After twenty-four miles of Minsk highway, Vassily’s generator exploded. “Fifty-two pieces assembled with my own hands!” he said. “It’s a prototype.”
“I’m very disappointed,” Vitaly said.
It started to snow. The wind rose. The two Russians took the motorbike apart on the shoulder, in the gusts of wind, while I took a nap, lying on the tank, and Gras, in the sidecar, splashed by passing trucks, was reviewing Caulaincourt’s Mémoires. Goisque was nosing around, his camera over his shoulder, brooding over the line from Tapisseries by Charles Péguy : “This is the land that cannot be captured in a photograph.”
An hour later, Vassily looked up from his jigsaw puzzle. “I can’t find the origin of the problem, guys.”
“What are we going to do?” Gras said.
“Tow it!”
The strap was too short, and it was a terrible sight. Vitaly’s bike, attached to Vassily’s, dragged by inertia, swung from one side of the road to the other. We expected it to capsize any moment. Vassily didn’t seem to realize he was going too fast. On the slopes, Vitaly would adjust his brakes and avoid ramming into his friend by a yard. The scariest moment was when, in between two sways that made a Lithuanian truck driver very nervous, Vitaly lifted his visor, raised his thumb and shouted, “It’s cool!”
It took two hours in a service station to repair Vassily’s “prototype.”
And then three more hours to reach Barysaw. The cold was making a dent. At times, it bit a thumb, grabbed a foot, attacked a knee, your neck, your cheek. It had a life and plans of its own.
In 1812, on this very road, after the halt at Smolensk, the cold dropped by a few more degrees. The army was marching toward Krasnoi. Between the front and rear, the column unraveled over thirty-eight miles. Topography was on the side of the Russians. The Belarus undulations, the very same ones on which Vassily and Vitaly narrowly avoided killing themselves, put extra pressure on the Grande Armée. They had neglected to make any ice-proof horseshoes in Smolensk, so the few remaining horses in French possession kept slipping on the track. “It is to this lack of horseshoeing that we owe our biggest losses,” Caulaincourt says. Napoleon arrived in Krasnoi on November 15th with twenty thousand men, and was almost totally crushed. Kutuzov was waiting for him there with eighty thousand soldiers. If the Field Marshal had proved less shy, the French Emperor would have been captured or would have died, sword in hand. Far from suspecting that the bulk of the Russian army was before him, Napoleon ordered his Young Guard to attack what he mistook for beacons. The Russians, impressed by the charge, concluded that the Grande Armée still had its resources. And Napoleon fled toward Orsha as early as on the 18th, giving up, in spite of himself, on reaching Marshal Ney’s rear guard.
The latter needed all his courage and cunning to escape the eighty thousand Russians who were blocking his way. Ney replied to the general who was ordering him to lay down his weapons that “a marshal of France never gives himself up.” Then he fired his last bullets, made a diversion, returned toward Smolensk, maneuvered in the night, and, after two days of forced march during which they were relentlessly harried by the Cossacks, he managed to cross over the right bank of the Dnieper and reach Orsha. Of the six thousand men who had left Smolensk with him, about a thousand remained. Ney’s new tour de force cheered up the Emperor and, for a few hours, distracted him from the terrible news that Minsk was in enemy hands.
The men marched relentlessly on the track. Inkovno, Krasny, Orsha went by slowly, as monuments to horror. Even the Emperor had to get out of his carriage and walk leaning on the arm of Caulaincourt or a camp aide. The road was cluttered with dead men and horses, dying civilians and soldiers, crates, carts, cannons, and all that the scattering army was losing behind it. Those who were not dead stumbled over the corpses of those who had already fallen. The men advanced through soul-destroying plains. The cold had destroyed all hope, God no longer existed, the temperatures were dropping, and they were still putting one foot in front of the other. Crazy with suffering, emaciated, eaten by vermin, they walked straight on, from fields covered in dead to other fields of graves. Every forced step constituted salvation as well as loss. They walked on and were cursed.
How did these men stand this crazy march? How did some of them survive this fast-paced carousel of death and the frost? Of what metal were they forged, these shako-wearing skeletons who still cheered the man who pretended to pull them out of hell through the same path by which he had brought them there? Napoleon must have radiated a truly magnetic power for his men not to bear a grudge against him for their misfortune and even lose any bitterness as soon as he appeared! Not one soldier would have considered feeling resentment toward the Emperor. How can we, they said, hold something against the one who led us to Egypt, Italy, and Spain, who subjugated the world and made the sovereigns of Europe quake? The one who turned energy, youth, and heroism into the virtues of a reign. Léon Bloy raps out at him in the dynamite-fueled pages of his Napoleon’s Soul: “When these wretches died shouting ‘Long live the Emperor!’ they genuinely believed they were dying for France, and they were not wrong.” And it was like Bloy to be touched by a poor grenadier who finds the strength to go into raptures when the Emperor walks on foot in the midst of ghosts of the Old Guard, “He, so great, who makes us proud.”
Bourgogne was not outdone in his fondness for the chief, but, just over the page, provides another key: “Although we were unhappy, and dying from hunger and the cold, we still had something to support us: honor and courage.” Honor and courage! What a strange ring these words had two hundred years later. Were these words still alive in the world we were crossing with our headlights on full? We made a short pause on the shoulder. It was snowing, and the night seemed to be in tears in the beam of the headlights. Good God, I thought while pissing in the dark, we poor 21st-century guys are such dwarves, aren’t we? Softened in the mangrove of comfort, how could we understand these 1812 ghosts? Could we quiver with the same passion and accept the same sacrifices? Or even understand them? The Glorious Thirties had been useful for this: develop family paradise, domestic bliss, private enjoyment. Allow us to have a lot to lose. Would we be ready to abandon our Capuas to fight the Moujiks beneath the bulbs, or conquer the pyramids?
Moreover, we had become individuals. And, in our world, the individual did not accept sacrifice except for other individuals of his or her choice: his family, his nearest and dearest, perhaps a few friends. The only conceivable wars consisted in defending our property. We were quite happy to fight, but only for the safety of the floor where our apartments were. We would never have competed in enthusiasm at the prospect of sacrificing ourselves for an abstract concept that was superior to us, for the collective interest or—worse—for the love of a chief.
It must be said that the 20th century was over and its hideousness still horrified us. That’s what made us different than the Old Guard. We knew that Verdun and Stalingrad, Buchenwald and Hiroshima were the Fall of Man and we were haunted by that. From now on, the idea of conquest sounded absurd.