Eugène was one of the few personalities around the Emperor who had earned Nicholas’s respect. He was cool, efficient and kind-hearted; although he was Viceroy of Italy and the Emperor’s stepson by Napoleon’s first marriage, he did not give himself airs like King Murat. During the retreat Nicholas saw a good deal of Eugène when the army round him was disintegrating and the majority of senior officers were coolly shifting for themselves, and his behaviour did much to confirm the ex-schoolmaster’s high opinion of his chief. They had all expected Eugène to sulk when his mother, Joséphine, had been cast aside for the Habsburg woman, but when summoned for the Russian campaign Eugène rode up from Italy with a full complement of men and guns, and displayed his usual cool generalship in all the minor engagements along the road to Moscow.
Watching the Prince dismount and harness his magnificent Arab horse to a floundering gun-carriage in a birch forest outside Smolensk, Nicholas pondered on the vicissitudes of all Frenchmen of his generation. Sixteen years ago Eugène de Beauharnais had been an orphan of the Terror; his father was a victim of the guillotine, his mother the mistress of a corrupt politician. Nicholas wondered if the man’s startling change of fortune was due to his mother’s sound judgment in marrying Napoleon when the latter was an obscure, hysterical general, or to Eugène’s own talents and integrity. He did not pursue the query, his reflections being cut short by the necessity of climbing down from the box and helping to lever a dismounted gun clear of the road.
When he climbed back and warmed himself with a nip of brandy, Nicholas glanced sideways at Nicholette and decided that it was high time that she left the box and travelled inside the wagon. Her pale face was pinched and drawn, contrasting oddly with her swollen figure. She wore a long sheepskin cape and a fur cap pressed well down over her ears, and her hands, thrust into a muff improvised out of a grenadier’s bearskin, lay listlessly on her knees. She looked exhausted and apathetic, but she smiled when she met his glance and said: “We ought to be in Smolensk tomorrow!”
She knew that this was a futile thing to say. Even if they were in Smolensk the next day they could not stay there long enough to rest the horses, and, although independent of the revictualling magazines for their own food to continue the journey, they were dangerously short of forage. There was not likely to be any fodder in Smolensk, and even if they were lucky enough to get an issue, the horses needed rest far more than they needed food.
For the first time in her life Nicholette felt vaguely alarmed. She was not afraid of the prospects of losing her wagon and team, or even of what such a disaster might mean to herself and to Nicholas, who would then be obliged to continue the journey on foot. She was worried about the child inside her and the knowledge that the regimental surgeon-major, who had sworn to deliver it, was far behind with the rearguard.
The prospect of having the child did not frighten her. She had assisted her mother on several occasions when Old Carla had acted as midwife to other cantinières. She knew approximately what one must do on such occasions; the certainty of pain and the risks of confinement on the march she accepted as she accepted all the rigours of a campaign. She was afraid only because she desperately wanted the child to live and she knew that, under present conditions, the chance of this was remote. The temperature had dropped each successive day, and despite her thick layers of clothing the cold made her gasp.
She was terrified lest something should happen to Nicholas to take him away from her, and she fussed over Major-General Péliot as the arbiter of his presence and of the child’s survival. The boy—she was convinced that it would be a boy—was not due until February. With luck and endurance she could hold out until the New Year, and by that time they must all surely have reached Königsberg and security.
The town of Königsberg became a symbol to her and she began to compose incantations about it, as though the mere repetition of the phrase “Königsberg by Christmas, Königsberg by Christmas,” uttered a hundred times before they passed through a patch of forest and emerged into the open, would ensure the life of the child. She could never have imagined that she would feel so strongly about anything, and once or twice she recalled her mother’s contemptuous observations on cantinières who bore children during campaigns. Nicholette had been born comfortably in barracks at Lille and it had been summertime. Carla always said that if one did indulge in such folly once in a lifetime one might as well make sensible arrangements about it.
There had been no opportunity to exercise common sense over this child. She had married Nicholas in May and the child must have been conceived immediately. Nobody could have foreseen the fact that they would not winter in Moscow or, alternatively, get out before the snow was expected. The whole campaign had been badly bungled, and Nicholette, considering this, felt the same spurt of anger against the Emperor as her mother had experienced when they were kept hanging about outside Genoa instead of marching at once to the city’s relief and the extrication of the Irishman who owed Carla four hundred francs.
“You’d better go back into the wagon,” Nicholas advised her. “We’ll have another blizzard within an hour!”
She turned and rubbed her chin on his epaulette, and he winked encouragingly, taking one hand from the reins and throwing it across her padded shoulders.
“We’ll get there all right, Nico, don’t worry!”
It was odd that his presence should be so comforting to a woman who had grown up surrounded by men of every type and temperament. Nicholas puzzled her as he puzzled Jean. Like the sergeant, she had never understood why this cynical schoolmaster should have captured her fancy and held it so strongly that she trembled with excitement at the prospect of bearing his child.
She wondered if her mother had felt like this about Big Hervé, her favourite, and, if she had done so, whether it was virtually certain that Big Hervé had been her own father.
The wagon crunched on, its wheels grinding the army’s débris into slush. They passed frostbitten men who looked after them piteously, but Nicholette noticed neither them nor their wretchedness. She crawled back into the wagon and doled out the brandy ration to her passengers. Bald-headed Péliot cursed, and one of the colonels, who had neither moved nor spoken since they left Vyazma, muttered the name of a woman and turned feverishly in his blankets.
Nicholas managed to buy some oats from the merchants in Smolensk. The price was fantastically high, but it would have been worth all the money they possessed. They stayed in the ruined town two days and saw the wreckage of the divisions stagger in, too weak and too frostbitten to fight for the inadequate supplies of flour left by the Guard. Late arrivals were lucky to secure a handful apiece; senior officers stood by and threatened to shoot any man who helped himself to the rearguard’s allocation.
Discipline was now virtually at an end. Imperial Guardsmen consumed bottles of vodka and died raving in the streets. Groups of men huddled in the cellars, too exhausted to rejoin their ranks when the survivors mustered to continue the march. All that remained of the cavalry was formed into a few squadrons for personal attendance upon the Emperor, and a few thousand of the Guard still kept their ranks. Infantry and cavalry combined did not total ten thousand men.
The army was saved from complete annihilation only by the timely arrival of Marshal Victor’s corps, which had not advanced beyond Smolensk. The divisions still on the road, including Ney’s rearguard, were considered lost.
The escort of Italian troopers left the wagon at Smolensk and were enrolled in the Sacred Band, the name given to the remnant of mounted men. Nicholas saw that they would have to face the next part of the journey alone, and took the precaution of cleaning his musket and laying in a good stock of cartridges. There were plenty lying about in abandoned knapsacks, and he also emptied the holsters of a dead cuirassier whose saddle had been flung on one side when his horse was dismembered by a horde of famished Badeners.
One of the wounded colonels they carried died during the halt, and Nicholas tumbled him into a ditch, not even bothering to s
earch the body for valuables. There would be plenty to perform that office, and Nicholas was no longer concerned with anything that would not contribute to their chances of getting home. He went through the wagon inch by inch, stripping it of everything unlikely to be of service. Spare harness and farrier’s equipment were thrown out as useless weight, and Major-General Péliot was moved from the top of the locker he had occupied since Moscow and placed on the floor, beside the other passenger. Nicholas then sawed the locker in pieces in order that they might have dry kindling for the bivouac fires. Their dwindling stock of food was augmented by a pound of coarse meal. It cost Nicholette one hundred and fifty francs in gold.
The cold was not nearly so intense when they left Smolensk and set out along the road for Orsha, but the sudden thaw had made the going difficult and their progress was painfully slow. A mile or so beyond the town they overtook a lame grenadier whose right foot was badly frostbitten. His boot had gone and he limped along in a sheepskin pad. As they passed, the man begged hard for a lift and offered to pay handsomely for the privilege. In other circumstances Nicholas would have passed him without a glance, but he reflected that without an escort he might need another musket and the man looked fairly sound apart from his feet. He told the grenadier to climb up beside him, Nicholette having permanently transferred to the interior of the wagon.
The guardsman’s name was Joicy and he came from Tours. He told Nicholas that he believed himself the sole survivor of his company. He was a man of Jean’s disposition and believed in travelling light.
“The other fools clung to their ikons and silver plate until they fell dead in the snow,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for my cursed boot I’d have kept up with the Guard; there’s sure to be fighting ahead.”
Nicholas asked why, supposing the Russians to have been too busy attacking the columns in the rear to be anywhere in the neighbourhood of Smolensk.
“They’ve moved up on both flanks,” Joicy told him. “We’ll never get out of this.”
Nicholas reminded him ironically that the Emperor was still in the van.
The veteran spat, or tried to, for his lips were cracked and encrusted with frozen blood.
“Napoleon’s a conscript,” he grunted. “Who else would have hung on in Moscow for so long?”
Nicholas shrugged and said nothing. He found it interesting to hear a veteran of Jean’s class cursing the Emperor, but he was not impressed, knowing that at the first sound of gunfire the man at his side would hobble into the snow and instinctively make his way towards the firing. As likely as not he would shout, “Vive l’Empereur!” when he presented his bayonet at the Cossacks. They were all like that, Nicholas told himself, incapable of logical thought, guided solely by the impulses of their emotions and ready to have those emotions exploited at a moment’s notice.
The following day they discovered that the grenadier’s information had been correct. A wedge of fifty thousand Russians had overtaken the vanguard south of the line of march and occupied the hills on each side of the approaches to Krasnoe. The remnant of the Grand Army would have to fight its way through or else surrender en masse. The Emperor decided to fight.
Nicholas was not very sanguine as to the result. The enemy had cannon posted on all the ridges, and their infantrymen were able to pour an enfilading fire into the thin columns of Frenchmen strung out along the main road. The army closed up and moved forward, Napoleon marching on foot, surrounded by veterans of the Guard and a group of senior officers. What remained of the transport halted to await the issue of the battle.
The cannonade was murderous and the wagon train came under close fire, a four-pound ball tearing through the taut canvas of the canopy, within a few feet of Nicholette and the two wounded officers. The guardsman, Joicy, as Nicholas had prophesied, slipped off the driving-box during the action and moved up to take his place in the ranks. He returned the following morning in the best of spirits. Nicholas had already heard that the road had been cleared.
“We went through them like a bayonet through pork,” he told them.
“How did the conscript behave?” asked the schoolmaster, with a sardonic grin, as he cracked his whip, setting the wagon in motion once more.
The veteran Joicy rubbed his nose.
“Ah,” he said thoughtfully, “it was like the Sierra de Guadarrama all over again!”
“What happened at the Sierra de Guadarrama?” asked Nicholas, glad of a chance to talk and thrust his immediate worries into the back of his mind for an hour.
“Didn’t you hear about that?” said Joicy, helping himself to a swig of brandy from the bottle wedged between the leather cushions of the driver’s seat.
Nicholas reached out and grabbed the bottle before Joicy could empty it. “No,” he said, “tell me.”
Joicy smacked his cracked lips, the tip of his tongue seeking a stray dribble of liquor.
“We were chasing the Englishman Moore out of Spain. He was bolting for the coast and we were hot on his track. Hot, did I say? Hell, it was worse than this.” He gazed round the dismal landscape. The vast snowfield was broken only by yellow wheel ruts where the Russian guns had been hastily evacuated in the face of the French advance. Here and there a blue, inert mass, already half-covered with drifting snow, marked the farthest limit of an Imperial Guardsman’s retreat. Joicy interrupted his story to say that the break-through had cost the Guard several hundred men and that almost all the wounded had been abandoned. Behind him, in the wagon, Nicholas heard the persistent coughing of the surviving colonel and the clumsy movements of Nicholette rearranging blankets. He thought how lucky Péliot and the other man were to have made a bargain with his wife back in Moscow. No other cantinière would have adhered so rigidly to the terms—transport, with service, over a journey of six hundred miles—under conditions of this sort. He wished that she wouldn’t exert herself so much on behalf of her passengers.
With an effort he pushed Nicholette from his thoughts again and addressed the grenadier beside him.
“Go on, finish telling me about the Sierra.”
The veteran was not unwilling and Nicholas reflected that all these old soldiers liked the sound of their own voices.
“Ney got over the mountains with the cavalry, but we were caught in a blizzard and the wind bowled us over like skittles. I saw several men blown over precipices. The Emperor was there, helping to dig the snow from the track. I saw him at it, with his old grey coat streaming out like a swallow’s tail. Afterwards we all linked arms and marched up the pass in a body. I forget what we sang, but it was something to help us along.”
“You didn’t catch the English, did you?” put in Nicholas, who now realized that he had heard the story before from Old Jean.
“Of course we didn’t,” said Joicy. “The Emperor left us and cleared off to Paris. He put Soult in charge, and Soult couldn’t catch a cartload of horseshoes with a squadron of light cavalry!”
They jogged along in silence for a few minutes and passed over a wide area of churned-up white snow piled with the previous day’s dead, now frozen into grotesque attitudes.
“I heard music between the gunfire yesterday,” said Nicholas. “What was it?”
“The fifes,” Joicy told him. “The fools began to play ‘Safe in the Bosom of the Family,’ but the Emperor soon stopped that. He ordered ‘Watch Over the Safety of the Empire’ and played it right up to their bayonets!”
A memory stirred in Nicholas, bringing a picture of the idiot youth Dominique scraping away at his fiddle in the churchyard at Essling, playing the same tune to the same man. That had been only three years ago, but it seemed like fifty.
They bivouacked that night in a wretched little village on the road to Orsha. A few battalions passed them on their way back towards Smolensk, and Nicholas heard that they were being sent to extricate the remains of Eugène’s and Davout’s corps, cut off by the army that the Guard had pushed on one side the previous day. The men were sullen but resolute, and for a brief moment Nicholas w
as tempted to join them. He was worried about Old Jean and the others. Perhaps they were back there, struggling against terrific odds, without food or brandy. The impulse passed. He had Nicholette to look after, and for once in her life she was in no condition to look after herself.
During the night Nicholette awakened him. In spite of the intense cold she seemed feverish. She said: “I think the child’s coming.”
He was petrified. “That’s impossible!”
He used the word because he wanted it to be impossible. He was not concerned, as she was, whether his child lived or died. He had long since resigned himself to the child dying within a few hours of birth. The important thing was to get Nicholette to a place where she could be delivered in reasonable comfort and safety. Here, in this village, which would be evacuated at first light and might be occupied by the enemy almost immediately, the dice were loaded against all of them.
By morning Nicholette’s pains had ceased and he began to hope again. He moved off after the infantry without waiting to make soup. Stragglers from the corps in the rear began to come in. There had been a night battle in the snow and once more the French had had the best of it.
They struggled on towards Orsha, but one of the horses went lame and the wagon began to lag. Men passed them in twos and threes, walking blindly along the road, dragging frostbitten feet, not even glancing at the slow-moving wagon.
Soon after midday complete disaster occurred. The lame horse collapsed and dragged its floundering companion into the soft snow beside the road. Nicholas and the old grenadier wasted an hour in efforts to get the animal to rise again. The horse lay on its side with flanks heaving and eyes glazed, its mouth frothing in distress.
They agreed to bivouac and hope for a sledge to overtake them. If they had such luck Nicholas decided that its owner must be bribed with half of all they possessed to convey Nicholette as far as Orsha. If they reached a town there was certain to be someone who could be hired as midwife.
Seven Men of Gascony Page 25