Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [163]
The battle of Viazma showed that there was still plenty of fight left in many of Napoleon’s troops but it also revealed his army’s growing weakness. For the first time in 1812, a clash between Kutuzov and Napoleon’s infantry resulted in much heavier French than Russian losses. Lieutenant Ivan Radozhitsky’s battery was part of Miloradovich’s force and fought at Viazma. He wrote that ‘our superiority was clear: the enemy had almost no cavalry and in contrast to previous occasions his artillery was weak and ineffective…we rejoiced in our glorious victory, and in addition saw our superiority over the terrible enemy’. Eugen of Württemberg wrote that at any time after the battle of Viazma a determined attack by the whole Russian army would have destroyed Napoleon’s force. But Kutuzov preferred to leave the job to the winter, which put in its first appearance three days after the battle.44
Subsequently Napoleon himself and some of his admirers were much inclined to blame the unusually cold winter for the destruction of his army. This is mostly nonsense. Only in December, after most of the French army had already perished, did the winter become unusually and ferociously cold. October had been exceptionally warm, maybe lulling Napoleon into a false sense of security. As sometimes happens in Russia, winter then came suddenly. By 6 November Napoleon’s men were marching through heavy snow. All the Russian sources say, however, that November 1812 was cold but seldom exceptionally so for this time of year. The main ‘trick’ played on Napoleon in this month by the weather was in fact the milder spell in the second half of November, which thawed the ice on the river Berezina and thereby created a major obstacle to his retreat. The basic point, however, is that Russian Novembers are cold, especially for exhausted men who sleep in the open, without even a tent, with very inadequate clothing, and with little food.45
Ivan Radozhitsky’s battery pursued the enemy down the Smolensk highway from Viazma to Dorogobuzh. He wrote that a mass of prisoners were taken and led away under Cossack escort but they still included very few officers. Dead and dying men littered the road in large numbers. For the Russian troops the sight of French soldiers eating often semi-raw horsemeat was deeply disgusting. Radozhitsky recalls one particularly awful scene of a French soldier frozen in death at the very moment he was trying to rip the liver out of a fallen horse. The Russian soldiers had no love for their enemy but even so pity often became the dominant feeling amidst such dreadful scenes. Things were not easy for the Russians themselves, however, let alone for their horses. Radozhitsky writes that there was no hay, his battery had exhausted its supply of oats and the exhausted animals were surviving on whatever scraps of straw could be scrounged. His soldiers did at least have fur jackets and felt boots, which had been distributed to his battery at the camp in Tarutino before the campaign began, but they had nothing to eat save biscuit and a very thin gruel. A growing number of sick and exhausted men dropped out of the ranks and by the time it turned off the highway and joined Kutuzov’s main body on 11 November very few infantry companies had more than eighty men. Nevertheless, buoyed by victory, their morale was excellent.46
Napoleon himself arrived in Smolensk on 9 November and left five days later. For the soldiers retreating down the highway the city offered the hope of warmth, food and security. In different circumstances it might have been just that. Its stores contained plentiful food and until recently the fresh corps of Marshal Victor, 30,000 strong, had been located in Smolensk. The advance of Peter Wittgenstein