Goisque, on the other hand, had crossed the Mekong delta and the Kirgiz steppes on a Ural. Together, on the 1966 Ural, we had gone for a spin around Lake Baikal over bare ice. We had to get used to driving on the icy mirror and not suddenly brake whenever the crystal surface started to look like free water. Goisque shared my taste for driving Russian motorbikes with sidecars, for the feeling of riding while steering a trawler.
Gras, however, couldn’t drive, so would act as a counterbalance. We were offering him the role of the dead man in a zinc coffin. On Baffin Island, I had already lied to him by promising he could keep warm and read. In actual fact, the weather forecast intimated a terrible return. Of course, it wasn’t going to be the nightmare of 1812, but more energetic than a picnic in Tuscany. We attached our flag to the front of the basket. Against the tricolor background was written, in gold letters:
“Hey, guys!” I said. “Nothing will stop our Ural. Not even its brakes!”
It was the beginning of December. We decided to leave the following day, December 2nd, date of the Emperor’s coronation and of Austerlitz. Since our bike was going to be a shuttle on the smooth rail of time, since we were going to play, head down, the great game of memory and myth, we might as well have as many symbols and references as we could.
We had the bicorn, we had the date.
Now all we needed was to find the ghosts.
They were waiting by the side of the road.
With a gap of two hundred years, we were one and a half months behind History. On October 19th, 1812, the Grande Armée left Moscow. It was down to just one hundred thousand men. Under his black bicorn, for the first time, the Emperor had doubts. His army was about to climb one of the highest peaks of suffering and horror in the long thread of human History.
A hundred thousand soldiers. Behind them, thousands of civilians, horses, and wagons.
There would be five of us. Gras, Goisque, and I for France. As for our Russian friends, Vitaly and Vassily, they would drive their own Urals, black and white, respectively. They belonged to a club of suicidal motorcyclists. Every year, they would throw themselves into long-distance treks with no return. They would have to cover three hundred miles a day in the cold and the mud, toward icy stopping stages, cities that had been backdrops to terrible wars, washed by women’s tears, ancient capitals of sorrow with names that broke your heart: Kursk, Kharkiv, Kiev. They illustrated the Slav’s indifference toward the climate, the Russian mountaineer’s insolence before the blows from the sky. They called themselves “Radical-Uralists.” Vassily looked like a golden-haired Varangian, one of those bards who, during the 11th century, came down along the river Dnieper to sell Baltic amber to the Turks of the Pontic Empire. He was tall and his wild eyes only looked into those of his interlocutor if the latter was explaining an injection problem with the carburetor. A genius mechanic and an inventor, he had already deboned dozens of Urals. Did he have as much talent for putting them back together as for dissecting them?
Vitaly, a financier by trade, was the embodiment of the Muscovite: quick, intelligent, urban, lithe, and skillful with his hands. By day, he wore a tie in the air-conditioned office of his company, but, on a snowy night, could sleep in the middle of a forest, wrapped in a woolen coat. In Russia, Tolstoy was never far away. Modernity had not snatched its children away from a life outdoors.
They were our friends, and thought a memorial salute to hundreds of thousands of dead Russians and Frenchmen was a good enough reason to freeze their knees for two weeks in the nothingness of winter. They were delayed. The engines of their bikes were lying in oil.
“We won’t be ready tomorrow,” Vitaly said.
“Who cares?” Vassily said. “You three leave tomorrow on your Ural, and we’ll catch up with you in Borodino with your baggage…”
“We’ll be like Platov’s Cossacks harrying Ney’s rear-guard,” Vitaly said.
“The Cossacks harried but never caught up,” I said.
“You’ll see, we’ll catch up,” Vassily said.
“See you tomorrow then,” I said.
DAY ONE.
FROM MOSCOW TO BORODINO
My insomnia was populated by visions of crumpled sheet metal. All night I’d tried to fall asleep. I was always more tormented by the prospect of traveling by motorbike than by the idea of a long stay in the forest, or plans for a mountain climb. I could never sleep the night before getting on a bike. You’re much more at the mercy of destiny’s irony on the road than amid the wilderness of nature. A pothole, a truck that’s too wide, an oil puddle: you’re dead before you’ve had the chance to do anything. I switched on the light and looked at the map on which the itinerary of the 1812 campaign was reproduced.
Napoleon should never have approached the splendor of Moscow. Its glare was too powerful for him. Some beauties are forbidden. In strategy as well as in love: beware of what sparkles.
On September 14th, 1812, his eyes on the onion domes, he contemplated the third Rome from the top of a hill. The following day, he positioned his rear guard behind the Kremlin ramparts. I believe in dharma, in the wheel of destiny. There are times when an apparently trivial event triggers a series of unexpected occurrences. That day in Moscow, a chain of causalities was set off that, two years later, was to sweep away the Empire.
There were soldiers who thought that Moscow was just a stage on the way to India. They imagined they would go as far as Mongolia to “take hold of British possessions,” as Sergeant Bourgogne writes.
The soldiers of the Grande Armée would have followed to the ends of the world this emperor who had covered them in glory in Egypt, Italy, Prussia, and Spain.
They had no inkling that, this time, their idol had led them to the brink of a nightmare.
Had Napoleon really wanted this hazardous war? Had he truly wished to send his men into the shapeless territory of a birch-covered plain where the Cossack and the pitchfork-wielding Moujik prowled? Alas, for him, the campaign against Russia had become inexorable. Had Alexander I, his friend and brother, not violated the Tilsit Treaty signed in 1807? What remained of the Tsar’s commitment to join the blockade against Britain? Nothing! The Russian sovereign had opened his harbors to British ships and was trading with perfidious Albion. The Emperor of the French could not leave this betrayal unpunished.
The Tsar had to be forced to renew his promises. The secret bonds between Saint Petersburg and the British had to be severed. This last effort had to be made and this ultimate capitulation obtained in order for the blockade against London to be successful, and therefore complete the great task of European peace. “Spain will fall just as soon as I have destroyed British influence in Saint Petersburg.” Napoleon was venturing into the immensity of this continental power in order to vanquish his sea rival!
He outlined to his peers the advantage of a show of strength before Alexander I. He was thereby inventing—two hundred years early—the equation that supported the Cold War of 1945. “The reputation of weapons is entirely equivalent to actual power,” he told his marshals. To display your fangs—that is, muskets, cannons, and cavalry sabers—would be sufficient. Impressed with the deployment by the River Neman and terrified by the prospect of charging cavalry, the Tsar would capitulate at the first jingling, resume his favorable disposition, and restore the alliance. A strange war that consisted in thrashing an adversary in order to turn him once more into a friend!