When the time came to retire, they gave Anne and Nikolai the best places on top of the stove, where they slept warm – almost too warm. The night seemed to pass very quickly. The old woman was up before first light, stirring up the stove and lighting the samovar for tea; and by the time the sun rose mistily on the first day of November, they were mounting their ponies in the clearing, their breath smoking on the cold, uncharitable air.
They came up to the road a few miles west of Ghzatsk. The first thing they saw was a five-foot long, elaborately wrought gold torchere, lying at a drunken angle half in and half out of a deep rut at the side of the road: a piece of plunder from Moscow, presumably, that had fallen from a cart. A little further along, however, they came upon a trail of scattered goods – a dozen beautifully bound books, a pair of candelabra, a rolled-up tapestry tied with string, a canteen of silvery cutlery, a framed portrait of a woman in the dress of the previous century. It looked like a deliberate attempt to lighten the load of a carriage in trouble.
They rounded a bend in the road, and there before them was the carriage itself, at the bottom of a slope which led into a ford and up again. The carriage stood – or rather leaned on a broken axle – across the ford, its doors hanging open, more plunder scattered around it, as the occupants had presumably searched amongst their loot for the most portable objects. As they drew closer, they saw something else lying on the ground beyond the carriage.
Half a dozen carrion crows flapped and hopped away from it as they approached, and Anne turned her face away, feeling a little nauseous. It was a dead horse – so thin its ribs and hips seemed almost ready to break through its dull hide. Its tongue hung out of its mouth, and there was a white tide mark along its neck where its labours had raised a foam. What was peculiarly horrible was that chunks had been roughly hacked out of it – and not by the beaks of carrion crows, either.
Kirov remembered Kutuzov’s words: I’ll see him eat horseflesh! It was plain that the retreating French army was desperately short of food; as desperately as it was short of fodder for the horses. This one looked as though it had died in the effort of dragging the carriage out of the shallow ford into which its momentum had carried it; and to judge by its condition, it had been lucky to get this far.
Adonis jumped down from his horse and passed the reins to Kirov, walked over to the dead horse, and bent to examine its hooves. He straightened up and called out, ‘Come and look at this, Colonel.’
Kirov urged the horses nearer, until they caught the scent of their dead brother, and snorted and goggled and would not go any further. Adonis lifted a hoof and angled it towards him.
‘No spikes. These aren’t winter shoes,’ he said. ‘See – smooth as glass, and a ball of frozen mud on its sole. No wonder the poor beast fell and couldn’t get up.’
‘Not winter shoes?’ Kirov said dazedly. ‘But – Napoleon sat in Moscow for a month doing nothing! Surely to God he must have had all his horses reshod? If he did nothing else, he must have done that!’
Adonis shrugged, and dropped the hoof, and came back to reclaim his mount. Anne watched in silence. Even she knew that every horse in Russia was reshod at the end of autumn with spiked shoes, so that they could get a grip on icy ground and packed snow. Without winter shoes, they would slip about hopelessly and fall every few steps.
Adonis was mounted. He took the rein of the packhorse, and they trotted on.
That was the first they saw of the debris left by the retreating Grande Armée, but it was not the last. Discarded plunder littered the road: statues and paintings and candelabra, gold plates and silver goblets, icons and altar furniture, tapestries and carpets, silk gowns and gauze scarves, ormolu clocks and porcelain figures, silver inlaid tables and delicate Louis Quinze chairs. The Grande Armée had stripped Moscow of everything it could carry away; but the desperate state of the horses had forced them to jettison their booty in the attempt to save their lives.
They soon stopped counting the dead horses. Every hundred yards or so they found another, and almost all had been rudely hacked by the starving soldiers, desperate for something – anything – to put in their stomachs. There were abandoned carts, and boulevard carriages whose light frames had not survived the roughness of the road. Some of them had evidently been partly destroyed to provide firewood to cook the lumps of horsemeat, for they found the remains of many fires, and occasionally charred bones, and the sticks they had speared the meat on.
They found any number of discarded arms, breastplates, helmets; cannons too, usually dismounted or spiked to prevent their being used by the enemy, presumably abandoned when there were no more draught horses to haul them. What was fleeing before them was evidently no longer an army, but a rabble of desperate men hoping to save their lives.
They found dead men, too. It was a grim sight. Some had evidently died of exhaustion and starvation; others told another, harsher tale. Bandaged or treated wounds suggested that they had been brought along in hospital carts, and had either fallen out, or been dumped like the excess baggage. More than once they found clear evidence that the unfortunate, in falling or being thrown from the cart, had been run over by the vehicle following.
The path of the Grande Armée cut a great swath across the land, spreading out far to either side of the road. Beyond it, in the fringes of the woods and what remained of the fields, they found evidence of the work of Cossacks, picking off men who strayed out of line, possibly foraging or perhaps wandering in delirium. Adonis, scouting further into the woods, found in a clearing evidence of a grimmer sort. The trunk of a fallen tree lay across the clearing, and lying in a line along it were the bodies of seven French soldiers. They had evidently been captured and handed over to the peasants, who had obliged them to place their heads on the tree trunk, and had then, with great thoroughness, smashed their skulls to pulp with clubs.
He returned to the road and rejoined Kirov and Anne and said nothing about what he had seen. He had been ready to propose leaving the road, so that Anne might not have to witness any more unpleasant sights; but he had an idea that what had happened in the clearing to the seven Frenchmen was amongst the more merciful ends that the peasants were likely to mete out; and he did not think his master would want her to be exposed to that kind of reality.
They reached Viasma, and skirted the town, which, despite the biting cold which had set in over the last couple of days, they could smell a good way off. Outside the town, they came across the remains of a bivouac camp: more abandoned carts, rudely hacked to provide firewood; a score or more dead horses, which presumably had succumbed to the bitter cold of the night; and at least a dozen human corpses, some of which seemed to have been stripped of their clothing, presumably by colleagues desperate for warmth. Two of them were bare-footed, but those who still had shoes revealed that suitable footwear had not been provided for them any more than for the horses.
They hurried past this grim sight, and beyond the town they were intercepted by a group of four Cossacks, who plainly knew of their approach.
‘Best stay off the road now, Colonel,’ they told him. ‘It’s not a nice sight up ahead. And you’re not far behind the stragglers now.’
‘We’ve caught up with them?’
‘Only the back end. The French army’s spread over such a distance now, it takes ’em three days to pass through a place. Most of ’em wouldn’t notice if you rode right past ’em, but one or two are still armed, and all of ’em are desperate enough for a horse and a warm coat to kill you with their bare hands.’