The Retreat

by Patrick Rambaud

  The grenadiers of the Old Guard formed square around His Majesty. With the band at their head, three thousand soldiers and horsemen made ready to leave the town. Crowded in doorways, the administrative staff and the servants wondered anxiously whether these last-remaining, well-ordered troops would come back; if not, they would all fall into the hands of the Russians, who would exterminate them. Paulin found himself one of the people having such thoughts. The captain didn’t turn his head toward him; he got his dragoons in step, shivering with cold, or joy, it was hard to tell.

  Raising fifes to their chapped lips, bandsmen struck up ‘Where can one be happier than in the bosom of one’s family?’ – the irony of which was not appreciated by the Emperor, who preferred a martial air more suited to their situation, and so it was to the strains of ‘Let us watch over the Empire’s safety’ that the divisions emerged shortly after from the sunken road where they had been sheltering. The veterans, Napoleon’s old grumblers, spotted the Russian army on a hill, drawn up by a fir forest. They jeered mockingly. They marched straight ahead through the snow, in step, to join up with Davout’s soldiers, who were surrounded by hordes of Cossacks. Confronted by the eagles, the unfurled tricolour battalion flags, the music and the famous bearskins of the Imperial Guard, whom they had saluted in so many battles, the Russians were stupefied. The Cossack cavalry fell back in disorder without daring to attack. D’Herbigny deployed his troop as a shield on the grenadiers’ flank. He observed his Emperor, very sure of himself, invincible again, just as he used to be. The enemy avoided engaging. Then its artillery positioned on the ridges went into action.

  Safely out of reach, the Russian cannon concentrated their fire on the column, an easy, slow-moving target they could take good aim at. The grapeshot and roundshot opened breaches in the dense mass of the battalions. When one man fell to the ground, his knees shattered or his head blown off, another replaced him to close up the ranks and present a wall of bodies to the enemy. They stepped over the fallen without a glance, a gesture, a word of comfort or feeling, deaf to their screams and supplications and oaths. Sergeant Bonet was marching on the captain’s right; he stooped forward convulsively, his stomach torn open by a shell splinter, fell to his knees, holding his entrails with both hands, and as he collapsed in the snow, he beseeched d’Herbigny, ‘Sir! Finish me off!’

  ‘We can’t stop, Bonet, we can’t! Do you understand?’

  ‘No!’

  As Bonet moaned, his friends set one bandaged foot in front of the other in the reddening snow; after the dragoons came others and they passed by in their turn, inhuman, mechanical. The grumblers marched on, on towards the unbowed Davout; they left comrades from the bivouacs behind them, they heard the report when a wounded man managed to put the barrel of his pistol to his temple and, with a feverish hand, pull the trigger. They marched on. They may not have been able to look down at the dying, but the men’s prayers and abuse would stay in their memories for a long time, unless, that is, they joined them within the minute or the hour. They marched on to their graves but the Emperor was with them.

  *

  General Saint-Sulpice had been hit by a burst of case-shot in the calf, and by another in the hip. Pale, fighting back the pain, he was delegating command to his subordinates as he was being carried off on a stretcher to the infirmary’s barouches in Krasnoie. ‘D’Herbigny,’ he said, ‘I’m entrusting the remains of the brigade to you.’

  ‘Don’t you think me capable, General, of serving as part of the Emperor’s close escort?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Perhaps my fellow officer Pucheu is more competent?’

  ‘He has both his hands.’

  Having made his way through the Russian lines and escorted back the remainder of Davout’s army, His Majesty had given the order that officers who still had their horses should form a sacred squadron for his protection. Generals would serve as lieutenants and colonels as sergeant majors in a new hierarchy of modestly titled ranks that were all the more prestigious for the duties they entailed. D’Herbigny had come through the attack without a scratch and offered to look after his general’s Turkish mare, a raw-boned but wiry creature. He would have liked to strut on a proper horse close to the emperor, but Saint-Sulpice had chosen Pucheu for that and now this braggart would win all the glory instead of him. D’Herbigny protested, ‘I don’t need both my hands to sabre!’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t, but Pucheu has less hold over my men than you do.’

  ‘I shall obey your orders.’

  ‘Our profession is not always glorious, Captain.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Maintain discipline.’

  ‘I will try.’

  ‘Don’t try, succeed.’

  ‘Farewell, sir.’

  ‘Until we meet again, Captain. I’ll see you’re promoted in Paris.’

  ‘Paris is a long way away.’

  D’Herbigny dutifully went off and melted into the rank and file. His record of service meant nothing. Aboukir had been brushed aside, Saint-Jean-d’Acre, Eylau, Wagram – all of them brushed aside. Pucheu put his foot in the stirrup and swung himself up onto the general’s black mare, saying, ‘My fellows are all yours! Put them together and you’ll have almost a half-squadron of poachers.’

  ‘I’ll keep your ruffians in check, even with just one hand.’

  ‘Ah yes, I’ve got two hands, but for how much longer?’

  ‘Vaya con dios!’ The captain had heard this expression so often in Saragossa, that it sometimes occurred to him at difficult moments; he translated it oddly as Go to the devil! Pucheu set off at a slow trot to join the sacred squadron, about sixty officers of all ranks and regiments in capes, plumed bicornes and fur caps. The emperor was preparing to take the road to the little town of Orcha, through marshes and over a series of wooden bridges. Prince Eugène was already herding the stragglers and the civilians in that direction with his Italians. Davout was staying at Krasnoie to wait for Marshal Ney, of whom there was no news. The cannon boomed again. Drawn up in line, a ravine at their backs, Mortier’s Red Lancers and Portuguese were checking Kutuzov’s advance. D’Herbigny envied them their part in the massacre. Why did the cannon-balls always spare him? Why must he keep on fighting and always obeying? He imagined himself galloping after Mortier, Duke of Treviso, a tall fellow with a pinhead on an outsize body, not very smart but loyal just like him, and offering himself up to the Russian cannon. For the first time in his life, the captain was asking himself clear questions. His brains felt as if they had been turned upside down.

  Lost in thought, he pushed open a door of his dragoons’ hutments. They hadn’t had enough rest and they grumbled when they saw him; the ones in best fettle fell into line. Images ran though his mind: he saw Anissia’s face, the novice he had buried in Moscow, her imploring eyes, her gentle smile, her gold cross that he had worn round his neck ever since; then Normandy’s hedges, meadows, the valleys that stretched like clouds to the horizon, cows, churns of cream, Rouen market, the inns, his home in the countryside that Paulin always talked about with a quaver in his voice. Where had he got to, that one? ‘Paulin!’ The dragoons hadn’t seen him. He wouldn’t be able to manage on his own, that idiot! ‘Paulin!’ He missed his batman, even though there was hardly anything for him to do in this retreat. No need to polish his boots now; polished boots, there’s a joke! Herbigny tightened the pearl necklaces holding up the rags on his legs. Drawing himself up to his full height, he laid about the shirkers to get them into line. The trumpeter burst into hysterical laughter, d’Herbigny snatched his instrument from him and blew into it hard enough to rupture a lung; the trumpet let out a squawk.

  *

  At Orcha, by the banks of a swollen, fast-moving Dnieper awash with drift ice, the weather grew milder. With this abrupt thaw, the snow melted and filled the streets with a runny black slime that came up to a man’s shin. Carriages became bogged down in the cesspool, the fugitives splashed and floundered about, swamping the town that was too sma
ll to shelter their numbers and crowding into its isbas. Often they didn’t even have room to lie down and the most exhausted fell asleep squatting on their heels, jammed together amid a nauseating stench of mould, filth and musk. Distraught, they were reverting to their bestial state. Only the grenadiers posted as sentries indicated that the Emperor had taken up his quarters in a row of poorly squared log cottages. Beside them, sappers had demolished a cabin to lay walkways between the coaches and doors, so as not to dirty His Majesty’s boots, luggage or archives. Valets were ferrying chests under Sebastian’s supervision, when several mud-bespattered gendarmes brought up some sort of Russian merchant, with a heavy moustache and very blond, long hair under a bell-shaped hat. The sentries levelled their muskets.

  ‘I am Captain Konopka,’ said the supposed merchant. ‘I’ve come from Lithuania, I have a communication for the Emperor from the Governor of Vilna, the Duke of Bassano.’

  ‘You’re not Russian?’

  ‘Polish!’

  ‘I’ll go and inform His Majesty,’ said Sebastian.

  He went into a room that was full of smoke from a stove. Slouched in his travelling armchair, Napoleon was listening sullenly to the major general list the army’s strength and losses.

  ‘We have not more than eight thousand combatants, sire. We have recently lost twenty-seven generals, forty thousand men have been taken prisoner and sixty thousand are dead. We have had to leave five hundred cannon on the road …’

  ‘Our reserves?’

  ‘Oudinot is still in Lithuania.’

  ‘Have him join us. How many men has he?’

  ‘Five thousand.’

  ‘And Victor?’

  ‘Fifteen thousand.’

  ‘Have him join us as well. Davout?’

  ‘He left Krasnoie this morning.’

  ‘With Ney?’

  ‘No, sire.’

  ‘That unreliable fool, who gave him the order?’

  ‘He did himself.’

  ‘He was to wait for Ney!’

  ‘He is marching on Orcha, burning the bridges as he goes.’

  ‘So Ney is lost?’

  Berthier did not answer. The Emperor noticed Sebastian standing in the doorway. ‘What does that lump wringing his hands want?’

  ‘Sire,’ said Sebastian as Napoleon glared at him, ‘a Polish officer is here, he has come from Lithuania …’

  ‘Well, send him in, you awkward lump!’

  ‘Sire,’ said the captain as he entered, hat in hand, ‘a Russian army is advancing on Vilna.’

  ‘What of the Duke of Bassano?’

  ‘He is concerned and sent me to inform you.’

  ‘Let him stand fast!’

  ‘Will he able to?’

  ‘He must!’

  ‘The situation is perilous, I had to disguise myself to cross enemy lines.’

  ‘So those barbarians are everywhere, are they?’

  ‘Everywhere.’

  ‘How far to Vilna and the Niemen?’

  ‘A hundred and twenty leagues of wilderness.’

  ‘Which way should we go?’

  ‘The thaw means we have to take the bridges.’

  ‘Cross the Dnieper here?’

  ‘Yes, sire.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘There is another bridge on a tributary of the Dnieper, at Borisov.’

  ‘How long to get there?’

  ‘A week, roughly.’

  ‘Can the Russians get there before us?’

  ‘Perhaps, sire, but it’s the only way out.’

  ‘Is it broad, this river of yours?’

  ‘Not especially, about forty fathoms.’

  ‘Its name?’

  ‘The Berezina.’

  *

  Two grenadiers of the Guard came out of the convent occupied by the commissariat. Toting a big bundle, they were heading back to their cantonment with provisions for the battalion – keeping clear of the centre of town, where they would have been robbed by the starving even though they were armed – when they saw a tattered, mud-splashed young woman leaning against the wall of a wooden shack. She was giving them the glad eye. She had long, tousled black hair and a face as angelic as her pose was provocative: Ornella made a wickedly alluring picture. The grenadiers stopped in front of her and talked between themselves. ‘Do you think she speaks French?’

  ‘If she does or doesn’t, what’s it matter?’

  ‘Course, you’re right, for what we’re after.’

  ‘I’m from Paris and I’m hungry,’ said Ornella, eyeing them.

  ‘That can be discussed,’ said one of the grenadiers.

  ‘That can be paid for,’ she answered.

  ‘What are you offering for our biscuits?’

  ‘You won’t be disappointed!’ she called, disappearing into the shack.

  The grenadiers hesitated.

  ‘You go first, you’re the sergeant.’

  ‘Keep an eye on our rations.’

  ‘Trust me,’ said the other, cocking his pistol.

  Then, in a state of high excitement, the sergeant entered a dark room.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Come closer.’

  The sergeant groped his way forward.

  ‘Ah, got you!’

  He felt Ornella’s hair under his fingers.

  ‘Got you too!’

  She gripped his wrists as Dr Fournereau slit his throat from behind with a precise movement, without a sound. They conferred in a low voice. ‘The one guarding the sack of biscuits is armed,’ said Ornella.

  ‘Call him …’

  ‘He won’t come, he’s waiting for his friend.’

  ‘Make him wait, then. Play your part, let’s have some groans.’

  Ornella started to moan; she lit one of the candles she’d taken when they left their cart. ‘Hey, old ham,’ the doctor said to Vialatoux. ‘You’re the same height, or near enough, as that dumb soldier, put on his cap and coat. It’s getting dark …’

  ‘I understand my character,’ Vialatoux murmured professionally.

  The others spread out in the semi-darkness; they stripped the grenadier. Striking a variety of poses, Vialatoux put on the coat, jammed the tall bearskin on his head, wrapped his face in the fur scarf, and then regretted not having a brighter light and mirror to check his costume. Fournereau whispered that it was perfect. After some extravagant trills, on Ornella’s last scream, he pushed the actor outside.

  ‘Hey, Sergeant, you know how to make that hussy sing!’ the other grenadier congratulated him, but as he held out the sack, he suddenly became suspicious and raised his pistol. ‘Where’s that blood on your coat come from?’

  Vialatoux made a sign that it was nothing.

  ‘Have you been struck dumb? Who are you? What about the sergeant? Where’s the sergeant?’

  Vialatoux jumped at him, wrenched his hand away and the bullet went into the ground. Fournereau and two or three strong men rushed out. The grenadier lost his footing; Fournereau pinned him to the ground, twisted his face into the liquid mud and held him under long enough for him to suffocate. His job done, he went back into the shack where the biscuits and rye bread were being handed out.

  ‘Don’t eat it all, think of tomorrow,’ said the doctor, dragging in the body of the second grenadier.

  They had thrown themselves on the bread; sprawled on the floor, they were devouring it, stuffing their mouths so full they were almost choking. Fournereau joined them.

  Suddenly they stopped. A bright light spilled though the door of their refuge. They picked up their share of the provisions and went outside. Carriages were burning in the middle of the street. Gunners were leading horses away by the bridle, others were smashing the windows of a berline; still others were running up with torches. Fournereau and his group went closer; perhaps there would be some clothes to salvage.

  ‘Here,’ a soldier said to Vialatoux.

  He handed him a torch. The actor was still wearing the grenadier’s bearskin and now it seemed he had
been enlisted. Why not? The Guard got fed, at least. He seized the chance to join this swirling crowd of incendiaries who were taking delight in destroying half the carriages: they started running, yelling, smashing and setting them on fire with Vialatoux in their midst. The Emperor had set an example by burning part of his baggage on a bonfire: any horses remaining he wanted for the few cannon and caissons that had come this far, not for the useless carriages which only got in the way.

  *

  Pedestrians and coachmen crossed the Dnieper on two bridges that Davout was going to burn. It couldn’t be helped about Marshal Ney; they had to make haste towards Borisov, since the Russians could strike in numbers at any moment and cut off their route home. Oudinot and Victor had been ordered to wait at the Berezina with their reserve armies in winter clothes. After navigating a slushy road marked out by rows of birches, the cohort crossed Minsk’s dark forest. In the secretariat’s wagon, Sebastian and Baron Fain had cleared a space for themselves by destroying armfuls of archives in Orcha.

  ‘Monsieur Roque,’ said the Baron, ‘your teeth are chattering.’

  ‘My teeth are chattering.’