To and from Russia without love

My Ladybird book of The Story of Napoleon had two pages to illustrate 1812. Napoleon sits on a white horse and watches Moscow burn, torched by fleeing Russians. Then the Grande Armée retreats, a column winding into a blurry, white oblivion. ‘With the thermometer seventy degrees below freezing’, read the text, ‘few of those who had crossed the river Niemen into Russia in June ever got back to France.’ But for a few images such as this — and War and Peace — not many English people know what actually happened. I didn’t, until I read this magnificent book. Adam Zamoyski is the first writer in English to have properly researched Russian, Polish and French sources. No review can do justice to the scholarly integrity and human sensitivity of this book, or to the horrors it describes. I could not sleep after reading his description of the last days of the French retreat.

First, Zamoyski argues, war between Napoleon and Alexander was inevitable. Whatever the immediate causes — Poland, and trade with the British — Europe was not big enough for both of them. Napoleon believed that if his upstart empire was to survive, Paris had to be the undisputed capital of Europe while Alexander was convinced that it was Russia’s destiny to advance west. Humiliated at Austerlitz, seduced by Napoleon’s charm at Tilsit and tortured by guilt at his role in his father’s assassination, the young Tsar had developed — in a weak, deluded and fatalistic way — a sense of a spiritual destiny as the saviour of Europe. ‘Blood must flow again,’ he wrote in the summer of 1811, moving an army to the border. Napoleon shouted about insults to his honour. Later, he admitted that the two had bluffed themselves ‘into a position of two blustering braggarts who, having no wish to fight, seek to frighten each other’.