The Officer's Prey

CHAPTER 32

ON 22 November, Margont was trudging through the middle of a wood of birch trees. It was foggy and it was snowing yet again. The soldiers’ faces were gaunt, exhausted, dazed and sometimes blackened by the frost. Each one looked like a walking corpse. They advanced amidst the shadows, ghosts amongst ghosts. The fear of straying was ever present, because if you got lost there were Cossacks or partisans out there who would slaughter or capture you, according to their mood.

Fanselin had been walking with Margont and his companions since morning. His worn-out horse had slowed down so much that in the end he got left behind by his squadron. After his mount had died, Fanselin tried to cut across a forest but was caught in a snowstorm. When he at last got back to the army he found himself with IV Corps. He was wearing an enormous pelisse, a red one, needless to say. He felt it his duty to set an example and warded off his fears by laughter and bravado. As a result, he had a constant following of soldiers.

‘I got completely lost in that forest and my only weapons were my two pistols and my lance,’ he recounted.

He was so proud of his lance that every time he mentioned it, he flourished it and did battle with the branches of the birch trees.

‘Of course, I was thinking about the filthy Cossacks! They appear from nowhere, shoot you in the back and by the time you’ve turned round, they’re far away. And they can certainly gallop! It’s hard work catching up with those scoundrels! They’re devilish clever with their bark-coloured pelisses that make them invisible. You don’t see them, you don’t capture them and they vanish. In short, after a while, if you’ll pardon this unsavoury detail, I started to relieve my bladder against a tree trunk when all of a sudden I said to myself: “Watch out, Edgar, make sure you’re not pissing on a Cossack’s boots …”’

His audience laughed, he stopped talking to save his breath and then, a few minutes later, he came out with another anecdote or philosophical observation. Fanselin had such confidence in himself and in the French, and the Guard enjoyed such prestige, that his presence lifted the soldiers’ spirits a little.

The column was making slow progress. The road was littered with the frozen corpses of soldiers and half-eaten horses. There was also silver cutlery, vases and gold coins that people had dumped to lighten their load. Suddenly, there was a long whistling noise that became more and more piercing, followed by the roar of an explosion. A birch tree collapsed with a snapping sound and trapped some of the men in a tangle of branches. Cannonballs bounced this way and that. But the march continued. The troops were being bombarded at regular intervals by cannon that the Russians had had the detestable idea of mounting on sledges. The outline of a figure on horseback drew closer in the fog. Muskets were levelled in that direction because two times out of three a horse meant a Cossack. The figure suddenly emerged from the icy fog like an apparition. It probably was one. It was an adjutant, impeccably dressed, his trousers and gloves spotless. He was young and very angry.

‘Soldiers, they’re shelling us! Do something! Are you fighters or rabbits? Fix your bayonets and follow me!’

He galloped off in the direction of the enemy batteries, which were blasting away for all they were worth.

‘Who was that?’ asked a soldier wrapped in a series of shawls.

‘The phantom of the Grande Armée,’ replied a figure. ‘The one that haunts us all.’

Fanselin began to talk again. Margont could hardly hear his voice any more. His lips, welded together by ice, and his legs were giving him terrible pain. His legs were so heavy to lift that he looked at them often, convinced that they had caught on something. They felt stuffed and swollen with pain. Sometimes the pain exploded into thousands of pinpricks all over his body. It was almost more than he could bear because it made him think of death and being eaten by worms. Worse than that: sometimes he lost all sensation in his lower limbs. It was as if he had lost both legs and they now belonged to someone else. So he extricated his hands from the depths of his muff and frantically rubbed his thighs to bring back the circulation. When the pain returned he felt as if his body was at last whole again. He looked enviously at those being transported on carts or gun carriages. But rest proved to be a trap. Death crept up in silence. The cold gradually numbed their minds and the passengers fell into a pleasant sleep from which they never awoke. The choice was simple: march or freeze.

Margont frequently thought about his childhood or certain moments in his life. He recalled in particular the birth of his friendship with Piquebois because that day he had almost died. Piquebois, then at the height of his hussar period, had noticed him reading while he was slashing away at pumpkins on stakes topped with Austrian helmets. Piquebois, sabre in hand and probably running out of pumpkins, had called him a ‘book-devouring little squirt’. He would have been only too happy to see the ‘infantry librarian’ unsheathe his sword. But Margont had replied that he only used his weapon for opening letters, not for slicing off the heads of French hussars. Piquebois had burst out laughing before dragging Margont off for a drinking session that it would have been unwise to refuse. However, these memories were rather a bad omen. When you reach the end of a long journey or a project that took a long time to complete, you often think back to its beginning. Margont had the impression that his mind was going back over his life one last time, before gently fading away …

A little further on, Lefine fell. Margont bent his knees to crouch down, which caused him intense pain, as if the bulging muscles in his thighs had ripped his frozen skin. He wanted to remove his friend’s knapsack but was surprised by its weight. He opened it and discovered silver ingots, jewellery and gold plate. He started to empty it. Lefine groaned, stuck out his hand and with considerable difficulty picked up a gold snuffbox that he stuffed into one of his pockets. But Margont was throwing away far more than he could retrieve.

‘I’ve left you your jewels. Otherwise you’d probably have stayed here,’ Margont said in a whisper as he was out of breath.

Lefine was getting to his feet with the aid of Saber and Fanselin when loud cries of ‘Huzza! Huzza!’ rang out. In an instant, men on horseback swept down on the column from all sides at once. Most of the attackers were Cossack irregulars, Bashkirs and Kalmucks. Everything about them – their Mongol features, their strangely shaped red hats, the fact that some of them were armed with bows – caused fear and panic. Accompanying them were hussars, who yelled as they set upon the French with their sabres.

There was total confusion. Infantrymen were fleeing, putting their arms in the air or trying to defend themselves with anything that came to hand. Hands stiffened by the cold managed to wield muskets and fire at the horsemen or, more often, at the horses. The Russians, better fed, less tired, drunk with victory but also just plain drunk, were indulging in a massacre. The hussars galloped along the column laughing, leaving a bloody trail behind them. Fanselin wielded his lance. He had jammed the end of it against a large stone. A Bashkir charged at him, and the lancer, bending down at the last minute to avoid the point, impaled the Russian. He immediately clung on to the horse’s mane but the animal did not interrupt its headlong charge, carrying the Frenchman away with it. Fanselin eventually rolled on to the ground. He picked himself up, pistol in hand, ready to grab hold of another mount. The Bashkirs who had witnessed the scene had no desire to take on such a madman.

Margont felt an uncontrollable frenzy come over him. He shot dead a Bashkir with his pistol and wounded another with his other weapon. This second assailant was bleeding from the shoulder. His weakened hand had let go of the reins and his horse was galloping round and round a cart. Margont wanted to finish the Russian off but his sword failed to pierce the thick cloak. So he seized the Russian and threw him to the ground. He sat astride him and brandished his knife. He wanted to gouge his opponent’s eyes out to make him finally understand what suffering could be. He revelled in the Bashkir’s fear. The man had a round face with prominent cheekbones. His head was shaven except at the back, where he had a long, dangling plait. He had a very thin moustache, the ends of which drooped down to his chin. His eyes were so narrow and slanting that his pupils were barely visible. Despite all these differences, Margont saw his own reflection in this face. The Bashkir had been hit; for him the war was over. Margont put away his knife, took the bag that the Cossack was wearing on his belt and moved away. At once he flung himself on his stomach because a Frenchman was taking aim at him, mistaking him for a partisan.

‘French! 84th!’ he yelled.

Realising his mistake, the marksman shot a Kalmuck for good measure.

The assailants left as suddenly as they had arrived. As they rode off, they thrust their lances into the backs of bodies, occasionally striking an infantryman who was pretending to be dead. A scream of pain told them when they had been ‘lucky’.

Fanselin was engaged in a lance duel with a regular Cossack officer. The Russian was swiftly whirling his lance around to parry an attack. When he had deflected his opponent’s weapon sufficiently, he stopped flourishing his own and thrust its point towards the Frenchman’s chest. With surprising agility, Fanselin leapt to the side before counterattacking. Changing tactics, Fanselin pretended to attack with the point of his lance only to suddenly turn it in an arc and strike his opponent with the other end. The Cossack received a violent blow to the chin and fell from his horse. A chorus of explosions stopped the fleeing horse dead in its tracks. They were not going to let such a heap of meat get away. Fanselin kept the prisoner at bay with his lance.

‘Long live our Red Cossack!’ exclaimed Margont weakly.

More shouts greeted the ‘Red Cossack’ and Fanselin smiled at the compliment. The Cossack exclaimed ‘Huzza!’ and to general amazement hurled himself at the lance to impale himself. Fanselin immediately withdrew the point but it was too late.

Everyone rushed for the carcasses of the horses to eat their fill, gnawing on the bones like dogs, without even taking the time to cook them because the Cossacks were still prowling around.

Margont opened the Bashkir’s bag. Inside it he found black bread mixed with bits of straw. The loaf had been baked any old how: it had been placed in an overheated oven and the outside was burnt and the middle still doughy. Margont bit right into it. He couldn’t believe that he had almost tortured this Bashkir. Was suffering making him mad? He needed to build up some protection against insanity for himself. Instead of repeating that he was marching to the Duchy of Warsaw – which was still so far away – his thoughts turned to Colonel Pirgnon. Don’t let him out of your sight. Keep your monster on a leash, he thought. He said to himself that he didn’t have the right to let himself die or to lose his sanity, and that managed to put some life back into those aching blocks of wood that were his legs. The march resumed. Yet again. *

Colonel Pirgnon was cursing the fog that was hiding the full scale of the disaster from him. In his opinion it was all up for the Emperor. The Russian armies were going to cut off the retreat and that would sound the death knell. The irony of the situation amused him, because while everything around him was dying, he himself felt reborn. His future at last seemed crystal clear. He went up to the soldiers in his escort who, blue with cold, were shivering near a fire. The frozen branches were bad for burning as they produced a sort of smoke but no fire or heat. However, the colonel felt a surge of contentment well up inside him.

On 25 November, the Grande Armée found itself opposite the Berezina. It was here that the Russians had planned to crush it. The Berezina, a huge tributary of the Dnieper, had not in fact frozen over. A hundred and fifty paces wide, almost ten feet deep and bordered by marshes and forest, it cut off the retreat. By now the Emperor only had at his disposal twelve thousand soldiers, half of whom made up the Guard. He could also count on reinforcements of twenty thousand men led by Victor, Oudinot and Dombrovski. In addition to these troops there were forty thousand civilians and stragglers, for the most part unarmed. The Russians, who numbered one hundred and twenty thousand men divided into three armies, had also been weakened by the fighting and the winter. Admiral Chichagov held the west bank of the Berezina and was supposed to prevent the French from getting through. To the north was Wittgenstein and to the east and south, Kutuzov. But the latter, still more than sixty miles away from the French, was not urging his army on. It was Napoleon’s unprecedented prestige that had led the Russian generalissimo to commit this blunder, much to the consternation of his general staff. Napoleon had won so many victories that Kutuzov greatly underestimated the disorganised and weakened state of the Grande Armée. So, once more, he sought to avoid direct confrontation and to let the climate and the hardships do their work.

Napoleon managed a feat that saved a large part of what remained of his army. He sent a battalion followed by thousands of stragglers towards the little town of Borisov. Admiral Chichagov thought that this was where the French would try to cross and moved his troops opposite this position. However, the Emperor ordered General Éblé’s pontoneers to build two bridges opposite the village of Studianka. When Chichagov was informed of this work he thought it was a manoeuvre intended to divert him from Borisov. When he eventually realised his mistake, the two bridges across the Berezina had been built in appalling conditions and the French had begun to consolidate themselves on the west bank. The first construction, which was fragile and with a deck that was sometimes at water level, was used by the infantry, and the second, more sturdy, by the artillery and vehicles. Napoleon had had thirty guns set up to protect them.

On 27 November, several corps, including that of Prince Eugène, now consisting of only one thousand eight hundred men, crossed the Berezina.

On 28 November, at seven in the morning, the Russians attacked both banks at the same time.