The Retreat (21 page)

Down below the gold coins had fallen on a drove of oxen. Hundreds of the beasts had been frozen, their eyes open, in a welter of horns and muzzles set in ice. The leaders of the drove had left the road, blinded by a storm perhaps, and their kin had followed, pushing and jostling, until they were at the bottom; unable to get back up, they must have lowed and thrashed about and gouged each other for a long time. The ice had frozen them in ghastly or ludicrous poses.

Some soldiers were letting down ropes to have a closer look at the oxen sprinkled with gold. They walked on the ice, holding onto the horns as if they were handles. A giant fellow brought down a sapper's axe on one of the beasts, but the blade didn't even cut its hide, it was so hard. Under Sebastian's feet, Dimitri the dog barked with impunity at the dead oxen that terrified him. He went too close to the edge and slithered down a few metres. Sebastian went after him, clinging to outcropping rocks, and scooped the dog up against his chest; hands reached out to help him. A modicum of fraternity still existed amongst the men of the Imperial Guard.

Then the wagons crossed the bridge.

It was night when they entered a Krasnoie brightly lit up by bivouac fires. The drivers unharnessed in front of the rudimentary headquarters buildings and Sebastian checked to see how his passenger had taken the journey. She was
completely still, curled up on the cardboard boxes of records. He slapped her hands and cheeks, but couldn't get any blood circulating under that transparent skin.

‘Take her to the doctors, Monsieur Roque.'

Baron Fain, told that the wagons had arrived, didn't appear surprised to see Mlle Sautet. He even offered to help his clerk take her to the Guard's hospital, where Dr Larrey was practising.

‘Don't go to all that trouble, my lord.'

‘Oh, but I shall! What if you come a cropper with your load on this slippery snow? If you sprain your wrist? I need your quill hand, you know.'

The hospital proved to be a barn full of wounded and frostbitten grenadiers, who were being massaged by medical orderlies and exhausted voluntary nurses. Sebastian recognized Mme Aurore from behind; she was bustling about a sergeant in a bed, pulling off his boots; his feet were frozen and their skin, which had stuck to the leather, was peeling off in strips. Catherine, the red-headed actress, was going up and down the rows with a flask of brandy. After leaving the bookseller's daughter with an apprentice surgeon, Sebastian questioned Mme Aurore, who was bandaging her sergeant with strips torn from a shirt. Where was Ornella? She didn't know. She had fallen in with a group of stragglers. When they had left their cart, the troupe had split up; the manageress and Catherine had found refuge with some gunners and hitched a lift astride a gun carriage.

*

That night, shirkers had stolen Captain d'Herbigny's Cossack horse; all he had found was the cut bridle. Everyone had to sleep at some time or another, but thieves took
advantage of it. How many men no longer left their knapsacks and took it in turns to watch their horses? A cavalryman reduced to an infantryman's state, the captain felt disgraced by his misfortune. When he had discovered the theft, he hadn't even had time to go looking in town: the Emperor was assembling all the able-bodied divisions of the Guard on Krasnoie's main square. Grenadiers, dis-mounted dragoons, skirmishers – they were all there stamping their feet, snow on their hats and their beards. The Russians were trying to cut Napoleon off from the rest of his army. Davout's I Corps, so staunch and so depleted, was coming under the fire of an army ten times its size but fortunately poorly commanded. The Tsar's generals still feared Napoleon; even in the midst of a rout, his name was enough to make them tremble. Knowing this, he had decided to lead his elite troops into action himself, relying on his presence to push back the enemy and rescue the hard-pressed units trying to reach him. He came onto the square on foot, dressed in the Polish style with a green pelisse with gold frogging, fur-lined boots, a marten-fur cap edged with fox fur tied on with ribbons, and holding a baton made of birch in his hand. He gave a speech, phrases of which were repeated through the ranks. D'Herbigny only remembered one, but it electrified him: ‘I have been an emperor long enough, now I'll be a general again.'

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 small 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 …'