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

DAY FIVE. FROM BARYSAW TO VILNIUS

At 9 A.M. we were at the Barysaw Museum. Like in all the former Soviet Empire establishments, a dozen fat ladies in woolies were guarding empty rooms. The Napoleonic epic had at least created jobs. The museum was crammed with flags, uniforms, weapons, and wall maps streaked with red arrows. Every year, while ploughing, peasants would dig up cannon shafts, buttons, and rusty helmets. The museum had ended up declining the discoveries.

Goisque, who was a born archeologist, couldn’t pull himself away from the display of cannon balls. “Tesson, do you remember F.’s story?”

During our dinner in Moscow, our friend from Rostov-on-the-Don had told us about his adventure. He’d gotten used to going around the battlefields of the former USSR with a metal detector. One day, in the Berezina mudflats, his device started ringing. He parted the gorses, dug in the silt, and uncovered a ball. He had it identified and received confirmation of something he already knew: it was a piece of Napoleonic artillery. He drove back to the Saint Petersburg airport with his seven-pound treasure and showed up at boarding, with his ball in his hand baggage. No doubt his error was due to his naivety. No sooner had he gone through the security barrier than the arches began to ring, the authorities panicked, bags were searched, and the ball was discovered. Not bothering to explain how a plane could be destroyed with a 1812 cannon ball, the cops forbade him from boarding. Attached to his discovery, F. asked for ten minutes’ grace, left the airport terminal, saw a tree in the parking lot, glanced right and left, and dug a hole in the summer soil, and buried his treasure. Then, after writing down the exact location, he jumped on his plane, hoping to recover his possession some day. Several months later, our friend von Polier was taking some Russian businessmen very important to the survival of his business to Saint Petersburg airport. He had in his suit jacket pocket F.’s instructions and a map scribbled on a page from a school exercise book: “Two steps to the right after the parking meter, third birch from the barrier.” Von Polier asked the financiers to excuse him, “Just give me five minutes, gentlemen.” He ran out into the parking lot, found the cannon ball tree, and started digging. It was winter and the soil was frozen. And here’s this guy in a suit, crouching in a parking lot, busy digging the shoulder with his Montblanc pen. The cannonball brought back to Moscow by rail had place of honor on his piano, between a Golden Ring icon and a portrait of Lenin.

We had to wait for Nina, the museum historian, to arrive. A dog bit Vassily on the calf in the little garden where two-and-a-half inch Pak 40 cannons taken from the Germans in 1940 are on display. The blood drew a flower on the snow. When the Grande Armée passed through Berezina, the river was red with blood. Nina wore a blue acrylic suit from the Andropov era and large Coke-bottle glasses like Hillary Clinton when she was a student at Yale. Nina was touched that we should have traveled from Moscow on our machines. She devoted two hours to explanations from which it transpired that Napoleon arrived in Barysaw on November 25th, when all the elements had gathered to capture him. He was finally going to fall into the trap. Minsk was in Russian hands, and the Barysaw bridge had been destroyed. The warm spell prevented him from going over the ice, Kutuzov was hot on the Emperor’s heels, and Admiral Tchigatchev’s army held the west bank, while Wittgenstein had conquered Vitsberg and was advancing on the left bank, from the north. The Grande Armée was in a vise.

Kutuzov was so certain he would annihilate the French, Nina said, that he harangued his soldiers thus: “Napoleon’s end is irrevocably written, and it’s here, in the icy waters of the Berezina, that this meteor will be defused.” The trap, set on the day the French had crossed the Neman, was about to snap shut.

“Finally!” Vassily said.

“Poor you,” Vitaly said, looking at us.

“Shut up, man, listen to what happens next.”

“Napoleon used one more trick,” Nina said. “Two days earlier, on the 23rd, by chance, General Corbineau had found a ford on the Berezina, nine miles north of Barysaw, near the hamlet of Studianka. The passage was barely four-foot deep! It was a godsend for the Grande Armée. When he discovered this, Napoleon realized he could cheat the Russians, escape from them once more, and continue his ‘meteoric’ flight.”

Nina led us to the main room in the museum. Frescoes, prints, and reproductions of paintings traced the chronology of those feverish days.

On November 25th, Napoleon commanded General Éblé to build wooden bridges in Studianka. The Emperor stayed at the construction site all day, encouraging the sappers. And, on the afternoon of the 26th, there were two bridges going over the three hundred and thirty-foot waterway. The four hundred bridge builders had taken the little Russian village isbas apart in order to build their creation. They had worked with no hope of survival. The time spent in the water was fatal to them, and they were dying of hypothermia. In the meantime, Napoleon had had time to place his snares. As early as the evening of the 25th, he had organized two fake construction sites: one on the ruins of the Barysaw bridge, the other one seven miles downstream, near the village of Okhuloda. Cheated, Tchigatchev sent the bulk of his army to wait for the French—who had no intention of doing so—to cross the Berezina. On the evening of the 26th, Admiral Tchigatchev realized he had been duped. But his troops, exhausted by the forced march south, did not have the strength to immediately go back up eighteen miles to Studianka. And Napoleon, who did not like sailors, joked, “Gentlemen, I have duped the Admiral!”

“Let’s go look at the place,” Goisque said.

“Which bank is it on?” Gras asked.

“The west one,” Goisque replied. “The salvation one.”

We left Nina at noon. There were ten kisses, since each of us kissed her on both cheeks while our engines warmed up. We went past the Barysaw bridge before going up the river upstream through a small country lane, as far as the Grande Armée crossing. Goisque, possessed by the spirit of the place, kept repeating, “We’re slap-bang in the middle of the myth, guys, we’re right in the myth. We’ve never been quite so deep in the myth before.”

From the huge plateau hatched with forests, the view stretched onto the other bank, far toward the east. A sandy valley, streaked with strati, cut through the landscape from north to south. Layers of marl and clay leafed through the alluvial embankment with pale veins. At the far end was the Berezina. It was a pleasant, hesitant waterway, with meanders that had a mercury glow. They were fixed by the frost and wound between islands covered in reeds. The sun tore through clouds puffy with snow. The rays splashed willows growing on the sandy banks. The silver birches looked lilac in the light. The village houses seemed to huddle up to keep warm on the edge of the thalweg. Black flapping crows flew across the tableau. Their lament fell with the snow. Otherwise, the world was just a beautiful silence. We looked at everything avidly. It was the setting for the apocalypse and you would have thought we were in the Loiret region.

The stone stela bore an inscription: “Here, the soldiers of the Grande Armée crossed the Berezina.” A sentence that made the nightmare sound like nothing at all.

The army crossed the river during the afternoon of the 26th and all day on the 27th. It had started snowing again, which concealed the French maneuvers. For once, winter was doing the Grande Armée a good turn, by throwing a screen over the rout, and blinding the Russian troops. The timber footbridges, narrow and made heavy by the ice, snapped under the weight of the humans and horses. Éblé’s bridge builders kept jumping back into the water to reinforce the supports. Those who did not die from immersion syncope risked being crushed against the bridge stillage by the collapsing debris. Their sacrifice was the price of the rescue.

Napoleon crossed onto the right bank on the morning of the 27th. That same evening, thirty thousand slowpokes—exhausted soldiers, civilians, women, and children—arrived on the Studianka bank. Night fell, it stopped snowing, and the cold gripped the plain again. The shore groves then lit up with hundreds of fires next to which, made stupid by weakness, unaware of the urgency, the latecomers became numb instead of getting to safety by crossing onto the west bank as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, the Russians were approaching Studianka. Wittgenstein arrived with his forty thousand men at dawn on November 28th. The bridge at Barysaw had been rebuilt by the Russians, and Kutuzov had gone onto the right bank, on the same shore where Tchitchagov’s army, thirty thousand soldiers strong, reached the Grande Armée bridges at 7 A.M. The powers were in place. The Battle of Berezina broke out before tens of thousands of stragglers had even crossed. Napoleon had hoped in vain that his own army corps, in charge of holding back Wittgenstein and Tchitchagov on their respective banks, would hold until the evening of the 28th, thus allowing all the French to cross over. However, the French divisions were submerged.

When the Russian cannon balls fell on the left bank crowd, the horror began. There was a rush on the crossing, and the bridges were covered with a human tide. People died crushed and stifled. They slipped, fell, tried to get back onto the footbridges, but fell into the water and drowned. The river collected the corpses of men and horses, carriage debris mixed with ice. Those who had been able to keep their balance were running on a carpet of bodies. The access and exit of the footbridges were obstructed by the heap of corpses. At the exit of the bridge, the swamp mire was shielded by a wall of dead bodies into which the passage trench led. On the left bank, Russian artillery kept sowing desolation. A first bridge collapsed and the Berezina swallowed up “the victims killed by Russian barbarity,” Caulaincourt says. Even Sergeant Bourgogne, who had seen so much and who was “used to going to sleep in the middle of a company of corpses,” even he, the wretched Vélite grenadier, who had survived everything, and who dipped his quill in composure, snapped: “I couldn’t bear to see anymore. It was beyond my strength.”

On the morning of the 29th, the horror rose to a new level when Napoleon ordered Éblé to destroy his work. Marshal Victor, who formed the French rear guard, had crossed over the night before and the final pieces of artillery had been brought over during the night. At dawn on the 29th, the Russians had to be cut off from crossing the Berezina. As soon as the flames rose, there was one final rush. The screams covered the cannon fire. Those who were still on the other bank threw themselves into the blaze or the water. They could choose to die in either of these opposite elements.

We were mesmerized by the spectacle of this valley. We were standing in the snow and none of us dared move. There were peasants haranguing a horse on a nearby path. The horse lent the landscape an air of bygone times. They drove past us, sitting on a cart. The snow embellished the edge of the forest and muffled the ringing of the little bells. The cart disappeared in the fine hail. Gras touched my arm, “You see, this is a top location.”

“What do you mean?”

“A top location,” he replied, “is a stretch of geography fertilized by the tears of History, a piece of territory made sacred by an act, cursed by a tragedy, a land that, over the centuries, keeps echoing with hushed-up suffering or past glory. It’s a landscape blessed by tears and blood. You stand before it and suddenly sense a presence, a surge, a manifestation of something you can’t quite put your finger on. It’s the echo of History, the fossilized radiation of an event that seeps out of the soil, like a wave. Tragedy has been so intense here, and in such a short space of time, that the geography hasn’t recovered yet. The trees may have grown but the Earth continues to suffer. When it drinks too much blood it becomes a top location. Then you must look at it in silence because it’s haunted by ghosts.”

Even Goisque had stopped taking photos of the world. The snowy fields were dotted with monuments dedicated to the memory of the two armies. A stela bore the name of a man of whom charity obliges us to conceal his name and only refer to him as F.B. It was he who ordered the monument—and maybe financed it—and made sure this was known. Why didn’t he erect a commemorative stone with the following sentence engraved: “Here, where I have laid this slab, Napoleon passed with his entire army”?

The monument made me think of that TV journalist to whom I announced, live, a few months earlier, that I wished to retrace the steps of the Retreat, and pass through the Berezina. “Napoleon? The Berezina? That’s not very glorious,” was her comment.

Here, before the river grave, the words I should have said back to her came to my lips. But, once again, I had been the victim of staircase wit.

“Really, my dear? You don’t think there’s any glory in the bridge builders who accepted death so that their companions might cross over? Or in Éblé, the gray-haired general who crossed the bridge several times under cannon fire in order to report to the Emperor the progress of the rescue, and who died from exhaustion a few days later? Nothing glorious about Larrey, the chief surgeon who made countless trips back and forth between banks in order to save his surgical equipment? Or about Bourgogne, who gave his bearskin to a shivering soldier? Or about the sappers who threw ropes to the wretches who’d fallen into the water, or about the women about whom Bourgogne writes that ‘they shamed some of the men, by bearing with admirable courage all the suffering and deprivations they were subjected to’? Or about the Emperor who saved forty thousand of his men, and about whom the Russians had sworn three days earlier that he didn’t have a chance in a million to escape them? What is glory for you, Madame, if not the warding off of horror through heroic deeds?”

Instead, I had stammered, “Er, well, actually…”

The rest of the journey, toward Lithuania, was a marvel. At times, we would glide through cream-colored woods. Suddenly, the road would penetrate citadel-forests with high peaks, and pine trees would erect walls of bronze, made faintly white by scattered patches of snow. Had a procession of elves crossed before our wheels, we wouldn’t have been in the least surprised. Goisque and I took it in turns driving and being a passenger. In the zinc coffin of the sidecar, one was free to think. Or rather to daydream. I remember the mountain climber Reinhold Messner as he was crossing the Antarctic. As he pulled his pulka, he confessed he killed entire hours with erotic fantasies. We were driving toward Smorgon and trying to cover as much road as possible before dark. Full bellies, Moldavian dancers, and rosy thighs were dancing before my eyes.

“Tesson, what are you thinking?”

“About top locations,” I replied.

Gras’s theory about top locations was a good one. Between the villages of Pleshnitzy and Viliejka, since I had a hour to kill lying in my cold room on wheels, I tried to picture a typology of top locations, and identified six types:

The top locations of tragedy: they had been the settings for battles. The whisperings of History resounded there like an echo. For me, these top locations were Confrécourt, the plowing fields of the Soissonnais region, Masada, and Stalingrad.

Spiritual top locations: these were places historian Maurice Barrès described as “where the spirit blows, locations that pull the soul out of its lethargy,” stelas where the Earth touched the Sky, and were, as magi used to say, consecrated. Gods roamed there. The Ancient Greeks would erect temples in these mythical settings. For me, these places were the heights of Lhasa, where the city opened up like a flow of gold at the bottom of the pan, the Ménez-Hom, which bolted the tricuspid point of the Crozon peninsula, the peak of the Drus, where a Blessed Virgin subject to lightning bolts kept watch.

Geographical top locations: these didn’t need any help from Man. Their natural architecture and formal beauty spoke for itself. For me, these peak locations were Lake Manasarovar, the Kailash mirror, the source of Syr Darya in the heights of the Heavenly Mountain, the cliffs of the Ustyurt Plateau, by the Aral.

The top locations of memory: these were the graves of our friends or heroes. You would stand on the exact spot where they had died. For me, these peak locations were the shoulder of a road in Afghanistan where companions I was fond of died in my arms, the building on an embankment of the Seine, where a Jewish philosopher with an exalted voice lived his final days, the plowing fields of Villeroy, where Péguy was killed with a shot in the head.

The top locations of creation: these were not spectacular places but gardens, houses, and even ruins. There, in the shade of the trees, in the silence of an office, artists had composed everlasting works. For me, these top locations were the walls of Nicolas de Staël’s country house, the silent rooms of Anna Akhmatova’s apartment in Saint Petersburg, and the cafés of Rue de la Huchette where the shadows of Huysmans and Jean Follain roamed.

The top Heraclitean locations: these were places with physical contrasts. Locations for the old Ephesian wise man. He believed that “everything is born from discord,” and that “any contrariety is beneficial.” In geographical terms, these had to be places where there’s a marriage of elements, where water meets rock, where light fertilizes the sea, where the wind hisses in the trees. The walls of Calanques de Cassis belonged to these top locations.

It was bitterly cold and we were soaked. Moreover, in his sidecar, Gras was beginning to find time a drag. In the Pleshnitzy service station, where we stuffed our machines with seventy-two octane gas, he started moaning. “Hey, guys, you sold me a picnic in a comfortable sidecar where I was supposed to be able to read and write.”

“Do you have any complaints?” I said.

“Are you becoming precious?” Goisque said.

“Buzz off,” Gras said.

After crossing the Berezina, Napoleon could consider himself lucky, since he had escaped annihilation, saved his own skin, his marshals, and what could be called his army, down to two thousand officers, less than twenty thousand men, and forty thousand survivors in no condition to fight. “You see how one can pass right under the enemy’s nose?” he kept telling his close entourage.

From a strictly numerical point of view, just like at Borodino, the Russians had lost more men than the French.

From a tactical point of view, Napoleon had duped the enemy. The trick had been a slap in the face, an insolent disavowal. It underlined flaws in the Russian command. If Kutuzov and Tchitchagov had delayed launching their assaults, it was because they still feared the proletarian king. Neither of them wanted a full-frontal conflict with him. Napoleon continued to advance, crowned with “the capital gathered for many years,” von Clausewitz writes. Russians still saw this man at bay, reduced to walking while leaning on a stick, as the unvanquished sovereign. Napoleon’s power lay in his reputation. His former glory was his caparison.

From a human point of view, the soldiers of the Empire had made a supernatural effort. Drained of blood, the Grande Armée had gained a victory. Nevertheless, collective French memory remembered only the horror of the carnage. The name of this geographically insignificant waterway passed into History and current French language usage and acquired the meaning we know. If we’d stuck to the pure reality of facts, “it’s a Berezina,” in French, should have meant, “we made it by a whisker, guys, we felt it fly right by us, we got our fingers burned, but life goes on and stuff the Queen of England.”

The ordeal of the Emperor, accompanied by his ghosts, continued toward Vilnius, through Zembin, Pleshnitzy and Ilya. A rear guard of three thousand men was formed under the command of Ney. “Two or three days later,” Labaume writes, “it was so reduced that we wondered where the rear guard was even when we were with it.” Kutuzov was still hot on French heels. And the French kept melting like butter in the sun. The shame of having allowed the enemy to escape the mousetrap hurt Russian pride. As Caulaincourt puts it, Platov’s Cossacks, “tired of killing,” harried the stragglers and robbed them before leaving them to die stark naked in the woods. Forests and swamps rolled by, larded with frozen streams. One day, the Grande Armée got involved in a system of footbridges that crossed ruts. Caulaincourt was surprised by the enemy’s lack of initiative. “Six Cossacks with torches would have been sufficient to deprive us of this means of retreat.” Kutuzov’s hesitation, Tchitchagov’s errors, Wittgenstein’s slowness: the Russians seemed to be laying pearls of incompetence at the feet of Napoleon. The French could burn candles for their enemy.

They had not finished descending into hell. For them, hell was paved with ice. They were yet to experience the harshest cold of the countryside. As the wind and the snow tormented us on the bikes and sidecars, I thought of these soldiers wandering about at -22°F. Flocks of crows were circling over their troops. Semi-wild dogs were fighting over corpses, getting braver as the men were growing more exhausted. The temperature was constantly dropping in this early December of 1812.

Once, Goisque and I had spent some time in the Sakha Republic, in January, to experience extreme temperatures. Breathing was a chore, and ice particles would stick to mucous membranes. We had an evening at -54°F and some guys had said to us, “A bit more of this and the tires will become square.” From that time, I’d kept the memory of a constant struggle against the cold, which left us exhausted in the evening. And yet we, we slept every night in a warm room after being well fed and watered with tea!

The cold killed the weakest and drove the others insane. Limbs would snap like glass. There were soldiers who wrapped their feet “in the skins of freshly-skinned horses,” Labaume writes. The bivouac fires punctuating the road were a temptation. Caulaincourt knew that “As soon as these wretches would fall asleep, they were dead.” Still, thinking they had been saved after crossing the Berezina, they had all regained a little hope. Only to fall like flies on the road to Vilnius. I remembered these accounts and said to myself that hope is a terrible impostor, a wait that makes you suffer a little more than disappointment. The only thing the walkers didn’t need to fear was getting lost. “The number of men who fell never to get up again acted as a guide,” Bourgogne writes. How sorry he must have been to have given away his bearskin by the Berezina.

On December 3rd, in Molodechno, the Emperor drafted the 29th bulletin, which was addressed to French subjects. This text passed on to posterity. In it, Napoleon admitted to the disaster with a generous helping of euphemisms. He underlined Ney’s glorious behavior, the merit of his soldiers, the annihilation of his cavalry, the joyous indifference of the best elements in his army in the face of adversity, and the villainy of the Cossacks, “that contemptible cavalry that only makes noise but is incapable of taking on a company of light infantrymen.” The bulletin ended as follows: “The Emperor’s health has never been better,” which Napoleon’s critics considered proof of his egotistical folly, not seeing that the Emperor considered his body and that of France as one.

We were gaining miles toward Lithuania. Night had fallen. Driving constituted avoiding being blinded by passing trucks. Puzzled by the dimness of our lights, they would turn up their headlights in full. Goisque slammed on the brakes, skidded, stalled, and narrowly avoided being hit by Vitaly’s bike, which was close behind us.

“What the fuck are you doing, pal?”

“The sign, you bunch of blind men!” Goisque replied. “We’re in Smorgon! In Smorgon!”

On December 5th, Napoleon arrived in Smorgon with his military staff. Two days earlier, he had told Caulaincourt, “In the current state of affairs, I can command Europe only from the Palais des Tuileries.” This meant that he had decided to go back to Paris and leave the debris of his army behind. This idea had germinated since the day when, shortly after stopping at Dorogobouj, in early November, he had learned of the coup by Malet. This obscure general, interned for mental illness, had left his Paris convalescent home and tried to overturn the Empire on October 22nd. The putsch had failed but the Emperor had been as shaken by this news as by the announcement of the number of losses against the Russians on that day. There he was, harried by Kutuzov’s army and increasingly threatened at the heart of his power. He told Caulaincourt, “The French are like women, you mustn’t leave them for too long.” From that moment on, he’d vowed to return to France as soon as possible in order to take the Empire back in hand.

Under the snow, in the middle of the night, we had to obey Goisque, who had decided to snap away at the Smorgon sign, with all three bikes in line at the foot of it. The flash sent its absurd glow onto the curtain of flakes.

Here, a few steps from Vilnius, Napoleon judged the moment to be favorable. Leaving the army in the hands of Murat (“Your turn, King of Naples,” he had said by way of passing on the command), he left at 10 P.M., in a sleeper hitched to six horses. He took Caulaincourt with him, escorted by a detachment of the Guard that split up along the versts. Together, at top speed, they were going to return to Paris through Poland and Germany, burning stages like bats out of hell, writing the pages of one of History’s strangest journeys, combined with a session of intimate confidences conducted at 4°F in the wild forest snow. It was now no longer about saving the army, but taking back the reins of the Empire, which had been dropped six months earlier.

We reached the border at 8 P.M. A line of trucks was stretching back from the customs post.

The first truck driver we asked—a Romanian—explained: “The bastards are on strike. Yesterday, the police threw some corrupt customs officers in jail, so the others have now closed their windows as a sign of protest.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Two days.”

“How many miles is the line?” Vassily asked.

“Eleven miles and six hundred trucks,” the Romanian replied.

We drove up the line, at fifty miles an hour, along the emergency lane, brushing past trucks and praying to the border gods that a door might be opened to let us through, which would make everything quicker. What did Vassily say to the Belarus female guard beautifully dressed in a khaki uniform? She gave our party a look of contempt. Had Belarus customs officers received instructions not to stop Urals from clearing off the land? Three minutes later, we were on the other side, in the European Union, on Lithuanian soil, separated from Vilnius by thirty miles of asphalt so smooth that Vitaly exclaimed, “Funny, as soon as you’re in the European Union, there’s less mud!” In the city center, everything suggested that the country had been multiplying its efforts for the last twenty years to meet EU standards. The well-stocked shops, spruce streets, Christmas decorations, German cars, and people wearing cool clothes on sidewalks cleared of snow were in contrast with the construction site atmosphere, factory architecture, steel industry aesthetics, and depressive inhabitants of the former USSR cities. In a Brussels-standard brewery—waitresses with piercings, sushi, and World Music—Vitaly carried on with his theories. “Before, Lithuania was part of our Empire, and now it’s in your Union.” We seemed to have come out of a night of suffering and the forests from hell, in order to enter, head low, the Disneyland staff canteen. We looked around at these pleasant, pink people who were waiting for Friday to finish off a week at the bank with a weekend of leisure.

We’d been so cold in the past few hours, since Berezina, that we decided to warm ourselves up with peppered vodka. The first bottle in memory of the French, the second in memory of the Russians, and a few extra glasses for the Polish, British, and German auxiliaries of both Empires. And, if that night we went to bed at not too ungodly an hour, it was because we’d developed the ways of drunks, and the bar manager threw us out after, in between bellows, we’d set fire to the tablecloth by knocking over the candles on our table.