In 1869 a retired French civil engineer named Charles-Joseph Minard, then eighty-eight years old, published a diagram that has been called the finest statistical graphic ever drawn. It needs no caption to break the heart. A thick beige band, 422,000 men wide, flows east from the Niemen river towards Moscow, thinning as it goes; a black band crawls back west, dwindling almost to nothing, pinned to a temperature scale that sinks to around thirty degrees below zero. The band sets out as a river and comes home a hairline. It is the story of Napoleon's Grande Armée in Russia, and the arithmetic behind it remains barely believable: roughly 600,000 men went in; perhaps 100,000 came out.
Napoleon crossed the Niemen on 24 June 1812 with the largest invasion force Europe had ever assembled — some 600,000 men counting reserves and flanking corps, and fewer than half of them French: Poles, Germans, Italians, Dutch and Swiss, the conscripted muscle of a continental empire. The plan was the usual one — force a quick, decisive battle and dictate the peace. The Russians declined to cooperate. Under Barclay de Tolly and then the wily veteran Mikhail Kutuzov, they traded space for time, retreating for hundreds of miles and stripping the land bare as they went. The Grande Armée began dying long before the snow: typhus, dysentery, summer heat, foul water and desertion had carved away perhaps a third of the central army before it fought a single major battle.
Borodino and the fire
The great battle finally came at Borodino, some seventy miles west of Moscow, on 7 September 1812. Around a quarter of a million men collided in a day of frontal slaughter that produced roughly 70,000 casualties between the two sides — commonly reckoned the bloodiest single day of the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon held the field but destroyed nothing: Kutuzov withdrew in good order and then abandoned Moscow itself. When the French entered the city on 14 September they found it nearly empty. That night fires broke out, and within days about two-thirds of Moscow — a city built largely of wood — had burned. Blame is still argued over: the standard account holds that the city's governor, Count Rostopchin, ordered incendiaries to torch it rather than shelter the invader, though he later denied this. Napoleon waited five weeks amid the ashes for Tsar Alexander I to sue for peace. No letter ever came.
The retreat began on 19 October. Napoleon tried to swing south through fresh, unplundered country, but after the battle of Maloyaroslavets he was forced back onto the same devastated Smolensk road his army had already eaten bare on the way in. Then the temperature fell. 'General Winter' — the phrase quiz setters adore — did not cause the catastrophe by itself, but it finished what hunger and typhus had begun: sentries froze at their posts, horses died in their tens of thousands, and a fighting army dissolved into a column of stumbling survivors.
The Berezina
The climax came at the Berezina river at the end of November. Three Russian armies were converging, the bridges were down, and the river, half-thawed by a cruel spell of milder weather, was running with ice. Napoleon was saved by his Dutch pontoon engineers under General Jean-Baptiste Éblé, who stood for hours in the freezing water to build two trestle bridges; very few of those engineers survived the campaign. Between 26 and 29 November the fighting core of the army escaped across, at the cost of tens of thousands of soldiers and stragglers killed, drowned or captured. Militarily the escape was a kind of miracle — yet in French the word 'bérézina' survives to this day as slang for a total disaster. Soon afterwards the famous 29th Bulletin admitted the calamity to a stunned France while assuring readers that 'His Majesty's health has never been better', and on 5 December Napoleon left the army and raced for Paris by sledge. Marshal Ney — 'the bravest of the brave' — commanded the rearguard, and is reputed to have been the last French soldier to recross the Niemen, musket in hand.
The arithmetic of 1812 made Minard's map possible and Napoleon's fall inevitable. Of the roughly 600,000 who had crossed in June, perhaps 100,000 returned; the rest were dead, captured or gone. Prussia and Austria changed sides, and within eighteen months allied armies were in Paris. Tolstoy built War and Peace around the invasion, and Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture — cannon fire included — celebrates its defeat. But the campaign's most eloquent monument remains Minard's quiet diagram, drawn by an old man more than half a century later: no emperor pictured anywhere on it, no battle scenes — just a band of men, shrinking.
Quiz nuggets
- Napoleon crossed the Niemen river on 24 June 1812 with roughly 600,000 men, fewer than half of whom were French.
- The Battle of Borodino (7 September 1812) caused roughly 70,000 casualties, widely cited as the bloodiest single day of the Napoleonic Wars.
- The crossing of the Berezina (26–29 November 1812), bridged by General Éblé's Dutch engineers, gave French the slang term 'bérézina' for a total disaster.
- Marshal Ney, 'the bravest of the brave', led the rearguard and is reputed to have been the last Frenchman to leave Russian soil.
- Charles-Joseph Minard drew his celebrated flow map of the campaign in 1869, at the age of 88.