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

DAY EIGHT. FROM WARSAW TO PNIEWY

We looked in vain for the Hôtel d’Angleterre in Warsaw, where the Emperor had stayed. It wasn’t there anymore. We had fallen back on furnished accommodations in the city center and, in the early morning, were in the process of repairing coils damaged by the salt spread over the roads, when an embassy press officer named Alain, sent by Mireille, turned up. We told him about our retreat, he took notes, we started the engines and, while the cylinders were warming up, since our new friend seemed eminently friendly, I asked, “You haven’t always been in diplomacy, have you?”

“No,” he said.

“What did you use to do?”

“Philosophy.”

“What was your subject?”

“Berkeley,” he said.

“The university?”

“The thinker.”

“Ah.”

“Do you know him?”

“No.”

“He was Irish. 18th century,” he said. “The concept of immaterialism was his idea. That the world is the sum of our opinions about it.”

“Like Schopenhauer?”

“Even better! It’s not just a question of representation, but of a collection of ideas. Things don’t exist except in as far as they are perceived.”[9]

“Are you saying that Goisque doesn’t exist per se?” I said.

“Mr. Goisque exists because you perceive him. You, your motorbikes, this bicorn, there’s nothing to prove that they are no more than a beam of information interpreted by your senses.”

“I love it, it’s so beautifully Shakespearean,” I said. “I’ve always known that this life was a grotesque illusion.”

“Besides,” Goisque said, “ever since Moscow, we’ve been indulging in a big game, something built by our minds.”

“Your big game is more interesting than the maneuvers of many of the people I frequent, who take themselves very seriously, and whose gravitas is just the sullenness of prigs.”

It was bitterly cold when we left Warsaw, and I wondered whether, had Berkeley frozen to the bone on a damn Ural, he would have perhaps reconsidered his wild imaginings about the nonexistence of phenomena. Funny how freezing your butt off cures you of speculations. The road followed the rhythm of the trucks: the shoulder was populated by garages, service stations, drivers, and lodges. The snow was an appropriate shroud for this country of battles. There must be quite a few skeletons in this favorable compost. History had crushed this country to the point of flattening it. We left Kutno at our rear, and followed, give or take a verst, the path of the sleigh. This morning, the cold was an enemy who’d learned all the techniques of an infiltration commando. The motorbikes were purring steadily at fifty miles an hour. Everything was in order, the trees planted straight. By the end of the afternoon, we had covered a hundred and eighty-seven miles, and gone past Poznań. The snow began to fall without any consideration for motorcyclists. Within an hour, the road was an ice rink. A few thirty-three-ton semi trailers slid across the highway and blocked the traffic toward Pniewy, northwest of Poznań. Tricycles had their advantages: we were the only ones able to get ahead without difficulty along the emergency lane. By evening, we decided that the flakes were falling too thick, so we stopped at a motel kept by a peroxide-blond Ukrainian who seemed to share with the road the company a large number of truck drivers.

In the evening, our conversation turned to our destination. We were now only a hundred and twenty-four miles from Berlin, which, as Germans have always believed, is on the way to Paris. Paris, where the Emperor arrived just before midnight on December 18th. Where the survivors of the tragedy didn’t come until early January 1813. Paris, which neither Vassily nor Vitaly knew. Paris, where Goisque had promised us a surprise. Paris, to which we were drawn.

Nowadays, it’s considered fashionable to sing the praises of wandering. Many travelers, experts at detour, give us their penny’s worth. “You must get lost in order to find yourself again,” they say. “The journey is more important than the destination,” add the more Confucian ones. “You must let go,” say those who don’t practice mountain climbing. As far as traveling was concerned, neither Goisque nor I felt we were wandering types. We were neither strolling nor shortcut professionals.

Rather, we were on the side of Tolstoy’s theory. The old prophet writes in War and Peace: “Whenever a man is on the move, he always gives this move a goal. In order to travel a thousand versts, he must think that he will find something good at the end of these thousand versts. The hope of a promised land is necessary to give him the strength to go forth.” When I was crossing the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, or Anatolia, I felt propelled toward my goal. I walked on, hypnotized by my objective, and would never have considered dawdling along with the wind. In terms of movement, I believed in ballistics.

However, if the total itinerary turned out to be outrageously long, then it was better not to think too much about the city on the finishing line. When you’re on foot, a distant objective of three thousand miles smacks of abstraction. One then has to divide the journey into intermediary legs, provisional objectives that, in turn, would constitute Tolstoy’s “promised land.” Moreover, I thought of the scattered soldiers of the Grande Armée, who not only had no goal, but couldn’t even rely on a stopping place to recover! Smolensk and Vilnius, for which they had so much prayed, turned out to be their graves. Their walk turned into a headlong flight, a relentless stumbling. “The man who has to cover a thousand versts,” Tolstoy goes on to say, “must be able to tell himself, forgetting the final goal, ‘Today, after forty versts, I will reach a place where I will be able to rest and sleep,’ and, during this first stage, this place of rest conceals the final goal and focuses all his wishes and hopes on it.”

To suffer when you know exactly where you are and what you’re aiming for is just about tolerable. You grin and bear it, you take it on the chin, you start the countdown, you know it will all come to an end, you tell yourself you have to hang in there until you reach the bivouac, and that you’ll start again tomorrow. You tell yourself, “Two more bad days and I’ll see the end of this.” Mountain climbers are familiar with this state of being in parentheses. But to fight for your life without knowing whether the ordeal is going to last two weeks or three months, when it will end, or if it will ever end, or if you’ll have any respite before it ends, must increase suffering considerably. Not knowing is the hardest thing. During adversity, uncertainty is like poison. And the Russian Retreat was definitely an uncertain rout. Neither the men nor their chiefs were in charge of destiny anymore, and had become the toy of uncontrollable forces. They had won from the military point of view, but collapsed logistically. Napoleon might have shouted that the supply corps would follow. But it did not.