Disaster
The snow came down, men froze, and horses starved. The last lap of the almost two-month trek back to Vilnius, was the worst of all. The soldiers barely managed the crossing of the Berezina River - over two frail bridges - and there were perhaps as only as few as 50,000 half-stunned survivors of the Grand Army who, harried by Cossacks, tottered on through icy temperatures towards the town. Man after man 'did a bear', tumbling with his haggard face downwards into a snow-filled ditch, never to rise again.
'a veritable moving mountain, more than 2 metres deep, of dead and dying, pushing, shoving, hemmed in on all sides, at each step risking being thrown down by the convulsive spasms of those we were trampling underfoot.'
Some of these unfortunates certainly ended up in the mass grave discovered in 2002. And there are sure to be other graves, too, as yet undiscovered. Probably as many as a half of the starving survivors who had managed to reach Vilnius died once they got there. They may have over-eaten, in their desperation to assuage their hunger, or drunk themselves silly. Many had frost-bitten noses, toes or fingers, which turned gangrenous. Some died of exhaustion or cold almost on arrival. As for lodgings, 'the stronger drove out the weaker', so that many a soldier, especially those with no Moscow gold to pay with, froze to death on an inhospitable doorstep.
Others again simply refused to go on, or were captured by the Cossacks - who had harried them throughout their retreat, and had starved the army to death by keeping it to one narrow highway. The prisoners were driven naked all the way back again into Russia.
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