No sooner had the French entered Moscow and begun to ransack it, therefore, than they had to try to save it from being razed by its own inhabitants. With no knowledge of its geography and no fire-fighting equipment, they were unequal to the task. They shot around four hundred arsonists, but 6,500 of the 9,000 major buildings in the city were either burned down or ruined.14 Many of his soldiers, Napoleon remembered, died while ‘endeavouring to pillage in the midst of the flames’.15 When they cleaned up the city after the French had left, Muscovites found the charred remains of nearly 12,000
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