Adam Zamoyski: 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March On Moscow

Have you ever had the feeling that you simply did not want a book to end? That it was so good, so gripping, so all-consuming that you restricted yourself to reading, say just one chapter each night and lived each day in private anticipation of your bedtime treat, and indeed, felt a final sense of loss when the book was complete?

In the past year, I have had three such experiences. Two concerned books where nothing apparently happened, and yet the skill of the writer involved you in the minutiae of its ordinariness - and the measured tempo of its unfolding tale.

William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault is one such book. It holds a dark mirror up to the changing world of the Irish Protestant of the 1920s, and yet it is a noble and beautifully written tale of affection and gradual forgiveness.

John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun is also a wonderfully crafted tale of mundane life in a remote townland in the northwest of Ireland. The characters become your friends; their reactions, your anticipation; their predictabilities, satisfying. The changing seasons are observed with a detail that surprises and enriches.

So much for the anticipation of the ordinary. Adam Zamoyski's book, 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow, is about the extraordinary. It envelops you in the growing disaster of history in a masterly way. It makes you sympathise with all sides. It has the metronome of inextricability. In short, it is a stupendous tale.

Reflecting loosely on history, I simplistically coupled Napoleon's disaster in Russia with that of Adolf Hitler's over a hundred years later.

But they were quite different, and Zamoyski, gifted in his languages, had access as no other, to the story from all sides - Prussian, English, Polish, Austro-Hungarian, Italian, Swedish, Portuguese, and of course, Russian - and most importantly from the point of view of the ordinary soldier and civilian.

The story that emerges is a surprise, with Napoleon, far from desiring to invade Russia, being lured slowly by bluff and counter-bluff into arguing with himself that to achieve peace in Europe against the Grand Coalition that festered against him, he must decisively defeat Tsar Alexander as he had at Friedland in 1807 leading to the Treaty of Tilsit.

Tilsit marked the zenith of Napoleon's power and his qualified entente with Tsar Alexander. He insisted on Alexander embracing the Continental system against Great Britain which forbade all trade with the United Kingdom, and the final treaty, though acceptable in its measured generosity to the Tsar, was hugely rejected by the Tsar's family and the general body of the aristocracy in Russia.

In a scene reminiscent of Henry VIII's "Field of the Cloth of Gold" in 1520, Napoleon, who would have been a masterly film-maker with a great eye for the occasion, held his negotiations with the Tsar on a raft in the River Niemen with both armies drawn up in full regalia on either side of the river, and finally admitted a humiliated Frederick William III of Prussia to the negotiations. Prussia had to make heavy reparations - shades of the Armistice in 1919 - and they lost a substantial amount of territory, including most of Poland.

His great adversary, William Pitt, "The Younger," had died in England in 1806, and Napoleon now appeared to be supreme and unchallengeable. How uncertain life is, was to unfold over the following five years.

In 1810 and 1811, Napoleon was immersed in ever conflicting loyalties and disloyalties. By 1811, he had decided that threatening activity by the Grande Armee was called for, and he moved large arsenals into Prussia, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and was levying troops in Croatia and Italy but without any really specific intent.

Meanwhile, that doughty Irishman, the Duke of Wellington, was slowly fighting his way across Portugal and Spain and would eventually arrive at the door of France as Napoleon's disasters in Moscow excited Europe, and the possibility of defeating their nemesis of the past 12 years.

In reviewing a previous book, How Far From Austerlitz, by Alistair Horne, I commented that Napoleon suffered a fundamental flaw - and that was his inability to effect lasting coalitions. He seemed incapable of providing that sense of accommodation, inclusion and vision that leaders such as Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had in World War II and indeed Lloyd George and Clemenceau showed in World War I.

So much for the historical background. The book itself is like a symphony, rising to the crescendo of the Pyrrhic victory at Borodino. The Grande Armé had rarely fought outside Europe, and the Battle of Smolensk drained its powers, yielded it a partial victory at immense cost, and cast itself into the trackless wilderness of Russia in August of 1812. According to Clausewitz, it was the greatest single error of the campaign.

At this point, Napoleon should clearly have withdrawn his army, with a mission partly accomplished. Tsar Alexander, who was in St. Petersburg, was still unengaged, but the Russian commanders Barclay de Tolly, Bagration and the elusive and aged Kutusov had led them on into Russia by what might be described as a policy of "non-engagement".

However, determined now to do battle with the Tsar himself, Napoleon made the fatal decision to press on into the inhospitable, under-populated, friendless Russia with its constant rivers, its lack of roads, its lack of forage for his horses, its unyielding citizenry and finally, at Borodino, its immensely courageous soldiers.

It is a battle that ranks in Russian history with the defence of Moscow in 1941, the galactic struggle of the Kursk salient, and the victory at Stalingrad. It will be forever remembered as the battle that, although Russia did not win, it did not lose.

Vast losses were suffered on both sides. The cunning Kutusov and his two fellow generals, Barclay and Bagration, called on all the resources, and particularly on innate Russian stubbornness. Both armies almost fell apart and the Russian army retreated towards Moscow with Napoleonic forces limping 15km behind.

Kutusov and the Russians passed through Moscow without stopping. Their sappers and Count Fyodor Vasilievich Rostopchin, the military governor of Moscow, and the police chief Voronenko set fire to the city, and the army of Napoleon arrived to see Moscow in a sea of flames, without forage or food, and with winter coming on.

Here, Napoleon made the second fatal mistake. Instead of leaving and returning to fight another day, he waited until the 20th of October in Moscow. That ensured that his return would be through a climate of rapidly falling temperatures, ceaseless harrying by Cossack forces and a revivified and fortified Russian army nipping viciously at his heels.

The scene at the crossing of the River Berezina is a central part of the book. The pontonniers and engineers of Napoleon's army, under General Jean-Baptiste Eble, were heroic beyond description. They barely got the Emperor across, and much of the army perished in the attempt.

When they reached the safety of the far side, the army had lost its command structure and form and became a shapeless mob struggling to survive. Sights of the most utter chaos and carnage including mass cannibalism, the killing of virtually all the horses for food, and being frozen to death when one stopped to sleep were everywhere - it was a nightmare beyond description.

On the 5th of December, the Emperor consulted with marshals, Ney, Poniatowski, Davout and Murat, and for the second time in his career, effectively deserted his army as he had done in Egypt in 1799. He fled with his armed guard back to Paris, and four days later, arrived there, affecting as though all was normal while a helpless army died in their thousands in their attempt to get back to civilisation. At Miedniki, on the 6th of December, Dr. Louis Lagneau recorded a temperature of -37.5C. "It was," he said in a somewhat understated way, "really intolerable."

In all of this, the Tsar had not participated, and yet he was clearly the winner. Napoleon won further striking battles despite his reverses in Russia, but the die was cast. The aura of invincibility was shattered. People had seen the unspeakable and they had seen him run. He was defeated by the Allied forces at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813. He abdicated in 1814 and was sent to the Isle of Elba. After nine months, he escaped and began his final 100 days as leader of France, culminating in the Battle of Waterloo.

It is fair to say that although Wellington fought magnificently in this battle, if Blucher and the Prussian army had not returned to his assistance on the evening of the last day, Napoleon might well have prevailed. However, he was defeated, captured, taken in a British warship, HMS Bellerophon, to, as he thought, Great Britain. It was not to be.

The powers that be in Britain thought he was far too dangerous a man to be allowed a country life in England, and so the Emperor was sent to his final resting place at St. Helena, where at 51 years of age, he died, allegedly of cancer, although suspicion still abounds that he was poisoned with arsenic.

The book is a long and masterly tale told in an unusual way. Zamoyski, with his skills in language, is able to use the letters and records of ordinary soldiers and their fellow officers writing to their loved ones about the nature of the fast-changing world in which they found themselves and the appalling scenes they observed. The over-arching sensation as you conclude the book is of the bestiality of war and the depths to which we as humans can descend in trying to preserve our lives.

This book is a lesson that history can teach us if only we will learn it, but the lesson we do learn is that history, sadly, teaches us very little and that the span of human ambition and focus is on the future and not on the past.

* Published by Harper Perennial

* Sir Anthony O'Reilly is executive chairman of Independent News & Media, the largest single shareholder in APN News & Media, owner of the Herald.