By 1812 Napoleon ruled or dominated nearly all of continental Europe; Russia’s defection from his economic blockade of Britain supplied the quarrel, and hubris the rest. The army he assembled on the Niemen was the largest Europe had ever seen — over 600,000 men, half of them unwilling allies and subjects from a dozen nations, with hundreds of thousands of horses and a supply train built for a short war. On 24 June 1812 it crossed into Russia.
The short war never came. The Russian armies traded space for time, retreating for eight hundred kilometres through a stripped and burning countryside while heat, dysentery, typhus, and desertion ate the Grande Armée’s strength before any great battle was fought.
Borodino and Moscow
At Borodino, west of Moscow, on 7 September, the Russian commander Kutuzov finally stood. The day cost the two armies some 70,000 casualties — the bloodiest single day of warfare until the twentieth century — and settled nothing: the Russians withdrew in order, and Napoleon, husbanding his Guard, declined the killing blow. A week later he entered Moscow to find it emptied — and then alight, as fires (started largely by Russian incendiaries) burned two-thirds of the city around its conquerors. Napoleon waited five weeks in the ashes for a peace offer that never came, while his army looted, drank, and rotted.
On 19 October he marched out — too late, into a countryside already exhausted, with winter arriving early and hard.
The retreat
The retreat became one of history’s great destructions. Frost reached and passed thirty below; horses died by the tens of thousands (taking the cavalry, the artillery draught, and the supply system with them); Cossacks and partisans harvested the stragglers; men froze upright at bivouac fires or were killed for a cloak. At the Berezina river in late November, Dutch pontoneers working chest-deep in ice water bridged the river under attack and saved the army’s core — at the cost of thousands of stragglers abandoned to the far bank. Of the host that crossed the Niemen in June, barely a tenth recrossed in December as an organised force; total losses — dead, captured, deserted — approached half a million. Napoleon had already left by sledge for Paris, where he arrived days after his own bulletin admitted catastrophe.
What it broke
Europe read the lesson at once: Prussia and Austria changed sides, and within eighteen months the allies were in Paris and Napoleon on Elba — the road that ended at Waterloo. The campaign left two immortal artefacts: Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and the 1869 flow-map by the French engineer Charles Minard, whose tapering band — 422,000 men shrinking to 10,000, plotted against geography and temperature — is still taught as perhaps the finest statistical graphic ever drawn: an army’s death, legible at a glance.