1812:
The March on Moscow

Review

Reviewed by Ken Guest, UK

Author: Paul Britten Austin

Pub 1993, 432 pages, 16 plates, 5 maps. Greenhill Books

Napoleon's disastrous campaign of 1812 has been the subject of much study in the past. Unusually Paul Britten Austin's book concentrates not upon the whole campaign, but on the eighty five day advance from crossing the River Niemen to arrival in Moscow.

Drawing upon eyewitness accounts from more than a hundred diaries and memoirs, the author offers a fascinating insight to Napoleonic campaigning on the grand scale. The reader is drawn along in the footsteps of the main French Army, day by day, as it makes its weary way towards Moscow.

Whilst in the beginning, Napoleon appeared optimistic the dangers of a prolonged campaign were to be seen all around him: from the thousands of horses dying daily (10,000 by day two of the campaign), to the early decimation of his infantry by the combined evils of dysentery, typhus and agues. All of which were exacerbated by acute shortages of everything from blankets to food.

Subaltern Eduard Ruppel, 2nd Westphalian Hussars, had grave misgivings about the campaign when, early on, his men were reduced to using gunpowder instead of salt to flavour their meal of horse meat, only worse could follow and the number of suicides to escape the rigours of the march mounted daily.

Thousands became victim of marauding Cossacks or hostile peasants as they attempted live off the land by plunder alone, others fell in action. At Smolensk Lance Corporal Heinemann was almost killed by Cossack lancers when his voltigeur company became cut off. Knocked from his feet and covered by other wounded men when "a lance-thrust, passing through the chest and back of a comrade who was laying on top of me, strikes my skull a glancing blow and rips open the skin".

Westphalian Hussar's dressed in their blue uniforms arrived in the knick of time and, grievously wounded, Heineman survived, just. Meanwhile a more fortunate Carabinier, Sergeant Bertrand, mourned both the loss of a friend and the red pom-pom shot off the top of his shako.

Napoleon was a showman who knew his audience, the Grand Armée, intimately. Despite the rigours of the march he maintained their moral with well timed praise, or, better still, promotions. In the aftermath of the battle of Smolensk, Lieutenant Brandt of the Vistula Legion, found himself parading before Napoleon when the great man reached out and drew him forward by a button on his coat. He then demonstrated his photographic memory for faces by recalling the last parade on which Brandt had been passed over for promotion, "This one should have been promoted Captain already, in Paris. Make him Captain-adjutant-major!" No wonder his men adored him.

Napoleon had betrayed unspoken reservations about the possible outcome when, as early as 24th of July, he sent a decree to Paris for the early call up of the 1813 conscripts. Perhaps, like many of his officers, he had already begun to suspect that few of the 650,000 men marching with him to Moscow would survive the campaign.

When the main Russian army finally turned to face the French at Borodino it was not the victory Napoleon anticipated. Lieutenant Heinrich Vossier, with the Prussian Prince Louis' Hussars, graphically captured the mood of the hour when he wrote after the battle that "...instead of rejoicing, it filled us with grim foreboding".

Moscow was not surrendered, merely abandoned. At first Napoleon found it hard to accept the evidence, once forced to concede strategic defeat there was nothing to do but lead the dilapidated remnants of the Grand Armée back to France. The retreat, with the added horrors of the Russian winter, was even more catastrophic than the advance, but that is another story not covered in this book.

Paul Britten Austin's 1812, is the result of twenty years re-search. Almost four fifths of the eyewitness descriptions, often written within hours of the events themselves, have not previous-ly appeared in English. It is highly recommended as essential reading for anyone interested in Napoleonic history.

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