Diary of a Napoleonic Footsoldier Read Free Page A

had to be obtained on the spot. The local population was compelled to furnish shelter (through billeting) and food, through requisitions by units detached for that purpose by the commander. Additional food—and liquor, of course—was to be purchased either from local traders or from sutlers (canteen keepers) who accompanied the regiments; many sutlers were women, frequently the wives of professional noncoms and soldiers. In Central and Western Europe, areas that were densely populated and, on the whole, quite prosperous, with an elaborate network of traders and stores, this “system” worked fairly well. Especially when it was supplemented by marauding—forbidden, of course, but tolerated as long as it was not excessive. In this respect, the Württemberg soldiers had a particularly bad record, as Walter illustrates.
    Inherited by the Revolution and Napoleon from the practice of the standing armies introduced after the Thirty Years’ War, this “system” would not work as expected in areas too poor to have any kind of surplus, or emptied of their population and of everything edible and movable. This, however, was precisely the situation that the Grande Armée encountered when it crossed into Russian Poland and from there into Russia proper. Russian Poland was poor, with a sparse population and an extremely backward agrarian economy that provided barely enough sustenance to avoid permanent hunger. Trade networks were primitive,too—peddlers and small village stores (mostly operated by Jews) carried only a few items of necessity and shoddy luxuries. Conditions in Russia were even worse. The Byelorussian provinces that lay between eastern Poland and Moscow were among the poorest in European Russia: swamps, forests, and a few tilled fields bearing a poor crop of rye. Here, too, there were a meager number of inhabitants, settled in widely scattered villages; manor houses and noble estates were also few and far between, and far from magnificent. The situation was made worse for the Grande Armée by two developments: first, scare propaganda and direct orders of the Russian authorities had resulted in the mass flight of the local population; second, the Russian armies, as they retreated, destroyed everything that could be remotely of use to the enemy—crops, stores of grain, fodder, and hay, cattle, and even peasant dwellings (setting whole villages afire). That is why, from the start of the campaign, Napoleon’s troops lacked food supplies; the situation grew worse as the Grande Armée advanced deeper into the empire, and it became tragically catastrophic on the retreat. Whatever supplies could be secured by headquarters went first to the French troops, in particular the Imperial Guard; soldiers of the vassal states were left to their own devices.
    Napoleon’s attempt at subduing Russia ended in tragic disaster, signaling the beginning of his doom. Of about 600,000 men who crossed into Russia in June 1812, about 140,000 retreated from Moscow, and barely 25,000 recrossed the border in December 1812. The disastertriggered the uprising for national liberation in Prussia and the renewal of an all-European coalition against France. Alexander I’s decision—against the advice of his commander in chief, Marshal M. I. Kutuzov—to continue fighting after the expulsion of the Grande Armée from his realm, eventually led to Napoleon’s defeat and exile, the entrance of the allies into Paris, and the return of King Louis XVIII to the throne of his ancestors. Little wonder that the campaign of Russia appeared to be proof of Napoleon’s
hybris
and, as in Greek classical tragedy, conjured up his own
nemesis.
In Victor Hugo’s words,
on était conquis par sa conquête
(one was conquered by one’s conquest).
    The tragic end of Napoleon’s epic has generated an immense literature, for it offered the dramatic contrast of almost superhuman triumphs and glory followed by an abyss of misery and wretchedness. It is the image of the