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

DAY SIX. FROM VILNIUS TO AUGUSTÓW

This morning, war council over four pints of black coffee aimed at knocking out our hangover. Gras was leaving us and we were sad about it. We liked the way he read Labaume or François’s Memoirs in the Ural sidecar, indifferent to the cold, as though comfortably seated in the armchair of the Geographical Society in Saint Petersburg. He had commitments in Donetsk. Ukraine hadn’t yet exploded through the impetus of democrats and new philosophers. He jumped onto the morning Vilnius-Kiev after telling us off.

“What shall we do, guys?” Goisque asked.

“We can either follow the route of the retreat toward the Neman and Kœnigsmark, or that of the Emperor, as far as Paris, through Warsaw,” I said.

“Don’t you think your ‘Corsican king’ went a bit far, abandoning his men like that?” Vitaly said.

“It’s more complicated than that,” I said.

“That’s what people always say when they’re in a bit of a jam.”

The secret of his departure from Smorgon had been well kept. When the soldiers discovered that the Emperor had left them, there was overwhelming consternation. The sun had withdrawn from their sky. Did the astonishment turn to reproach? Labaume talks of the men’s “legitimate” indignation. Bourgogne, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to hold it against his chief. Perhaps the men were too busy looking for carrion to sink their teeth into to get lost in curses. When one is trying to escape from death, is there any energy left to subject somebody to public scorn?

Besides, should Napoleon be disowned? Isn’t the role of an admiral to look after the fate of his fleet rather than to die in the shipwreck of one of his vessels? That’s what I was trying to explain to Vitaly in Russian.

The Emperor was the cement that kept the debris of the army together. His magnetism bound the officers. His energy galvanized soldiers. The certainty of his presence, albeit invisible, inspired everybody to stand up and acquire some of the general glory. Once the sovereign had gone, everything could fall apart. And it did fall apart. And there was nothing Murat could do to prevent dereliction. The army dragged itself along, attracted by the prospect of Vilnius. Like in Smolensk, a few weeks earlier, the human wreckage needed a mirage. And, just like Smolensk, Vilnius turned out to be far from expectations.

It was a horde of human skeletons that crowded the gates at Vilnius on December 8th. Forty thousand hungry men swooped on a slumbering town that knew nothing of the rout. When the burghers saw this stream of godforsaken men covered in animal skins, they did exactly what burghers do when they feel threatened: they closed the city gates.

The tide of zombies smashed against the ramparts. “This chaos reminded me of Berezina,” Labaume writes. Marshal Davout had to climb a ladder in order to enter the city through hidden gardens. The pack ended up forcing the gates and penetrating the square, but only to find no aid there. The absence of command prevented the distribution of supplies even though there was enough to feed an army. Overly zealous officials refused to start emergency distribution, and demanded “distribution coupons” from the wretches who were begging for a crust of bread. Can you imagine dying men reaching the threshold of their salvation only to be refused help by the very people who were supposed to provide it? Forty-eight hours later, this treasure of bread and meat fell into the hands of the Russians.

The rebuffed soldiers wandered down the streets of the city, hoping only to glean some warmth and food by a kind stroke of fate. They were returning from the far ends of life and were being refused entry into homes that exhaled the smell of freshly-baked bread. The residents had barricaded themselves in. And death took its toll on more soldiers on the sidewalks where the wind blew at -4°F. If Vilnius escaped total sacking, it was because the men were drained of strength. Berthier’s admission on the morning of November 9th fell like a funeral oration: “Sire, I must be truthful and tell you that the army is in a total rout.”

As early as the 9th, a Cossack vanguard approached the city. The bulk of Kutuzov’s troops was two or three walking days behind. Prince Murat, eager to ensure a way out for himself, fled the city in the evening, and headed straight west, toward Kaunas. And the Grande Armée evacuated the city in the darkness. On the 10th, no sooner had Ney’s rear guard escaped from Vilnius than the Cossacks galloped into the capital with their war cries.

By the time Kutuzov entered Vilnius on December 12th, he had completed his mission: that of chasing the hydra off Russian territory. The city gates were those of a burial vault. There reigned a putrid smell. Twenty thousand stragglers of the Grande Armée hadn’t had the strength to leave the place, and were waiting to die, bullied by the Cossacks and tortured by the cold. In the monastery of Saint Basil, there were about eight thousand dead heaped in the corridors. The windows were blocked by stacks of corpses. When he remembered “seeing a group of four men, with frozen hands and legs but their minds still alert, with dogs devouring their feet,” the British general Robert Thomas Wilson, Kutuzov’s advisor, said, “One must envy the dead.”

Despite the medals jangling on his overly large chest, Kutuzov had nothing to crow about. He could certainly take the credit for Napoleon’s escape, but had decimated his own troops. Winter, vermin, and famine hadn’t made any distinction among nationalities and dealt the Russians a blow as harsh as French ranks. Since Moscow, he had lost two thirds of his men. In Vilnius, he had thirty thousand soldiers left out of the hundred thousand with whom he had set off.

For the French, the Vilnius slaughter had originated in something other than exhaustion, famine, and cold. The Cossacks did not know that they had an ally in the form of lice. In August 2001, in the Šiaures miestelis district of Vilnius, Lithuanian workmen unearthed a “catastrophic burial place” containing hundreds of French soldiers. Scientists from a Franco-Lithuanian excavation commission identified in the corpses the traces of bacteria which, as well as having a Polish-sounding name—rickettsia prowazecki—was the means of transmitting typhus. Thus, thousands of soldiers had survived the Cossack saber and the drop in temperature, only to succumb to fever. The First French Empire had discovered a new enemy: vermin.

“Can you imagine?” Vitaly said. “The army of lice!”

“Russians certainly got their help during that war,” I said.

“Let’s go to Antakalnis,” Goisque says. “That’s where they buried the bodies of the French.”

The Antakalnis cemetery occupies a hillside northeast of Vilnius, not far from the banks of the Neris River. We arrived there at midday and cut the engines outside the entrance wall. Two homeless men were smoking on a bench. Our eyesight was distorted. In the snow, with puffy faces, their rags, their heads wrapped in wool, and their white-blond hair, they looked like something in a 19th century print, “Army Voltigeurs During the Rout” style. They offered to watch our motorbikes.

“Are you going to look at the French?” they said.

“How do you know?” I said.

“A bunch of guys on Urals, where else would you be going if not to look at the French grave?”

“Oh?”

“Three litai to watch your bikes.”

“Three litai for all three?” Vitaly said.

“Three litai per bike,” they said.

“They’re not worth that much,” Vitaly said.

I would have liked to rest in this cemetery. The stone tombs had been erected in an undergrowth of conifers. The corners were softened by moss. Sculptures of neo-Gothic angels were leaning tenderly over the slumber of the dead. There was something about this undergrowth that reminded one of the abandonment of British cemeteries. Vitaly strolled among the sections, the bicorn on his head. The cypresses were like black candles. We walked for a long time, looking for the 1812 plot. We reviewed the martyred Poles, World War I Germans, and the cement monument erected to the heroes of the Red Army. We discovered the stelae of the January 1991 victims. I’d forgotten about that case, until Vitaly reminded me. Encouraged by the liberal endorsement unanimously awarded by Western leaders, Gorbachev had crushed the demonstrations of young Lithuanian anti-socialist protesters in blood. The cemetery stated: Lithuania, like Poland, was a country that traveled across the 20th century in the worst possible geographical position anyone could occupy: that of being between Germany and Russia. Might as well keep your hand in the vise.

At the end of a long descent, there was the plot of our own ghosts. And a plaque: “Here lie the remains of the soldiers of the twenty nations that made up Emperor Napoleon I’s Grande Armée, who died in Vilnius on their way back from the Russian campaign in December 1812.”

The forgotten soldiers in the mass grave of Šiaures miestelis had been buried in the cemetery in 2003. For the first time, we were entering a tangible location of the Retreat, a space that was not just a setting for the memory or a historical theater. Beneath the snow lay the bones of men whose tracks we had been following since Moscow. We were no longer chasing after ghosts. We were standing before their remains.

“Guys,” Vitaly said, “I understand you find this moving, but davay.”

That morning, we had finally agreed on the sequence of events. We were going to follow the tracks of Napoleon and Caulaincourt’s flight on a sleigh, rather than those of the final days of the dying army. The route of the sleeper went through Warsaw and Erfurt and would take us to Paris through Westphalia. Our progress promised a journey across highly Napoleonic geography. We would still be living through the Imperial memory.

Destiny had one final trial in store for the runaways. Once Vilnius was evacuated, the army was supposed to reach Kaunas, sixty-two miles to the west. On the Ponary escarpment, as they left the Lithuanian capital, the icy slope dealt the final blow. “That’s where we lost all our artillery, our wagons, and our baggage once and for all,” Berthier writes in his dispatch to the Emperor. The soldiers could not heave the carriages over the hill. The cold was still at 4°F. The horses were just skinny flesh incapable of the slightest spurt. The clutter of the equipment and crowd of humans blocked the way. And yet the essential—the imperial treasure—had to be saved. The officers requisitioned a few horses from the cavalry in order to try and save it, but the carriages were immobilized by the jumble of crates mixed with corpses. There was the solution of trusting the soldiers with sacks of gold, and carrying the treasure on foot. The operation turned into looting. The dying men smashed the wooden panels and took possession of the sacks with gold coins like mantises. They were drawing their salaries for suffering. The looting carried on all night, until the gunshots of Platov’s Cossacks snatched the most avid ones away from their fever. What was the use to them of these furs and barrels of silver in a night of terrors when some mutton broth was more precious than a hundred golden francs? Many, weighed down by their loot, were caught up with and killed by the Russians. Others surged back to Kaunas, for two entire days, ballasted by their riches. “Every soldier was laden with silver,” Labaume says, “but nobody had a rifle.” Only methodical, heroic Marshal Ney continued to assemble the men and protect the rear, yelling out his orders. He remained even greater than his legend till the very end. Bourgogne saw him clenching a fist, holding a rifle “the way the heroes of Antiquity are depicted.” At this stage of the Retreat, while Murat was fleeing and the infantrymen were counting their pennies, Ney was the last depository of the army’s lost greatness.

In Kaunas, just like in Smolensk and Vilnius, there was no respite for the debris. On the heels of a troop where you could no longer tell the difference between a stable boy and a marshal, the wolves of the Cossack divisions entered the city on the 14th, breathing down the necks of Napoleon’s army. The remnants of the French vanguard had arrived a few days earlier, forced the cellars, and emptied the barrels. Many had died from drunkenness. The campaign therefore ended in crepuscular folly. Defeat always produces these scenes of Boschian madness. Before they die, knowing they’re damned, men get drunk, screw, and eat till their bellies burst. Oddly, nobody goes looking for a library to reread one more poem by Virgil.

On December 14th, about twenty thousand runaways crossed the Neman and settled a few leagues away from the left bank. Ney insisted on defending honor, and, containing the Russians, was the last one to ford the river, in the evening, “walking behind everybody else,” according to Ségur. His rear guard had only six hundred defeated men left. The curtain was falling on one of the most disastrous military campaigns in History.

Ney perched on the other side of the river, the prow light of a destroyed army. Of the four hundred and fifty thousand soldiers at the start of the invasion, two hundred and fifty thousand had died in battle, and two hundred thousand had been made prisoners. The Russians had lost three hundred thousand of their men.

The invasion of Russia had been devised in order to build peace on the continent. It was the first step toward the fall of the First French Empire. Six months earlier, the army had crossed this same river, in the June sun, all aquiver, accustomed to glory and ready to fight as far as the sands of the Gobi Desert, “with hearts beating with joy and pride,” writes General Louis-François Lejeune. On that June 24th, the gates of hell had worn their most attractive finery to entice the army. Then they had shut behind it.

There was, in the eddies of the Neman, a premonition of the choppy waves of Saint Helena.

At the fork of the south exit from Vilnius, we headed in the direction of Marijampolė. Instead of following the calvary of those 1812 wretches through Kaunas, we decided to drive southwest, behind the fleeing Emperor. It was in Kaunas that Caulaincourt decided to go to Marijampolė and travel through the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw. He thought this route would be safer, albeit longer. Napoleon did not trust Prussia.

“Tesson!” Goisque shouted on a slope.

“Yes?”

“What’s a sleeper?”

“I think it’s a kind of litter, with wheels.”

“What do you mean?”

“A litter with wheels.”

“Like a Ural sidecar?” he said.

“That’s right. With tasseled curtains and embroidered cushions.”

It’s History’s most exclusive psychoanalysis session. A sovereign of unequalled power was about to confide, during almost two weeks at 4°F, to the Grand Squire, lying in a sleeper drawn by six Lithuanian horses, under the protection of a Mameluke, a few officers, and a handful of piqueurs. By leaving the theater of misfortune, Napoleon was warding off the failure of the Russian campaign. Body and soul, he was reaching out for Paris, in other words, for the future.

After their departure from Smorgon on December 5th, the Emperor and Caulaincourt glided non-stop along the snowy roads of the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw, Prussia, Saxony, and Westphalia. They traveled incognito. They changed from litters to carriages and mail coaches at random. They ended up shaking off most of their escort. It took them thirteen days to go from Smorgon to Paris: a speed record, if we think about the fifteen hundred miles through the snow! And it was still too slow! Throughout the entire journey, Napoleon, a man in a rush, hassled the piqueurs, rushed his meals, galvanized the landlords of the coach inns. Faster! Faster! he seethed. He wanted to see the Empress again. He wanted to reassure his government. He wanted to strengthen his position at the head of the empire. Sometimes, refusing to get out of his carriage, he would swallow a cup of tea and dictate a few letters while the postilions changed his horses. Since his ascent, at military school, Men had never been fast enough for him. And now this damned carriage ride back was dragging through forest tracks of his Empire! He, who loved to rule over History, would have liked to shrink Geography. For six months, he had procrastinated before Alexander, hesitated in Vilnius, dawdled in Moscow. On his way back, he was recovering his dazzling speed.

Already on the first night, the cold made them suffer. The temperatures didn’t get milder until Fulda, in Westphalia. However much the Grand Squire covered him with his bearskin, “the Emperor was shivering.” On the escarpment of Marijampolė, they had to get off and push the carriage to the top of the slope. Did Napoleon help? At the Gragow post house, Caulaincourt bought one of those covered sleighs, fixed on skates, that “flew along the surface.” In Pułtusk, moved by the modesty of a servant girl, the Emperor gave her a few gold coins together with this pre-Marxist thought: “In this class, you could make many people happy with a little money.” In Warsaw, suddenly seized by a sovereign whim, he insisted on entering the city on foot, “very curious to see if he would be recognized.” In Kutno, one of the sleigh shafts broke, and it took two hours of DIY to repair it, during which Napoleon took advantage to sample the conversational charms of the sub-prefect’s wife and sister-in-law—very attractive Polish women. Before entering Prussia, he checked that his pistols were in good working order. “In case of certain danger, kill me rather than let me hang,” he had told his officers before leaving. In Poznań, going back on the route of the army, Caulaincourt could receive the courier dispatches, which Napoleon would devour, reproaching his Grand Squire for never breaking the seals fast enough. In Dresden, the King of Saxony lent his beautiful Berline but its skates broke between Lützen and Auerstaedt, so they had to enter Vigenov in “the modest post coach” before leaving in “a carriage Monsieur de Saint-Aignan had arranged in such a way that the Emperor could lie down in it.” In Leipzig, Napoleon took a nap on a few chairs lined up near a stove, before he noticed he was being watched by a spy. Farther on, in Eisenach, Caulaincourt uncovered an ambush and obtained fresh horses by threatening with his sword the landlord of coach inn who was grumbling he couldn’t supply them. When they reached the banks of the Rhine, they noticed that the river was still carrying ice. The boat bridge hadn’t been set up yet, so they had to cross in a small boat. In Saint-Jean-les-Deux-Jumeaux, the two men got into a small, open cabriolet in which they continued “at the speed of hell.” In Meaux, they jumped into a post chaise “that could shut firmly” and it was in this contraption that, at a quarter to midnight on December 18th, they reached the Tuileries. Caulaincourt knocked on the door of the gallery that opened onto the garden, and the hall beadle had the good sense to choose not to recognize the Emperor and his Grand Squire in these two muddy, bearded ghosts in fur-lined boots!

Thus ended one of the most formidable games in the history of open-air sports. Caulaincourt went to the Empress’s duty staff, and the ladies nearly passed out before this specter who, in addition, announced the return of the Emperor. Finally, unable to bear it any longer, Napoleon rushed to the Empress and rewarded Caulaincourt for his four years as Ambassador to Saint Petersburg, four months of war, two months of rout, and two weeks of galloping, with a magnanimous, “Goodnight, Caulaincourt. You also need some rest.”

“You couldn’t ride back from Smorgon in thirteen days now,” I said to Goisque in the service station on the road to Marijampolė.

“Why? Do you want us to try?”

“Because the forests are interrupted by highways, the fields by barbed wire, and the plains by canals.”

“We’re no longer in the days of horse-riding Europe. The car has triumphed.”

“And yet Gouraud managed it.”

In 1990, the writer Jean-Louis Gouraud had traveled from Paris to Moscow on horseback. He had been welcomed in triumph on Red Square and had made a gift of his mount to Raisa Gorbachev. We had boundless admiration for the author of this trek undertaken with a bridle across the countries of the Warsaw bloc. Even though we suspected he had organized his adventure solely for the pleasure of being able to boast that he had “ridden through the Iron Curtain on horseback.”

“It took him seventy-seven days,” Goisque said.

“Yes, but he had no Grand Squire to prepare the legs of his journey.”

During these solitary hours across snowy fields, Napoleon talked to Caulaincourt. He talked as though words transcended the nightmare, and kept ghosts away. He talked as though to free himself. And Caulaincourt took on the role of court clerk in this conversation that was actually more of a monologue. The Grand Squire took “rushed” notes, he says, without respite. At the relay station, next to a stove in the inn, while Napoleon slept or had dinner, under his bearskin, his fingers numbed from the cold, he would take notes. And the hundred or so pages, to which he gave the title of On a Sleigh with the Emperor, became one of the most unclassifiable confessions of a head of state. Did Napoleon manipulate his Grand Squire? Did he know that his words would immediately be published? Was he rehearsing The Memorial of Saint Helena three years before its time? Whatever the case may be, he was aware of the strange atmosphere of this confession, since he stressed to Caulaincourt that “never has a man had such a long tête-à-tête with his sovereign…”

We were making good progress toward Marijampolė. Our machines seemed delighted with the icy evening air. These were the forests at the start of the European Union. Everything looked tidier than in the ex-Soyuz. The road cut through images of Brueghel countryside. A man with a chapka on his head went by on a bicycle. A cart hitched up to a bay horse was carrying peasants to farmhouses covered with shingled roofs that came down to the ground. We went through hamlets. We guessed that wood stoves were pulling in full. Poor Lithuania, that had suffered so much, was smoking happily now that History had gone to bed. The sun set and the countryside turned into a Viennese cake, pink and fat.

What the hell had Vassily eaten? He was darting into the night. We left Marijampolė behind us, and drove at a hundred and twelve miles an hour. A few hours later, we were on the Polish border. Complete with sodium projectors lighting the snow, and awnings with Cło! and Postój! stamped on them, their installations maintained a Cold War feel about them. We weren’t even entitled to a glance on the part of the customs officer.

“This is becoming annoying,” Vitaly said.

Vassily wanted to drive even faster. I struggled like mad to keep up with him in the fast-forming fog. The road snaked and all the former Eastern Bloc trucks seemed to have agreed to gather in this section of Masuria. I dreaded the right turns, which were likely to lift the sidecar and capsize the bike. It started snowing more heavily and got the better of Vassily’s rage. We stopped off in a timber inn by the roadside, in Augustów, the very same town through which Caulaincourt and the Emperor traveled two hundred years earlier to the day.

“To the day? Thomas asked at the inn.

“Yes,” I said, “they arrived in Warsaw on the 10th, and were in Marijampolė on the 7th, so they went through Masuria and Podlachia on December 8th and 9th, and today is the 8th, so they clearly stopped off in Augustów.”

Sensitive to symbols, Goisque couldn’t get over the coincidence and wanted to check this in the oil-stained copy of Caulaincourt’s Memoirs.

“Show me, Tesson, I don’t believe you.”

I quoted Napoleon speaking to Caulaincourt, “Goisque, when I tell you something, you must believe it.”