On no account would the Grande Armée advance beyond Minsk. Let’s say Smolensk at most. They might even go back to spend the winter in Paris. That was the plan.
What Napoleon had not foreseen was that Alexander I was no longer afraid. The Tsar had changed. He was following different maneuvers and had made new friendships. Britain, Sweden, Austria, and even the Ottoman Porte were now Russian allies. Saint Petersburg had become the anti-Napoleonic salon where the future members of the coalition were preparing for 1814.
It was 5 A.M. There was silence in Jacques’s apartment. We were drinking black tea, delaying the moment we’d be going out into the freezing air, feverish from lack of sleep, and I was telling Gras that Napoleon was not the guiltiest party in the 1812 affair. Something that relieved us of the remorse of commemorating the campaign.
“Oh, that’s Sokolov’s theory! I read his book in Donetsk.”
“Sokolov?” Goisque says. “The man who thinks he’s Napoleon?”
Oleg Sokolov, history lecturer at the University of Saint Petersburg, devoted a cult to the Emperor. Every year, he organized historical reconstructions. Thousands of extras in helmets, boots, and 1812 costumes would re-enact the battles. He would wear a bicorn and command the maneuvers. He published Le Combat de deux Empires: la Russie d’Alexandre Ier contre la France de Napoleon – 1805-1812[3] in which he concealed nothing about Alexander I’s responsibility in the Franco-Russian war. He highlighted the Tsar’s betrayal and Napoleon’s efforts to bring him back to his Tilsit promises. This way, he had attracted the wrath of his readers. Sokolov had broken a Russian rule: History is a delicate science and you must never speak ill of your own people, even if you’re telling the truth.
We were now in the garage. An electric coffee pot stood on the back seat, steaming, lit by an oily light bulb. Vassily was busy welding some undefinable parts. We crammed our tools and baggage in the trunk of the sidecar. We were ready to set off. The Ural looked ready too.
On June 25th, 1812, the Grande Armée had crossed the Neman. A column of four hundred and fifty thousand men had gone over the river, carting a thousand cannons over the ford. It was the same river where, in 1807, Alexander I and Napoleon, sheltering in a tent erected on a raft, had signed the Tilsit Treaty and sworn mutual peace. Five years later, fate had brought the Emperor back to the banks where this agreement had been sealed. Napoleon should have been inspired to reread Heraclitus and hesitate awhile before crossing his Acheron. “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” the wise man of Ephesus said.
Moreover, on the grassy bank, shortly before the start of the war, a strange event should have warned Napoleon that dreadful omens were accumulating in his horoscope. A hare shot through the legs of his horse. The mount swerved and the Emperor—a better horseman than the dreadful Saint Paul—fell, picked himself up, got back into the saddle, and paid no more attention to the incident.
“There’s another hare intervention in history,” Gras, who had read everything and drunk almost nothing, said. “I think it’s in Herodotus.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yes. One day, Darius, the Persian king, arrived before the Scythian cavalry. The two armies faced each other, ready for attack. A hare burst forth from amid the ranks, and the Scythians scattered and chased after the animal. Their hunting instinct had been awakened and they only thought of hunting down the hare. This frightened Darius. If, at the moment of engaging in battle, these men could be distracted by a damned little animal, it meant they were fearless, emotionless brutes. And so the Persians, upon discovering this, turned back.”
“It’s what we would have done,” Vitaly said.
Vassily and Vitaly were Russian, therefore superstitious. If Napoleon had had Slav or Oriental blood, he would have cursed the Neman hare, spat in the wild grass, mounted his horse, and sounded the return to Paris.
“That kind of story can really screw up your plans,” Goisque said.
In the absence of signs and not very au fait with oracles, we stepped on the gas at 8 A.M. on December 2nd, 2012. Nothing could have diverted us from our obsession: to go back home.
Russians have a passion for giving streets disproportionate names. An eerie street slashing across an industrial estate stuck in a marsh can be called “Enthusiasts’ Road.” One in an abandoned township “October Revolution Pioneers’ Boulevard.” A path between two rows of sheds “Science Academy Avenue.” To go back to Paris from Moscow, all you have to do is follow the direction of Russian irony and plunge into “Kutuzov Avenue,” named for the general who kicked the French out of Russia.
Kutuzov was fat, but still a genius. On August 17th, 1812, Alexander I thanked his army commander, Barclay de Tolly, and replaced him with Field Marshal Kutuzov. The avoidance strategy established by Barclay de Tolly was thereby rejected. Since the French army had crossed the Neman, Barclay de Tolly had effectively chosen evasion. His was a brilliant idea. He had anticipated that geography could be his best ally. Its hugeness would overcome the Grande Armée better than the warfare at his disposal. The country was a rut and the plain a mousetrap. The horizon would swallow the French.
Napoleon, attracted by the golden tints of Moscow, eager for battle, seeking a confrontation that would conform to his strategy, would be trapped by the dungeon-like steppes, the frightening monotony of the forest, and the nothingness of the sky. All you had to do was let him sink in deeper. You would retire, refuse all battle, and leave the cohorts to fray in long meanders of men and beasts harassed by vermin, afflicted by the heat, exasperated by the receding enemy.
Anyone who has walked for a few days amid the vegetation of this country knows the despair and anguish that crush your soul, at the end of a day where every effort to get closer to the horizon has proved in vain. The Russian expanse is discouraging.
Except that there was a problem. The Russian people, the Saint Petersburg elite, were no longer tolerating this climbdown. They were demanding a clash. The tournament of shadows could not last any longer for a nation humiliated by the French invasion. Hatred demanded a bloodbath. So the task of cleanse their honor in battle fell to the old chief Kutuzov. Kutuzov was the author of Borodino. He chose the location of the massacre that took place on September 7th, “beneath the walls of Moscow,” to use Napoleon’s expression, or seventy-five miles from the capital (but why quibble when you rule over the world?) All day, infantry, cavalry, and artillery fought over redoubts, taking turns to lose and gain them, until the French ended up seizing them. Napoleon found that Russians went to their deaths “like machines.”
Goisque reminded me of how we’d met this French officer, on the Shamali Plain, in Afghanistan. He was responsible for the officer training of the Afghan National Army. The man must have been familiar with Napoleon’s formula. He’d left us in front of a troop of soldiers advancing in line, during a training session. “Look at this. They’ve been trained by the Russians. They offer themselves up in rows. That’s how the Soviets must have advanced in Stalingrad.”
For a long time, the Borodino massacre held the terrible record of “the most deadly battle since the invention of gunpowder.” On one side, twenty-eight thousand Frenchmen died. On the other side, fifty thousand Russians. This clash heralded the mass slaughters of the American Civil War and the battles of 1914, those storms of steel beneath which 20th-century man was relegated to the rank of material—like lead and powder—which the military could use to ensure victory. Borodino marked our entry into the era of Titans. From that day onward, war would no longer be contented with a meager catch but would demand mass sacrifice. The difference—a major one—was in the way the men fell. Under Napoleon, the soldier would die in battle by the fatal blow of another soldier discharging his volley of lead on him. In other words, men would kill one another individually. In 1914, the situation was reversed: seventy-five percent of victims would be mowed down by artillery. Under Foch, the slaughter would become blind…