“Let’s go look at the place,” Goisque said.
“Which bank is it on?” Gras asked.
“The west one,” Goisque replied. “The salvation one.”
We left Nina at noon. There were ten kisses, since each of us kissed her on both cheeks while our engines warmed up. We went past the Barysaw bridge before going up the river upstream through a small country lane, as far as the Grande Armée crossing. Goisque, possessed by the spirit of the place, kept repeating, “We’re slap-bang in the middle of the myth, guys, we’re right in the myth. We’ve never been quite so deep in the myth before.”
From the huge plateau hatched with forests, the view stretched onto the other bank, far toward the east. A sandy valley, streaked with strati, cut through the landscape from north to south. Layers of marl and clay leafed through the alluvial embankment with pale veins. At the far end was the Berezina. It was a pleasant, hesitant waterway, with meanders that had a mercury glow. They were fixed by the frost and wound between islands covered in reeds. The sun tore through clouds puffy with snow. The rays splashed willows growing on the sandy banks. The silver birches looked lilac in the light. The village houses seemed to huddle up to keep warm on the edge of the thalweg. Black flapping crows flew across the tableau. Their lament fell with the snow. Otherwise, the world was just a beautiful silence. We looked at everything avidly. It was the setting for the apocalypse and you would have thought we were in the Loiret region.
The stone stela bore an inscription: “Here, the soldiers of the Grande Armée crossed the Berezina.” A sentence that made the nightmare sound like nothing at all.
The army crossed the river during the afternoon of the 26th and all day on the 27th. It had started snowing again, which concealed the French maneuvers. For once, winter was doing the Grande Armée a good turn, by throwing a screen over the rout, and blinding the Russian troops. The timber footbridges, narrow and made heavy by the ice, snapped under the weight of the humans and horses. Éblé’s bridge builders kept jumping back into the water to reinforce the supports. Those who did not die from immersion syncope risked being crushed against the bridge stillage by the collapsing debris. Their sacrifice was the price of the rescue.
Napoleon crossed onto the right bank on the morning of the 27th. That same evening, thirty thousand slowpokes—exhausted soldiers, civilians, women, and children—arrived on the Studianka bank. Night fell, it stopped snowing, and the cold gripped the plain again. The shore groves then lit up with hundreds of fires next to which, made stupid by weakness, unaware of the urgency, the latecomers became numb instead of getting to safety by crossing onto the west bank as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, the Russians were approaching Studianka. Wittgenstein arrived with his forty thousand men at dawn on November 28th. The bridge at Barysaw had been rebuilt by the Russians, and Kutuzov had gone onto the right bank, on the same shore where Tchitchagov’s army, thirty thousand soldiers strong, reached the Grande Armée bridges at 7 A.M. The powers were in place. The Battle of Berezina broke out before tens of thousands of stragglers had even crossed. Napoleon had hoped in vain that his own army corps, in charge of holding back Wittgenstein and Tchitchagov on their respective banks, would hold until the evening of the 28th, thus allowing all the French to cross over. However, the French divisions were submerged.
When the Russian cannon balls fell on the left bank crowd, the horror began. There was a rush on the crossing, and the bridges were covered with a human tide. People died crushed and stifled. They slipped, fell, tried to get back onto the footbridges, but fell into the water and drowned. The river collected the corpses of men and horses, carriage debris mixed with ice. Those who had been able to keep their balance were running on a carpet of bodies. The access and exit of the footbridges were obstructed by the heap of corpses. At the exit of the bridge, the swamp mire was shielded by a wall of dead bodies into which the passage trench led. On the left bank, Russian artillery kept sowing desolation. A first bridge collapsed and the Berezina swallowed up “the victims killed by Russian barbarity,” Caulaincourt says. Even Sergeant Bourgogne, who had seen so much and who was “used to going to sleep in the middle of a company of corpses,” even he, the wretched Vélite grenadier, who had survived everything, and who dipped his quill in composure, snapped: “I couldn’t bear to see anymore. It was beyond my strength.”
On the morning of the 29th, the horror rose to a new level when Napoleon ordered Éblé to destroy his work. Marshal Victor, who formed the French rear guard, had crossed over the night before and the final pieces of artillery had been brought over during the night. At dawn on the 29th, the Russians had to be cut off from crossing the Berezina. As soon as the flames rose, there was one final rush. The screams covered the cannon fire. Those who were still on the other bank threw themselves into the blaze or the water. They could choose to die in either of these opposite elements.
We were mesmerized by the spectacle of this valley. We were standing in the snow and none of us dared move. There were peasants haranguing a horse on a nearby path. The horse lent the landscape an air of bygone times. They drove past us, sitting on a cart. The snow embellished the edge of the forest and muffled the ringing of the little bells. The cart disappeared in the fine hail. Gras touched my arm, “You see, this is a top location.”
“What do you mean?”
“A top location,” he replied, “is a stretch of geography fertilized by the tears of History, a piece of territory made sacred by an act, cursed by a tragedy, a land that, over the centuries, keeps echoing with hushed-up suffering or past glory. It’s a landscape blessed by tears and blood. You stand before it and suddenly sense a presence, a surge, a manifestation of something you can’t quite put your finger on. It’s the echo of History, the fossilized radiation of an event that seeps out of the soil, like a wave. Tragedy has been so intense here, and in such a short space of time, that the geography hasn’t recovered yet. The trees may have grown but the Earth continues to suffer. When it drinks too much blood it becomes a top location. Then you must look at it in silence because it’s haunted by ghosts.”
Even Goisque had stopped taking photos of the world. The snowy fields were dotted with monuments dedicated to the memory of the two armies. A stela bore the name of a man of whom charity obliges us to conceal his name and only refer to him as F.B. It was he who ordered the monument—and maybe financed it—and made sure this was known. Why didn’t he erect a commemorative stone with the following sentence engraved: “Here, where I have laid this slab, Napoleon passed with his entire army”?
The monument made me think of that TV journalist to whom I announced, live, a few months earlier, that I wished to retrace the steps of the Retreat, and pass through the Berezina. “Napoleon? The Berezina? That’s not very glorious,” was her comment.
Here, before the river grave, the words I should have said back to her came to my lips. But, once again, I had been the victim of staircase wit.
“Really, my dear? You don’t think there’s any glory in the bridge builders who accepted death so that their companions might cross over? Or in Éblé, the gray-haired general who crossed the bridge several times under cannon fire in order to report to the Emperor the progress of the rescue, and who died from exhaustion a few days later? Nothing glorious about Larrey, the chief surgeon who made countless trips back and forth between banks in order to save his surgical equipment? Or about Bourgogne, who gave his bearskin to a shivering soldier? Or about the sappers who threw ropes to the wretches who’d fallen into the water, or about the women about whom Bourgogne writes that ‘they shamed some of the men, by bearing with admirable courage all the suffering and deprivations they were subjected to’? Or about the Emperor who saved forty thousand of his men, and about whom the Russians had sworn three days earlier that he didn’t have a chance in a million to escape them? What is glory for you, Madame, if not the warding off of horror through heroic deeds?”