to join the fighting: with his country almost bankrupt, the Crown Prince was still insisting on remaining neutral until Russia had sent troops to help him conquer Norway. However, heavy hints from Alexander that Bernadotte might be given the throne of France should Napoleon be overthrown had made the prospect much more likely. Moreover, the eastern and western struggles against Napoleon had in July 1812 been linked. No sooner had the French invaded Russia, than first Sweden and then Russia signed peace treaties with Britain. As yet there were no formal alliances between the three - the only power actually to make a pact with Russia was Spain - nor still less any agreement on subsidies, but the Royal Navy provided such assistance in the Baltic as it could, while 100,000 muskets were sent to Russia and 20,000 more to Sweden, the latter also receiving £200,000 as an advance on what she might get in the future.

In all this, the French had only one piece of good news. At precisely the moment when it would have been most useful to have a substantial expeditionary force for service on the shores of the Baltic or the North Sea, Britain’s attention was once again distracted by events on the far side of the Atlantic. The clash between Britain and the United States, known as the ‘War of 1812’, had been in the offing for some time. By 1800 the United States had emerged as a major