The columns of soldiers were becoming more and more ragged, the ranks slacker and slacker. Exhausted stragglers, left behind by their regiments, attracted the attention of sergeants, who gesticulated at them, but to no avail. Some collapsed, overcome by sleep as if hit by a thunderbolt. Others lengthened their stride to regain their position before falling behind once more. Sometimes the officers turned a blind eye, but those in command could also prove ruthless. A flurry of punishments would then be meted out and surreal scenes would ensue: here three infantrymen being forced to wear their uniforms back to front as a mark of dishonour; there a straggler running back and forth between two columns of soldiers ten times without stopping; yet another miscreant being put on guard duty every night. There seemed no limit to the inventiveness of the punishments.
Fortunately, the men were united by a feeling of camaraderie. When a young recruit threatened to fall by the wayside, one veteran carried his musket and another his kit. When some of the men could no longer keep up, the regiment imperceptibly slowed its pace, or lieutenants would be furious to witness a sudden general outbreak of blisters and corns. Resupply problems had become so severe that officers sent detachments out looting to bring back what they could, which in most cases meant little or nothing. Everyone always volunteered for this sort of mission, despite the considerable risks posed by the Cossacks.
Originally, the Cossacks were free peasants and soldiers who fought the Russians, the Poles or the Tartars but now they were subjugated by Russia. Enamoured of nature and freedom, always on horseback, armed with lances and fanatically devoted to the Tsar, these marvellous horsemen were key elements in the Russian army. Highly mobile, swift and unobtrusive, they attacked isolated groups and concealed Alexander’s troop movements by disrupting reconnaissance expeditions and making it impossible to estimate their number by their constant comings and goings. At the head of the Cossacks of the Don was Hetman Platov, who had sworn to bring Napoleon back to St Petersburg in chains.
On that day, the 84th had just been given permission to make a halt. The soldiers lay down so quickly that the regiment looked like a house of cards blown over by the wind. Two corporals dragged the sick horses to one side. Because of the shortage of fodder, the animals grazed on wet grass, unripe rye and even straw from the roofs of the isbas, which gave them serious bouts of dysentery, which weakened them even more.
Margont lit a fire and boiled some water, into which he dropped a handful of rice. Saber and Piquebois did likewise. As he waited for the rice to cook, Margont stretched out on the grass and began to munch a biscuit, his only pleasure of the day. Lieutenants Saber and Piquebois were Margont’s other two close friends. Irénée Saber was a very self-assured man and too full of himself. His handsome face could look surprisingly arrogant when it broke into a sardonic smile. Though generous by nature, he was consumed with overwhelming ambition. In his youth, Julius Caesar had wept before the statue of Alexander the Great who, in his youth, had already conquered an empire. Saber, at thirty, inwardly broke down in tears before both Caesar and Alexander. He was only a lieutenant! Not even a major! When would he have a colonel’s epaulettes? Why had he not been decorated on the evening of the battle of Wagram? Had no one noticed that, without him, all would have been lost? Saber was jealous of Margont because of his higher rank but he also looked down on him because there was no doubt that by the age of thirty-two he, Saber, would be at least a colonel, perhaps higher … much higher.
Poor Saber. Rather than his military career, it was his lack of sincerity and narrow-mindedness that had become legendary (and then only in the small world of the 84th). So, when a soldier was too obstinate, it had become customary in the regiment to call him ‘as pig-headed as Saber’. Yet Irénée Saber had a brilliant mind. He had a real tactical sense and was able to grasp the deployment of troops and to work out the movements generals expected of them. He had an eye for all this on the battlefield, where all that most people could see was smoke, blood and indistinct masses of troops. In short, he could read pattern in chaos. But as he refused to question his own judgement, he was equally capable of displaying the clear-sightedness of a marshal and of raving like a madman claiming to be Napoleon. A little more flexibility would have turned his intelligence into genius. Margont was convinced that his friend would go very far. But what was very far for Margont was only halfway for Saber.
Lieutenant Piquebois had been very similar, before becoming very different. Aged thirty-three, he behaved as if he were fifty, with the result that he was often taken for a young-looking fifty-year-old. He had fallen madly in love with the daughter of a rich cloth merchant from Uzès. Étienne Marcelin, the young woman’s father, had not approved of this match. Piquebois had been studying medicine in Montpellier but for some strange reason he was to be seen every day in the taverns of Uzès. He had sailed the seas during his ‘I shall be a ship’s captain’ period and he had lived in Africa for two years during his ‘I shall make a fortune out of cocoa’ period. On his return, he declared that he was going to emigrate to South America. His journey to Peru never got any further than the Peyrou Gardens in the heart of Montpellier … Marcelin had therefore said no, categorically. His daughter, Anne-Lise, had become distraught, with the result that the veto was qualified: ‘No, unless you acquire a respectable social position.’ ‘But I’m studying to become a Protestant minister,’ Piquebois had explained, though no one seemed aware of this new calling. ‘“Minister” is not a social position, it’s a theological position,’ Marcelin had retorted. Piquebois guessed that this subtle distinction had something to do with income. He therefore gave up his religious studies before they had started, together with his interminable medical studies, naval studies and chocolate studies in order to enlist in the army. Nothing can compare with the army in wartime as a way of climbing the social ladder. For a long time Uzès had mocked ‘Piquebois the chocolate soldier’. In the cafés bordering the superb main square, all the inhabitants of Uzès had drunk to his health: ‘Heaven forbid that anything should happen to him! But let’s not worry too much. The sound of cannon fire isn’t often to be heard in Montpellier.’ Everyone had assumed that Piquebois was still there, dead drunk, snoring under the table like his fellow medical students, a young Rabelais without the inspiration.
To general surprise, Piquebois reappeared in full hussar’s uniform, his hair braided into elegant little plaits, sporting a bushy moustache and a smile on his face. In every house people exclaimed: ‘Has our chocolate soldier changed into a hussar? Let’s drink some of this magic cocoa straight away.’ Marcelin, thoughtful father that he was, had found plenty of better matches (better in his eyes, at least, and weren’t they the only ones that counted?). However, Anne-Lise, who was as stubborn as her father, had turned them all down. He eventually accepted the marriage, which was celebrated in the cathedral of the former duchy of Uzès.
Piquebois had not chosen the hussars by accident. Turbulent, fun-loving young men who lived their lives at a frantic pace were attracted to the hussars because everything they did was fast and furious. Instead of talking, they yelled; instead of drinking they got slewed; and they picked quarrels with anyone who wasn’t a hussar (while also getting into arguments with hussars from other regiments). Piquebois performed heroically on the battlefield but took even more risks away from it. He had nearly broken his neck by jumping out of the window of an inn in which he had thrashed a cuirassier. He was frequently picked up by the police ‘more dead than drunk’. He had also wounded two men in duels: one because of the accidental clash between two sabre scabbards – he let his own drag along the ground because he enjoyed the sound of it scraping over the cobbles – and the other because of a look he judged ‘full of innuendoes’, though what the innuendoes were, no one ever knew, not even the man on the receiving end.