Napoleon Symphony

by Anthony Burgess

  At four of the afternoon of November 27 there was an unfortunate accident, the passage of troops over both bridges having been up to that point smoothly maintained, when the structure reserved to the transfer of the artillery suddenly collapsed. We were standing by, watching for strains, not liking too much the look of the trestles under Bridge J, when Cornevin yelled out O fucking Jesus, him being first to notice one of them wobbling, then it was all panic and screaming and yelling as three of the fucking trestles went down splash and thud, and the lot up there pushed and clawed their way back, hitting and screaming O Jesus Christ almighty as they saw the planks in front going down, troops clawing at sergeants and even officers (that’s when Captain Roeder nearly bought it forever, only his sergeant major thudded back at them) as they shoved back, thousands of the bastards, all arms and legs and screaming meatholes, trying to get to shore. And the guns trundling down the angled planks or over the sides, crashing into the ice, all of them clawing and screaming to shore. All discipline unfortunately failed at this juncture and there were some reprehensible gestures of insubordination which, granted the exceptional circumstances and the shock induced in personnel already in an advanced state of exhaustion, were, even when disciplinary action became a feasible consideration, taken no fucking notice of at all. Every bastard for himself. Hundreds of yelling bodies piling up on the east shore, the ones underneath squelched to buggery, you could see the blood pouring out and freezing at the same time, boots crunching into skulls and eyes popping out and one poor bastard trying to hold up both hands as a living witness to something or other, all the fingers broken, yelling as if he was the only one hurt.

  What they were doing right away, those who didn’t get rammed to bits in the crush, was to make for Bridge N, this being at the time fully operational, with the transit of infantry personnel proceeding at a smooth and rhythmical rate, yelling like war cries and thrashing about so that it soon looked just the same here as at the boarding-point of the other one. Not only bodies kicking and screams of Jesus but now horses snorting and neighing away, and carriages going over, wheels spinning in the air. But our job was not to watch but to the engineers with commendable promptitude and totally without panic at once commenced repairing the collapsed artillery bridge, restoring the fallen trestles and affixing the planks so that crossing might be resumed. The trouble was when it came to trying to get the First and Fourth Corps even into a position to start getting over, because everything was blocked up in front of both N and J, all these bodies piled up like the dirty washing of two whole regiments, as well as wheels and axles and carriage bodywork, horses, some of them not yet dead, only stupefied sort of with eyes blaring at you. What we had to do under General Eblé’s orders was to General Eblé ordered not the removal of the obstructive dead personnel and impaired or ruined equipment, since the time required for such an operation would be excessive but the what we had to do was to hack. To hack. What we had to do was to hack. Hack, lads and keep on hacking, Sergeant Rebour kept on hacking out, so we hacked. Suppose you had a big plate of steaks and cutlets and fried eggs served up, and the whole mess was like ravenous, then instead of serving out an egg here and a bit of steak there, instead of that you’d just hack, meat juice and eggyolk flying, hacking away. Gontier screamed and said that he’d just hacked at somebody who opened his eyes at him and then nodded and died from the hack in his belly. So we hacked a couple of ways clear, the things we do for fucking France, and on either side of each clear way was like a wall of bone and flesh and guts and hacked uniform. Then the First and Fourth, a lot of them too sick to vomit, got through to N and J, and then over. There was a bit of a lull then, and along the east bank were these little fires lit by the stragglers who wouldn’t go over, no will left in them, and then the ice came down like a great cold flat iron. Right down the east bank as far as your eye could see were this lot, all rags and shivers, who’d lit their little fires and crouched over them, without the nerve or the guts or the fucking brains to do a single fucking thing. They’d gone sort of quietly mad, that was about it. General Eblé, aware that neither bridge was at present in operational service, pending the arrival of the delayed Ninth Corps, endeavored to persuade and even to order under pain of dire punishment the noncombatant appendage of the Army to take advantage of the opportunity offered throughout the night to effect a passage to the western bank, but the personnel in question was apathetic and totally lacking in the moral fiber even to be able to perceive the necessity of undertaking such salvatory action. Quietly mad.

  The engineers bivouacked and snow came down over the empty bridges just before daybreak. Look at all that snow, huddling round the fires they fed with boots, rags of uniform, perhaps a leg, a handful of teeth, anything, nobody really saw anything. Look at all that snow coming down. What is snow? What is the Ninth Corps? What does Ninth mean? Where are we? Russia. Where is Russia? What are we doing in Russia? We should be in France. Where or what is France? France. It woke something in some. If you go over those bridges there you get to France. Which bridge? Why two? Of the forty thousand odd some left their weak fires and dithered between the two bridges. Which one to take? Which one takes you to France? The Engineers said: We’re waiting for the Ninth Corps. Non-combatant personnel had its chance during the night. We’re expecting the Ninth Corps any moment now. No no, we’re coming over, we want to go to France. The ragged stream began to push at N, then at J, it swelled, it began to go over.

  Over away on the western bank, N, in his headquarters at Brilli, watched the snow fall. A rider, all iced up from his rapid fording, panted in with news of the Ninth Corps. Marshal Victor, Duke of Belluno, holding the rear there along the ridge near Studienka, has no left flank worth speaking of. Wittgenstein is moving in, a three-pronged assault.

  “For God’s sake, man, why hasn’t he a left flank? Where’s General Partonneaux’s division?”

  Took the wrong turning leaving Borisov with orders to fall back on Studienka, marched straight into the arms of the Russians, only one hundred and sixty men found their way to the Duke of Belluno’s HQ.

  “What sort of a divisional commander is that damned Partonneaux? Four thousand men being deballocked by the Cossacks at this very minute. Took the wrong turning, did he? How many turnings are there to take in a godforsaken hellhole like this? Did he think he was in the Place des Vosges?”

  “Ggg-”

  “How about that Baden brigade? Where is it?”

  “Withdddr—”

  “Well, who let me withdraw it? Didn’t anybody have the sense to see that this is no time for withdrawing anything? Right, I want those Badeners back over those bridges and galloping like buggery for the left flank of the Ninth Corps. Infantry too galloping, no time to lose.” Snow and sweat mingled on his nose.

  I could practically feel my lower jaw dropping into my ball sack with the sheer fucking astonishment of it. There was this lot, artillery and all, trying to come back to where everybody had already come from, except for the Ninth Corps, and making us wonder why we’d had to build the fucking bridges at all, there’s the army all over for you. It was a shitscaring astonishment for everybody including this brigade as it turned out to be, though their astonishment was in finding both N and J blocked with this ragged brainless whimpering load of bastards shambling over crying out for France as though it was a meat breakfast being served on the other side of the bridges. Scheiss and Ach du lieber Gott was coming out of this brigade, a German-speaking load, and they kicked and pushed and slammed, and then as we expected bodies started going over the sides, arms and legs and yells of mother mother and then down splash and crash and gurgurgurg into the ice and the icy water. It was a two-way push and scramble all the way, and they couldn’t get the artillery pieces across. The story got round, and it turned out true again as though it was not possible for anything to be got wrong anymore, since whatever anybody invented had to be less fantastic than what this whole fucking fantastic campaign was capable of throwing up, that they were on the way to ma
ke the left flank of the Ninth which was acting as rear guard. Over on the west side there was a fair-sized set of battles going on too as we could hear thump crump and we heard that the cavalry was doing all right and old Shitshagoff was shagging off shitting himself. Snow coming down all the time and those that had time to notice it were fucking freezing to death.

  At midday the enemy commenced a calculated artillery assault on the throng of unarmed refugees that was attempting to cross the bridges, the source of the fire evidently the position of the left flank of the Ninth Corps. This envelopment was speedily liquidated from the western bank by a withering storm of enfilading fire from batteries that the Emperor had speedily ordered to be drawn up there, as also from a notable cavalry charge led by General Fournier, the eventuality being that in the early evening the Ninth Corps was still maintaining its position and covering the bridges. But the fucking panic started off by the first salvo from the Russes started the crowd screaming and yelling and turning itself into a kind of fucking animal fighting itself with a million claws. It is estimated that the mass of would-be refugees formed itself into an indisciplined and maddened pack some two hundred yards deep and nearly a mile wide, the panic and indeed in effect suicidal behavior being compounded by the attempts by drivers of carriages to effect a passage through the press and inevitably crushing an incomputable number of the personnel in question under wheels and hooves. Many thousands were dislodged from the bridges and sent hurtling incontinently into the river, a certain number being lethally concussed rather than drowned by their striking of the increasing number of ice blocks that now clogged the waters.

  I can’t find the words, I just cannot find the cunting words for what happened when Bridge J broke down, it just sort of burst and collapsed, and there were still screamers and clawers and thumpers trying to push on over while it was breaking. Those that pushed the poor bastards in front over the edge got themselves pushed over the edge and so on all the way back. Never in my whole bleeding life. Those that could see what was happening from the J approach ran fighting and tumbling over and getting crushed trying to get to Bridge N and then it started all over again. When we started repairing both we were just standing on corpses that were like starting to dam the river, and later on the hack hack hack business had to be done like before on both the approaches because the Ninth Corps was already withdrawing and we could hear the bugles warning us they were on their way. Hack hack hack with hatchets and on living as well as dead to let the Ninth get through, they started crossing about half past nine and were still going across at one in the morning, and there was the rear guard of the Ninth to come at daybreak.

  The funny thing was that as soon it was night the non-combatant mob got all dead and weak and couldn’t move a muscle, as though France was only over there when it was day. There they were again with their bits of fires, huddling, some of them sitting on corpses as if they were chairs. General Eblé spent a great deal of the night attempting to clarify the situation to the apathetic and ragged companies, who did not appear to understand either plain language or gesture, namely that orders from Imperial Headquarters had been received for the firing of the bridges immediately after the transit to the western shore of the rearguard of the Ninth Corps. Arguing all fucking night with them and himself near dropping with the fatigue while the rest of us bivouacked down after we’d melted ice and made stews of the frozen horseflesh that we hacked hacked away at. It was hard for some of us to get any sleep at first because we’d had the figures about the Engineers, we were down from four hundred to about forty, no wonder the work had seemed to get tougher all the time. Forty of us, Jesus Christ.

  When morning came, showing white white white as far as the fucking eye could see, the rest of the Ninth came shambling along and then over, and at about nine General Eblé ordered us to set fire to the bridges. As soon as the mob saw the flames licking they were all seized with a great fucking panic and they began to rush to both bridges and then to run over, pushing and clawing (those that had any claws left), screaming and cursing us for the flames, then a great number went over screaming, all outlined in fire. The bridges didn’t take long to burn out, and down they went covered with burners and screamers, like flypapers in summer you throw in the kitchen fire. The river was no longer ice and water but people, dead and dying, absolutely fucking blocked, a new kind of thing, a river made out of corpses. And that was the end of the crossing of the Berezina. Thus ended the episode of the evacuation of the remnant of the Great Army across the Berezina river, one of the most glorious chapters in the history of the Russian campaign. Glorious my arse, it was fucking murder. The Corps of Engineers in particular covered itself in glory. In shit.

  In snow and snow and growing snow they go

  So slow in woe the glowing snow their foe

  Forego foreshow but oh foreknow the snow

  The snow tableau and flow in vertigo

  Rousseau and Diderot and frozen toe

  Bestow or sow an Eskimo bravo

  A tremolo fortissimo of snow

  Fifth of December twenty-one below

  Eighth of December twenty-six below

  And throes of snow below and to and fro

  And oh so slow to go and know the snow

  To sow and hoe and grow and mow the snow

  The groaning scarecrows moaning through the snow

  Some died puzzled. Sergeant Huppe knew at odd intervals that they were evacuating Russia and had crossed a big river to do it and as soon as they saw the Niemen again they would be really on their way home, but he knew that the main enemy was England and why in God’s name had they had to march into Russia in order to fight England? Because Russia was not supporting the Continental System. And what was the Continental System? It was everybody all being forced to band together to stop England exporting the things she manufactured into Europe, that was to say the French Empire. So you marched over half a million men into Russia to make the Czar or Tsar start supporting the Continental System again. But if supporting the Continental System was the most important thing in the world, then why was the Great Army not supporting it? Sergeant Huppe had had undeniable proof until very recently that army boots were coming from England—a tag in the inside of the boot said NOTTINGHAM, now disintegrated along with the boot, N and TT and NGH and M lowing like ghost-cows through the steppe winds. Sergeant Huppe composed himself for death inside the frozen shell of a horse. I am your little shuddering foal, give birth to me, huppe huppe, gee up, whoa, Continental System.

  Lieutenant Ratiano saw his left leg, from the knee down, actually break off, no pain, like a rotten tree-limb, and then wept for it, seeing it in the snow: my baby, part of me, I have let you die. He prepared to die puzzled that God had not interfered in the huge agony of a dying army, but then saw the incredibly beautiful subtlety of the whole Universal System, God using the Emperor to bring about undeniable evidence of the immortality of the soul. It was so simple really: the one part of the Human System that could not break off and lie there in the snow was the Human Spirit. Lieutenant Ratiano prepared in ecstasy to break everything off, including his brain, and then what would be left was the essential Lieutenant Ratiano, counting his broken-off parts invisibly, seeing that everything was there. Hallelujah hallelujah. And then he died puzzled that anybody had to be born in the first place.

  Major Cordaillet was puzzled about too many things—the delay in leaving Moscow, the failure to use the warmer southern route home, the burning of the pontoon train (somebody had said that the rivers would be frozen, so the train would not be needed), but out of the manifold cloud of puzzlement flashed a maxim that he felt a dreadful hunger to be expounding in some military college somewhere to crop-headed cadets, lean as a bone and listening intently, just before the end of the morning session, then home to his quarters and onion soup and a small roast leg of veal with garlic: Gentlemen, with Russia no army can win. The winter was killing them, the summer had already killed them: they were dead before they saw the cupolas of Moscow,
what with dysentery and malaria and starvation. It is Russia itself, gentlemen, that purveys death; Russia will find one form or another. But for God’s sake expunge from your minds any romantic image of General Winter as the killer. He then dismissed his class and, saluting General Winter, grimly died.

  Colonel Boutteau, who came of dairy fanning stock in the Midi, wept for the cattle that had marched with the army into Russia, now all gone and mooing and grunting and bellowing forever in a sort of Homeric hell. For the horses he felt little pity: they had gone snorting in, willing extensions of man, saying ha ha among the trumpets. But the calves new-dropped had been cursed for not keeping a better pace. He died smiling, warmly nuzzled.

  Senior Private Cornu was one of the men who did not drop away from the column between Smorgoni and Vilna. How many was it who had? Twenty thousand? Thirty forty? Figures meant nothing. Cornu had Grandjean on one side and Sauveur on the other when the story began to spread through the snow that Vilna was full of rations, the usual army fuckup, everybody starved on the way into Russia while the cunting rations were there all the time. Cornu said to his mates: Listen to the advice of an old soldier, don’t fight, wait. They saw what he meant when they got to the town gates (town, gates, lamps, walls, streets, people in fur coats, women) because the raw and stupid began to clamor to be let in: open up, fuck it, we’re fucking starving, if you knew what we’d been through you fucking bastards you’d fucking well open up. There, see, Cornu said, look. Fucking Jesus, Grandjean said. Men being crushed to death at the gates, hundreds going down, crushed and yelling. The fur-coated officers of the garrison, leading a small army with guns at the ready, would not open the gates, not until there’s a semblance of order, who is in charge there? There—a big jet of steam out of his well-fed gob. The only way to stop the hammering and tearing at the gates was to let those in the front have it, right in the chest. See what I meant? Cornu said. That’s quietened the stupid bastards down a bit. Then they opened up and let them trickle in. The trouble was that nobody could tell officers and NCO’s from the rest of the mob, a ragged screaming lot as they were. Some got clobbered with rifle butts as soon as they got in, keep their fucking hysteria down. Get the bastards into billets, first job. Get the casualties into hospital, first job. NCO’s barked away, sometimes cuffing, all right for those swine, they’ve been here guzzling while we’ve been fucking fighting. They got twenty thousand (or thirty or forty) into hospital, bundling them into beds or onto floors. They shoved the raving hungry noncasualties (but everybody was a casualty really) into big cold halls and barrack rooms and even into the houses of frightened civilians (all right missis we’re not going to rape nobody we’re just about ready to fucking drop). Then the quarter buggers started coming round, carrying blankets and new uniforms and rations.