Far Flies the Eagle (18 page)

They were strangers and enemies and friends at the same time. At any moment one tendency might emerge above the others.

“You're sure he'll come to-night?” she asked.

“Kutuzov's never failed to keep me informed so far. And the weather has been much worse than this.”

She laughed spitefully. “I wonder how His Majesty of France enjoys our winter! I wonder how they like frostbite and starvation. If they last out much longer they'll be eating each other next instead of their horses!”

“They won't last much longer,” Alexander said. “We've set a trap for them.”

“A trap?” She swung round and hurried to the fireplace.

“What trap, where?”

“That's what the messenger will tell me. Kutuzov has a plan, a plan to capture Napoleon himself and wipe out the whole French Army—what's left of it. I've warned him to be careful though. He underestimated Bonaparte at Borodino; I don't want him to forget it. But this time, we may succeed. You always wanted to see Napoleon, didn't you, Catherine? I'll have him brought to St. Petersburg for your inspection!”

“Oh, how I pray God we get him! How I should like to have the custody of him, just for a few hours! I'd brand the word Bagration across his face.…”

“You are a savage, my dear sister. I said you could look at him if he's caught. I'm not going to behave like Ghengis Khan.”

She shrugged and half smiled. “No, I suppose I can trust you to deal with him. Oh, Alexander, think of it! Napoleon a prisoner! What a triumph. We'll be the greatest nation in the world.…”

“We'll be that anyway, when he makes peace. What we've done, we've done alone, and we'll finish it. I'll follow him out of Russia across Europe, if he doesn't fall into Kutuzov's hands.”

She sat down in a chair opposite to him. After a time he closed his eyes and she watched him, thinking he was asleep.

He was better looking, she thought suddenly, in spite of the tiredness, the thinning fair hair; it was a hard face even in repose, and she preferred it. His character was showing through the charm, and it increased his attraction. How odd that this religious phase had taken hold of him. He had even tried making
her
read the Bible till she threw it aside and laughed at him. If he didn't want Marie, he should find someone else, or if not one woman, then several. All this abstinence and praying was unhealthy, she thought. A different lover every night had kept her sane after Bagration's death, but her handsome, virile brother was leading the life of a penitent monk when he wasn't governing Russia. It was all very strange and very typical. One thing she had noticed. Like most conscientious despots, Alexander's harshness increased with his morality. Her thoughts drifted away from him and returned to Napoleon marching across the frozen wastes so many thousands of miles away. A trap was being set for him. A trap to destroy him and take him prisoner.…

At three in the morning a lackey awoke them with the news that the army messenger had arrived. His dispatches were brought to the Czar, who broke the seals and read them while Catherine strained to look over his shoulder.

“Well, tell me! What does he say?”

“The French are almost finished. Our Cossacks have been harrying them, and Kutuzov says he's mustering the main army to finish them and take Napoleon.”

She caught at his sleeve and her voice trembled with excitement.

“Where, where?” she said.

“Directly ahead of them,” Alexander answered. “At the River Beresina.”

The weather was still mild when the French Army left Borodino. As they retrod the devastated ground of their former advance, the army straggled, marching with less discipline every day. Many carried bundles of loot stolen from Moscow; silks, dresses, jewellery, silver and gold plate, anything they had been able to grab up and take out of the blazing city. These marched more slowly than the rest; round the camp fires men fought each other over thefts, real and imagined, of the useless treasures, and the outposts reported attacks by marauding enemy units.

Soon the line of march was infested by Cossacks; the nights became more terrible than the days, when men who were miserable with hunger and fatigue slept fitfully between attacks.

The attackers grew bolder, inflicting greater casualties; they hid in the woods, behind every rise in the ground, and a new ally had joined them.

When Napoleon advanced into Russia, the mass of the people were apathetic; villages were burnt and evacuated by their own troops on their own Emperor's order, and many thousands died as a result. The wretched serf accepted his miseries as part of his lot in life; there was fear of the invader, as there was fear of the landlord and the Imperial troops; fear was an integral part of peasant life, but until Moscow burned, the fear hadn't become hatred. To the great mass of the Russian people, the infidel French had burnt Holy Moscow. The peasants rose in their wrath to attack the blasphemers.

They crept up on French stragglers and murdered them; sentries were knifed, often horribly mutilated; the women killed as ferociously as their men. That dread word, first used in Spain where so many of Napoleon's troops had died, was murmured among the soldiers of the Grand Armée. Guerrilla. The little war of the people. It was no longer safe to desert; it was better to keep together, to be hungry and sleepless from fighting the Cossacks in one ambush after another, than to venture into that silent country and fall into the hands of the mujiks.

They were about a hundred miles from Smolensk when the Russian forces attacked in numbers at Viasma. Again the brilliance of Napoleon repulsed them, in spite of his troops' weakness and their exposed position, and again Kutuzov blundered by not pressing forward with reinforcements which the French couldn't have withstood.

The French gathered their wounded—God forbid any should be left behind now—and set out for the shelter of Smolensk. Smolensk could be defended; they had left a garrison there and a good supply of stores. Forward! Napoleon ordered, forward to Smolensk as fast as possible!

Overhead the skies were still blue, but on the 4th and 5th of November a biting wind sprang up. Men turned up their coat collars and huddled round the fires. In his tent, the Emperor sat round a stove with Ney and Murat, holding his hands out to the heat. It was Ney who expressed everyone's dread.

“It's getting colder,” he said. “The temperature is dropping suddenly.”

Neither Murat nor Napoleon answered him.

That night the icy wind became a snowstorm and the thermometer fell to eighteen degrees below zero.

It was almost impossible to tell when day dawned. A blizzard howled with hurricane force over the whole countryside, and a smothering torrent of snow covered everything. Tents were swept away, horses froze to death, the supply wagons sank in deep drifts of snow; frozen, blinded men cursed and struggled to get them moving, but most of the wagons had be abandoned, and with them the shelter afforded the wounded.

The army began to crawl forward through an uncharted sea of snow, where columns wandered off the route, were lost and perished in a few hours. There were no roads, no landmarks, nothing.

Infantry, artillery and cavalry merged in hopeless confusion, struggling against the blizzard, and as the cold reached its peak, men began falling as they marched. Those too weak to go on were left to freeze to death. There was no room for pity; the spirit of comradeship died in that dreadful desert of snow and all discipline died with it. Only the Old Guard tried to maintain some kind of order, but they were helpless to control the savagery, the despair and the folly of the rest of the army. Rank was forgotten, officers and men dragged along side by side, groups formed which provided shelter and what scraps of food there were for themselves only; an intruder was driven away with blows. The miserable horses, once the pride of the world's foremost cavalry, faltered and fell, to be surrounded by fighting ravenous men who cut the meat from the living animal and tried to eat it raw. Thousands died of frostbite; men staggered forward, knee deep in snow, half blind from the glare, infested with vermin and ravaged by hunger. Many threw themselves down and died rather than go farther, and many went mad.

Seventy thousand horsemen had crossed the Niemen into Russia; only six hundred were left to form an escort for Napoleon. Murat, gaunt and unrecognizable, was in command of this battalion.

At night they bivouacked in woods or on the site of villages burnt out during the advance, and the sparks of many fires glowed wherever there was shelter, and the evening meal of flour soup, flavoured with gunpowder and horseflesh, was cooked and distributed. The strongest shelter was allotted to the Emperor and the tenderest meat reserved for him; men who had exhausted themselves searching for a few sticks for their own fire offered them gladly so that Napoleon might be warm. In the indescribable horror of that march the love of the starving, suffering multitude for Napoleon Bonaparte transcended their agony and their indifference to each other. Men died gasping the old battle cry, “
Vive L'Empereur”;
at the sight of the little figure, wrapped in a shabby greatcoat with a fur hat pulled low over the eyes, every head raised with hope. He had brought them into Russia; he would get them out. The Emperor never failed.

He walked with the help of a strong stick, his head always lowered to the ground; the blizzard had spent itself but the savage cold continued. He seldom spoke and his escorts were silent also.

Once only, Ney surprised him; a crowd of bearded scarecrows had divided to let the Emperor pass, and some of them managed a quavering cheer. A boy in the filthy remains of a Cuirassier's uniform had lost a leg, and was standing on one foot, his crutch lifted in salute.

The Cuirassiers, so magnificently equipped and mounted, charging the Russian batteries at Borodino.… The dead Cuirassiers, rotting on the quiet battlefield, and the boy without a leg, his chafed armpits bleeding through his uniform, saluting his Emperor with a crutch.…

A terrible anger surged up in Ney, as he turned to look at the man who had caused so much suffering and whom no one had blamed. Then he saw his face; the plump cheeks were sunken, the dark eyes stared from side to side, and slowly, one hand lifted to return the salute. In all the years he had known him, Ney had never seen what he saw then. Napoleon was weeping.

It was still freezing hard when the vanguard reached Smolensk, to find the shattered city occupied by a garrison nearly as hungry as themselves. The stores left behind were exhausted; there was practically nothing to succour the main army.

They halted at Smolensk until the 14th of November, and Napoleon sent for his staff to assess their position.

By the light of a few candles they gathered round the stained campaign maps, to plot their route out of Russia with what was left of the army. Scouts reported the advance of Kutuzov with the bulk of his forces; Smolensk was not provisioned for more than a few days, much less a siege, and in those few days miracles of reorganization had taken place. If they marched at once there was a chance of missing Kutuzov, crossing the Dnieper and destroying the pontoons before the Russians came up. That would give them time to reach the Beresina, where a corps under the command of Marshal Oudinot had been left behind to protect the bridge at Borisoff.

“At the Beresina we will be safe, Gentlemen,” Napoleon declared. On the 14th they evacuated Smolensk.

Ney commanded the rear-guard, and the Russians caught up with him at Krasnoe. The Emperor and the rest of the army were crossing the Dnieper ahead when the Marshal turned to give battle and allow them time to escape.

It was incredible that his men could fight at all, but they gathered under the Eagle standards as they had done so often and so gloriously in the past, starved and decimated by disease, to hold off the Russians till Napoleon got away. At Krasnoe they fought as bravely and fiercely as at any time during the campaign, led by Ney, whom the Emperor himself described as the bravest of the brave.

When the French buglers sounded the retreat he led them through a host of Cossacks in a desperate attempt to reach the pontoons and escape over the Dnieper. A salvo of artillery told Napoleon that Ney and his troops had crossed the river, and moments before the first Cossacks galloped up, the bridges were dynamited.

The army marched onwards, its numbers dwindling from cold, hunger and sickness, buoyed up by hope that Oudinot waited for them at the River Beresina, and after the crossing they would reach the shelter of Vilna and be on the frontier of Russia again.

On November the 24th they halted and began pitching camp, using the remaining supply wagons and a few ragged tents for shelter; it was a freezing night, but mercifully still. Thousands lay huddled on the ground, wrapped in rags, scratching, and groaning with hunger; others wandered off into the white wilderness in a mad search for food and better shelter, never to return.

In his own tent Napoleon dozed on a camp-bed, watched over by his orderly. The Emperor had eaten practically nothing; when they pressed him he cried out that his men were starving and he wished to starve with them. Then he lay down in his clothes and the orderly covered him while he slept.

In the small hours the orderly woke from an uneasy dream, to find someone bending over him, shaking him roughly.

It was the Chief of Staff, Marshal Berthier.

“Wake the Emperor! Wake him at once!”

But Napoleon was already sitting up, looking as if he had never slept at all. He recognized his Marshal by the light of one candle guttering on a table in the middle of the floor.

“What is it, Berthier?” he said.

Berthier saluted. “News from Oudinot, Sire. Terrible news.” He paused and his face twitched. “The Russians have attacked them. They've burnt the bridge at Borisoff. There's no way across.”

“Bring the messenger to me.” Napoleon got up and turned to the orderly. “Go to Duroc, wake him and request the other Marshals to come here.”