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The Retreat

By Patrick Rambaud

Atlantic Monthly Press

Copyright © 2004 Patrick Rambaud
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780871138774

Chapter One

Moscow, 1812 Captain d'Herbigny felt ridiculous. Swathed in a pale cloak that floated on his shoulders, one could make out a dragoon of the Guard by the helmet enturbanned in navy calfskin, with a black horsetail on its brass crest, but astride a miniature horse he had bought in Lithuania, this strapping fellow had to dress his stirrups too short to stop his boots dragging along the ground - except that then his knees stuck up. 'What in Heaven's name do I look like?' he grumbled. 'What sort of a sight must I be?' The captain missed his mare and his right hand. The hand had been hit by a Bashkir horseman's poisoned arrow during a skirmish: the surgeon had amputated it, stopped the bleeding with birch cotton because there was a shortage of lint, and dressed the wound with paper from the archives for lack of bandages. As for his mare, she had bloated after eating rain-soaked green rye; the poor thing had started trembling and soon she was hardly able to stand upright; when she stumbled into a gully, d'Herbigny had resigned himself to destroying her with a bullet behind the ear; it had brought him to tears. His batman Paulin limped behind him, sighing, dressed in a black coat covered with leather patches and a crumpled hat, and with a cloth bag slung over his shoulder filled with grain he'd gathered along the way; he was leading by a string a donkey with a portmanteau strapped to its back. These two fine fellows were not alone in railing against their ill fortune. Lined with a double row of huge trees similar to willows, the new Smolensk road they were trudging along ran through flat, sandy country. It was so broad that ten barouches could drive down it abreast, but on that grey, cold September Monday, as the mist lifted it revealed an unmoving crush of vehicles following the Guard and Davout's army. There were goods wagons in their thousands, a mass of conveyances for transporting the baggage, ambulance carts, masons', cobblers', and tailors' caravans; they carried handmills and forges and tools; on their long wooden handles, scythe blades poked out of one dray. The most exhausted, victims of fever, let themselves be carried, sitting on the ammunition wagons drawn by scrawny horses; long-haired dogs chased in and out, trying to bite each other. Soldiers of all arms of the army escorted this throng. They were marching to Moscow. They had been marching for three months. Ah yes, the captain remembered, they'd been a mighty fine sight in June when they'd crossed the Niemen to violate Russian territory. The procession of troops across the pontoon bridges had lasted for three days. Just imagine: cannon by the hundred, over five hundred thousand fresh, alert fighting men, French a good third of them, with the grey- coated infantry rubbing shoulders with Illyrians, Croats, Spanish volunteers and Prince Eugene's Italians. Such might, such order, such numbers, such colour: one could spot the Portuguese by the orange plumes of their shakoes, the Weimar carabineers by their yellow plumes; over there were the green greatcoats of the Wurttember regiments, the red and gold of the Silesian hussars, the white of the Austrian chevaux-legers and the Saxon cuirassiers, the jonquil jackets of the Bavarian chasseurs. On the enemy bank, the Guard's band had played 'Le Nouvel Air de Roland', 'Whither go these gallant knights, honour and hope of France ...' The moment they crossed the river, their misfortunes began. They had to tramp through desert wastes in intense heat, plunge into forests of black firs, suffer sudden freezing cold after hellish storms; countless vehicles got bogged in the mud. In under a week the supply trains, heavy, slow-moving wagons drawn by oxen, had been left far behind. Resupply posed a grave problem. When the vanguard arrived in a village, they found nothing. The harvests? Burned. The herds? Moved. The mills? Destroyed. The warehouses? Devastated. The houses? Empty. Five years earlier, when Napoleon was conducting the war in Poland, d'Herbigny had seen peasants abandon their farms to hide in the depths of the forests with their animals and provisions; some secreted potatoes under their tiled floors, others buried flour, rice, and smoked bacon under the firs and hung boxes full of dried meat from the highest branches. Well, it had begun again, only much worse. The horses gnawed at the frames of mangers, ate the straw in mattresses and the wet grass; ten thousand died before a Russian had even been seen. Famine reigned. The soldiers filled their bellies with a porridge of cold rye; they devoured juniper berries; they fought over the water in the mires, since the peasants had thrown carrion and dung down their wells. Dysentery was rife; half the Bavarians died of typhus before seeing action. Bodies of men and horses rotted on the roads; the stinking air they breathed made them nauseous. D'Herbigny cursed but he knew he was favoured; officers had requisitioned other army corps's rations for the Imperial Guard, which led to brawls and no lack of resentment towards the privileged men. As his horse plodded along, the captain crunched a green apple that he had taken from a dead man's pocket. With his mouth full he called to his batman: 'Paulin!' 'Sir?' the other said in a barely audible voice. 'Heavens above! We're not moving at all now! What's going on?' 'Well, sir, I wouldn't have the foggiest.' 'You never know anything!' 'Just give me a moment to hitch our donkey to your saddle and I'll run off and find out ...' 'Because, on top of everything else, you see me leading a toy donkey, do you? You complete ass! I'll go.' They could hear swearing in front. The captain threw away his apple core, which was immediately fought over by some yapping, raw-boned mongrels and then, with a noble flourish, he steered his minute mount left-handed into the bottleneck. Skewed sideways across the road, the covered vehicle of a canteen was blocking the traffic. A chicken, tied to the cart's frame by its feet, was shedding feathers as it struggled to escape; a band of dirty conscripts leered at it with spitroasters' eyes. The canteen-woman and her driver were bewailing their luck. One of their draught horses had just collapsed; some voltigeurs in torn uniforms had put down their arms to take it out of the shafts. The captain went closer. The carcass was now unharnessed but the soldiers, despite their number and their efforts, couldn't push it onto the verge. 'It'd take two good sturdy carthorses,' the driver was saying. 'There ain't none,' a voltigeur was replying. 'A strong rope will do,' d'Herbigny suggested as if stating the obvious. 'What then, sir? The animal's going to be just as heavy.' 'No, dammit! Tie the rope round the pasterns, and then ten of you haul it together.' 'We're no stronger than the horses,' replied a pale young sergeant. D'Herbigny twisted up his moustache and scratched the wing of his long, proud nose. He was preparing to direct the road-clearing operation when a great clamour stopped him. It came from up ahead, towards the horizon, where the road curved. The clamour was persisting, taking hold, a fearsome, unremitting barrage of sound. Slowed by the can- teen's accident, the throng now stopped dead. Every face turned in unison towards the uproar. It didn't sound warlike, more like a song bursting from a thousand throats. The cries were growing louder as they came nearer, passing along the column, rolling,...