[The following is in regards to Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow.]
In his memoirs, The Crime of 1812, Labaume recalled the continual sound of the rearguard blowing up their own ammunition wagons, ‘which reverberated from afar like the roar of thunder’. The horses that could pull them had died, sometimes as a result of eating tainted straw from thatch torn off cottage roofs. On reaching Uvaroskoye, close to Gorodnya, Labaume found ‘numerous corpses of soldiers and peasants, as well as infants with their throats cut, and young girls murdered having been ravished’. As Labaume was in the same army as the perpetrators, there was no reason for him to have invented these outrages, which began once discipline evaporated.
Men who had kept bread since Moscow now ‘crept off to eat it in secret’. On October 29-30 the army tramped – it no longer marched – past the Borodino battlefield, which was full of ‘bones gnawed by famished dogs and birds of prey’.
A French soldier was found who had had both his legs broken and for two months had been living off herbs, roots and a few bits of bread he had found on corpses, sleeping at nights inside the bellies of eviscerated horses. Although Napoleon ordered that any survivors be carried on carts, some were unceremoniously pushed off shortly afterwards. By late October even generals were eating nothing but horseflesh.
Source:
Roberts, Andrew. "Retreat." Napoleon: A Life. New York: Penguin, 2014. 621. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Labaume, Crime of 1812 pp. 185-86, 189, 193.
Further Reading:
Бородинское сражение / Bataille de la Moskova (Battle of Borodino)
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