[The following is in regards to Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Russia, and details what often happened when Frenchmen fell into the hands of the Russians pursuing them.]
That [surrendering] took courage in itself, as the rumors about what the [Russian] peasantry and Cossacks were doing to captured Frenchmen easily equaled those of what the Turks, Calabrians and Spanish had done, and included skinning them alive. (Peasants would buy prisoners off the Cossacks at two rubles a head.) The luckiest were merely stripped of their clothing and left naked in the snow, but torture was commonplace (hence the high rate of suicide on the retreat). Even surrendering successfully en masse to the Russian regular army was akin to a death sentence: of one column of 3.400 French prisoners-of-war only 400 survived; in another only 16 out of 800. When fifty French soldiers were captured by peasants and buried alive in a pit, ‘a drummer boy bravely led the devoted party and leapt into the grave’.
There were occasional tales of altruism: Labaume recorded a French soldier sharing his food with a starving Russian woman whom he had found in a cemetery just after she had given birth, for example. But overall the retreat now became reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s depiction of Hades.
Source:
Roberts, Andrew. "Retreat." Napoleon: A Life. New York: Penguin, 2014. 622. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Labaume, Crime of 1812 pp. 128, 163.
Wilson, Narrative of Events pp. 225-60.
Further Reading:
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