The Little Corporal Never Fails to Impress: Remains of Napoleon's Army Laid to Rest in Belarus

By Tracy Dove, Ph.D
Editor, The Russia News Service

November 28, 2007

Conveniently 5 years before the 200th anniversary of the 1812 invasion of Russia by Napoleon, the Belarus government of Aleksander Lukashenko won some much-needed good publicity in the European Union this week when it made a diplomatic ceremony out of an obscure archeological find. The French ambassador in Minsk attended the funeral, as did a number of historians- professional and amateur- while 113 buttons from the uniforms of nameless soldiers were interred in a ceremony that was most likely choreographed behind the scenes by the Belarus state travel agency hoping to make some early bookings for the celebration, properly scheduled for 2012.

In a news week that was uninteresting and glum thanks to high oil prices and a falling stock market, the news of the funeral found its way into the international news agencies and filled the hearts of veterans everywhere who feel forgotten. The setting for the story was 195 years ago, when Napoleon misjudged the scorn of the Russian winter and decided to withdraw his Grand Armee from Moscow on what turned out to be a suicide march back to France. Historians have been increasingly interested in this war that was never really declared, and now that Soviet historians and their patriotic histories have been retired, the real story of Napoleon's defeat can be told.

The Russian general in charge of evicting Napoleon from Russian territory was Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov- a disgraced commander in the Russian army who until then had been exiled for sexual indecencies with certain ladies in St Petersburg. Tsar Alexander I appointed him for some mysterious reason, and when Kutuzov learned of this important promotion, he apparently spent several hours sobbing in a church and mumbling religious nothings to an icon. The General was blind in one eye and not of sound mind, but that didn't prevent him from overseeing the disintegration of Napoleon's army as it tried to cross the border river of Russia- the Berezina- and reach the safety of allied Lithuania.

Oversee- and not cause- the disintegration? For nearly 7 decades Soviet historians had the monopoly on the archive material on this war, and their task was nothing less than attributing Napoleon's failure to Russian ingenuity. This was not the case. Napoleon made the major tactical error of calling for a "withdrawal" and not a retreat- resulting in his tactical failure. The significant difference between these two similar terms is that in the former the army orderly picks-up its cannons and goes somewhere else, while a retreat requires dropping everything and running away in as orderly a fashion as possible. The Grand Armee- thinking it might get a bit chilly on the way but nothing worse- was poorly dressed and heavily loaded down by booty taken from the empty city of Moscow, which the Russians had deserted by the time Napoleon marched in. The fact that there was no official surrender of the city had miffed the French Emperor to no end, and once the abandoned town mysteriously began to burn, he signaled to his troops a withdrawal to winter quarters, so that they might fight on to Petersburg next year. This is how they got in the unfortunate position they found themselves that fall on the banks of the river Berezina where the 115 buttons, 3 cannon balls and one gold coin were found this fall.

Kutuzov, for his part, can be credited for nipping at the heels of the Grand Armee once it broke into a full retreat, but the real fight was orchestrated by the Cossacks, who were ultimately braver than Kutuzov himself. By the time the French multinational force had reached the river, they found it un-crossable and unfortunately unfrozen, so no one was able to walk across. A bridge needed to be built in a hurry, and soldiers took turns of 15 minutes each in the frozen waters to erect piles for the bridge, and often they never came back out. The remaining soldiers and what was left of their material wealth and mistresses waited on the banks, impatiently, and froze to death.

The interesting find of these remains in Belarus this year attest to the fact that the bridge itself took too long to build. The French ambassador's Euro-speech was followed by the Belarus minister, who pointed out that many Belarussian soldiers had been enlisted in Napoleon's Grand Armee too, thereby sharing in the national sadness of the French by claiming historical solidarity. The one Prussian coin that was found among the remains was turned over to the Belarus State Bank for safe keeping, giving the country at least a symbolic monopoly of at least this part of the historic battlefield.

Tracy Dove, editor of The Russia News Service, is a Professor of History and Dean of Summer Programs for the Lessing Institute. He also teaches history at the Anglo-American College in Prague.

See all previous articles by Tracy Dove here.