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

DAY ONE. FROM MOSCOW TO BORODINO

My insomnia was populated by visions of crumpled sheet metal. All night I’d tried to fall asleep. I was always more tormented by the prospect of traveling by motorbike than by the idea of a long stay in the forest, or plans for a mountain climb. I could never sleep the night before getting on a bike. You’re much more at the mercy of destiny’s irony on the road than amid the wilderness of nature. A pothole, a truck that’s too wide, an oil puddle: you’re dead before you’ve had the chance to do anything. I switched on the light and looked at the map on which the itinerary of the 1812 campaign was reproduced.

Napoleon should never have approached the splendor of Moscow. Its glare was too powerful for him. Some beauties are forbidden. In strategy as well as in love: beware of what sparkles.

On September 14th, 1812, his eyes on the onion domes, he contemplated the third Rome from the top of a hill. The following day, he positioned his rear guard behind the Kremlin ramparts. I believe in dharma, in the wheel of destiny. There are times when an apparently trivial event triggers a series of unexpected occurrences. That day in Moscow, a chain of causalities was set off that, two years later, was to sweep away the Empire.

There were soldiers who thought that Moscow was just a stage on the way to India. They imagined they would go as far as Mongolia to “take hold of British possessions,” as Sergeant Bourgogne writes.

The soldiers of the Grande Armée would have followed to the ends of the world this emperor who had covered them in glory in Egypt, Italy, Prussia, and Spain.

They had no inkling that, this time, their idol had led them to the brink of a nightmare.

Had Napoleon really wanted this hazardous war? Had he truly wished to send his men into the shapeless territory of a birch-covered plain where the Cossack and the pitchfork-wielding Moujik prowled? Alas, for him, the campaign against Russia had become inexorable. Had Alexander I, his friend and brother, not violated the Tilsit Treaty signed in 1807? What remained of the Tsar’s commitment to join the blockade against Britain? Nothing! The Russian sovereign had opened his harbors to British ships and was trading with perfidious Albion. The Emperor of the French could not leave this betrayal unpunished.

The Tsar had to be forced to renew his promises. The secret bonds between Saint Petersburg and the British had to be severed. This last effort had to be made and this ultimate capitulation obtained in order for the blockade against London to be successful, and therefore complete the great task of European peace. “Spain will fall just as soon as I have destroyed British influence in Saint Petersburg.” Napoleon was venturing into the immensity of this continental power in order to vanquish his sea rival!

He outlined to his peers the advantage of a show of strength before Alexander I. He was thereby inventing—two hundred years early—the equation that supported the Cold War of 1945. “The reputation of weapons is entirely equivalent to actual power,” he told his marshals. To display your fangs—that is, muskets, cannons, and cavalry sabers—would be sufficient. Impressed with the deployment by the River Neman and terrified by the prospect of charging cavalry, the Tsar would capitulate at the first jingling, resume his favorable disposition, and restore the alliance. A strange war that consisted in thrashing an adversary in order to turn him once more into a friend!

On no account would the Grande Armée advance beyond Minsk. Let’s say Smolensk at most. They might even go back to spend the winter in Paris. That was the plan.

What Napoleon had not foreseen was that Alexander I was no longer afraid. The Tsar had changed. He was following different maneuvers and had made new friendships. Britain, Sweden, Austria, and even the Ottoman Porte were now Russian allies. Saint Petersburg had become the anti-Napoleonic salon where the future members of the coalition were preparing for 1814.

It was 5 A.M. There was silence in Jacques’s apartment. We were drinking black tea, delaying the moment we’d be going out into the freezing air, feverish from lack of sleep, and I was telling Gras that Napoleon was not the guiltiest party in the 1812 affair. Something that relieved us of the remorse of commemorating the campaign.

“Oh, that’s Sokolov’s theory! I read his book in Donetsk.”

“Sokolov?” Goisque says. “The man who thinks he’s Napoleon?”

Oleg Sokolov, history lecturer at the University of Saint Petersburg, devoted a cult to the Emperor. Every year, he organized historical reconstructions. Thousands of extras in helmets, boots, and 1812 costumes would re-enact the battles. He would wear a bicorn and command the maneuvers. He published Le Combat de deux Empires: la Russie d’Alexandre Ier contre la France de Napoleon – 1805-1812[3] in which he concealed nothing about Alexander I’s responsibility in the Franco-Russian war. He highlighted the Tsar’s betrayal and Napoleon’s efforts to bring him back to his Tilsit promises. This way, he had attracted the wrath of his readers. Sokolov had broken a Russian rule: History is a delicate science and you must never speak ill of your own people, even if you’re telling the truth.

We were now in the garage. An electric coffee pot stood on the back seat, steaming, lit by an oily light bulb. Vassily was busy welding some undefinable parts. We crammed our tools and baggage in the trunk of the sidecar. We were ready to set off. The Ural looked ready too.

On June 25th, 1812, the Grande Armée had crossed the Neman. A column of four hundred and fifty thousand men had gone over the river, carting a thousand cannons over the ford. It was the same river where, in 1807, Alexander I and Napoleon, sheltering in a tent erected on a raft, had signed the Tilsit Treaty and sworn mutual peace. Five years later, fate had brought the Emperor back to the banks where this agreement had been sealed. Napoleon should have been inspired to reread Heraclitus and hesitate awhile before crossing his Acheron. “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” the wise man of Ephesus said.

Moreover, on the grassy bank, shortly before the start of the war, a strange event should have warned Napoleon that dreadful omens were accumulating in his horoscope. A hare shot through the legs of his horse. The mount swerved and the Emperor—a better horseman than the dreadful Saint Paul—fell, picked himself up, got back into the saddle, and paid no more attention to the incident.

“There’s another hare intervention in history,” Gras, who had read everything and drunk almost nothing, said. “I think it’s in Herodotus.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes. One day, Darius, the Persian king, arrived before the Scythian cavalry. The two armies faced each other, ready for attack. A hare burst forth from amid the ranks, and the Scythians scattered and chased after the animal. Their hunting instinct had been awakened and they only thought of hunting down the hare. This frightened Darius. If, at the moment of engaging in battle, these men could be distracted by a damned little animal, it meant they were fearless, emotionless brutes. And so the Persians, upon discovering this, turned back.”

“It’s what we would have done,” Vitaly said.

Vassily and Vitaly were Russian, therefore superstitious. If Napoleon had had Slav or Oriental blood, he would have cursed the Neman hare, spat in the wild grass, mounted his horse, and sounded the return to Paris.

“That kind of story can really screw up your plans,” Goisque said.

In the absence of signs and not very au fait with oracles, we stepped on the gas at 8 A.M. on December 2nd, 2012. Nothing could have diverted us from our obsession: to go back home.

Russians have a passion for giving streets disproportionate names. An eerie street slashing across an industrial estate stuck in a marsh can be called “Enthusiasts’ Road.” One in an abandoned township “October Revolution Pioneers’ Boulevard.” A path between two rows of sheds “Science Academy Avenue.” To go back to Paris from Moscow, all you have to do is follow the direction of Russian irony and plunge into “Kutuzov Avenue,” named for the general who kicked the French out of Russia.

Kutuzov was fat, but still a genius. On August 17th, 1812, Alexander I thanked his army commander, Barclay de Tolly, and replaced him with Field Marshal Kutuzov. The avoidance strategy established by Barclay de Tolly was thereby rejected. Since the French army had crossed the Neman, Barclay de Tolly had effectively chosen evasion. His was a brilliant idea. He had anticipated that geography could be his best ally. Its hugeness would overcome the Grande Armée better than the warfare at his disposal. The country was a rut and the plain a mousetrap. The horizon would swallow the French.

Napoleon, attracted by the golden tints of Moscow, eager for battle, seeking a confrontation that would conform to his strategy, would be trapped by the dungeon-like steppes, the frightening monotony of the forest, and the nothingness of the sky. All you had to do was let him sink in deeper. You would retire, refuse all battle, and leave the cohorts to fray in long meanders of men and beasts harassed by vermin, afflicted by the heat, exasperated by the receding enemy.

Anyone who has walked for a few days amid the vegetation of this country knows the despair and anguish that crush your soul, at the end of a day where every effort to get closer to the horizon has proved in vain. The Russian expanse is discouraging.

Except that there was a problem. The Russian people, the Saint Petersburg elite, were no longer tolerating this climbdown. They were demanding a clash. The tournament of shadows could not last any longer for a nation humiliated by the French invasion. Hatred demanded a bloodbath. So the task of cleanse their honor in battle fell to the old chief Kutuzov. Kutuzov was the author of Borodino. He chose the location of the massacre that took place on September 7th, “beneath the walls of Moscow,” to use Napoleon’s expression, or seventy-five miles from the capital (but why quibble when you rule over the world?) All day, infantry, cavalry, and artillery fought over redoubts, taking turns to lose and gain them, until the French ended up seizing them. Napoleon found that Russians went to their deaths “like machines.”

Goisque reminded me of how we’d met this French officer, on the Shamali Plain, in Afghanistan. He was responsible for the officer training of the Afghan National Army. The man must have been familiar with Napoleon’s formula. He’d left us in front of a troop of soldiers advancing in line, during a training session. “Look at this. They’ve been trained by the Russians. They offer themselves up in rows. That’s how the Soviets must have advanced in Stalingrad.”

For a long time, the Borodino massacre held the terrible record of “the most deadly battle since the invention of gunpowder.” On one side, twenty-eight thousand Frenchmen died. On the other side, fifty thousand Russians. This clash heralded the mass slaughters of the American Civil War and the battles of 1914, those storms of steel beneath which 20th-century man was relegated to the rank of material—like lead and powder—which the military could use to ensure victory. Borodino marked our entry into the era of Titans. From that day onward, war would no longer be contented with a meager catch but would demand mass sacrifice. The difference—a major one—was in the way the men fell. Under Napoleon, the soldier would die in battle by the fatal blow of another soldier discharging his volley of lead on him. In other words, men would kill one another individually. In 1914, the situation was reversed: seventy-five percent of victims would be mowed down by artillery. Under Foch, the slaughter would become blind…

A Ural with a sidecar isn’t worth much in the Moscow traffic. The asphalt is ruled by Darwinian laws of selection. As soon as we left, Goisque wanted us to take a detour through the Kremlin.

“We don’t have the time,” I said.

“What about my photos, guys?”

So we had to wind our way to Red Square.

Heading to the banks of the Moskva River through the streets of the capital, I thought about Barclay de Tolly’s strategy. The British have a word for this art of dodging: escapism. When faced with an obstacle, the escapist advocates flight. Like shooting stars, wild horses, and streams of clear water, the escapist cannot bear collision, friction, or the ugliness of contact. He considers even quibbling vulgar. He thinks it’s better to turn on his heels, and is akin to the grace of a ballet dancer crossing the stage from one side of the wings to the other in four doe-like leaps. He prefers the about-turn of a butterfly to a charge of cattle. I’d lived the first forty years of my life according to this principle and now wasn’t very affected by it. I had no anchor, not the slightest attachment, no family, very few enemies, no children, and no washing machine, and my only friends were discreet people imbued with the same philosophy. Gras, for instance, would measure the degree of affection of his entourage by their ability to “put up with absences and silences.” Was escapism cowardice? Perhaps, but I could care less. Let’s flee, I thought, since tomorrow will be worse than today. To hell with everything and long live Barclay de Tolly!

Moreover, Kutuzov’s behavior after the Battle of Borodino and then during the French Retreat proved that he wasn’t really opposed to escapism either.

If we rely on simple statistics and consider the Grim Reaper as an accountant, the Battle of Borodino was a Napoleonic victory. The Russian losses were greater than the French. But as far as victory goes it was a perverse victory. What had the Emperor gained? The right to go a little deeper into the country. He hadn’t obtained the definitive military success that would have served him the Tsar’s surrender on a plate. Had he erred too much on the side of caution? Many marshals blamed him for having balked at sending the Imperial Guard to deal the final blow.

Until then, Napoleon would appear in the theater of operations, devising plans, giving orders, staying up all night, pacing up and down the bivouacs, scolding some, haranguing others, then, at dawn, he would direct the operations, watch his thoughts being incarnated in the movement of his troops, and, in the evening, he would have an unmitigated success where the genius of the maneuver, the audacity of the technique, and French fury would strike nations, subjugate monarchs, and the battle pass into posterity.

At Borodino, however, he was timid. It wasn’t the Battle of Austerlitz. Murat even dared say, “I don’t recognize the Emperor’s genius anymore.” Napoleon let Kutuzov slip through his fingers. The Tsar was in no way weakened and the Russian army continued to march behind the screen of silver birches, as elusive as a bank of mist in a bunch of gorse. Moreover, the more the Russians eluded him, the more Napoleon—certain that peace would be played out in Moscow—urged his columns to hurry. Was summer 1812 a conquest? No, it was a fall into the abyss.

We parked on the cobbles behind the apse of Saint Basil’s Cathedral and managed to persuade a militiaman to let us stay there for a few minutes. At the foot of Notre Dame, in Paris, I often thought of 13th-century peasants traveling to Paris from Hurepoix or Gâtinais and suddenly discovering the monster of stone with its three hundred and thirty-foot spire soaring through the air. To us, it was a Gothic cathedral. To them, the vision of a vessel of mysteries and mischief, a fossilized insect becalmed in a city of timber. Before the colorful bulbs of Saint Basil, I thought of the French soldiers. Of how, on that September 14th, they must have been struck by these Byzantine domes, these red crenellations and confectionery bulbs, rising in the city of “twelve hundred sky-blue belfries and domes, sown with golden stars and linked together with gilded chains.”[4] Sergeant Bourgogne begins his memoirs with the following admission: “Many other capital cities I had seen, such as Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, and Madrid, had inspired no more than ordinary feelings in me, but this was something different: for me, as well as for everyone else, there was something magical about it.”

“Now clear off.”

A universal rule: never let a cop tell you something twice.

All three of us owed our knowledge of Napoleon to recent reading. We could have spent the rest of our lives in libraries, since there had been a new book about the First French Empire published every day since 1815. Gras had devoured the memoirs of half a dozen verbose Empire barons and officers. Goisque preferred testimonies written on the hoof by enlisted men and non-commissioned officers: he swore only by Sergeant Bourgogne, his fellow man, his brother, a tireless Velite who worshipped the Emperor, accepted his ordeals, and took his share of pleasure when fate offered it. Bourgogne left behind visual, naïve memoirs. Personally, I liked Caulaincourt, Napoleon’s Grand Squire. I had taken his account of the Russian campaign with me. Caulaincourt was a complex character: French Ambassador at the Court of Alexander I, he had dissuaded Napoleon from invading Russia. With the impending doom, he displayed his knowledge of the country, his foresight, and his tactical genius to try and find a solution for the Grande Armée and, at the same time, the courage and coolness of a Muscovite girl. His text was a blend of high-brow thoughts and anecdotes. Caulaincourt was as comfortable with a sword in hand on a moonless night as he was sitting at the table of princes.

Books would be our guides on the road. They would tell us where to go through and where to sound a halt. Opening them in the evening would mark the start of another journey, no longer on the asphalt of Slav highways, but through the memory of 1812 survivors who had picked up a quill to conjure up the nightmare.

I thought that Goisque, with his sense of reality and his military past, was the embodiment of a kind of Bourgogne. Had he not himself been a sergeant on the Igman slopes during the Yugoslav war? Gras, more touchy and introverted, would make an excellent Caulaincourt. Hadn’t he spent the last five years working in diplomacy?

“And who will you be, Tesson?”

“Napoleon, of course,” I said, fully aware that this kind of project led to the asylum.

When the bulk of the French troops reached Moscow on September 14th and 15th, they discovered a “magical” city, of course, definitely Oriental, but desperately deserted. Not an officer in the streets, not a Boyar, not even a soldier, or a single shopkeeper: the Russians had abandoned the city. Barclay de Tolly’s beloved escapism had become the strategy of an entire nation. There were only a few tramps, a handful of Moujiks in rags, and a few Jewish shopkeepers roaming on the sidewalks. Here and there, shapes would vanish down an alley, eerie and furtive—and why were they waving those torches? The French columns went deeper into the dead avenues soon to be ravaged by fire. Napoleon was about to find out that, in terms of pyrotechnics, next to Alexander, Nero was an amateur.

After Borodino, the Tsar had made up his mind to sacrifice his capital city. Since his field marshal had failed to hold back the French advance, he would deliver Moscow to the flames. The city would not fall into the hands of the Corsican Antichrist. He reluctantly ordered the fire, thereby giving History the largest pyre a monarch ever produced. Moscow would be torched so that the Russian Empire might survive. Rostopchin, the city’s governor, was charged with the task. He freed all common law prisoners and ordered them to start the fire. All the water pumps were removed from the city to stop the invaders from using them, and the ex-prisoners started setting ablaze the bazaar of Kitay-gorod, the warehouses, the timber churches, and the houses of the nobility! The first wind-swept sparks were seen during the night of September 14th to 15th. Day and night, the city burned with a raging fire. On September 16th, installed in the Kremlin, Napoleon was nearly trapped by the fire. The Emperor owed his life to an open alley behind the rampart and a hidden flight of steps that led him to the Moskva River. The fire was mirrored in the waters, and the Old Guard, who’d seen it all, from Egypt to Spain, from the pyramids to Jena, thought they were looking at hell. The bulbs turned red, buildings crashed down in the rustle of charcoaled timber, the air burned their throats, and the heat melted the bells. Before the blood-stained sky and burning palaces, Napoleon realized he had underestimated the sacrificial rage of the Russians, Alexander’s determination, and that Slav ability to go to the bitter end which would, a hundred and fifty years later, make thousands of human waves run aground in Stalingrad, on the allegedly invincible reefs of the Wehrmacht.

The Grande Armée had ventured into a swamp, pursued an army of ghosts, and obtained half a victory.

All that for a heap of ashes.

Why had Napoleon dug his heels in while in Moscow? Why had he allowed the jaws of winter to close on him? He had thought that, by occupying the economic capital, the Tsar would be cornered and end up pleading for a peace treaty. The French emperor had already harbored such illusions by the River Neman. In the smoking rubble of Moscow, he kept feeding on his own hopes. Misled by his self-confidence, he did not listen to General de Caulaincourt, who was urging him to leave.

While the King of Kings procrastinated, in Saint Petersburg Alexander remained inflexible. You do not negotiate with the devil. He was no longer the French sovereign’s friend, but then had he ever been that? Napoleon had overlooked something: that Saint Petersburg, the spiritual capital, was more important in Alexander’s eyes than the secular capital. Moscow could fall, burn down, vanish from the map, but Russia would remain.

So time passed in the soot dust. From September 15th to October 19th, eating his heart out, drawing up plans, ruling the Empire from a distance through a system of express mail and dispatch riders organized by Caulaincourt, Napoleon waited, hoped, and convinced himself. He lost a month. The troops of General Winter had time to get ready for attack.

So, we backfired along Kutuzov Avenue. Moscow, the large capital of iron, steel, tears, and stars, was pushing us out through the West Gate, the name of which is associated with all the woes of the Grande Armée.

On the avenue, a car brushed past us, the window opened, and a young Russian with a pointy nose shouted, “Tired of life, are you, guys?”

“Shut up, you jerk,” I said. Driving does not raise the standard of your thoughts.

Russians have paved the path of their history with glorious monuments and compelling statues. We came across one of Kutuzov the Fat and one of Gagarin. Then there was a war plane during take-off on a pedestal. Then we reached the suburbs: we were on the road to Moyjak when a notice appeared that confirmed that our journey no longer belonged just to the realm of dreams, pleasant distractions, or drunken projects: “Borodino, fifty-five miles.”

The bike was rocking terribly, with Goisque too heavy at the back; Gras, asleep in the sidecar, wasn’t counterbalancing the profile shift. It was like being on an unmaneuverable raft with my two friends. Both were imperturbable. For years they had been traveling around the world in the worst possible conditions without a single complaint.

Gras, 30, had kept his childish habits. He drank nearly a gallon of pineapple juice a day, swam in the pool for two hours, fed on chocolate, and looked like a high-strung hockey champion. He’d been living in the old Soviet Empire for eight years, learned Russian in Omsk, and stayed in Vladivostok for four. He enjoyed silence and had found Siberia to match his melancholy disposition. Later, he had become the director of the Alliance Française in Donetsk, in the Ukrainian Donbas region. His Russian friends considered him one of their own. His female students were secretly in love with him. His work superiors envied his detachment. The old fogies at the Embassy slightly dreaded this ironic young hussar who felt so at ease in the country’s society. He was preparing a thesis in Geography on the borders of empires. He would quite happily never have left mountain peaks, deep forests, and this desolate geography which, just by itself, suited his sadness. He channelled his love for Russia into beautiful books his blond students read in full in the hope of attracting a look from their teacher. His black hair and dark skin never failed to attract the favor of Slav girls, while cops would frequently check on him because they mistook him for a Chechen. Once, in Pakistan, he broke a leg on a mountain wall and had to wait twenty-four hours for help, hanging off a piton at an altitude of sixteen thousand five hundred feet without worrying too much. Whenever we went walking in the forest or tackled a summit climb, he made it a point of honor not to carry enough equipment. He considered foresight vulgar. Soon enough, the situation would turn critical and then Gras, feeling in his element, would double his efforts to get out of the tight spot. The rest of the time, he was bored and couldn’t care less.

Goisque was earthier. He wouldn’t have been out of place in a Soissons trench in 1914. He was from Picardy, and attached to his land like a boot to clay. After visiting a hundred countries, he still considered a field of beets exhausted by the drizzle the most beautiful spectacle the planet could offer. His Antwerp stevedore build was at odds with his fine hands. A pair of piercing blue eyes shielded by Neanderthal eyebrows completed his paradoxical look, as though nature had refused to grant him any gradation between brutality and finesse. He’d been taking photos of the world for the French press for twenty-five years. His style was eclectic. He would accompany the minister to Afghanistan one day, jump above the Volga with Russian parachutists the next, then spend two weeks on board the Charles-de-Gaulle before going off to report on masseuses in the Mekong delta. We’d camped together in the Gobi Desert, the Siberian Taiga, by the Caspian Sea, in Tibet and Afghanistan, and by the fire he’d tell me about his time as a UN Peacekeeper, his years as a humanitarian volunteer in the Cambodian jungle, crossing the ocean on a Vietnamese junk boat, traveling to Kapisa, Sudan, and the Caucasus. He’d conclude, much to my annoyance, that none of these memories was a patch on spending a spring morning in a farmhouse full of children’s shrieks. Goisque had one obsession in his reports: the light. It was his passion, his obsession. If the sky had been clear that day, he could go to sleep on the ground, in the cold, with a bone to chew on, and a blissful smile on his face. But if the light had been scarce, not even the most luxurious hotel or the friendliest company could distract him from his rambling: “It’s all screwed, this shitty report.” I therefore had beside me a pessimistic dandy and a photon monomaniac. A fine combination.

We weren’t dressed warmly enough, the 1.4°F air was biting at my kneecaps, and Latvian trucks, looming huge at our weak rear, would brush past us, spattering our jackets with snow. Doubt was worming its way into me: what the hell was I doing on a Ural in the middle of December, with two fools in tow, when these damned machines are made to transport small, 90-pound Ukrainian women from Yalta beach to Simferopol on a summer afternoon?

All around us there was ice, snowdrifts, gray suburbs, crumbling factories, and crooked isbas. The landscape had a hangover. Even the trees grew askew. The sky was the color of dirty flannel. And the salty mud churned out by thirty-three-ton trucks gave us a taste of polluted fish in our mouths.

A motorbike helmet is a meditation cell. Trapped inside, ideas circulate better than in the open air. It would be ideal to be able to smoke in there. Sadly, the lack of space in an integral crash helmet prevents one from drawing on a Havana cigar, and the ensuing wind blows out the burning tip when the helmet is open. A helmet is also a sounding box. It’s nice to sing inside it. It’s like being in a recording studio. I hummed the epigraph from Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. These lines were to become my mantra for the weeks to come:

The lady at the service station got frightened. With all our layers of clothing, we looked like cosmonauts.

“Where are you heading?” a truck driver asked.

“Paris,” I said.

“On a Ural?” he said.

“Yes.”

Before slamming shut the door of his Volvo, he issued the mythical Red Army slogan: “Retreat? Never!”

As far as the French were concerned, it was not a matter of retreating but of fleeing. At the head of his weakened army, Napoleon first aimed at the city of Kaluga, less than a hundred and twenty-five miles south of Moscow. He wanted to take another way and not go where a swarm of soldiers—might as well say locusts—had devastated the fields. Farther south, he hoped to find a rich countryside, a fairer climate, and well-stocked storehouses. Von Clausewitz outlined the following principle in The 1812 Campaign in Russia: “Anyone who retreats in enemy country needs a well laid-out route, anyone who performs such a retreat in very bad conditions needs it twice as much, and anyone who wants to leave Russia after going into it a hundred and twenty miles needs it three times as much.” Napoleon launched his hundred thousand survivors down a route that had not been prepared.

The plan to extricate themselves through the south was abandoned less than a week later. The Russians awaited the French at Maloyaroslavets, on the road to Kaluga. On October 24th, General Dokhturov attacked the vanguard of Viceroy Eugène without an order from Field Marshal Kutuzov. Now that it was in flight, the Field Marshal meant to harry the army without ever confronting it, push it the way a hound chases after a deer in the woods, and “let it melt down” by escorting its flight. He wanted to be the whip on their backs. “It was absurd to stand in the way of men who were devoting all their energy to running away,” Tolstoy writes in War and Peace.

Exasperated by his commander’s restraint and eager to fight, Dokhturov launched his troops. The clash at Maloyaroslavets was merciless. The Russians felt that luck was changing sides. The French suspected they were playing a vital match. Dismembered and demoralized, the Grande Armée, already frozen, did not fail to live up to its name. And yet “it was already carrying within it the inevitable germs of death, and the chemical conditions for decomposition,” Tolstoy thought he knew. Ten thousand corpses later, Russians sounded the retreat. However, they had managed to arrest the momentum of the retreat, hamper the initial plan, and sow doubt where there was already discouragement.

Napoleon gave up on the road to the south, on the well-stocked villages, and full barns. On October 26th, he made his decision: the army would return to Smolensk, through where it had come, through the land it had burned down. The cohort turned north-west to return to the major Moscow-Smolensk road. With his Guard at his side, Napoleon headed the march. Going towards a path “that had already been trodden,” as Tolstoy writes, going headlong into a yet unsuspected tragedy, unaware that he was taking the first step on the path to his fall, he went toward Borodino.

We arrived in Borodino at 3 P.M. When we left Moscow, we had decided to go straight to the battlefield and not take the detour via Maloyaroslavets. Two hours of pretty snowfall had restored its looks to the landscape. A road that ran parallel to the highway brought us closer to our destination through a forest Andersen would have authored if landscapes could be written. We inspected the army of white trees. We drove past small villages, foot down on the gas, and the Ural was doing fifty miles an hour on the crusty road. A supermarket here, a service station there. Wherever soldiers had fallen, humans had resumed the course of life and erected buildings necessary for their comfort. Man had gotten used to living on top of dead bones.

“Good thing ghosts don’t exist,” Gras said, “or the place would be unlivable.”

I am now sorry we didn’t drive through the forests of Maloyaroslavets. Our impatience (Borodino was a magnet) had prevented us from seeing a place where the Emperor experienced a perfectly Stendhalian scene. On the morning of the 25th, shortly before the battle, Napoleon decided to check the enemy’s position. Accompanied by Caulaincourt, Lauriston, and a few officers and Chasseurs, he rode toward the Russian positions at dawn. During the night, the small squad didn’t notice that he was going beyond the French limits and he went straight into the Cossack camp. War cries were heard. The Chasseurs contained the enemy, reinforcements arrived, and Napoleon was saved. For a long time, this sent chills up Caulaincourt’s spine. “The Emperor was alone with the Prince of Neufchâtel and me. All three of us had swords in our hands. […] If the Cossacks who came under our noses and briefly surrounded us had been more audacious and silent on the way, instead of screaming and clattering at the edge of the road […] the Emperor would have been killed or captured.”

As the Ural parted the curtain of snowflakes, I thought about the scene. I thought about “the greatest captain who ever was” on horseback, in the middle of the night, ready to cross swords with the enemy. I thought of Sergeant Bourgogne who, after the skirmish, revealed that “the Emperor laughed at the thought of having nearly been captured.” And I remembered pictures of Yeltsin on his tank before a White House in flames, of de Gaulle lighting his cigarette during the Notre Dame gun battle of 1944, of Chancellor Helmut Kohl charging against a crowd of detractors and knocking down his bodyguards. Great men aren’t forbidden from showing grit every so often.

Borodino, capital of sorrow. We stopped the front wheel of our vehicle in the snow, at the foot of the monument erected in Kutuzov’s memory. From up there, he took in the entire plain where French fury pushed into Russian courage. There fell the bodies of the seventy thousand victims of the “battle of giants.” Silver birch and aspen groves decorated the countryside with gray medals. The forefathers of these trees must have thrived after that carnage. War kills men, torments animals, pushes away gods, works the land, and fertilizes the soil. There were smoking farmhouses, crowded in folds of the land. Hamlets seemed to shiver. A sob lingered over this destruction. The dead gave the aluminum landscape solemnity.

“Hey, guys, read this,” Gras said.

“Rather, you translate.”

There was an inscription engraved in the stone marking the spot where Kutuzov had watched the battle, “Here, we fought against Europe.” Technically speaking, this sentence wasn’t incorrect, since the Grande Armée was speckled with nations of the empire and its ranks were increased by Italian, Polish, Prussian, and Austrian recruits. From a historical point of view, this statement was dishonest because the Russians could also claim foreign support, especially from Britain. From the cultural point of view, the Russians liked that summary, since they were convinced of their extra-European destiny, certain they had the mission to open their own way between Asia and the West. From a spiritual point of view, the formula was crucial: the Battle of Borodino had caused blood to flow that had been used as a holy Chrism for baptizing a brand-new feeling of Russian patriotism.

We cut across a field to reach a monastery built by Nicholas II in 1912 on the occasion of the centenary. The snow grew thicker. The cylinders were roaring in the ruts because we were too heavy and the track was a gash of frozen mud. Our flag was flapping at the prow of the sidecar. The row of trees formed sad bundles. The monastery appeared, blurred by the slow flakes that got stuck on the headlight wiper. It was a brick building, graceless, grinning and bearing the torment. Then, we saw the outline of Borodino’s main monument at the end of an alley of trees: a black pillar with a gold cross on the top. Opposite, there was a small museum devoted to the battle.

“We bewildered the French by withdrawing skillfully.” This was the kind of declaration we read on the documents in the display cabinets. The Russians wrote their history by taking quite a lot of liberties. On the contrary, the French thought Russians had a “passive” courage.[5] However, Russian enthusiasm was fair and square. Is it a crime to sacrifice a little truth to pride?

The snow poured silence onto the road. Night fell, and it continued to snow in the dark. In Moyjak, thanks to Mikhail, the watchman of a truck garage, we found somewhere to stay in a workmen’s club attached to a factory. In a modest room, heated by the local thermal factory, we were glad we didn’t have to build a fire and keep watch in the Cossack night, roll up in bad coats, or protect ourselves against the snow under a few valuable tapestries snatched off Moscow palace walls.

We even unearthed an open sauna. In Russia, for a few hundred rubles, you can purify your body and cleanse your soul in public steam rooms. It was 176°F in the wooden hut. We were there, stark naked, felt hats on our heads, taking turns to whip one another with veniki, silver birch branches which, when slapped on the skin, are supposed to open the pores, stir the blood, and warm you up. It took at least an hour of pummeling for our bodies to forget that they’d been very cold on the road. And yet we’d left Moscow only a day earlier!

At midnight, Vassily rang. “OK, guys?”

“What about the repairs?” I said.

“Finished. I mean almost,” he said.

“When will you catch up?”

“We’ll just finish tweaking things tonight, have the oil changed, fill up at dawn, set off, and be in Borodino by midday tomorrow.”

“I hope so,” I said.

“Hope is the last thing to die,” he said.