Sylvain Tesson

BEREZINA

FROM MOSCOW TO PARIS FOLLOWING NAPOLEON’S EPIC FAIL

Translated from the French

by Katherine Gregor

To my late mother, Marie-Claude Tesson-Millet

“Nevertheless, anything that breathed set forth.”

—SERGEANT BOURGOGNE, Memoirs

“Extreme abulia! In order to escape from it, I sometimes read the odd book about Napoleon. Sometimes, other people’s courage acts like a tonic.”

—CIORAN, Cahiers, January 17, 1958

“I’m reading the recollections of Captain Coignet, in which four Frenchmen often triumph over ten thousand Cossacks. Times have changed.”

—PAUL MORAND, Journal inutile, Volume II

“To fight aloud is very brave,

But gallanter, I know,

Who charge within the bosom,

The cavalry of woe.

[…]

We trust, in plumed procession

For such the angels go,

Rank after rank, with even feet

And uniforms of snow.”

—EMILY DICKINSON

BEREZINA: River in Belarus, a tributary of the Dnieper River, 349 miles long. It was the scene of one of Napoleon’s battles against the Tsar’s troops in 1812, during the famous French Retreat from Moscow.

In colloquial French, a bérézina refers to a disastrous situation.

MAPS

JULY, BAFFIN ISLAND.

SIX MONTHS PRIOR TO DEPARTURE

It’s during a previous journey that the idea of a future one comes to mind. Imagination carries the traveler far from the trap where he’s gotten stuck. While in the Negev desert, he’ll dream of a Scottish glen; in a monsoon, of the Hoggar Mountains; on the west side of the Aiguille du Dru, of a weekend in Tuscany. Man is never happy with his lot, but aspires to something else, cultivates the spirit of contradiction, propels himself out of the present moment. Dissatisfaction motivates his actions. “What am I doing here?” is the title of a book and the only question worth asking.

That summer, every day, we would brush against moaning icebergs. They drifted by, sad and lonely, suddenly appearing out of the fog, ice-cubes in our evening whisky. Our sailboat, La Poule, sailed from fjord to fjord. The summer light, clouded by steam, nourished the Baffin coastline night and day. Sometimes, we would draw alongside the bottom of a two-thousand-foot wall sticking out of the water. Then we would unwind our ropes and go climbing. The granite was compact, so you had to drive the pitons hard. For this we had Daniel Du Lac, the bravest among us. He was comfortable suspended over the water—more so than on the deck of the ship. In opening up the way, he’d dislodge blocks. Rocks would come pouring down onto our backs and slam into the water with the sound of an uppercut into a guilty jaw.

Cédric Gras would follow, lifted by the virtue of indifference. As far as I was concerned, I dreaded coming back down. The atmosphere on board the ship was not cheerful. In the wardroom, everybody would lap up their soup without a word. The captain talked to us as if we were dogs and, in the evening, treated us as his audience. You had to endure his exploits, and listen to him go on with his opinions about the science in which he’d become an expert: shipwrecks. There are such mini-Napoleons about; they generally end up on board ships, the only place where they can reign over empires. His was sixty feet long.

One evening, Gras and I happened to be on the foredeck. Whales were sighing at the prow, swimming lazily, rolling on their sides: the lifestyle of the large. “We should start all over with a real trip, my friend,” I said. “I’m fed up with this Mormon cruise.”

“And what’s a real trip?” he asked.

“It’s a madness we get obsessed with, that transports us into myth; a drift, a frenzy, with History and Geography running through it, irrigated with vodka, a Kerouac-style ride, something that, in the evening, will leave us panting, weeping by the side of a pit. Feverish…”

“Oh?” he said.

“That’s right. Next December, we have to go the Moscow Book Fair, you and I. Why don’t we go back to Paris on a bike with a sidecar? On a beautiful, Russian-made Ural. You’ll be nice and warm in the sidecar, so you can read all day long. I’ll drive. We can leave from Red Square, go straight west toward Smolensk, Minsk, and Warsaw. And you know something else?”

“No,” he said.

“This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the Retreat from Moscow,” I replied.

“You’re kidding.”

“Why not give these twenty-five hundred miles as a tribute to Napoleon’s soldiers? To their ghosts. To their sacrifice. In France, nobody gives a damn about the Old Guard. They’re all absorbed by the Mayan calendar. They’re talking about the ‘end of the world’ and don’t realize the world is already dead.”

“You’re not wrong there.”

“I say it’s up to us to salute the Grande Armée. Two hundred years ago, there were guys who dreamed of something other than high-speed internet. They were ready to die just so they could see the Moscow domes sparkle.”

“Except that it turned out to be a slaughter!” he said.

“So? It’ll be a journey to remember. I promise you, we’ll also come very close to a few disasters.”

“Alright then.”

A moment later, Priscilla joined us in the prow. She came on all our trips. With her cases of photos, essential oils, and yoga moves. We told her about our plan. A cyanotic sun was drifting on the horizon. The sea was made of steel. The tail of a large fin whale was whipping this expanse of mercury. Priscilla suddenly said, “Why reconstruct the Retreat exactly?”

On the port side, a whale breathed out a puff of steam. The cloud lingered in the light.

“For the sheer glory of it, darling. For the sheer glory of it.”

A FEW DAYS BEFORE DEPARTURE.

MOSCOW, NOVEMBER

The Moscow Book Fair was a success. Why did the organizers call it a round-table debate when it was a meeting of people who were all in agreement and around a square table? I sat next to Maylis de Kerangal and was intimidated by the beauty of this author of Tangente vers l’est. She spoke of her love for Russia with variety. She snatched away all I would have wanted to say. Her eyes were far apart, a sign of superior people. She was talking about her journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I wished I could have been on the train with her, serving her tea, carrying her bags, reading her Boris Godunov in the evening to help her fall asleep.

Gras and I were trying to persuade our audience of the necessity to recreate the itinerary of the Retreat from Moscow. Petrified by Maylis, not quite knowing our stuff, we kept passing the buck to each other. We must have looked like Flaubert’s characters Bouvard and Pécuchet.

“Napoleon may have been a bloodthirsty monster—” I began.

“—but we must admit that in terms of our administration, our land registry, our legal system—” Gras continued.

“—we owe him everything,” I concluded authoritatively.

“Not a day goes by in France when we don’t come across regulations sprung out of his brain,” Gras said.

“Was he a madman? Or a genius?” I said. “Or an insular prophet who was inspired by Corsican clan divisions to long for unity—”

“—and even a fusion between East and West?” Gras said.

“This isn’t really about our escapade, actually—”

“—Not at all,” Gras continued, “what we want—”

“—is to pay tribute to the memory of hundreds of thousands of poor soldiers, victims of having followed their leader, of having believed that a nation,” I said.

“—could write a collective novel with each and everyone’s blood—”

“—and touch glory with the tip of its finger—”

“—and blend in with Napoleon’s soul, as Léon Bloy put it.”

“We’ll travel by motorbike in memory of these men,” I said.

“We won’t celebrate anything,” Gras said.

“We’ll simply recreate the itinerary of the Retreat.”

“And measure, deep inside us—”

“—the burden of misery—”

“—the sum of suffering—”

“—what a dream of greatness costs in terms of sorrow—”

“—and the amount of tears needed to reform the world.”

“Why did these men agree to take part in a marriage of honor, folly, and death?” Gras concluded.

“They’re close to us, after all. Two hundred years is nothing,” I said.

The conference came to a close. Maylis ran away. We went back to our host, a network diplomat, in charge of literary events at the French Embassy.

We were all fired up by our contribution. We went up to her. “Do you think our speech made the Russians shudder?” I said.

“They like Napoleon, don’t they? Will they appreciate our journey?” Gras said.

The representative for the diffusion of the French language replied, “You have checked into your hotel, haven’t you?”

You soon get used to wearing a bicorn. It was late November. There were fifteen of us at the table that night, after the conference at the Moscow Book Fair. Fifteen friends in the apartment on Rue Petrovka, sitting under portraits of Lenin and Beria. The chandeliers held Slavonic candles: they melted at full speed, with translucent sobs. We spoke Russian the way polite Europeans do. There were French present, Slavs, a German, a Balte, two or three Ukrainians: all had been invited by our friend Jacques von Polier, an asthma sufferer, grand seigneur, Russophile, and businessman. I was wearing on my head a replica of the imperial hat, the one you find in lunatic asylums, and which I’d decided not to take off for the whole duration of our campaign. I’ve always been a great believer in the merits of headdress. In ancient times, the hat made the man. This is still the case in the East: you’re identified by what you wear on your head. One of the symptoms of modern times was to make us go out into the streets with our heads bare. Thanks to the bicorn, a mysterious alchemical percolation would perhaps instill into me some of the Emperor’s genius…

The bicorn I was wearing was a replica of the diminutive Corsican’s. The hat with the rosette had covered the head of an enigma more than a man. The Emperor was born on a granite island covered in chestnut trees, unaware that he carried within him a monstrous energy. How do we become what we are? It was what we were wondering about Napoleon’s fate. What mysterious string of events led the obscure officer all the way to the coronation in Notre Dame de Paris in 1804? What divinatory power propelled him to the command of half a million warriors feared by the whole of Europe? What star led him to triumph? What genius inspired his technique, worthy of a Greek god: lightning, daring, kairos.

He had persuaded his men that nothing would stand in the way of their glorious march. He had offered them the Pyramids in 1798, the Rhineland in 1805, the gates of Madrid in 1808, the plains of Holland in 1810. He had brought Britain to her knees in 1802, in Amiens, and forced the Tsar of all the Russias to purr softly in Tilsit in 1807. He had ruled the administration, reformed the State, overturned old models of civilization, and built a legend with Macedonian undertones.

Then, suddenly, the dream would come crashing down because of a march to the death across the Russian steppes. The year 1812 was a whirlwind of shadows, the first chapter of which would be played out by the River Neman and, three years later, end within the salt-corroded walls of Saint Helena.

And so we were drinking von Polier’s wines. Knocking back Crimean cabernet, eating herrings with dill, black pudding with cranberries, sweet gherkins. There were small carafes filled with that elixir of oblivion—that is, of forgiveness—and wicked joy: Belarus vodka, as limpid as Savoy spring water. Our host had moved to Moscow twenty years earlier, having gotten weary of France, of its regulations, its petit-bourgeois reactionaries, its bad-mannered socialists, its potted geraniums, and its rural traffic circles. France, a little paradise inhabited by people who think they’re in hell, administered by do-gooders busy keeping in check the residents of the human park, no longer suited his need for freedom.

He’d longed for adventure, for reality. He preferred dealing with businessmen who looked like thugs, rather than HEC[1]-qualified barracudas who never even thought of inviting him to get hammered in a sauna after negotiating a contract. Jacques felt closer to a fisherman on Lake Lagoda than to a guy rambling on about tax installments. As a matter of fact, he thought everybody in France seemed preoccupied with his own bank balance. So, ever since then, he’d been dragging his tall frame to the farthest corners of the former USSR, along with his generous gestures and a pair of dark, wild eyes hungry for an opportunity for not sleeping.

In 2008, he’d purchased the Raketa watch factory, founded in the 17th century by Tsar Peter the Great and taken over by the Soviets in order to establish the legend of the USSR. The Politburo ordered an edition of a watch for every event. There were models to glorify submariners, the 1980 Olympics, Gagarin’s first flight into space, and polar expeditions. The factory had escheated in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Jacques was excited by bad business, and his spirit would get carried away by lost causes. Of the six million watches produced in 1990, the factory was manufacturing a mere thousand by the year 2000. The staff, whose salaries were six months in arrears, was down to a forgotten fifty, whereas it had amounted to thousands under Gorbachev.

And so Jacques slaved away at resurrecting the brand. He devoted his entire energy and his whole heart to it. Mocking at first, the Russians had ended up admiring this Parisian who wouldn’t let the only precision industry factory in the country of approximation die, and who fought for the Raketa pulse to keep beating on the wrists of the Moujiks.

Gras and I were as proud as tractor drivers of Farm Squad No. 12 receiving the work medal: Jacques had just given us two watches stamped with the Napoleonic eagle, which he’d issued for the bicentenary of the 1812 campaign. The profiles of Napoleon and Kutuzov were depicted on the back, facing each other on the battlefield of Borodino. With a watch like this you could head into winter and into the night with nothing to fear. Except delays, since the mechanism wasn’t automatic yet, and we children of the West had lost the habit of winding our watches.

Thomas Goisque was at the table, a friend of ten years, a photographer turned Russophile later than us, but with as much ardor. He’d come to join us. He’d felt demoralized by his landing at Sheremetyevo Airport, twenty-four miles from Moscow city center. Through the porthole, he’d discovered the true face of the Russian winter: a depressing landscape. The world had been forsaken by color. The forest looked dejected. The sky was a defeat, and the snow was the same tint as cement. Mud everywhere.

“We’ll never be able to drive through that, guys,” he’d said as he sat down at the table. “We’ll drown. And what kind of pictures am I going to take?”

We gave him a watch, he drank the contents of a small carafe, and his outlook on difficulties leveled off in his heart. Vodka is at least as effective as hope. And so much less vulgar. It was time for the toasts. Everybody took it in turn to stand up, raise their glass, say something, and trigger protests or enthusiasm on the part of the company. In Russia, the art of the toast allows you to avoid psychoanalysis. When you can get things off your chest in public, you no longer need to consult a silent Freudian while lying on a couch.

“To your Retreat from Russia! It’s 5°F in Minsk,” Jacques said. “I’m not sure whether I envy you or not.”

“To the proletarian king!” I said.

“To the Corsican villain!” a Muscovite friend yelled. “It’s thanks to him that the Russian people felt patriotic for the first time!”

“The Bonaparte Antichrist,” his girlfriend added. “He made Russians of us! He turned us into what we are!”

“To the Cossacks,” huge F., with his Falstaffian hands, blasted. He was born in the fields of Picardy but, prompted by the same disgust as von Polier, had exiled himself to the banks of the River Don. “To the Cossacks of my heart,” he added. “To their wonderful war cries! To their 1814 campaign, and to my little child who is in heaven!”

A tear trickled down his fat cheek. A reckless driver had killed his six-year-old son a few years earlier, and F. had the poor child’s face tattooed on his left forearm. He looked at it with intense pain and the little creature’s image on his skin seemed to come alive, perhaps because a muscle shuddered, or because some magic had taken place. And we watched this orphan-father in silence as he downed the fifty grams of poison.[2]

A female friend with a very dark complexion, whose lips were turning blue in contact with the Moldavian merlot, had invited the founder of an anti-Putin protest network. His name was Ilya. His skin was very white, and he looked more like a distinguished family nephew used to hunting in the forests of Sologne than someone about to blow up the Kremlin. Beware of the physiognomy of Russian anarchists. They look like altar boys, but something—a Rasputin-like glow deep in their eyes, a forehead that’s too receding, streaked with feverish locks—reveals mental agitation and a readiness to act. Look at the picture of Savinkov, author of The Pale Horse: it can’t be easy to live in that oversized skull. You can sense blizzards inside. Kropotkin, the easy-going-type anarchist prince, is no better: looks like Santa Claus, the face of a gingerbread producer, and yet with a thirst to blow up the whole world.

That year, 2012, some educated young Muscovites had sowed disorder in the center of the capital. The West, only too happy to destabilize Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, had relayed their claims, and given its support to these young, well-connected, middle-class people amply versed in the tools of communication. Since the explosion of the Internet, a revolution required marketing techniques. What mattered was no longer to take over the administration, overturn the army, and hang the ruler from a meat hook: all you had to do was keep hold of the media field, come out with speeches, fuel blogs, and prepare a stage for Western speakers, hired orators called upon if the cause turned out to be bankable on the ideals market of the EU. There had to be a unity of location (a large city square would capture the imagination), a team of tweeters, an appealing cause, rally signs, T-shirts, a symbolic color, and powerful slogans. You wanted to change the world? Then you had to promise a show!

Ilya was a pro at these urban springs. We discovered a pleasant young man with fine wrists and a large brain crammed with liberal ideas. I don’t know what he thought of our table strewn with bottles, with collapsing guests, guys with sabretaches waving period sabers, sporting Orthodox crosses and regimental insignia tattooed on their biceps, drinking Tokay wine like there was no tomorrow, bawling out military tunes from the First French Empire and Red Army anthems, bringing back the memory of Sergeant Bourgogne, drinking toasts to Prince Murat, and emitting war cries like Platov’s Cossacks.

F. started singing a parachutists’ song. Ilya realized there was nothing there worth posting on YouTube. He left.

At eight the following morning, we were in a garage behind Yaroslavsky station. It was dark, the air smelled of cold asphalt. Moscow was already roaring like a monstrous soul-washing machine. The streets, the sky, and the morale were sticky with mud. Motorists lunged into traffic jams. Snowdrifts bordered the sidewalks. There were sure to be bodies of drunks under the snow. They’d surface in the spring. They called them “snowdrops” in Russia, and they forecast fair weather as accurately as migratory birds. We’d had some difficulty reaching the place.

When we switched on the ceiling light of a lock-up garage, we found it, khaki-green and ready to launch us into a Belarus ditch: our motorbike with sidecar. It would be more aesthetically pleasing to describe this vehicle as a “motorcycle with adjacent basket.” These machines are robotics of the Soviet industry. They promise adventure. You can never tell if they’ll start and, once launched, no one knows if they’ll stop. The Soviets built them in the 1930s, modeling them on the BMWs of the German army. Ever since, they would cover the territory of the Union. The sight of a Ural driven by Oleg, a cap-wearing Moujik, with children at the back, and, in the sidecar, a peasant woman with a red headscarf—Tatyana or Lena—and a can of milk hanging on the spare wheel, is the Jungian epitome of Russian rurality. Even now, there’s not a village without three or four specimens rusting amid apiaceae. The Ural factory keeps churning out identical machines. They’re the only ones to resist modernity. They go up to fifty miles an hour. They travel through the countryside, devoid of electronic devices. Anybody could repair them with a pair of metal pliers. They date from a time when man was not slave to electronics, when the steel industry ruled by its simplicity. You need to get used to driving them, avoid turning right too quickly on pain of lifting the basket, and constantly adjust the profile toward the left. You must also possess an inner life, since the Ural is slow and Russia endless. For the past twenty years, driven by a blend of fascination and masochism, I’ve been buying these machines. As a matter of fact, I would have liked to die while on one of them.

One year, I drove one from Kiev through Southern Poland. We broke down near Frankfurt and ended up towing the motorbike with a rope used by a butcher to hang carcasses in his refrigerated storage area. The Germans were looking us up and down. The fall of the Berlin Wall had awakened the reunified Teutonic contempt for the Slav. I crossed the Kyzylkum desert in Uzbekistan on a 1966 vehicle. At night, you had to keep pressing the horn down to keep the headlights lit because of a short circuit. In Khiva, I had an accident with a police car and, having dented the right side of their vehicle, had to give up my boots as well as a nice leather jacket to these uniformed pieces of manure. On Olkhon Island, I decided to buy one from a peasant. The brakes weren’t working and the tank leaked. “Every motorbike has a life of its own,” the owner explained. In Cambodia, I returned to Angkor on a white Ural, the drive shaft of which broke by the West door where the Buddha kept watch. I took a blue specimen from Moscow, through Finland, in the middle of the summer: the Baltic smelled of humus, wild geese flew in an angular formation toward late-setting suns. On the outskirts of Paris, I missed a turn and drove into the corner of a detached burrstone house. The owner failed to appreciate the poetry of Soviet scrap iron. His wall had been demolished but the motorbike was unscathed. During a random check in Rungis, my machine was seized. It was not in order and my fake Russian papers had no effect on customs officers.

Goisque, on the other hand, had crossed the Mekong delta and the Kirgiz steppes on a Ural. Together, on the 1966 Ural, we had gone for a spin around Lake Baikal over bare ice. We had to get used to driving on the icy mirror and not suddenly brake whenever the crystal surface started to look like free water. Goisque shared my taste for driving Russian motorbikes with sidecars, for the feeling of riding while steering a trawler.

Gras, however, couldn’t drive, so would act as a counterbalance. We were offering him the role of the dead man in a zinc coffin. On Baffin Island, I had already lied to him by promising he could keep warm and read. In actual fact, the weather forecast intimated a terrible return. Of course, it wasn’t going to be the nightmare of 1812, but more energetic than a picnic in Tuscany. We attached our flag to the front of the basket. Against the tricolor background was written, in gold letters:

Imperial Guard

Emperor of the French

to the 1st regiment of light cavalry lancers

“Hey, guys!” I said. “Nothing will stop our Ural. Not even its brakes!”

It was the beginning of December. We decided to leave the following day, December 2nd, date of the Emperor’s coronation and of Austerlitz. Since our bike was going to be a shuttle on the smooth rail of time, since we were going to play, head down, the great game of memory and myth, we might as well have as many symbols and references as we could.

We had the bicorn, we had the date.

Now all we needed was to find the ghosts.

They were waiting by the side of the road.

With a gap of two hundred years, we were one and a half months behind History. On October 19th, 1812, the Grande Armée left Moscow. It was down to just one hundred thousand men. Under his black bicorn, for the first time, the Emperor had doubts. His army was about to climb one of the highest peaks of suffering and horror in the long thread of human History.

A hundred thousand soldiers. Behind them, thousands of civilians, horses, and wagons.

There would be five of us. Gras, Goisque, and I for France. As for our Russian friends, Vitaly and Vassily, they would drive their own Urals, black and white, respectively. They belonged to a club of suicidal motorcyclists. Every year, they would throw themselves into long-distance treks with no return. They would have to cover three hundred miles a day in the cold and the mud, toward icy stopping stages, cities that had been backdrops to terrible wars, washed by women’s tears, ancient capitals of sorrow with names that broke your heart: Kursk, Kharkiv, Kiev. They illustrated the Slav’s indifference toward the climate, the Russian mountaineer’s insolence before the blows from the sky. They called themselves “Radical-Uralists.” Vassily looked like a golden-haired Varangian, one of those bards who, during the 11th century, came down along the river Dnieper to sell Baltic amber to the Turks of the Pontic Empire. He was tall and his wild eyes only looked into those of his interlocutor if the latter was explaining an injection problem with the carburetor. A genius mechanic and an inventor, he had already deboned dozens of Urals. Did he have as much talent for putting them back together as for dissecting them?

Vitaly, a financier by trade, was the embodiment of the Muscovite: quick, intelligent, urban, lithe, and skillful with his hands. By day, he wore a tie in the air-conditioned office of his company, but, on a snowy night, could sleep in the middle of a forest, wrapped in a woolen coat. In Russia, Tolstoy was never far away. Modernity had not snatched its children away from a life outdoors.

They were our friends, and thought a memorial salute to hundreds of thousands of dead Russians and Frenchmen was a good enough reason to freeze their knees for two weeks in the nothingness of winter. They were delayed. The engines of their bikes were lying in oil.

“We won’t be ready tomorrow,” Vitaly said.

“Who cares?” Vassily said. “You three leave tomorrow on your Ural, and we’ll catch up with you in Borodino with your baggage…”

“We’ll be like Platov’s Cossacks harrying Ney’s rear-guard,” Vitaly said.

“The Cossacks harried but never caught up,” I said.

“You’ll see, we’ll catch up,” Vassily said.

“See you tomorrow then,” I said.

DAY ONE.

FROM MOSCOW TO BORODINO

My insomnia was populated by visions of crumpled sheet metal. All night I’d tried to fall asleep. I was always more tormented by the prospect of traveling by motorbike than by the idea of a long stay in the forest, or plans for a mountain climb. I could never sleep the night before getting on a bike. You’re much more at the mercy of destiny’s irony on the road than amid the wilderness of nature. A pothole, a truck that’s too wide, an oil puddle: you’re dead before you’ve had the chance to do anything. I switched on the light and looked at the map on which the itinerary of the 1812 campaign was reproduced.

Napoleon should never have approached the splendor of Moscow. Its glare was too powerful for him. Some beauties are forbidden. In strategy as well as in love: beware of what sparkles.

On September 14th, 1812, his eyes on the onion domes, he contemplated the third Rome from the top of a hill. The following day, he positioned his rear guard behind the Kremlin ramparts. I believe in dharma, in the wheel of destiny. There are times when an apparently trivial event triggers a series of unexpected occurrences. That day in Moscow, a chain of causalities was set off that, two years later, was to sweep away the Empire.

There were soldiers who thought that Moscow was just a stage on the way to India. They imagined they would go as far as Mongolia to “take hold of British possessions,” as Sergeant Bourgogne writes.

The soldiers of the Grande Armée would have followed to the ends of the world this emperor who had covered them in glory in Egypt, Italy, Prussia, and Spain.

They had no inkling that, this time, their idol had led them to the brink of a nightmare.

Had Napoleon really wanted this hazardous war? Had he truly wished to send his men into the shapeless territory of a birch-covered plain where the Cossack and the pitchfork-wielding Moujik prowled? Alas, for him, the campaign against Russia had become inexorable. Had Alexander I, his friend and brother, not violated the Tilsit Treaty signed in 1807? What remained of the Tsar’s commitment to join the blockade against Britain? Nothing! The Russian sovereign had opened his harbors to British ships and was trading with perfidious Albion. The Emperor of the French could not leave this betrayal unpunished.

The Tsar had to be forced to renew his promises. The secret bonds between Saint Petersburg and the British had to be severed. This last effort had to be made and this ultimate capitulation obtained in order for the blockade against London to be successful, and therefore complete the great task of European peace. “Spain will fall just as soon as I have destroyed British influence in Saint Petersburg.” Napoleon was venturing into the immensity of this continental power in order to vanquish his sea rival!

He outlined to his peers the advantage of a show of strength before Alexander I. He was thereby inventing—two hundred years early—the equation that supported the Cold War of 1945. “The reputation of weapons is entirely equivalent to actual power,” he told his marshals. To display your fangs—that is, muskets, cannons, and cavalry sabers—would be sufficient. Impressed with the deployment by the River Neman and terrified by the prospect of charging cavalry, the Tsar would capitulate at the first jingling, resume his favorable disposition, and restore the alliance. A strange war that consisted in thrashing an adversary in order to turn him once more into a friend!

On no account would the Grande Armée advance beyond Minsk. Let’s say Smolensk at most. They might even go back to spend the winter in Paris. That was the plan.

What Napoleon had not foreseen was that Alexander I was no longer afraid. The Tsar had changed. He was following different maneuvers and had made new friendships. Britain, Sweden, Austria, and even the Ottoman Porte were now Russian allies. Saint Petersburg had become the anti-Napoleonic salon where the future members of the coalition were preparing for 1814.

It was 5 A.M. There was silence in Jacques’s apartment. We were drinking black tea, delaying the moment we’d be going out into the freezing air, feverish from lack of sleep, and I was telling Gras that Napoleon was not the guiltiest party in the 1812 affair. Something that relieved us of the remorse of commemorating the campaign.

“Oh, that’s Sokolov’s theory! I read his book in Donetsk.”

“Sokolov?” Goisque says. “The man who thinks he’s Napoleon?”

Oleg Sokolov, history lecturer at the University of Saint Petersburg, devoted a cult to the Emperor. Every year, he organized historical reconstructions. Thousands of extras in helmets, boots, and 1812 costumes would re-enact the battles. He would wear a bicorn and command the maneuvers. He published Le Combat de deux Empires: la Russie d’Alexandre Ier contre la France de Napoleon – 1805-1812[3] in which he concealed nothing about Alexander I’s responsibility in the Franco-Russian war. He highlighted the Tsar’s betrayal and Napoleon’s efforts to bring him back to his Tilsit promises. This way, he had attracted the wrath of his readers. Sokolov had broken a Russian rule: History is a delicate science and you must never speak ill of your own people, even if you’re telling the truth.

We were now in the garage. An electric coffee pot stood on the back seat, steaming, lit by an oily light bulb. Vassily was busy welding some undefinable parts. We crammed our tools and baggage in the trunk of the sidecar. We were ready to set off. The Ural looked ready too.

On June 25th, 1812, the Grande Armée had crossed the Neman. A column of four hundred and fifty thousand men had gone over the river, carting a thousand cannons over the ford. It was the same river where, in 1807, Alexander I and Napoleon, sheltering in a tent erected on a raft, had signed the Tilsit Treaty and sworn mutual peace. Five years later, fate had brought the Emperor back to the banks where this agreement had been sealed. Napoleon should have been inspired to reread Heraclitus and hesitate awhile before crossing his Acheron. “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” the wise man of Ephesus said.

Moreover, on the grassy bank, shortly before the start of the war, a strange event should have warned Napoleon that dreadful omens were accumulating in his horoscope. A hare shot through the legs of his horse. The mount swerved and the Emperor—a better horseman than the dreadful Saint Paul—fell, picked himself up, got back into the saddle, and paid no more attention to the incident.

“There’s another hare intervention in history,” Gras, who had read everything and drunk almost nothing, said. “I think it’s in Herodotus.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes. One day, Darius, the Persian king, arrived before the Scythian cavalry. The two armies faced each other, ready for attack. A hare burst forth from amid the ranks, and the Scythians scattered and chased after the animal. Their hunting instinct had been awakened and they only thought of hunting down the hare. This frightened Darius. If, at the moment of engaging in battle, these men could be distracted by a damned little animal, it meant they were fearless, emotionless brutes. And so the Persians, upon discovering this, turned back.”

“It’s what we would have done,” Vitaly said.

Vassily and Vitaly were Russian, therefore superstitious. If Napoleon had had Slav or Oriental blood, he would have cursed the Neman hare, spat in the wild grass, mounted his horse, and sounded the return to Paris.

“That kind of story can really screw up your plans,” Goisque said.

In the absence of signs and not very au fait with oracles, we stepped on the gas at 8 A.M. on December 2nd, 2012. Nothing could have diverted us from our obsession: to go back home.

Russians have a passion for giving streets disproportionate names. An eerie street slashing across an industrial estate stuck in a marsh can be called “Enthusiasts’ Road.” One in an abandoned township “October Revolution Pioneers’ Boulevard.” A path between two rows of sheds “Science Academy Avenue.” To go back to Paris from Moscow, all you have to do is follow the direction of Russian irony and plunge into “Kutuzov Avenue,” named for the general who kicked the French out of Russia.

Kutuzov was fat, but still a genius. On August 17th, 1812, Alexander I thanked his army commander, Barclay de Tolly, and replaced him with Field Marshal Kutuzov. The avoidance strategy established by Barclay de Tolly was thereby rejected. Since the French army had crossed the Neman, Barclay de Tolly had effectively chosen evasion. His was a brilliant idea. He had anticipated that geography could be his best ally. Its hugeness would overcome the Grande Armée better than the warfare at his disposal. The country was a rut and the plain a mousetrap. The horizon would swallow the French.

Napoleon, attracted by the golden tints of Moscow, eager for battle, seeking a confrontation that would conform to his strategy, would be trapped by the dungeon-like steppes, the frightening monotony of the forest, and the nothingness of the sky. All you had to do was let him sink in deeper. You would retire, refuse all battle, and leave the cohorts to fray in long meanders of men and beasts harassed by vermin, afflicted by the heat, exasperated by the receding enemy.

Anyone who has walked for a few days amid the vegetation of this country knows the despair and anguish that crush your soul, at the end of a day where every effort to get closer to the horizon has proved in vain. The Russian expanse is discouraging.

Except that there was a problem. The Russian people, the Saint Petersburg elite, were no longer tolerating this climbdown. They were demanding a clash. The tournament of shadows could not last any longer for a nation humiliated by the French invasion. Hatred demanded a bloodbath. So the task of cleanse their honor in battle fell to the old chief Kutuzov. Kutuzov was the author of Borodino. He chose the location of the massacre that took place on September 7th, “beneath the walls of Moscow,” to use Napoleon’s expression, or seventy-five miles from the capital (but why quibble when you rule over the world?) All day, infantry, cavalry, and artillery fought over redoubts, taking turns to lose and gain them, until the French ended up seizing them. Napoleon found that Russians went to their deaths “like machines.”

Goisque reminded me of how we’d met this French officer, on the Shamali Plain, in Afghanistan. He was responsible for the officer training of the Afghan National Army. The man must have been familiar with Napoleon’s formula. He’d left us in front of a troop of soldiers advancing in line, during a training session. “Look at this. They’ve been trained by the Russians. They offer themselves up in rows. That’s how the Soviets must have advanced in Stalingrad.”

For a long time, the Borodino massacre held the terrible record of “the most deadly battle since the invention of gunpowder.” On one side, twenty-eight thousand Frenchmen died. On the other side, fifty thousand Russians. This clash heralded the mass slaughters of the American Civil War and the battles of 1914, those storms of steel beneath which 20th-century man was relegated to the rank of material—like lead and powder—which the military could use to ensure victory. Borodino marked our entry into the era of Titans. From that day onward, war would no longer be contented with a meager catch but would demand mass sacrifice. The difference—a major one—was in the way the men fell. Under Napoleon, the soldier would die in battle by the fatal blow of another soldier discharging his volley of lead on him. In other words, men would kill one another individually. In 1914, the situation was reversed: seventy-five percent of victims would be mowed down by artillery. Under Foch, the slaughter would become blind…

A Ural with a sidecar isn’t worth much in the Moscow traffic. The asphalt is ruled by Darwinian laws of selection. As soon as we left, Goisque wanted us to take a detour through the Kremlin.

“We don’t have the time,” I said.

“What about my photos, guys?”

So we had to wind our way to Red Square.

Heading to the banks of the Moskva River through the streets of the capital, I thought about Barclay de Tolly’s strategy. The British have a word for this art of dodging: escapism. When faced with an obstacle, the escapist advocates flight. Like shooting stars, wild horses, and streams of clear water, the escapist cannot bear collision, friction, or the ugliness of contact. He considers even quibbling vulgar. He thinks it’s better to turn on his heels, and is akin to the grace of a ballet dancer crossing the stage from one side of the wings to the other in four doe-like leaps. He prefers the about-turn of a butterfly to a charge of cattle. I’d lived the first forty years of my life according to this principle and now wasn’t very affected by it. I had no anchor, not the slightest attachment, no family, very few enemies, no children, and no washing machine, and my only friends were discreet people imbued with the same philosophy. Gras, for instance, would measure the degree of affection of his entourage by their ability to “put up with absences and silences.” Was escapism cowardice? Perhaps, but I could care less. Let’s flee, I thought, since tomorrow will be worse than today. To hell with everything and long live Barclay de Tolly!

Moreover, Kutuzov’s behavior after the Battle of Borodino and then during the French Retreat proved that he wasn’t really opposed to escapism either.

If we rely on simple statistics and consider the Grim Reaper as an accountant, the Battle of Borodino was a Napoleonic victory. The Russian losses were greater than the French. But as far as victory goes it was a perverse victory. What had the Emperor gained? The right to go a little deeper into the country. He hadn’t obtained the definitive military success that would have served him the Tsar’s surrender on a plate. Had he erred too much on the side of caution? Many marshals blamed him for having balked at sending the Imperial Guard to deal the final blow.

Until then, Napoleon would appear in the theater of operations, devising plans, giving orders, staying up all night, pacing up and down the bivouacs, scolding some, haranguing others, then, at dawn, he would direct the operations, watch his thoughts being incarnated in the movement of his troops, and, in the evening, he would have an unmitigated success where the genius of the maneuver, the audacity of the technique, and French fury would strike nations, subjugate monarchs, and the battle pass into posterity.

At Borodino, however, he was timid. It wasn’t the Battle of Austerlitz. Murat even dared say, “I don’t recognize the Emperor’s genius anymore.” Napoleon let Kutuzov slip through his fingers. The Tsar was in no way weakened and the Russian army continued to march behind the screen of silver birches, as elusive as a bank of mist in a bunch of gorse. Moreover, the more the Russians eluded him, the more Napoleon—certain that peace would be played out in Moscow—urged his columns to hurry. Was summer 1812 a conquest? No, it was a fall into the abyss.

We parked on the cobbles behind the apse of Saint Basil’s Cathedral and managed to persuade a militiaman to let us stay there for a few minutes. At the foot of Notre Dame, in Paris, I often thought of 13th-century peasants traveling to Paris from Hurepoix or Gâtinais and suddenly discovering the monster of stone with its three hundred and thirty-foot spire soaring through the air. To us, it was a Gothic cathedral. To them, the vision of a vessel of mysteries and mischief, a fossilized insect becalmed in a city of timber. Before the colorful bulbs of Saint Basil, I thought of the French soldiers. Of how, on that September 14th, they must have been struck by these Byzantine domes, these red crenellations and confectionery bulbs, rising in the city of “twelve hundred sky-blue belfries and domes, sown with golden stars and linked together with gilded chains.”[4] Sergeant Bourgogne begins his memoirs with the following admission: “Many other capital cities I had seen, such as Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, and Madrid, had inspired no more than ordinary feelings in me, but this was something different: for me, as well as for everyone else, there was something magical about it.”

“Now clear off.”

A universal rule: never let a cop tell you something twice.

All three of us owed our knowledge of Napoleon to recent reading. We could have spent the rest of our lives in libraries, since there had been a new book about the First French Empire published every day since 1815. Gras had devoured the memoirs of half a dozen verbose Empire barons and officers. Goisque preferred testimonies written on the hoof by enlisted men and non-commissioned officers: he swore only by Sergeant Bourgogne, his fellow man, his brother, a tireless Velite who worshipped the Emperor, accepted his ordeals, and took his share of pleasure when fate offered it. Bourgogne left behind visual, naïve memoirs. Personally, I liked Caulaincourt, Napoleon’s Grand Squire. I had taken his account of the Russian campaign with me. Caulaincourt was a complex character: French Ambassador at the Court of Alexander I, he had dissuaded Napoleon from invading Russia. With the impending doom, he displayed his knowledge of the country, his foresight, and his tactical genius to try and find a solution for the Grande Armée and, at the same time, the courage and coolness of a Muscovite girl. His text was a blend of high-brow thoughts and anecdotes. Caulaincourt was as comfortable with a sword in hand on a moonless night as he was sitting at the table of princes.

Books would be our guides on the road. They would tell us where to go through and where to sound a halt. Opening them in the evening would mark the start of another journey, no longer on the asphalt of Slav highways, but through the memory of 1812 survivors who had picked up a quill to conjure up the nightmare.

I thought that Goisque, with his sense of reality and his military past, was the embodiment of a kind of Bourgogne. Had he not himself been a sergeant on the Igman slopes during the Yugoslav war? Gras, more touchy and introverted, would make an excellent Caulaincourt. Hadn’t he spent the last five years working in diplomacy?

“And who will you be, Tesson?”

“Napoleon, of course,” I said, fully aware that this kind of project led to the asylum.

When the bulk of the French troops reached Moscow on September 14th and 15th, they discovered a “magical” city, of course, definitely Oriental, but desperately deserted. Not an officer in the streets, not a Boyar, not even a soldier, or a single shopkeeper: the Russians had abandoned the city. Barclay de Tolly’s beloved escapism had become the strategy of an entire nation. There were only a few tramps, a handful of Moujiks in rags, and a few Jewish shopkeepers roaming on the sidewalks. Here and there, shapes would vanish down an alley, eerie and furtive—and why were they waving those torches? The French columns went deeper into the dead avenues soon to be ravaged by fire. Napoleon was about to find out that, in terms of pyrotechnics, next to Alexander, Nero was an amateur.

After Borodino, the Tsar had made up his mind to sacrifice his capital city. Since his field marshal had failed to hold back the French advance, he would deliver Moscow to the flames. The city would not fall into the hands of the Corsican Antichrist. He reluctantly ordered the fire, thereby giving History the largest pyre a monarch ever produced. Moscow would be torched so that the Russian Empire might survive. Rostopchin, the city’s governor, was charged with the task. He freed all common law prisoners and ordered them to start the fire. All the water pumps were removed from the city to stop the invaders from using them, and the ex-prisoners started setting ablaze the bazaar of Kitay-gorod, the warehouses, the timber churches, and the houses of the nobility! The first wind-swept sparks were seen during the night of September 14th to 15th. Day and night, the city burned with a raging fire. On September 16th, installed in the Kremlin, Napoleon was nearly trapped by the fire. The Emperor owed his life to an open alley behind the rampart and a hidden flight of steps that led him to the Moskva River. The fire was mirrored in the waters, and the Old Guard, who’d seen it all, from Egypt to Spain, from the pyramids to Jena, thought they were looking at hell. The bulbs turned red, buildings crashed down in the rustle of charcoaled timber, the air burned their throats, and the heat melted the bells. Before the blood-stained sky and burning palaces, Napoleon realized he had underestimated the sacrificial rage of the Russians, Alexander’s determination, and that Slav ability to go to the bitter end which would, a hundred and fifty years later, make thousands of human waves run aground in Stalingrad, on the allegedly invincible reefs of the Wehrmacht.

The Grande Armée had ventured into a swamp, pursued an army of ghosts, and obtained half a victory.

All that for a heap of ashes.

Why had Napoleon dug his heels in while in Moscow? Why had he allowed the jaws of winter to close on him? He had thought that, by occupying the economic capital, the Tsar would be cornered and end up pleading for a peace treaty. The French emperor had already harbored such illusions by the River Neman. In the smoking rubble of Moscow, he kept feeding on his own hopes. Misled by his self-confidence, he did not listen to General de Caulaincourt, who was urging him to leave.

While the King of Kings procrastinated, in Saint Petersburg Alexander remained inflexible. You do not negotiate with the devil. He was no longer the French sovereign’s friend, but then had he ever been that? Napoleon had overlooked something: that Saint Petersburg, the spiritual capital, was more important in Alexander’s eyes than the secular capital. Moscow could fall, burn down, vanish from the map, but Russia would remain.

So time passed in the soot dust. From September 15th to October 19th, eating his heart out, drawing up plans, ruling the Empire from a distance through a system of express mail and dispatch riders organized by Caulaincourt, Napoleon waited, hoped, and convinced himself. He lost a month. The troops of General Winter had time to get ready for attack.

So, we backfired along Kutuzov Avenue. Moscow, the large capital of iron, steel, tears, and stars, was pushing us out through the West Gate, the name of which is associated with all the woes of the Grande Armée.

On the avenue, a car brushed past us, the window opened, and a young Russian with a pointy nose shouted, “Tired of life, are you, guys?”

“Shut up, you jerk,” I said. Driving does not raise the standard of your thoughts.

Russians have paved the path of their history with glorious monuments and compelling statues. We came across one of Kutuzov the Fat and one of Gagarin. Then there was a war plane during take-off on a pedestal. Then we reached the suburbs: we were on the road to Moyjak when a notice appeared that confirmed that our journey no longer belonged just to the realm of dreams, pleasant distractions, or drunken projects: “Borodino, fifty-five miles.”

The bike was rocking terribly, with Goisque too heavy at the back; Gras, asleep in the sidecar, wasn’t counterbalancing the profile shift. It was like being on an unmaneuverable raft with my two friends. Both were imperturbable. For years they had been traveling around the world in the worst possible conditions without a single complaint.

Gras, 30, had kept his childish habits. He drank nearly a gallon of pineapple juice a day, swam in the pool for two hours, fed on chocolate, and looked like a high-strung hockey champion. He’d been living in the old Soviet Empire for eight years, learned Russian in Omsk, and stayed in Vladivostok for four. He enjoyed silence and had found Siberia to match his melancholy disposition. Later, he had become the director of the Alliance Française in Donetsk, in the Ukrainian Donbas region. His Russian friends considered him one of their own. His female students were secretly in love with him. His work superiors envied his detachment. The old fogies at the Embassy slightly dreaded this ironic young hussar who felt so at ease in the country’s society. He was preparing a thesis in Geography on the borders of empires. He would quite happily never have left mountain peaks, deep forests, and this desolate geography which, just by itself, suited his sadness. He channelled his love for Russia into beautiful books his blond students read in full in the hope of attracting a look from their teacher. His black hair and dark skin never failed to attract the favor of Slav girls, while cops would frequently check on him because they mistook him for a Chechen. Once, in Pakistan, he broke a leg on a mountain wall and had to wait twenty-four hours for help, hanging off a piton at an altitude of sixteen thousand five hundred feet without worrying too much. Whenever we went walking in the forest or tackled a summit climb, he made it a point of honor not to carry enough equipment. He considered foresight vulgar. Soon enough, the situation would turn critical and then Gras, feeling in his element, would double his efforts to get out of the tight spot. The rest of the time, he was bored and couldn’t care less.

Goisque was earthier. He wouldn’t have been out of place in a Soissons trench in 1914. He was from Picardy, and attached to his land like a boot to clay. After visiting a hundred countries, he still considered a field of beets exhausted by the drizzle the most beautiful spectacle the planet could offer. His Antwerp stevedore build was at odds with his fine hands. A pair of piercing blue eyes shielded by Neanderthal eyebrows completed his paradoxical look, as though nature had refused to grant him any gradation between brutality and finesse. He’d been taking photos of the world for the French press for twenty-five years. His style was eclectic. He would accompany the minister to Afghanistan one day, jump above the Volga with Russian parachutists the next, then spend two weeks on board the Charles-de-Gaulle before going off to report on masseuses in the Mekong delta. We’d camped together in the Gobi Desert, the Siberian Taiga, by the Caspian Sea, in Tibet and Afghanistan, and by the fire he’d tell me about his time as a UN Peacekeeper, his years as a humanitarian volunteer in the Cambodian jungle, crossing the ocean on a Vietnamese junk boat, traveling to Kapisa, Sudan, and the Caucasus. He’d conclude, much to my annoyance, that none of these memories was a patch on spending a spring morning in a farmhouse full of children’s shrieks. Goisque had one obsession in his reports: the light. It was his passion, his obsession. If the sky had been clear that day, he could go to sleep on the ground, in the cold, with a bone to chew on, and a blissful smile on his face. But if the light had been scarce, not even the most luxurious hotel or the friendliest company could distract him from his rambling: “It’s all screwed, this shitty report.” I therefore had beside me a pessimistic dandy and a photon monomaniac. A fine combination.

We weren’t dressed warmly enough, the 1.4°F air was biting at my kneecaps, and Latvian trucks, looming huge at our weak rear, would brush past us, spattering our jackets with snow. Doubt was worming its way into me: what the hell was I doing on a Ural in the middle of December, with two fools in tow, when these damned machines are made to transport small, 90-pound Ukrainian women from Yalta beach to Simferopol on a summer afternoon?

All around us there was ice, snowdrifts, gray suburbs, crumbling factories, and crooked isbas. The landscape had a hangover. Even the trees grew askew. The sky was the color of dirty flannel. And the salty mud churned out by thirty-three-ton trucks gave us a taste of polluted fish in our mouths.

A motorbike helmet is a meditation cell. Trapped inside, ideas circulate better than in the open air. It would be ideal to be able to smoke in there. Sadly, the lack of space in an integral crash helmet prevents one from drawing on a Havana cigar, and the ensuing wind blows out the burning tip when the helmet is open. A helmet is also a sounding box. It’s nice to sing inside it. It’s like being in a recording studio. I hummed the epigraph from Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. These lines were to become my mantra for the weeks to come:

Our life is a journey

Through winter and night

We try to find our way

Beneath a sky without light

The lady at the service station got frightened. With all our layers of clothing, we looked like cosmonauts.

“Where are you heading?” a truck driver asked.

“Paris,” I said.

“On a Ural?” he said.

“Yes.”

Before slamming shut the door of his Volvo, he issued the mythical Red Army slogan: “Retreat? Never!”

As far as the French were concerned, it was not a matter of retreating but of fleeing. At the head of his weakened army, Napoleon first aimed at the city of Kaluga, less than a hundred and twenty-five miles south of Moscow. He wanted to take another way and not go where a swarm of soldiers—might as well say locusts—had devastated the fields. Farther south, he hoped to find a rich countryside, a fairer climate, and well-stocked storehouses. Von Clausewitz outlined the following principle in The 1812 Campaign in Russia: “Anyone who retreats in enemy country needs a well laid-out route, anyone who performs such a retreat in very bad conditions needs it twice as much, and anyone who wants to leave Russia after going into it a hundred and twenty miles needs it three times as much.” Napoleon launched his hundred thousand survivors down a route that had not been prepared.

The plan to extricate themselves through the south was abandoned less than a week later. The Russians awaited the French at Maloyaroslavets, on the road to Kaluga. On October 24th, General Dokhturov attacked the vanguard of Viceroy Eugène without an order from Field Marshal Kutuzov. Now that it was in flight, the Field Marshal meant to harry the army without ever confronting it, push it the way a hound chases after a deer in the woods, and “let it melt down” by escorting its flight. He wanted to be the whip on their backs. “It was absurd to stand in the way of men who were devoting all their energy to running away,” Tolstoy writes in War and Peace.

Exasperated by his commander’s restraint and eager to fight, Dokhturov launched his troops. The clash at Maloyaroslavets was merciless. The Russians felt that luck was changing sides. The French suspected they were playing a vital match. Dismembered and demoralized, the Grande Armée, already frozen, did not fail to live up to its name. And yet “it was already carrying within it the inevitable germs of death, and the chemical conditions for decomposition,” Tolstoy thought he knew. Ten thousand corpses later, Russians sounded the retreat. However, they had managed to arrest the momentum of the retreat, hamper the initial plan, and sow doubt where there was already discouragement.

Napoleon gave up on the road to the south, on the well-stocked villages, and full barns. On October 26th, he made his decision: the army would return to Smolensk, through where it had come, through the land it had burned down. The cohort turned north-west to return to the major Moscow-Smolensk road. With his Guard at his side, Napoleon headed the march. Going towards a path “that had already been trodden,” as Tolstoy writes, going headlong into a yet unsuspected tragedy, unaware that he was taking the first step on the path to his fall, he went toward Borodino.

We arrived in Borodino at 3 P.M. When we left Moscow, we had decided to go straight to the battlefield and not take the detour via Maloyaroslavets. Two hours of pretty snowfall had restored its looks to the landscape. A road that ran parallel to the highway brought us closer to our destination through a forest Andersen would have authored if landscapes could be written. We inspected the army of white trees. We drove past small villages, foot down on the gas, and the Ural was doing fifty miles an hour on the crusty road. A supermarket here, a service station there. Wherever soldiers had fallen, humans had resumed the course of life and erected buildings necessary for their comfort. Man had gotten used to living on top of dead bones.

“Good thing ghosts don’t exist,” Gras said, “or the place would be unlivable.”

I am now sorry we didn’t drive through the forests of Maloyaroslavets. Our impatience (Borodino was a magnet) had prevented us from seeing a place where the Emperor experienced a perfectly Stendhalian scene. On the morning of the 25th, shortly before the battle, Napoleon decided to check the enemy’s position. Accompanied by Caulaincourt, Lauriston, and a few officers and Chasseurs, he rode toward the Russian positions at dawn. During the night, the small squad didn’t notice that he was going beyond the French limits and he went straight into the Cossack camp. War cries were heard. The Chasseurs contained the enemy, reinforcements arrived, and Napoleon was saved. For a long time, this sent chills up Caulaincourt’s spine. “The Emperor was alone with the Prince of Neufchâtel and me. All three of us had swords in our hands. […] If the Cossacks who came under our noses and briefly surrounded us had been more audacious and silent on the way, instead of screaming and clattering at the edge of the road […] the Emperor would have been killed or captured.”

As the Ural parted the curtain of snowflakes, I thought about the scene. I thought about “the greatest captain who ever was” on horseback, in the middle of the night, ready to cross swords with the enemy. I thought of Sergeant Bourgogne who, after the skirmish, revealed that “the Emperor laughed at the thought of having nearly been captured.” And I remembered pictures of Yeltsin on his tank before a White House in flames, of de Gaulle lighting his cigarette during the Notre Dame gun battle of 1944, of Chancellor Helmut Kohl charging against a crowd of detractors and knocking down his bodyguards. Great men aren’t forbidden from showing grit every so often.

Borodino, capital of sorrow. We stopped the front wheel of our vehicle in the snow, at the foot of the monument erected in Kutuzov’s memory. From up there, he took in the entire plain where French fury pushed into Russian courage. There fell the bodies of the seventy thousand victims of the “battle of giants.” Silver birch and aspen groves decorated the countryside with gray medals. The forefathers of these trees must have thrived after that carnage. War kills men, torments animals, pushes away gods, works the land, and fertilizes the soil. There were smoking farmhouses, crowded in folds of the land. Hamlets seemed to shiver. A sob lingered over this destruction. The dead gave the aluminum landscape solemnity.

“Hey, guys, read this,” Gras said.

“Rather, you translate.”

There was an inscription engraved in the stone marking the spot where Kutuzov had watched the battle, “Here, we fought against Europe.” Technically speaking, this sentence wasn’t incorrect, since the Grande Armée was speckled with nations of the empire and its ranks were increased by Italian, Polish, Prussian, and Austrian recruits. From a historical point of view, this statement was dishonest because the Russians could also claim foreign support, especially from Britain. From the cultural point of view, the Russians liked that summary, since they were convinced of their extra-European destiny, certain they had the mission to open their own way between Asia and the West. From a spiritual point of view, the formula was crucial: the Battle of Borodino had caused blood to flow that had been used as a holy Chrism for baptizing a brand-new feeling of Russian patriotism.

We cut across a field to reach a monastery built by Nicholas II in 1912 on the occasion of the centenary. The snow grew thicker. The cylinders were roaring in the ruts because we were too heavy and the track was a gash of frozen mud. Our flag was flapping at the prow of the sidecar. The row of trees formed sad bundles. The monastery appeared, blurred by the slow flakes that got stuck on the headlight wiper. It was a brick building, graceless, grinning and bearing the torment. Then, we saw the outline of Borodino’s main monument at the end of an alley of trees: a black pillar with a gold cross on the top. Opposite, there was a small museum devoted to the battle.

“We bewildered the French by withdrawing skillfully.” This was the kind of declaration we read on the documents in the display cabinets. The Russians wrote their history by taking quite a lot of liberties. On the contrary, the French thought Russians had a “passive” courage.[5] However, Russian enthusiasm was fair and square. Is it a crime to sacrifice a little truth to pride?

The snow poured silence onto the road. Night fell, and it continued to snow in the dark. In Moyjak, thanks to Mikhail, the watchman of a truck garage, we found somewhere to stay in a workmen’s club attached to a factory. In a modest room, heated by the local thermal factory, we were glad we didn’t have to build a fire and keep watch in the Cossack night, roll up in bad coats, or protect ourselves against the snow under a few valuable tapestries snatched off Moscow palace walls.

We even unearthed an open sauna. In Russia, for a few hundred rubles, you can purify your body and cleanse your soul in public steam rooms. It was 176°F in the wooden hut. We were there, stark naked, felt hats on our heads, taking turns to whip one another with veniki, silver birch branches which, when slapped on the skin, are supposed to open the pores, stir the blood, and warm you up. It took at least an hour of pummeling for our bodies to forget that they’d been very cold on the road. And yet we’d left Moscow only a day earlier!

At midnight, Vassily rang. “OK, guys?”

“What about the repairs?” I said.

“Finished. I mean almost,” he said.

“When will you catch up?”

“We’ll just finish tweaking things tonight, have the oil changed, fill up at dawn, set off, and be in Borodino by midday tomorrow.”

“I hope so,” I said.

“Hope is the last thing to die,” he said.

DAY TWO.

FROM BORODINO TO VYAZMA

Unfortunately, well-being—like energy and happiness—can’t be stored. If there’s a raging storm early in the morning, then it will jump at your throat whether or not you have simmered in a banya the night before and slept in a warm bed. That morning, the Ural had vanished under the snow. We shoveled and went to the battlefield to wait for our friends.

Around October 28th, 1812, almost ten days after leaving Moscow, the Grande Armée reached Borodino and crossed the same field where the battle had raged fifty-two days earlier. The residents had not returned to the villages. The ground was strewn with putrefying corpses. Heads and limbs were sticking out of the soil. The sky stank with miasma and flocks of scavenging birds reigned over this tableau. And so the soldiers walked on, sometimes crushing the flesh of their comrades or adversaries with their laced boots. There was the odd moan: a survivor, a ghost unwanted by death, who had spent two months feeding on the dead flesh of his brothers, and found refuge in the carcasses of animals. In the collective imagination, crossing the Borodino field represents the beginning of those idealized images of the Grande Armée soldier spending the night in a horse’s entrails. Sergeant Bourgogne is quite candid: “There was nothing sadder than the sight of these dead who had barely kept their human form…”

This made me think. I found the “nothing sadder” extraordinarily restrained. What would the rest of us have felt before such a sight? How would we have described this Borodino plain, we who had not accepted the fact that eighty-nine of our soldiers should have given their lives over ten years of war in Afghanistan? How could these men bear what they saw? Does one really get used to being near the dead? Was it our nerves that had weakened over eight generations? Over our forty years of life, we had seen a few corpses, perhaps thirty but not much more: close friends or relatives dying in their beds, some killed in accidents, fallen in the mountains, or dropped dead on the road. But they, the soldiers of the year 1812, were actually treading over fields of flesh, sleeping in thalwegs “full of putrefying corpses”—Bourgogne again—seeing their regiments decimated by artillery in a few hours, their friends of twenty years cut in half by the edge of a saber, and getting to the evening at the end of days when seventy thousand men had been torn to pieces all around them.

“You see, guys,” Gras said, “perhaps the thing about modernity isn’t so much that we’ve become a society of the spectacle, but just that the spectacle has grown gentler.”

“And for that let’s be thankful,” I said.

The other explanation is provided by Caulaincourt. It evokes all that the hapless infantrymen of 1914 put up with. They tolerated being the witnesses of horror because they were also its victims: “Perhaps we owed our carefree attitude to the fact that the dangers each of us faced personally dulled the pity which, in other circumstances, the painful spectacle before our eyes would have inspired.”

At noon, Vassily calls. “There’s a problem with the generator. We’re still in Moscow.”

“Will you be long?”

“No, we finished. You go ahead. We’ll join you in Vyazma tonight. We’re faster, anyway: there’s three of you, you’re heavy, and you’re French.”

There were other monuments erected on the Borodino field. One of them paid homage to the dead of the Grande Armée; it had been unveiled by President Giscard d’Estaing during his mandate. You had to push through the powdery snow in order to get close to it.

“Have you noticed?” Goisque said, “Only the passage to Russian monuments is swept by the maintenance department.”

Coming from a country where much attention is paid to the Other, to our victims, our adversaries, our enemies, where we never missed an opportunity to blame ourselves for having defended our interests, and to apologize for winning, we did find something slightly cavalier about this difference in attitude.

We drove to the Minsk road through small country lanes. The bike wheels had a good grip on the hard snow. If it weren’t for the backfiring, we could have been on a sleigh, riding through fairy-tale forests. I’d miscalculated the gas reserve, and we broke down four miles from the main road. Gras and I set off with a can, toward a village becalmed in the snowdrift, a mile away, behind a curtain of poplars, and left Goisque to watch over the Ural. No sooner had we reached the isbas than a police car stopped by the motorbike and sidecar. The Russians syphoned their tank, gave us a gallon, and left wishing Goisque that he “may not die.” The Russians were delighted by the sight of the flag, the bicorn, and our imperial insignia. The name of Napoleon always caused them a wriggle of pleasure. Mentioning to people the name of someone they have triumphed over is one of those little joys it would be a shame to deprive them of. That day, we owed our gallon of gas to the Emperor’s aura.

In the winter, the road to Minsk isn’t advisable for an overloaded bike with sidecar that can do fifty miles an hour tops. A steady line of trucks drove west, brushing the aquaplaning on the disgusting mud. Latvians, Czechs, Russians, and Germans drove in a line, at full speed. The entire old Eastern bloc was traveling on the road, transporting Russian vodka, illegal Tajiks, and Polish meat, and didn’t give a damn about the little khaki-green Ural the size of a shoe polish kit.

It was there, on the way to Vyazma, that the cold bit into the Retreat columns. “The following day, the 29th,” Caulaincourt writes, “we were in Ghjat. It was bitterly cold. […] Here, the winter was already more noticeable.” The cold… It was the cold, even more than the distance, the Cossack raids, starvation, and epidemics, that would bring down the Grande Armée, and “melt it down,” to quote Kutuzov. In Moscow, the soldiers had enjoyed good weather. They had made up for the forced marches by piercing barrels and getting drunk on Jamaican rum, German schnapps, Russian vodka, and everything not snatched away by the fire. They had organized balls, forcing Jewish fiddlers hiding in the rubble to provide the tunes. Some had even found themselves women thanks to the principle of life’s oscillation Sergeant Bourgogne puts forward in his Memoirs: “From battle to love and from love to battle.” But how many soldiers had devoted their months of billeting to making muffs, woolen coats, rabbit gloves, and fur chapkas? Only the Polish soldiers had taken a few precautions. They were Slavs, so they knew what fuel was required by the winter.

How many had listened to Caulaincourt who—almost the only one—worried about the winter, advocated that studded horseshoes be melted down, and clothes be lined? No one. The Grand Squire had even tried to warn the Emperor. “Sire, beware of the trying winter over there.”

“Caulaincourt, you’re already worrying about freezing.”

Napoleon held meteorology in contempt. One day in 1809, when he met Lamarck, who had just laid the foundation stones of this science, he said, “Your meteorology […] is a dishonor to your old age.” The King of Kings, confident in his own star, did not accept that climatic circumstances could get in the way of his destiny. It wasn’t up to the sky to command! On November 1st, 1812, in Vyazma, when the weather allowed for the hope of a milder spell, he told the Prince of Neuchâtel, “The stories about the Russian winters must have only served to scare children.” The geniuses of this world always sport contempt for cosmic laws in proportion with the confidence they place in their own tiny person. The Grande Armée had been the grasshopper, then the cold wind had started to blow…

Night was falling over Russia. There was still no sign of Vyazma’s lights. Trucks were brushing past us and the air pockets caused by their bulk sucked us toward the middle of the road. We were like a toy tossed between the walls of sheet steel. A pothole would have solved all our problems and removed any regrets. We had to fight against the cold, the condensation, the night, the traffic, the snow, and the black ice. And of all the hounds snapping at our rears there was the worst of them: sleepiness. I fought tooth and nail in my helmet so I wouldn’t close my eyes. Speaking of my eyes, blind as a bat, I couldn’t see a thing through the triple protection of my glasses, my mask, and the visor of my helmet. In the beginning, I tried to wipe away the condensation but my muddy gloves left opaque smears on the Plexiglas. Then, hunched on my seat, trying to interpret what I saw to the best of my ability, I decided that Gras and Goisque were peculiar companions. To trust me with their lives—me, who couldn’t make out Serbian tail lights farther than thirty yards away—was one hell of a proof of friendship. Goisque, at least, was aided by his Christian faith, but Gras, who, like myself, believed in nothing but the night and running in the mountains, must have been desperate or, at least, as little attached to his life as a sidecar to the motorbike it’s pulled by.

“Vyazma, six miles” the sign said. We couldn’t complain, really. Does one have a right to complain on a road where men ate one another, horses fell by the thousand then were torn to shreds by ghosts that were left to chew on the leather of their boots? The reason for this journey was precisely to make this nightmare sink deep into our heads in order to hush the inner laments and to wring the neck of this shrew, this repugnant tendency that is man’s true enemy: self-pity. Since our journey along the path of the French Retreat, whenever I’ve found myself on cliffs that were too steep, or in bivouacs that were too cold, I’ve often thought of those poor devils crawling on the icy road, huddled in their rags, fed on rotting tripe, and I’ve swallowed back the phlegm of whining rising to my lips.

How did we get to Vyazma? How did we find ourselves in that little city-center hotel? It was 5°F that night.

“Guys, this is really stupid, you know,” Goisque said. “I know we’ve done some crazy stuff but there, on that road, in the midst of those trucks, with us clinging to that little sidecar and Tesson who can’t see a thing, I mean it’s one of the most dangerous trips of my life.”

And, since we agreed with him, since all three of us had felt the breath of trucks on our necks hissing like the blade of the Grim Reaper, we decided to go and plunge into a bowl of hot borscht in the nearest café.

DAY THREE.

FROM VYAZMA TO SMOLENSK

Our room was like a battlefield. Our clothes were hanging on lines extending from the light fixture to the door, and from the window to the bed. The night before, we’d drunk half a gallon of vodka instead of the intended three small glasses, had come back quite rowdy, and gotten into a friendly fight around midnight. I’d held my own against Cédric’s chunky frame for at least three seconds, but the tackle was enough to smash the closet. We’d gotten back up, started again, and had fun. The curtains were half-torn. The furniture had been knocked over. The table, overturned, was buried under our soaked parkas. The helmets were dripping in the bath tub. A Romani would have been shocked.

At dawn, over a hot coffee and cabbage soup, Vassily calls. The vodka from the night before was digging hollows between my temples. His voice pierced through my brain like a thick drill. “We’re still in Moscow,” he said. “We’re leaving at noon. We had to change the alternators.”

“Hey, guys, we’re getting fed up with this. You’ve got our bags and our stuff! We’re freezing our butts off, and the bike and sidecar are struggling with the three of us on top.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll join you between Vyazma and Smolensk,” he said. “We’re faster than you.”

“It’s been three days you’ve been saying this! I don’t believe you anymore.”

“Western man despairs very soon,” he said.

The weather had gotten milder: 17°F. The sky was blue, the sun a joyful ball above the forest. The bulbs were drops of pearly-gold in the morning hope. The bike started immediately and we took the road to Dorogobuzh with a light heart and an anvil in our heads.

Napoleon had reached Vyazma on October 31st. He stationed there on November 1st and left again at noon on the 2nd. The army that had left Moscow with over one hundred thousand soldiers was down to almost half!

Around us, that morning, the curtains of silver birches alongside the road had a blue glow. The saplings were whipping the lilac air and a pale yellow flow, escaped from the cold light, streaked the snowdrifts on the shoulders. I thought of Chagall and summoned shadows. What did that routing column look like? Like an army of ghosts. But colorful ghosts, in full dress.

Leaving Moscow, more or less bucked up after five months of being stationed in the capital, everyone wanted to bring back to their home country the fruit of his pillage. In his Memoirs, Sergeant Bourgogne makes an inventory of his booty with the innocence of victorious men. He departs, his bag weighed down by a “Chinese woman’s dress made of silk, woven with gold and silver,” a “piece of the cross of the great Ivan,” “a brown woman’s coat with green velvet lining,” as well as two paintings, one of which represented Neptune, the other the Judgement of Paris, a woman’s petticoat, a large collar lined with ermine, and a small Chinese vase… However, as soon as it started getting cold at the end of October, and snowing in Vyazma, these expensive fabrics, silk brocades, and palace hangings were only useful for protecting the numbed limbs and heads of the soldiers, whose “brains were freezing,” according to Bourgogne. And then there were tens of thousands of sergeants, officers and a mixture of civilians—because there were over a thousand craftsmen, actors, shopkeepers, women, and children who had chosen to follow the Grande Armée to escape Russian reprisals—tens of thousands of escapees, decked out in fancy hats they had stuffed with straw, draped in cotton fabrics padded with felt or wool, rolled up in satin canopies they had torn off the wood paneling of a palace, or wrapped in Bukhara rugs held together with silk ribbons.

Thus, they formed a grotesque column where, amid shakos, sabretaches, and regulation hullabaloo, you could glimpse a Russian lady’s cape, a sable, a piece of lace. Captain François, with two bullets in his leg, walked “with boots and worn-out shoes on his feet, a crutch in his hand […] covered in a pink cloak lined with ermine, with the hood over his head.”

This fancy-dress army was walking deeper and deeper into horror. On occasion, François tells us, the sight of these infantrymen in rags, with long icicles hanging from every hair in their beard, covered in skins “burned by the rare bivouac fires,” still managed to make a soldier laugh. Was laughter perhaps a way of warding off misfortune? Was it death sending its spasms?

The balance of wealth was reversed. Those who had loaded themselves with gold bells, Gardner porcelain, Petrodvorets-manufactured clocks, Baltic amber, and Siberian ivory were now coveting furs, flour, and even battered pans, which, on the market of ordeals, would be worth infinitely more than the rivers of pearls stolen from Moscow countesses. People started shedding their harvest. So the road, Bourgogne writes, ended up covered with “precious objects such as paintings, candelabra, and many books […] copies of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Buffon’s Natural History, bound in red morocco leather and with gilded spines.” Therefore, those who’d taken the precaution of kitting themselves out in earnest became the masters and exploiters of those who were carrying useless treasures, and would make money out of a pound of potatoes or a handful of oats, thereby adding individual usury to the general distress.

We were driving along the road, keeping to fifty miles an hour on the counter display. Behind the hedge of willows and reeds, stiff from the frost, ponds were slumbering. And, at the bottom of the ponds, lay the gold from the looting of Moscow. After about thirty miles, the Ural started showing signs of weakness. The engine was strained by the accumulation of snow. The valves were overheating and the track was getting worse. I would make Goisque and Gras frequently get off so we could take a section full of potholes on foot. The oil pan was scraping against the frozen mud. When a wheel sank into a hole, the exhaust pipe would slam hard against the ground. I had to step on the gas to push through. We exhausted the animal. I cut the engine fifty miles from Dorogobuzh. “We’re going to break the bike, guys,” I said. “We have to turn back.”

“The Guard dies but does not turn back,” Gras, who was turning all heroic, said.

“It’s not about the Guard but about the sidecar, pal.”

The alternative was to return to Vyazma and take the main road, the new Moscow-Smolensk highway, which ran parallel, twelve miles north of the historical route. We weren’t exactly thrilled about going back on ourselves, but we took to the track anyway, in the opposite direction.

The engine’s hiccuping doubled. The Ural was in severe pain. This wasn’t a machine suitable for grinding through powder. Vyazma was still far away. We wiped the soot off the spark plugs, then I left Goisque and Gras walking in the snow and drove to the village of Vasino to look for a driver to go pick up my friends. In the main street of the hamlet, an Uzbek grocer was in the process of dismantling his stall.

The guy was suspicious. I think the bicorn attached to the basket didn’t make a good impression on him. He found it unlikely that a group of French would have picked the triple whammy of winter, a bike with sidecar, and the old Smolensk road to go back home. I was getting muddled in my explanations which resulted in the fact that we were repeating the journey of the Retreat and that I’d left my two friends behind.

“But Paris is in the opposite direction,” he said.

“Yes, but the spark plugs are dead,” I said. “We’ve backtracked precisely to change them in Vyazma.”

Five hundred rubles softened his reluctance. Mentioning the village of Tim, where he was born and which I’d gone through on horseback, ten years earlier, while crossing the steppes of the former Soviet Turkmenistan did the rest. I remained in the village while he went to fetch Gras et Goisque.

“How will I recognize them?” he said before leaving.

“Do you know many people walking on foot on Russian roads, these days? One will probably be reading and the other taking pictures of signposts,” I said.

In Vyazma, we changed spark plugs, gloves, and route. Then we set off straight west, along the awful Moscow-Smolensk highway where the procession of thirty-three-ton trucks reminded us in heavy bursts that Russia had joined the free-trade carousel.

During the first weeks of the Retreat, the strategy of the Russians left the French flabbergasted. With the exception of Maloyaroslavets, where Dokhturov had led his charge, the Russians did not attack. Caulaincourt says, “The Emperor could not understand Kutuzov’s march leaving us alone.” The Field Marshal wanted to let Napoleon’s army drain itself of its strength of its own doing. In Maloyaroslavets, the Russian losses strengthened this resolve. It served no purpose to deal blows to troops that were still aggressive, when you could simply escort them in their agony. The balance of power with the French was to the Tsar’s disadvantage. The Grande Armée was still combative. Napoleon was still concealing reserves of strategic genius. The Guard was untouched. And the cold bit at the Russians as much as at the French, with no patriotic distinction! If the Russian army, stretched to the maximum of its power, attacked instead of simply harrying, it would risk destroying itself… Around him, generals grumbled, officers champed at the bit, wanting to take off. The desire for revenge couldn’t live with this caution. Even Alexander I would scold his Field Marshal, “Inaction is incomprehensible.” But the obese old man held on to his resolution. Later, by way of a rehabilitation, he received literary glory. In War and Peace, Tolstoy insists the Russian chief was a genius. “Napoleon’s collapsing army was fleeing Russia as quickly as possible, in other words it was doing the very thing any Russian could wish for. Why then undertake an operation… ? What would have been the point when, from Moscow to Vyazma, without a fight, a third of this army had melted?” And Tolstoy added, in case the reader had not understood: when cattle encroaches on your territory, is it better to push it quickly toward the exit or to block its way, hold it back, close the gates of the enclosure, and whip it to blood?

History justified Kutuzov: all the skirmishes between Russians and French were to the advantage of the latter. The Retreat from Russia therefore rests on this paradox, unique in Human History: an army marched, from victory to victory, toward its total annihilation!

Night had come down on the plain. The hundred miles between Vyazma and Smolensk were not pleasant. The condensation blinded you. I was trying to remember the quotation by Cendrars: “One should close one’s eyes when traveling.” The poet hadn’t intended these words for Ural travelers in the winter. Wiping my visor had become an obsession. In the end, I was looking at the road through a square quarter of an inch of transparent plastic spared by the flower patterns of the frost. I was so numbed by the cold that all I longed for was sleep, which was incompatible with driving. Cold is a ferocious beast. It grabs you by a limb, sinks its teeth into it, doesn’t let go, and its venom gradually spreads through your being. Mountain climbers know that numbness is a response that is mortally tempting to storms. On a motorbike, if you’ve managed to wrap up warm, the slightest gesture that moves the edifice of your protection by as little as half an inch could be fatal: the cold will be injected into you. At fifty miles an hour, it will exploit the slightest gap in the barricade of your clothes. I was so exhausted that I would deliberately swerve to the left when a truck wanted to overtake us, so that the roar of the horn would give me a few reviving slaps and keep me awake.

“Smolensk, sixty miles,” a blue sign stated. Vassily and Vitaly had called us earlier, when we had returned to Vyazma. This time they had really left Moscow and, at full throttle, had sworn on the gods of all the Russias that they would catch up with us by midnight. “We’ll have dinner with you in Smolensk!”

There were other reasons for Kutuzov’s restraint. The Field Marshal did not wish Napoleon’s death. He knew Britain could take advantage of the disappearance of this King of Kings from the surface of the globe to extend its dominion.

His reticence about exposing his army also came from the certainty that he could count on partisans. A partisan war is defined by the amount of damage a handful of determined men can inflict on a regular army corps, tangled up in its logic of mass, the heavy bulk of its logistics, the ugliness of its principles. According to Tolstoy, a partisan war was “what guerilleros did in Spain, mountain folk did in the Caucasus, and Russians did in 1812.” One could carry on with the litany of asymmetry: it’s what Fellahs did in Algeria, the Karen against the Burmese junta, and the Taliban in Afghanistan. And it is what Islamist sleeper cells are still doing in the global war they’ve waged on secular democracies. The author of War and Peace dates the partisan war from the “enemy entering Smolensk.” In actual fact, since its departure from Moscow, the Grande Armée had been assaulted by the army of shadows. “Cossacks were all over the country,” Caulaincourt complains. Everywhere, from behind the edge of a wood or the mist of marshes, a detachment of a few dozen or several hundred partisans would spring out. Among them there were peasants hungry for pillaging, perfectly-organized groups, miniature armies commanded by a chief, bands of marauders, quartermaster sergeants fearing neither God not man, and last-minute opportunists who relied on the French rout in order to buy themselves a future. Napoleon “compared them to Arabs,” Caulaincourt said.

In war, hooligans follow the troops like seagulls follow fishermen’s trawlers. They wait for the day after the battle to rob the dead. They’re as patient as vultures. Sometimes, they lend a hand, join the regulars, and take part in battles. Where pillage is concerned, might as well be ready to get down to work. In War and Peace, Tolstoy portrays the character of Tikhon, a highwayman who fights in the Cossack ranks and steals whatever he can while declaring his faith in the “holy war and liberation of the homeland.” It’s the perennial image of the optimistic villain who benefits from the high stakes of his time. I thought that quite a few members of the current Islamic factions resembled this archetype. The West quivered and considered them without distinction as religious fanatics. But were all Jihadist highway robbers Muhammad’s pious servants? Many probably concealed a soul like Tikhon and used the holy cause to justify the use of weapons and professional crime.

During this marginal war, chiefs of the regular army, such as the poet Denis Davydov and General Platov, genies of the raid, strategists of the decisive blow, became famous for their commando actions, surrounding isolated groups of the main troops, destroying supplies, and harassing French bivouacs. Tolstoy mentions a detachment commanded by a sacristan and another by a woman “who killed hundreds of French.” Kutuzov stirred his nation. In the countryside, his speeches were charismatic. On October 31st, the Field Marshal issued a proclamation: “Extinguish the Moscow flames in the blood of your enemies. Russians, obey this solemn order.”

From that moment on, nothing—not thickets, or farms on the edge of fields, nothing could provide a refuge for the French. The smallest bed of reeds could shelter a nest of partisans. Cossacks could spring out at any time, from anywhere, ready, according to Tolstoy, to sweep “the dead leaves that fell off the dried-up tree of their own accord.”

When civilians and irregulars got involved, the war acquired a further degree of cruelty. Captured by peasants, the hapless soldiers were impaled, plunged into boiling water, buried alive, beaten to death, or thrown naked into frozen woods. The Russian countryside was intoxicated with an outburst of violence. Slumbering for centuries, the old nation had never expressed against the Tsar’s yoke the energy it was devoting to punishing the invader. This characteristic persists even today: what a Russian inflicts on another Russian is only the Russian’s business, but beware the foreigner who butts in… “The war of armed peasants […] is hurting us more than their army. […],” a hospital officer[6] admitted.

I confess that, on the way to Smolensk that night, knowing that Vassily and Vitaly were right behind us, I often looked into my rearview mirror, just in case a band of human wolves howling war cries was about to catch up with us, riding smoking motorbikes.

In Smolensk, we stopped at the old hotel for Soviet apparatchiks, the Dnieper, still in its original condition. Room attendants with peroxided hair, Brezhnev-era decor, 1970s chandeliers, thermal industry piping: we enjoyed the Cold War atmosphere. I was forty years old and nostalgic for a world I hadn’t known. I preferred this atmosphere to that of standardized hotels with which capitalism with an inhuman face has covered our city centers: establishments designed by salespeople who thought that WiFi and an air conditioner fixed above a bolted window was better than a chat with a babushka and a window that opens over a frozen river.

I soaked in the bath for an hour and a half and felt almost ashamed about it. Our journey had ended up turning into a very serious game. The duty to pay tribute to the memory of these soldiers had pegged our souls so firmly that the slightest deviation from the rule of physical suffering seemed inappropriate.

Two pints of vodka in the hotel restaurant soon overcame these hang-ups.

“Guys,” I said, “do you remember when Napoleon’s Old Guard took something from a Vyazma warehouse that earned the city the name of ‘Schnapps City?’”

“And,” Gras said, “remember when, in Ghjat, Napoleon and his entourage discovered abandoned crates full of Chambertin and Clos Vougeot?”

“And remember,” Goisque said, “when the Emperor had carts of brandy taken from the Imperial Guard stock escorted to the troops at the rear?”

Vassily and Vitaly arrived at the restaurant at 11 P.M. The two hundred and fifty-mile stretch, covered in one breath at 10°F, had given them an appetite for soup. They were dressed in professional biker gear. Their helmets, jackets, and boots made our equipment looks like amateur rags. We had the strange feeling we were doing things “Russian-style,” in other words, we Westerners thought that’s how Russians did things, and so were looked at by Russians the way we Europeans usually look at Russians: like a rough boor who makes up for his lack of preparation for life by being indifferent to hazards.

Two more glasses and another bottle were placed on the Formica table. More toasts, there was never a shortage of those.

“Here’s to our reunion, guys,” I said.

“Smolensk is taken,” Vitaly said, using the ritual formula.

“Tomorrow,” Vassily said, “we’ll take Belarus.”

“Here’s to your leg of the journey!” I said. “You’ve beaten General Winter.”

For the first time since we’d known him, Vitaly’s face clouded over. “General Winter doesn’t exist. Russians vanquish their enemies on their own.”

In the evening, reading Caulaincourt, I came across these lines in which the general states that it was the cold that caused the disaster, “and not tiredness or attacks by the enemy.” I avoided going to wake up Vitaly and read him the passage.

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…

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.

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.”

DAY SEVEN.

FROM AUGUSTÓW TO WARSAW

Where did they go through? This was now our concern.

“Caulaincourt mentions the village of Pułtusk, between Augustów and Warsaw,” I said.

“Off to Pułtusk then!” Vassily screamed.

Our friends were remarkably low maintenance.

This morning, the cold was digging its heels in. The road ran perfectly straight. The horizon was resting in a rectilinear position. The plain was at the disposal of the winds. Bunches of frosted gorse, groves of silver birches, marshes: the Mazovia triptych. These unobstructed expanses made perfect battlefields. Or rather spaces for cavalry maneuvers. In the 20th century, Panzers and T-34s used them to their hearts’ content. The whole landscape had been exhausted by it. Empty stork’s nests on top of pylons added to the feeling of abandonment. There wasn’t a figure in the villages: humanity had run away to huddle by the stoves. A very Catholic Poland ran beneath our wheels: disproportionately large cathedrals in the smallest hamlets. There were almost as many Virgin statues and wayside crosses as milestones.

Since contemplating the landscape was only relatively entertaining, I let the following question spin inside my helmet: Napoleon—a tyrant or a liberator?

If the Revolution boils down to an enterprise of struggling for freedom, then Napoleon is the gravedigger of the principles of 1789. His anti-parliamentary government, his authoritarianism, his belligerent imperialism make him akin to Caesar. However, if the Revolution is defined as a fight for equality, then the Emperor was its most ardent champion. Civil equality was his technical achievement. Equality of merit, his moral obsession. In which other era in the History of France did a butcher’s assistant have this much chance of becoming a general thanks to his talent? The ideal of heroism irrigated the beginnings of the Empire. These marshals, glowing in the imperial dawn, insulted the privileges of the Old Regime with more insolence than the butchers of the Terror.

It was strange to see these 21st-century top bureaucrats, mired in cronyism, rambling on against Le Mal Napoleonien[8] without admitting that the Emperor had managed to give civil and administrative form to the abstract impulse of the Enlightenment. One of our former Prime Ministers had distinguished himself by his critique of the Imperial adventure. He suggested that the balance sheet of 1815 was terrible: the abdication had heralded the return of reactionary monarchies, freedoms had taken a step back in France, and the country was emerging weak from a military adventure that had cost millions of human lives.

Caulaincourt’s words, scribbled under his fur-lined cloak, kept coming back to me. “The Emperor wished for the way to be open to merit, for the means to achieve without a distinction of caste, without needing to be the relative or friend of a well-placed man or of a royal mistress.” Also, “Any soldier being able to become a general, a baron, a duke, a marshal; the son of a peasant, of a school master, of a lawyer, of a mayor, a government counsellor, a minister, a duke, and this nobility would, in time, not shock anyone because it would reward everyone without distinction.” While rows of trees, painfully planted on the side of the road, paraded by, I found it ironic that the man professing such things should be disowned under our republic by one of those self-proclaimed socialists who had, however, lost the public’s favor.

We stopped off at service stations to revive our frozen hands and rub our kneecaps, which had been exposed directly to the wind. We had ended up wrapping them in newspapers, woolen balacklavas, and fabric muffs held together with Scotch tape. We each wore two pairs of socks, a pair of leather boots, and waterproof boot covers over which we also had a complete bodysuit. The result of this layering: we were still cold and it took us ten minutes to take a leak.

Warsaw was drawing nearer, and the temperature dropping. Wrapped up in his furs, Goisque looked increasingly like an old lady.

“Goisque!”

“What?”

“You look like an old lady.”

“What’s that?”

And a deaf old lady at that! I thought inside my helmet.

In the afternoon, we crossed the Vistula over a bridge, entered Warsaw, and switched off our engines in Uprising Square. It had been called Napoleon Square until the end of World War II. A few months before our arrival, in 2011, a bust of Napoleon on a ten-foot pedestal had been unveiled. Poland was saluting the man who, in 1807, had created the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and equipped it with a civil code that is still in force. We had saved two Partagas cigars for the occasion, and smoked them in the sidecars, and saw that the smoke matched the gray tones of Warsaw’s architecture.

On Napoleon’s chess board, Poland represented a weapon against Alexander. The Tsar was wary of the Grand Duchy’s uprising. Coming back after the Russian disaster, Napoleon’s objective was to persuade the European nations that Russia was the common enemy, and that war had to be waged against her “in the aptly-calculated interest of Old Europe and civilization.” To start with, the Poles had to be put into “a kind of drunken state.” Only the crazy pace of his return did not give him the time to “electrify the Poles,” who, in addition, were freezing their butts off, ruined by their contribution to the war effort. Napoleon spent only a short day in the capital and, at 9 P.M., jumped into the sleigh.

She was waiting for us at the foot of the statue, in her fur coat. I’d met her in Moscow, when she managed the network of Alliances Françaises in Russia. Currently, Mireille Cheval had been posted to Poland and was all gloomy in the plain, homesick for Russia. She stood out in the diplomatic corps. Her personality and generosity made her unsuitable for a career on the carpets of chancelleries.

I don’t know if she has kept a happy memory of her sidecar tour through the streets of the city. The disadvantage of the “monkey” position on a Ural is the fact that it’s low down, cramped, and cold. The sense of being imprisoned in an ice coffin and skimming the road at axle and carbon dioxide discharge level doesn’t suit everybody. Mireille didn’t complain and invited us to the Russian dinner she had prepared at her home. A Russian dinner consists in slowing down the ravages of vodka by swallowing an onion, some dill, and a small herring.

“Mireille, for all our affection, do you know why we couldn’t possibly not come to see you?”

“No,” she said.

“Your name, Mireille. Mireille Cheval!”

“It’s wonderful,” Goisque said.

Horses. They were the great martyrs of the Retreat. They were killed through overload, skinned alive, eaten raw, either straight from the carcass or quartered and braised at the end of a saber. And they were not even gobbled down respectfully away from the sight of live animals. Did anybody think how a horse might feel before the spectacle of a congener’s flesh dripping on a spit? Isn’t the prospect of being eaten the absolute dread of evolution?

Nobody has celebrated the 1812 horses in correct proportion to their suffering. The men who fell on the battlefield have been glorified. There are monuments to commemorate their courage. Books telling their exploits. Streets and children bearing their names. But what about the animals? What are they entitled to? Nothing. Except perhaps to be taken into account by painters. The paintings that represent the disaster of 1812 give particular focus to the meat. How come painters were so interested in equine martyrdom?

Was it for moral reasons? Perhaps. If there’s any innocence mowed down by war, it is that of animals: they would have gladly avoided the violence of men.

For aesthetic reasons? Almost certainly. There is tragic beauty in an emaciated horse, lying on a snow-covered field, the grace of someone flayed.

For spiritual reasons? Definitely. The death of a horse is a supremely painful sight because it takes place in silence. The silence of animals is the double expression of their dignity and of our dishonor. We humans make such a racket… Painters, masters of silence, perhaps felt that the mute agony of horses was a subject destined for their art. Brushes dipped in light and contemplation took upon themselves the funeral oration to horses, which no one had thought of writing.

There is a painting by Édouard Bernard Swebach, on display at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Besançon. It has a cavalryman sitting on the croup of his horse lying on the ground. The man looks desperate. He’s looking at his boots. He knows he won’t go far. Behind him, there’s a column of wretches trailing on the horizon. And yet what is striking is the horse. It’s lying on the black ice. Dying—perhaps already dead. Its head gently resting on the snow. Its body a reproach: “Why did you bring me here? You, Men, have failed, because not one of your wars has been an animal war.” At the beginning of the war the French owned about a hundred and fifty thousand animals: a hundred thousand draft horses and forty-five thousand mounts. The Russians had more or less the same. Of these three hundred thousand animals, two hundred thousand died during the first six months of the campaign.

“Mireille, do you know Gouraud?” Goisque said.

“Jean-Louis Gouraud, the writer?”

“Yes, he said that the Franco-Russian war was ‘the biggest equine slaughter in History,’” Goisque said.

“In 1812, the Russians invented a word to mean rot,” I said to Mireille.

“I know,” she said.

“What?” Goisque said.

“It’s from the French word cheval. Pronounced chval.”

“Chval,” Goisque echoed.

“Not at all, I think it’s delicious,” Vassily said, having only heard the Russian word, and dipped his onion in the pot of cream.

“What about Napoleon?” Mireille said. “Was he a good horseman?”

“From a strictly academic point of view he wasn’t,” Goisque said. “Not the kind of guy who’d perform a volt at a Spanish step in a Viennese riding school with his shagreen-gloved little finger raised. There’s a funny description by Odeleben: ‘Napoleon rode like a butcher. During a gallop, he would rock forward and sideways, at the whim of his mount. We know that more than once, he lost his stirrups.’ On the other hand, he was inexhaustible. Here’s what Colonel Jean-Baptiste Vachée says: ‘We saw him ride in five hours, at fifteen miles an hour, the road from Valladolid to Burgos. […] He was not only tireless, but a brave horseman, he rode recklessly.’”

“And listen to this! De Caulaincourt says,” I grabbed my copy of the Memoirs.

“There they go again with their readings,” Vitaly said. “It’s like being in church.”

“‘The Emperor would get on his horse by night or day, without telling anyone.’”

“He would have liked you, Mireille,” Goisque said. “He had a sense of names.”

DAY EIGHT.

FROM WARSAW TO PNIEWY

We looked in vain for the Hôtel d’Angleterre in Warsaw, where the Emperor had stayed. It wasn’t there anymore. We had fallen back on furnished accommodations in the city center and, in the early morning, were in the process of repairing coils damaged by the salt spread over the roads, when an embassy press officer named Alain, sent by Mireille, turned up. We told him about our retreat, he took notes, we started the engines and, while the cylinders were warming up, since our new friend seemed eminently friendly, I asked, “You haven’t always been in diplomacy, have you?”

“No,” he said.

“What did you use to do?”

“Philosophy.”

“What was your subject?”

“Berkeley,” he said.

“The university?”

“The thinker.”

“Ah.”

“Do you know him?”

“No.”

“He was Irish. 18th century,” he said. “The concept of immaterialism was his idea. That the world is the sum of our opinions about it.”

“Like Schopenhauer?”

“Even better! It’s not just a question of representation, but of a collection of ideas. Things don’t exist except in as far as they are perceived.”[9]

“Are you saying that Goisque doesn’t exist per se?” I said.

“Mr. Goisque exists because you perceive him. You, your motorbikes, this bicorn, there’s nothing to prove that they are no more than a beam of information interpreted by your senses.”

“I love it, it’s so beautifully Shakespearean,” I said. “I’ve always known that this life was a grotesque illusion.”

“Besides,” Goisque said, “ever since Moscow, we’ve been indulging in a big game, something built by our minds.”

“Your big game is more interesting than the maneuvers of many of the people I frequent, who take themselves very seriously, and whose gravitas is just the sullenness of prigs.”

It was bitterly cold when we left Warsaw, and I wondered whether, had Berkeley frozen to the bone on a damn Ural, he would have perhaps reconsidered his wild imaginings about the nonexistence of phenomena. Funny how freezing your butt off cures you of speculations. The road followed the rhythm of the trucks: the shoulder was populated by garages, service stations, drivers, and lodges. The snow was an appropriate shroud for this country of battles. There must be quite a few skeletons in this favorable compost. History had crushed this country to the point of flattening it. We left Kutno at our rear, and followed, give or take a verst, the path of the sleigh. This morning, the cold was an enemy who’d learned all the techniques of an infiltration commando. The motorbikes were purring steadily at fifty miles an hour. Everything was in order, the trees planted straight. By the end of the afternoon, we had covered a hundred and eighty-seven miles, and gone past Poznań. The snow began to fall without any consideration for motorcyclists. Within an hour, the road was an ice rink. A few thirty-three-ton semi trailers slid across the highway and blocked the traffic toward Pniewy, northwest of Poznań. Tricycles had their advantages: we were the only ones able to get ahead without difficulty along the emergency lane. By evening, we decided that the flakes were falling too thick, so we stopped at a motel kept by a peroxide-blond Ukrainian who seemed to share with the road the company a large number of truck drivers.

In the evening, our conversation turned to our destination. We were now only a hundred and twenty-four miles from Berlin, which, as Germans have always believed, is on the way to Paris. Paris, where the Emperor arrived just before midnight on December 18th. Where the survivors of the tragedy didn’t come until early January 1813. Paris, which neither Vassily nor Vitaly knew. Paris, where Goisque had promised us a surprise. Paris, to which we were drawn.

Nowadays, it’s considered fashionable to sing the praises of wandering. Many travelers, experts at detour, give us their penny’s worth. “You must get lost in order to find yourself again,” they say. “The journey is more important than the destination,” add the more Confucian ones. “You must let go,” say those who don’t practice mountain climbing. As far as traveling was concerned, neither Goisque nor I felt we were wandering types. We were neither strolling nor shortcut professionals.

Rather, we were on the side of Tolstoy’s theory. The old prophet writes in War and Peace: “Whenever a man is on the move, he always gives this move a goal. In order to travel a thousand versts, he must think that he will find something good at the end of these thousand versts. The hope of a promised land is necessary to give him the strength to go forth.” When I was crossing the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, or Anatolia, I felt propelled toward my goal. I walked on, hypnotized by my objective, and would never have considered dawdling along with the wind. In terms of movement, I believed in ballistics.

However, if the total itinerary turned out to be outrageously long, then it was better not to think too much about the city on the finishing line. When you’re on foot, a distant objective of three thousand miles smacks of abstraction. One then has to divide the journey into intermediary legs, provisional objectives that, in turn, would constitute Tolstoy’s “promised land.” Moreover, I thought of the scattered soldiers of the Grande Armée, who not only had no goal, but couldn’t even rely on a stopping place to recover! Smolensk and Vilnius, for which they had so much prayed, turned out to be their graves. Their walk turned into a headlong flight, a relentless stumbling. “The man who has to cover a thousand versts,” Tolstoy goes on to say, “must be able to tell himself, forgetting the final goal, ‘Today, after forty versts, I will reach a place where I will be able to rest and sleep,’ and, during this first stage, this place of rest conceals the final goal and focuses all his wishes and hopes on it.”

To suffer when you know exactly where you are and what you’re aiming for is just about tolerable. You grin and bear it, you take it on the chin, you start the countdown, you know it will all come to an end, you tell yourself you have to hang in there until you reach the bivouac, and that you’ll start again tomorrow. You tell yourself, “Two more bad days and I’ll see the end of this.” Mountain climbers are familiar with this state of being in parentheses. But to fight for your life without knowing whether the ordeal is going to last two weeks or three months, when it will end, or if it will ever end, or if you’ll have any respite before it ends, must increase suffering considerably. Not knowing is the hardest thing. During adversity, uncertainty is like poison. And the Russian Retreat was definitely an uncertain rout. Neither the men nor their chiefs were in charge of destiny anymore, and had become the toy of uncontrollable forces. They had won from the military point of view, but collapsed logistically. Napoleon might have shouted that the supply corps would follow. But it did not.

DAY NINE.

FROM PNIEWY TO BERLIN

I confess to the devil that I lied. I lied to you, Vassily, Vitaly, and you, too, my friend Goisque. After Poznań, Caulaincourt and Napoleon turned southwest, on the road to Dresden. At Głogów, the track left the Duchy of Warsaw and crossed a narrow band of Prussian Silesia before reaching Saxony, just before Bautzen. Besides, Napoleon dreaded this brief passage through Prussia and imagined being arrested. “The Prussians would hand me over to the British. […] Caulaincourt, what would you look like in an iron cage, in the middle of London?” And they killed themselves laughing for the entire stage of the journey.

Now after Poznań we left the imperial route and I suggested a quick detour through the northwest. I was thinking of going through Berlin. For good reason. First, Vassily was complaining about a problem with his generator, and we would find a specialist for these things more easily in the capital. Moreover, I wanted to drive my motorbike and sidecar at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, where Napoleon paraded after kicking the Prussian asses at Jena in 1806. And then there was Lisa. I’d decided that a night of human warmth would do me no harm along this path of bones. So, in a nutshell, that morning, I was very vague about the Emperor and Caulaincourt’s itinerary, and refrained from telling my friends that the historical tracks did not pass through Berlin. After all, it was only a small detour: we would catch up with the official route around Leipzig the following day. I swallowed my remorse.

I had written to Lisa from Moscow, and asked if she was willing to put up four winter travelers. Unaware of the effect produced on an apartment parquet by the arrival of four bikers, she had agreed. She worked at a cultural institution, I’d known her for five years, she spoke perfect German, had eyes like Estonian ice, and, ever since our departure, I don’t know why, as soon as the cold bit at my knees, I had thought of her. In a nutshell, as Tolstoy advocates, I was reaching out for the promised land.

The stretch of journey wasn’t very nice until the German border. Small sleigh roads snaked through marshland. A gray forest. Between the woods and the anthracite sky rose houses hastily built by Polish plumbers who’d become wealthy in the West. In Frankfurt, we drove across the Oder, which was mainly sad: the river had witnessed too much human revenge fighting over its banks.

The border between Poland and Germany was made material by the change in landscape. The wealthy German hamlets were in contrast with Polish villages that had been strewn over the plain as blocks. Even the Teutonic forest seemed to grow straighter than on the other side. Twelve miles from the capital, trees lined the road. We entered Berlin through the East gate. Lisa was waiting for us in Alexanderplatz. It was snowing. She was wearing a woolen miniskirt, leather boots, and a super-severe coat. As beautiful as a Soviet policewoman. We handed her a sheepskin touloupe, sat her in my sidecar, and gave her a tour of the Brandenburg square. Snowflakes studded her black hair, which poured out of the helmet. After defeating William and the Prussians in 1806, Napoleon must have thought that his dream of a global state had almost come true. I’m sure that here in Berlin, as he passed beneath the quadriga, he thought he was on his way to the continental project: the peaceful fusion of powers into a universal empire.

Of course, Britain was still in the way.

We drove past the Reichstag and I remembered my trip back in December 1989. The Wall had just fallen. My parents had said, “Let’s go!” We’d gotten into a van with my sisters and a couscous steamer, driven all night, and the following day we were with Berliners who had just made the first dent in the outposts of the USSR and were breaking off little pebbles in order to keep a memento of one of the most brilliant socialist architectural achievements. Time had passed since then, the USSR had collapsed, and my mother had died.

Vitaly and Vassily were in a state. They kept pointing out the Reichstag to each other and yelling. They remembered the picture of the partisan sticking the red flag on the roof, over a Berlin in smoke. The photo had been retouched by order of the Kremlin because the guy playing the hero on the parapet was wearing watches on both wrists. It’s possible to be a liberator and to rob corpses… Today, on top of the building, wavered the flag with the Marian stars of the European Union. Such a long way and so many dead to change the color of the linen at the windows of government buildings.

The center of Berlin was paralyzed by a traffic jam. It took us an hour to reach Lisa’s digs. The engines were overheating. The bikes were suffering and we along with them, since the Ural, like its driver, is made to abandon itself calm and straight to the emptiness of the Slav plain.

Lisa took us to a stub where the Russians discovered the proportions of German cooking. The cooks seemed to think that all their customers were on their way to the country or the mountains for three weeks.

In the evening, Lisa said, “So, are there any ghosts on the way?”

“Sometimes I feel as though they climb into the sidecar.”

Then I forgot about it all, the cold in Poland, the Belarus mud, and the dead in the plain, in a bed warmer than a bivouac fire.

DAY TEN.

FROM BERLIN TO NAUMBURG

That morning, there were just three of us left. Goisque had gone. He had to attend to his photoshoots. There were long goodbyes to Lisa. Her silhouette walking away in the snow was sad. At 10 A.M., the three of us, Vitaly, Vassily, and I, were in an East Berlin district, at Michaël’s. Vassily had dug up his address in a jiffy (out of twelve). Michaël owned what we were looking for: a heated garage that sheltered a concession of Enfield motorbikes and sidecars. In addition, he knew Ural engines and was a self-proclaimed anarchist. But a German anarchist. His palace of motorized carcasses was as well organized as an operating room. Framed pictures of Enfields hung from the ceiling in a perfect line. His tools were laid out by size, and my two Russians were flabbergasted by the condition of this barracks. Vassily started his engine again. He was trying to diagnose the problem by ear and, not succeeding, started taking the thing apart. It took him three hours to admit defeat.

“I still can’t find anything,” he said.

“Put it all back together then,” Vitaly said, “and let’s get out of here. It will fix itself on the way.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“Urals follow mysterious laws which the Russian mind still hasn’t been able to penetrate,” Vitaly replied. “Sometimes, our bikes solve a mechanical problem of their own accord.”

“In Russian, you call that avtoremont,” Vassily said. “Self-repair.”

We went at a crazy speed. Goisque’s departure had lifted a considerable weight off me and I wasn’t used to driving such a light machine. Vassily kept at sixty-two miles an hour along the Leipzig Autobahn and I felt as though the three wheels of my sidecar were about to dissociate themselves from the asphalt. We caught up with the route of the imperial sleigh around the Lützen region, a small place south-west of Leipzig. In 1812, this small town was nothing on the map: just a few farmhouses in the forest. But it eventually got what it deserved. It was about to enter posterity when, in 1813, Napoleon beat the Prussians and Russians there on the way to Leipzig. In 2012, it had once again become a village of four thousand residents who intended to spend a quiet evening.

Wrapped up warmly in his sleigh, little did Napoleon suspect that, less than a year later, he would travel again across this area, as a war leader, fighting to save his dream against a coalition determined to have done with him.

When the Russians crossed the Neman right on the tail of the Grande Armée in January 1813, they were marching with an impetus nothing could hamper. For all his raising an army of eight thousand men and going back to war as early as Spring 1813, he was unable to hold back the energy of the Anglo-Prusso-Russian alliance. Within a year, this unnatural wave unfurled all the way to Paris…

The Battle of Nations took place in the middle of October 1813, in Leipzig, in this area that the sleigh had just traveled across. It marked the first act in the fall of the Empire. The coalition forced the French to back down, then crossed the Rhine at the beginning of 1814. Despite a relentless defense and bursts of victory, Napoleon’s army, outnumbered, was moving back. The War of the Sixth Coalition was its drawn out agony.

Alexander I entered Paris on March 1814, at the head of allied troops. What a revenge for the Russian sovereign who had had to sacrifice his capital city and witness the devastation of his empire!

In the sleigh, lulled by his own illusions and by the pleasant swaying on the road, Napoleon was a thousand versts from imagining that his end was so near. His conversation proves it. He displayed to Caulaincourt pathological optimism. His confessions are an example of autosuggestion. He was convinced that he would succeed in reconstituting his military power as soon as he arrived in Paris. “I will have conscripts and five thousand men in arms by the Rhine within three months.”

He still believed in his lucky star. He dreamed big. His energy had become psychotropic. He was in denial.

The Russian disaster? That was nothing, a setback, a chain of events: “It’s the winter that killed us.” He was wrong to stay “a further two weeks in Moscow.” But all that was a trifle, and the army would recover at Vilnius. It would find storerooms, warehouses, and would turn against the Russian hordes. Besides, the Russians wouldn’t dare cross the Neman, they would stop “as soon as we bare our teeth at them.” There was nothing to fear from the Tartars, led by “that old dowager Kutuzov.” Caulaincourt kept quiet, took notes, but had his own thoughts on the matter.

Napoleon’s presence in Paris would light his star again: “The ill effect of our disasters will be counterbalanced, in Europe, by my arrival in Paris.” Then he would go back to fight. He could already picture himself at the helm of a new naval power “which I will form in a couple of years’ time.” He was convincing himself by pretending to convince his scribe: “Two years from now you will be surprised by the number of my ships.” He thought he could capture Britain in the nets of the blockade, break the prosperity of the Crown, and impose the continental system upon the nations: “Two years of perseverance will bring about the fall of the British government. […] Europe will bless me.” He imagined he could raise Poland in order to keep Russia in check, and already pictured himself, once peace was restored, criss-crossing the French countryside like a Medieval king, sampling cheeses and teasing shepherdesses during farming festivals: “We will travel inland for four months every two years. I will take day trips with my horses. I will see inside the huts of this beautiful France.” These were the daydreams of the Emperor whose army was in its final throes. This is how he lulled himself while his soldiers were dying in Vilnius. In the evening, I had read Goisque these pages with a blend of dismay and admiration. They were the plans of a man who didn’t know he was already dead. The confession of a madman in the process of falling off the top of a building, and who’s making a list of resolutions for the future somewhere between the third and second story.

Napoleon had always felt the need to strive toward an idea. Did he not profess that the world was led by imagination? He would project on the screen of the future the images of his mental constructions. Nothing must hinder the mechanics, a defeat was not conceivable. This is why the Emperor gives the impression of brushing aside the Russian disaster, minimizing it, and casting it out of his mind. Sadly, the means at his disposal were never sufficient to bring his plans to a successful conclusion, and to consolidate the work he had begun in every direction and every country. He started everything and finished nothing. He wanted to redesign the world, but didn’t achieve a single local reform.

And so his reign was like the sleigh trip: a crazy pursuit. Napoleon’s life was the journey of a genius galloping after his visions, carried away by the torrent of dreams, and leaving behind a sketch of impossible projects.

We kept our foot down and our wrists, straight, clutching the handles, had lost all feeling. We reached Naumburg after waving through the hills. We chose a hotel that oozed rural Saxon delicacy. Timber beams, thick carpets, Gretchens with pigtails, and porcelain tankards.

All around us, in the night, stretched the battlefields of 1813. Not far, there was Erfurt, where Napoleon confirmed to Alexander the Tilsit agreement in 1808, there was Weimar, where he met Goethe, Leipzig, where everything was played out in 1813, Jena, where Prussia yielded in 1806. My room bore the name of Frederick William III. Vassily was sleeping in the Goethe room, and Vitaly in the Napoleon room. That night, I felt I was falling asleep in the middle of History’s spiderweb.

DAY ELEVEN.

FROM NAUMBURG TO BAD KREUZNACH

Yesterday, I had clenched my teeth so hard during the night ride that I spat half a stub in the bathroom’s earthenware sink.

“Vitaly, I’ve lost a tooth,” I said over our morning coffee.

“A Ural can keep going with just eighty percent of its bolts,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

That morning, we were driving toward Eisenach and Fulda through Westphalian woods. When the banks of fog were torn apart, pine forests would appear that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a scene from Parsifal. The road was a silver whip. On the Fulda Autobahn, we were overtaken by a customs officers’ car, which squeezed up against us, its  revolving lights on, and an arm through the window signaled that we should pull over on the emergency lane. A second Mercedes jammed our behinds just as we’d braked dangerously fast. Our column had lured the salt-tax collectors. They must have smelled Chechens. It hadn’t occurred to them that a Caucasus dealer wouldn’t take the risk of carting around his merchandise in such obvious collector’s pieces as Ural motorbikes.

We’d been driving four hours in the cold, soaked through like drowned rats, and we could have done without having to empty our trunks. The Germans seemed to find the scene entertaining. They must have been bored this morning. They wanted to see everything. We had to open every bag. They felt our belongings like tourists at a souk. They showed little respect for our machines. Their sense of humor was devastating: “Have you vodka, haschich, Makarov, Kalachnikov?” They asked in English. They laughed boisterously. Frozen, muddy, we unpacked, repacked, squinted at their thick jackets, their dry boots, and the inside of their cars. Still, we soon lost any temptation to warm up on their back seats because we would have then had to endure their jokes.

We had nothing to declare. Not even goodbye when we set off again. These were the last few miles of calm before the Frankfurt conurbation.

I couldn’t stop thinking that, along this road, there had been a moment when our rubber tires had touched the spot where the skates of the sleigh had passed, two hundred years before us to the day—and the second! This point of quantum contact, this spatiotemporal conjunction must have occurred somewhere before Poznań, where the Emperor passed at dawn on December 12th, and where we had driven through during the night of December 11th and 12th, 2012. This idea was of no interest, but these small calculations helped me stay awake until we’d reached Fulda.

I was convinced that movement encourages meditation. The proof of this is that travelers always have more ideas on their return than when they leave. They’ve captured them on their way. Moreover, this is at the expense of their friends, through what we call travel stories. Therefore, the law of thermodynamics must apply to moving. Whenever we “stagger” (Montaigne’s expression to indicate travel), the body warming up seems to produce spiritual energy which then contributes to triggering ideas. When the body moves, the mind wanders, and our thoughts explore hidden recesses. It’s a law known to all escape professionals: truck drivers, tramps, and hikers. Often, thoughts engendered by trials are the best. “Only those thoughts that come to us while we’re walking have any value,” Nietzsche rapped out at sunset. Along the roads of car-led civilization, the metronome-like passing of white stripes in your field of vision invites you to ponder.

So did the parading of foliage past the frosted windows of the sleigh inspire the Emperor’s meditation? At any rate, it encouraged introspection. For two weeks, Napoleon talked to Caulaincourt the same way he had lived: in a whirlwind. He changed subjects quicker than piqueurs replaced horses. He would skip from politics to women, from his childhood to military deployment. He would redo the French Directory, visit the campaigns of Spain, Italy, and Illyria, fly to Egypt, return to Europe to talk about Prussian maneuvers, and comment about Austrian politics.

He opened up, and invented a genre: the confession of a child of the century, beneath a bearskin. He took pleasure in his self-portrait. He confessed the whole truth to Caulaincourt: he was carrying a burden. Destiny had charged him with a mission: to bring Europe to peace. He was fulfilling it in spite of himself: “I’m no more an enemy of life’s pleasures than anyone else. I am not a Don Quixote who needs to seek adventures.”

He was not overly modest. He knew he was superior to other men, sovereigns especially: “I am only too aware of my power. […] I can see things from higher up. […] I walk with a franker step.” He also knew he was a champion on the physical front, and “would joke that rest was intended only for lazy kings.” He would talk about his Corsican family, his uncle Lucien, his success at military school while running after skirts. He would punctuate his descriptions of himself with very humble conclusions: “What seemed difficult to other people appeared easy to me.” At times, he would try to describe himself as an ordinary being: “I am a man. Whatever some people might say, I also have guts, a heart, but it’s the heart of a sovereign. I am not softened by the tears of a duchess but I am touched by the afflictions of nations.”

Depending on the leg of the journey, when he received a dispatch letter from Marie-Louise, he would wax lyrical: “I have a good woman here, don’t I?” On other days, he would dream about the empress and the King of Rome, their son, and would “talk extensively about the pleasure he would feel at seeing them again.” Still, as someone who knew men, he was wary of women. They were hotbeds of intrigue, drained your energy, and drove the strongest minds to distraction. Several had set him “ambushes of tears,” and would “confuse empires” if you let them.

He was not taken in by men either. He had spent too much time with them to like them. Lucidity doesn’t turn anyone into a philanthropist. His fellow men didn’t even deserve his anger. “I don’t respect them enough to be, as they say, cruel and take revenge.” He would review his government, remember Talleyrand, praise Cambacérès, but would criticize the Duke of Otranto and his cohorts of hasslers. At one stage, when faced with the number of victims, Caulaincourt was forced to exercise self-censorship: “In this respect, the Emperor mentioned such prominent traits and names that I do not dare write them down. I do not wish to tarnish the glory of some names that belong to History.”

Like other people with too large an entourage, he had turned his affections on “the peoples,” these abstract monsters. “I want them to be happy and the French will be.” But then he would immediately water down his affection: “I make myself out to be nastier than I am because I’ve noticed that the French are always ready to eat right out of your hand.”

He would congratulate himself on having built an egalitarian system, thus breaking with the privileges of the Old Regime: “Have talent and I will promote you, have merit, and I will protect you.” He believed only in the “open paths of merit.” He would conclude with this aphorism: “It’s in the appreciation of the principle of equality that lies the power of the government.” He knew that his political task was not complete, but was relying on the help of posterity: “They will bless me as much, ten years from now, as they perhaps hate me today.”

At times, his confidences would lapse into pure self-apology. He would grant himself mountains of laurels. “France,” Caulaincourt writes, “owed him codes that would be the making of her glory.” It’s hard to imagine that Napoleon didn’t know that his Grand Squire was secretly writing down his monologues, and that these pages would one day help build generations: “Under my government […] there are no bribes, the cash boxes are watched, […] taxes go where they are intended. […] Who shouts in France? […] The bulk of the nation is righteous.” And he would complete the extolling of his own virtues in a booming voice: “Nobody is less preoccupied with what is personal to him than I.”

And this long monologue, which Caulaincourt would interrupt with timid assents, was interspersed with self-persuasion sessions aimed at concealing the disaster of the campaign from himself: “A well stocked Wilna will put everything back in order.”

Meanwhile, Paris drew nearer with strong lashes of the horsewhip.

Our crossing of the Rhine was more laborious and less romantic than that of the Emperor. He had crossed on board a boat kept by Count Anatole de Montesquiou-Fezensac. We just had a bridge, but still had trouble finding it in the Frankfurt web of highways, next to which the Ruhr interchange looked like neighboring byway crossroads. In the middle of the night, we drove another fifty miles and, our eyes sore from tiredness, when we approached the small town of Bad Kreuznach, we decided it was time to put a stop to our outing before a roadside tree did it for us.

DAY TWELVE.

FROM BAD KREUZNACH TO REIMS

Nothing predisposed the day to a struggle. We had reached a mild latitude, and were due to enter France today. Things promised to be more pleasant than on the Smolensk bypass. On the breakfast table of the Bad Kreuznach inn, we had pushed away the strudel to make room for our map. Because I love looking at an atlas more than anything else, I thought strategists must have a brilliant job. They spend their lives bending over maps, sticking pins and drawing arrows, and take offense if the movement of troops doesn’t follow their plans.

“Where did Napoleon go through?” Vassily asked.

I pointed at the Mainz-Saarbrücken line. “After Mainz, they sped up again. They stopped only to grease the axles. They headed south-west as far as Saint-Avold and Verdun. Then Harville, la Ferté-sous-Jouarre, Château-Thierry and Meaux.”

“Sylvain,” Vitaly said.

“What?”

“Do us a favor.”

“Go on.”

“A small infringement to the sleigh route.”

“And go where?” I said.

“We’d like to go a little farther north, through Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Ardennes. We’ll catch up with the historical route just below Reims.”

“You really want to do that?”

He traced with his finger an itinerary that went around the Woëvre through the north.

“If we do this, we’ll cross four countries in sixty-two miles!”

“So?”

“We’ll be madly popular when we talk about this in Russia.”

Russia, where you could spend ten days on a train before crossing a border…

We therefore headed toward the Duchy of Baroque and banks. The forests were purple, the landscape silky. Humidity made the hills smooth. In a gap through the woods, we could see a steeple watching sadly over a soaked village. The countryside hadn’t changed since the Emperor had passed through, despite the proliferation of factories and plants. In 21st-century Rhineland, they were everywhere, sown amid the groves, dotting small towns, dappling hamlets. Back home, we would concentrate them on the outskirts of outskirts. This had created spaces that were very representative of contemporary France: “industrial zones,” “commercial zones”: a depressive geography, ruined by a network of bypasses and traffic circles.

In Waldböckelheim, fog wrapped a gauze around the wounds of the relief. In Bad Sobernheim, the view unfolded on the forest swells of the Palatinate. In Idar-Oberstein, the residents had set their church in a wall of schist. In Nohfelden, there was the highway. The signs had a historical tone: Koblenz, Cologne, Loreley. We drove around the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg by the south. The Gothic spires rose in the distance, next to the throttle grip, in other words to the north: tiny flags planted in the mass of buildings.

Since there were no more tangible borders within Schengen, we grew certain that we had arrived in Belgium because of the lamp posts that light the highways of the kingdom. They were on even though it was broad daylight in Wallonia. Shortly before the French border, it started to rain. The rain felt warm. We left the highway and crossed the Ardennes. We were in France, and it was raining cats and dogs.

“Is this what your winter is like?” Vassily asked under the eaves of a service station where we struggled with our rain ponchos.

The owner of the place came out of his hut and sniffed around our bikes. We had Moscow number plates: 77.

“Oh, you’re from Seine-et-Marne,” the guy said. “Quite a way from here!”

It was dark beneath the naves of the Ardennes pines. I was thinking about my Russians. To cross the borders of a federal republic, a duchy, a kingdom, and a Jacobin republic in under sixty miles was an illustration of the complexity of European history. The outlines of our states were like the art of trimming a bonsai. In Russia, things were simpler: Turko-Mongolian barbarians had invaded the steppes. The Russians had taken revenge and were now reigning from Belarus to the Sea of Japan. Since Stalin, they hadn’t played at twiddling borders.

In Vitron, we turned south-west to join again the track of the ghost sleigh. We would link up with it south of Reims. We still had to cross the flatland of Champagne. We went through one more downpour. The storm rose as we were reaching the Meuse. “Sleepy Meuse,” as Péguy had called it. Seriously, Charles. What had the Earth done to the wind for the latter to harass it to this extent? It had gotten dark just as the Ardennes were sinking into the plain. The rectilinear asphalt was drawing us to Reims.

This last leg of the journey should have been a picnic, we should have driven toward the cathedral, comfortably tucked in the memories of the trek, savoring our imminent arrival. Instead, it turned out to be the worst recollection of our trip. The rain got heavier past the Aisne valley and had the better of our waterproof clothes. “Extreme” jackets never read technical signs. Soaked, boxed in by the gusts, we maintained our speed. The trees along the shoulder were swaying beneath the uppercuts. My short-sighted eyes, my steamed-up glasses, and my visor, which had turned into a porthole, spread car headlights into blurry halos like the asses of fireflies on a summer’s night. I was blinded by the glare of cars coming toward me. I would deviate on the shoulder to let them pass, wary of biting into this highway D946 that was too narrow. Reims seemed to be farther and farther away. The Russians seemed pleased.

“It’s 42°F!” Vassily cried out at the Vouziers traffic lights. “This is the good life! This is democracy!”

This crazy blind driving had frayed my nerves. Once in Reims, the two Russians were relying on me. I was French, so they would be my guests, and it was up to me to dig up a hotel, preferably one run by Russophile owners in love with sidecars. Except that the people of Reims were going about their Christmas shopping, and weren’t falling over themselves trying to help us. I drove in circles for an hour before I came across a pleasant African from Champagne behind the wheel of an old banger. The only one who not only agreed to recommend an establishment in the city center, but even insisted on leading us there, saying, “Follow me, guys.”

Our irruption in reception was something with stage directions like, “Enter the Huns on a stormy night, into an old people’s home.” We invaded three rooms then, champagne capital or not, we went to celebrate our last evening in a beer bar. As Ural drivers, we weren’t about to give in to the snobbery that consists in getting ecstatic about the absurd ballet of aggressive little bubbles in a flute of cheap wine.

Vassily raised the first tankard. “To the Emperor.”

“Can I ask something?” I said. “Why do Russians venerate Napoleon?”

“Because he was a leader,” Vitaly the Muscovite replied.

“Because he bound us together,” Vassily the mechanic said.

“Because you beat him,” I said.

Before going to bed, we went to the cathedral square. The angel of Reims was smiling under the arches. I showed my friends his face. He was telling us that men would keep killing one another on battlefields till kingdom come because that’s what they did best. But that there would also be a few artists slaving away to redeem the failings of evildoers.

LAST DAY.

FROM REIMS TO THE INVALIDES (PARIS)

The sun’s rays were finally filtering through. There was a glow pouring through the gaps in the clouds. Washed by the rain the day before, the countryside looked splendid. The highway was empty and we were nearing the end of our trip. The sky was already Parisian: a breath of light.

We were about to rejoin the tracks of the imperial escape, around Meaux. Just outside Reims, in the highway service station, Vassily complained. “The machines aren’t running properly.”

“Yes,” I said. “My Ural is grumbling.”

“Russian engines are built for seventy-two-octane fuel,” Vitaly said.

“Your capitalistic fuel is too refined,” Vassily said.

It was 44°F. The fuel was too delicate and the winter more like spring: Europe truly was a paradise. We had to speed up because we had to keep an appointment on Place des Invalides. The night before, in Reims, I had sent the following message to a dozen or so close people:

“Dear friends,

Tomorrow, we arrive in Paris from Moscow.

We have repeated the itinerary of the Grande Armée during its Retreat from Russia in 1812 on our three Soviet motorbikes with sidecars.

We have paid homage to our heroes.

For them, it was chaos.

For us, one of the most emotionally moving journeys of our lives.

Tomorrow, we will be at the Invalides at 5 P.M.

Come.

Then we’ll go to my place.”

I kept checking my watch. It would be elegant to arrive in the square on the dot. However, around Meaux, we had to stop off in a rest area. Vitaly’s right-hand cylinder wasn’t responding anymore.

And so, at the critical moment of arriving, at the time when we should have honored a reunion, one of our Urals was letting us down. We laid the bike on its side and Vassily plunged into its bowels. I was furious. In actual fact, History was sending us a sign.

According to Caulaincourt, the axle of the imperial vehicle “broke down five hundred steps from the post,” in Saint-Jean-les-Deux-Jumeaux, between Ferté-sous-Jouarre and Meaux. In other words, a stone’s throw from where we were!

For the past two weeks, I had been expecting this kind of meeting point between our journey and the events of 1812, this superimposition of the Imperial tribulations and our own adventures. Historical journeys take on flavor when things repeat themselves identically, in the same locations, several centuries apart. You then get the impression you’re throwing a bridge (a suspension bridge, of course) over time.

That genius Vassily. Within thirty minutes, he had changed the carburetor. We just had an hour left before our appointment.

In the distance, Paris: all gold and zinc. The sun was casting its light through the clouds. The sky was dragging behind. We entered the city. I was feeling the tension of the past weeks relenting inside me. It was like the deflation of a balloon. Whenever I traveled, arriving always produced in me a mixture of relief and sadness: the adventure was over, the dream was dead, transformed into a memory. Later, I would have to leave again and head for “splendid names.” Whenever I reached the top of a mountain wall, there was the same blend of sad joy, of accomplishment. As well as the feeling of another step toward death.

As we passed the sign that we were entering Paris, I felt rid of the worry of my mission. I had seen my ghosts off. I had carried their memory. We had arrived, and I would unload the burden.

We were driving along the Seine.

I had been obsessed with the suffering endured in 1812 by nearly a million men of all nationalities. For weeks, I had wallowed in the memory of Napoleon. At night, I could see them, those distraught civilians and wounded soldiers, those tortured animals, dancing their sabbath before my eyes. I dedicated my sleeplessness to their memory and, during the day, my imagination to their sacrifice.

I thought of those bodies whose indistinct mass constituted the body of an army. Those young men—so alive—those frothing horses sacrificed by the handful upon the signal of a general commanding a movement of his troops. From a tactical point of view, the soldiers were the anonymous pieces of a device. They had no individual value. They were not considered as individual beings. No more than a single drop of water is taken into account when one speaks of the branch of a river. A troop is an abstract category in the mind of those who send it into the breach. It does not correspond to a list of soldiers with distinct names and faces. It’s a faceless mass to which a few thousand elements are subtracted the evening after a battle, when the counting is done.

From the point of view of the hill or high ground on which the general staff stood, what did a battle look like? We get an idea from 19th-century paintings: like a tussle, a fusion of lava flow with indistinguishable particles—in other words, men. There was something fluid about a Napoleonic battle. Troops were slippery tongues crawling toward one another, blending or repelling like a tidal bore.

Did Napoleon, even once in his life, stop considering human losses from just a statistical point of view? Did he once abandon the opera glass of the strategist to consider that the “dead on the field” didn’t just boil down to an expression? Did he realize that, behind these words, there were specific events and human actions hatching? Did he ever place himself on the side of the tragedy? Were his nights troubled by the sight of just one of those corpses? In the silence of the night, did he agonize over having flung open the gates of war and hurled entire nations into the abyss? Was he tormented by ghosts?

We drove past the ministry of fiscal predation, on Bercy. On the opposite bank, the towers of the François-Mitterrand library reflected the clouds.

There was one final question. What was the field of heroic expression nowadays? Would we, two hundred years after the French Empire, agree to charge against the enemy in order to promote an idea or the love of a leader? Would a general mobilization be possible at the dawn of the 21st century? I remembered my 1914 grandfather, who had spent five years wading through the Somme trenches and was in no way bitter about it. His letters, like those of other World War I infantrymen, were full of resignation. They said it was destiny, that you had to serve your country, and there was nothing you could do about it.

Were we capable of this? Of this restraint, of this acceptance?

I had the feeling we weren’t. That we’d lost our nerve. That something had happened since the World War Two. The collective paradigm had undergone a transformation. We no longer believed in a common destiny. Politicians would mutter stuff in their newspeak about “living together,” but nobody believed it, nobody read Renan anymore, and nobody took the trouble to propose the idea of a collective story.

What had happened for a nation to become an aggregate of individuals convinced they had nothing in common with others? Shopping, perhaps? Shopkeepers had managed to pull it off. For many of us, buying things had become a principal activity, a horizon, a destination. We were cultivating our gardens. That was probably preferable to fertilizing battlefields.

In Afghanistan, I’d had a conversation with two young French captains. We spoke for a long time, sitting on a rock, surrounded by the scent of artemisia. We asked ourselves what we would be ready to die for. Our country? I suggested. They exclaimed that they’d quite like to. But it should first be glorified by those who rule it. The young captains added with sadness that this was far from the case. The cause had collapsed. The very word was pedestrian. Nobody wants to die for a shameful idea. Who would throw himself into a game when you’re told it just isn’t worth it? It’s precisely there that Napoleon’s genius had been deployed. The Emperor had succeeded in an enterprise of exceptional propaganda. He had imposed his dream with the word. His vision had been made incarnate. France, the Empire, and he himself had become an object of desire, of a fantasy. He had managed to dazzle men, enthuse them, then involve them all in his project: from the lowliest conscript to the highest aristocrat.

He had told men something and the men had wanted to listen to a fairy story, and believe it could come true. Men are ready for anything, just as long as someone exalts them and the speaker is skillful.

The diminutive Corsican had used every publicity technique. He had staged his coronation, embraced a heritage without doing its inventory, and pictured a new aesthetic. He had distributed new titles, rewritten pedigrees, invented rewards. In his puppeteer hands a new court had been established. The system was based on merit: everybody could bring home the bacon and aspire to high office. You used to be a pork butcher’s boy? You could end up a marshal! It was no longer necessary to be of noble birth, as long as you were driven! He had produced slogans. His responses were imprinted in the collective unconscious. His letters and bulletins had acted as press releases for immediate business and archives for posterity. In battle, he had shaken up old rules. He had raised opportunism into an art of war. His military feats were theatrical. He had baffled war scholars, trusting in his lucky star, manhandling theories. Basking in victories, he had formed a geography of glory. Austerlitz, Wagram, Jena warmed the cockles of the heart, and inflamed minds. In the architecture of legend, he had neglected nothing: with the help of his Napoleonic Code, he had even endowed the Empire with its little red book!

The golden dome was glowing. Goisque had been busy. He had called the military governor of Paris and obtained permission for us drive our bikes into the main courtyard. We cut through a line of tourists. The Japanese were staring, eyes wide. The gendarmes moved back against the railings. Vitaly was proud. He wasn’t used to the constabulary holding the door open for him.

Our small column of Uralist-radical-Napoleonists, as Vassily called it, ventured onto the cobbles. We drove in a row, made half a turn to the left, parked our bikes, and cut our engines at the bottom of the courtyard, at the foot of Napoleon’s statue. We were a few yards away from his tomb. We had stretched an earthly thread from Moscow to this courtyard.

There were a few friends there. They’d come to hug us. They were surprised by the fact that we said nothing. We were just happy standing there, beneath the bronze statue.

I felt as though I was waking up after a two-and-a-half-thousand-mile-long dream.

Who was Napoleon? A wide-awake dreamer who believed life wasn’t enough? What was History? A faded dream of no use to our small-minded present?

The sky darkened, and a few drops fell.

I suddenly felt like going home, taking a shower, and washing off all those horrors.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sylvain Tesson has traveled the world by bicycle, train, horse, motorcycle, and on foot. His best-selling accounts of his travels have won numerous prizes, including the Dolman Best Travel Book Award for The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga (2013). He is also the president of an NGO, La Guilde Européenne du Raid.

COPYRIGHT

Europa Editions

214 West 29th St.

New York NY 10001

info@europaeditions.com

www.europaeditions.com

Copyright © 2015 by Editions Guérin

Published by arrangement with Agence litteraire Astier-Pécher

All Rights Reserved

First publication 2019 by Europa Editions

Translation by Katherine Gregor

Original Title: Berezina

Translation copyright © 2019 by Europa Editions

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

www.mekkanografici.com

Cover photo © www.thomasgoisque-photo.com

ISBN 9781609455552

NOTES

1

Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Paris: a prestigious European business school based in the suburbs of Paris.

2

In Russia, you count the amount of alcohol you drink in grams. A small glass: 50 grams. A large glass: 100 grams. A wreck of a morning: 500 grams.

3

Published by Fayard, Paris

4

Ménéval (Claude François de): Dix ans avec Napoleon, Les Mémoires du secrétaire particulier de l’Empereur, Paris, Le Cherche-Midi, 2014.

5

Op. Cit.

6

Bourbon-Gravierre, organizer of the civilian hospice.

7

Pirsig (Robert M.), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (William and Morrow, 1974).

8

Title of Lionel Jospin’s brilliant (but debatable) book (Paris, Le Seuil, 2014), who shares with the Emperor the fact that he failed at a campaign.

9

Berkeley (George), A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710.

Content

Sylvain Tesson
BEREZINA
FROM MOSCOW TO PARIS FOLLOWING NAPOLEON’S EPIC FAIL
Translated from the French
by Katherine Gregor

MAPS

JULY, BAFFIN ISLAND. SIX MONTHS PRIOR TO DEPARTURE

A FEW DAYS BEFORE DEPARTURE. MOSCOW, NOVEMBER

DAY ONE. FROM MOSCOW TO BORODINO

DAY TWO. FROM BORODINO TO VYAZMA

DAY THREE. FROM VYAZMA TO SMOLENSK

DAY FOUR. FROM SMOLENSK TO BARYSAV

DAY FIVE. FROM BARYSAW TO VILNIUS

DAY SIX. FROM VILNIUS TO AUGUSTÓW

DAY SEVEN. FROM AUGUSTÓW TO WARSAW

DAY EIGHT. FROM WARSAW TO PNIEWY

DAY NINE. FROM PNIEWY TO BERLIN

DAY TEN. FROM BERLIN TO NAUMBURG

DAY ELEVEN. FROM NAUMBURG TO BAD KREUZNACH

DAY TWELVE. FROM BAD KREUZNACH TO REIMS

LAST DAY. FROM REIMS TO THE INVALIDES (PARIS)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

NOTES