We weren’t dressed warmly enough, the 1.4°F air was biting at my kneecaps, and Latvian trucks, looming huge at our weak rear, would brush past us, spattering our jackets with snow. Doubt was worming its way into me: what the hell was I doing on a Ural in the middle of December, with two fools in tow, when these damned machines are made to transport small, 90-pound Ukrainian women from Yalta beach to Simferopol on a summer afternoon?
All around us there was ice, snowdrifts, gray suburbs, crumbling factories, and crooked isbas. The landscape had a hangover. Even the trees grew askew. The sky was the color of dirty flannel. And the salty mud churned out by thirty-three-ton trucks gave us a taste of polluted fish in our mouths.
A motorbike helmet is a meditation cell. Trapped inside, ideas circulate better than in the open air. It would be ideal to be able to smoke in there. Sadly, the lack of space in an integral crash helmet prevents one from drawing on a Havana cigar, and the ensuing wind blows out the burning tip when the helmet is open. A helmet is also a sounding box. It’s nice to sing inside it. It’s like being in a recording studio. I hummed the epigraph from Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. These lines were to become my mantra for the weeks to come:
The lady at the service station got frightened. With all our layers of clothing, we looked like cosmonauts.
“Where are you heading?” a truck driver asked.
“Paris,” I said.
“On a Ural?” he said.
“Yes.”
Before slamming shut the door of his Volvo, he issued the mythical Red Army slogan: “Retreat? Never!”
As far as the French were concerned, it was not a matter of retreating but of fleeing. At the head of his weakened army, Napoleon first aimed at the city of Kaluga, less than a hundred and twenty-five miles south of Moscow. He wanted to take another way and not go where a swarm of soldiers—might as well say locusts—had devastated the fields. Farther south, he hoped to find a rich countryside, a fairer climate, and well-stocked storehouses. Von Clausewitz outlined the following principle in The 1812 Campaign in Russia: “Anyone who retreats in enemy country needs a well laid-out route, anyone who performs such a retreat in very bad conditions needs it twice as much, and anyone who wants to leave Russia after going into it a hundred and twenty miles needs it three times as much.” Napoleon launched his hundred thousand survivors down a route that had not been prepared.
The plan to extricate themselves through the south was abandoned less than a week later. The Russians awaited the French at Maloyaroslavets, on the road to Kaluga. On October 24th, General Dokhturov attacked the vanguard of Viceroy Eugène without an order from Field Marshal Kutuzov. Now that it was in flight, the Field Marshal meant to harry the army without ever confronting it, push it the way a hound chases after a deer in the woods, and “let it melt down” by escorting its flight. He wanted to be the whip on their backs. “It was absurd to stand in the way of men who were devoting all their energy to running away,” Tolstoy writes in War and Peace.
Exasperated by his commander’s restraint and eager to fight, Dokhturov launched his troops. The clash at Maloyaroslavets was merciless. The Russians felt that luck was changing sides. The French suspected they were playing a vital match. Dismembered and demoralized, the Grande Armée, already frozen, did not fail to live up to its name. And yet “it was already carrying within it the inevitable germs of death, and the chemical conditions for decomposition,” Tolstoy thought he knew. Ten thousand corpses later, Russians sounded the retreat. However, they had managed to arrest the momentum of the retreat, hamper the initial plan, and sow doubt where there was already discouragement.
Napoleon gave up on the road to the south, on the well-stocked villages, and full barns. On October 26th, he made his decision: the army would return to Smolensk, through where it had come, through the land it had burned down. The cohort turned north-west to return to the major Moscow-Smolensk road. With his Guard at his side, Napoleon headed the march. Going towards a path “that had already been trodden,” as Tolstoy writes, going headlong into a yet unsuspected tragedy, unaware that he was taking the first step on the path to his fall, he went toward Borodino.
We arrived in Borodino at 3 P.M. When we left Moscow, we had decided to go straight to the battlefield and not take the detour via Maloyaroslavets. Two hours of pretty snowfall had restored its looks to the landscape. A road that ran parallel to the highway brought us closer to our destination through a forest Andersen would have authored if landscapes could be written. We inspected the army of white trees. We drove past small villages, foot down on the gas, and the Ural was doing fifty miles an hour on the crusty road. A supermarket here, a service station there. Wherever soldiers had fallen, humans had resumed the course of life and erected buildings necessary for their comfort. Man had gotten used to living on top of dead bones.
“Good thing ghosts don’t exist,” Gras said, “or the place would be unlivable.”
I am now sorry we didn’t drive through the forests of Maloyaroslavets. Our impatience (Borodino was a magnet) had prevented us from seeing a place where the Emperor experienced a perfectly Stendhalian scene. On the morning of the 25th, shortly before the battle, Napoleon decided to check the enemy’s position. Accompanied by Caulaincourt, Lauriston, and a few officers and Chasseurs, he rode toward the Russian positions at dawn. During the night, the small squad didn’t notice that he was going beyond the French limits and he went straight into the Cossack camp. War cries were heard. The Chasseurs contained the enemy, reinforcements arrived, and Napoleon was saved. For a long time, this sent chills up Caulaincourt’s spine. “The Emperor was alone with the Prince of Neufchâtel and me. All three of us had swords in our hands. […] If the Cossacks who came under our noses and briefly surrounded us had been more audacious and silent on the way, instead of screaming and clattering at the edge of the road […] the Emperor would have been killed or captured.”
As the Ural parted the curtain of snowflakes, I thought about the scene. I thought about “the greatest captain who ever was” on horseback, in the middle of the night, ready to cross swords with the enemy. I thought of Sergeant Bourgogne who, after the skirmish, revealed that “the Emperor laughed at the thought of having nearly been captured.” And I remembered pictures of Yeltsin on his tank before a White House in flames, of de Gaulle lighting his cigarette during the Notre Dame gun battle of 1944, of Chancellor Helmut Kohl charging against a crowd of detractors and knocking down his bodyguards. Great men aren’t forbidden from showing grit every so often.
Borodino, capital of sorrow. We stopped the front wheel of our vehicle in the snow, at the foot of the monument erected in Kutuzov’s memory. From up there, he took in the entire plain where French fury pushed into Russian courage. There fell the bodies of the seventy thousand victims of the “battle of giants.” Silver birch and aspen groves decorated the countryside with gray medals. The forefathers of these trees must have thrived after that carnage. War kills men, torments animals, pushes away gods, works the land, and fertilizes the soil. There were smoking farmhouses, crowded in folds of the land. Hamlets seemed to shiver. A sob lingered over this destruction. The dead gave the aluminum landscape solemnity.