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

DAY TWO. FROM BORODINO TO VYAZMA

Unfortunately, well-being—like energy and happiness—can’t be stored. If there’s a raging storm early in the morning, then it will jump at your throat whether or not you have simmered in a banya the night before and slept in a warm bed. That morning, the Ural had vanished under the snow. We shoveled and went to the battlefield to wait for our friends.

Around October 28th, 1812, almost ten days after leaving Moscow, the Grande Armée reached Borodino and crossed the same field where the battle had raged fifty-two days earlier. The residents had not returned to the villages. The ground was strewn with putrefying corpses. Heads and limbs were sticking out of the soil. The sky stank with miasma and flocks of scavenging birds reigned over this tableau. And so the soldiers walked on, sometimes crushing the flesh of their comrades or adversaries with their laced boots. There was the odd moan: a survivor, a ghost unwanted by death, who had spent two months feeding on the dead flesh of his brothers, and found refuge in the carcasses of animals. In the collective imagination, crossing the Borodino field represents the beginning of those idealized images of the Grande Armée soldier spending the night in a horse’s entrails. Sergeant Bourgogne is quite candid: “There was nothing sadder than the sight of these dead who had barely kept their human form…”

This made me think. I found the “nothing sadder” extraordinarily restrained. What would the rest of us have felt before such a sight? How would we have described this Borodino plain, we who had not accepted the fact that eighty-nine of our soldiers should have given their lives over ten years of war in Afghanistan? How could these men bear what they saw? Does one really get used to being near the dead? Was it our nerves that had weakened over eight generations? Over our forty years of life, we had seen a few corpses, perhaps thirty but not much more: close friends or relatives dying in their beds, some killed in accidents, fallen in the mountains, or dropped dead on the road. But they, the soldiers of the year 1812, were actually treading over fields of flesh, sleeping in thalwegs “full of putrefying corpses”—Bourgogne again—seeing their regiments decimated by artillery in a few hours, their friends of twenty years cut in half by the edge of a saber, and getting to the evening at the end of days when seventy thousand men had been torn to pieces all around them.

“You see, guys,” Gras said, “perhaps the thing about modernity isn’t so much that we’ve become a society of the spectacle, but just that the spectacle has grown gentler.”

“And for that let’s be thankful,” I said.

The other explanation is provided by Caulaincourt. It evokes all that the hapless infantrymen of 1914 put up with. They tolerated being the witnesses of horror because they were also its victims: “Perhaps we owed our carefree attitude to the fact that the dangers each of us faced personally dulled the pity which, in other circumstances, the painful spectacle before our eyes would have inspired.”

At noon, Vassily calls. “There’s a problem with the generator. We’re still in Moscow.”

“Will you be long?”

“No, we finished. You go ahead. We’ll join you in Vyazma tonight. We’re faster, anyway: there’s three of you, you’re heavy, and you’re French.”

There were other monuments erected on the Borodino field. One of them paid homage to the dead of the Grande Armée; it had been unveiled by President Giscard d’Estaing during his mandate. You had to push through the powdery snow in order to get close to it.

“Have you noticed?” Goisque said, “Only the passage to Russian monuments is swept by the maintenance department.”

Coming from a country where much attention is paid to the Other, to our victims, our adversaries, our enemies, where we never missed an opportunity to blame ourselves for having defended our interests, and to apologize for winning, we did find something slightly cavalier about this difference in attitude.

We drove to the Minsk road through small country lanes. The bike wheels had a good grip on the hard snow. If it weren’t for the backfiring, we could have been on a sleigh, riding through fairy-tale forests. I’d miscalculated the gas reserve, and we broke down four miles from the main road. Gras and I set off with a can, toward a village becalmed in the snowdrift, a mile away, behind a curtain of poplars, and left Goisque to watch over the Ural. No sooner had we reached the isbas than a police car stopped by the motorbike and sidecar. The Russians syphoned their tank, gave us a gallon, and left wishing Goisque that he “may not die.” The Russians were delighted by the sight of the flag, the bicorn, and our imperial insignia. The name of Napoleon always caused them a wriggle of pleasure. Mentioning to people the name of someone they have triumphed over is one of those little joys it would be a shame to deprive them of. That day, we owed our gallon of gas to the Emperor’s aura.

In the winter, the road to Minsk isn’t advisable for an overloaded bike with sidecar that can do fifty miles an hour tops. A steady line of trucks drove west, brushing the aquaplaning on the disgusting mud. Latvians, Czechs, Russians, and Germans drove in a line, at full speed. The entire old Eastern bloc was traveling on the road, transporting Russian vodka, illegal Tajiks, and Polish meat, and didn’t give a damn about the little khaki-green Ural the size of a shoe polish kit.

It was there, on the way to Vyazma, that the cold bit into the Retreat columns. “The following day, the 29th,” Caulaincourt writes, “we were in Ghjat. It was bitterly cold. […] Here, the winter was already more noticeable.” The cold… It was the cold, even more than the distance, the Cossack raids, starvation, and epidemics, that would bring down the Grande Armée, and “melt it down,” to quote Kutuzov. In Moscow, the soldiers had enjoyed good weather. They had made up for the forced marches by piercing barrels and getting drunk on Jamaican rum, German schnapps, Russian vodka, and everything not snatched away by the fire. They had organized balls, forcing Jewish fiddlers hiding in the rubble to provide the tunes. Some had even found themselves women thanks to the principle of life’s oscillation Sergeant Bourgogne puts forward in his Memoirs: “From battle to love and from love to battle.” But how many soldiers had devoted their months of billeting to making muffs, woolen coats, rabbit gloves, and fur chapkas? Only the Polish soldiers had taken a few precautions. They were Slavs, so they knew what fuel was required by the winter.

How many had listened to Caulaincourt who—almost the only one—worried about the winter, advocated that studded horseshoes be melted down, and clothes be lined? No one. The Grand Squire had even tried to warn the Emperor. “Sire, beware of the trying winter over there.”

“Caulaincourt, you’re already worrying about freezing.”

Napoleon held meteorology in contempt. One day in 1809, when he met Lamarck, who had just laid the foundation stones of this science, he said, “Your meteorology […] is a dishonor to your old age.” The King of Kings, confident in his own star, did not accept that climatic circumstances could get in the way of his destiny. It wasn’t up to the sky to command! On November 1st, 1812, in Vyazma, when the weather allowed for the hope of a milder spell, he told the Prince of Neuchâtel, “The stories about the Russian winters must have only served to scare children.” The geniuses of this world always sport contempt for cosmic laws in proportion with the confidence they place in their own tiny person. The Grande Armée had been the grasshopper, then the cold wind had started to blow…

Night was falling over Russia. There was still no sign of Vyazma’s lights. Trucks were brushing past us and the air pockets caused by their bulk sucked us toward the middle of the road. We were like a toy tossed between the walls of sheet steel. A pothole would have solved all our problems and removed any regrets. We had to fight against the cold, the condensation, the night, the traffic, the snow, and the black ice. And of all the hounds snapping at our rears there was the worst of them: sleepiness. I fought tooth and nail in my helmet so I wouldn’t close my eyes. Speaking of my eyes, blind as a bat, I couldn’t see a thing through the triple protection of my glasses, my mask, and the visor of my helmet. In the beginning, I tried to wipe away the condensation but my muddy gloves left opaque smears on the Plexiglas. Then, hunched on my seat, trying to interpret what I saw to the best of my ability, I decided that Gras and Goisque were peculiar companions. To trust me with their lives—me, who couldn’t make out Serbian tail lights farther than thirty yards away—was one hell of a proof of friendship. Goisque, at least, was aided by his Christian faith, but Gras, who, like myself, believed in nothing but the night and running in the mountains, must have been desperate or, at least, as little attached to his life as a sidecar to the motorbike it’s pulled by.

“Vyazma, six miles” the sign said. We couldn’t complain, really. Does one have a right to complain on a road where men ate one another, horses fell by the thousand then were torn to shreds by ghosts that were left to chew on the leather of their boots? The reason for this journey was precisely to make this nightmare sink deep into our heads in order to hush the inner laments and to wring the neck of this shrew, this repugnant tendency that is man’s true enemy: self-pity. Since our journey along the path of the French Retreat, whenever I’ve found myself on cliffs that were too steep, or in bivouacs that were too cold, I’ve often thought of those poor devils crawling on the icy road, huddled in their rags, fed on rotting tripe, and I’ve swallowed back the phlegm of whining rising to my lips.

How did we get to Vyazma? How did we find ourselves in that little city-center hotel? It was 5°F that night.

“Guys, this is really stupid, you know,” Goisque said. “I know we’ve done some crazy stuff but there, on that road, in the midst of those trucks, with us clinging to that little sidecar and Tesson who can’t see a thing, I mean it’s one of the most dangerous trips of my life.”

And, since we agreed with him, since all three of us had felt the breath of trucks on our necks hissing like the blade of the Grim Reaper, we decided to go and plunge into a bowl of hot borscht in the nearest café.