HarperCollins £25 pp643

The sequence of events that would see Napoleon briefly ensconced in the Kremlin amid a burnt-out Moscow began in 1807 when he met Tsar Alexander I on a raft on the river Niemen. Having defeated Austria, Prussia and Russia, Napoleon decided to offer the tsar an honourable settlement, designed to detach him from erstwhile allies whom Napoleon treated like vassals. On the raft, the Corsican Prometheus tantalised the impressionable young tsar with plans to carve up Europe and the Ottoman Empire. He followed this with fanciful schemes for a joint attack on the British in India.

The reality of the deal was that Russia had to tolerate French occupation of Prussia and a fledgling Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and was forced to damage its own economy by joining Napoleon’s continental embargo against Britain. Napoleon further trod on Russian sensibilities when Bernadotte, one of his marshals, became king of Sweden. To Russians, all this smacked of encirclement. Encouraged by inflamed elite opinion, Alexander reneged on his earlier commitments, and sought further concessions, at a time when Napoleon was hard-pressed in Spain and potentially menaced by wavering allies and incipient nationalist uprisings.

Although war suited neither emperor, Russian troop movements convinced Napoleon that the moment he left to deal with Spain, Alexander would stab him in the back. Beyond this, he sensed that his empire and dynasty would have no peace until the northern “barbarians” had been “thrown back into their icy wastes, so that they do not come and meddle in the affairs of civilised Europe for the next 25 years at least”. Alexander, meanwhile, had come to the view: “Napoleon or me, him or me — but we cannot reign together.” Such calculations sent enormous armies rumbling to their bleak destinies.

Adam Zamoyski’s account of the 1812 campaign is so brilliant that it is impossible to put the book aside. This is not simply because the story is so dramatic. Zamoyski is such an economical and elegant writer that one could overlook the amount of difficult original material he has read in so many languages. His grasp of both the big picture and of the significant detail reveals a master craftsman at work. His prose matches the extraordinary illustrations of military existence by such contemporary war artists as Albrecht Adam. An invasion that began as a huge party in Vilna became an exhausting trek in cruel heat along dusty tracks and across crude timber bridges under a vast sky occasionally animated by huge flocks of geese. Terrible downpours left the army drowning in torrents of mud.

The backwardness of Russia nullified the standard practices of the Grande Armée’s expert foragers. Dehydration, dysentery and death devastated the army before it had even encountered the Russians. In so far as Russian generals had any strategy, it was to pull back until they were forced to make a stand to salvage their honour. They did this at Smolensk and Borodino, a savage battle whose casualty rates, including 70,000 dead, were not repeated until the first day on the Somme in 1916. Clausewitz, who served with the Russians, wrote of the “motionless obstinacy” of peasant troops who had to be bayoneted, bludgeoned and hacked into lasting inertia. The invaders’ incomprehension of their opponents mounted when they entered Moscow and realised that it had been set on fire. “How can one make war on barbarians like these?” observed a Dutch officer in Napoleon’s polyglot army.

The retreat from Moscow (for there was nowhere else to go) was an extended Calvary. Copious amounts of booty were abandoned by troops who had to improvise warm clothing, their gnarled faces peeping out from Orthodox vestments or multilayered dresses intended for wives and girlfriends back home. Troops accustomed themselves to such delicacies as fricassée of farmyard cat or ragout of officer’s pet poodle, the taste disguised by sprinkled gunpowder. When campfires died in the night, men froze to death where they sat. Feral Cossacks robbed stragglers, turning their prisoners over to peasants, invariably to be tortured and murdered.

Of the original invasion force of 500,000-600,000 in June 1812, 400,000 men and their women camp followers, together with 160,000 horses, were left dead in Russia. Russian casualties were of a similar order, making a total of nearly one million dead. Although Russia’s incompetent commanders had little to do with Napoleon’s failure that winter, the campaign destroyed his aura of invincibility and contributed to the outcome of Leipzig and Waterloo in 1813-15. Alexander became the arbiter of Europe, crushing those liberal freedoms that his own army officers craved as they encountered western Europe. This is a great book, about what might be called the first total war.

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