The Retreat (17 page)

‘By that sacked road?'

‘It is in fact the shortest way.'

‘Send for Dr Yvan, I want to see him immediately.'

The Emperor gathered up the maps he had thrown on the floor, his plans of Russia, Turkey, Central Asia, the Indies. Events were shattering his dreams. He weighed the arguments. Should they shut themselves up in Smolensk and spend the winter there? He was hesitating when Dr Yvan entered the barn.

‘Yvan, you damned charlatan, prepare that thing of yours.'

‘Tonight?'

The Emperor was asking for the poison that Cabanis had invented for Condorcet, and that Corvisart, the Emperor's doctor in Paris, had recreated: opium, belladonna, hellebore … He would carry the mixture in a pouch under his woollen waistcoat. If a Cossack chief had identified him that morning, he would have tried to capture him and then what? Send him to St Petersburg in a cage? It could happen again; he refused to fall into Russian hands alive.

*

And so it was that the convoy turned northwards to rejoin the road that it had followed in the opposite direction at
the start of autumn. A wind blew colder and colder and everyone bundled up as best they could. D'Herbigny wore his fox-fur-lined coat under his cloak; Paulin had unearthed a red cape with an ermine trim, which he wore with the hood up and his hat squashed down on top of it; it made him look like a prelate. They rode their horses at a walk through the firs and birch trees.

‘Sir,' the servant called out, urging his donkey alongside his master's horse. ‘Sir, I've got a feeling we're going round in circles.'

‘Oh, do be quiet! Do you think you're cleverer than the Emperor now?'

‘I'm trying to understand what he's up to, sir.'

‘He has his reasons.'

‘We've been marching for ten days and we can't be more than ten or twelve leagues from Moscow.'

‘What would you know about it?'

‘I recognize this countryside …'

The road came out onto a river whose icy waters rolled over a ford. The artillery were already halfway across; the cannon wheels were spinning on the muddy riverbed, blocking the way; the soldiers, water up to their knees, were trying to help the draught animals haul the mud-clogged gun carriages up onto the bank – a waste of effort in some cases and then they had to unhitch the guns and surrender them to the current.

D'Herbigny recognized the place too: they were approaching Borodino. He saw the stunted, buckled trees, mutilated by constant shelling, the battered hills, the scene of utter havoc. He saw the line of flat-topped rises where the Russians had built their redoubts, the broken palisades,
the parapets that had collapsed on the dead or dying in craters like mass graves. The green wheat had come through but it barely hid the marks of the battle. The standards' shoes constantly struck a helmet or a cuirass or a drum case and these iron sounds rang out in the cold air. When the captain decided to carry on on foot, to lessen the chances of his horse missing its footing, it felt as if he was walking on twigs; but it was bones beneath his feet, not wood. The rain had disinterred thousands of bodies and the crows were eating them; the birds progressively flew away, cawing, as the cortege advanced. High up, looking down from one of the redoubts, a group of skeletons greeted the survivors as they passed. One of them, nailed by a lance to a birch tree, clad in the tattered remnants of a grey greatcoat, still had his boots and a horsetail helmet on his death's head.

No one wanted to linger.

They marched with lowered heads.

As he marched along, the captain thought he could hear reveille being sounded and in his mind's eye, the landscape reverted to how it had been before that battle at which the Emperor had husbanded his Guard. They'd had the sun in their eyes, that morning. He remembered the smoke, the explosions, the cuirassiers' lethal charges up the slopes, the roundshot falling around Napoleon and him, sick, kicking them away like balls to follow the movements of the troops through his theatre glasses. Shots rang out; the captain started. Bonet and the troopers had brought down a brace of crows and were running to retrieve them from amongst the corpses that were beginning to freeze in the cold.

‘It's only us, sir!'

‘We're thinking about soup, sir!'

They brandished the plump black birds, holding them by the feet.

‘Are you going to eat those rot-eaters?'

‘If they'll stay down …'

‘Hey!'

‘What is it, Bonet? Have your soup birds been pecking one of your old barrack mate's guts?'

‘Come and have a look, sir.'

The column continued on its way but the captain broke off for a moment to look at his sergeant's discovery. Something vaguely human, without legs, was squirming between the stalks of wheat, its face encrusted with blood and earth. The dragoons shrank back from the monster.

‘He's not dead,' said Bonet.

‘He's come out of the open stomach of that dead horse,' said Trooper Chantelouve. ‘He must have kept himself warm in there and eaten its insides and drank rainwater perhaps.'

‘Impossible!' said the captain roughly to disguise his terror.

‘No, look, he's even opening his eyes …'

*

Standing on a hillside, protected by a close-planted birch wood, the Kolotskoi abbey resembled a fortress with its battlemented grey walls, towers and stark belfries; poking through a long plank fence, cannon were trained on the valley through which the Moskova flowed. The Imperial suite spent a night there without getting out of their carriages, since the rooms were full of wounded, nearly
twenty thousand of them who had been looked after since the horrific battle; it had also been used as an arms depot. A snowstorm blew for part of the night. In the secretaries' berline, Baron Fain and his passengers disappeared under an avalanche of greatcoats and furs. Sebastian was delighted with himself for having bought a pair of velvet boots lined with flannel for two diamonds from a canteen-woman. By morning the snow had stopped but it covered everything. Shaking the handle of the frosted door he was sitting next to, Sautet the bookseller fretted and fumed, ‘I feel certain, absolutely certain, that we can find something edible in this cloister!'

‘Have some more white wine from the crate,' Baron Fain said without opening his eyes.

‘Get drunk in front of my daughter? Heavens, no! A fine example that would be!'

‘Eat the peas.'

‘Raw?'

‘Eat your dog.'

‘Are you mad?'

‘I'll go and see what there is,' offered Sebastian.

‘No, no,' the bookseller puffed. ‘I'm cold and I'm ankylosed and I jolly well want to lose my temper!'

‘Leave him be, Monsieur Roque,' said the baron. ‘The exercise will warm up our friend.'

‘I am not your friend.'

The bookseller hazarded a step outside, skidded and crumpled in the snow, squealing, ‘My leg! My leg! I'm wounded! I'm entitled to the wounded's hot soup!'

Sebastian got out to help the fat man, but he had trouble standing up himself and slipped every time he took a step.

‘My leg, I tell you!'

‘There isn't a single person in the entire world who gives a damn about your leg.'

‘But … Where are the horses?' asked the bookseller.

The postilion, after covering the wounded lying on the roof with a tarpaulin, had got in a canvas sack the night before. Now he shook the snow off his cloaks and sleeping bag, drank some grain alcohol and answered, ‘In the stable, they're having a feed.'

‘Oh, bravo! The horses are eating. What about us?'

‘Do you want some straw?'

The forage in fact consisted of unripe wheat harvested by the abbey's garrison, a pittance which had been supplemented by straw from the pallets of the dying – they, at any rate, wouldn't have to endure this life for longer. When the horses had finished, they were put back between the shafts, and the vehicles of His Majesty's household rejoined the main body of the convoy. Württemberg chasseurs had stowed more wounded on the roofs of the carriages, on limbers, wherever they could, sometimes tying them on with ropes if they were too weak to hang on to the hood or the check straps.

The coaches in front set a course for those following but, apart from those that had been rough-shod for the ice by the farsighted Caulaincourt, most of the horses slipped constantly on the rolling ground covered with black ice; many fell from exhaustion and were abandoned. Nose pressed to the window, impassive now by force of habit, Sebastian studied a group of voltigeurs, blue with cold, whom the berline was passing. The soldiers cut open the belly of a mare that still had steam coming from its nostrils and sank their teeth into its flesh, blood running down
their chins and onto their shabby clothes. A band of skirmishers were looting barouches that had become trapped in a ditch beside the road; they were tossing candela-bras, ball gowns and fine china into the snow while they loaded up with liqueurs. One of the barouches was on fire and surrounded by skinny, bearded ghosts; they were grilling chunks of dubious-looking meat on their sabres. Just at that moment Sebastian saw a body fall from the berline's roof, one of the wounded they'd taken on at the abbey, who'd been poorly secured and knocked off balance by the jolting of the carriage. The young man opened the door and shouted at the postilion, ‘Stop! We've lost one of the wounded!'

‘Close that door, Monsieur Roque,' said Baron Fain. ‘Unless you're too hot?'

‘Very well, my lord.'

He glanced at his fellow passengers. The lieutenant and the one-legged officer weren't moaning anymore, or drinking, or eating: living, were they still doing that? Mme Sautet and her daughter were curled up in each other's arms, frozen stiff; the bookseller was clasping his black dog to him; the dog was panting. Baron Fain had wrapped a woollen scarf round his head. Their provisions had almost run out but they were still confident; in His Majesty's entourage they couldn't die of hunger; when they stopped they'd go to the canteens. From time to time an explosion rocked the berline; the gunners were setting fire to any caissons they couldn't pull, so that at least the enemy wouldn't get their hands on the powder. Suddenly a more powerful explosion, closer to, smashed one of the windows by the two wounded who were huddled together on the sacks of peas. Sebastian climbed up the baggage piled
against that inaccessible door to try to cut off the icy wind. That was when he realized that the carriage had stopped moving and that the one-legged Dutchman was dead.

This time it was Baron Fain who got out to enquire about the latest setback. Sebastian followed after wrapping a cashmere scarf round his ears and nose, like him. Outside their eyes smarted, their hands turned white at the joints and they had to cling to the berline with numb fingers not to slip on the sheet ice. The postilion was stretched full length on a heap of snow at the side of the road; as it exploded the caisson had shot bits of wood into the air with the force of missiles; a splinter had split open his skull. They saw carriages with all their windows broken which the occupants were trying to board up. Barouches and supply wagons, impatient to pass these unfortunates blocking their path, were venturing into thicker, more unstable snow, sometimes tipping over. The Baron had crouched down next to the postilion to check he was dead. Sebastian offered to take the man's place.

‘Do you know how to drive these contraptions, Monsieur Roque?'

‘I have driven my father's charabanc in Rouen many times.'

‘I'm sure you have, but we're not travelling by cart here; we have, thank heaven, two horses shoed with frost-nails.'

‘Do we have a choice, my lord?'

‘Get us out of here and then let's catch up His Majesty's carriages as fast as possible, they've left us behind.'

‘Very well, but you should know that one of our wounded is as dead as this postilion.'

‘I'll get him out, you take care of the driving.'

Fain climbed back into the berline while his clerk took
off the postilion's cloaks and put them on; he relieved him of his fur gloves, picked up the whip, perched himself on the bench and took the reins. Barely had he sat down before some army stragglers had stripped the postilion and the one-legged officer, whom the Baron had pushed out into the snow. They were in no danger of losing their way: they just had to follow the trail of hundreds of naked, frozen corpses, male and female, lying on the ice, the burnt carriages and the mutilated horses that stained the snow pink.

*

The cold and the monotony of the journey numbed the stand-in coachman. Sebastian just gave the horses their head, letting them follow the supply wagons without any chance of going faster or hope of catching the other carriages of the Emperor's household, which he had lost all sign of; they must be far ahead by now. There were too many corpses, too much carrion – how could one still feel pity? If one of the wounded fell from a carriage he let the berline drive over him; he couldn't stop at any price or lose their place in the convoy. Many of these unfortunates died crushed by hundreds of wheels; the carriages jolted from side to side, other wounded fell off and were crushed in turn, to complete indifference. Sebastian sometimes actually envied these mutilated wretches their lot; that was them shot of it all, at peace somewhere a thousand leagues away from this endless plain. At other moments he conjured up happy memories of the time when, with a few other lucky fellows, he'd worked in the attics of the Ministry of War in the Hôtel d'Estrées. His days had been spent copying out duty sheets, notes and dispatches in an office in the
conscription department, hunched over one of the desks that were arranged around the stove. In the morning he'd splash water on the floor to settle the dust and then put his feet up and sharpen his quill with a penknife, or else nip along to the porter's lodge, where he'd had set up a canteen; from eleven in the morning the corridors would smell of the grilled sausages they'd take back to their desks and eat amongst the piles of letters and reports … He was hungry. He would have killed for some of that disgusting horse broth. He'd dream about it at the halting place, he knew, when night forced them to stop wherever they were, without a fire, rugged up in their blankets, with that black dog he kept seeing as a roast.