nails hammered into the body, legs and arms cut off to leave a bleeding
torso, stakes driven down the throat. One of two particularly favoured
methods was to wrap a naked victim in a wet sack with a pillow tied
around the torso; villagers would then vie with one another to beat the
stomach with hammers, logs and stones, so that the internal organs were
crushed but no marks were left. Another was to raise the victim on a
pulley with hands and feet tied together; he would then be dropped so
that the vertebrae in his back were broken. The process was continued
until the prisoner was reduced to a spineless sack.
News of the fate that awaited them if captured ran through the ranks
of the Grande Armee, causing terror. Such was the soldiers' fear of the
partisans that they would attempt suicide if taken prisoner, and the more
humane Russian officers simply shot their captives out of hand to spare
them the insane attentions of the peasants. Lest it be thought that stories
of Russian atrocities lost nothing in the telling, it is worth citing three
instances recorded by Sir Robert Wilson, a British observer with the
Russian Army. After subjecting their prisoners to horrible tortures, the
partisans first burnt a group of some fifty French troops alive; a second
group of the same number was buried alive; while for the third group,
about sixty strong, a kind of death by peasant bacchanalia was prepared.
The prisoners were stripped naked, then spreadeagled across a large
fe lled tree with their necks protruding as if on the executioner's block;
peasant men and women then hopped about singing in chorus while they
beat out the prisoners' brains with hoes and cudgels.
That large numbers of wounded were rounded up to share this
gruesome fate was largely the fault of the callous French wagoneers.
When carts jolted over rutted tracks, the wounded would naturally
scream in agony. Exasperated by this, the drivers liked to crack the whip
to accelerate, thus bouncing off their ululating charges; the lucky ones
were run over by the carts following behind, and the unlucky ones left for
wolves to devour or the partisans to execute in their frightful way. Sir
Robert Wilson conveyed some of the flavour of the French panic-stricken
retreat in a famous description:
The naked masses of dead and dying men; the mangled carcasses of
Io,ooo horses which had in some cases been cut for food before life
had ceased; the craving of famine at other points forming groups
of cannibals; the air enveloped in flame and smoke; the prayers of
hundreds of naked wret'�;es flying from the peasantry, whose shouts
of vengeance echoed incessantly through the woods; the wrecks of
cannon, powder-wag�ons, all stores of every description: it formed