Berezina: From Moscow to Paris Following Napoleon's Epic Fail

DAY SEVEN. FROM AUGUSTÓW TO WARSAW

Where did they go through? This was now our concern.

“Caulaincourt mentions the village of Pułtusk, between Augustów and Warsaw,” I said.

“Off to Pułtusk then!” Vassily screamed.

Our friends were remarkably low maintenance.

This morning, the cold was digging its heels in. The road ran perfectly straight. The horizon was resting in a rectilinear position. The plain was at the disposal of the winds. Bunches of frosted gorse, groves of silver birches, marshes: the Mazovia triptych. These unobstructed expanses made perfect battlefields. Or rather spaces for cavalry maneuvers. In the 20th century, Panzers and T-34s used them to their hearts’ content. The whole landscape had been exhausted by it. Empty stork’s nests on top of pylons added to the feeling of abandonment. There wasn’t a figure in the villages: humanity had run away to huddle by the stoves. A very Catholic Poland ran beneath our wheels: disproportionately large cathedrals in the smallest hamlets. There were almost as many Virgin statues and wayside crosses as milestones.

Since contemplating the landscape was only relatively entertaining, I let the following question spin inside my helmet: Napoleon—a tyrant or a liberator?

If the Revolution boils down to an enterprise of struggling for freedom, then Napoleon is the gravedigger of the principles of 1789. His anti-parliamentary government, his authoritarianism, his belligerent imperialism make him akin to Caesar. However, if the Revolution is defined as a fight for equality, then the Emperor was its most ardent champion. Civil equality was his technical achievement. Equality of merit, his moral obsession. In which other era in the History of France did a butcher’s assistant have this much chance of becoming a general thanks to his talent? The ideal of heroism irrigated the beginnings of the Empire. These marshals, glowing in the imperial dawn, insulted the privileges of the Old Regime with more insolence than the butchers of the Terror.

It was strange to see these 21st-century top bureaucrats, mired in cronyism, rambling on against Le Mal Napoleonien[8] without admitting that the Emperor had managed to give civil and administrative form to the abstract impulse of the Enlightenment. One of our former Prime Ministers had distinguished himself by his critique of the Imperial adventure. He suggested that the balance sheet of 1815 was terrible: the abdication had heralded the return of reactionary monarchies, freedoms had taken a step back in France, and the country was emerging weak from a military adventure that had cost millions of human lives.

Caulaincourt’s words, scribbled under his fur-lined cloak, kept coming back to me. “The Emperor wished for the way to be open to merit, for the means to achieve without a distinction of caste, without needing to be the relative or friend of a well-placed man or of a royal mistress.” Also, “Any soldier being able to become a general, a baron, a duke, a marshal; the son of a peasant, of a school master, of a lawyer, of a mayor, a government counsellor, a minister, a duke, and this nobility would, in time, not shock anyone because it would reward everyone without distinction.” While rows of trees, painfully planted on the side of the road, paraded by, I found it ironic that the man professing such things should be disowned under our republic by one of those self-proclaimed socialists who had, however, lost the public’s favor.

We stopped off at service stations to revive our frozen hands and rub our kneecaps, which had been exposed directly to the wind. We had ended up wrapping them in newspapers, woolen balacklavas, and fabric muffs held together with Scotch tape. We each wore two pairs of socks, a pair of leather boots, and waterproof boot covers over which we also had a complete bodysuit. The result of this layering: we were still cold and it took us ten minutes to take a leak.

Warsaw was drawing nearer, and the temperature dropping. Wrapped up in his furs, Goisque looked increasingly like an old lady.

“Goisque!”

“What?”

“You look like an old lady.”

“What’s that?”

And a deaf old lady at that! I thought inside my helmet.

In the afternoon, we crossed the Vistula over a bridge, entered Warsaw, and switched off our engines in Uprising Square. It had been called Napoleon Square until the end of World War II. A few months before our arrival, in 2011, a bust of Napoleon on a ten-foot pedestal had been unveiled. Poland was saluting the man who, in 1807, had created the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and equipped it with a civil code that is still in force. We had saved two Partagas cigars for the occasion, and smoked them in the sidecars, and saw that the smoke matched the gray tones of Warsaw’s architecture.

On Napoleon’s chess board, Poland represented a weapon against Alexander. The Tsar was wary of the Grand Duchy’s uprising. Coming back after the Russian disaster, Napoleon’s objective was to persuade the European nations that Russia was the common enemy, and that war had to be waged against her “in the aptly-calculated interest of Old Europe and civilization.” To start with, the Poles had to be put into “a kind of drunken state.” Only the crazy pace of his return did not give him the time to “electrify the Poles,” who, in addition, were freezing their butts off, ruined by their contribution to the war effort. Napoleon spent only a short day in the capital and, at 9 P.M., jumped into the sleigh.

She was waiting for us at the foot of the statue, in her fur coat. I’d met her in Moscow, when she managed the network of Alliances Françaises in Russia. Currently, Mireille Cheval had been posted to Poland and was all gloomy in the plain, homesick for Russia. She stood out in the diplomatic corps. Her personality and generosity made her unsuitable for a career on the carpets of chancelleries.

I don’t know if she has kept a happy memory of her sidecar tour through the streets of the city. The disadvantage of the “monkey” position on a Ural is the fact that it’s low down, cramped, and cold. The sense of being imprisoned in an ice coffin and skimming the road at axle and carbon dioxide discharge level doesn’t suit everybody. Mireille didn’t complain and invited us to the Russian dinner she had prepared at her home. A Russian dinner consists in slowing down the ravages of vodka by swallowing an onion, some dill, and a small herring.

“Mireille, for all our affection, do you know why we couldn’t possibly not come to see you?”

“No,” she said.

“Your name, Mireille. Mireille Cheval!”

“It’s wonderful,” Goisque said.

Horses. They were the great martyrs of the Retreat. They were killed through overload, skinned alive, eaten raw, either straight from the carcass or quartered and braised at the end of a saber. And they were not even gobbled down respectfully away from the sight of live animals. Did anybody think how a horse might feel before the spectacle of a congener’s flesh dripping on a spit? Isn’t the prospect of being eaten the absolute dread of evolution?

Nobody has celebrated the 1812 horses in correct proportion to their suffering. The men who fell on the battlefield have been glorified. There are monuments to commemorate their courage. Books telling their exploits. Streets and children bearing their names. But what about the animals? What are they entitled to? Nothing. Except perhaps to be taken into account by painters. The paintings that represent the disaster of 1812 give particular focus to the meat. How come painters were so interested in equine martyrdom?

Was it for moral reasons? Perhaps. If there’s any innocence mowed down by war, it is that of animals: they would have gladly avoided the violence of men.

For aesthetic reasons? Almost certainly. There is tragic beauty in an emaciated horse, lying on a snow-covered field, the grace of someone flayed.

For spiritual reasons? Definitely. The death of a horse is a supremely painful sight because it takes place in silence. The silence of animals is the double expression of their dignity and of our dishonor. We humans make such a racket… Painters, masters of silence, perhaps felt that the mute agony of horses was a subject destined for their art. Brushes dipped in light and contemplation took upon themselves the funeral oration to horses, which no one had thought of writing.

There is a painting by Édouard Bernard Swebach, on display at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Besançon. It has a cavalryman sitting on the croup of his horse lying on the ground. The man looks desperate. He’s looking at his boots. He knows he won’t go far. Behind him, there’s a column of wretches trailing on the horizon. And yet what is striking is the horse. It’s lying on the black ice. Dying—perhaps already dead. Its head gently resting on the snow. Its body a reproach: “Why did you bring me here? You, Men, have failed, because not one of your wars has been an animal war.” At the beginning of the war the French owned about a hundred and fifty thousand animals: a hundred thousand draft horses and forty-five thousand mounts. The Russians had more or less the same. Of these three hundred thousand animals, two hundred thousand died during the first six months of the campaign.

“Mireille, do you know Gouraud?” Goisque said.

“Jean-Louis Gouraud, the writer?”

“Yes, he said that the Franco-Russian war was ‘the biggest equine slaughter in History,’” Goisque said.

“In 1812, the Russians invented a word to mean rot,” I said to Mireille.

“I know,” she said.

“What?” Goisque said.

“It’s from the French word cheval. Pronounced chval.”

“Chval,” Goisque echoed.

“Not at all, I think it’s delicious,” Vassily said, having only heard the Russian word, and dipped his onion in the pot of cream.

“What about Napoleon?” Mireille said. “Was he a good horseman?”

“From a strictly academic point of view he wasn’t,” Goisque said. “Not the kind of guy who’d perform a volt at a Spanish step in a Viennese riding school with his shagreen-gloved little finger raised. There’s a funny description by Odeleben: ‘Napoleon rode like a butcher. During a gallop, he would rock forward and sideways, at the whim of his mount. We know that more than once, he lost his stirrups.’ On the other hand, he was inexhaustible. Here’s what Colonel Jean-Baptiste Vachée says: ‘We saw him ride in five hours, at fifteen miles an hour, the road from Valladolid to Burgos. […] He was not only tireless, but a brave horseman, he rode recklessly.’”

“And listen to this! De Caulaincourt says,” I grabbed my copy of the Memoirs.

“There they go again with their readings,” Vitaly said. “It’s like being in church.”

“‘The Emperor would get on his horse by night or day, without telling anyone.’”

“He would have liked you, Mireille,” Goisque said. “He had a sense of names.”