In questo giorno del 1812 – il fuoco scoppia mentre Napoleone raggiunge l’abbandono Mosca
https://i.redd.it/syay3qwrw0pf1.jpeg
di Ok-Baker3955
In questo giorno del 1812 – il fuoco scoppia mentre Napoleone raggiunge l’abbandono Mosca
https://i.redd.it/syay3qwrw0pf1.jpeg
di Ok-Baker3955
4 commenti
If you enjoy learning about things that happened on this day in history, then feel free to subscribe to my newsletter for a short email every day about an event that happened on that day in the past:
https://today-in-history.kit.com/1159f3ff76?fbclid=PAZnRzaAMy6PpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABp1GXAKbpKtZmHa-wIMB69mcUpzXGDvK3dQM_7pMaTtWQ3aAsYVVfl46d2-pj_aem_A1djG0XOtj4ds474JPeeYA
IIRC, around two thirds of Moscow got destroyed by the fires. Funnily enough, after dealing with the fires, there was still enough loot to plunder that the French army got completely bogged down when Napoleon decided staying in Moscow was too dangerous and it was safer to retreat to Smolensk.
The French army was so heavily slowed down by their own loot and constant Cossack attacks that it allowed the Russian armies regrouping to catch up, and the rest was history.
Tolstoj’s War and Peace later chapters describe the whole situation perfectly, both for the french and the russian side. Even tho some aspects are of course fictionalized for obvious reasons it still sums up what the *feeling* of living in that era was like.
Napoleon’s “victory” at Borodino, ironically, confirmed his own demise.
Good old times, i guess. One of my family members in the Swiss Regiments (Switzerland was the Helvetic Republic in this time, a satellite state of France), died in Polotsk. The other one shows up in the list before they got near Moscow, but he disappears without a trace and is not listed anymore after they left the city.
These regiments took some serious losses, like one of the Swiss regiments had an overall strength of 2310 men, but when they returned, 69 officers and 333 soldiers were left, but less than 100 soldiers were still able to fight, the others were injured and disabled, like because of frostbite.
The thing was kinda strange: Napoleon got to the Kreml and slept in the bed of the Tsar. In almost all cases of wars in history, when the enemy commander sleeps in the bed of your commander, you know the war is lost. But here, it was different for once.