25,000 men; the Russians lost r5,ooo (the figures are disputed and some
authorities are inclined to reverse these numbers). Napoleon was forced
to crank his propaganda machine into top gear to disguise the scale of the
disaster, using the dubious fact that he had been left in possession of the
field to claim victory. About the scale of the casualties he lied barefacedly,
admitting to only r,900 dead and 5,700 wounded. Secretly glad the
Russians had not decided to renew the conflict next day, he looked
around for scapegoats. He found more than he was looking for, as,
incredibly, Bernadotte had once again disobeyed orders. The Emperor
had sent General Hautpol to the Gascon marshal with urgent orders to
bring his corps to Eylau. Bernadotte claimed never to have received any
such order, and as Hautpol was killed in the battle, there was no way to
nail Bernadotte's transparent lie.
Next day Napoleon rode over the battlefield, gloomily inspecting the
mounds of corpses. Later he wrote to Josephine: 'The countryside is
covered with dead and wounded. This is not the pleasantest part of war.
One suffers and the soul is oppressed to see so many sufferers.' That was
an understatement. Percy, surgeon to the Grand Army, put it more
vividly:
Never was so small a space covered with so many corpses. Everywhere
the snow was stained with blood. The snow which had fallen and which
was still falling began to hide the bodies from the grieving glances of
passers-by. The bodies were heaped up wherever there were small
groups of firs behind which the Russians had fought. Thousands of
guns, helmets and breastplates were scattered on the road or in the
fields. On the slope of a hill, which the enemy had obviously chosen to
protect themselves, there were groups of a hundred bloody bodies;
horses, maimed but still alive, waited to fall in their turn from hunger,
on the heaps of bodies. We had hardly crossed one battlefield when we
found another, all of them strewn with bodies.Appalled at the casualties, depressed by the mounds of dead and the huge
task involved in burying them, and generally suffering from nervous
exhaustion, Napoleon suspended military operations and took his
depleted army back into winter quarters on 23 February. The Russians
moved cautiously forward and retook the field of Eylau with its grisly
heaps of frozen corpses. The most serious problem the Emperor faced
was plummeting morale in the Grande Armee. The general atmosphere of
chaos was compounded by a marauding army, a consequently hostile
Polish peasantry and the implosion of the physical terrain, as a sudden
thaw turned frozen rivers into oceanic surges and covered everywhere