The Long March
'ON the 12th of June the Western hordes entered Russia and war broke out That is to say, an event took place in diametrical opposition to all laws human and divine.' Tolstoy's vehement and historically lopsided account of the events that followed Napoleon's ill-advised crossing of the Niemen in 1812 is the version with which English readers are likely to be most familiar. The recently published personal records of such participants as Captain Roeder, General Wilson and Count dz. Sigur give an inevitably sub- jective view, while the histories of Clausewitz and Tarte are not likely to have a wide appeal for the non-specialist.
Antony Brett-James's selection of reports by over a hundred eye-witnesses is, therefore, to be warmly welcomed. Most of this admirably edited material is little known, much of it is here in English for the first time, all of it com- bines to present a moving, vivid and revealing picture of one of the most terrible campaigns in the history of warfare. This sort of approach to the re-creation of the past—the building-up of a true and coherent impression from a series of personal, often prejudiced and fleeting glimpses—requires a skilled hand. Mr Brett- James has a skilled hand. The book opens with a Russian nun, on her way to church, alarmed by the sight of a comet, like a shower of glitter- ing flames, shooting across the sky as a portent
of calamity. It closes with a French Colonel at a ball at the Tuileries where the Emperor is revealing a 'cruel insensitivity to the victims of his war.' The colonel, who has undergone the horrors of the retreat from Moscow, feels as though he were dancing on the graves of the dead.
Between these two scenes the whole tragedy unfolds in the words of those who experienced it—a Muscovite girl who helps to kill a French soldier in her father's shop; General de Caulain- court, shocked by Napoleon's comment as he looks down upon Smolensk: 'The corpse of an enemy always smells sweet'; Baron Fain, who overhears another remark that Napoleon makes as he walks out of his tent on the morning of Borodino: 'It is a trifle cold, but the sun is bright. It is the sun of Austerlitz.' But Borodino was not to be the personal triumph that Austerlitz had been. In his last exile Napoleon was to say, 'The most terrible of all my battles was the one before Moscow. The French showed themselves worthy of victory, and the Russians worthy of being invincible.' Both sides, in fact, claimed a victory; and the 65,000 losses were almost equally divided. Napoleon, as at Water- loo, fitfully fell into moods of torpid inatten- tion, appearing content to leave the direction of the battle to his generals; and, when he did interfere, showing a tactical sense by no means superior to theirs.
Austerlitz was a very different affair. And Claude Manceron's account of it is a very different type of military history from that ex- emplified in 1812. M Manceron tells a com- pelling story with wonderful vigour. His book is full of illuminating details and witty vignettes. But the approach is rather that of a novelist than a historian. Sources are tampered with to heighten desired effects; and invented con- versations are inserted to strengthen a sense of urgency or to strike a more dramatic note. Neither the author, who writes very well, and has been well translated, nor his splendidly or- ganised theme of Napoleon's most decisive and brilliantly executed victory, stands in need of such spurious ornamentation.
CHRISTOPHER HIBBERT
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