A Ural with a sidecar isn’t worth much in the Moscow traffic. The asphalt is ruled by Darwinian laws of selection. As soon as we left, Goisque wanted us to take a detour through the Kremlin.
“We don’t have the time,” I said.
“What about my photos, guys?”
So we had to wind our way to Red Square.
Heading to the banks of the Moskva River through the streets of the capital, I thought about Barclay de Tolly’s strategy. The British have a word for this art of dodging: escapism. When faced with an obstacle, the escapist advocates flight. Like shooting stars, wild horses, and streams of clear water, the escapist cannot bear collision, friction, or the ugliness of contact. He considers even quibbling vulgar. He thinks it’s better to turn on his heels, and is akin to the grace of a ballet dancer crossing the stage from one side of the wings to the other in four doe-like leaps. He prefers the about-turn of a butterfly to a charge of cattle. I’d lived the first forty years of my life according to this principle and now wasn’t very affected by it. I had no anchor, not the slightest attachment, no family, very few enemies, no children, and no washing machine, and my only friends were discreet people imbued with the same philosophy. Gras, for instance, would measure the degree of affection of his entourage by their ability to “put up with absences and silences.” Was escapism cowardice? Perhaps, but I could care less. Let’s flee, I thought, since tomorrow will be worse than today. To hell with everything and long live Barclay de Tolly!
Moreover, Kutuzov’s behavior after the Battle of Borodino and then during the French Retreat proved that he wasn’t really opposed to escapism either.
If we rely on simple statistics and consider the Grim Reaper as an accountant, the Battle of Borodino was a Napoleonic victory. The Russian losses were greater than the French. But as far as victory goes it was a perverse victory. What had the Emperor gained? The right to go a little deeper into the country. He hadn’t obtained the definitive military success that would have served him the Tsar’s surrender on a plate. Had he erred too much on the side of caution? Many marshals blamed him for having balked at sending the Imperial Guard to deal the final blow.
Until then, Napoleon would appear in the theater of operations, devising plans, giving orders, staying up all night, pacing up and down the bivouacs, scolding some, haranguing others, then, at dawn, he would direct the operations, watch his thoughts being incarnated in the movement of his troops, and, in the evening, he would have an unmitigated success where the genius of the maneuver, the audacity of the technique, and French fury would strike nations, subjugate monarchs, and the battle pass into posterity.
At Borodino, however, he was timid. It wasn’t the Battle of Austerlitz. Murat even dared say, “I don’t recognize the Emperor’s genius anymore.” Napoleon let Kutuzov slip through his fingers. The Tsar was in no way weakened and the Russian army continued to march behind the screen of silver birches, as elusive as a bank of mist in a bunch of gorse. Moreover, the more the Russians eluded him, the more Napoleon—certain that peace would be played out in Moscow—urged his columns to hurry. Was summer 1812 a conquest? No, it was a fall into the abyss.
We parked on the cobbles behind the apse of Saint Basil’s Cathedral and managed to persuade a militiaman to let us stay there for a few minutes. At the foot of Notre Dame, in Paris, I often thought of 13th-century peasants traveling to Paris from Hurepoix or Gâtinais and suddenly discovering the monster of stone with its three hundred and thirty-foot spire soaring through the air. To us, it was a Gothic cathedral. To them, the vision of a vessel of mysteries and mischief, a fossilized insect becalmed in a city of timber. Before the colorful bulbs of Saint Basil, I thought of the French soldiers. Of how, on that September 14th, they must have been struck by these Byzantine domes, these red crenellations and confectionery bulbs, rising in the city of “twelve hundred sky-blue belfries and domes, sown with golden stars and linked together with gilded chains.”[4] Sergeant Bourgogne begins his memoirs with the following admission: “Many other capital cities I had seen, such as Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, and Madrid, had inspired no more than ordinary feelings in me, but this was something different: for me, as well as for everyone else, there was something magical about it.”
“Now clear off.”
A universal rule: never let a cop tell you something twice.
All three of us owed our knowledge of Napoleon to recent reading. We could have spent the rest of our lives in libraries, since there had been a new book about the First French Empire published every day since 1815. Gras had devoured the memoirs of half a dozen verbose Empire barons and officers. Goisque preferred testimonies written on the hoof by enlisted men and non-commissioned officers: he swore only by Sergeant Bourgogne, his fellow man, his brother, a tireless Velite who worshipped the Emperor, accepted his ordeals, and took his share of pleasure when fate offered it. Bourgogne left behind visual, naïve memoirs. Personally, I liked Caulaincourt, Napoleon’s Grand Squire. I had taken his account of the Russian campaign with me. Caulaincourt was a complex character: French Ambassador at the Court of Alexander I, he had dissuaded Napoleon from invading Russia. With the impending doom, he displayed his knowledge of the country, his foresight, and his tactical genius to try and find a solution for the Grande Armée and, at the same time, the courage and coolness of a Muscovite girl. His text was a blend of high-brow thoughts and anecdotes. Caulaincourt was as comfortable with a sword in hand on a moonless night as he was sitting at the table of princes.
Books would be our guides on the road. They would tell us where to go through and where to sound a halt. Opening them in the evening would mark the start of another journey, no longer on the asphalt of Slav highways, but through the memory of 1812 survivors who had picked up a quill to conjure up the nightmare.
I thought that Goisque, with his sense of reality and his military past, was the embodiment of a kind of Bourgogne. Had he not himself been a sergeant on the Igman slopes during the Yugoslav war? Gras, more touchy and introverted, would make an excellent Caulaincourt. Hadn’t he spent the last five years working in diplomacy?
“And who will you be, Tesson?”
“Napoleon, of course,” I said, fully aware that this kind of project led to the asylum.
When the bulk of the French troops reached Moscow on September 14th and 15th, they discovered a “magical” city, of course, definitely Oriental, but desperately deserted. Not an officer in the streets, not a Boyar, not even a soldier, or a single shopkeeper: the Russians had abandoned the city. Barclay de Tolly’s beloved escapism had become the strategy of an entire nation. There were only a few tramps, a handful of Moujiks in rags, and a few Jewish shopkeepers roaming on the sidewalks. Here and there, shapes would vanish down an alley, eerie and furtive—and why were they waving those torches? The French columns went deeper into the dead avenues soon to be ravaged by fire. Napoleon was about to find out that, in terms of pyrotechnics, next to Alexander, Nero was an amateur.
4
Ménéval (Claude François de):