A very good military read
Adam Zamoyski’s “1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow” gets my vote as an “unputtable down” book of military history.
Some 600,000 troops crossed the Niemen River into Russia in the summer and autumn of 1812, among them Frenchmen, Germans, Poles, Italians and Swiss. About 400,000 of them died: on the march, in battle and during the horrific winter retreat. Similar numbers are thought to have perished on the Russian side. Composers — Tchaikovsky, most famously with his 1812 overture — were inspired to write stirring music about the event and Leo Tolstoy put the 1812 campaign at the heart of his novel War and Peace.
As so often happens in war, it was incompetence, not careful planning, that was crucial, bringing Napoleon practically to the gates of Moscow without a fight, only to find that Czar Alexander had razed the city to the ground to deny Napoleon the food, supplies and shelter that he expected.
The confusion and horror of the French retreat through the Russian winter are well described in the letters and memoirs of ordinary combatants that Zamoyski has pulled together from a huge range of sources. The retreat, through an interminable blizzard, is a pitiful procession westwards by a ravaged, starving, frost-bitten French army ‘not dressed for cold weather’. By the end of November, the temperature was minus 30 C, by the time they'd reached the ‘icy death’ at Vilna, it had reached minus 37.5 C.
“1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow” is a masterful piece of military history writing; an epic story describing a dramatic series of memorable events, the humiliation of a great Emperor, the merciless destruction of a massive army and the almost unimaginable suffering of its soldiers.
Highly recommended.
PS Anthony Beevor's "Stalingrad" describes almost similar events about an army defeated partly by the extremes of the Russian winter, this too is highly readable.