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

DAY THREE. FROM VYAZMA TO SMOLENSK

Our room was like a battlefield. Our clothes were hanging on lines extending from the light fixture to the door, and from the window to the bed. The night before, we’d drunk half a gallon of vodka instead of the intended three small glasses, had come back quite rowdy, and gotten into a friendly fight around midnight. I’d held my own against Cédric’s chunky frame for at least three seconds, but the tackle was enough to smash the closet. We’d gotten back up, started again, and had fun. The curtains were half-torn. The furniture had been knocked over. The table, overturned, was buried under our soaked parkas. The helmets were dripping in the bath tub. A Romani would have been shocked.

At dawn, over a hot coffee and cabbage soup, Vassily calls. The vodka from the night before was digging hollows between my temples. His voice pierced through my brain like a thick drill. “We’re still in Moscow,” he said. “We’re leaving at noon. We had to change the alternators.”

“Hey, guys, we’re getting fed up with this. You’ve got our bags and our stuff! We’re freezing our butts off, and the bike and sidecar are struggling with the three of us on top.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll join you between Vyazma and Smolensk,” he said. “We’re faster than you.”

“It’s been three days you’ve been saying this! I don’t believe you anymore.”

“Western man despairs very soon,” he said.

The weather had gotten milder: 17°F. The sky was blue, the sun a joyful ball above the forest. The bulbs were drops of pearly-gold in the morning hope. The bike started immediately and we took the road to Dorogobuzh with a light heart and an anvil in our heads.

Napoleon had reached Vyazma on October 31st. He stationed there on November 1st and left again at noon on the 2nd. The army that had left Moscow with over one hundred thousand soldiers was down to almost half!

Around us, that morning, the curtains of silver birches alongside the road had a blue glow. The saplings were whipping the lilac air and a pale yellow flow, escaped from the cold light, streaked the snowdrifts on the shoulders. I thought of Chagall and summoned shadows. What did that routing column look like? Like an army of ghosts. But colorful ghosts, in full dress.

Leaving Moscow, more or less bucked up after five months of being stationed in the capital, everyone wanted to bring back to their home country the fruit of his pillage. In his Memoirs, Sergeant Bourgogne makes an inventory of his booty with the innocence of victorious men. He departs, his bag weighed down by a “Chinese woman’s dress made of silk, woven with gold and silver,” a “piece of the cross of the great Ivan,” “a brown woman’s coat with green velvet lining,” as well as two paintings, one of which represented Neptune, the other the Judgement of Paris, a woman’s petticoat, a large collar lined with ermine, and a small Chinese vase… However, as soon as it started getting cold at the end of October, and snowing in Vyazma, these expensive fabrics, silk brocades, and palace hangings were only useful for protecting the numbed limbs and heads of the soldiers, whose “brains were freezing,” according to Bourgogne. And then there were tens of thousands of sergeants, officers and a mixture of civilians—because there were over a thousand craftsmen, actors, shopkeepers, women, and children who had chosen to follow the Grande Armée to escape Russian reprisals—tens of thousands of escapees, decked out in fancy hats they had stuffed with straw, draped in cotton fabrics padded with felt or wool, rolled up in satin canopies they had torn off the wood paneling of a palace, or wrapped in Bukhara rugs held together with silk ribbons.

Thus, they formed a grotesque column where, amid shakos, sabretaches, and regulation hullabaloo, you could glimpse a Russian lady’s cape, a sable, a piece of lace. Captain François, with two bullets in his leg, walked “with boots and worn-out shoes on his feet, a crutch in his hand […] covered in a pink cloak lined with ermine, with the hood over his head.”

This fancy-dress army was walking deeper and deeper into horror. On occasion, François tells us, the sight of these infantrymen in rags, with long icicles hanging from every hair in their beard, covered in skins “burned by the rare bivouac fires,” still managed to make a soldier laugh. Was laughter perhaps a way of warding off misfortune? Was it death sending its spasms?

The balance of wealth was reversed. Those who had loaded themselves with gold bells, Gardner porcelain, Petrodvorets-manufactured clocks, Baltic amber, and Siberian ivory were now coveting furs, flour, and even battered pans, which, on the market of ordeals, would be worth infinitely more than the rivers of pearls stolen from Moscow countesses. People started shedding their harvest. So the road, Bourgogne writes, ended up covered with “precious objects such as paintings, candelabra, and many books […] copies of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Buffon’s Natural History, bound in red morocco leather and with gilded spines.” Therefore, those who’d taken the precaution of kitting themselves out in earnest became the masters and exploiters of those who were carrying useless treasures, and would make money out of a pound of potatoes or a handful of oats, thereby adding individual usury to the general distress.

We were driving along the road, keeping to fifty miles an hour on the counter display. Behind the hedge of willows and reeds, stiff from the frost, ponds were slumbering. And, at the bottom of the ponds, lay the gold from the looting of Moscow. After about thirty miles, the Ural started showing signs of weakness. The engine was strained by the accumulation of snow. The valves were overheating and the track was getting worse. I would make Goisque and Gras frequently get off so we could take a section full of potholes on foot. The oil pan was scraping against the frozen mud. When a wheel sank into a hole, the exhaust pipe would slam hard against the ground. I had to step on the gas to push through. We exhausted the animal. I cut the engine fifty miles from Dorogobuzh. “We’re going to break the bike, guys,” I said. “We have to turn back.”

“The Guard dies but does not turn back,” Gras, who was turning all heroic, said.

“It’s not about the Guard but about the sidecar, pal.”

The alternative was to return to Vyazma and take the main road, the new Moscow-Smolensk highway, which ran parallel, twelve miles north of the historical route. We weren’t exactly thrilled about going back on ourselves, but we took to the track anyway, in the opposite direction.

The engine’s hiccuping doubled. The Ural was in severe pain. This wasn’t a machine suitable for grinding through powder. Vyazma was still far away. We wiped the soot off the spark plugs, then I left Goisque and Gras walking in the snow and drove to the village of Vasino to look for a driver to go pick up my friends. In the main street of the hamlet, an Uzbek grocer was in the process of dismantling his stall.

The guy was suspicious. I think the bicorn attached to the basket didn’t make a good impression on him. He found it unlikely that a group of French would have picked the triple whammy of winter, a bike with sidecar, and the old Smolensk road to go back home. I was getting muddled in my explanations which resulted in the fact that we were repeating the journey of the Retreat and that I’d left my two friends behind.

“But Paris is in the opposite direction,” he said.

“Yes, but the spark plugs are dead,” I said. “We’ve backtracked precisely to change them in Vyazma.”

Five hundred rubles softened his reluctance. Mentioning the village of Tim, where he was born and which I’d gone through on horseback, ten years earlier, while crossing the steppes of the former Soviet Turkmenistan did the rest. I remained in the village while he went to fetch Gras et Goisque.

“How will I recognize them?” he said before leaving.

“Do you know many people walking on foot on Russian roads, these days? One will probably be reading and the other taking pictures of signposts,” I said.

In Vyazma, we changed spark plugs, gloves, and route. Then we set off straight west, along the awful Moscow-Smolensk highway where the procession of thirty-three-ton trucks reminded us in heavy bursts that Russia had joined the free-trade carousel.

During the first weeks of the Retreat, the strategy of the Russians left the French flabbergasted. With the exception of Maloyaroslavets, where Dokhturov had led his charge, the Russians did not attack. Caulaincourt says, “The Emperor could not understand Kutuzov’s march leaving us alone.” The Field Marshal wanted to let Napoleon’s army drain itself of its strength of its own doing. In Maloyaroslavets, the Russian losses strengthened this resolve. It served no purpose to deal blows to troops that were still aggressive, when you could simply escort them in their agony. The balance of power with the French was to the Tsar’s disadvantage. The Grande Armée was still combative. Napoleon was still concealing reserves of strategic genius. The Guard was untouched. And the cold bit at the Russians as much as at the French, with no patriotic distinction! If the Russian army, stretched to the maximum of its power, attacked instead of simply harrying, it would risk destroying itself… Around him, generals grumbled, officers champed at the bit, wanting to take off. The desire for revenge couldn’t live with this caution. Even Alexander I would scold his Field Marshal, “Inaction is incomprehensible.” But the obese old man held on to his resolution. Later, by way of a rehabilitation, he received literary glory. In War and Peace, Tolstoy insists the Russian chief was a genius. “Napoleon’s collapsing army was fleeing Russia as quickly as possible, in other words it was doing the very thing any Russian could wish for. Why then undertake an operation… ? What would have been the point when, from Moscow to Vyazma, without a fight, a third of this army had melted?” And Tolstoy added, in case the reader had not understood: when cattle encroaches on your territory, is it better to push it quickly toward the exit or to block its way, hold it back, close the gates of the enclosure, and whip it to blood?

History justified Kutuzov: all the skirmishes between Russians and French were to the advantage of the latter. The Retreat from Russia therefore rests on this paradox, unique in Human History: an army marched, from victory to victory, toward its total annihilation!

Night had come down on the plain. The hundred miles between Vyazma and Smolensk were not pleasant. The condensation blinded you. I was trying to remember the quotation by Cendrars: “One should close one’s eyes when traveling.” The poet hadn’t intended these words for Ural travelers in the winter. Wiping my visor had become an obsession. In the end, I was looking at the road through a square quarter of an inch of transparent plastic spared by the flower patterns of the frost. I was so numbed by the cold that all I longed for was sleep, which was incompatible with driving. Cold is a ferocious beast. It grabs you by a limb, sinks its teeth into it, doesn’t let go, and its venom gradually spreads through your being. Mountain climbers know that numbness is a response that is mortally tempting to storms. On a motorbike, if you’ve managed to wrap up warm, the slightest gesture that moves the edifice of your protection by as little as half an inch could be fatal: the cold will be injected into you. At fifty miles an hour, it will exploit the slightest gap in the barricade of your clothes. I was so exhausted that I would deliberately swerve to the left when a truck wanted to overtake us, so that the roar of the horn would give me a few reviving slaps and keep me awake.

“Smolensk, sixty miles,” a blue sign stated. Vassily and Vitaly had called us earlier, when we had returned to Vyazma. This time they had really left Moscow and, at full throttle, had sworn on the gods of all the Russias that they would catch up with us by midnight. “We’ll have dinner with you in Smolensk!”

There were other reasons for Kutuzov’s restraint. The Field Marshal did not wish Napoleon’s death. He knew Britain could take advantage of the disappearance of this King of Kings from the surface of the globe to extend its dominion.

His reticence about exposing his army also came from the certainty that he could count on partisans. A partisan war is defined by the amount of damage a handful of determined men can inflict on a regular army corps, tangled up in its logic of mass, the heavy bulk of its logistics, the ugliness of its principles. According to Tolstoy, a partisan war was “what guerilleros did in Spain, mountain folk did in the Caucasus, and Russians did in 1812.” One could carry on with the litany of asymmetry: it’s what Fellahs did in Algeria, the Karen against the Burmese junta, and the Taliban in Afghanistan. And it is what Islamist sleeper cells are still doing in the global war they’ve waged on secular democracies. The author of War and Peace dates the partisan war from the “enemy entering Smolensk.” In actual fact, since its departure from Moscow, the Grande Armée had been assaulted by the army of shadows. “Cossacks were all over the country,” Caulaincourt complains. Everywhere, from behind the edge of a wood or the mist of marshes, a detachment of a few dozen or several hundred partisans would spring out. Among them there were peasants hungry for pillaging, perfectly-organized groups, miniature armies commanded by a chief, bands of marauders, quartermaster sergeants fearing neither God not man, and last-minute opportunists who relied on the French rout in order to buy themselves a future. Napoleon “compared them to Arabs,” Caulaincourt said.

In war, hooligans follow the troops like seagulls follow fishermen’s trawlers. They wait for the day after the battle to rob the dead. They’re as patient as vultures. Sometimes, they lend a hand, join the regulars, and take part in battles. Where pillage is concerned, might as well be ready to get down to work. In War and Peace, Tolstoy portrays the character of Tikhon, a highwayman who fights in the Cossack ranks and steals whatever he can while declaring his faith in the “holy war and liberation of the homeland.” It’s the perennial image of the optimistic villain who benefits from the high stakes of his time. I thought that quite a few members of the current Islamic factions resembled this archetype. The West quivered and considered them without distinction as religious fanatics. But were all Jihadist highway robbers Muhammad’s pious servants? Many probably concealed a soul like Tikhon and used the holy cause to justify the use of weapons and professional crime.

During this marginal war, chiefs of the regular army, such as the poet Denis Davydov and General Platov, genies of the raid, strategists of the decisive blow, became famous for their commando actions, surrounding isolated groups of the main troops, destroying supplies, and harassing French bivouacs. Tolstoy mentions a detachment commanded by a sacristan and another by a woman “who killed hundreds of French.” Kutuzov stirred his nation. In the countryside, his speeches were charismatic. On October 31st, the Field Marshal issued a proclamation: “Extinguish the Moscow flames in the blood of your enemies. Russians, obey this solemn order.”

From that moment on, nothing—not thickets, or farms on the edge of fields, nothing could provide a refuge for the French. The smallest bed of reeds could shelter a nest of partisans. Cossacks could spring out at any time, from anywhere, ready, according to Tolstoy, to sweep “the dead leaves that fell off the dried-up tree of their own accord.”

When civilians and irregulars got involved, the war acquired a further degree of cruelty. Captured by peasants, the hapless soldiers were impaled, plunged into boiling water, buried alive, beaten to death, or thrown naked into frozen woods. The Russian countryside was intoxicated with an outburst of violence. Slumbering for centuries, the old nation had never expressed against the Tsar’s yoke the energy it was devoting to punishing the invader. This characteristic persists even today: what a Russian inflicts on another Russian is only the Russian’s business, but beware the foreigner who butts in… “The war of armed peasants […] is hurting us more than their army. […],” a hospital officer[6] admitted.

I confess that, on the way to Smolensk that night, knowing that Vassily and Vitaly were right behind us, I often looked into my rearview mirror, just in case a band of human wolves howling war cries was about to catch up with us, riding smoking motorbikes.

In Smolensk, we stopped at the old hotel for Soviet apparatchiks, the Dnieper, still in its original condition. Room attendants with peroxided hair, Brezhnev-era decor, 1970s chandeliers, thermal industry piping: we enjoyed the Cold War atmosphere. I was forty years old and nostalgic for a world I hadn’t known. I preferred this atmosphere to that of standardized hotels with which capitalism with an inhuman face has covered our city centers: establishments designed by salespeople who thought that WiFi and an air conditioner fixed above a bolted window was better than a chat with a babushka and a window that opens over a frozen river.

I soaked in the bath for an hour and a half and felt almost ashamed about it. Our journey had ended up turning into a very serious game. The duty to pay tribute to the memory of these soldiers had pegged our souls so firmly that the slightest deviation from the rule of physical suffering seemed inappropriate.

Two pints of vodka in the hotel restaurant soon overcame these hang-ups.

“Guys,” I said, “do you remember when Napoleon’s Old Guard took something from a Vyazma warehouse that earned the city the name of ‘Schnapps City?’”

“And,” Gras said, “remember when, in Ghjat, Napoleon and his entourage discovered abandoned crates full of Chambertin and Clos Vougeot?”

“And remember,” Goisque said, “when the Emperor had carts of brandy taken from the Imperial Guard stock escorted to the troops at the rear?”

Vassily and Vitaly arrived at the restaurant at 11 P.M. The two hundred and fifty-mile stretch, covered in one breath at 10°F, had given them an appetite for soup. They were dressed in professional biker gear. Their helmets, jackets, and boots made our equipment looks like amateur rags. We had the strange feeling we were doing things “Russian-style,” in other words, we Westerners thought that’s how Russians did things, and so were looked at by Russians the way we Europeans usually look at Russians: like a rough boor who makes up for his lack of preparation for life by being indifferent to hazards.

Two more glasses and another bottle were placed on the Formica table. More toasts, there was never a shortage of those.

“Here’s to our reunion, guys,” I said.

“Smolensk is taken,” Vitaly said, using the ritual formula.

“Tomorrow,” Vassily said, “we’ll take Belarus.”

“Here’s to your leg of the journey!” I said. “You’ve beaten General Winter.”

For the first time since we’d known him, Vitaly’s face clouded over. “General Winter doesn’t exist. Russians vanquish their enemies on their own.”

In the evening, reading Caulaincourt, I came across these lines in which the general states that it was the cold that caused the disaster, “and not tiredness or attacks by the enemy.” I avoided going to wake up Vitaly and read him the passage.