In midsummer 1812, Napoleon crossed over the river Niemen into Russia with the largest army hitherto assembled in European history. In September, the Grand Army, exhausted, famished, and reduced to a third of its initial size, finally reached Moscow, but the famed holy city was empty. Fires were burning and only inmates loosed from prisons and asylums roamed the streets. Citizens had already evacuated in great convoys, taking with them all the provisions and as many belongings as they could transport, including the fire engines.
For the next five weeks, the occupying forces found themselves in a strange, suspended state, conquerors of a ruined city. A semblance of normalcy prevailed - Napoleon's staff jockeyed for position; a stranded French theatrical troupe performed in the Kremlin; Stendhal, a foot soldier in the Army, recalled Nero's fire in Rome, and as winter drew near Napoleon waited for Tsar Alexander to return and sue for peace.
Filled with horrific human suffering and almost indescribably scenes of carnage, The Retreat is a vivid and memorable depiction of the Russian campaign, and an unblinking look at the capacity of those in extreme adversity, and of what men, when called upon, can survive.

The Retreat

By Patrick Rambaud

Atlantic Monthly Press

Copyright © 2004 Patrick Rambaud
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780871138774

Chapter One

Moscow, 1812 Captain d'Herbigny felt ridiculous. Swathed in a pale cloak that floated on his shoulders, one could make out a dragoon of the Guard by the helmet enturbanned in navy calfskin, with a black horsetail on its brass crest, but astride a miniature horse he had bought in Lithuania, this strapping fellow had to dress his stirrups too short to stop his boots dragging along the ground - except that then his knees stuck up. 'What in Heaven's name do I look like?' he grumbled. 'What sort of a sight must I be?' The captain missed his mare and his right hand. The hand had been hit by a Bashkir horseman's poisoned arrow during a skirmish: the surgeon had amputated it, stopped the bleeding with birch cotton because there was a shortage of lint, and dressed the wound with paper from the archives for lack of bandages. As for his mare, she had bloated after eating rain-soaked green rye; the poor thing had started trembling and soon she was hardly able to stand upright; when she stumbled into a gully, d'Herbigny had resigned himself to destroying her with a bullet behind the ear; it had brought him to tears. His batman Paulin limped behind him, sighing, dressed in a black coat covered with leather patches and a crumpled hat, and with a cloth bag slung over his shoulder filled with grain he'd gathered along the way; he was leading by a string a donkey with a portmanteau strapped to its back. These two fine fellows were not alone in railing against their ill fortune. Lined with a double row of huge trees similar to willows, the new Smolensk road they were trudging along ran through flat, sandy country. It was so broad that ten barouches could drive down it abreast, but on that grey, cold September Monday, as the mist lifted it revealed an unmoving crush of vehicles following the Guard and Davout's army. There were goods wagons in their thousands, a mass of conveyances for transporting the baggage, ambulance carts, masons', cobblers', and tailors' caravans; they carried handmills and forges and tools; on their long wooden handles, scythe blades poked out of one dray. The most exhausted, victims of fever, let themselves be carried, sitting on the ammunition wagons drawn by scrawny horses; long-haired dogs chased in and out, trying to bite each other. Soldiers of all arms of the army escorted this throng. They were marching to Moscow. They had been marching for three months. Ah yes, the captain remembered, they'd been a mighty fine sight in June when they'd crossed the Niemen to violate Russian territory. The procession of troops across the pontoon bridges had lasted for three days. Just imagine: cannon by the hundred, over five hundred thousand fresh, alert fighting men, French a good third of them, with the grey- coated infantry rubbing shoulders with Illyrians, Croats, Spanish volunteers and Prince Eugene's Italians. Such might, such order, such numbers, such colour: one could spot the Portuguese by the orange plumes of their shakoes, the Weimar carabineers by their yellow plumes; over there were the green greatcoats of the Wurttember regiments, the red and gold of the Silesian hussars, the white of the Austrian chevaux-legers and the Saxon cuirassiers, the jonquil jackets of the Bavarian chasseurs. On the enemy bank, the Guard's band had played 'Le Nouvel Air de Roland', 'Whither go these gallant knights, honour and hope of France ...' The moment they crossed the river, their misfortunes began. They had to tramp through desert wastes in intense heat, plunge into forests of black firs, suffer sudden freezing cold after hellish storms; countless vehicles got bogged in the mud. In under a week the supply trains, heavy, slow-moving wagons drawn by oxen, had been left far behind. Resupply posed a grave problem. When the vanguard arrived in a village, they found nothing. The harvests? Burned. The herds? Moved. The mills? Destroyed. The warehouses? Devastated. The houses? Empty. Five years earlier, when Napoleon was conducting the war in Poland, d'Herbigny had seen peasants abandon their farms to hide in the depths of the forests with their animals and provisions; some secreted potatoes under their tiled floors, others buried flour, rice, and smoked bacon under the firs and hung boxes full of dried meat from the highest branches. Well, it had begun again, only much worse. The horses gnawed at the frames of mangers, ate the straw in mattresses and the wet grass; ten thousand died before a Russian had even been seen. Famine reigned. The soldiers filled their bellies with a porridge of cold rye; they devoured juniper berries; they fought over the water in the mires, since the peasants had thrown carrion and dung down their wells. Dysentery was rife; half the Bavarians died of typhus before seeing action. Bodies of men and horses rotted on the roads; the stinking air they breathed made them nauseous. D'Herbigny cursed but he knew he was favoured; officers had requisitioned other army corps's rations for the Imperial Guard, which led to brawls and no lack of resentment towards the privileged men. As his horse plodded along, the captain crunched a green apple that he had taken from a dead man's pocket. With his mouth full he called to his batman: 'Paulin!' 'Sir?' the other said in a barely audible voice. 'Heavens above! We're not moving at all now! What's going on?' 'Well, sir, I wouldn't have the foggiest.' 'You never know anything!' 'Just give me a moment to hitch our donkey to your saddle and I'll run off and find out ...' 'Because, on top of everything else, you see me leading a toy donkey, do you? You complete ass! I'll go.' They could hear swearing in front. The captain threw away his apple core, which was immediately fought over by some yapping, raw-boned mongrels and then, with a noble flourish, he steered his minute mount left-handed into the bottleneck. Skewed sideways across the road, the covered vehicle of a canteen was blocking the traffic. A chicken, tied to the cart's frame by its feet, was shedding feathers as it struggled to escape; a band of dirty conscripts leered at it with spitroasters' eyes. The canteen-woman and her driver were bewailing their luck. One of their draught horses had just collapsed; some voltigeurs in torn uniforms had put down their arms to take it out of the shafts. The captain went closer. The carcass was now unharnessed but the soldiers, despite their number and their efforts, couldn't push it onto the verge. 'It'd take two good sturdy carthorses,' the driver was saying. 'There ain't none,' a voltigeur was replying. 'A strong rope will do,' d'Herbigny suggested as if stating the obvious. 'What then, sir? The animal's going to be just as heavy.' 'No, dammit! Tie the rope round the pasterns, and then ten of you haul it together.' 'We're no stronger than the horses,' replied a pale young sergeant. D'Herbigny twisted up his moustache and scratched the wing of his long, proud nose. He was preparing to direct the road-clearing operation when a great clamour stopped him. It came from up ahead, towards the horizon, where the road curved. The clamour was persisting, taking hold, a fearsome, unremitting barrage of sound. Slowed by the can- teen's accident, the throng now stopped dead. Every face turned in unison towards the uproar. It didn't sound warlike, more like a song bursting from a thousand throats. The cries were growing louder as they came nearer, passing along the column, rolling, echoing, swelling, growing distinct. 'What are those devils yelling?' the captain asked no one in particular. 'I think I know, sir,' said Paulin who had caught his master up in the crowd. 'Well, out with it, then, you halfwit.' 'They're shouting Moscow! Moscow!' At a bend in the monotonous road, the first battalions had emerged onto the Hill of Salvation, and from there, spread out below them, they saw Moscow. It was a vision of the Orient at the end of a desolate plain. In the ranks, noisy shouts of joy gave way to a stunned silence; they gazed at the measureless city and the grey sweep of its river. After flushing its brick walls, the sun was glinting on the gilded domes of a clustered multitude of churches. They counted the blue cupolas spangled with gold, the minarets, the pointed towers, the palaces' balconies; they were astonished by the mass of cherry-red and green roofs, the brilliant splashes of orangeries, the tangles of waste land, the geometry of kitchen and pleasure gardens, the ornamental lakes glittering like sheets of metal. And radiating out from the crenellated walls stretched suburb after suburb, each a village enclosed by a simple epaulement. Many of them dreamt they were in Asia. Grenadiers who had survived Egypt feared a mirage, feared that, like a terrible memory, Ibrahim Bey's savages might suddenly appear again, chain mail under their burnooses and black silk tassels on their bamboo lances. The majority, who'd seen less service, anticipated a reward: Caucasian women with hair the colour of straw, something to eat, too much to drink, a night between clean sheets. 'What a sight, eh, Paulin?' said Captain d'Herbigny when it was his turn to crest the hill. 'More impressive than Rouen from St Catherine's Hill, wouldn't you say!' 'Certainly, sir,' replied the servant, who preferred Rouen, its belfry and the Seine. Unfortunately for Paulin, his was a loyal nature; he followed where his master led. D'Herbigny stood as his guarantor whenever, with a soldier's wartime licence, he stole, and, since wars followed one after the other, Paulin's savings were growing; he hoped to buy a tailor's shop, that was his father's trade. If the captain was wounded, he pitied him - whilst discreetly rubbing his hands together, quarters nearer the ambulances were always better - but the respite never lasted. D'Herbigny had the constitution of an ox; even when he lost a hand or took a bullet in the calf, he quickly recovered and his spirits never wavered, since his devotion to the Emperor was bordering on the religious. 'Still,' grumbled the manservant, 'why come such a long way ...' 'It's because of the English.' 'Are we going to fight the English in Moscow?' 'I've told you a hundred thousand times!' The captain launched into his habitual lesson. 'The Russians have been trading with the English for a century, and the English want our downfall.' Then, more heatedly, he continued, 'The Russians are hoping to get money from London to improve their ships and dominate the Baltic and the Black Sea. And the English are having a whale of a time, naturally! They're turning the Tsar against Napoleon. They want an end to the cursed blockade that's stopping them flooding the Continent with their goods and so driving them to ruin. As for the Tsar, he takes a dim view of Napoleon extending his conquests. The Empire is pressing on his borders; the English point out the danger in that; he's swayed by their arguments, seeks some incident, provokes us and the next thing you know, here we are, outside Moscow.' Will all this ever end? Paulin thought about his shop and the London cloth he'd like to cut. A squadron of Polish lancers charged past, roaring orders which they had no need to translate; flourishing their lances adorned with multicoloured pennons, they moved the inquisitive crowd back to clear a sort of terreplein. Recognizing the white greatcoats and the funnelshaped black-felt shakos of the Imperial escort, the regiments covering the hillside raised their hats on the points of their bayonets, saluting His Majesty's arrival with wild cheers; d'Herbigny shouted himself hoarse in unison. Napoleon rode by at a fast trot, his left arm hanging slackly at his side, a beaver-fur bicorne pulled down over his forehead, followed by his general staff in full uniform - plumes, gold lace, broad fringed belts, spotless boots - riding well-fed chestnuts. The cheers redoubled when the group halted on the brow of the hill to study Moscow. The Emperor's blue eyes lit up fleetingly. He summed up the situation in four words: 'It was high time.' 'Ah yes, sire,' murmured the grand equerry, Caulaincourt, jumping down from his horse to help the Emperor dismount. Napoleon's mount, Tauris, a silver-grey Persian Arab that was shaking its white mane, had been a present from the Tsar, when the two sovereigns held each other in high regard, intermingled with curiosity on the part of the Russian, and pride on that of the Corsican. In the first rank behind the lancers, d'Herbigny stared at his hero: with his hands behind his back, grey and puffy-faced, the Emperor seemed as broad as he was tall because of the very full sleeves of his grey overcoat which allowed him to put it on over his colonel's uniform without first taking off the epaulettes. Napoleon sneezed, sniffed, wiped his nose and then took from his pocket the pair of theatre glasses that never left his side now his sight was beginning to deteriorate. Several of the generals and his Mamelukes had dismounted and were standing around him. Outspread map in hand, Caulaincourt was describing Moscow; he indicated the triangle of the Kremlin's citadel on a rise, its winding walls flanked by towers following the line of the river; he pointed out the walls that bounded the five districts, named the churches, listed the warehouses. The army grew impatient. Apart from the officers' conference, it was unnervingly silent. Everyone held their breath. Nothing, they heard nothing, barely even the wind: no birds, no dogs barking, no echo of voices or footsteps, no clop of hooves, no creak of cartwheels on Moscow's cobblestones, none of the usual hum of a substantial city. Major General Berthier, his telescope to his eye, scrutinized the walls, the mouths of the deserted streets, the banks of the Moskova, where a number of barges were moored. 'Sire,' he said, 'it's as if there's no one ...' 'Your good friends have flown, have they?' the Emperor snarled at Caulaincourt, to whom he had been unfailingly unpleasant since his return from the embassy to St Petersburg: this scion of an old aristocratic family had made the mistake of liking the Tsar. 'Kutuzov's troops have carried on past it,' the grand equerry replied glumly, his hat under his arm. 'That superstitious oaf Kutuzov refuses to engage, does he? We gave him a good hiding at Borodino, then!' The officers of the general staff exchanged impassive glances. At Borodino they had lost far too many men in terrible hand-to-hand combat, and forty-eight generals, one of whom was Caulaincourt's brother. The latter sank his chin in the folds of his cravat; he was smooth-skinned, with a straight nose, close-cropped brown hair and mutton-chop whiskers. Created the Duke of Vicenza, he may have had the manner of a maitre d'hotel, but he did not have the matching servility; unlike most of the dukes and marshals, he had never hidden his disapproval of this invasion. From the start, when they had crossed the Niemen, he had been telling the Emperor in vain that Tsar Alexander would never give in to threats. Events had proved him right. The cities had gone up in flames; all they took possession of was ruins. The Russians slipped away, laying their country waste. Sometimes a party of Cossacks attacked; they swirled about, fell on a marauding squadron and then vanished. Often in the evening they'd see Russians bivouacked; they'd prepare themselves, post men on watch, but by dawn the enemy would be gone. There were brief, bloody bouts of fighting, but no Austerlitz or Friedland or Wagram. At Smolensk the Russians had resisted long enough to kill twenty thousand men and set the city on fire; most recently, a few days earlier, near Borodino, ninety thousand from both sides had been left dead or wounded on a field riddled with shell holes. The Russians had been able to withdraw towards Moscow, although they didn't seem to be there now, or at least not any longer. After half an hour without moving, Napoleon turned to Berthier. 'Give the order.'

Continues...

Excerpted from The Retreatby Patrick Rambaud Copyright © 2004 by Patrick Rambaud. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.