Free B009YBU18W EBOK by Adam Zamoyski

by men desperate for firewood, a frequent occurrence.

    ‘Billets – understand? Billets! Not a bivouac, not a camp, but real billets – a palace, paradise!’ noted Chicherin in his diary on 11 November, the first time they had not camped in the snow for two weeks.In his drawing of the scene one can see him and his brother officers pressed like sardines on the floor, with the luckiest ones on the shelf above the stove – the warmest place.

    The pursuing Russians were under severe strain as well, both physical and psychological, and iron discipline had to be applied.This grim watercolour in Chicherin’s diary records the execution of a Russian officer.

    A dying man being stripped by his fellows, a watercolour by an unidentified participant.

    This detail from a watercolour by an anonymous French soldier shows men cutting up a horse for meat.

    ‘The sight of these people so numbs the heart that in the end one ceases to feel anything at all,’ Chicherin noted over this drawing of a group of stragglers seeking a remnant of warmth among the corpses and embers of a burnt-out cottage.

    Many witnesses noted that as they froze to death, men looked haggard and even appeared to be drunk. Detail of a lithograph by Faber du Faur.

    Remnants of the Grande Armée drifting into Vilna on 9 December, sketched by Jan Krzysztof Damel. Note the variety of bizarre raiments, including liturgical vestments, with which they have supplemented their uniforms.

    Charles de Flahault, one of Napoleon’s aides-de-camp, carrying his servant David up the slope of Ponary outside Vilna, assisted by his secretary Boileau.Alerted to the fact that David had collapsed at the foot of the slope, Flahault had gone back to fetch him.By the time he arrived, the man’s boots had been stolen by a needy soldier.David could only wail: ‘ Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! ’ as he was carried up, and died before they reached the top. A painting by Horace Vernet, executed under Flahault’s direction.

    ‘I cannot render the horror that overpowered me this morning,’ Chicherin wrote in his diary on 20 December, after visiting one of the improvised prisons in Vilna.Returning to his billet, he painted this watercolour, in which one can see corpses being thrown out of the ‘hospital’ windows, and others being carted away on a sledge, while emaciated French soldiers fight amongst themselves or wander aimlessly, wearing, in the case of one of them, little more than a horse-blanket.

Sources
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    1812 god v Vospominaniakh, Perepiske i Raskazakh Sovremennikov , Voenizdat, Moscow 2001
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