Once, Goisque and I had spent some time in the Sakha Republic, in January, to experience extreme temperatures. Breathing was a chore, and ice particles would stick to mucous membranes. We had an evening at -54°F and some guys had said to us, “A bit more of this and the tires will become square.” From that time, I’d kept the memory of a constant struggle against the cold, which left us exhausted in the evening. And yet we, we slept every night in a warm room after being well fed and watered with tea!
The cold killed the weakest and drove the others insane. Limbs would snap like glass. There were soldiers who wrapped their feet “in the skins of freshly-skinned horses,” Labaume writes. The bivouac fires punctuating the road were a temptation. Caulaincourt knew that “As soon as these wretches would fall asleep, they were dead.” Still, thinking they had been saved after crossing the Berezina, they had all regained a little hope. Only to fall like flies on the road to Vilnius. I remembered these accounts and said to myself that hope is a terrible impostor, a wait that makes you suffer a little more than disappointment. The only thing the walkers didn’t need to fear was getting lost. “The number of men who fell never to get up again acted as a guide,” Bourgogne writes. How sorry he must have been to have given away his bearskin by the Berezina.
On December 3rd, in Molodechno, the Emperor drafted the 29th bulletin, which was addressed to French subjects. This text passed on to posterity. In it, Napoleon admitted to the disaster with a generous helping of euphemisms. He underlined Ney’s glorious behavior, the merit of his soldiers, the annihilation of his cavalry, the joyous indifference of the best elements in his army in the face of adversity, and the villainy of the Cossacks, “that contemptible cavalry that only makes noise but is incapable of taking on a company of light infantrymen.” The bulletin ended as follows: “The Emperor’s health has never been better,” which Napoleon’s critics considered proof of his egotistical folly, not seeing that the Emperor considered his body and that of France as one.
We were gaining miles toward Lithuania. Night had fallen. Driving constituted avoiding being blinded by passing trucks. Puzzled by the dimness of our lights, they would turn up their headlights in full. Goisque slammed on the brakes, skidded, stalled, and narrowly avoided being hit by Vitaly’s bike, which was close behind us.
“What the fuck are you doing, pal?”
“The sign, you bunch of blind men!” Goisque replied. “We’re in Smorgon! In Smorgon!”
On December 5th, Napoleon arrived in Smorgon with his military staff. Two days earlier, he had told Caulaincourt, “In the current state of affairs, I can command Europe only from the Palais des Tuileries.” This meant that he had decided to go back to Paris and leave the debris of his army behind. This idea had germinated since the day when, shortly after stopping at Dorogobouj, in early November, he had learned of the coup by Malet. This obscure general, interned for mental illness, had left his Paris convalescent home and tried to overturn the Empire on October 22nd. The putsch had failed but the Emperor had been as shaken by this news as by the announcement of the number of losses against the Russians on that day. There he was, harried by Kutuzov’s army and increasingly threatened at the heart of his power. He told Caulaincourt, “The French are like women, you mustn’t leave them for too long.” From that moment on, he’d vowed to return to France as soon as possible in order to take the Empire back in hand.
Under the snow, in the middle of the night, we had to obey Goisque, who had decided to snap away at the Smorgon sign, with all three bikes in line at the foot of it. The flash sent its absurd glow onto the curtain of flakes.
Here, a few steps from Vilnius, Napoleon judged the moment to be favorable. Leaving the army in the hands of Murat (“Your turn, King of Naples,” he had said by way of passing on the command), he left at 10 P.M., in a sleeper hitched to six horses. He took Caulaincourt with him, escorted by a detachment of the Guard that split up along the versts. Together, at top speed, they were going to return to Paris through Poland and Germany, burning stages like bats out of hell, writing the pages of one of History’s strangest journeys, combined with a session of intimate confidences conducted at 4°F in the wild forest snow. It was now no longer about saving the army, but taking back the reins of the Empire, which had been dropped six months earlier.
We reached the border at 8 P.M. A line of trucks was stretching back from the customs post.
The first truck driver we asked—a Romanian—explained: “The bastards are on strike. Yesterday, the police threw some corrupt customs officers in jail, so the others have now closed their windows as a sign of protest.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Two days.”
“How many miles is the line?” Vassily asked.
“Eleven miles and six hundred trucks,” the Romanian replied.
We drove up the line, at fifty miles an hour, along the emergency lane, brushing past trucks and praying to the border gods that a door might be opened to let us through, which would make everything quicker. What did Vassily say to the Belarus female guard beautifully dressed in a khaki uniform? She gave our party a look of contempt. Had Belarus customs officers received instructions not to stop Urals from clearing off the land? Three minutes later, we were on the other side, in the European Union, on Lithuanian soil, separated from Vilnius by thirty miles of asphalt so smooth that Vitaly exclaimed, “Funny, as soon as you’re in the European Union, there’s less mud!” In the city center, everything suggested that the country had been multiplying its efforts for the last twenty years to meet EU standards. The well-stocked shops, spruce streets, Christmas decorations, German cars, and people wearing cool clothes on sidewalks cleared of snow were in contrast with the construction site atmosphere, factory architecture, steel industry aesthetics, and depressive inhabitants of the former USSR cities. In a Brussels-standard brewery—waitresses with piercings, sushi, and World Music—Vitaly carried on with his theories. “Before, Lithuania was part of our Empire, and now it’s in your Union.” We seemed to have come out of a night of suffering and the forests from hell, in order to enter, head low, the Disneyland staff canteen. We looked around at these pleasant, pink people who were waiting for Friday to finish off a week at the bank with a weekend of leisure.
We’d been so cold in the past few hours, since Berezina, that we decided to warm ourselves up with peppered vodka. The first bottle in memory of the French, the second in memory of the Russians, and a few extra glasses for the Polish, British, and German auxiliaries of both Empires. And, if that night we went to bed at not too ungodly an hour, it was because we’d developed the ways of drunks, and the bar manager threw us out after, in between bellows, we’d set fire to the tablecloth by knocking over the candles on our table.
DAY SIX.
FROM VILNIUS TO AUGUSTÓW
This morning, war council over four pints of black coffee aimed at knocking out our hangover. Gras was leaving us and we were sad about it. We liked the way he read Labaume or François’s Memoirs in the Ural sidecar, indifferent to the cold, as though comfortably seated in the armchair of the Geographical Society in Saint Petersburg. He had commitments in Donetsk. Ukraine hadn’t yet exploded through the impetus of democrats and new philosophers. He jumped onto the morning Vilnius-Kiev after telling us off.