The Retreat Read online

  THE RETREAT

  Also by Patrick Rambaud

  THE BATTLE

  NAPOLEON’S EXILE

  Patrick Rambaud

  THE RETREAT

  Translated from the French by

  William Hobson

  Copyright © 2000 by Patrick Rambaud

  Translation copyright © 2004 by Macmillan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  First published in English in 2004 by Picador,

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd., London, England

  Originally published in 2000 as Il neigeait

  by Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, Paris

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rambaud, Patrick.

  [Il neigeait. English]

  The retreat / Patrick Rambaud ; translated by William

  Hobson.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9804-4

  1. Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815—Campaigns—Russia—

  Fiction. I. Hobson, Will. II. Title.

  PQ2678.A455153 2004

  843′.914—dc22 2004050281

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  To Tieu Hong for ever

  To The Unknown Soldier

  To Captain Fasquelle and his crew

  who, I’m certain, are delighted to welcome

  you aboard this flight 1812 to Beresina

  Translation of caption

  Map representing successive troop losses sustained by the French army during the Russian campaign, 1812–1813. Drawn up by M. Minard, Inspector General of Public Works retired. Paris 20 November 1869.

  The number of men present at any particular time is represented by the width of the coloured lines, to the ratio of one millimetre for ten thousand men [at original size]. Numbers are also written at an angle to the lines. Red [grey tint here] designates men entering Russia; black those leaving. The sources consulted for this map are the works of Messrs. Thiers, Ségur, Fezensac, Chambray and the unpublished diary of Jacob, an army pharmacist from 28 October. In order to represent the army’s losses more clearly, I have treated the troops under Prince Jérome and Marshal Davout, who in fact were diverted to Minsk and Mikilov and only rejoined the others at Orcha and Vitebsk, as if they marched with the main army throughout.

  ‘ON 20 MARCH 1811, sir, I was in Paris. It was a Wednesday. I was hugging the walls as usual …’

  ‘Did you have the Imperial police on your tail?’

  ‘Not a bit of it, but Paris’s streets were still narrow, filthy affairs in those days; the drains ran into them, people emptied chamber pots out of their windows, and one was always within a whisker of being flattened against a corner-post by some passing carriage or other. Anyway, suddenly, at ten o’clock in the morning – I’d just consulted my fob watch – I stopped dead in my tracks.’

  ‘In the middle of the street? With all those hazards?’

  ‘The carriages weren’t moving, the passers-by had fallen silent, all of us were straining our ears.’

  ‘To hear what?’

  ‘The cannon.’

  ‘Were we going to war?’

  ‘Oh, no, the Invalides’s little cannon was firing blanks.’

  ‘I see! A ceremony.’

  ‘Better than that, much better. We were counting the reports, ten, eleven, twelve … When it got to twenty-two, everyone all over Paris started shouting and singing and applauding like crazy. It was a boy. The throne had an heir and the Emperor had a son.’

  ‘Ah. And this warranted such an outpouring of joy, did it?’

  ‘Yes, because it meant continuity: if the Emperor were to die, a regency would succeed him, we would be spared further upheaval, and believe me sir, we had had too much experience of upheaval.’

  ‘But I was told that Empress Josephine couldn’t have any more children …’

  ‘My poor friend! That’s why Napoleon divorced her. After defeating the Austrians at Wagram, he married their monarch’s daughter, a Habsburg, the great-niece of Marie-Antoinette. And this royal princess had just given him a blond, pink-cheeked, chubby son who was created King of Rome in his cradle.’

  ‘What if it had been a girl?’

  ‘She would have become Queen of Venice, but …’

  ‘I understand. With a boy, the dynasty was assured and the French reassured.’

  ‘Exactly. From then on the Emperor need not be so preoccupied when he left Paris to pursue the unification of Europe. He already governed a hundred and thirty departments of an enlarged France; he controlled Germany, Prussia, Holland, his father-in-law’s Austria and all the kingdoms and duchies which he had persuaded to enter into alliances with him.’

  ‘By force, once again.’

  ‘Napoleon wanted peace, finally, he said, but England opposed French domination of the Continent. The Emperor hadn’t managed to invade that island; in fact he had lost his fleet to it at Trafalgar.’

  ‘So, if I’m following you correctly, he hoped to neutralize England, but how?’

  ‘By a blockade of its merchandise. If the English were no longer able to sell their goods in Europe, their factories would shut and their merchants go bankrupt, food shortages and unemployment would run rife – in short, London would have to capitulate.’

  ‘I understand the plan, but in practice?’

  ‘Alas, the Continental blockade had a perverse effect. It may have put England in an awkward position, but it was the other European countries that had to pay the real price: staples grew scarce, factories shut for lack of imported raw materials, there was no cotton, no sugar, no fabric dyes, everyone was at the mercy of a bad harvest …’

  ‘And the Europeans resented it.’

  ‘Exactly. The Russians in particular. The Tsar had sworn friendship to the Emperor, but the rouble was falling, the merchants were bemoaning their predicament and, as you might expect, the English seized on the opportunity to intrigue. They were constantly in St Petersburg, winning the Tsar over: “Open your eyes!” they’d say.

  “Napoleon rules from Naples to the North Sea, now he has Elba and is threatening the Russian borders – where will he stop? And what about Poland? Doesn’t he want to make it a kingdom at Russia’s expense?”’

  ‘We still had the Grande Armée …’

  ‘Hardly! Our best troops had been wearing themselves out for years in Portugal and Spain. They were no longer invincible.’

  ‘So, in a nutshell, we were heading for war.’

  ‘And no sparing the horses. This was common knowledge in Paris, in Vienna, in Berlin, all the more so because the Tsar, by opening his ports to British contraband, had broken the blockade. Tension was mounting, everyone was raising armies.’

  ‘The eternal spiral, then?’

  ‘In June 1812, with more than five hundred thousand men, Napoleon crossed the Niemen and entered Russia. He was confident; he thought the matter would be settled in twenty days.’

  ‘There he was m
istaken, but how did this rapid victory of his turn to tragedy?’

  ‘Let me tell you …’

  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 Eugène’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 Württemberg regiments, the red and gold of the Silesian hussars, the white of the Austrian chevaux-légers 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 spit-roasters’ 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 canteen’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, echoing, swelling, growing distinct.

  ‘What are those devils yelling?’ the captain asked no one in particular.

  ‘I think I know, sir,’ said Paulin who had caught his master up in the crowd.

  ‘Well, out with it, then, you halfwit.’

  ‘They’re shouting Moscow! Moscow!’

  *

  At a bend in the monotonous road, the first battalions had emerged onto the Hill of Salvation, and from there, spread out below them, they saw Moscow. It was a vision of the Orient at the end of a desolate plain. In the ranks, noisy shouts of joy gave way to a stunned silence; they gazed at the measureless city and the grey sweep of its river. After flushing its brick walls, the sun was gl
inting on the gilded domes of a clustered multitude of churches. They counted the blue cupolas spangled with gold, the minarets, the pointed towers, the palaces’ balconies; they were astonished by the mass of cherry-red and green roofs, the brilliant splashes of orangeries, the tangles of waste land, the geometry of kitchen and pleasure gardens, the ornamental lakes glittering like sheets of metal. And radiating out from the crenellated walls stretched suburb after suburb, each a village enclosed by a simple epaulement. Many of them dreamt they were in Asia. Grenadiers who had survived Egypt feared a mirage, feared that, like a terrible memory, Ibrahim Bey’s savages might suddenly appear again, chain mail under their burnooses and black silk tassels on their bamboo lances. The majority, who’d seen less service, anticipated a reward: Caucasian women with hair the colour of straw, something to eat, too much to drink, a night between clean sheets.

  ‘What a sight, eh, Paulin?’ said Captain d’Herbigny when it was his turn to crest the hill. ‘More impressive than Rouen from St Catherine’s Hill, wouldn’t you say!’

  ‘Certainly, sir,’ replied the servant, who preferred Rouen, its belfry and the Seine.

  Unfortunately for Paulin, his was a loyal nature; he followed where his master led. D’Herbigny stood as his guarantor whenever, with a soldier’s wartime licence, he stole, and, since wars followed one after the other, Paulin’s savings were growing; he hoped to buy a tailor’s shop, that was his father’s trade. If the captain was wounded, he pitied him – whilst discreetly rubbing his hands together, quarters nearer the ambulances were always better – but the respite never lasted. D’Herbigny had the constitution of an ox; even when he lost a hand or took a bullet in the calf, he quickly recovered and his spirits never wavered, since his devotion to the Emperor was bordering on the religious.

  ‘Still,’ grumbled the manservant, ‘why come such a long way …’

  ‘It’s because of the English.’