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

DAY FOUR. FROM SMOLENSK TO BARYSAV

On that morning, when the sun was perched above the Smolensk ramparts like a ceiling light in a Kruschchev-era bathroom, our situation would improve. From now on, we wouldn’t travel three on one Ural. Gras would stay in my sidecar, while Goisque would go into Vitaly’s, and Vassily would transport the baggage. The Russians had brought our bags, and we got back our sleeping bags, tights, and woolies that we’d neglected to take when we left for Borodino. We’d committed the same error as all the Western armies who take on Russia while underestimating the cold.

“So what’s the plan for today, guys?” I said.

“To visit the ramparts,” Vitaly said.

“Or what’s left of them,” Vitaly said, “since Napoleon destroyed quite a lot of them.”

“Then to Belarus,” Vitaly added.

We were excited by the prospect of entering Belarus territory. It was the only one of the fifteen former USSR republics—together with Turkmenistan—that I didn’t know. Two years earlier, Goisque and I had been at the Belarus Ambassador’s in France. On Boulevard Suchet. The man was an admirer of the Emperor. He kept a very “Empire” mustache and wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Cossack battalion. After telling us that Belarus was world famous for its production of bolts and space stations, he had entered into a strategic review of the Battle of Berezina, after which, two hours later, he’d exclaimed, “For you, Belarus will always have a green light and a red carpet!” Nevertheless, a few days later, our visa application had been denied because of some mysterious administrative misunderstanding. This year, we had obtained the precious blank signed papers and were planning on experiencing, in full, the green light and red carpet doctrine.

Vassily and Vitaly were very proud of their installation: they had decorated their engines with Russian imperial flags. The eagle with two heads flapped over their sidecars.

“People need to know who’s who,” Vitaly said.

Oh, how we loved these Russians. Back home, public opinion held them in contempt. The press, at most, took them for straight-haired brutes incapable of appreciating the amiable customs of Caucasus peoples, or the subtleties of social democracy and, at worse, a bunch of blue-eyed half-Asians who fully deserved the brutality and satraps under whose yoke they would get drunk on Armenian brandy while their women dreamed of strutting down the streets of Nice.

They were emerging from seventy years under the Soviet yoke. They had suffered ten years of Yeltsinian anarchy. Now, they were taking their revenge on the red century and returning to the world chessboard in large strides. They said things we considered dreadful: they were proud of their history, felt a surge of patriotic ideas, were overwhelmingly supportive of their president, wished to resist the hegemony of NATO, and opposed the idea of a Eurasianism that was close to Euro-Atlantism. Moreover, they didn’t think that the USA was yearning to take over the procedures of the former USSR. Heck! They’d become intolerable.

I’d been frequenting Russians since the failed coup by Gennady Yanayev in August 1991. They never seemed to be wracked with worry, calculation, rancor, or doubt: virtues of modernity. They looked like close cousins inhabiting a geographical belly bordering on the terribly windswept Tartary to the east and our crisis-ridden peninsula to the west. I felt tenderness for these plain and mountain Slavs whose handshakes crushed all desire to say hello to them again. I liked their fatalism, the way they announced tea with a whistle on a sunny afternoon, their taste for the tragic, their sense of the holy, their inability to get organized, their skill for throwing all their strength out of the window on the spot, their exhausting impulsiveness, their contempt for the future and anything resembling personal programs. Russians were the champions of the five-year plans because they were incapable of foreseeing what they themselves would be doing in the next five minutes. Even if they had known, “they would never reach their goals because they always went beyond them,” as Madame de Staël said. And then the first impression of roughness. A Russian never made an effort to charm you. “We’re not doormen at the Sheraton here,” they seemed to think while slamming the door in your face. In principle, they sulked, but I’ve known them to offer me their help as though I were their son and I preferred this kind of unpredictability to that of creatures who would clear off at the slightest sign of rain after patting your back with excessive familiarity.

Was it because History had let rip upon them with the rage of a swell against a tropical reef that they had developed a tragic view of life, a taste for permanently expressing sorrow, and a constant ability to proclaim the inconvenience of having been born?

We Latins, fed on stoicism, watered by Montaigne, inspired by Proust, we tried to enjoy what happened to us, to grab happiness anywhere it happened to shimmer, see it when it appeared, and give it a name whenever there was an opportunity. In other words, we tried to live as soon as the wind rose. Russians, on the other hand, were convinced that you had to have suffered beforehand in order to appreciate things. Happiness was no more than an interlude in the tragic game of existence. Once, in an elevator rising from a coal mine, a Donbas miner summed up the Slav “difficulty of being” perfectly: “How do you know the sun if you haven’t been down a mine?”

Milan Kundera often deplored the lack of rationality in the Russian way of thinking. He was repelled by this tendency on the part of Dostoyevsky’s compatriots always to sentimentalize everything, to tarnish a life with pathos when they themselves were guilty of doing it. What if this was the key to the Russian mystery? An ability to leave everything behind in ruins to then water them with floods of tears.

Certainly, this journey was a way of honoring the manes of Sergeant Bourgogne and Prince Eugène, but also an opportunity to throw ourselves from potholes into bistros with two of our brothers from the East and seal our love for Russia, for crumbling roads, and for freezing mornings washing away drunken nights.

We drove to the Smolensk fortifications. I tried to picture this sleepy city consumed by fire and pillage. It was hard to distract myself from the babushkas coming back from the market or the female students in leather boots and dressed in fox furs, who, in Russia, always confuse sidewalks with Fashion Week catwalks.

Arriving here must have been such a disappointment for the soldiers of the Grande Armée. The wretches had dreamed of it so long! They thought this city was their promised land.

Hunger had started torturing them since the first weeks of the retreat. The horses, fed on straw torn off the thatched roofs of isbas, were growing weaker, buckling beneath the weight, and falling. Without waiting for them to be dead, the soldiers would throw themselves on them and tear them to pieces. After all, you robbed dying companions who had stumbled from exhaustion. You got rid of the wounded perched on saddles and allowed the animals to trot. Why then not skin the horses alive?

I was telling Gras what I had read the night before in Bourgogne’s story. Goisque was not listening, and was trying to fit the hotel building and the view over the Dnieper into his Japanese box. With the Cossacks on their heels, and no time even to cook the meat, the soldiers would plunge their heads into cauldrons of boiled blood. There were fights over a handful of potatoes. Beards and coats were stained in red. The cold froze the carcasses of the animals. You then had to scrape the hardened flesh with a sword. “Those who had no knives, no sabers, and no axes, and whose hands were frozen could not eat. […] I saw soldiers on their knees next to carcasses, biting into the flesh like hungry wolves,” Captain François recalls. Bourgogne himself survived for a few days sucking “blood icicles.” According to him, the military staff officially approved the idea that only horse meat could save the army: “They made us walk behind the cavalry as much as possible […] so that we may eat the horses they left behind.” Hence, the prediction of Kutuzov the Toad on the field of Borodino came true: “I will do all I can so the French will end up eating horse.”

In the fleeing column, the bravest ones turned bandits. They would go in search of food away from the road. However, they risked being captured by partisans and suffering a fate more cruel than the pangs of hunger. When there were no more horses, they started eating one another. Archives are full of testimonies of cannibalism and even autophagy, though they bother the witnesses who report it and evade the taboo. One day, Bourgogne refuses to accompany a Portuguese warrant officer to see Russian prisoners devour one another. And this army of half-skeletons, of blood-stained faces, who robbed companions killed in action, lifting their own rags to chew at their stumps, terrified of ending up in the jaws of their brothers, “were the same men,” Captain François writes, “who, six months earlier, had made Europe quake.”

The road to Smolensk, cluttered with carts, crates, abandoned cannons, and the corpses of men and horses, was a view of the apocalypse. Even Caulaincourt, famous for his nerves of steel, has a momentary collapse: “Never has a battlefield displayed such horrors.”

I was watching Goisque and Gras squeezing their bags into the motorbike trunks. What would we have done? How far would hunger have pushed us? What did we know about ourselves and others, we, who were so civilized, so urban, so well fed? Our relationship was limited to pleasant trips and evenings sprinkled with loud-mouth conversations. That’s what friendships were fueled by nowadays in the prosperous West. Once, however, lost in the forests of the Far East with Gras, six hundred miles north of Vladivostok, we thought we risked starvation. We finally found our way and—thankfully—missed out on the opportunity to test our sense of honor and sacrifice. As for Bourgogne, he laments the fact that hunger destroys feelings: “There were no more friends. You would look at one another with distrust, and even became ungrateful toward your best friends.” “Love one another” is the commandment of a prophet who has just had a big meal.

Napoleon entered Smolensk on November 9th. A hundred thousand soldiers had left Moscow. At Smolensk, the army was down to half. And only ten thousand of them had died in combat. There were forty-five thousand men left out of the half million that had crossed the Neman six months earlier. The debris of the Grande Armée took five days to gather in the city. The final elements did not appear until November 13th and Napoleon left the following day. It was a huge disappointment for all. From the Emperor to the camp follower, everybody had pinned all their hopes on this city. There, they would find supplies, well-stocked warehouses, country hospitals, and fresh reinforcements. There, they would rebuild their strength, put an end to the nightmare, turn against the enemy, and change their luck. There, the sovereign’s star would shine again. But Smolensk had not recovered from its destruction three months earlier. The state of the warehouses, according to Caulaincourt, “was unfortunately neither in accordance with what (the Emperor) hoped, nor with our needs…” The first troops ransacked the few supplies, pillaged the storerooms, cracked open the barrels, and left the men in the rear nothing but the leftovers of a waste which could have been avoided with discipline. All hopes of reviving the army drained away, but they had to keep going, like a curse. “Walking as fast as possible seemed for everyone the true secret to escaping danger,” Caulaincourt sums up. It was salvation in flight. And the column of the dying collapsed on the road to the west, pressed by Cossacks who were increasingly well armed, and increasingly daring.

Naturally, the cops chased us away from the city ramparts. We formed a column, Vassily at the head on his wide motorbike and sidecar, us in the middle on our khaki Ural, and Vitaly closing the convoy on his black machine. We crossed the Dnieper and took the direction of Orsha, in Belarus.

There was a milder spell on the road. Everything was dull and tepid. The world was a wash drawing dripping with smoke from the farms. We were going straight toward the setting sun. A cement building spiked with flags formed the border between the two allied countries. Since the fall of the USSR, Belarus had never betrayed its allegiance to Russia. The vassal led a quiet life under the protection of the parent company. Not the kind that would ogle the EU. We didn’t need to show our visas at the customs: there weren’t any. We entered Belarus like the blade of a Russian saber through the fat of a Ukrainian.

It was the Belarus plain. Where the Grande Armée suffered martyrdom. Panzers ravaged it a hundred and fifty years later, first in one direction, then in the other. It was fields, endless plains. In the summer, glorious wheat that was not repelled by growing over a mass grave. In winter, a stretch of snow without form or edges, with, on the horizon, log villages huddled against fir woods.

The cylinders were purring. We kept a constant speed. We listened out for the holy punch of the pistons. The mind grew numb. In his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,[7] Robert M. Pirsig talks about the tireless purr of the engine, which is preoccupied only with its internal strength. We kept still in the saddle with this very particular, almost mystical enjoyment, typical to motorcycling. It was so good to dwell in the certainty that you were riding a system in good working order. Your eyes focused on the line of the horizon. In the corner of your field of vision, white strips paraded by, hypnotic.

After twenty-four miles of Minsk highway, Vassily’s generator exploded. “Fifty-two pieces assembled with my own hands!” he said. “It’s a prototype.”

“I’m very disappointed,” Vitaly said.

It started to snow. The wind rose. The two Russians took the motorbike apart on the shoulder, in the gusts of wind, while I took a nap, lying on the tank, and Gras, in the sidecar, splashed by passing trucks, was reviewing Caulaincourt’s Mémoires. Goisque was nosing around, his camera over his shoulder, brooding over the line from Tapisseries by Charles Péguy : “This is the land that cannot be captured in a photograph.”

An hour later, Vassily looked up from his jigsaw puzzle. “I can’t find the origin of the problem, guys.”

“What are we going to do?” Gras said.

“Tow it!”

The strap was too short, and it was a terrible sight. Vitaly’s bike, attached to Vassily’s, dragged by inertia, swung from one side of the road to the other. We expected it to capsize any moment. Vassily didn’t seem to realize he was going too fast. On the slopes, Vitaly would adjust his brakes and avoid ramming into his friend by a yard. The scariest moment was when, in between two sways that made a Lithuanian truck driver very nervous, Vitaly lifted his visor, raised his thumb and shouted, “It’s cool!”

It took two hours in a service station to repair Vassily’s “prototype.”

And then three more hours to reach Barysaw. The cold was making a dent. At times, it bit a thumb, grabbed a foot, attacked a knee, your neck, your cheek. It had a life and plans of its own.

In 1812, on this very road, after the halt at Smolensk, the cold dropped by a few more degrees. The army was marching toward Krasnoi. Between the front and rear, the column unraveled over thirty-eight miles. Topography was on the side of the Russians. The Belarus undulations, the very same ones on which Vassily and Vitaly narrowly avoided killing themselves, put extra pressure on the Grande Armée. They had neglected to make any ice-proof horseshoes in Smolensk, so the few remaining horses in French possession kept slipping on the track. “It is to this lack of horseshoeing that we owe our biggest losses,” Caulaincourt says. Napoleon arrived in Krasnoi on November 15th with twenty thousand men, and was almost totally crushed. Kutuzov was waiting for him there with eighty thousand soldiers. If the Field Marshal had proved less shy, the French Emperor would have been captured or would have died, sword in hand. Far from suspecting that the bulk of the Russian army was before him, Napoleon ordered his Young Guard to attack what he mistook for beacons. The Russians, impressed by the charge, concluded that the Grande Armée still had its resources. And Napoleon fled toward Orsha as early as on the 18th, giving up, in spite of himself, on reaching Marshal Ney’s rear guard.

The latter needed all his courage and cunning to escape the eighty thousand Russians who were blocking his way. Ney replied to the general who was ordering him to lay down his weapons that “a marshal of France never gives himself up.” Then he fired his last bullets, made a diversion, returned toward Smolensk, maneuvered in the night, and, after two days of forced march during which they were relentlessly harried by the Cossacks, he managed to cross over the right bank of the Dnieper and reach Orsha. Of the six thousand men who had left Smolensk with him, about a thousand remained. Ney’s new tour de force cheered up the Emperor and, for a few hours, distracted him from the terrible news that Minsk was in enemy hands.

The men marched relentlessly on the track. Inkovno, Krasny, Orsha went by slowly, as monuments to horror. Even the Emperor had to get out of his carriage and walk leaning on the arm of Caulaincourt or a camp aide. The road was cluttered with dead men and horses, dying civilians and soldiers, crates, carts, cannons, and all that the scattering army was losing behind it. Those who were not dead stumbled over the corpses of those who had already fallen. The men advanced through soul-destroying plains. The cold had destroyed all hope, God no longer existed, the temperatures were dropping, and they were still putting one foot in front of the other. Crazy with suffering, emaciated, eaten by vermin, they walked straight on, from fields covered in dead to other fields of graves. Every forced step constituted salvation as well as loss. They walked on and were cursed.

How did these men stand this crazy march? How did some of them survive this fast-paced carousel of death and the frost? Of what metal were they forged, these shako-wearing skeletons who still cheered the man who pretended to pull them out of hell through the same path by which he had brought them there? Napoleon must have radiated a truly magnetic power for his men not to bear a grudge against him for their misfortune and even lose any bitterness as soon as he appeared! Not one soldier would have considered feeling resentment toward the Emperor. How can we, they said, hold something against the one who led us to Egypt, Italy, and Spain, who subjugated the world and made the sovereigns of Europe quake? The one who turned energy, youth, and heroism into the virtues of a reign. Léon Bloy raps out at him in the dynamite-fueled pages of his Napoleon’s Soul: “When these wretches died shouting ‘Long live the Emperor!’ they genuinely believed they were dying for France, and they were not wrong.” And it was like Bloy to be touched by a poor grenadier who finds the strength to go into raptures when the Emperor walks on foot in the midst of ghosts of the Old Guard, “He, so great, who makes us proud.”

Bourgogne was not outdone in his fondness for the chief, but, just over the page, provides another key: “Although we were unhappy, and dying from hunger and the cold, we still had something to support us: honor and courage.” Honor and courage! What a strange ring these words had two hundred years later. Were these words still alive in the world we were crossing with our headlights on full? We made a short pause on the shoulder. It was snowing, and the night seemed to be in tears in the beam of the headlights. Good God, I thought while pissing in the dark, we poor 21st-century guys are such dwarves, aren’t we? Softened in the mangrove of comfort, how could we understand these 1812 ghosts? Could we quiver with the same passion and accept the same sacrifices? Or even understand them? The Glorious Thirties had been useful for this: develop family paradise, domestic bliss, private enjoyment. Allow us to have a lot to lose. Would we be ready to abandon our Capuas to fight the Moujiks beneath the bulbs, or conquer the pyramids?

Moreover, we had become individuals. And, in our world, the individual did not accept sacrifice except for other individuals of his or her choice: his family, his nearest and dearest, perhaps a few friends. The only conceivable wars consisted in defending our property. We were quite happy to fight, but only for the safety of the floor where our apartments were. We would never have competed in enthusiasm at the prospect of sacrificing ourselves for an abstract concept that was superior to us, for the collective interest or—worse—for the love of a chief.

It must be said that the 20th century was over and its hideousness still horrified us. That’s what made us different than the Old Guard. We knew that Verdun and Stalingrad, Buchenwald and Hiroshima were the Fall of Man and we were haunted by that. From now on, the idea of conquest sounded absurd.

The snowfall got heavier as we approached Barysaw. I couldn’t see anything. The white strip was my Ariadne’s thread, and I was desperately staring at it, struggling not to skid. I automatically braked whenever the red lights of a truck entered my field of vision, and would narrowly miss crashing into the bike in front of me. I was driving in crisis management mode. And a voice inside me kept whispering, “But that’s how you’ve been living the past forty years, pal.” A sign caught by my headlights at the entrance to a bridge sent an electric shock through me: Berezina. We crossed the river without the slightest incident.

We found a small, Soviet-looking hotel outside which we lined up our vehicles. I collared Vitaly. “The new helmet you gave me in Smolensk this morning is dreadful! I drove the last few hours not seeing a thing.”

“I think I understand,” Vitaly said.

The helmet was new and I’d forgotten to pull off the smoky plastic film protecting the visor. I’d driven down sixty miles of Belarus night with a screen in front of my eyes.

Every evening, it would take twenty minutes to remove our layers of clothing. Once we’d turned our room into a Tangiers souk, we were directed to a tavern called The Emperor’s Bivouac. The door handle was shaped like a bicorn. An Olga with purple fingernails served beer to truck drivers, in a chalet decor. On the walls, there were battle maps of Berezina, a portrait of Kutuzov, a print of Napoleon: they cultivated memory of the event here. We downed gallons of cabbage soup and had to walk down the streets of Barysaw for a long time to get back home. The little town was a charming refrigerator, and Belarus quite a livable place. Decent people lived there slowly, diligently, in a modest, socialist wellbeing, while declining Europe was convinced they suffered martyrdom under the yoke of a satrap infused by the Kremlin. We collapsed into our beds instead of throwing ourselves into the encampment lights, like hundreds of Old Guard soldiers, who preferred death in the embers to frostbite…