of making some money on the side through the more or less legitimate acquisition of precious items. Looting as such was not countenanced, but in the course of campaigns in distant lands it was possible to purchase things at knockdown prices and bring them home without paying any duties. Valuables found on the field of battle or in the enemy camp were fair game, as was anything that might be left masterless through the fortunes of war. As this great campaign to end all campaigns was being prepared, a good many felt that it would be their last opportunity to get rich.
There were also a great many for whom war furnished the prospect of adventure, the opportunity to distinguish themselves or a last chance to share in the glory. ‘At last I was going to find myself at some of those battles which are destined to change the course of history; I was going to fight under the eyes of so many of the illustrious warriors who filled the world with their renown, Murat, Ney, Davout, Prince Eugène, and so many others, and under the eyes of the greatest of them all, under the eyes of Napoleon!’ remembered a Creole from Saint-Domingue. ‘There I would have my chance to distinguish myself, there I would be able to obtain decorations and promotion of which I would be proud and which I could hold up to the world! Before a year was out I would be chef de bataillon; I would be colonel by the end of the campaign, and after that …’27
Most of Napoleon’s entourage, beginning with Caulaincourt and including close friends and collaborators such as General Duroc, repeatedly beseeched him not to go down the road of war. Many of them warned that Russia could not be defeated in conventional ways. Napoleon had read the accounts of Charles XII’s disastrous foray into Russia almost exactly a hundred years before, beginning with the famous one by Voltaire, who wrote that ‘there is no ruler who, in reading the life of Charles XII, should not be cured of the folly of conquest’. Napoleon dismissed such arguments with annoyance. ‘His capitals are as accessible as any others, and when I have the capitals, I hold everything,’ he snapped at one of his diplomats who had been pointing out the perils of going to war with Alexander. But he had a habit of making statements he did not believe in, as though he were trying to convince himself by convincing others. And the special nature of the forthcoming campaign was not lost on him. ‘If people think that I am going to make war in the old way, they are very much mistaken,’ he is alleged to have declared.28
He certainly prepared himself for the forthcoming campaign as he had prepared for no other. For one thing, realising that he would be operating in detached corps at some distance from each other, he decided to make an example of General Dupont, whose capitulation at Bailén had been such a humiliation. Before setting off for Russia, Napoleon had him retried and given a harsher sentence.29
He had officers who spoke German and Polish or Russian attached to every unit, while others were made to take Russian lessons so they could interrogate prisoners and gather intelligence, and he set up a network of intelligence agents fanning out from Poland into Russia’s western provinces. He ordered his librarian to supply him with books on the Russian army, and on the topography of Lithuania and Russia, which he studied, paying particular attention to roads, rivers, bogs and forests. As early as April 1811 he commissioned the Dépot de la Guerre to engrave a series of large-scale maps of western Russia.30
Not the least daunting aspect of this campaign was that the enemy frontier, on the river Niemen, lay about 1500 kilometres from Paris. Thus a length of time and a huge effort were required to move up men and supplies before the campaign could begin. And the Russian capital cities of St Petersburg and Moscow lay another 650 and 950 kilometres respectively beyond that. An army marching from Paris to Moscow without fighting would take up to six months to cover the distance. To make matters worse, the last three hundred of the 1500 kilometres up to the Niemen lay through poor, infertile areas of Prussia and Poland, while the first five hundred of the next 950 kilometres were in even less abundant country. It was, moreover, criss-crossed by rivers, mottled with bogs and forests, and contained large areas of wilderness.
Napoleon’s tactic had always been to move fast, concentrate large numbers of men at the right point before the enemy knew what was happening, knock out their army with a decisive blow and force them to make peace on his terms. But he would have to work hard to achieve it in this theatre of operations.
His armies had in the past been able to move fast because they travelled light, a tradition originally forged of necessity. The French revolutionary armies of the 1790s had been hurriedly improvised and had not possessed a proper commissariat. Since they regarded enemy territory as belonging to tyrants and enemies of the revolution, they lived by looting. With time, they began to buy what they needed, but as they paid with largely worthless paper assignats, it amounted to the same thing. Napoleon disapproved of looting, and brought in administrators who would provide for the army’s needs in a more methodical way. They bought what was needed, paying in real money or receipts that were generally honoured, when peace had been signed, by the government of the defeated country. But the fact remained that French armies lived off the fat of the land they moved through. And as they moved fast, they did not stay long enough to exhaust its resources.
Whenever the administrative machine broke down or failed to provide the necessities, the French reverted to the old system of ‘la maraude’. Every so often a company or similar unit would send out eight or ten men under a corporal into the areas alongside the line of march. These little bands would fan out through local villages and farms, paying for what they took, and rejoin their company a few days later, their carts laden with grain, eggs, chickens, vegetables and other victuals, driving before them a small herd of cattle. From time to time the main force would halt in order to allow the foraging parties to catch up.
As the French armies were conscripted, a company usually contained a baker, a cobbler, a tailor’s apprentice, a cooper, a blacksmith and a wheelwright, so not only could they bake their own bread, but also, given an occasional purchase of cloth, leather, iron and other raw materials, they could mend their uniforms, boots, equipment and wagons.
For everything else, there was the cantinière or suttler-woman, something of an institution, unique to the French army. ‘These ladies usually started out by following a soldier who had inspired tender feelings in them,’ explained Lieutenant Blaze de Bury. ‘You would see them first walking along with a cask of eau-de-vie slung round their neck. A week later, they would be comfortably seated on a horse someone had found, draped, to the right, to the left, in front, behind, with casks, saveloys, cheeses and sausages in precarious equilibrium. A month would not pass that a cart harnessed with a couple of horses and filled with provisions of every kind would not be testifying to the growing prosperity of their enterprise.’31
In camp, the tent of the cantinière became the company café, where officers would come to sit around and play cards or gossip. It was also a bank, lending money and giving credit. On campaign, the cantiniére went to untold lengths to stock up on all the little necessities which could transform a soldier’s life by guaranteeing survival or just relief. She always had a little something for a soldier who had money or whom she trusted to pay her when he got some. She usually had a protector, sometimes a husband but mostly just a temporary mate who was able to provide her with security and help in return for being supplied with victuals, and sometimes a change of protector would entail a financial transaction between the two men involved.
These ladies saw themselves as part of the army, and despised anyone not in uniform. They viewed the dangers of war as part and parcel of their trade. If they fell prey to enemy marauders and lost everything, they would shrug it off as hard luck and start again. Some would even take kegs of brandy onto the battlefield and give free slugs to the men, and not a few were wounded in this act.
When a regiment moved out on campaign, it was followed by the cantinière and her small gang of purveyors, the servants of the officers, a dozen washerwomen and a horse thief or two. As it went, it picked up petty criminals for whom things had got too hot in the locality, young men looking for adventure, stray dogs and the odd whore. ‘While the regiment marched along the road in good order, or wherever it was sent, this mounted rabble – or to give it its proper name, this robber band – swarmed round it to left and to right, in front and behind, and used the regiment as a base,’ wrote Lieutenant von Wedel. ‘They all carried large and small haversacks