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

DAY TEN. FROM BERLIN TO NAUMBURG

That morning, there were just three of us left. Goisque had gone. He had to attend to his photoshoots. There were long goodbyes to Lisa. Her silhouette walking away in the snow was sad. At 10 A.M., the three of us, Vitaly, Vassily, and I, were in an East Berlin district, at Michaël’s. Vassily had dug up his address in a jiffy (out of twelve). Michaël owned what we were looking for: a heated garage that sheltered a concession of Enfield motorbikes and sidecars. In addition, he knew Ural engines and was a self-proclaimed anarchist. But a German anarchist. His palace of motorized carcasses was as well organized as an operating room. Framed pictures of Enfields hung from the ceiling in a perfect line. His tools were laid out by size, and my two Russians were flabbergasted by the condition of this barracks. Vassily started his engine again. He was trying to diagnose the problem by ear and, not succeeding, started taking the thing apart. It took him three hours to admit defeat.

“I still can’t find anything,” he said.

“Put it all back together then,” Vitaly said, “and let’s get out of here. It will fix itself on the way.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“Urals follow mysterious laws which the Russian mind still hasn’t been able to penetrate,” Vitaly replied. “Sometimes, our bikes solve a mechanical problem of their own accord.”

“In Russian, you call that avtoremont,” Vassily said. “Self-repair.”

We went at a crazy speed. Goisque’s departure had lifted a considerable weight off me and I wasn’t used to driving such a light machine. Vassily kept at sixty-two miles an hour along the Leipzig Autobahn and I felt as though the three wheels of my sidecar were about to dissociate themselves from the asphalt. We caught up with the route of the imperial sleigh around the Lützen region, a small place south-west of Leipzig. In 1812, this small town was nothing on the map: just a few farmhouses in the forest. But it eventually got what it deserved. It was about to enter posterity when, in 1813, Napoleon beat the Prussians and Russians there on the way to Leipzig. In 2012, it had once again become a village of four thousand residents who intended to spend a quiet evening.

Wrapped up warmly in his sleigh, little did Napoleon suspect that, less than a year later, he would travel again across this area, as a war leader, fighting to save his dream against a coalition determined to have done with him.

When the Russians crossed the Neman right on the tail of the Grande Armée in January 1813, they were marching with an impetus nothing could hamper. For all his raising an army of eight thousand men and going back to war as early as Spring 1813, he was unable to hold back the energy of the Anglo-Prusso-Russian alliance. Within a year, this unnatural wave unfurled all the way to Paris…

The Battle of Nations took place in the middle of October 1813, in Leipzig, in this area that the sleigh had just traveled across. It marked the first act in the fall of the Empire. The coalition forced the French to back down, then crossed the Rhine at the beginning of 1814. Despite a relentless defense and bursts of victory, Napoleon’s army, outnumbered, was moving back. The War of the Sixth Coalition was its drawn out agony.

Alexander I entered Paris on March 1814, at the head of allied troops. What a revenge for the Russian sovereign who had had to sacrifice his capital city and witness the devastation of his empire!

In the sleigh, lulled by his own illusions and by the pleasant swaying on the road, Napoleon was a thousand versts from imagining that his end was so near. His conversation proves it. He displayed to Caulaincourt pathological optimism. His confessions are an example of autosuggestion. He was convinced that he would succeed in reconstituting his military power as soon as he arrived in Paris. “I will have conscripts and five thousand men in arms by the Rhine within three months.”

He still believed in his lucky star. He dreamed big. His energy had become psychotropic. He was in denial.

The Russian disaster? That was nothing, a setback, a chain of events: “It’s the winter that killed us.” He was wrong to stay “a further two weeks in Moscow.” But all that was a trifle, and the army would recover at Vilnius. It would find storerooms, warehouses, and would turn against the Russian hordes. Besides, the Russians wouldn’t dare cross the Neman, they would stop “as soon as we bare our teeth at them.” There was nothing to fear from the Tartars, led by “that old dowager Kutuzov.” Caulaincourt kept quiet, took notes, but had his own thoughts on the matter.

Napoleon’s presence in Paris would light his star again: “The ill effect of our disasters will be counterbalanced, in Europe, by my arrival in Paris.” Then he would go back to fight. He could already picture himself at the helm of a new naval power “which I will form in a couple of years’ time.” He was convincing himself by pretending to convince his scribe: “Two years from now you will be surprised by the number of my ships.” He thought he could capture Britain in the nets of the blockade, break the prosperity of the Crown, and impose the continental system upon the nations: “Two years of perseverance will bring about the fall of the British government. […] Europe will bless me.” He imagined he could raise Poland in order to keep Russia in check, and already pictured himself, once peace was restored, criss-crossing the French countryside like a Medieval king, sampling cheeses and teasing shepherdesses during farming festivals: “We will travel inland for four months every two years. I will take day trips with my horses. I will see inside the huts of this beautiful France.” These were the daydreams of the Emperor whose army was in its final throes. This is how he lulled himself while his soldiers were dying in Vilnius. In the evening, I had read Goisque these pages with a blend of dismay and admiration. They were the plans of a man who didn’t know he was already dead. The confession of a madman in the process of falling off the top of a building, and who’s making a list of resolutions for the future somewhere between the third and second story.

Napoleon had always felt the need to strive toward an idea. Did he not profess that the world was led by imagination? He would project on the screen of the future the images of his mental constructions. Nothing must hinder the mechanics, a defeat was not conceivable. This is why the Emperor gives the impression of brushing aside the Russian disaster, minimizing it, and casting it out of his mind. Sadly, the means at his disposal were never sufficient to bring his plans to a successful conclusion, and to consolidate the work he had begun in every direction and every country. He started everything and finished nothing. He wanted to redesign the world, but didn’t achieve a single local reform.

And so his reign was like the sleigh trip: a crazy pursuit. Napoleon’s life was the journey of a genius galloping after his visions, carried away by the torrent of dreams, and leaving behind a sketch of impossible projects.

We kept our foot down and our wrists, straight, clutching the handles, had lost all feeling. We reached Naumburg after waving through the hills. We chose a hotel that oozed rural Saxon delicacy. Timber beams, thick carpets, Gretchens with pigtails, and porcelain tankards.

All around us, in the night, stretched the battlefields of 1813. Not far, there was Erfurt, where Napoleon confirmed to Alexander the Tilsit agreement in 1808, there was Weimar, where he met Goethe, Leipzig, where everything was played out in 1813, Jena, where Prussia yielded in 1806. My room bore the name of Frederick William III. Vassily was sleeping in the Goethe room, and Vitaly in the Napoleon room. That night, I felt I was falling asleep in the middle of History’s spiderweb.