'They enjoy their work. Like any army, they live off the vanquished.' None of us quite followed Dmitry's meaning. 'The spoils of war. Armies live off the gold and the food and whatever other plunder they take from the enemy.'
'I'm not sure they'll find enough gold with the French army to make their journey worthwhile,' I said.
'There are rewards other than gold,' said Dmitry with an uncharacteristic lack of materialism. 'They are experts at taking what the rest of us would ignore.'
I don't think that any of us really liked the idea of resurrecting the Oprichniki, but the name stuck, even though we never said it to their faces. Once we'd met them, we got some sense of how Dmitry came up with the analogy.
It was late and Vadim Fyodorovich brought the meeting to a close. 'Well then, gentlemen, we have a week or so in which to prepare for the arrival of the "Oprichniki". That gives us plenty enough time to work out how to make best use of them.' He took a deep breath. He looked exhausted, but tried his best to instil some enthusiasm into all of us. 'It's been a tough campaign so far, I know, but this time I really feel it in my water that Bonaparte has overreached himself and that we've turned the corner. Eh? Eh?'
He seemed, against all hope and experience, to expect some sort of rousing cheer of agreement, but he got little more than a nod or a raised eyebrow as we each left the room and headed for our beds. He was not the kind of man to whom stirring propagandist speeches came naturally, nor were we the kind to be stirred by them. That's part of what had made us, until then, such a good team.
We had ridden at almost full gallop from Smolensk to Moscow, sleeping rough when we could find no convenient lodgings. The weather of early August was oppressively hot for some, but I enjoyed it; I always loved the summer and hated the winter. Even so, it was good to sleep in a real bed again. It was the same bed I always slept in – usually slept in – when staying in Moscow, in an inn just north of the Kremlin, in Tverskaya; the same inn where we had held our meeting. It was the small hours by the time we broke up, but I did not fall asleep immediately. Instead, my mind drifted back to another meeting, the first time I had met Vadim, the time when our strange little group had first begun to assemble.
'Dmitry Fetyukovich has told you what this is all about?' Vadim had asked.
Dmitry Fetyukovich, as ever, had not told me much. It had been seven years before, November of 1805; less than a month before the Battle of Austerlitz. Dmitry had said he knew of a major who was trying to form a small band for 'irregular operations'. I'd been interested and so the meeting had been arranged. I'd never spoken to Vadim, but I'd seen him around the camp, usually slightly dishevelled and unmilitary, but always respected by those who knew him.
'Not entirely, sir,' I had replied. 'Dmitry just told me it was something a bit out of the ordinary. It sounded worth a go.'
'There's no "sir"s here,' Vadim had told me, firmly. In those days he had been a little more austere than he became as I got to know him better, and as he became better practised at getting his way without coercion. 'Respect for your superiors may be the great strength of the Russian army, but it doesn't always encourage…' He could not find the word.
'Thinking?' suggested Dmitry.
'Exactly,' Vadim had continued. 'Thinking in the army can get you into a lot of trouble.'
He and Dmitry exchanged a smirk. Dmitry later told me that Vadim had once almost been court-martialled for disobeying an order. In doing so he'd captured an enemy gun emplacement and turned the tide of a battle, but the order had come from a very rich, very noble, very stupid senior officer and there were many who thought that the sensibilities of that breed of officer were of far greater significance than the winning of mere battles. Fortunately, others didn't. Moreover, and although none would have guessed it from his manner or demeanour, Vadim was also very rich and very noble, with the added advantage of not being in the slightest bit stupid. He had been promoted to major and given a pretty free rein to do whatever he thought would best harass the enemy.
'And thinking,' Vadim went on, 'is what I'm told you do rather a lot of.'
I smiled. 'It's more of a hobby, really. Like you say, there's not much use for it in battle.'
'Not in battle, no. In battles you obey orders – generally. When I give orders, you obey orders; but that won't happen often. And don't imagine you'll avoid battles either. You'll still have to fight like a soldier. It's what we do between the battles that will be different.'
'And what will we be doing?' I asked.
'Espionage. Sabotage. Uncovering information and spreading chaos. Sometimes in a small group, sometimes alone. I'll tell you what to do, then we work out how to do it. How's your French?'
Unusually, we had been speaking in Russian – something that was becoming popular amongst those who wanted to prove themselves true patriots.
'Pretty good,' I said.
'Dmitry tells me you could pass yourself off on a street in Paris.'
'I suppose that's true,' I ventured.
'Well, if it's true, then say it. Modesty is just another form of lying; useful with the ladies but dangerous amongst brothers-in-arms. You tell someone you're only a "pretty good" shot then he'll start taking risks to cover for you. Then he gets killed and it turns out you're a damned good shot, and his death's down to you. What are you like as a shot?'
'Pretty good,' I replied. Vadim frowned. 'But I'm damned good with a sword.'
Vadim grinned. 'Good. Ideally, you won't need to spend too much time using either. One last thing – for now: can you recommend anyone else for this? We can work as a team of three, but four or five would be better.'
'Another thinker, you mean?' I asked.
Vadim nodded. I thought for a moment, then turned to Dmitry. 'Have you mentioned Maksim Sergeivich?'
'I thought about him,' said Dmitry. 'He's very young and he's a bit… odd.'
'He certainly thinks,' I said.
'That's just it,' replied Dmitry. 'He thinks odd things.'
'Sounds ideal,' announced Vadim.
And so the following day Vadim had been introduced to Maks. He had required even less persuasion than I had, but then it would have been hard to find a role that was more appropriate for him. We had all met for the first time within the space of just a few months, but already our band was complete.
But now, seven years later, Dmitry had invited new members to join us – men that only he knew and only he could vouch for. Desperate diseases call for desperate remedies, but as I fell asleep I couldn't help but feel uncomfortable about these Oprichniki that Dmitry was to introduce into our midst.
Despite our late night, I woke early the following morning. We had a week until Dmitry's 'people' – the Oprichniki – arrived and, with only a little preparation to be made for them, that meant almost seven days of leisure.
I walked around the still-familiar streets for the first time in nearly six months and noticed little had changed except the weather, and on this glorious summer's day that was a change for the better. The people were much as they had been. Certainly they knew that Bonaparte was approaching, but they knew too that he must stop. No emperor whose throne was as far away as Paris could ever march his army all the way to Moscow. The fact that he had marched as far as Vilna, as Vitebsk, as Smolensk, the fact that those cities were also unassailable from Paris, they fully understood. But that didn't change their belief that Moscow itself could not be reached. And I was in full agreement. Of everything I was to see in that long autumn of 1812, despite the almost unimaginable horrors, the most unreal was to be the sight of French troops on the streets of Moscow.
Was it just that it wasn't my home town that made me love Moscow? I'd lived in and around Petersburg my whole life. It was beautiful and comfortable and familiar. Familiarity didn't breed contempt, simply predictability. A knowledge of every inch led to few surprises. It was odd then that Petersburg was by far the younger of the two cities. It had been only a century before – precisely a century, in 1712 – that Petersburg had replaced Moscow as the capital city, less than a decade after its foundation.