Far Flies the Eagle (19 page)

One by one they gathered in the tent; more candles were lit and chairs set round the table; at the Emperor's order a decanter of wine was served. Murat yawned, pulling at his long side-whiskers; it was bitterly cold, though he still wore his fur-lined greatcoat, the walk from his own tent to the Emperor's had chilled him. Ney was there, impassive as ever; his excessive calmness was a bad sign, as ominous as Berthier's nervous cough. Davoust stood by the table, his bald head bent, swilling the wine round in his glass.

The Emperor stood at the head of the table; he was pale and drawn with fatigue.

“Gentlemen, let us sit down.”

The chairs scraped back, and when there was silence he spoke again. “You've heard the news. Oudinot has lost the bridge across the Beresina.”

The words were staccato; he glanced round at them and then suddenly stabbed at the map with his finger.

“We are here, and Kutuzov is coming up behind us as fast as he can. If he catches us, he'll drive us
into
the Beresina.”

Murat was staring at the map, seeing the thin line as a swollen torrent of water and half melted ice, thinking that he was probably going to die without crossing it now. Their chances of escape had vanished as the burning timbers of the Borisoff Bridge collapsed; he would never see Naples again, or his wife Caroline. He had served a Bonaparte and married a Bonaparte, and loved them both. Not many rankers became Kings, he thought, and the impish grin appeared for a second. He had lived well; it was a pity to die in that freezing hell; he had always hoped to die in Naples, in the big sunny bedroom of the Palace which looked out over the Bay.…

“We can't fight Kutuzov,” Davoust said. “The men are almost at the end of their strength.”

Napoleon looked up. “We could surrender, Gentlemen,” he said quietly.

“Never!” Ney exclaimed. “Surrender, let them take you prisoner, Sire! The men'd fight with their bare hands before they let that happen!”

The Emperor smiled wistfully, and Ney thought suddenly that Napoleon could summon pathos and wring the last sacrifice out of the men who followed him. He'd said the men would defend their Emperor with their fists, and it was true. It was also true that he would do the same.

“There is no question of surrender, Sire.” Murat and Davoust spoke together. Napoleon smiled, his pale face had flushed with emotion.

“As you will not abandon me, Gentlemen, we must consider how to escape this trap,” he said. “I've been studying the position while I waited for you. I believe we have a chance.”

“My God, Sire, how?” Berthier cried out.

“Oudinot sent a further message,” Napoleon answered. “Three leagues above Borisoff the river is fordable. We shall build pontoons and cross there.”

“Kutuzov will catch up with us before we've time to build anything,” Davoust objected. “There can never be another rear-guard action; Ney fought the last.”

“I'll fight again,” Ney said quickly. “If you need time to get the pontoons across, Sire, I'll stay here with my men and hold the Russians back. Just give the word!”

“I nearly sacrificed you once before, Ney,” Napoleon answered. “No, we'll cross together or we'll perish together. I have another plan.” He held out his glass and the orderly filled it.

“Berthier!” he said briskly. “How many camp followers have we?”

“Hundreds, Sire. Perhaps thousands,” was the reply.

“Good, then we'll put them to use. Round up as many of the women as you can; detach two regiments and send them southwards in daylight. That should confuse friend Kutuzov into thinking we've changed direction. By night we'll march to join Oudinot while sappers go on ahead to build the pontoons.”

“It's a perfect plan,” Murat exclaimed. “Perfect. They'll follow them southwards while we reach the Beresina!”

“I'm confident they will,” Napoleon said grimly. “It was a clever trap, Gentlemen, but I believe we've escaped it. I suggest we dispense with sleep for to-night. There isn't a moment to lose!”

Scouts came into the Russian headquarters with the news that a large column of French troops was moving southwards. Kutuzov raised his head and blinked; he looked exactly like an old tortoise as the brown eyes opened and shut under their wrinkled lids; he was seventy and often very tired. But he'd chased the enemy from Moscow to the Beresina, and the trap in which he had such confidence was about to be sprung. In it, he meant to catch Napoleon Bonaparte himself.

Grunting, he bent over his maps, and then gave the order to patrol the river to the south. When the French arrived there, they would find his army waiting.

He wrote a long dispatch to Alexander and then fell asleep over his desk.

The French sappers had built two light bridges over the river. The word had travelled from man to man as he worked: “To save the Emperor!” and they plunged into the icy waters of the Beresina, often submerged to the neck, and built the frail pontoons. Those who weren't drowned died of cold afterwards.

On the 26th of November the Corps of Marshal Oudinot was reunited with the rest of the army and the Emperor; by that evening 7,000 men had crossed the river, and the next day Napoleon himself rode across. The plan had worked perfectly; by the next night the whole army would be safe on the opposite bank. A feeling of relief invaded officers and men; they gave way to aching tiredness and fell down and slept; only a few straggled across the pontoons. The wounded and a miscellany of women who had followed the army, and somehow survived, remained in a confused mass on the wrong side of the river.

They woke to the sound of gunfire. Kutuzov had discovered the trick and the Russians had caught up.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“It was the most terrible thing I've ever seen in my life, Sire.”

Kutuzov shifted from one foot to the other as he stood in front of the Czar.

His old legs were aching and he longed to sit down.

Alexander said kindly, “It must be a long story as well as a distressing one, General. You have my permission to sit down.”

Kutuzov accepted, and the Czar prompted him. “Go on, General. What happened then?”

“When we caught up with them there was a stiff fight. Napoleon had left Marshal Victor behind, and he tried to hold us off while the rest of the army got across. They fought very well, though God knows how. Then at one time we overwhelmed them and look one of the higher approaches to the river bank; we brought up artillery and began shelling the ground and the bridges. As I said, it was the most terrible thing I've ever seen. It was the wounded and the women, Sire. They panicked; there was a rush for the bridges. We were firing right into the middle of them, and there must have been thousands, fighting and screaming like wild beasts. One of the bridges gave way; they had cannon on it and the weight was too much; it was jammed with dead and people struggling to get over, and suddenly it gave way and the whole lot fell into the Beresina. There was a terrible cry then; it seemed like one cry, though it must have been hundreds screaming. God knows what Bonaparte must have felt when he heard it.

“Victor's men retook that height to stop the artillery fire, but it was too late. The French were trampling each other to death on the last bridge; I heard that dozens tried swimming the river and were drowned in a few minutes.

“We captured a division of the French, and at dawn on the 29th their rear-guard fired the last bridge to prevent our following. That was the end for the ones left behind. They were mostly wounded, hundreds of them, and before God, they began throwing themselves into the Beresina rather than be captured. With your permission, Sire.” Kutuzov took out a handkerchief and wiped the perspiration from his face.

“All great victories are horrible, General,” Alexander said. “And we're not at the end of it even now.”

Kutuzov looked up at him quickly. “We've driven him out of Russia. He's gone back to Paris without an army. Only 20,000 survived to cross the Niemen out of half a million men, and they're mostly diseased and falling from hunger. Napoleon's routed, Sire.”

“Napoleon's in Paris raising another army,” Alexander said stonily. “And Austria hasn't taken up arms against him. No one has moved, Kutuzov. It's been left to us to complete our victory alone. And we shall complete it. Europe has trembled at Napoleon's name long enough. Now she shall tremble at mine.”

He rose to end the interview, and the General bowed and backed out of the room. The Russian Army was back at Vilna and Alexander had left Petersburg to join it. It was curious, he thought, how patterns repeated themselves; again his presence was the signal for a ghastly gaiety, an echo of the elegant gatherings of those first months of 1812, when he stayed in the same town and heard the news that his enemy had crossed the Niemen with the greatest army of all time.

The remains of that army were in the woods and fields round Vilna, scattered in a terrible harvest of death and misery over the countryside from Moscow to the bridge at Kovno, where they had crossed to invade Russia on the 25th of June.

The host was obliterated, but Napoleon had escaped; Kutuzov's trap had closed over the miserable thousands who perished at the Beresina, but the real object of it was in Paris, and the French Senate had just promised him a conscript army of 300,000 men. Austria and Prussia were still honouring their treaties with Napoleon; everyone was waiting, too terrified of his power to exploit Alexander's victory. And his own staff urged him to overrun Poland and then stop. They argued that Russia's armies were decimated by continued fighting and by the diseases spread everywhere by the French. The country was stripped and burnt bare. The first need was peace. No one wanted to advance into Europe except himself and Catherine Pavlovna. No one trusted the Prussians or believed that the Austrians would rise later when they hadn't done so already. To go into Europe would be challenging Bonaparte on his own ground. Alexander listened and then gave the order to march through Poland and into Prussia as if no one had said a word.

If Prussia wouldn't support him of her own volition, he would invade her.

In the first weeks of 1813 the Russian armies entered Prussia. But a famous exile went ahead of them, the patriot Von Stein, entrusted with the task of rousing his country against Napoleon. It was a brilliantly clever move; Stein organized a militia at Königsberg, and the idea spread to Breslau and Berlin itself, where the student class rose in a mass to take up arms against the hated French. The sparks of German independence which Napoleon extinguished after Wagram erupted violently all over Prussia. On March 17th Prussia and Russia agreed to deliver the nation from the French, and the first side of the triangle of Napoleon's alliance collapsed.

In April the Austrian Ambassador to Paris went to see Napoleon. The Ambassador was the same Count Schwarzenberg who had been so popular in St. Petersburg. His considerable charm and talent were to be used to soften Napoleon and persuade him to agree with Austria's proposals. Metternich of Austria had been waiting and watching very carefully, and he disliked what he saw from every point of view.

His decision not to attack France immediately had been a wise one, for less than six months after the end of 1812, Napoleon had mustered an army of nearly half a million men. He had drawn troops from Spain to do it, and the untried youth of France had rushed to arms, roused by the unquenchable enthusiasm Napoleon's name inspired.

The homes and fields of France were emptied of young men; the factories worked night and day making uniforms, producing weapons and equipping this new army, the offspring of the vanished host of 1812. He had left Russia a ruined man, and fled across Europe to save his throne in Paris. A few months later he surveyed his enemies with an army nearly as big as the one he had lost.

Nearly as big, but not the same, Metternich thought. The veterans had perished in their tens of thousands. It was unlikely that even Napoleon could replace their quality as he had done their numbers.

But Metternich knew his opponent; the man had achieved the impossible already; it would be wisest to wait. The hordes of Russia pouring into Europe, ostensibly to pursue Napoleon and swallowing Poland at the same time, didn't please Metternich either. He dismissed the Czar's guise of a Crusader as a piece of hypocrisy, and evaded all attempts to embroil Austria openly against France. Then Prussia suddenly deserted her ally and joined Alexander. Metternich liked this even less. There was going to be a major war, fought out over Europe; whoever won would be supremely powerful, too powerful for the safety of Austria. He sent Schwarzenberg to Napoleon to offer Austrian mediation and prevent the war. Austria's reward would be a share in the lands parcelled out in the negotiations.

Bonaparte listened to the Count. He liked him, he liked Austrians in general; he had once liked Metternich, who used to be Ambassador to Paris himself, but he had measured Metternich, and he remined him of Talleyrand, whom he had used but always hated.

Peace, the Count explained, was the only sensible course for all sides. Austria was willing to secure it for France and for Russia and Prussia; her support to either side, he murmured gently, could be the deciding factor in any war.…

“In other words,” Napoleon interrupted, “Austria is now as frightened of Alexander of Russia as she is of Napoleon of France. She prefers us not to fight so that neither can win! Tell Monsieur le Comte I appreciate his point of view. For myself I have no wish for war. If the Russians want peace they must ask for it; I'll always listen. But the real obstacle to any lasting settlement in Europe is England.

“Good evening, Count Schwarzenberg. My compliments to your excellent Foreign Minister; he could have found no better replacement for himself than he has done in you.”

The audience was over, and Napoleon went to the apartments of his little son, where he took the child on his knee and played with him.