At the end of a long descent, there was the plot of our own ghosts. And a plaque: “Here lie the remains of the soldiers of the twenty nations that made up Emperor Napoleon I’s Grande Armée, who died in Vilnius on their way back from the Russian campaign in December 1812.”
The forgotten soldiers in the mass grave of Šiaures miestelis had been buried in the cemetery in 2003. For the first time, we were entering a tangible location of the Retreat, a space that was not just a setting for the memory or a historical theater. Beneath the snow lay the bones of men whose tracks we had been following since Moscow. We were no longer chasing after ghosts. We were standing before their remains.
“Guys,” Vitaly said, “I understand you find this moving, but davay.”
That morning, we had finally agreed on the sequence of events. We were going to follow the tracks of Napoleon and Caulaincourt’s flight on a sleigh, rather than those of the final days of the dying army. The route of the sleeper went through Warsaw and Erfurt and would take us to Paris through Westphalia. Our progress promised a journey across highly Napoleonic geography. We would still be living through the Imperial memory.
Destiny had one final trial in store for the runaways. Once Vilnius was evacuated, the army was supposed to reach Kaunas, sixty-two miles to the west. On the Ponary escarpment, as they left the Lithuanian capital, the icy slope dealt the final blow. “That’s where we lost all our artillery, our wagons, and our baggage once and for all,” Berthier writes in his dispatch to the Emperor. The soldiers could not heave the carriages over the hill. The cold was still at 4°F. The horses were just skinny flesh incapable of the slightest spurt. The clutter of the equipment and crowd of humans blocked the way. And yet the essential—the imperial treasure—had to be saved. The officers requisitioned a few horses from the cavalry in order to try and save it, but the carriages were immobilized by the jumble of crates mixed with corpses. There was the solution of trusting the soldiers with sacks of gold, and carrying the treasure on foot. The operation turned into looting. The dying men smashed the wooden panels and took possession of the sacks with gold coins like mantises. They were drawing their salaries for suffering. The looting carried on all night, until the gunshots of Platov’s Cossacks snatched the most avid ones away from their fever. What was the use to them of these furs and barrels of silver in a night of terrors when some mutton broth was more precious than a hundred golden francs? Many, weighed down by their loot, were caught up with and killed by the Russians. Others surged back to Kaunas, for two entire days, ballasted by their riches. “Every soldier was laden with silver,” Labaume says, “but nobody had a rifle.” Only methodical, heroic Marshal Ney continued to assemble the men and protect the rear, yelling out his orders. He remained even greater than his legend till the very end. Bourgogne saw him clenching a fist, holding a rifle “the way the heroes of Antiquity are depicted.” At this stage of the Retreat, while Murat was fleeing and the infantrymen were counting their pennies, Ney was the last depository of the army’s lost greatness.
In Kaunas, just like in Smolensk and Vilnius, there was no respite for the debris. On the heels of a troop where you could no longer tell the difference between a stable boy and a marshal, the wolves of the Cossack divisions entered the city on the 14th, breathing down the necks of Napoleon’s army. The remnants of the French vanguard had arrived a few days earlier, forced the cellars, and emptied the barrels. Many had died from drunkenness. The campaign therefore ended in crepuscular folly. Defeat always produces these scenes of Boschian madness. Before they die, knowing they’re damned, men get drunk, screw, and eat till their bellies burst. Oddly, nobody goes looking for a library to reread one more poem by Virgil.
On December 14th, about twenty thousand runaways crossed the Neman and settled a few leagues away from the left bank. Ney insisted on defending honor, and, containing the Russians, was the last one to ford the river, in the evening, “walking behind everybody else,” according to Ségur. His rear guard had only six hundred defeated men left. The curtain was falling on one of the most disastrous military campaigns in History.
Ney perched on the other side of the river, the prow light of a destroyed army. Of the four hundred and fifty thousand soldiers at the start of the invasion, two hundred and fifty thousand had died in battle, and two hundred thousand had been made prisoners. The Russians had lost three hundred thousand of their men.
The invasion of Russia had been devised in order to build peace on the continent. It was the first step toward the fall of the First French Empire. Six months earlier, the army had crossed this same river, in the June sun, all aquiver, accustomed to glory and ready to fight as far as the sands of the Gobi Desert, “with hearts beating with joy and pride,” writes General Louis-François Lejeune. On that June 24th, the gates of hell had worn their most attractive finery to entice the army. Then they had shut behind it.
There was, in the eddies of the Neman, a premonition of the choppy waves of Saint Helena.
At the fork of the south exit from Vilnius, we headed in the direction of Marijampolė. Instead of following the calvary of those 1812 wretches through Kaunas, we decided to drive southwest, behind the fleeing Emperor. It was in Kaunas that Caulaincourt decided to go to Marijampolė and travel through the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw. He thought this route would be safer, albeit longer. Napoleon did not trust Prussia.
“Tesson!” Goisque shouted on a slope.
“Yes?”
“What’s a sleeper?”
“I think it’s a kind of litter, with wheels.”
“What do you mean?”
“A litter with wheels.”
“Like a Ural sidecar?” he said.
“That’s right. With tasseled curtains and embroidered cushions.”
It’s History’s most exclusive psychoanalysis session. A sovereign of unequalled power was about to confide, during almost two weeks at 4°F, to the Grand Squire, lying in a sleeper drawn by six Lithuanian horses, under the protection of a Mameluke, a few officers, and a handful of piqueurs. By leaving the theater of misfortune, Napoleon was warding off the failure of the Russian campaign. Body and soul, he was reaching out for Paris, in other words, for the future.
After their departure from Smorgon on December 5th, the Emperor and Caulaincourt glided non-stop along the snowy roads of the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw, Prussia, Saxony, and Westphalia. They traveled incognito. They changed from litters to carriages and mail coaches at random. They ended up shaking off most of their escort. It took them thirteen days to go from Smorgon to Paris: a speed record, if we think about the fifteen hundred miles through the snow! And it was still too slow! Throughout the entire journey, Napoleon, a man in a rush, hassled the piqueurs, rushed his meals, galvanized the landlords of the coach inns. Faster! Faster! he seethed. He wanted to see the Empress again. He wanted to reassure his government. He wanted to strengthen his position at the head of the empire. Sometimes, refusing to get out of his carriage, he would swallow a cup of tea and dictate a few letters while the postilions changed his horses. Since his ascent, at military school, Men had never been fast enough for him. And now this damned carriage ride back was dragging through forest tracks of his Empire! He, who loved to rule over History, would have liked to shrink Geography. For six months, he had procrastinated before Alexander, hesitated in Vilnius, dawdled in Moscow. On his way back, he was recovering his dazzling speed.