One of Napoleon’s generals, Philippe de Ségur (1780-1873), wrote an eyewitness account of the march to Moscow a few years after the events. In it he describes the horrors of the retreat from Moscow as the cold set in and the Russian army and local populations continually harassed Napoleon’s multinational forces.

But on the 6th of November, the sky underwent a total change. Its azure disappeared. The army marched through a cold mist; the vapour then became dense, and soon fell in a thick and heavy shower of large snow-flakes. It seemed as if the heavens were falling and joining with the earth and its inhabitants in one common league for our utter destruction. . . .

We soon met a number of men of every corps, sometimes alone, sometimes in parties. They had not deserted their standards from cowardice; cold and inanition alone had detached them from their columns. In this general and individual struggle, they had been separated from each other, and they were now disarmed, subdued, defenceless, without a leader, and obeying nothing but the pressing instinct of self-preservation. Most of them, attracted by the sight of some cross-paths, dispersed themselves over the fields, in the hope of finding bread and shelter for the night, but on our former passage through the country, everything had been laid waste . . . ; they met nothing but Cossacks, and an armed population who surrounded them, wounded and stripped them, and left them with ferocious laughs to expire naked upon the snow.

Source: Philippe-Paul, comte de Ségur, History of the Expedition to Russia: Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812, 5th ed., 2 vols. (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1826), II: 143–45.

Question to Consider

What explains the disasters encountered by Napoleon’s armies on their retreat from Moscow?