Retreat from Russia and the Berezina — octobre – décembre 1812

Forced back along the devastated Smolensk road, the army disintegrated under cold, hunger and Cossack raids; the horses died, the artillery was abandoned. From 26 to 29 November, Éblé's pontoon engineers threw two bridges over the Berezina and saved the core of the army at the cost of thousands of stragglers. Of nearly six hundred thousand men engaged, a few tens of thousands recrossed the Niemen.

The road imposed

The army left Moscow on 19 October, still about a hundred thousand strong and loaded with plunder. Napoleon meant to reach the south by Kaluga, untouched country. On 24 October the action at Maloyaroslavets prevented him: Kutuzov barred the road, and the Smolensk road, already laid waste on the way out, had to be taken instead.

That choice decided everything. On that strip of scorched earth there was no fodder left, no intact village, no magazine. The Russians did not need to attack: they had only to follow.

The cold and the Cossacks

The first snows fell at the beginning of November. The horses, not rough-shod for ice, went down in thousands; the artillery and the wounded had to be abandoned. The columns dissolved into a mob of stragglers whom the Cossacks and the peasants finished off.

Smolensk, reached in mid-November, did not hold the expected supplies. Three days of fighting at Krasnoi cost thousands more. Ney, cut off with the rearguard, reappeared after crossing the Dnieper on the ice: the last legend of the campaign.

The Berezina and the end

At the end of November the retreat ran up against the thawed Berezina, the bridge at Borisov destroyed, two Russian armies at its heels. From 26 to 29 November Éblé's pontoneers worked in the freezing water and threw two bridges across at Studenka. The core of the army got over; thousands of stragglers were left on the bank. Éblé would die a few weeks later.

On 5 December, at Smorgoni, the Emperor left the army for Paris, where the Malet conspiracy had just shown how fragile the regime was. What recrossed the Niemen in mid-December was no longer an army. The Grande Armée of 1812 had ceased to exist, and with it the military superiority of the Empire.