“What shall we do, guys?” Goisque asked.
“We can either follow the route of the retreat toward the Neman and Kœnigsmark, or that of the Emperor, as far as Paris, through Warsaw,” I said.
“Don’t you think your ‘Corsican king’ went a bit far, abandoning his men like that?” Vitaly said.
“It’s more complicated than that,” I said.
“That’s what people always say when they’re in a bit of a jam.”
The secret of his departure from Smorgon had been well kept. When the soldiers discovered that the Emperor had left them, there was overwhelming consternation. The sun had withdrawn from their sky. Did the astonishment turn to reproach? Labaume talks of the men’s “legitimate” indignation. Bourgogne, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to hold it against his chief. Perhaps the men were too busy looking for carrion to sink their teeth into to get lost in curses. When one is trying to escape from death, is there any energy left to subject somebody to public scorn?
Besides, should Napoleon be disowned? Isn’t the role of an admiral to look after the fate of his fleet rather than to die in the shipwreck of one of his vessels? That’s what I was trying to explain to Vitaly in Russian.
The Emperor was the cement that kept the debris of the army together. His magnetism bound the officers. His energy galvanized soldiers. The certainty of his presence, albeit invisible, inspired everybody to stand up and acquire some of the general glory. Once the sovereign had gone, everything could fall apart. And it did fall apart. And there was nothing Murat could do to prevent dereliction. The army dragged itself along, attracted by the prospect of Vilnius. Like in Smolensk, a few weeks earlier, the human wreckage needed a mirage. And, just like Smolensk, Vilnius turned out to be far from expectations.
It was a horde of human skeletons that crowded the gates at Vilnius on December 8th. Forty thousand hungry men swooped on a slumbering town that knew nothing of the rout. When the burghers saw this stream of godforsaken men covered in animal skins, they did exactly what burghers do when they feel threatened: they closed the city gates.
The tide of zombies smashed against the ramparts. “This chaos reminded me of Berezina,” Labaume writes. Marshal Davout had to climb a ladder in order to enter the city through hidden gardens. The pack ended up forcing the gates and penetrating the square, but only to find no aid there. The absence of command prevented the distribution of supplies even though there was enough to feed an army. Overly zealous officials refused to start emergency distribution, and demanded “distribution coupons” from the wretches who were begging for a crust of bread. Can you imagine dying men reaching the threshold of their salvation only to be refused help by the very people who were supposed to provide it? Forty-eight hours later, this treasure of bread and meat fell into the hands of the Russians.
The rebuffed soldiers wandered down the streets of the city, hoping only to glean some warmth and food by a kind stroke of fate. They were returning from the far ends of life and were being refused entry into homes that exhaled the smell of freshly-baked bread. The residents had barricaded themselves in. And death took its toll on more soldiers on the sidewalks where the wind blew at -4°F. If Vilnius escaped total sacking, it was because the men were drained of strength. Berthier’s admission on the morning of November 9th fell like a funeral oration: “Sire, I must be truthful and tell you that the army is in a total rout.”
As early as the 9th, a Cossack vanguard approached the city. The bulk of Kutuzov’s troops was two or three walking days behind. Prince Murat, eager to ensure a way out for himself, fled the city in the evening, and headed straight west, toward Kaunas. And the Grande Armée evacuated the city in the darkness. On the 10th, no sooner had Ney’s rear guard escaped from Vilnius than the Cossacks galloped into the capital with their war cries.
By the time Kutuzov entered Vilnius on December 12th, he had completed his mission: that of chasing the hydra off Russian territory. The city gates were those of a burial vault. There reigned a putrid smell. Twenty thousand stragglers of the Grande Armée hadn’t had the strength to leave the place, and were waiting to die, bullied by the Cossacks and tortured by the cold. In the monastery of Saint Basil, there were about eight thousand dead heaped in the corridors. The windows were blocked by stacks of corpses. When he remembered “seeing a group of four men, with frozen hands and legs but their minds still alert, with dogs devouring their feet,” the British general Robert Thomas Wilson, Kutuzov’s advisor, said, “One must envy the dead.”
Despite the medals jangling on his overly large chest, Kutuzov had nothing to crow about. He could certainly take the credit for Napoleon’s escape, but had decimated his own troops. Winter, vermin, and famine hadn’t made any distinction among nationalities and dealt the Russians a blow as harsh as French ranks. Since Moscow, he had lost two thirds of his men. In Vilnius, he had thirty thousand soldiers left out of the hundred thousand with whom he had set off.
For the French, the Vilnius slaughter had originated in something other than exhaustion, famine, and cold. The Cossacks did not know that they had an ally in the form of lice. In August 2001, in the Šiaures miestelis district of Vilnius, Lithuanian workmen unearthed a “catastrophic burial place” containing hundreds of French soldiers. Scientists from a Franco-Lithuanian excavation commission identified in the corpses the traces of bacteria which, as well as having a Polish-sounding name—rickettsia prowazecki—was the means of transmitting typhus. Thus, thousands of soldiers had survived the Cossack saber and the drop in temperature, only to succumb to fever. The First French Empire had discovered a new enemy: vermin.
“Can you imagine?” Vitaly said. “The army of lice!”
“Russians certainly got their help during that war,” I said.
“Let’s go to Antakalnis,” Goisque says. “That’s where they buried the bodies of the French.”
The Antakalnis cemetery occupies a hillside northeast of Vilnius, not far from the banks of the Neris River. We arrived there at midday and cut the engines outside the entrance wall. Two homeless men were smoking on a bench. Our eyesight was distorted. In the snow, with puffy faces, their rags, their heads wrapped in wool, and their white-blond hair, they looked like something in a 19th century print, “Army Voltigeurs During the Rout” style. They offered to watch our motorbikes.
“Are you going to look at the French?” they said.
“How do you know?” I said.
“A bunch of guys on Urals, where else would you be going if not to look at the French grave?”
“Oh?”
“Three litai to watch your bikes.”
“Three litai for all three?” Vitaly said.
“Three litai per bike,” they said.
“They’re not worth that much,” Vitaly said.
I would have liked to rest in this cemetery. The stone tombs had been erected in an undergrowth of conifers. The corners were softened by moss. Sculptures of neo-Gothic angels were leaning tenderly over the slumber of the dead. There was something about this undergrowth that reminded one of the abandonment of British cemeteries. Vitaly strolled among the sections, the bicorn on his head. The cypresses were like black candles. We walked for a long time, looking for the 1812 plot. We reviewed the martyred Poles, World War I Germans, and the cement monument erected to the heroes of the Red Army. We discovered the stelae of the January 1991 victims. I’d forgotten about that case, until Vitaly reminded me. Encouraged by the liberal endorsement unanimously awarded by Western leaders, Gorbachev had crushed the demonstrations of young Lithuanian anti-socialist protesters in blood. The cemetery stated: Lithuania, like Poland, was a country that traveled across the 20th century in the worst possible geographical position anyone could occupy: that of being between Germany and Russia. Might as well keep your hand in the vise.