The Retreat (24 page)

‘Where?' a clerk said to him.

‘Cock – a – doodle – do!'

‘Is that a cockerel?'

‘It sounds like it, Monsieur Paulin.'

‘Does His Majesty have a travelling barnyard?'

‘Heavens, no; his meat is transported in salting tubs. A salt cockerel can't sing.'

‘Cock – a – doodle – do!'

Outside, soldiers were laughing and slapping their thighs. They formed a circle around the make-believe fowl, a valet in green livery laced with gold and a powdered wig; he was hopping up and down, his heels tucked in under his bottom, producing very convincing cock-a-doodle-doos. Sebastian asked what game they were playing. A corporal answered, gasping for breath, ‘Thinks he's a cock. He's mad.'

‘We're going to pluck him,' said another jovially.

Sebastian was not particularly amused. He had been noticing cases of delirium for more than a week, but they took less comical forms – yelling, incoherent speech, cursing. The man suddenly collapsed in the snow and refused to move; he was going to freeze to death. Prefect Bausset, whose gout made every step painful, gave instructions for the hysteric to be carried in the medical orderlies' caravan,
and then ordered the major-domos to take a hundred bottles of Chambertin to His Majesty. The first bridge was finished and the Emperor wanted personally to distribute his wine among the shivering workers, who were moving a hundred metres upstream to build a second one.

The coachmen put horses to their carriages, the gunners likewise to their cannon. Stragglers were coming out from the Borisov road, alerted by a rumour that the engineers were throwing bridges across the river; a multitude of vehicles, horses, and tatterdemalions spread across the plain without being able to reach the bridge, which was sealed off by the grenadiers. An angry clamour greeted this obstruction, as if their survival depended solely on crossing this river, the Berezina with its multiple branches and miry islets. Berthier, Murat, Ney exerted all their energies organizing their troops. Oudinot dressed the lines of his impeccably uniformed regiments. The carriages of the Imperial household moved off towards the site of the second bridge, where trestles had already been fixed in the bed.

Sebastian didn't stay in the barouche; he needed to move about. He approached the new building yard, where the Emperor was avidly monitoring the bridge's progress, standing at the start of the barely laid roadway, beside General Eblé who was coordinating the work.

Tied to rafts, pontoneers were nailing road-bearers or, as they had the previous night, stripping to dive into the water and hold piles steady in the muddy bed, or climbing under the trestles, nimble as acrobats, with nails at the corner of their mouths and hammers hanging from strings round their necks. The temperature was falling. There was no let-up in the mass of drift ice being swept downstream,
spinning and crashing into wood or bodies. A pontoneer cried out: a piece of ice was pinning him against a thick plank; he opened his mouth, threw his head back and sank. His companions didn't help him – they didn't have time – this bridge for the artillery had to be finished and sturdy before nightfall. Sebastian heard the Emperor say, ‘Eblé, reinforce your men with my sappers.'

‘They don't know this work, sire.'

‘Then explain it to them, we have to hurry.'

‘And make something that holds, sire.'

‘If you'd kept your boats, it would have made life easier for us.'

‘You requested I burn them.'

‘This drift ice!'

‘If we had had time, we would have built a barricade of tree trunks …'

On the right bank, Polish lancers were returning from patrol; their officer was shaking his lance with its multicoloured pennons. As he rode across the first bridge at a slow trot, it wobbled. On the other bank he made his way upstream to the site where the Emperor was standing.

‘Sire! Sire! The Russians!'

‘They're advancing on us?'

‘They have disappeared.'

‘They've scurried off to Borisov,' the Emperor said, smiling, pleased with his trick and the mediocrity of the enemy's generals.

*

‘There, Chantelouve, you see why the wounds they inflict are so awful?' D'Herbigny had kept the musket of the
Russian who had fleetingly been his prisoner and was displaying the calibre of the bullets he'd found in the cartridge pouch. ‘Those are pigeon's eggs, not bullets.'

‘What about when you haven't got any Russian ammunition left, Captain?' asked another cavalryman.

‘If I run out, that means I've put it to good use! I'll have blown some Cossacks' heads to bits!'

‘Or civilians‘, Captain. Look at that shambles.'

At the entrance to the finished bridge, over which Oudinot's regiments were filing, the grenadiers were endeavouring to keep the hordes at a distance. Their bayonets didn't impress anyone, however; civilians pushed in between horses and wagons, their numbers constantly growing as they massed in the plain.

The thousands of men of II Corps had not yet crossed the river when the other bridge was finished. The vehicles of the Emperor's household waited in line for the order to be given; the artillery readied itself. The Guard regrouped while a division deployed in front of the first bridge; navvies from the engineers, loudly booed on all sides, were digging a broad trench to contain the crowd. The captain and his brigade fell in behind the Old Guard. Caulaincourt gave his instructions to the drivers: ‘Drive as slowly as possible and keep a gap between yourselves, the bridge mustn't be overstrained.'

‘We'll be at it for hours!'

‘We've got all evening and night.'

A barouche made its way over the bridge. Everyone held their breath, listening to the wood creaking; then a berline followed in turn without mishap. Caulaincourt let the infantry of the Guard file by on either side of the vehicles. Soon torches had to be lit and for hours on end,
they crossed the Berezina like a funeral procession. Back on the plain, the confused mass of civilians had resigned themselves to waiting; they were setting up their camps around burning carts.

Raising his torch to a barouche's window, the captain caught sight of his batman and seemed reassured. Good old Paulin … All in all, they weren't doing too badly: in a few days they'd be resting up in Vilna, a prosperous town where everyone could spend their coins and ingots. The Russian army Bassano thought was a threat had gone away; it must have linked up with Kutuzov's forces. D'Herbigny was about to step onto the bridge when the carriage in front of him ground to a halt; a wheel had slipped through the planks. Pontoneers who were watching on rafts hurried over to brace the roadway. The driver and some infantrymen lifted the carriage and worked its wheel free.

As a precaution, the soldiers guided the horses by hand, which allowed them to control their speed and prevent accidents. As they drove onto the bridge, the vehicles kept their distance from one another, but leaving it they began to pile up; despite the hard frost, the ground was being ploughed into mud, new arrivals were becoming stuck and blocking the forest road. Thus overloaded at one end, the bridge began to grow weaker. Every moment pontoneers were straightening an unsteady trestle or reinforcing a joint.

*

D'Herbigny walked his horse onto the bridge, not even glancing at the black water with its great, circling blocks of ice. Sometimes one hit a strut and the roadway pitched. The captain was halfway across the bridge when, just in front of him, a berline pulled up; one of its horses had
collapsed. The driver and passengers cut the girths holding the animal and pushed it into the water, sending up a huge spray of foam.

The creaking of the struts was becoming alarming. The captain took the initiative; going from coach to coach, he ordered the passengers for their own safety to continue on foot. He was about to knock on the window of the secretaries' barouche, whose horses were stamping dangerously, when the roadway broke in two; the horses caught their pasterns in the planks and the carriage pitched over into the river. Dozens of torches lit up the disaster.

‘Paulin!' yelled the captain.

The pontoneers pushed a raft closer to the carriage that was edging sideways, the ice slashing at it; a trestle was the only thing keeping it from being carried downstream; everything was about to collapse. D'Herbigny handed over his torch; supporting himself with his one hand, he leant over the edge to step onto the body of the carriage, now on its side, and broke the window with the heel of his boot. Flattening himself on his stomach, the captain reached in his hand, sprung the latch, opened the door. Inside shadowy figures were scrambling about; hands stretched out. The grenadiers threw down ropes, pontoneers rowed towards the accident. Every passenger they saved was pulled up onto the bridge and relative safety. But where was Paulin? And Monsieur Roque? D'Herbigny groped around with his arm and shouted for a lantern to see inside the barouche. There was no one there.

‘Sir!'

Paulin was sitting on the edge of the bridge with Monsieur Roque and some other clerks; warned of the risk, they had chosen to walk behind the carriage. Sebastian
leant down. ‘Monsieur d'Herbigny, will you have a look and see if you can't spot a brown leather satchel. It's where I keep my books.'

The captain pretended to look but was thinking that this young Monsieur Roque, even if he was his neighbour from Normandy, had a damn nerve.

*

Sebastian and the Imperial staff sat shivering around a blazing fire, at the edge of a little wood from which they could see the whole Berezina. The army was still crossing slowly, column after column, lit by a white morning sky. The artillery bridge had broken a hundred times and, all things considered, Sebastian preferred his job as secretary to the gruelling work of the pontoneers, constantly and uncomplainingly immersed in freezing water, repairing, patching together – and knowing everyone's fate depended on them.

At the bridgeheads the grenadiers were struggling to prevent a vast, seething crowd crossing in the rare moments when there was a gap between battalions. The army had priority and let it be known. Generals forced their way through with sticks or the flat of a sabre or a musket butt. Sebastian thought he could see Davout on horseback, almost crushed by two carriages; he rallied his smoke-blackened, emaciated soldiers, and then plunged into the tangle of vehicles, horses and frenzied men and women. Scanning the heaving mass of abandoned on the riverbank, Sebastian hoped, by some stroke of luck, to catch a glimpse of Mlle Ornella, but what did she look like now? Had she survived? Something told him she had and was struggling in that throng, but he wanted to know for sure. He turned
on his heels, and headed towards the hamlet where the Emperor was to stay that night. He heard smothered shouts and calls for help. A voltigeur was moaning, lying flat on his stomach. Misled by the darkness before dawn, his friends had fallen into a deep well that had been dug by peasants and hidden by the snow.

‘Aren't you going to throw them a rope?'

‘All the ropes are being used for the bridges.'

‘Your belt?'

‘I can't reach my comrades.'

‘Branches?'

‘They break.'

‘There's nothing we can do …'

‘Yes, there is. Watch where you're putting your feet, make sure you don't fall into these damned holes!'

Lancers wrapped in thick blankets were smoking their pipes around the remnants of a fire. They had tethered their mounts to a clump of fir trees.

‘Can you lend me a horse?' asked Sebastian.

‘To go where?'

‘Down by the bridges.'

‘And what if we don't see this horse again?'

‘Lend it to me for this …'

Sebastian held up a diamond between two fingers. The diamonds from the Kremlin were everything he owned. The lancers smoothed their moustaches; they weren't sure, they hesitated. Gold, silver, precious stones: none of it was any use in those frozen wastes. The other day Sebastian had seen an unattached man sitting on the ground like a beggar; he was trying to trade an ingot for bread but people were walking past him without stopping. One of the lancers
agreed. He was a lieutenant and he had two horses; he gave Sebastian his servant's horse, a spotted mare.

Sebastian covered the two hundred metres to the bank at a trot. He took the bridge cautiously; the trestles were sinking, the planks nearing the level of the water, constantly battered by the ice. On the left bank, which was jammed solid with vehicles, the press of refugees was so intense that they were no longer moving at all. The wheels of the berlines and wagons were locked, postilions were yelling, lashing about them with their whips, while the dense crowd stamped their feet. Sebastian realized his stupidity. What had he come here for? He had already escaped fire, cold, hunger, drowning and the Cossacks and now he was going back of his own free will to join a crowd of civilians who were never going to cross the Berezina unharmed. He scrutinized the faces of those closest to him, hoping to see a head of black hair he recognized. The Emperor was crossing the second bridge on horseback with the Young Guard, and Oudinot's cannon were dashing down the hill from where they had swept the marshes.

‘If you go into that morass, sir, the crowd will swallow you up and who knows if you'll come out whole?'

The officer commanding the picket of grenadiers had noticed the cockade on Sebastian's hat and was anxious to warn him. The young man had no need of that type of advice, however: he saw the extent of the catastrophe but a force, or his bad conscience, was urging him on.

‘I'll risk it,' he said.

‘That's the word for it.'

‘On the Emperor's service!'

‘I'd gathered that.'

The ranks parted and Sebastian rode into the chaos. The snarl of carriages and wagons prevented any access to the bridges; overwhelmed, the refugees were preparing to camp for a second night on the white plain. In a hail of insults, Sebastian pushed through the crowd, looking around from his vantage point astride his horse – but nothing, no black hair. Wait, near a berline, with her back to him, there was a woman holding a torch of straw. Sebastian shouted Ornella's name but the woman didn't turn round. With his mare's breast he cleared a path through to the berline, which was starting to burn. The woman finally turned round: it wasn't the actress. He tried to turn back before it grew dark. Snow was starting to fall slowly on the fires.