General Winter
As the remnants of the Imperial Army fled Moscow, their bitterest enemies were not the Czar's troops. With Moscow burned the army had few food stores to sustain 100,000 men, and hunger and bitter cold accounted for countless deaths. With food so scarce, horsemeat had become a staple of the army's diet. In fact, when starving French horses dropped on the road, troops frequently lagged behind to devour their uncooked flesh (Bourgogne, p 55).
The onset of the harsh Russian winter proved as formidable a foe as starvation. The attrition of the bitter cold gave the weather the nickname of "General Winter"--the Czar's deadliest soldier. Sgt. Bourgogne recounts the night of November 8, 1812, when the temperature dropped to twenty-seven degrees below zero, Celsius scale.
"It was perhaps nine o"clock, an intensely dark night, and many of us were already asleep--a sleep contumely broken by the cold and the pain we suffered from fatigue and hunger...I had just finished my miserable supper of horse's liver, with snow for drink...we were roused by an extraordinary noise. This was the north wind traveling over the forests, bringing with it heavy snow and twenty-seven degrees of frost, so that it became quite impossible for the men to stay where they had camped. We heard them shouting as they ran about towards any fire they saw; but the heavy snow-storms caught them, and they could soon run no more, or if they tried to do so, they fell and never rose again. In this way many hundreds perished, and thousands died of those who had stayed where they were camped" (Bourgogne, p 64).
Illustration:
I was able to withstand the cold
Comments to: Lori Eichelberger