Milan Kundera often deplored the lack of rationality in the Russian way of thinking. He was repelled by this tendency on the part of Dostoyevsky’s compatriots always to sentimentalize everything, to tarnish a life with pathos when they themselves were guilty of doing it. What if this was the key to the Russian mystery? An ability to leave everything behind in ruins to then water them with floods of tears.
Certainly, this journey was a way of honoring the manes of Sergeant Bourgogne and Prince Eugène, but also an opportunity to throw ourselves from potholes into bistros with two of our brothers from the East and seal our love for Russia, for crumbling roads, and for freezing mornings washing away drunken nights.
We drove to the Smolensk fortifications. I tried to picture this sleepy city consumed by fire and pillage. It was hard to distract myself from the babushkas coming back from the market or the female students in leather boots and dressed in fox furs, who, in Russia, always confuse sidewalks with Fashion Week catwalks.
Arriving here must have been such a disappointment for the soldiers of the Grande Armée. The wretches had dreamed of it so long! They thought this city was their promised land.
Hunger had started torturing them since the first weeks of the retreat. The horses, fed on straw torn off the thatched roofs of isbas, were growing weaker, buckling beneath the weight, and falling. Without waiting for them to be dead, the soldiers would throw themselves on them and tear them to pieces. After all, you robbed dying companions who had stumbled from exhaustion. You got rid of the wounded perched on saddles and allowed the animals to trot. Why then not skin the horses alive?
I was telling Gras what I had read the night before in Bourgogne’s story. Goisque was not listening, and was trying to fit the hotel building and the view over the Dnieper into his Japanese box. With the Cossacks on their heels, and no time even to cook the meat, the soldiers would plunge their heads into cauldrons of boiled blood. There were fights over a handful of potatoes. Beards and coats were stained in red. The cold froze the carcasses of the animals. You then had to scrape the hardened flesh with a sword. “Those who had no knives, no sabers, and no axes, and whose hands were frozen could not eat. […] I saw soldiers on their knees next to carcasses, biting into the flesh like hungry wolves,” Captain François recalls. Bourgogne himself survived for a few days sucking “blood icicles.” According to him, the military staff officially approved the idea that only horse meat could save the army: “They made us walk behind the cavalry as much as possible […] so that we may eat the horses they left behind.” Hence, the prediction of Kutuzov the Toad on the field of Borodino came true: “I will do all I can so the French will end up eating horse.”
In the fleeing column, the bravest ones turned bandits. They would go in search of food away from the road. However, they risked being captured by partisans and suffering a fate more cruel than the pangs of hunger. When there were no more horses, they started eating one another. Archives are full of testimonies of cannibalism and even autophagy, though they bother the witnesses who report it and evade the taboo. One day, Bourgogne refuses to accompany a Portuguese warrant officer to see Russian prisoners devour one another. And this army of half-skeletons, of blood-stained faces, who robbed companions killed in action, lifting their own rags to chew at their stumps, terrified of ending up in the jaws of their brothers, “were the same men,” Captain François writes, “who, six months earlier, had made Europe quake.”
The road to Smolensk, cluttered with carts, crates, abandoned cannons, and the corpses of men and horses, was a view of the apocalypse. Even Caulaincourt, famous for his nerves of steel, has a momentary collapse: “Never has a battlefield displayed such horrors.”
I was watching Goisque and Gras squeezing their bags into the motorbike trunks. What would we have done? How far would hunger have pushed us? What did we know about ourselves and others, we, who were so civilized, so urban, so well fed? Our relationship was limited to pleasant trips and evenings sprinkled with loud-mouth conversations. That’s what friendships were fueled by nowadays in the prosperous West. Once, however, lost in the forests of the Far East with Gras, six hundred miles north of Vladivostok, we thought we risked starvation. We finally found our way and—thankfully—missed out on the opportunity to test our sense of honor and sacrifice. As for Bourgogne, he laments the fact that hunger destroys feelings: “There were no more friends. You would look at one another with distrust, and even became ungrateful toward your best friends.” “Love one another” is the commandment of a prophet who has just had a big meal.
Napoleon entered Smolensk on November 9th. A hundred thousand soldiers had left Moscow. At Smolensk, the army was down to half. And only ten thousand of them had died in combat. There were forty-five thousand men left out of the half million that had crossed the Neman six months earlier. The debris of the Grande Armée took five days to gather in the city. The final elements did not appear until November 13th and Napoleon left the following day. It was a huge disappointment for all. From the Emperor to the camp follower, everybody had pinned all their hopes on this city. There, they would find supplies, well-stocked warehouses, country hospitals, and fresh reinforcements. There, they would rebuild their strength, put an end to the nightmare, turn against the enemy, and change their luck. There, the sovereign’s star would shine again. But Smolensk had not recovered from its destruction three months earlier. The state of the warehouses, according to Caulaincourt, “was unfortunately neither in accordance with what (the Emperor) hoped, nor with our needs…” The first troops ransacked the few supplies, pillaged the storerooms, cracked open the barrels, and left the men in the rear nothing but the leftovers of a waste which could have been avoided with discipline. All hopes of reviving the army drained away, but they had to keep going, like a curse. “Walking as fast as possible seemed for everyone the true secret to escaping danger,” Caulaincourt sums up. It was salvation in flight. And the column of the dying collapsed on the road to the west, pressed by Cossacks who were increasingly well armed, and increasingly daring.
Naturally, the cops chased us away from the city ramparts. We formed a column, Vassily at the head on his wide motorbike and sidecar, us in the middle on our khaki Ural, and Vitaly closing the convoy on his black machine. We crossed the Dnieper and took the direction of Orsha, in Belarus.
There was a milder spell on the road. Everything was dull and tepid. The world was a wash drawing dripping with smoke from the farms. We were going straight toward the setting sun. A cement building spiked with flags formed the border between the two allied countries. Since the fall of the USSR, Belarus had never betrayed its allegiance to Russia. The vassal led a quiet life under the protection of the parent company. Not the kind that would ogle the EU. We didn’t need to show our visas at the customs: there weren’t any. We entered Belarus like the blade of a Russian saber through the fat of a Ukrainian.
It was the Belarus plain. Where the Grande Armée suffered martyrdom. Panzers ravaged it a hundred and fifty years later, first in one direction, then in the other. It was fields, endless plains. In the summer, glorious wheat that was not repelled by growing over a mass grave. In winter, a stretch of snow without form or edges, with, on the horizon, log villages huddled against fir woods.
The cylinders were purring. We kept a constant speed. We listened out for the holy punch of the pistons. The mind grew numb. In his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,[7] Robert M. Pirsig talks about the tireless purr of the engine, which is preoccupied only with its internal strength. We kept still in the saddle with this very particular, almost mystical enjoyment, typical to motorcycling. It was so good to dwell in the certainty that you were riding a system in good working order. Your eyes focused on the line of the horizon. In the corner of your field of vision, white strips paraded by, hypnotic.
7
Pirsig (Robert M.),