The Officer's Prey

CHAPTER 31

SMOLENSK was not the promised paradise. The damaged city had not been sufficiently restored. Many soldiers had to sleep outdoors in the snow. Food supplies had been badly managed and the reserves depleted by the troops passing through. An inefficient administration had been incapable of organising the distribution of resources properly and looting had resulted in considerable wastage. The Guard was the first to be served, something that Napoleon always saw to. The officers often received good rations but some regiments were given only a little flour, which some of the infantrymen swallowed immediately, just as it was.

Margont and his friends went to the Valiuski palace. Unfortunately, it was empty. One of the servants had stayed behind to wait for them. The Valiuski family had learnt of the French retreat and had decided to go to the Duchy of Warsaw to stay with relatives. They were afraid that the French would entrench themselves in Smolensk and that the Russians would attack them there. Margont thought that they probably also feared reprisals on the part of the Russians and preferred to let time heal the wounds. The servant went into a storeroom. He removed two planks from the wall to reveal a recess containing a package. Inside it was a ham, some rice, a jar of honey, a bottle of brandy, two sacks of flour and some potatoes: a treasure trove.

‘That’s all, because a lot of food was requisitioned,’ explained the servant in an accent so heavy that they had to guess the meaning of most of what he was saying.

The man also handed Margont a letter. The captain went to his former bedroom, as if he was going to read its contents before going down to dinner with the Valiuskis, as if by returning in space to Smolensk he had also gone back in time and it was no longer mid-November but mid-August again.

Dear friend,

My father has decided that we should leave for Warsaw within the hour. It does indeed appear as if the campaign is not over and that more fighting lies ahead. Father had already greatly underestimated the violence of the attack on Smolensk when you came, so he prefers to take us away from the ‘field of operations’ (you know how fond he is of talking like a general). Contrary to what I had hoped, we shall not therefore be celebrating the peace with you in Smolensk.

My good Oleg has agreed to stay behind. He will hand you this letter as well as a little food. Unfortunately, your Emperor has requisitioned so much and the war has disrupted trade so badly that I cannot offer you more.

Keep my book or, if you have finished it, take some others. I hope we shall have the opportunity to see each other again in happier circumstances. It will be easy for you to find us: all the nobility in Warsaw knows the Valiuski family. But I realise that the combatants are unlikely to be liberated in the near future. Even if all French people are nothing but dreadful heathens, be assured that despite everything you are present in my prayers.

Countess Natalia Valiuska

Margont reread the letter several times, trying to hear the voice behind the words. This was only the first of a long series of disappointments. Napoleon had quickly realised that it was impossible for him to winter in Smolensk. The city was nothing but ruins and there was a shortage of food. Added to which, to the north-west Wittgenstein’s fifty thousand Russians were increasing the pressure on Marshal Gouvion-Saint-Cyr, who had been defeated at Polotsk in mid-October. Similarly, to the south, the army of Moravia under the command of Admiral Chichagov, and reinforced by Tormasov’s army, which had become available because of the peace with Turkey, had pushed back Schwarzenberg’s Austrians and Reynier’s French. The Grande Armée risked being surrounded by substantial forces. So the retreat resumed, with temperatures falling to twenty degrees below zero. There were only forty thousand men left in the army proper, with thousands of disarmed people as hangers-on.

Kutuzov was attempting to position his army between the different French corps in order to destroy them separately. At Krasny, on 16 November, IV Corps, which now consisted of only six thousand men, had to force its way through twenty thousand Russians, under the command of General Miloradovich, who were blocking its path. Two thousand French soldiers perished.

Colonel Fidassio was killed, his carotid artery severed by a hussar’s sabre as he was personally launching a counterattack. His faithful shadow, Captain Nedroni, perished a few moments later, nailed to a birch tree by a Cossack lance. As for Colonel Barguelot, he was not at his post. He did not rejoin his regiment until the following day. He told how he had been captured by hussars but had managed to escape when a scuffle broke out between sentries guarding their prisoners and fanatical Russian peasants who had come to slaughter the captives. Colonel Pirgnon survived, despite the very heavy losses sustained by the Broussier Division.

Margont was in a sombre mood. His change of tactics, namely recovering the letter sent by Pirgnon to Barguelot, had led nowhere. Nothing in that document amounted to definite proof of Pirgnon’s guilt. This lack of evidence annoyed him. He felt he was in the worst position imaginable: seeing a murderer free to come and go as he pleased just because there was one tiny piece of jigsaw missing to set the vast judicial process in motion. So he turned everything over again in his mind, thinking back to the scenes of the crimes, the discussions with witnesses, the clues … He imagined a thousand possibilities: setting another trap, telling Prince Eugène the whole story, talking to Pirgnon to try to … well, to try to do what exactly? All these thoughts swirled around in his head for hours before bringing him back inevitably to his starting point: he was completely stuck.

So he informed Captain Dalero of the progress of his investigation. He also handed a sealed letter to Saber, Piquebois and six other friends from different regiments. If Lefine and he were killed, these missives should be passed on to Prince Eugène.

The nights had become interminable. For sixteen hours the temperature fell to minus twenty-eight degrees. Margont, Lefine, Saber, Piquebois and thirteen soldiers were huddled together, a dark outline that gradually became covered in snow, like a blemish that needed to be blotted out of the landscape. They were all that was left of two companies that previously had consisted of two hundred and forty fusiliers.

Lefine, who was keeping guard, was constantly glancing at the watch Margont had lent him. He was waiting impatiently for the hour to end and wondered if there was any way of moving the hands forward by say, five, or seven, minutes … He kept the fire going with logs taken from the ruins of an isba. He was almost up to his knees in snow, which clung to him like a shroud as if inviting him to lie down and let himself be covered by it. His visibility was restricted by the snowflakes and the surrounding trees. He was vigilant, afraid that a Cossack might spring up behind him and slit his throat. Or perhaps a looter.

Suddenly, loud cries rang out: ‘Huzza! Huzza! Paris! Paris!’

‘To arms!’ yelled Lefine, waving his musket in the direction of the din.

The snow began to move, and black and white shapes emerged, changing into men sitting up and searching for their muskets. There were a few shots, creating brief puffs of smoke in the wood, the sound of laughter and then nothing. It was the third fake attack of the night.

They tried to get back to sleep. The silence was disturbed by a soldier sobbing and the whispers of one of his comrades trying to comfort him.

Hunger was making Lefine want to scream, to kill. He was gnawing a root. It was not edible but in any case his teeth could not bite into it. It was just to have something in his mouth, to pretend to be eating something and to really believe it. The previous day he had heated up some water into which he had plunged two tallow candles and a leather belt. The candles had melted in this foul liquid and the belt had given it a vaguely meaty taste. He and his friends had then chewed interminably on the bits of boiled leather. Every other day they ate nothing unless they found a dead horse. Every other day they were all entitled to a potato or a piece of cake that Margont made from flour and snow. This ‘miraculous meal’ was soon only served every three days. Their two mounts had died and had immediately been devoured by all of them with the exception of Piquebois. Sometimes they also treated themselves to a small pot of horse blood. This sort of black pudding soup restored their strength. It was Lefine who prepared this dish, with a wooden spoon in one hand and a pistol in the other, the reason being that on one occasion some starving creatures had rushed at him and his pot. In the ensuing struggle, everything had been knocked over. Fortunately, chunks of frozen horse blood were appreciated just as much.

A silhouette wrapped in a blanket crossed the encampment.

‘On your feet! It’s time to march,’ it shouted.

The soldiers got up with difficulty, numb and exhausted, and shook themselves. Many had thrown away their muskets, either to lighten their load or because they had no gloves, and contact between frozen metal and the skin was unbearable. The remnants of regiments had merged together and had been joined by stragglers. So there were dismounted cuirassiers, Bavarians, Westphalians, Württembergers, Saxons, a few velites, either on foot or ‘on horseback but without horses’ from the Neapolitan Guard, a handful of Poles … A good number of soldiers were rigged out in such a way as to make it impossible to tell which regiment they belonged to. They were wearing civilian cloaks, women’s pelisses, gaudy tunics on top of their greatcoats, cashmere jackets, bearskins, bed sheets and curtains made into clothes, dresses, dressing gowns …

Margont straightened up, exhausted, famished beyond words and surprised not to be dead. He had grown up in an area where snow was a rare sight, and in the summer the scorching heat made it look as if the scrubland was on fire without ever burning up and that you were moving forward surrounded by invisible flames. That climate had enabled him to withstand heat but had also made him sensitive to the cold. Were it not for his natural foresight and what he had read about Russia, he would long ago have fallen victim to the first flakes of snow. He was wearing silk stockings, woollen stockings, leggings, corduroy trousers, a silk shirt, two waistcoats including one in cashmere, a padded jacket and a bulky fur-lined cloak with an ermine collar that half hid his face and whose skirts trailed along the ground. He also had on a woollen hood, a hat and a double pair of gloves thrust into a fox-fur muff. His feet were swathed in several layers of stockings and socks and protected by bearskin boots. Encumbered with all these layers, which made him into a sort of fossil, he looked like a thickset, clumsy giant. The sword at his waist was the only indication that he was a soldier, apart from the epaulettes that he had sewn on to his cloak. But all this did not stop his teeth from chattering and he felt as if he were a little child who had fallen naked into the snow. He took a few steps and already felt exhausted. They had slept too little, in appalling conditions, with the fear of never waking up.

He heard shouting and wailing. Some exhausted soldiers had fallen asleep on the ground and their faces were now stuck to the snow. Others had frostbitten cheeks and noses, and large patches of frozen skin were peeling away from their faces. Some people came to their aid but not many, it must be said. They had been through so much horror and were so afraid for themselves that they were now insensitive to everything. The bivouac was littered with the dead. People were looking for food around the corpses – a vain hope – and taking the clothes. As Margont passed close to a victim being stripped of his trousers by an infantryman, he heard a murmur of ‘Mein Gott’.

‘He’s still alive!’ Margont exclaimed.

But the fusilier continued to tug at the trousers that the German was holding on to, a Württemberger to judge from the shape of his black-crested helmet.

‘He’s practically dead,’ retorted the looter.

‘So will you be if you continue,’ Margont warned, putting the frozen barrel of his pistol to the man’s temple.

The fusilier backed away, holding his bayonet because he’d thrown away his musket. The Württemberger was too weak to get up. Margont motioned to some Württemberg artillerymen, who were lamenting having had to abandon their guns in Smolensk because of the lack of horses to pull them. They referred to these pieces of ordnance as if they were human. When they recalled the moment they had spiked them – which involved driving a spike into the touch-hole to render them unusable by the enemy – they had tears in their eyes. The Württembergers moved forward suspiciously, then rushed to help their comrade as soon as they caught sight of him.

Lefine approached Margont.

‘I don’t even feel the cold any more!’ he shouted gleefully.

Nevertheless, he had been shivering for almost a week.

‘Don’t lose heart. We’ll pull through, Fernand!’

‘Well, of course we will. Everyone’s going to pull through! Talking of which, Pirgnon’s going to pull through too.’

‘No, not him.’

‘So, with all that’s happened you still believe in divine justice, do you? He’s a colonel, so he eats much better than us. One of these days he’ll step over our dead bodies laughing.’

Margont was trying to tread in the footprints in front of him so as not to exhaust himself unnecessarily by disturbing heaps of snow.

‘My investigation’s at a standstill for the moment but—’

‘What a bad loser you are! Pirgnon’s had us. He’s had us. That’s all there is to it.’

‘The game’s not over yet.’

Lefine pointed to a pile of corpses covered with snow. Men had huddled together to keep themselves warm but in the end the entire group had frozen.

‘Even if you were frozen stiff like them, you’d still believe in victory. The Emperor should take you into his Guard! We’re all going to kick the bucket! By the way, do you know what I think? That so many people are dying in this damned retreat that it could well happen to Pirgnon. A shot fired in a wood – by a Cossack, of course! – and that’s it. No more Pirgnon. A Cossack who’s as good a marksman as me, for example.’

Margont shuddered.

‘No, Fernand.’

‘Did you say something, Captain? With all this snow in my ears I can’t hear a thing.’

‘You heard perfectly well.’

‘Why? Because it’s wrong to kill a murderer?’

Margont stopped and turned towards his friend. ‘Because it’s meaningless. It would be absurd to become a murderer in order to eliminate a criminal.’

‘What a noble sentiment and how well put. Another fine idea to form the basis for a book.’

‘There’s another reason. You’d be bound to miss him – especially as you can’t stop shivering, like the rest of the army. But his escort wouldn’t miss you. The snow would slow down your escape: his men would catch up with you or would only have to take aim as you floundered about in a snowdrift.’

Trails of steam poured out of Lefine’s mouth.

‘If Pirgnon had killed Natalia you’d agree with me. The two of us would have gone to pump him full of lead. Bang, bang! Yes, we would have been shot immediately afterwards but at least we’d have gone out on a high note instead of ending up as blocks of ice!’

‘No!’

Margont had tried to shout but exhaustion took his breath away. Lefine was right and that unsettled him even more.

‘I’ll get him,’ he concluded simply.

Lefine made a snowball, waved it in front of him, stood stiffly to attention and said: ‘At your orders, Captain!’

The Grande Armée was now just one long caravan, a thick column of motley soldiers dressed up to fight the cold, and of carts and sledges interspersed with the occasional trooper. In some places people were crowded together and in others they were spread out, dangerously exposed and isolated, easy targets for the Cossacks. Only the Guard had kept up appearances. It advanced steadfastly in an orderly fashion, protecting the Emperor.