Part 15 (1/2)
Napoleon added, that ”authentic reports had made him acquainted with the weakness of the Russian divisions; that most of them were already much reduced; that they suffered themselves to be destroyed in detail, and that Alexander would soon cease to have an army. The rabble of peasants armed with pikes, whom we had just seen in the train of their battalions, sufficiently demonstrated to what s.h.i.+fts their generals were reduced.”
While the emperor was thus talking, the b.a.l.l.s of the Russian riflemen were whizzing about his ears; but he was worked up by his subject. He launched out against the enemy's general and army, as if he could have destroyed it by his reasoning, because he could not by victory. No one answered him; it was evident that he was not asking advice, but that he had been talking all this time to himself; that he was contending against his own reflections, and that, by this torrent of conjectures, he was seeking to impose upon himself, and endeavouring to make others partic.i.p.ators in the same illusions.
Indeed, he did not give any one time to interrupt him. As to the weakness and disorganization of the Russian army, n.o.body believed it; but what could be urged in reply? He appealed to positive doc.u.ments, those which had been sent to him by Lauriston; they had been altered, under the idea of correcting them: for the estimate of the Russian forces by Lauriston, the French minister in Russia, was correct; but, according to accounts less deserving of credit, though more flattering, this estimate had been diminished one-third.
After talking to himself for an hour, the emperor, looking at the heights on the right bank, which were nearly abandoned by the enemy, concluded with exclaiming, that ”the Russians were women, and that they acknowledged themselves vanquished!” He strove to persuade himself that these people had, from their contact with Europe, lost their rude and savage valour. But their preceding wars had instructed them, and they had arrived at that point, at which nations still possess all their primitive virtues, in addition to those they have acquired.
At length, he again mounted his horse. It was then the Grand-marshal observed to one of us, that ”if Barclay had committed so very great a blunder in refusing battle, the emperor would not have been so extremely anxious to convince us of it.” A few paces farther, an officer, sent not long before to Prince Schwartzenberg, presented himself: he reported that Tormasof and his army had appeared in the north, between Minsk and Warsaw, and that they had marched upon our line of operation. A Saxon brigade taken at Kobrynn, the grand-duchy overrun, and Warsaw alarmed, had been the first results of this aggression; but Regnier had summoned Schwartzenberg to his aid. Tormasof had then retreated to Gorodeczna, where he halted on the 12th of August, between two defiles, in a plain surrounded by woods and marshes, but accessible in the rear of his left flank.
Regnier, skilful before an action, and an excellent judge of ground, knew how to prepare battles; but when the field became animated, when it was covered with men and horses, he lost his self-possession, and rapid movements seemed to dazzle him. At first, therefore, that general perceived at a glance the weak side of the Russians; he bore down upon it, but instead of breaking into it by ma.s.ses and with impetuosity, he merely made successive attacks.
Tormasof, forewarned by these, had time to oppose, at first, regiments to regiments, then brigades to brigades, and lastly divisions to divisions. By favour of this prolonged contest, he gained the night, and withdrew his army from the field of battle, where a rapid and simultaneous effort might have destroyed it. Still, he lost some pieces of cannon, a great quant.i.ty of baggage, and four thousand men, and retired behind the Styr, where he was joined by Tchitchakof, who was hastening with the army of the Danube to his succour.
This battle, though far from decisive, preserved the grand-duchy: it confined the Russians, in this quarter, to the defensive, and gave the emperor time to win a battle.
During this recital, the tenacious genius of Napoleon was less struck with these advantages in themselves, than with the support they gave to the illusion which he had just been holding forth to us: accordingly, still adhering to his original idea, and without questioning the aid-de-camp, he turned round to his auditory, and, as if continuing his former conversation, he exclaimed: ”There you see, the poltroons! they allow themselves to be beaten even by Austrians!” Then, casting around him a look of apprehension, ”I hope,” added he, ”that none but Frenchmen hear me.” He then asked if he might rely on the good faith of Prince Schwartzenberg, for which the aid-de-camp pledged himself; nor was he mistaken, though the event seemed to belie his confidence.
Every word which the emperor had uttered merely proved his disappointment, and that a great hesitation had again taken possession of his mind; for in him success was less communicative, and decision less verbose. At length he entered Smolensk. In the pa.s.sage through its ma.s.sive walls, Count Lobau exclaimed, ”What a fine head for cantonments!” This was the same thing as advising him to stop there; but the emperor returned no other answer to this counsel than a stern look.
This look, however, soon changed its expression, when it had nothing to rest upon but ruins, among which our wounded were crawling, and heaps of smoking ashes, where lay human skeletons, dried and blackened by the fire. This great destruction confounded him. What a harvest of victory!
That city where his troops were at length to find shelter, provisions, a rich booty, the promised reward for so many hards.h.i.+ps, was but a ruin on which he should be obliged to bivouac! No doubt his influence over his men was great, but could it extend beyond nature? What would they think?
Here, it is right to observe, that the sufferings of the army did not want for an interpreter. He knew that his soldiers asked one another ”for what purpose they had been marched eight hundred leagues, to find nothing but muddy water, famine, and bivouacs on heaps of ashes: for such were all their conquests; they possessed nothing but what they had brought with them. If it was necessary to drag every thing along with them, to transport France into Russia, wherefore had they been required to quit France?”
Several of the generals themselves began to tire: some stopped on account of illness, others murmured: ”What better were they for his having enriched them, if they could not enjoy their wealth? for his having given them wives, if he made them widowers by a continual absence? for his having bestowed on them palaces, if he forced them to lie abroad incessantly on the bare ground, amidst frost and snow?--for every year the hards.h.i.+ps of war increased; fresh conquests compelling them to go farther in quest of fresh enemies. Europe would soon be insufficient: he would want Asia too.”
Several, especially of our allies, ventured to think, that we should lose less by a defeat than by a victory: a reverse would perhaps disgust the emperor with the war; at least it would place him more upon a level with us.
The generals who were nearest to Napoleon were astonished at his confidence. ”Had he not already in some measure quitted Europe? and if Europe were to rise against him, he would have no subjects but his soldiers, no empire but his camp: even then, one-third of them, being foreigners, would become his enemies.” Such was the language of Murat and Berthier. Napoleon, irritated at finding in his two chief lieutenants, and at the very moment of action, the same uneasiness with which he was himself struggling, vented his ill-humour against them: he overwhelmed them with it, as frequently happens in the household of princes, who are least sparing of those of whose attachment they are most sure; an inconvenience attending favour, which counterbalances its advantages.
After his spleen had vented itself in a torrent of words, he summoned them back; but this time, dissatisfied with such treatment, they kept aloof. The emperor then made amends for his hastiness by caresses, calling Berthier ”his wife,” and his fits of pa.s.sion, ”domestic bickerings.”
Murat and Ney left him with minds full of sinister presentiments relative to this war, which at the first sight of the Russians they were themselves for carrying on with fury. For in them, whose character was entirely made up of action, inspiration, and first movements, there was no consistency: every thing was unexpected; the occasion hurried them away; impetuous, they varied in language, plans, and dispositions, at every step, just as the ground is incessantly varying in appearance.
CHAP. VI.
About the same time, Rapp and Lauriston presented themselves: the latter came from Petersburgh. Napoleon did not ask a single question of this officer on his arrival from the capital of his enemy. Aware, no doubt, of the frankness of his former aid-de-camp, and of his opinion respecting this war, he was apprehensive of receiving from him unsatisfactory intelligence.
But Rapp, who had followed our track, could not keep silence. ”The army had advanced but a hundred leagues from the Niemen, and already it was completely altered. The officers who travelled post from the interior of France to join it, arrived dismayed. They could not conceive how it happened that a victorious army, without fighting, should leave behind it more wrecks than a defeated one.
”They had met with all who were marching to join the ma.s.ses, and all who had separated from them; lastly, all who were not excited either by the presence of the chiefs, or by example, or by the war. The appearance of each troop, according to its distance from home, excited hope, anxiety, or pity.
”In Germany, as far as the Oder, where a thousand objects were incessantly reminding them of France, these recruits imagined themselves not wholly cut off from it; they were ardent and jovial; but beyond the Oder, in Poland, where the soil, productions, inhabitants, costumes, manners, in short every thing, to the very habitations, wore a foreign aspect; where nothing, in short, resembled a country which they regretted; they began to be dismayed at the distance they had traversed, and their faces already bore the stamp of fatigue and la.s.situde.
”By what an extraordinary distance must they then be separated from France, since they had already reached unknown regions, where every thing presented to them an aspect of such gloomy novelty! how many steps they had taken, and how many more they had yet to take! The very idea of return was disheartening; and yet they were obliged to march on, to keep constantly marching! and they complained that ever since they left France, their fatigues had been gradually increasing, and the means of supporting them continually diminis.h.i.+ng.”
The truth is, that wine first failed them, then beer, even spirits; and, lastly, they were reduced to water, which in its turn was frequently wanting. The same was the case with dry provisions, and also with every necessary of life; and in this gradual dest.i.tution, depression of mind kept pace with the successive debilitation of the body. Agitated by a vague inquietude, they marched on amid the dull uniformity of the vast and silent forests of dark pines. They crept along these large trees, bare and stripped to their very tops, and were affrighted at their weakness amid this immensity. They then conceived gloomy and absurd notions respecting the geography of these unknown regions; and, overcome by a secret horror, they hesitated to penetrate farther into such vast deserts.