Alexander shuddered, vomiting into his rein hand.
“Follow me!” shouted Czartoryski, tugging at Alexander’s rein. “We’ll find cover and I’ll fetch the physician.”
Czartoryski left the Tsar in the care of the imperial physician, James Wylie. Then the Pole wheeled his horse around and galloped back to the Russian battle line.
Alexander sat hunched by an icy ditch under a linden tree, his head buried in his hands, sobbing.
“Your Majesty?” asked Doctor Wylie.
Alexander choked. This doctor, this voice. The hands who had dressed the corpse of his father.
“Please remount, sire,” said the doctor. “We must move from this spot.”
“Leave me be!”
The doctor looked at the young squire who stood nearby, holding the Tsar’s mare.
“There is a hamlet just a few versts away,” said the young squire. “Please, I beg you to remount, Your Majesty.”
The sobs had turned to convulsions, the Tsar now desperately ill.
“We have to get him to shelter,” said the doctor to the squire. “I will prepare a potion to calm him. His Majesty is ill.” He turned again to the Tsar, authority creeping into his voice. “You must remount. The Grand Armée is advancing.”
Little by little the doctor and squire managed to coax the Tsar onto his mare. The squire jumped his horse back and forth across the little ditch as an example, urging the shaken emperor to follow close behind.
Then the squire rode on to find shelter in the hamlet.
“This is all we can manage?” asked the doctor when he arrived with the Tsar at a peasant’s hut that the squire had found.
“The Austrians have requisitioned all the other buildings,” said the young man.
“Outrageous!” said Doctor Wylie. He turned to see the Tsar hunched in his saddle, listing to one side, about to fall.
“All right. Strew the floor with straw. Keep watch while I find wine for the medicine.”
King Charles of Austria was housed in the same town. The doctor pounded on the door of his temporary residence. “Open up in the name of Tsar Alexander of Russia!”
After several minutes the door finally unlatched.
“Please!” said an Austrian aide-de-camp. “I beg you not to make such noise! The king of Austria sleeps.”
“Give me wine and I shall stop my bellowing. I need to prepare the Tsar’s medication.”
“Wine? Oh, no, sir!” said the officer. “I cannot procure wine from the king’s storeroom without his express permission. And I cannot wake him, of course.”
“You must! This is the Tsar of Russia, your ally!”
“Please go away. The king of Austria must not be disturbed.”
“Did you not hear me? The wine is for the Tsar of Russia, Alexander I!”
“Go away, I must insist!”
Doctor Wylie rode away, his heart pulsing in rage. A few minutes away he found a campfire surrounded by Cossacks.
“Please!” he implored the men. He looked at their dirty faces, scarred and bloody. One had lost his eye, and another writhed on a filthy blanket.
“Please give me a draft of wine that I might make the Tsar a potion!”
The eldest man, dressed in a dirty blue chekmen, nodded. He lurched to his feet in agony, staggering forward. He reached for a bladder tied up in his leather kit, giving it to the doctor.
“To our Tsar’s health,” he croaked, his arm shaking wildly as he made his offering.
The doctor nodded solemnly, accepting the old Cossack’s gift to an emperor.
Back at the hovel, he prepared a draft of opium in the wretched wine.
“Drink, I beg you, Your Excellency,” the doctor said. “You will wake refreshed.”
The first news that reached St. Petersburg was that Austerlitz was a Russian victory. As Alexander rode back into the capital, citizens lauded him and peasants kissed his boots.
It was not long before the truth became known. With thousands of casualties, the defeat hit Russia hard.
Czartoryski penned a letter to his friend Tsar Alexander, reproaching him for pushing General Kutuzov aside and for his own vainglorious but useless presence on the battlefield. Alexander received the missive and read, his hands shaking with emotion:
… instead of moving ahead to the advance posts, or later exposing yourself in front of the columns, Your Majesty, far from helping, if I may speak the truth.
The Tsar closed his eyes, shaking with emotion. Of course that impertinent Pole would speak the truth. He always had—even to the detriment of their friendship:
You only upset and impeded the generals. It would have been better had Your Majesty stayed clear and let the army march forward without you. You were a distraction and the charm of your accompaniment lost its power. It was precisely at that place in the battlefield of Austerlitz where you rode that the rout was so immediate and complete. Yes, Your Majesty had his share of that chaos, but you ought to have hastily ridden away from the engagement without demonstrating your terror. To see your predicament only increased the sense of panicked retreat and general demoralization.
Your servant,
Adam Czartoryski
Tears of humility sprung to Alexander’s eyes.
He’s right. No one else on earth would tell me the truth. They would kiss the manure from my boots, toast my immortal name and all tsars of Russia before me. But only Adam Czartoryski would ever dare to show me my error. No one else in the world would have the courage to berate me like this in order that I might alter my course of destiny.
No—there is one other who tells me the truth. One other whom I can trust.
Alexander turned toward his secretary, who was standing in the antechamber.
“Please tell Her Highness, the Tsarina Elizabeth, to expect me to sup with her this evening.”
Chapter 28
Berlin
October 1806
The French soldier smiled broadly, exposing the gaps in his rotten teeth. Warm sun, bright for so late in October, lit his face.
He bit off a chunk of bread and hearing the whining of the dog that accompanied him, threw him half his piece.
The sun glanced off the soldier’s bayonet. From his musket hung a goose, dangling wildly from its broken neck on a piece of twine. Like all the French troops, this soldier was not shy about taking the spoils.
The soldier grinned, blinking into the tart autumnal air, his skin red and oily. He looked up at the nearby statue of Frederick the Great and shook his head. The Frenchman and his comrades had defeated the Prussian army—a quarter million strong—and battled their way into the Prussian capital. They had won the right to take whatever they could find. He looked down at his toes, emerging caked with dirt from the holes in his boots.
He sniffed the air, enjoying the wafting aroma of the enormous cooking pot on a flatbed wagon just ahead of him. The army was accompanied by vast cauldrons attached to wagons, kettles large enough to feed hundreds at a time. The cooks and stokers worked around the clock. The cooks concocted stews and soups to feed French stomachs so far from home, while the stokers kept the fires burning constantly despite inclement weather or raging battle.
As the soldier enjoyed the thought of a hot meal, Napoleon reined in his stallion and surveyed the city of Berlin from the shadow of the statue of Frederick the Great. Watching his troops march through the arched gateway, he noticed the jolly soldier with his tattered uniform and battered boots, a goose swinging from his musket.
“Now he’s a sight,” said a staff general, reining his horse next to the emperor. “What a disgrace to the Grand Armée!” As the general moved to reprimand the soldier, Napoleon held up his hand, staying him.
“Leave him be. He’s not that far, not that long from the battlefield of Jena. These Frenchmen. My countrymen. They can fight, Mon Dieu!”
Napoleon nodded toward the soldier.
“Let him hang a goose from his bayonet. He enters Berlin a French victor. He’ll look
livelier for the next battle.”
Napoleon turned to his brother-in-law, Murat, the king of Naples.
“I want to pay my respects to Frederick the Great,” he said, tucking his right hand into his shirt, his fingertips on his heart.
“The Prussian?” said Murat, wrinkling his nose in disgust.
“Ask Caulaincourt to locate the crypt. I intend to pay my respects before I settle into quarters.”
“And what about the king and his beautiful queen?” asked Murat, smirking. “Will you pay your respects to her? Or only to her defeated husband?”
“Queen Louise of Prussia is a beauty. But both she and her husband Frederick William are fools.” Napoleon leaned over from his horse to take an apple offered by a staff sergeant. He bit into the fruit with a crisp snap.
“Good autumn fruit,” he said. “It has been a good season.” The emperor smiled, dabbing apple juice from his mouth with his gloved hand.
“Why, they thought they could defeat France and the Grand Armée without a single ally standing along them. Stupidity! Arrogance!” Napoleon said. “If they had waited until Alexander moved his Russian army to the battlefield, then we would have had a battle to test our strength.”
The king of Naples grunted in agreement.
“The Russians weren’t much use at Austerlitz, were they? Rumor has it Alexander relieved General Kutuzov of command just before the battle.”
Napoleon smiled. That great victory would always remain sweet. And yet, victory or defeat, there was always another battle to be fought. He sighed.
“Alexander suffers from inexperience and youthful arrogance,” said Napoleon. “As for these Prussians, they are brave and quite skilled, but they have some incompetent commanders. That’s why I pay my respects to the greatest warrior of them all: Frederick the Great.”
He looked up at the statue above him. “If he were alive we wouldn’t be here. Don’t doubt that for a minute, Murat.”
In the street, the soldier started whistling a tune, a bawdy song from a Parisian tavern. The dog trotted along at his side, his tongue slung long and panting from his mouth.
“Find Caulaincourt,” Napoleon said, referring to his former ambassador to St. Petersburg, now his master of the horse. “He’ll know where the crypt is. I hear Tsar Alexander visited the tomb a year or so ago.” The victorious emperor of France chuckled. “A lot of good it did him. He must have offended the great warrior.”
Chapter 29
Battlefield of Heilsberg, Prussia
May 1807
I can barely hold my pen, I am so exhausted:
Dear Papa,
Since our ignoble defeat at Austerlitz seventeen months ago (28,000 noble Russian soldiers slaughtered!) our Polish uhlans have been ordered to the battlefields of the East in Heilsberg to defend Prussia.
Prussia! Their vile King Frederick William antagonized Napoleon, challenging him to war on the battlefields of Jena and Auerstadt. What stupidity! Together we could have defeated this French ogre. But instead of waiting for us to join the Prussian army on the battlefield, Frederick William declared war and stood against Napoleon. Alone.
Now their country is sliced into tidbits at Napoleon’s whim.
I swear my allegiance to our supreme Tsar Alexander I. I shall die for him. I shall die for Russia. But for Prussia?
Heilsberg. I see many men as white as sheets, I see them duck when a shell flies over as if they could evade it. Evidently in these men, fear has more force than reason. I have already seen a great many killed and maimed. It is pitiful to watch the wounded moaning and crawling over the so-called field of honor. What can ease the horror for a common soldier? For an educated man it is a completely different matter; the lofty feeling of honor, heroism, devotion to the emperor, and sacred duty to his native land compel him to face death fearlessly, endure suffering courageously, and part with life calmly.
As I dipped my pen in the bottle of ink, I wondered, What did the infantryman really feel? So many serfs were forced to fight, “given” by the wealthy aristocrats as their contribution to the cause, Mother Russia, to our tsar. So cheap are their souls, offered so freely by their masters! These serfs were the ones who pressed forward, who fell face first into the mud, one after another to fight, to die winning just another patch of mud, foot by foot against the French. Their war was a bloody game of dominoes, one dead comrade falling against another.
The infantry had no horses to carry them into victory or to gallop away in retreat. Battles were won by the foot soldiers, not by the cavalry. We owe them a great debt.
But I could not write that to my father.
So I simply signed the letter:
Your loving son,
Aleksandr Durov
I sat and stared at that letter for a long time. How long, I could not say. Then I carefully tore it into tiny pieces and scattered them to the wind.
Alcides lost a shoe. The imbalance would make him lame if he didn’t bruise and tear his hoof first.
As I rode through the explosions, heavy smoke, and rain of grapeshot, I was wondering how to find a good farrier in the heat of battle when a grenade exploded under Alcides. He leapt with wild surprise. Shrapnel whistled around us, showering us in dirt so that I saw nothing. I responded the only way I could, by digging my seat deep into the saddle and clamping my legs around Alcides’s barrel.
“You’ve been hit by a grenade,” shouted Nestor, a new recruit, riding next to us.
“What?” I could not comprehend.
I leapt off Alcides, examining him from head to tail, running my shaking hands under his belly.
“Get back on him,” screamed another uhlan. “Race for the hill! We are under artillery attack!”
It was not until we were over the knoll that I thought of examining myself.
“Are you wounded, Durov?”
“No,” I said, not comprehending.
“It is impossible,” said Nestor to the others in my squadron. “We saw the grenade explode under the horse’s belly.”
“No, I examined him! He galloped soundly and swiftly. Not a false step.”
“Impossible!” repeated Nestor. “We all saw the grenade explode!”
“What strong angels guard over you,” said Oleg, who rode directly behind me in our regular formation. “Think now of your angels and those who pray for you, that you might recognize their power and give thanks.”
Still dumbfounded, I thought of my father and old grandmother. My mind flashed on the old Lithuanian babushka who cared for me when I was dying.
And of course Astakhov, who gave me Alcides.
The order was given to pull back. Our regiment suffered many casualties, and the groaning survivors were carried in an endless parade of litters to tents or simply laid in the trampled grass. The echoing screams of amputation made the horses white eyed with fear, rearing and pulling back on the picket lines.
I needed no looking glass to imagine my physical state. I regarded the faces around me. Young men, aristocrats, moving with the stiffness of ninety-year-old men. Knuckles swollen as big as pig trotters, faces haggard. I heard the chatter of teeth that matched my own.
But worst of all, their eyes! Haunted. Seared by images too horrible, blocking the natural light of their young souls. Their eyes were dull, deadened to the world around them. These soldiers moved merely in order to survive, automatically stuffing stale brown bread into their mouths, dampened by the pouring rain. Their hair was either plastered to their skulls or spiked in dozens of directions like madmen’s.
They were no longer alive, just phantoms wandering the earth.
I received permission to ride to Heilsberg a verst away from the battlefield to find a farrier. I had to find food as well. In battle we are required to carry our own rusks. Mine had disappeared with my saddlebags.
The rain had begun the night before, soaking the ground where we slept. Rain dripped down my helmet, splashing my chafed breasts, forming rivulets at my collar that worked a chill down my spine
. The rain even made its way into my boots, soaking my already-freezing feet. I quaked like a birch leaf and could not control my shivering body.
At Heilsberg I found a blacksmith who was shoeing some Cossacks’ horses. He agreed to shoe Alcides. I walked a short distance to a roadside tavern. A Jewess ushered me to a large leather chair, where I flopped down in exhaustion. She agreed to find me bread and rusks. I could barely manage to dig my frozen hand into my purse for money.
I gave her the coins with my stiff fingers and fell instantly asleep. The warmth of a fire, the comfort of the old stuffed chair, lulled my aching body and mind into a numbing slumber.
I dreamt of a man in the dark touching me, in intimate places. His hands were huge and rough. I was riding Alcides in my nightgown. The man seized my shoulders, lifting me off my horse’s back.
He forced me astride, facing him in his own saddle, a bolster almost as large as a chair. His tongue ran over my neck, my breasts. He grasped at the ribbons of my nightgown.
I strained to see his face in the darkness. He pressed his shoulder against my mouth so I could not scream.
“Shh! Little horse girl,” he said. “I will not hurt you.”
I awakened to a soldier shaking my shoulder.
“Honorable sir! You must wake up!”
The room was black, with only the embers of a fire glowing orange. It was deserted except for the soldier and me.
“The cannons are getting closer,” he said. “Cannonballs are falling on the city!”
I raced back to the blacksmith and found Alcides still standing there. Wet from the rains, unfed and unshod. The blacksmith, the tavern owners, had all fled.
“Oh, Alcides!” I muttered, burying my face in his neck. I felt his body shivering.
I mounted my poor horse, moving him toward the city gates. But we were fighting against the tide. Throngs of wounded were pushing their way into the city, along with men, women, and children all surging through the gates to find shelter from Napoleon’s troops.
Alcides kicked against the pressing crowd. I knew he would rear if he could find space. We stood like a rock in a river, immobile in the flood of humanity fleeing the French.
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