The Retreat (8 page)

*

A strong easterly wind was gusting hard, pushing the fire towards the Kremlin. Soot was raining down on its courtyards and clouds of eddying smoke wreathed the tops of its towers. The spectacle was making Sebastian feverish. On the sofa in the large salon, where he was failing to get any sleep, he struggled to shake off terrible visions: Ornella walled in by flames, her hair burning like a torch, her running – but no, Mme Aurore knew Moscow, its twists and turns, its shortcuts and traps, she would never let herself be cornered by the fires. With such arguments he tried to convince himself. It was night but one could see without a lamp because of the conflagration. He stood up, burnt his hand on the glass of the French window and went out onto the terrace. Half the city was ablaze. He inhaled ashes, bitumen and sulphur, heard the wrought-iron roofs of the shops in the bazaar exploding, went back into the salon covered in sweat, and caught his breath.

His Majesty was asleep. The letter to the Tsar had been adjourned. Napoleon had gone to bed early, wanting to make up for his trying night in the filthy inn at Dorogomilov, and no one had taken it upon himself to inform him of the situation. How were they supposed to ask him to leave the city? Berthier, Lefebvre, Caulaincourt and various other decorated generals were holding a conference about this problem at the other end of the salon. Eventually Duroc, the Marshal of the Imperial Household, sacrificed himself; he tended to be insulted less than his colleagues.
Nevertheless shouting could still be heard through the door of the imperial bedchamber. How were they to persuade their sovereign to abandon the Kremlin, which was now under threat, and evacuate his troops to the surrounding countryside because no one could check the fire? How was he going to react? Badly, they guessed. Berthier, as was his wont, bit his fingernails, Caulaincourt looked at the door, Lefebvre the floor, until their emissary returned to announce that the Emperor was being dressed by his valets.

Then he appeared, surly and irritated, with Constant helping him into his overcoat as he strode out of his room. He went up to the windows and grimaced at the sight of the inferno. ‘The savages! Savages like their forefathers! Scythians!'

‘Sire, we must leave Moscow without delay.'

‘Go to the devil, Berthier!'

‘We're there already.'

Napoleon shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, then clamped his theatre glasses to his eyes. Below, in a lurid orange glare, gunners were trying to smother the showers of sparks falling from the sky. Already the wads from a number of caissons thoughtlessly parked in a courtyard were starting to catch fire; men were trampling on them: four hundred ammunition chests could explode at any moment. Above, on the Kremlin's iron roofs, soldiers of the Guard were sweeping hot ashes blown by the wind. He could see others at the windows of the Senate, throwing out archives so as not to fuel the fires in the building, and the papers fluttered down, sometimes catching fire and burning before they landed. Fresh fires were breaking out in the west of the city now, and nearer, in the palace stables and one of the towers of the Arsenal. The alarm was being
sounded. Windowpanes clattered to the ground; the wind was gusting twice as hard.

‘Let's go and see,' said the Emperor, taking Caulain-court's arm.

Wrapping rags round his fingers, so as not to leave any skin behind, Roustam the Mameluke opened a French window. The air burnt their throats. Stepping into clouds of ash, the cortege left the imperial apartments by the large front staircase. Some knotted a handkerchief round their necks to cover their noses and mouths; others pulled their cloaks up over their heads. Grenadiers in grey greatcoats with fixed bayonets surrounded Napoleon and his suite. Sebastian jammed his broad-brimmed hat down over his forehead, turned up his collars and followed at their heels. They hurried, beating their clothes to shake off the falling cinders that burned holes in them. A grenadier's bearskin caught fire; its owner took it off and beat it on the steps. Down on the esplanade, grooms and stable boys were putting horses to the vast number of carriages that belonged to the commissariat; having just been brought out of the stables where the roofs looked like they were about to collapse, the horses were hard to control, whinnying and rearing and refusing the harness, stamping their hooves on the cobblestones. It was becoming clear they were evacuating; everyone was chaotically making their preparations. Shouts, panic, agitation; commissaries in black uniforms were loading cases of wine and snuff, statuettes and violins into their carriages. A colonel arrived at the double, out of breath, before the Emperor. ‘A wall has collapsed on the north side!'

‘Sire, we must cross the Moskova as soon as possible!'

‘By the main gate,' said Berthier.

When the gate's two leaves were pushed open, a wall of fire sealed off the colossal square. The narrow streets leading to the river on the right were covered with a vault of flames. Entire walls of houses were collapsing, making it even harder to get through.

‘There, sire, where the fire is weakest, there is only one cordon of fire to cross.'

‘Sire, we will wrap you in our cloaks and carry you.'

‘Let us go back,' said the Emperor, unnervingly calm. His overcoat had been scorched in several places.

Sebastian had joined the cortege so as to be one of the first to leave Moscow before the fire spread to the entire Kremlin, and now he followed the party back across the esplanade, his face black with smoke. He stopped at the foot of the towering staircase, which the Emperor was climbing to return to his terrace. The young man's legs felt weak, numbed. All around, civilians of the administrative staff, commissaries and members of the household were continuing to pile mounds of goods from the palace's cellars, bottles especially, into their carriages, even onto the roofs. Brushing at the glowing ash falling constantly on his cape, Sebastian walked along the line of overloaded barouches and berlines. Baron Fain was holding a bunched-up cloth over his nose, but Sebastian recognized him by his uniform.

‘My lord!'

The carriage door was shut and the Baron, who was drowsing between a white marble goddess, a stack of rugs and other pieces of luggage, couldn't hear him. Sebastian knocked on the window, the door opened and Fain said reprovingly, ‘What on earth are you doing here, Monsieur Roque?'

‘I was with His Majesty …'

‘But no longer! You were taking the night watch, were you not?'

‘Yes …'

‘Deserter! To whom will His Majesty dictate his correspondence if he is so minded? Off you go! No, wait a moment. What has the Emperor decided?'

‘He has gone back up to his apartments with the major general, that's all I know.'

‘Cut along now!' said Baron Fain, brusquely, and uncharacteristically, slamming his door shut.

*

Like many soldiers who enjoy obeying because it spares them having to think, d'Herbigny was a simple man of animal pleasures and commonplace tastes: inactivity sent him into a sharp decline. Rest was out of the question: mulling over familiar, persistent memories would only make him bitter; he needed to be constantly on the go. It is also fair to say that he could not stand Mme Aurore and the affected little princesses and appalling old hams of her troupe a moment longer. His exasperation had reached a pitch when the manageress had dismissed his forage as woefully meagre, and called him, in so many words, useless. Grumbling, he had given her his part of the sturgeon, a mouthful, to shut her up, and then gone to perch at the top of one of the pinnacle towers of the church in which they had taken shelter. From there he studied the situation. Day was breaking, not that one could tell. Ceaselessly fed by the infernal fires, the smoke was banked up in a thick black pall that covered the entire city. Pillars of flame soared into the sky like tornadoes. The captain could barely
make out the ramparts of the Kremlin on its hill, overlooking neighbourhoods that had been utterly laid waste. The fire, however, had not yet reached the northernmost districts; d'Herbigny thought they could make their way back to the citadel through these, along the banks of the river, and meet up with the rest of the brigade. He rounded up his dozen or so troopers, none of them very presentable, and gave Sergeant Martinon, who was still in valet's livery, another earful. They walked their horses out of the church; not even the ring of their hooves on the flagstones woke the actors, who had collapsed with exhaustion in the side chapel.

The dragoons headed north by guesswork, assailed by searing fumes, skirting conflagrations that were straining to spread out. Passing through a stone arch with a green slate roof, they rode down a street of log houses and came out onto a patch of waste ground. Starving dogs with protruding ribs were rooting around in a pile of corpses: moujiks who had been bound hand and foot, blindfolded, shot against a wall and left pell-mell in the dirt. Interrupted by the sudden appearance of the dragoons, the animals began barking, the fur bristling on their backs, their muzzles smeared with blood, strips of flesh hanging from their mouths. One of them leapt at the captain's horse; using his good hand he slashed at it with his sabre, but it wouldn't back off and kept trying to bite him. Fearing for his horse, d'Herbigny dismounted to set about the dog, at which the rest of the pack advanced and were met by a volley of musket fire. Cut to pieces, the dogs in front distracted those behind, who began greedily lapping at their blood, and the dragoons took their chance to slit the dogs' throats with their sabres or stave in their skulls with their musket butts. Then they rode off without giving a thought to the gnawed
Russian corpses. Further on they passed other incendiaries swinging from posts; one of them was dressed in the uniform of the Cossack regulars and had a clipped moustache; his body was riddled with bullet holes and nobody had closed his white eyes.

‘Sirrrrrrr!'

Muttering, d'Herbigny reined in his horse. Behind him Paulin was thrashing the hindquarters of his stationary donkey with a switch. The captain drew a breath, assumed a weary air and retraced his steps. The donkey was refusing to set one foot in front of the other and the beating was only making it more stubborn.

‘Don't leave me on my own in these hostile streets, sir!'

‘It's my uniforms I don't want to leave on their own! You'd be quite capable of getting yourself robbed.'

‘The only people we've seen have been dead …'

‘They're quick on their feet, your dead,' said the captain.

He had just seen two or three furtive shadows with bundles on their backs in an alley of battered isbas. He forgot his servant to plunge into the higgledy piggledy little thoroughfare. No sign. Wait, there, in a small yard, the shadows were scurrying past. He urged his horse on and blocked in three Muscovites under an outside staircase. The man wore baggy trousers under a long, tight-waisted coat, the two women aprons and headscarves knotted under the chin; they dropped their bundles. With the tip of his sabre, the captain slit one open and foodstuffs spilled out, a sack of flour, a cabbage and a ham which made his mouth water. Other dragoons came to his assistance, staring wide-eyed at the ham.

‘Split that in two and give half back to these people,
they don't look like convicts and they're scared to death.' He asked the Muscovite, ‘The river? This way?'

‘Ver?

‘The Kremlin, do you understand?'

‘Kreml! Kreml!' the man repeated, pointing.

‘Help!'

D'Herbigny saw his servant being carried off by the donkey in the direction the Muscovite was indicating. Paulin was holding his hat and yelping; the other dragoons were following at a smart trot, laughing.

‘What's the matter with that donkey?'

‘I gave him a little pat with my tinderbox, Captain,' said Trooper Bonet.

‘Mount up, you two!' d'Herbigny commanded the dragoons who had cut up the ham and were stowing the pieces in their saddlebags. Paulin was setting a fast pace; the captain had to overtake him to steer his ass. In a short while the group came out onto an avenue. To their left they heard the roaring of the fire. Veering southwest, the wind was blowing through the broken windows of a big brick house, creating an in-draught and fanning the flames that were belching forth, first from the small basement windows and then from wherever they could. They had worked their way round to the north of the Chinese quarter. Paulin's donkey stopped dead.

‘I've had enough of your donkey,' shouted the captain. ‘Is there any blasted thing it is good for?'

‘Sausages?' suggested Martinon.

‘I'll listen to what you have to say when you're wearing something presentable!'

The captain turned: convicts were roaming about on the
outskirts of the bazaar, led by one of Rostopchin's policemen, who held up a torch, making no attempt to hide his uniform. D'Herbigny flew at him whilst his men shot at the moujiks at random, wherever they seemed thickest, like starlings. The captain and the policeman squared off. An able swordsman, even with his left hand, the captain darted in sideways and severed the incendiary's wrist along the line of his jacket's red cuff. Unconcerned by the gushing blood, the Russian was picking up the torch with his other hand when d'Herbigny's sabre ran him through the throat.

Gusts of wind were lifting burning fir joists into the air; firebrands were crashing to the ground like missiles. The fire was converging on the end of the Chinese street, devouring everything in its path, driving soldiers in Turkish or Persian robes from store to store, their arms full of ill-assorted plunder, fur-lined boots, hides, sacks of tea or sugar, the entire contents of an ironmonger's shop; Muscovites driven from their basements, brigands and drunken moujiks darted amongst them, with the same design in mind. These silent bands were tossing furniture and bolts of silk and Oriental muslin into the middle of the road; a few fellows could be seen caught in two minds, putting down sacks of coffee to pick up a mirror with a carved wooden frame instead. The luckiest bunch had got their hands on a cart; uhlans from a regiment of the Vistula, they were thrashing a team of Russians they'd yoked like cattle with their riding whips. ‘They slaughtered all my family in Warsaw!' a lieutenant was bawling.