On 26 November 1812 the first French troops crossed the Berezina River at Studianka, in today's Belarus, over a trestle bridge built by General Jean-Baptiste Eblé's pontonniers standing in freezing water. With three Russian armies closing in, the remains of Napoleon's Grande Armée crossed over two bridges in the next three days, fighting on both banks. Napoleon escaped the trap, but the losses were terrible, and when the bridges were burned on 29 November thousands of stragglers were left behind.
A trap on the Berezina
The Grande Armée left Moscow on 19 October 1812 and reached the Berezina a month later. By then Admiral Chichagov's army had come up from the south and taken the French depot at Minsk, General Wittgenstein was pressing down from the north, and Marshal Kutuzov's main army followed behind. The only road west crossed the river at Borisov. On 21 November Chichagov drove General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski's Polish troops out of the town, and although Marshal Oudinot retook it two days later, the Russians burned the bridge. An unexpected thaw had broken the ice, turning the river into a real barrier.1
A ford was found upstream at Studianka, near Brili, by General Corbineau's cavalry with the help of a local peasant. On 25 November Napoleon staged diversions to the south, and Chichagov, according to the historian John Rickard also misled by letters from Kutuzov, moved his main force away. The pontoon train had been lost when Napoleon cut down his baggage, but Eblé had saved a few wagons of tools and equipment; his men spent the night pulling down the houses of Studianka for timber.2
Into the freezing river
At about eight in the morning on 26 November Corbineau's cavalry crossed the ford and drove off the few Russians on the far bank, and the pontonniers went into the water. The infantry bridge, about 100 meters long, was finished by one in the afternoon, and Oudinot's corps crossed first, followed by Dąbrowski's division. A second bridge for guns and wagons followed and broke down repeatedly. Rickard writes that only 40 of Eblé's 400 engineers and bridge builders survived the campaign, and Eblé himself died of exhaustion weeks later. The Fondation Napoléon credits the army's escape to the sacrifice of those pontonniers.3
The bulk of the army crossed on 27 and 28 November. On 28 November Chichagov attacked on the west bank and Wittgenstein on the east; a charge by cuirassiers and Polish lancers checked the Russians on the west bank, while Marshal Victor's rearguard held the crossing on the east, as Russian guns fired into the crowd of stragglers at the bridges.4
The bridges burn
Many stragglers had refused to cross at night when the bridges stood empty. On the morning of 29 November Eblé set the bridges on fire, and, according to the Fondation Napoléon, nearly 10,000 men, women and children were abandoned on the eastern bank. Losses are uncertain. The Fondation Napoléon speaks of 25,000 soldiers and 30,000 non-combatants killed; Rickard estimates at least 20,000 and possibly 30,000 soldiers lost, and 10,000 to 20,000 non-combatants killed or captured. The Fondation Napoléon still counts it a tactical victory for Napoleon, who got his army out of a potentially fatal situation, and Rickard calls it one of his more impressive achievements of the campaign, a victory of sorts only because he escaped. In French the word Bérézina has come to mean a disaster.5 › Napoleon Bonaparte
Russia still used the Julian calendar, twelve days behind, so Russian accounts date the crossing to 14 to 17 November. Napoleon left the army on 5 December to return to Paris.6
