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.”