Cork: A place for society
THERE may be hundreds of paintings recording the flight-or-death retreat of Napoleon’s defeated Grande Armée from Russia in 1812. For some unfathomable reason they seem more poignant, more humane and far more touching than the photographs documenting the next great retreat from a winter-bound Mother Russia taken almost a century and a half later.
One painting, Marshal Ney Supporting the Rear Guard During the Retreat from Moscow painted by Adolphe Yvon 44 years after the event — www.manchestergalleries.org — captures the tragedy of the French; the exuberant determination of the Cossacks to do what homeland defenders do when circumstances swing in their favour; the appalling conditions, the starvation, the typhus and, most of all, the inescapable snow and cold consuming the invaders. Napoleon led 600,000 men unused to defeat into Russia but only about 30,000 survived and of those fewer than 1,000 ever returned to duty.
