Memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne, 1812-1813

One of the most harrowing accounts of war ever written. Adrien-Jean-Baptiste-François Bourgogne was a sergeant in Napoleon's Grande Armée, and his memoir of the 1812 Russian campaign stands as an unparalleled record of what ordinary soldiers endured as the French empire collapsed in snow and fire. Written years after the events but drawing on contemporaneous letters and diaries, Bourgogne leads us through the burning streets of Moscow and into the frozen nightmare of the retreat. He records the disintegration of order, the cannibalism, the corpses stacked like firewood, the men who simply sat down in the snow and refused to move until death claimed them. Yet his account is neither melodramatic nor self-aggrandizing. He writes with the flat precision of a man who saw too much, whose feelings were burned out of him by frost and horror. This is not a military history. It is a testament from the bottom of the chain, where wars are actually fought and where ambition becomes mass graves.