VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF NAPOLEON’S MOSCOW CAMPAIGN*

IRENE COLLINS

University of Liverpool

In a poem written by Walter de la Mare in 1906, Napoleon communes with his army:

What is the world, 0 Soldiers? It is I . I this incessant snow, This northern sky. Soldiers, this solitude Through which we go Is I.

As an example of egotism, Napoleon’s decision to invade Russia in 1812 with more than 600,000 men has had few parallels in history. Many people afterwards were fascinated by the sheer effrontery of it. Pushkin, for instance, writing his famous story of The Queen of Spades in 1833, made the hero Hermann into a ludicrous but terrifying copy of Napoleon; a ruthless army officer who pushed his luck to the extent of trying to conquer Providence with a single throw of the dice. Dostoyevsky, writing Crime and Punishment in the 1860s, believed that the very callousness with which Napoleon conducted the Moscow Campaign was in itself regarded by some men as a sign of greatness. He made Raskolnikov, the young student ‘hero’ of the novel, murder a grasping old woman in order to prove to himself that he was like Napoleon: that he too was an extraordinary human being who had the courage to kill. Raskolnikov’s sister Dunya could not imagine how a squalid crime could be equated with Napoleon’s colossal enterprise, but the examining magistrate was more perceptive. He had dealt with many young men whose frustrations had led them to violence. ‘Who, in Russia, does nof imagine himself to be a Napoleon nowadays?’ he shrugged.

Dostoyevsky’s father had been a medical student in Moscow in 1812 when thousands of men were brought in wounded from the battle of Borodino. He was suddenly torn from his studies to help with the emergency amputations which were such a startling feature of the Napoleonic Wars. He often talked to his children afterwards about ‘all that bloodshed’, but by the time his son was writing novels Napoleon was remembered not as a killer but as a hero. The son had meditated long on criminal psychology, and had come to the conclusion that bloodshed and heroism could easily be confused in a fevered mind.l

Fortunately, more ordinary mortals than Raskolnikov have usually learned from 1812 the more prosaic lesson that unbridled ambition can bring its own defeat. ‘How far is St Helena from the Beresina ice?’ asks the

*This presidential lecture was given at the Historical Association annual conference at Canterbury, April 1985. I D. Arban, ‘Dostoievski et NapolCon’, Europe: Revue rnensuelle. 480-481 (Paris, 1969). pp. 184-190.

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40 NAPOLEON’S MOSCOW CAMPAIGN

child in Rudyard Kipling’s Rewards and Fairies. ‘Not so far for gentlemen who never took advice,’ the poet answers. Napoleon’s diplomatic officials had long been warning him against invading Russia, but he would take no notice.

Few men have ever doubted that Napoleon’s defeat in Russia was the beginning of the end for him: yet oddly enough the Romantic poets, who delighted in fallen heroes, paid little attention to it.* Only Robert Southey penned from Keswick in 1813 the deplorable verses which begin:

The Emperor Nap he would set off On a summer excursion to Moscow; The fields were green, and the sky was blue, Morbleu Parbleu What a pleasant excursion to Moscow

Southey’s doggerel was chiefly aimed at deriding the Whigs for their lack of faith in the Allied war effort:

The Emperor Nap he talk’d so big That he frighten’d Mr Roscoe. John Bull, he cries, if you’ll be wise, Ask the Emperor Nap if he will please To grant you peace upon your knees, Because he is going to Moscow He’ll make all the Poles come out of their holes, And beat the Russians and eat the Prussians, For the fields are green, and the sky is blue, Morbleu Parbleu And he’ll certainly march to Moscow And Counsellor Brougham was all in a fume At the thought of the march to Moscow: The Russians, he said, they were undone, And the great Fee-Faw-Fum Would presently come With a hop, step, and jump unto London.

However, after much more in this vein, the verses continue with a useful reminder that Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was not one long triumphal march. The Russians did indeed withdraw very rapidly until they came within 75 miles of Moscow, but tenacious rearguard actions, especially around Smolensk, played havoc with the advancing Grand Army, and when the Russians finally did take a stand, at Borodino. the French suffered between thirty and fifty thousand casualties in one day.

... the Russians stoutly they turned-to Upon the road to Moscow. Nap had to fight his way all through; They could fight, though they could not parlez-vous, But the fields were green, and the sky was blue, Morbleu Parbleu And so he got to Moscow.

‘John Bailey in ‘Napoleon in Poetry’, The Conrinuity of Lerters (edited by J.O. Bailey. Oxford. 1923), pp. 218-41 expressed surprise at how few major poets have written about Napoleon. Tennyson’s poem on the Moscow Campaign in the Trinity Norebook remains unpublished. ’ As was to be expected, many lesser poets than Southey wrote satirical verses on the occasion: see John Ashton, English Caricatiire and Satire on Napoleon I(1888). pp. 325-45.

IRENE COLLINS 41 But although Southey had thus hit upon one aspect of the truth, he was wide of the mark when he assumed that the burning of Moscow was the main cause of Napoleon’s retreat. In fact the famous fire had no strategic importance. A quarter of the city, including the Kremlin, remained intact and gave plenty of shelter for Napoleon’s depleted army of 95,000 men. In November, French staff experts reported that the salvaged resources of the Russian capital would suffice to feed the troops for another six months should the Emperor choose to winter there. The decision to retreat was taken because the auxiliary forces, wintering in the countryside, would have little chance of survival, and because Napoleon had learned that the Russian army, away to the south, had gathered reinforcements and might launch a counter-attack before the spring could bring him relief from France.

Of the horrors of the retreat we learn little from Southey, who concentrates on denouncing Napoleon for deserting his army after the crossing of the Beresina. From Napoleon’s point of view he had succeeded in getting the remainder of his troops out of Russia and it was imperative that he himself should return to France as rapidly as possible, for he had just learned that the Parisians believed him to be dead in Russia and that in consequence a Republican coup had been only narrowly averted. Nevertheless, almost every man in England believed that Napoleon’s hurried departure proved him to be a cad. When, having abandoned one army, he proceeded at once to collect another to fight in Germany, Southey predicted that he would soon be consigned to Hell: and

... there he must stay for a very long day, For from thence there is no stealing away As there was on the road from Moscow.

In 1821 the news of Napoleon’s death on St Helena produced a flurry of poems inspired by Manzoni’s ode I1 Cinque Maggio, which recalled the wonders of Napoleon’s career and left posterity to judge them.4 Italians of the Risorgimento period were on the whole grateful to Napoleon as the first man to free them from the Austrians. Among their major poets, only Leopardi, whose zeal for Italian unity could not quench his inborn hatred of Napoleonic tyranny, realized that if Italians were ever again to free themselves from the Austrians they would need an army, and in some of his most beautiful lines Leopardi lamented the flower of Italy’s fighting youth which had perished among Napoleon’s conscripts in the Moscow Campaign .s

The French were for some time at a disadvantage in writing about Napoleon because the subject was a dangerous one under the restored Bourbons. Beranger took a delight in courting prosecution, but most other poets were more discreet. Victor Hugo began pouring forth glowing

Similar sentiments were expressed by Pushkin, Lermontov, Lamartine and a host of lesser writers. A rather different note was struck by Shelley in Lines written on hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon.

Leopardi, Sopra il monumenta di Dante, vv.134-166. For Leopardi’s views on Napoleon see Paul Hazard, ‘Leopardi et Napolton’, Revue des Etudes Napolioniennes (Paris, 1914), pp. 5-39, and for more general surveys of Italian literature on Napoleon, Eileen A. Millar, Napoleon in Italian Lirerature, 1796-1821 (Rome, 1977) and Maria Dell’Isola, Napolion dans fa poisie italienne a partir de 1821 (Paris. 1927).

42 NAPOLEON’S MOSCOW CAMPAIGN

praises of Napoleon as soon as press controls wavered,6 but after doing a great deal to encourage the growth of the Napoleonic Legend he was horrified when, in 1852, his adored Emperor’s very different nephew was raised to the throne of France. Hugo regarded this as the greatest humiliation which had ever befallen Napoleon: greater even than the defeat in Russia. His poem on this theme, entitled L’Expiation, begins with a powerful evocation of the horrors of the retreat from Moscow, the details of which are only too shockingly accurate; but by repeating several times the words ‘il neigeait’ the poem has done much to perpetuate the myth that the Grand Army was destroyed by the Russian winter. In fact Napoleon lost far more men as the result of heat on the way into Russia than he did from cold on the way out. For most of the invasion period, from June to September 1812, the weather was as hot as it had been in Egypt. A steaming miasma rose from the marshes; clouds of burning dust were trodden up from the unsurfaced roads; tens of thousands of men dropped out of the ranks and died of heat exhaustion or thirst; their corpses putrified within days and poisoned the air through which the remaining columns passed. On the subsequent retreat there were heavy snowstorms as the army approached Smolensk, but persistent cold weather did not set in until after the crossing of the Beresina, and by then the army had been reduced to a skeleton anyway. It is from this last stage of the retreat that most of the horror stories come. Frightful conditions were experienced by the men who dragged themselves through the wastes of Poland, starving and ill-clad; but unfeeling statistics tell us that even then the weather was only slightly colder than might have been expected for the time of year. In this the French were luckier than the Germans, who in 1941-42 encountered the worst weather known in Eastern Europe for almost a quarter of a millenium.’

Napoleon’s total losses in the Moscow Campaign were astronomical: 570,000 soldiers, 200,000 trained horses, and 1,100 cannon. Most families never knew where or how their menfolk perished. France waited for news and none arrived until shortly before the Emperor himself returned, dishevelled and unannounced, startling Marie Louise by his sudden arrival at thc Tuilcrics ncar to midnight on 10 Decemhcr 1812.8 To contemporaries there was something monstrously uncanny about the disappearance of so huge an army in the little-known spaces of Russia: a feeling which George Meredith recaptured many years later in one of the most perceptive poems about Napoleon in the English language:

Behind the Northern curtain-folds he passed. There heard hushed France her muffled heart beat fast Against the hollow ear-drum, where she sat In expectation’s darkness, until cracked The straining curtain-seams; a scaly light Was ghost above an army under shroud.

Ode a la C‘olonne, 1827; Lui, 1828. ’ J.M. Angervo. ‘How cold was 1812?’, The Times, 8 February 1961; R.H.S. Stolfi, ‘Chance in History: the Russian Winter of 1941-42’, Hisrory (1980). pp. 214-28. ’ The ‘29th Bulletin of the Grand Army’, composed by Napoleon at Molodetchna on 4-5 December, arrived in Paris shortly before he did, and was published on 16 December. I t admitted to the loss of the army but attrihuted the disaster to the weather.

IRENE COLLINS

His veterans and auxiliaries, The trained, the trustful, sanguine, proud, Princely, scarce numerable to recite, Titanic of all Titan tragedies; The Northern curtain took them, as the seas Gulp the great ships, to give back seamen white.9

43

Visions of impending doom are common in accounts of the Moscow Campaign; as, for instance, in Hazlitt’s description of the French troops leaving Moscow and seeing the snowclad horizon as ‘one vast winding sheet, in which nature was enveloping the whole army’.Ifl

Meanwhile, Russian losses, though nothing like those of Napoleon, were by no means light. It has been estimated that at least 150,000 soldiers died and twice as many more were disabled by wounds or frostbite.11 It is impossible to tell how many civilians were killed or wounded in the war zone. But at least Russia could rejoice in having expelled the invader, and could claim to have achieved the biggest single-handed victory over Napoleon. Pushkin, who was a schoolboy in 1812 and had learned then to denounce Napoleon as anti-Christ , later credited him with having given Russia ‘a destiny worthy of her size’.I2 Naturally the greatest encomiums were lavished upon Tsar Alexander I. When the rebuilding of Moscow after the fire was finished in 1834, a Triumphal Gate, modelled upon the Arch of Titus at Rome, was erected at one of the entrances to the city ‘to commemorate the deeds of Alexander I in 1812’.13 At the same time, a huge pillar of polished granite, claimed to be the largest monolith of modern times, was raised in the centre of Palace Square in St Petersburg and inscribed ‘Grateful Russia to Alexander I’.14

The gratitude was not entirely misplaced. It now seems uncertain as to whether Alexander intended his armies to adopt the retreating tactics which proved to be Napoleon’s undoing or whether these were the result of necessity, but at least Alexander was determined never again, after Tilsit, to make peace with the French whilst there was a corner of Russian soil to shelter him. He told the French envoy Narbonne, one month before

Meredith’s poem Napoleon is the second of his Odes in contribution to the song of French history. For appreciations of i t see John Bailey, op. cit., pp. 237-41, and G.M. Trevelyan, The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith (1906). pp. 213-17. ’” W. Hazlitt, Life of Napoleon (1852). iii, p. 13. On impressionistic writing by historians of the Napoleonic Wars, see Emma Clifford, ‘Thomas Hardy and the Historians’, Studies in Philosophy (1959). pp. 654-68. I ’ D.G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (1967), p. 853. l2 H. Troyat, Pushkin, his life and times (trans. 1951), pp. 62-63, 167-68. I 3 The Triumphal Gate was designed by the city’s chief architect 0.1. Bove and executed by Timofeyev and Vitali. I t originally stood at the cntrance to Moscow from St Petersburg and was used when the Tsar paid ceremonial visits to the city. It was dismantled in 1934, but the iron victory chariot surmounting the arch was preserved, along with the bas-reliefs, in the Don Monastery. In 1968 the Gate was rebuilt, using the original sculptures, on the Kotuzovskiy Prospekt, this being the road along which Napoleon’s troops entered Moscow. On the work of Bove, see A.J. Schmidt, ‘The Restoration of Moscow after 1812’, Slavic Review (1981), pp. 37-48. The Triumphal Gate is described in K. Berton, Moscow: an architectural history (1977). p. 161.

The monument was commissioned by Tsar Nicholas I and designed by Montferrand. The column of Finnish granite stands 30 metres high and weighs 6,000 tons. The task of quarrying it out of a cliff in the Gulf of Finland took three years. It was floated to St Petersburg on a specially constructed barge, after which 2.000 soldiers, aided by a complicated system of pulleys, were needed to raise the column into position. V. and J . Louis, Complete Guide to the Sovier Union (1976). p. 170.

44 NAPOLEON’S MOSCOW CAMPAIGN

Napoleon invaded, ‘If the Emperor Napoleon is determined on war, and if fortune does not shine on our just cause, he will have to go to the end of the earth to find peace’.” Though the French remained encamped for 35 days in the Holy City of Moscow, Alexander resolutely refused to negotiate for their withdrawal. It is true that when the demoralized French army left Moscow of its own accord, Alexander was thwarted of any desire he might have had to crush the enemy with one resounding blow. This was because the conduct of affairs had passed briefly into the hands of Field Marshal Prince Michael Kutuzov.

It is mainly to Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace, written in the 1860s, that we owe the apotheosis of Kutuzov, though he had received exaggerated honours in his own day. From all historical accounts Kutuzov emerges as an enigmatic if not distinctly unpleasant character. He was undoubtedly brave: his exploits in Catherine the Great’s Turkish Wars won praise from no less a person than the legendary Suvorov. He was also undoubtedly the most experienced of Russia’s generals: in 1812 he was 67 years old and had spent 52 summers campaigning. But he was also cunning, deceitful, lecherous and self-indulgent. The effigy on his tomb, by a Soviet sculptor Tomsky who is better know for dedicated workers and futuristic Lenins, reveals a cynical man of the world who would not have looked out of place in the dissipated court of the French ancien regime.Ih

Tsar Alexander hated Kutuzov because the sly old man had witnessed the young sovereign’s futile attempts to win glory in the campaign of 1805 and knew that he had fled from the battlefield of Austerlitz in tears. In 1812 Alexander had intended to keep Kutuzov out of the war. He had placed his main forces under the command of the Livonian, Baron Barclay de Tolly, who as Minister for War since 1810 had modernized the Russian army and given it a chance of withstanding any foe except the vast horde with which Napoleon invaded Russia. Alexander retained his faith in Barclay to the end of the war, but the latter’s continued retreats, first from Vilna, then from Vitebsk, and finally from Smolensk, angered Russia’s military officers and bewildered the population, and in August 1812 Alexander felt obliged to appoint over him the strangely popular Kutuzov, with orders to accept battle from Napoleon before the latter reached Moscow.

Kutuzov, however, had no wish to fight. After one day’s pounding match at Borodino, which ended in a draw, he allowed Napoleon to enter Moscow in return for a promise that Russian troops could retreat unhindered. He led them straight through Moscow and collected them to the east of the city, then swung round to the south-west to deter the French from leaving Russia along a more southerly route than the one by which they had invaded. He was not prepared to do much fighting even to attain this end, however. After a minor skirmish with the retreating French, he withdrew his forces, and the French could have taken the more southerly route had they wished. Napoleon hastened back to the more familiar road simply because he had been frightened by a band of Cossacks whilst out on reconnaissance, although by returning through the already devastated area he condemned his army to inevitable disaster. Kutuzov followed as slowly

Is General de Coulaincourt, Mdmoires (pocket edition, 1950), i , 154. l6 For the work of N.V. Tomsky and an illustration of the Kutuzov effigy see P. Baltun, Tomsky (Moscow, 1974). pp. 20-21.

IRENE COLLINS 45 as he decently could and deliberately failed to catch Napoleon’s army before it crossed the Beresina.

Whereas Barclay de Tolly had been denigrated as a coward and suspected of treachery for his retreats in the first half of the campaign (it was not until many years later that Pushkin paid tribute to him in a poem entitled The Commander), Kutuzov throughout his phlegmatic command of the second half of the campaign was treated by the entire rank and file of the Russian army with a respect amounting to adulation. His sloth was interpreted as cunning, his indecision as wisdom, his religious pretences as sincere, and his errors of judgment as profound subtleties. In St Petersburg he was credited with stiffening Alexander’s resolve not to negotiate for peace with Napoleon, and for this he received the unprecedented honour of becoming in his own lifetime the hero of a fable.” In the fable, written in the autumn of 1812 by the Russian author Krylov, the grey wolf steals into the sheepfold, but pandemonium breaks out and the wolfhounds are alerted. The wolf tries to parley with the master of the hounds, but the latter replies, ‘Neighbour, your coat is grey, but my head is white, and I have sworn to have no dealings with wolves until they are flayed’. Kutuzov actually read this story to his assembled troops, and at the words ‘my head is white’ he took off his hat and displayed his silvered hair, producing a burst of cheering. As a sustained piece of play-acting, Kutuzov’s behaviour during 1812 can scarcely be faulted.

Pushkin, meditating at the grave of Kutuzov in 1831, described him as ‘the mighty realm’s revered defender’, and honoured him for answering in his old age the call of the people to save them from their enemies.lX To Tolstoy, however, Kutuzov was more than the leader of patriotic Russia in her hour of need. He was the man who personified the finest characteristic of the Russian people: their acceptance of the will of Providence.

Tolstoy despised Napoleon, not because he was a Frenchman (there is more hatred of the Germans than of the French in War and Peace), but because he seemed to be a petty-minded individual, vain enough to believe that armies marched because he commanded them to do so, that victories were won because he devised them, and that the fate of nations could be changed by his decree. Almost every time he appears in War and Peace, Napoleon makes ridiculous gestures with his little white hand. Kutuzov, by contrast, is portrayed as the wise old man who knows that in war nothing happens according to plan. Reports are received and orders despatched, but no man can dictate the conduct of individuals in the heat of battle. To press home this point, Tolstoy gave Kutuzov an even more passive role than the one he actually played in real life. He denied him such credit as he deserved for choosing the site of the battle of Borodino; he ignored several successful initiatives taken by Kutuzov during the battle; and he insisted that the Russian flanking movement around Moscow resulted not from Kutuzov’s orders but from haphazard migration by the troops in search of pastures new. According to Tolstoy’s novel, the Russians won the campaign of 1812 because the French lost. It was obvious that Napoleon’s army would lose its impetus once it came to rest in Moscow. The retreat could be nothing other than a scramble to get out of Russia as quickly as

P. Ozouf, ‘Krylov et Napoleon’, Europe: Revue mensuelle, 480-481 (Paris, 1969), pp.

An English translation of Pushkin’s poem At Kutuzov’s Grave can be read in Walter Arndt, 201-4.

Pushkin threefold (1972), pp. 43-44.

46 NAPOLEON’S MOSCOW CAMPAIGN

possible. The outcome was a matter of common sense: in other words it was ordained by Providence.

Inevitably the novel was attacked by veterans who said that it did less than justice to the great patriotic war.” But Tolstoy had never intended to write a hymn of praise to a glorious feat of arms. To him all wars, even just wars to expel an aggressor, were mindless and tragic, and his excessive praise of Kutuzov was rooted in his belief that Kutuzov had ensured Russia’s deliverance from the French with the minimum number o f Russian lives lost.?“ His lack of enthusiasm for the Russian campaign of 1813 in Germany, during which Kutuzov died, is mirrored in a passage near to the end of War and Peace: ‘For the representative of the Russian people, after the enemy had been annihilated and Russia liberated and raised to the summit of her glory, there was nothing left for a Russian as a Russian to do. Nothing remained for the representative of the national war but to die. And Kutuzov died’.”

One of the greatest admirers of Tolstoy’s novels was Tchaikovsky.” The writer and the composer met each other enthusiastically in Moscow in 1876, but the relationship turned sour when Tchaikovsky discovered that Tolstoy was willing to condemn out of hand all music that contained no echoes of Russian folksong. Tchaikovsky, for his part, was equally dismissive of Tolstoy’s mystical works. Almost the only thing that the two men had in common was a passionate love of their native land. ‘I am Russian, Russian, Russian to the marrow of my bones’, Tchaikovsky once wrote. It is therefore surprising that he should have written disparagingly of his Festival Overture in E flat, entitled 1812. ‘It will be very loud and noisy,’ he predicted, ‘but I have written it without affection and enthusiasm and therefore there will be little merit in it.’ The words are at odds with the great energy he showed in making plans for the performance of the overture. He had been asked to write it for an Exhibition of Russian Art and Industry, planned to coincide in 1882 with the dedication of the Church of the Redeemer, which had been under construction in the Kremlin for more than 40 years to commemorate the deliverance of Russia from N a p ~ l e o n . ? ~ He finished the overture two years before it was required, and arranged, therefore, for it to be performed in the open air in front of the church. To increase the effect of the already large orchestra he wrote optional extra parts for bells, cannon, and military bands; and though these reinforcements were not used in the first performance they

“) A.V. Knowles, Tolstoy, the critical heritage (1978), pp. 19-24. ?‘I For Tolstoy’s attitude to war see R.F. Christian, Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’: a srudy (1962),

ppWar and Peace, book 4, part 4, chapter 11. 22 The relationship between the musician and the novelist is described by R. Felber in ‘Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy’, The Chesterian, 12 (1930), pp. 65-69 and by E. Garden in an article with the same title in Music and Letters (1974), pp. 307-16. 23The Church of the Redeemer, built in 1839-83, was designed by K.A. Thon in the pbeudo-Russian style which Nicholas 1 had decreed should be adopted for all Russian churches (in contrast to the classical influences seen in the work of Bove). Built in the design of a Greek cross, whose outer walls were encased in marble, and surmounted by five gilded domes, the enormous cost in labour and materials was met by public subscription. Alto-reliefs in the south facade were of saints on whose days the battles of 1812 had been fought. Inside the church, 177 marble tablets recorded imperial manifestoes of 1812 and the names of officers killed in the war. Capable of holding 10,000 people, the church overpowered other buildings in the Kremlin. It was blown up in 1934. Baedeker, Russia (1914). pp. 304-5; K . Berton, op. cit.. p. 169.

106-8.

IRENE COLLINS 47 have been employed with enormous success and improvised with equally enjoyable disaster on many occasions since. Indeed, although there has been much mockery of this famous piece of music, it has aroused in millions of concert goers the world over an exhilarating sense of participation in a great victory of right over wrong. I t has thus achieved a validity outside its immediate context, for to regard the outcome of the Moscow Campaign as a victory of right over wrong would be grossly to over-simplify the issues.

The overture begins softly with a hymn tune, ‘God save thy people’. As the music quickens, a Russian folksong is heard on the oboe, interspersed with fanfares and fragments of the Marseillaise, suggesting that a simple, peace-loving people is about to be attacked by a harsh military power. In the central section, sounds of battle are contrasted with a beautiful melody expressive of serene faith rising above threats of violence. As the guns roar, church bells begin to ring out (as they did indeed ring in Moscow after the battle of Borodino), and after a lengthy denouement the hymn ‘God preserve the Tsar’ is transformed into a victory march.

As an invocation of the year 1812, the most obvious error in this composition is the use of the Marseillaise, which Napoleon had banned shortly after his rise to power as too revolutionary in its connotations. The English writer Thomas Hardy was more accurate when in his epic drama The Dynasts he had Napoleon singing ‘Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre’ as he entered Russia. This old French song was a great favourite of Napoleon’s, though the words would scarcely seem to have been auspicious. It was presumably the devil-may-care tune of the chorus which Napoleon liked, and which seemed to Hardy to typify the reckless attitude with which Napoleon invaded Russia.24

Hardy’s epic-drama The Dynasts, written partly in prose and partly in verse, began to appear in 1904 when the author was wealthy enough to abandon writing novels.25 Publishers had found his novels increasingly unsuitable for serializing in family magazines, and there had been a big outcry over Jude the Obscure. Poetry, Hardy decided, would be a safer vehicle for his ideas than novels. ‘If Galileo had said in verse that the earth moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone,’ he remarked. To express his ideas fully he needed a massive subject, and he eventually chose the Napoleonic Wars because they were still vividly remembered in his native Wessex and because he believed that nineteenth-century historians had underestimated the part played by Britain. In Hardy’s view, the wars were basically a contest between France and Britain: even the Moscow Campaign was fought because Russia’s armies were ‘paid by British gold’, and if Napoleon had triumphed in Moscow he would have gone on, Hardy believed, to attack Britain’s mercantile Empire in India.2h 24 The Dynasrs, part 111, act I , scene 1. 2s For background to The Dynasts see especially H. Orel, Thomas Hardy’s Epic-Drama: a study of ‘The Dynasts (Kansas, 1963), and W.F. Wright, The Shaping of ‘The Dynasts’ (Nebraska, 1967). For Hardy’s ideas on history see R.J. White, Thomas Hardy and History (1974), and Emma Clifford, ‘The Impressionistic view of History in The Dynasts’. Modern Language Quarterly (1961). pp. 21-31. 2h Napoleon declares in The Dynusts, part I , act IV, scene 5 , ‘The English only are my enemies’, and in part 111, act I , scene i , as he begins the invasion of Russia: ‘...this long journey now just set a-trip/Is my choice way to India: and ‘tis there/That I shall next bombard the British rule./With Moscow taken, Russia prone and crushed,/To attain the Ganges is simplicity-/Auxiliaries from Tiflis backing me./Once ripped by a French sword, the scaffolding/Of English merchant-mastership in IndiWill fall a wreck ...’

48 NAPOLEON’S MOSCOW CAMPAIGN

Like Tolstoy, Hardy was an opponent of warfare. To him wars were part of the long history of human suffering which he found hard to reconcile with the existence of a caring God. In The Dynasts (a term which comes from the Magnificat and is more commonly translated ‘the Mighty’) Hardy tentatively put forward the view that man and nature are ruled by an almighty force which neither loves nor hates its creatures but which occasionally throws up an individual who believes that he, rather than the incomprehensible power above him, is born to rule; and this individual, in his efforts to fulfil what he believes to be his destiny, wreaks havoc in the world. Such a man was Napoleon. The havoc he caused was increased because he was surrounded by graceless rulers, among whom Hardy included British politicians, all of whom were equally unconcerned about the masses.

The chief characters in the drama are not, however, the Dynasts, but a group of spirits in outer space, who comment upon the scenes taking place in the world below. It is from their superior vantage point that we observe the Moscow Campaign, which occupies only nine scenes out of the total of 130 in the drama but could have stood alone as a complete exposition of all that Hardy has to say about the human predicament.?’ We see Napoleon, conscious in his more reflective moments that he is driven on by some force outside himself. ‘Why am I here?’ he ponders as his horse plunges into the Russian forests; and he answers himself.

‘By laws imposed on me inexorably History makes use of me to weave her web’.

For most of the time, however, Napoleon believes that he acts according to his own will, and within limits this is true: Hardy, unlike Tolstoy, never denied that armies move because commanders bid them do so. The armies, however, cannot understand the causes for which they fight, and so from the point of view of eternity the poor misguided creatures who compose and follow them appear other than human. At the start of the Moscow Campaign, Hardy describes ‘emerging from the wood.. .a shadowy amorphous thing in motion: the central or imperial column of Napoleon’s Grand Army for the invasion of Russia’; and on the retreat from Moscow ‘an object like a dun-piled caterpillar/Shuffling its length in painful heaves along’.

The only knowledge to which ordinary men and women attain is that of suffering, an experience shared by animals and enhanced by nature. Borodino is hardly a battle so much as ‘wholesale butchery’ in which the wounded entreat their comrades to run them through, horses are ‘maimed in myriads’, boys call on their mothers, and veterans blaspheme God and man. At the burning of Moscow, people yell as they are caught in the flames and ‘cocks crow, thinking it sunrise, ere they are burnt to death’. The retreat of the once Grand Army merges living with dying: the snow-filled sky seems to join the snow-covered ground, as the marching figures drop they ‘almost immediately become white grave mounds’. At the Beresina, round shot and canister pour upon soldiers and camp followers alike, and as the first bridge collapses the throngs of people

” The Dynasfs, part 111, act I , scene 1 and scenes 4-11 cover the Moscow Campaign. Scene 12. in which Napoleon arrives back at the Tuileries and discusses the campaign with Marie Louise, is also relevant.

IRENE COLLINS 49 crossing over it shriek as they fall into the icy river, ‘Giving in one brief cry their last wild word/On that mock life through which they’ve harlequined’. For the historian the great interest of Hardy’s drama is that it pre-figured, a decade before 1914, the facelessness of modern warfare. For the literary critic its great weakness is that it took an epic form, when Hardy could see no heroes to extol. The one ‘dynast’ who is known to have read it - Sir Winston Churchill - didn’t like it.2R

However, no sooner had epic proved to be intractable as a modern literary genre than it became the very stuff of cinema.?Y From the moment the movie camera was invented, one American director after another dreamed of bringing War and Peace to the cinema screen. Sam Spiegel claimed that he had been ‘ordained’ to do it. Alexander Korda and David Selznick made plans which came to nothing. Mike Todd seemed likely to be successful, but he had got as far as visiting Yugoslavia to find suitable locations when he was pipped at the post in 1956 by Paramount, with a three-and-a-half-hour film produced by Dino de Laurentiis and directed by King Vidor. With a cast of 60 speaking parts and 10,000 extras, the film cost two-and-a-half million pounds to make. Preparations were on a scale that would not have disgraced Napoleon. Five hundred skilled craftsmen worked for a month to recreate the ancient city of Moscow on an empty space outside Rome. Eighteen thousand soldiers hired from the Italian army and 2,000 horses volunteered by enthusiastic Italian stable owners were drilled for weeks by military experts on the plains of Tuscany. Twenty thousand weapons were manufactured, 100,000 moustaches and beards were simulated, and when the Italian button industry failed to supply enough fastenings for all the uniforms required, De Laurentiis responded to the crisis with Napoleonic panache and bought a button factory in Switzerland.

To cut down Tolstoy’s 600,000 words to manageable proportions the fictional story line was simplified: so simple did it become that the critic for the Daily Mirror styled it ‘the three loves of Natasha’. Most of the critics agreed that, apart from the duel scene, the first half of the film was a bore, and that the outstanding qualities of the production were to be found entirely in the second half, which dealt with Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. They would have agreed, it seems, with Thomas Hardy’s Spirit Sinister, that ‘War makes rattling good history, but Peace is poor reading’.3”

The film, like many paintings, portrayed the incongruous beauty of Napoleonic battle scenes, with their brightly coloured uniforms, glittering harnesses, and white puffs of cannon smoke. There were otherwise no special insights into the nature of the Moscow Campaign. Only King Vidor gained personal experience of the difficulties of handling thousands of troops, horses and guns over a large area of ground. How Napoleon did it

R.J. White, op. cit., p. 100. zy I am indebted to J.O. Thompson for bibliographical advice on film. For the American (1956) version of War and Peace the following sources were consulted: American Cinematographer, 37 (1956), pp. 732-34; Film Comment 4 (1973), pp. 16-19); Iskusstvo Kino, 1 1 (1958), pp. 123-26; Daily Express, 15 November 1956; Daily Herald, 15 November 1956; Daily Mirror, 16 November 1956; Daily Worker, 1 1 November 1956; Financial Times, 19 November 1956; New Statesman, 24 November 1956; New York Times, 26 April 1956; News Chronicle, 27 March 1956; Observer, 18 November 1956; Spectator, 23 November 1956; Sunday Times, 18 November 1956; Time and Tide, 26 November 1956; and studio publicity material. 3o The Dynasts, part I, act 11, scene 5 .

50 NAPOLEON’S MOSCOW CAMPAIGN

remained a mystery to him, and he seems never to have known that Napoleon’s failures in this respect accounted in large measure for the failure of his overall strategy. Vidor himself employed several assistant directors armed with walkie-talkies to convey his instructions to other assistants hidden in trees and bushes. The Battle of Borodino, which had taken a day to fight, took a fortnight to film. The Czech actor Herbert Lom, who gave a much admired performance as Napoleon, shivering convincingly in his greatcoat as he strode about the imitation Kremlin under the broiling Italian sun, remarked wryly to a newspaperman who asked him how he was enjoying the part, ‘They pay us well, and at the rate we’re going it’ll be months before I have to retreat from Moscow’. Lom was, in fact, an enthusiastic reader of Napoleonic history, and was interested to find that the role assigned to him in the film did not accord with his own conception of the mercurial Emperor.

A Russian film version of the novel, produced in 1967 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, was intended by its director Bondarchuk to be much more faithful to Tolstoy. This was to some extent achieved by a screenplay lasting eight hours. Even so War, whose title appeared first on the sceen in high three-dimensional letters, created a much bigger impression than Peace, which was announced a few seconds later in spindly characters lower right. The film was made at even more enormous cost than the American - the equivalent of 40 million pounds was estimated - and was intended to show that the Soviet film industry had arrived. The entire Soviet army was placed at Bondarchuk’s disposal for the war scenes, which were ear-splitting. In this, at any rate, they gave a true impression of the Battle of Borodino, which because of the heavy artillery used on both sides was the noisiest battle of the Napoleonic Wars. So much attention was paid to historical detail that the troops playing the parts of the Russian infantry were required to march at precisely 75 paces to the minute and those playing the part of the French at 120. So much effort deserved better success. Most critics thought that the film failed to achieve its main didactic purpose, which was to act as anti-war propaganda. Either the battle scenes were too enthralling, or they palled after the forty-thousandth casualty. Only the riderless horses, galloping frantically through the smoke, aroused pity and horror. Unlike the human actors, they could not have known that it was only make-believe..”

A quarter of a century earlier, the German army had advanced upon Moscow in the Second World War. The historian is strongly tempted to compare Napoleon with Hitler in regard to their Russian campaigns, for there were many similarities. Both men believed that they had little time left for waging war; both were allied with Russia before attacking her; both chose 22 June as the day on which to announce their intention of invading; both spoke of their campaign as being over in six weeks; both betrayed extraordinary ignorance of the Russian climate; both gave the impression 3 1 Information and opinion on the Russian film comes from R . Adler, A Year in the Dark (New York, 1969). pp. 131-33; R. Schickel. SecondSiglif (New York. 196.5). pp. 191-93; John Simon. Movies info Film (New York. 1971). pp. 38-41; Film and Filming, 15, viii (1969). pp. 60-63; Daily Mail, 18 October 1963, 22 January 1969; Daily Telegraph, 22 January 1969; Evening Sfandard, 23 January 1969; Morning Sfar, 13 January 1967, 22 January 1969; New Sociefy. 23 January 1969; New Stafesman, 24 January 1969; Newsweek, 6 May 1968; Observer Magazine, 9 February 1969; Observer Review, 26 January 1969; Specforor. 31 January 1969; Sunday Telegraph, 26 January 1969; Sunday Times. 26 January 1969; The Times. 23, 24 January 1969; Time Magazine, 3 May 1968.

IRENE COLLINS 51 that Moscow was ‘a station on the loopline to London’.3* They differed fundamentally, however; for Napoleon, though often betrayed by his temperament, had ideas which were rooted in the mainstream of European civilization, and it is to the credit of Prokoviev, who produced the greatest imaginative interpretation of 1812 to emerge from the Second World War, that he resisted the temptation to model Napoleon upon Hitler. Napoleon’s first appearance on stage in Prokoviev’s opera War and Peace is during the Battle of Borodino. Though he is savouring the thought of victory and of a magnificent entry into Moscow, he wants his greatness to be founded on clemency and wisdom. ‘From the heights of the Kremlin I shall give them just laws,’ he sings in a measured bass-baritone. ‘I shall show them the real meaning of civilization.’

Prokoviev had returned to Russia in 1936 after 18 years abroad. He was anxious to find life good in his native Russia, and to contribute to the development of Soviet culture by writing an opera on a Soviet theme, but he experienced some difficulty in finding a suitable libretto. Luckily Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which Prokoviev had read and loved during his boyhood in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg, was eventually blessed by Stalin as a work which revealed the strength of the ordinary Russian people.33 In the spring of 1941 Prokoviev, with the help of Mira Mendelson, began to draft out a libretto, but on a comparatively intimate scale. The German invasion in the summer seemed to give added relevance to the novel, and Prokoviev expanded the original conception. Between August 1941 and April 1942, a period of less than eight months, he wrote the piano score of a complete opera, comprising elements from both the fictional and historical parts of the novel. Over the next ten years, however, he was required to make revision after revision in attempts to satisfy the various Soviet committees which sat in judgment upon the work. He died in 1953 without ever seeing the complete opera perf0rmed.3~

Prokoviev’s main difficulty was to satisfy the various juries that sufficient prominence had been given to the part played by the spontaneous endeavours of the Russian people in the overthrow of Napoleon. He did his best by beginning the war scenes with peasant militias building the earthworks that strengthened the Russian position at Borodino. ‘Russia calls her sons to battle,’ the militiamen sing lustily; ‘The Mother Country’s summons is dear to our hearts.’ When the French enter Moscow they are set upon by women with pitchforks - a phenomenon which seems to have loomed large in the Soviet interpretation of 1812. During the French retreat from Moscow their prisoners are rescued not by Cossacks, as in Tolstoy’s novel, but by peasant guerrillas or partisans. And as a finale Prokoviev wrote a patriotic chorus: ‘The forces of 12 European nations burst into Russia. Hotter and hotter grew the people’s anger at the insult, sacred wrath burnt in them like fire. They rose in defence of the Russian land. The mighty club of a people’s war was raised with all its awesome, majestic force and went up, came down, and pounded the enemy until the

32 The phrase is used by Robert Cecil in Hiller’s Decision fo invade Russia in 1941 (1975), p. 78. 33 For the Soviet attitude to Tolstoy’s works see A . Fodor, Tolstoy and the Russians (Michigan, 1984). 34 For accounts of the making and revising of the opera see especially R. McAllister, ‘Prokoviev’s Tolstoy Epic’, Musical Times (1972), pp. 851-55, 1203-4; and M.H. Brown, ‘Prokoviev’s War and Peace’, Musical Quarterly (1977), pp. 297-326.

52 NAPOLEON’S MOSCOW CAMPAIGN

whole invasion force perished.’ Set to monumental block harmony, this was reported by the Musical Times to have made a stunning impact when the opera was produced in London in 1974.35

The part actually played by the Russian populace in 1812 is of course a much more complex matter. During the French invasion, Russian landowners were afraid that Napoleon would entice the peasants on to his side with decrees of emancipation from serfdom, and it was partly to keep a hold over their peasants that the landowners formed them into militias. The peasants on the whole responded loyally, but there were rebellions in some areas. Peasants were also reluctant in some cases to carry out the scorched earth policy, but they destroyed their crops rather than let them fall into the hands of the French as soon as it was discovered that the latter would not pay for what they got. The Partisan movement began whilst the French were in Moscow and gathered momentum during the retreat. The most successful bands were led by regular army officers and supported by light cavalry or by the dreaded Cossacks, but some purely peasant bands grew to enormous size, and Kutuzov tried to discourage their activities, which seemed to him less likely to damage the French than to produce a long-term breakdown in law and order.

Kutuzov would have been horrified, one imagines, at the role given to him in Prokoviev’s opera, in which he not only embodies the spirit of the Russian people, as he does in Tolstoy’s novel, but actually leads the people into battle. ‘Our Kutuzov came to the people,’ sings the chorus of militiamen. ‘He called the people together to beat the French.. .Kutuzov leads us, our own dear father leads us, he leads the Russian people forward in a just cause.’ It should be remembered, however, that when Prokoviev wrote these words Stalin himself had called upon the spirit of Kutuzov to lead the Russian people into battle. During the early months of the Nazi onslaught, Stalin’s radio appeals were not for the defence of communism against fascism but for the defence of Mother Russia against an alien foe. The people were urged to remember former patriotic leaders, among them Prince Michael Kutuzov. The wily old diplomat of the court of Catherine the Great thus rose again in the unlikely role of hero of the Soviet people.

When the Germans had been pushed back over the old Polish frontier the Soviet sculptor N.V. Tomsky began work on a statue of Kutuzov, originally intended to stand on the site of the Battle of Borodino. Plans for the size and composition of the statue were gradually extended, so that the work took over 20 years to complete. When the statue was eventually erected in Moscow itself, to honour in 1973 the 160th anniversary of Kutuzov’s death, the sculptor claimed to have done lengthy research into the history of 1812 in order to produce an authentic representation.36 It is

3s Musical Times (1974), p. 322. In recent productions of the opera, the Epigraph has been substituted for the Overture. Some of the words are actually to be found in Tolstoy’s novel (see War and Peace, book 4, part 111, chapter 1). 36 An interview with Tomsky was reported in Iskussrvo (1973), no. 1 1 , pp. 15-18. 1 am grateful to A.V. Knowles for drawing my attention to this and other sources of information on Tomsky. Other statues of Kutuzov (who was given the title of Prince of Smolensk before being deprived of his command by Alexander) are to be found in Smolensk, where a bust of the Field Marshal was unveiled in 1912 and a standing figure designed by Motorilov in 1954. Smolensk also possesses a memorial to the fighting which took place there under Barclay during the French invasion: a huge cast-iron pyramid represents Russia (in the form of a rock) attacked by France (represented by a male figure in the dress of ancient Gaul) and defended by two Russian armies (represented by two eagles). This memorial was erected in 1841.

IRENE COLLINS 53 an equestrian statue, with the horse shown glancing to the left, since there was a popular tradition that it was the horse’s instinct which led Kutuzov to carry out the famous flanking movement to the left of Moscow. On three sides of the pedestal stand the generals and guerrilla fighters of 1812, peasants carrying pitchforks, and at one corner a hefty peasant woman (mercifully unarmed). It is by any standards a superb piece of sculpture and a remarkable testimony to the continuing aesthetic appeal of 1812.

It was Napoleon himself who first viewed his Moscow Campaign in an aesthetic light, for as he sped back to France through the snows of Poland, talking incessantly to his companion Caulaincourt about the vagaries of fortune, he coined the famous apothegm, ‘From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step’. In 1912 the Russian historian Tar16 wondered what Napoleon could have found ridiculous in the loss of more than half a million men. Today, when the word sublime is seldom used outside a religious context, we may wonder what he meant by that also. In the course of the Enlightenment, however, Edmund Burke had written, in his Philosophical Enquiry into our ideas on the Sublime and the Beautiful, ‘Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite ideas of pain and danger, whatever is in any sort terrible, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.’ The Moscow Campaign was all of those things.