Napoleon's Retreat From Moscow Collapsed in a Single Cold Week

Napoleon entered Moscow on September 14, 1812, and found it burning. Russian Governor Rostopchin had ordered the city torched rather than handed over intact — most of the wooden city burned within days. There was no one to negotiate with and no winter supplies to loot.

For 35 days Napoleon waited in the Kremlin, certain that Tsar Alexander I would sue for peace. No offer came. Alexander had decided that time and winter were better allies than any army. On October 19, with the first snow already falling, Napoleon ordered the retreat.

The Grande Armée left Moscow with perhaps 100,000 remaining troops and a wagon train of looted art and silver that slowed their pace. By late October, temperatures dropped to -20°C; by November they hit -30°C. Men's muskets froze to their hands. Horses died by the thousands, leaving artillery pieces abandoned in the snow. Soldiers wore paper and straw over their uniforms. The Russian cavalry and Cossack raiders followed the retreating column, picking off the stragglers — and the stragglers were most of the army.

Napoleon crossed back into Poland on December 5, 1812, with perhaps 10,000 men still in organized formation. The full accounting of the Russian campaign is staggering: of approximately 422,000 soldiers who crossed into Russia in June 1812, fewer than 100,000 returned. The largest army Europe had assembled since antiquity had been annihilated in six months, mostly by cold and hunger rather than battle.