The Retreat

NAPOLEON'S RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN (306 pp.)--Philippe-Paul de Segur--Hough-ion Mifflin ($5).

Count de Segur's famed diary of Napoleon's Russian campaign is not just another book about Bonaparte; it is the main source of a thousand schoolbooks, cartoons, legends, sermons and second thoughts for would-be conquerors. Nor is it simply a great and exciting war story. To Segur, as it did to most who survived it, the retreat from Moscow had a deeper personal and political meaning. As a ruined aristocrat who embraced the French Revolution and became aide-decamp to the Emperor, Segur took the long, cold view:

"After fifteen hundred years of victories, the Revolution of the fourth century (that of the kings and nobles against the people) had been overthrown by the Revolution of the nineteenth century (that of the people against the kings and nobles). Napoleon was born of this conflagration, and he had allied himself so closely with it that it seemed as if the great convulsion had been nothing more than the labor pains of the birth of one man. He commanded the Revolution as if he were the genius of that terrible element."

Copy for Tolstoy. Segur was seldom far from the Emperor's side during the five fearful months that it took to unravel Napoleon's grand design. He was close enough to hear Napoleon exclaim as he came within sight of the Muscovite capital of logs and gilded domes: "So here at last is that famous city! It was high time!" The remark was used by Tolstoy in War and Peace; probably one of the original French editions of Segur's journal (first in 1824) was before Tolstoy as he wrote his masterpiece. The journal was a masterpiece of its own kind--the work of a man of taste, talent and action who kept an eye for fact amid the most extreme partisanship of war, and who could, while still faithful to his Emperor, record the deterioration of a man and his fortunes.

Always Segur keeps before his eye the vision of the Grande Armee as a sort of international brigade marching to liberate (among others) the Poles from an Asiatic despotism. It was indeed not a French national force but a great group of armies--half a million men from 17 nations.

Segur wonderfully evokes the opening scenes of the disastrous war, with the Emperor surrounded by men whom he had named princes and dukes titled for victories in a dozen countries. The great host glittered with invincibility, and the men were still heady with the idea that they represented liberty under arms. They had only to cross the Niemen into Russian territory, and "love and gratitude" would welcome them.

Holy Horror. But sinister portents made the true picture clear. The Emperor's horse fell ("A Roman would turn back," someone said); a gigantic thunderstorm destroyed, among other things, 10,000 horses. Worst of all, there were no Russians to defeat. Segur describes in familiar scenes how the Grande Armee advanced into silent wastes; the aristocrats burned their houses and took their serfs with them to the East. Napoleon snapped: "Do you think I have come all this way just to conquer these huts?" The Russians were inspired--not by liberty--but by what was literally a holy horror of the French; they would not even eat from a plate a Frenchman had touched. When they were brought to battle, they presented "inert masses" to the French artillery until the gunners themselves stopped, aghast at their slaughter. It had become a war of icon and tricolor. Segur records his disillusion: "It was no longer a war of kings we were fighting, but a class war, a party war, a religious war, a national war--all sorts of wars rolled into one."

By its nature, this is a book without surprises or scholarly caches of "new material." But it is presented in an admirable new translation by J. David Townsend, a Methodist clergyman in Cohasset, Mass. Above all, it gives evidence on every page that Author Segur was a war chronicler ranking with Herodotus and Bernal Diaz.

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