History justified Kutuzov: all the skirmishes between Russians and French were to the advantage of the latter. The Retreat from Russia therefore rests on this paradox, unique in Human History: an army marched, from victory to victory, toward its total annihilation!
Night had come down on the plain. The hundred miles between Vyazma and Smolensk were not pleasant. The condensation blinded you. I was trying to remember the quotation by Cendrars: “One should close one’s eyes when traveling.” The poet hadn’t intended these words for Ural travelers in the winter. Wiping my visor had become an obsession. In the end, I was looking at the road through a square quarter of an inch of transparent plastic spared by the flower patterns of the frost. I was so numbed by the cold that all I longed for was sleep, which was incompatible with driving. Cold is a ferocious beast. It grabs you by a limb, sinks its teeth into it, doesn’t let go, and its venom gradually spreads through your being. Mountain climbers know that numbness is a response that is mortally tempting to storms. On a motorbike, if you’ve managed to wrap up warm, the slightest gesture that moves the edifice of your protection by as little as half an inch could be fataclass="underline" the cold will be injected into you. At fifty miles an hour, it will exploit the slightest gap in the barricade of your clothes. I was so exhausted that I would deliberately swerve to the left when a truck wanted to overtake us, so that the roar of the horn would give me a few reviving slaps and keep me awake.
“Smolensk, sixty miles,” a blue sign stated. Vassily and Vitaly had called us earlier, when we had returned to Vyazma. This time they had really left Moscow and, at full throttle, had sworn on the gods of all the Russias that they would catch up with us by midnight. “We’ll have dinner with you in Smolensk!”
There were other reasons for Kutuzov’s restraint. The Field Marshal did not wish Napoleon’s death. He knew Britain could take advantage of the disappearance of this King of Kings from the surface of the globe to extend its dominion.
His reticence about exposing his army also came from the certainty that he could count on partisans. A partisan war is defined by the amount of damage a handful of determined men can inflict on a regular army corps, tangled up in its logic of mass, the heavy bulk of its logistics, the ugliness of its principles. According to Tolstoy, a partisan war was “what guerilleros did in Spain, mountain folk did in the Caucasus, and Russians did in 1812.” One could carry on with the litany of asymmetry: it’s what Fellahs did in Algeria, the Karen against the Burmese junta, and the Taliban in Afghanistan. And it is what Islamist sleeper cells are still doing in the global war they’ve waged on secular democracies. The author of War and Peace dates the partisan war from the “enemy entering Smolensk.” In actual fact, since its departure from Moscow, the Grande Armée had been assaulted by the army of shadows. “Cossacks were all over the country,” Caulaincourt complains. Everywhere, from behind the edge of a wood or the mist of marshes, a detachment of a few dozen or several hundred partisans would spring out. Among them there were peasants hungry for pillaging, perfectly-organized groups, miniature armies commanded by a chief, bands of marauders, quartermaster sergeants fearing neither God not man, and last-minute opportunists who relied on the French rout in order to buy themselves a future. Napoleon “compared them to Arabs,” Caulaincourt said.
In war, hooligans follow the troops like seagulls follow fishermen’s trawlers. They wait for the day after the battle to rob the dead. They’re as patient as vultures. Sometimes, they lend a hand, join the regulars, and take part in battles. Where pillage is concerned, might as well be ready to get down to work. In War and Peace, Tolstoy portrays the character of Tikhon, a highwayman who fights in the Cossack ranks and steals whatever he can while declaring his faith in the “holy war and liberation of the homeland.” It’s the perennial image of the optimistic villain who benefits from the high stakes of his time. I thought that quite a few members of the current Islamic factions resembled this archetype. The West quivered and considered them without distinction as religious fanatics. But were all Jihadist highway robbers Muhammad’s pious servants? Many probably concealed a soul like Tikhon and used the holy cause to justify the use of weapons and professional crime.
During this marginal war, chiefs of the regular army, such as the poet Denis Davydov and General Platov, genies of the raid, strategists of the decisive blow, became famous for their commando actions, surrounding isolated groups of the main troops, destroying supplies, and harassing French bivouacs. Tolstoy mentions a detachment commanded by a sacristan and another by a woman “who killed hundreds of French.” Kutuzov stirred his nation. In the countryside, his speeches were charismatic. On October 31st, the Field Marshal issued a proclamation: “Extinguish the Moscow flames in the blood of your enemies. Russians, obey this solemn order.”
From that moment on, nothing—not thickets, or farms on the edge of fields, nothing could provide a refuge for the French. The smallest bed of reeds could shelter a nest of partisans. Cossacks could spring out at any time, from anywhere, ready, according to Tolstoy, to sweep “the dead leaves that fell off the dried-up tree of their own accord.”
When civilians and irregulars got involved, the war acquired a further degree of cruelty. Captured by peasants, the hapless soldiers were impaled, plunged into boiling water, buried alive, beaten to death, or thrown naked into frozen woods. The Russian countryside was intoxicated with an outburst of violence. Slumbering for centuries, the old nation had never expressed against the Tsar’s yoke the energy it was devoting to punishing the invader. This characteristic persists even today: what a Russian inflicts on another Russian is only the Russian’s business, but beware the foreigner who butts in… “The war of armed peasants […] is hurting us more than their army. […],” a hospital officer[6] admitted.
I confess that, on the way to Smolensk that night, knowing that Vassily and Vitaly were right behind us, I often looked into my rearview mirror, just in case a band of human wolves howling war cries was about to catch up with us, riding smoking motorbikes.
In Smolensk, we stopped at the old hotel for Soviet apparatchiks, the Dnieper, still in its original condition. Room attendants with peroxided hair, Brezhnev-era decor, 1970s chandeliers, thermal industry piping: we enjoyed the Cold War atmosphere. I was forty years old and nostalgic for a world I hadn’t known. I preferred this atmosphere to that of standardized hotels with which capitalism with an inhuman face has covered our city centers: establishments designed by salespeople who thought that WiFi and an air conditioner fixed above a bolted window was better than a chat with a babushka and a window that opens over a frozen river.