Surviving Napoleons retreat from Russia
Napoleon Bonaparte is recognized as being one of the best army commanders of all time, but he is also seen as making one of the biggest mistakes in military history. During the Napoleonic wars, which ran from 18 May 1803 until 20 Nov 1815, France’s military power was greater than any of its enemies alone, but its greatest threat was Britain who managed to stop any chance of French invasion with her powerful navy.
At the time, France had angered many nations across Europe with its aggressive territorial expansions and occupation of foreign countries, so it wasn’t long until they banded together to stop Napoleon. Before his crushing defeat at the battle of Waterloo on Sunday, 18 June 1815 where Napoleon’s army was destroyed, he made a series of decisions to swing the war in his favor, and one of them was to invade Russia.
The plan was to put enough pressure on Russia to stop them from trading with and supporting the British, but to do this Napoleon needed to show them he was serious, so he produced an army of 685,000 men and marched towards Moscow.
Over the next few months, he would lose tens of thousands of men to disease during the summer, and by the time winter came, his men were already starving. There were several battles along the way, with the battle of Borodino being the single bloodiest day with 72,000 casualties, but nature would turn out to be the biggest killer.
Napoleon was mostly successful with his advance in terms of military confrontations, but as the Russian army retreated, it took or destroyed all crop fields and poisoned wells by putting dead animals in them. Because the country is so big it was difficult to get supplies in from friendly territories, and the ones that were sent usually never made it due to the various guerilla groups that had formed.
After Napoleon took Moscow on June 24, 1812, he contacted the Russian emperor and tried to make a deal, which the Russians refused. With no more supplies and winter closing in fast, Napoleon had no choice but to retreat back to France after he was turned down on multiple treaties.
At this point, the French army numbered around 500,000 men, after losing close to 100,000 men in battle and the rest to disease and various other nasty conditions, mostly dysentery. On 14 October, Napoleon decided to leave the capital and try to make it back to France before winter, but this is when things would really start to get bad.
The Russians took everything they could and destroyed the rest for Napoleon’s entire advance, but after taking the city of Moscow they were surprised to find it full of food, something his army made short work of. When Napoleon’s army left Moscow his men were already close to running out of food, because most of the supply wagons were being attacked by militia groups, leaving Napoleon’s Grande Armée to survive on the little they had left from Moscow.
The army would have been on the very last of their rations, which consisted mostly of hard tack and some salt pork if they were lucky, but by the time they left, most of his soldiers were completely out of food. The walk back to France from Moscow was around 1,500 miles, but Napoleon only needed to make it back to Poland before he would be able to find supplies, a journey which was still over 600 miles.
Over the next few weeks, his men began to die at a rapid pace, with several thousand each day during the worst part of the march, with the occasional battle thrown in by the Russian army sent to chase them out of the country. The temperature would have been as low as -20 °C during the nights, and not much better during the day, but to make matters worse they had no choice but to march as fast as they could to avoid the pursuing Russian army.
At the end of November, Napoleon found himself at the Berezina River in Belarus, at which point his advisors managed to convince him to ride ahead back to France to protect his position as emperor and to raise more troops. He did so and left his army to march back to France without him, something they managed to achieve on 14 December 1812.
The original Grande Armée consisted of 685,000 men, but by the time they crossed the Berezina River in Belarus, there was only 27,000 left. Around 100,000 were captured by the Russians, and around 150,000 were killed during combat, with the rest dying during the summer to various conditions or from starvation or freezing to death during the later months of the campaign.
The ability to survive as one of his soldiers would be entirely down to luck, and what you would be willing to do as a human being. There have been many claims of cannibalism during the last couple of months, and pieces of evidence have been found to support this, but after marching hundreds of miles with nothing to eat and being chased by angry Russians, I’d be surprised if the claims weren’t true.
