Текст книги "Officer's Prey"

Автор книги: Armand Cabasson

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Margont waved the letter handed to him by Colonel Barguelot.

‘Barguelot has just confirmed to us that Colonel Pirgnon was aware of the contents of this note! Although Pirgnon is capable of going into raptures over a poem or a painting, he seems to have no feeling for human life. His passion for classical heroes is morbid: he probably considers himself a sort of demigod, a superior being to whom other men’s morals and laws do not apply.’

‘What are we going to do? Inform Prince Eugène?’

Margont shook his head. ‘Colonel Barguelot will never give evidence. That would mean admitting the truth of what was in that note. I think he’d be capable of blowing his brains out rather than face such dishonour. And Pirgnon is very well thought of in IV Corps. Are we really sure he’ll be put on trial for his crimes?’

‘Well … yes, surely.’

‘Not surely enough for my taste. Especially amidst such chaos, where every senior officer who’s survived is worth his weight in gold.’

Lefine blew on his gloves. ‘I think I’ve guessed what Prince Eugène would think if we broke the news to him: “My God, how much simpler it would be if the Russians would just kill Colonel Pirgnon for us.”’

CHAPTER 31

SMOLENSK was not the promised paradise. The damaged city had not been sufficiently restored. Many soldiers had to sleep outdoors in the snow. Food supplies had been badly managed and the reserves depleted by the troops passing through. An inefficient administration had been incapable of organising the distribution of resources properly and looting had resulted in considerable wastage. The Guard was the first to be served, something that Napoleon always saw to. The officers often received good rations but some regiments were given only a little flour, which some of the infantrymen swallowed immediately, just as it was.

Margont and his friends went to the Valiuski palace. Unfortunately, it was empty. One of the servants had stayed behind to wait for them. The Valiuski family had learnt of the French retreat and had decided to go to the Duchy of Warsaw to stay with relatives. They were afraid that the French would entrench themselves in Smolensk and that the Russians would attack them there. Margont thought that they probably also feared reprisals on the part of the Russians and preferred to let time heal the wounds. The servant went into a storeroom. He removed two planks from the wall to reveal a recess containing a package. Inside it was a ham, some rice, a jar of honey, a bottle of brandy, two sacks of flour and some potatoes: a treasure trove.

‘That’s all, because a lot of food was requisitioned,’ explained the servant in an accent so heavy that they had to guess the meaning of most of what he was saying.

The man also handed Margont a letter. The captain went to his former bedroom, as if he was going to read its contents before going down to dinner with the Valiuskis, as if by returning in space to Smolensk he had also gone back in time and it was no longer mid-November but mid-August again.

Dear friend,

My father has decided that we should leave for Warsaw within the hour. It does indeed appear as if the campaign is not over and that more fighting lies ahead. Father had already greatly underestimated the violence of the attack on Smolensk when you came, so he prefers to take us away from the ‘field of operations’ (you know how fond he is of talking like a general). Contrary to what I had hoped, we shall not therefore be celebrating the peace with you in Smolensk.

My good Oleg has agreed to stay behind. He will hand you this letter as well as a little food. Unfortunately, your Emperor has requisitioned so much and the war has disrupted trade so badly that I cannot offer you more.

Keep my book or, if you have finished it, take some others. I hope we shall have the opportunity to see each other again in happier circumstances. It will be easy for you to find us: all the nobility in Warsaw knows the Valiuski family. But I realise that the combatants are unlikely to be liberated in the near future. Even if all French people are nothing but dreadful heathens, be assured that despite everything you are present in my prayers.

Countess Natalia Valiuska

Margont reread the letter several times, trying to hear the voice behind the words. This was only the first of a long series of disappointments. Napoleon had quickly realised that it was impossible for him to winter in Smolensk. The city was nothing but ruins and there was a shortage of food. Added to which, to the north-west Wittgenstein’s fifty thousand Russians were increasing the pressure on Marshal Gouvion-Saint-Cyr, who had been defeated at Polotsk in mid-October. Similarly, to the south, the army of Moravia under the command of Admiral Chichagov, and reinforced by Tormasov’s army, which had become available because of the peace with Turkey, had pushed back Schwarzenberg’s Austrians and Reynier’s French. The Grande Armée risked being surrounded by substantial forces. So the retreat resumed, with temperatures falling to twenty degrees below zero. There were only forty thousand men left in the army proper, with thousands of disarmed people as hangers-on.

Kutuzov was attempting to position his army between the different French corps in order to destroy them separately. At Krasny, on 16 November, IV Corps, which now consisted of only six thousand men, had to force its way through twenty thousand Russians, under the command of General Miloradovich, who were blocking its path. Two thousand French soldiers perished.

Colonel Fidassio was killed, his carotid artery severed by a hussar’s sabre as he was personally launching a counterattack. His faithful shadow, Captain Nedroni, perished a few moments later, nailed to a birch tree by a Cossack lance. As for Colonel Barguelot, he was not at his post. He did not rejoin his regiment until the following day. He told how he had been captured by hussars but had managed to escape when a scuffle broke out between sentries guarding their prisoners and fanatical Russian peasants who had come to slaughter the captives. Colonel Pirgnon survived, despite the very heavy losses sustained by the Broussier Division.

Margont was in a sombre mood. His change of tactics, namely recovering the letter sent by Pirgnon to Barguelot, had led nowhere. Nothing in that document amounted to definite proof of Pirgnon’s guilt. This lack of evidence annoyed him. He felt he was in the worst position imaginable: seeing a murderer free to come and go as he pleased just because there was one tiny piece of jigsaw missing to set the vast judicial process in motion. So he turned everything over again in his mind, thinking back to the scenes of the crimes, the discussions with witnesses, the clues … He imagined a thousand possibilities: setting another trap, telling Prince Eugène the whole story, talking to Pirgnon to try to … well, to try to do what exactly? All these thoughts swirled around in his head for hours before bringing him back inevitably to his starting point: he was completely stuck.

So he informed Captain Dalero of the progress of his investigation. He also handed a sealed letter to Saber, Piquebois and six other friends from different regiments. If Lefine and he were killed, these missives should be passed on to Prince Eugène.

The nights had become interminable. For sixteen hours the temperature fell to minus twenty-eight degrees. Margont, Lefine, Saber, Piquebois and thirteen soldiers were huddled together, a dark outline that gradually became covered in snow, like a blemish that needed to be blotted out of the landscape. They were all that was left of two companies that previously had consisted of two hundred and forty fusiliers.

Lefine, who was keeping guard, was constantly glancing at the watch Margont had lent him. He was waiting impatiently for the hour to end and wondered if there was any way of moving the hands forward by say, five, or seven, minutes … He kept the fire going with logs taken from the ruins of an isba. He was almost up to his knees in snow, which clung to him like a shroud as if inviting him to lie down and let himself be covered by it. His visibility was restricted by the snowflakes and the surrounding trees. He was vigilant, afraid that a Cossack might spring up behind him and slit his throat. Or perhaps a looter.

Suddenly, loud cries rang out: ‘Huzza! Huzza! Paris! Paris!’

‘To arms!’ yelled Lefine, waving his musket in the direction of the din.

The snow began to move, and black and white shapes emerged, changing into men sitting up and searching for their muskets. There were a few shots, creating brief puffs of smoke in the wood, the sound of laughter and then nothing. It was the third fake attack of the night.

They tried to get back to sleep. The silence was disturbed by a soldier sobbing and the whispers of one of his comrades trying to comfort him.

Hunger was making Lefine want to scream, to kill. He was gnawing a root. It was not edible but in any case his teeth could not bite into it. It was just to have something in his mouth, to pretend to be eating something and to really believe it. The previous day he had heated up some water into which he had plunged two tallow candles and a leather belt. The candles had melted in this foul liquid and the belt had given it a vaguely meaty taste. He and his friends had then chewed interminably on the bits of boiled leather. Every other day they ate nothing unless they found a dead horse. Every other day they were all entitled to a potato or a piece of cake that Margont made from flour and snow. This ‘miraculous meal’ was soon only served every three days. Their two mounts had died and had immediately been devoured by all of them with the exception of Piquebois. Sometimes they also treated themselves to a small pot of horse blood. This sort of black pudding soup restored their strength. It was Lefine who prepared this dish, with a wooden spoon in one hand and a pistol in the other, the reason being that on one occasion some starving creatures had rushed at him and his pot. In the ensuing struggle, everything had been knocked over. Fortunately, chunks of frozen horse blood were appreciated just as much.

A silhouette wrapped in a blanket crossed the encampment.

‘On your feet! It’s time to march,’ it shouted.

The soldiers got up with difficulty, numb and exhausted, and shook themselves. Many had thrown away their muskets, either to lighten their load or because they had no gloves, and contact between frozen metal and the skin was unbearable. The remnants of regiments had merged together and had been joined by stragglers. So there were dismounted cuirassiers, Bavarians, Westphalians, Württembergers, Saxons, a few velites, either on foot or ‘on horseback but without horses’ from the Neapolitan Guard, a handful of Poles … A good number of soldiers were rigged out in such a way as to make it impossible to tell which regiment they belonged to. They were wearing civilian cloaks, women’s pelisses, gaudy tunics on top of their greatcoats, cashmere jackets, bearskins, bed sheets and curtains made into clothes, dresses, dressing gowns …

Margont straightened up, exhausted, famished beyond words and surprised not to be dead. He had grown up in an area where snow was a rare sight, and in the summer the scorching heat made it look as if the scrubland was on fire without ever burning up and that you were moving forward surrounded by invisible flames. That climate had enabled him to withstand heat but had also made him sensitive to the cold. Were it not for his natural foresight and what he had read about Russia, he would long ago have fallen victim to the first flakes of snow. He was wearing silk stockings, woollen stockings, leggings, corduroy trousers, a silk shirt, two waistcoats including one in cashmere, a padded jacket and a bulky fur-lined cloak with an ermine collar that half hid his face and whose skirts trailed along the ground. He also had on a woollen hood, a hat and a double pair of gloves thrust into a fox-fur muff. His feet were swathed in several layers of stockings and socks and protected by bearskin boots. Encumbered with all these layers, which made him into a sort of fossil, he looked like a thickset, clumsy giant. The sword at his waist was the only indication that he was a soldier, apart from the epaulettes that he had sewn on to his cloak. But all this did not stop his teeth from chattering and he felt as if he were a little child who had fallen naked into the snow. He took a few steps and already felt exhausted. They had slept too little, in appalling conditions, with the fear of never waking up.

He heard shouting and wailing. Some exhausted soldiers had fallen asleep on the ground and their faces were now stuck to the snow. Others had frostbitten cheeks and noses, and large patches of frozen skin were peeling away from their faces. Some people came to their aid but not many, it must be said. They had been through so much horror and were so afraid for themselves that they were now insensitive to everything. The bivouac was littered with the dead. People were looking for food around the corpses – a vain hope – and taking the clothes. As Margont passed close to a victim being stripped of his trousers by an infantryman, he heard a murmur of ‘Mein Gott’.

‘He’s still alive!’ Margont exclaimed.

But the fusilier continued to tug at the trousers that the German was holding on to, a Württemberger to judge from the shape of his black-crested helmet.

‘He’s practically dead,’ retorted the looter.

‘So will you be if you continue,’ Margont warned, putting the frozen barrel of his pistol to the man’s temple.

The fusilier backed away, holding his bayonet because he’d thrown away his musket. The Württemberger was too weak to get up. Margont motioned to some Württemberg artillerymen, who were lamenting having had to abandon their guns in Smolensk because of the lack of horses to pull them. They referred to these pieces of ordnance as if they were human. When they recalled the moment they had spiked them – which involved driving a spike into the touch-hole to render them unusable by the enemy – they had tears in their eyes. The Württembergers moved forward suspiciously, then rushed to help their comrade as soon as they caught sight of him.

Lefine approached Margont.

‘I don’t even feel the cold any more!’ he shouted gleefully.

Nevertheless, he had been shivering for almost a week.

‘Don’t lose heart. We’ll pull through, Fernand!’

‘Well, of course we will. Everyone’s going to pull through! Talking of which, Pirgnon’s going to pull through too.’

‘No, not him.’

‘So, with all that’s happened you still believe in divine justice, do you? He’s a colonel, so he eats much better than us. One of these days he’ll step over our dead bodies laughing.’

Margont was trying to tread in the footprints in front of him so as not to exhaust himself unnecessarily by disturbing heaps of snow.

‘My investigation’s at a standstill for the moment but—’

‘What a bad loser you are! Pirgnon’s had us. He’s had us. That’s all there is to it.’

‘The game’s not over yet.’

Lefine pointed to a pile of corpses covered with snow. Men had huddled together to keep themselves warm but in the end the entire group had frozen.

‘Even if you were frozen stiff like them, you’d still believe in victory. The Emperor should take you into his Guard! We’re all going to kick the bucket! By the way, do you know what I think? That so many people are dying in this damned retreat that it could well happen to Pirgnon. A shot fired in a wood – by a Cossack, of course! – and that’s it. No more Pirgnon. A Cossack who’s as good a marksman as me, for example.’

Margont shuddered.

‘No, Fernand.’

‘Did you say something, Captain? With all this snow in my ears I can’t hear a thing.’

‘You heard perfectly well.’

‘Why? Because it’s wrong to kill a murderer?’

Margont stopped and turned towards his friend. ‘Because it’s meaningless. It would be absurd to become a murderer in order to eliminate a criminal.’

‘What a noble sentiment and how well put. Another fine idea to form the basis for a book.’

‘There’s another reason. You’d be bound to miss him – especially as you can’t stop shivering, like the rest of the army. But his escort wouldn’t miss you. The snow would slow down your escape: his men would catch up with you or would only have to take aim as you floundered about in a snowdrift.’

Trails of steam poured out of Lefine’s mouth.

‘If Pirgnon had killed Natalia you’d agree with me. The two of us would have gone to pump him full of lead. Bang, bang! Yes, we would have been shot immediately afterwards but at least we’d have gone out on a high note instead of ending up as blocks of ice!’

‘No!’

Margont had tried to shout but exhaustion took his breath away. Lefine was right and that unsettled him even more.

‘I’ll get him,’ he concluded simply.

Lefine made a snowball, waved it in front of him, stood stiffly to attention and said: ‘At your orders, Captain!’

The Grande Armée was now just one long caravan, a thick column of motley soldiers dressed up to fight the cold, and of carts and sledges interspersed with the occasional trooper. In some places people were crowded together and in others they were spread out, dangerously exposed and isolated, easy targets for the Cossacks. Only the Guard had kept up appearances. It advanced steadfastly in an orderly fashion, protecting the Emperor.

CHAPTER 32

ON 22 November, Margont was trudging through the middle of a wood of birch trees. It was foggy and it was snowing yet again. The soldiers’ faces were gaunt, exhausted, dazed and sometimes blackened by the frost. Each one looked like a walking corpse. They advanced amidst the shadows, ghosts amongst ghosts. The fear of straying was ever present, because if you got lost there were Cossacks or partisans out there who would slaughter or capture you, according to their mood.

Fanselin had been walking with Margont and his companions since morning. His worn-out horse had slowed down so much that in the end he got left behind by his squadron. After his mount had died, Fanselin tried to cut across a forest but was caught in a snowstorm. When he at last got back to the army he found himself with IV Corps. He was wearing an enormous pelisse, a red one, needless to say. He felt it his duty to set an example and warded off his fears by laughter and bravado. As a result, he had a constant following of soldiers.

‘I got completely lost in that forest and my only weapons were my two pistols and my lance,’ he recounted.

He was so proud of his lance that every time he mentioned it, he flourished it and did battle with the branches of the birch trees.

‘Of course, I was thinking about the filthy Cossacks! They appear from nowhere, shoot you in the back and by the time you’ve turned round, they’re far away. And they can certainly gallop! It’s hard work catching up with those scoundrels! They’re devilish clever with their bark-coloured pelisses that make them invisible. You don’t see them, you don’t capture them and they vanish. In short, after a while, if you’ll pardon this unsavoury detail, I started to relieve my bladder against a tree trunk when all of a sudden I said to myself: “Watch out, Edgar, make sure you’re not pissing on a Cossack’s boots …”’

His audience laughed, he stopped talking to save his breath and then, a few minutes later, he came out with another anecdote or philosophical observation. Fanselin had such confidence in himself and in the French, and the Guard enjoyed such prestige, that his presence lifted the soldiers’ spirits a little.

The column was making slow progress. The road was littered with the frozen corpses of soldiers and half-eaten horses. There was also silver cutlery, vases and gold coins that people had dumped to lighten their load. Suddenly, there was a long whistling noise that became more and more piercing, followed by the roar of an explosion. A birch tree collapsed with a snapping sound and trapped some of the men in a tangle of branches. Cannonballs bounced this way and that. But the march continued. The troops were being bombarded at regular intervals by cannon that the Russians had had the detestable idea of mounting on sledges. The outline of a figure on horseback drew closer in the fog. Muskets were levelled in that direction because two times out of three a horse meant a Cossack. The figure suddenly emerged from the icy fog like an apparition. It probably was one. It was an adjutant, impeccably dressed, his trousers and gloves spotless. He was young and very angry.

‘Soldiers, they’re shelling us! Do something! Are you fighters or rabbits? Fix your bayonets and follow me!’

He galloped off in the direction of the enemy batteries, which were blasting away for all they were worth.

‘Who was that?’ asked a soldier wrapped in a series of shawls.

‘The phantom of the Grande Armée,’ replied a figure. ‘The one that haunts us all.’

Fanselin began to talk again. Margont could hardly hear his voice any more. His lips, welded together by ice, and his legs were giving him terrible pain. His legs were so heavy to lift that he looked at them often, convinced that they had caught on something. They felt stuffed and swollen with pain. Sometimes the pain exploded into thousands of pinpricks all over his body. It was almost more than he could bear because it made him think of death and being eaten by worms. Worse than that: sometimes he lost all sensation in his lower limbs. It was as if he had lost both legs and they now belonged to someone else. So he extricated his hands from the depths of his muff and frantically rubbed his thighs to bring back the circulation. When the pain returned he felt as if his body was at last whole again. He looked enviously at those being transported on carts or gun carriages. But rest proved to be a trap. Death crept up in silence. The cold gradually numbed their minds and the passengers fell into a pleasant sleep from which they never awoke. The choice was simple: march or freeze.

Margont frequently thought about his childhood or certain moments in his life. He recalled in particular the birth of his friendship with Piquebois because that day he had almost died. Piquebois, then at the height of his hussar period, had noticed him reading while he was slashing away at pumpkins on stakes topped with Austrian helmets. Piquebois, sabre in hand and probably running out of pumpkins, had called him a ‘book-devouring little squirt’. He would have been only too happy to see the ‘infantry librarian’ unsheathe his sword. But Margont had replied that he only used his weapon for opening letters, not for slicing off the heads of French hussars. Piquebois had burst out laughing before dragging Margont off for a drinking session that it would have been unwise to refuse. However, these memories were rather a bad omen. When you reach the end of a long journey or a project that took a long time to complete, you often think back to its beginning. Margont had the impression that his mind was going back over his life one last time, before gently fading away …

A little further on, Lefine fell. Margont bent his knees to crouch down, which caused him intense pain, as if the bulging muscles in his thighs had ripped his frozen skin. He wanted to remove his friend’s knapsack but was surprised by its weight. He opened it and discovered silver ingots, jewellery and gold plate. He started to empty it. Lefine groaned, stuck out his hand and with considerable difficulty picked up a gold snuffbox that he stuffed into one of his pockets. But Margont was throwing away far more than he could retrieve.

‘I’ve left you your jewels. Otherwise you’d probably have stayed here,’ Margont said in a whisper as he was out of breath.

Lefine was getting to his feet with the aid of Saber and Fanselin when loud cries of ‘Huzza! Huzza!’ rang out. In an instant, men on horseback swept down on the column from all sides at once. Most of the attackers were Cossack irregulars, Bashkirs and Kalmucks. Everything about them – their Mongol features, their strangely shaped red hats, the fact that some of them were armed with bows – caused fear and panic. Accompanying them were hussars, who yelled as they set upon the French with their sabres.

There was total confusion. Infantrymen were fleeing, putting their arms in the air or trying to defend themselves with anything that came to hand. Hands stiffened by the cold managed to wield muskets and fire at the horsemen or, more often, at the horses. The Russians, better fed, less tired, drunk with victory but also just plain drunk, were indulging in a massacre. The hussars galloped along the column laughing, leaving a bloody trail behind them. Fanselin wielded his lance. He had jammed the end of it against a large stone. A Bashkir charged at him, and the lancer, bending down at the last minute to avoid the point, impaled the Russian. He immediately clung on to the horse’s mane but the animal did not interrupt its headlong charge, carrying the Frenchman away with it. Fanselin eventually rolled on to the ground. He picked himself up, pistol in hand, ready to grab hold of another mount. The Bashkirs who had witnessed the scene had no desire to take on such a madman.

Margont felt an uncontrollable frenzy come over him. He shot dead a Bashkir with his pistol and wounded another with his other weapon. This second assailant was bleeding from the shoulder. His weakened hand had let go of the reins and his horse was galloping round and round a cart. Margont wanted to finish the Russian off but his sword failed to pierce the thick cloak. So he seized the Russian and threw him to the ground. He sat astride him and brandished his knife. He wanted to gouge his opponent’s eyes out to make him finally understand what suffering could be. He revelled in the Bashkir’s fear. The man had a round face with prominent cheekbones. His head was shaven except at the back, where he had a long, dangling plait. He had a very thin moustache, the ends of which drooped down to his chin. His eyes were so narrow and slanting that his pupils were barely visible. Despite all these differences, Margont saw his own reflection in this face. The Bashkir had been hit; for him the war was over. Margont put away his knife, took the bag that the Cossack was wearing on his belt and moved away. At once he flung himself on his stomach because a Frenchman was taking aim at him, mistaking him for a partisan.

‘French! 84th!’ he yelled.

Realising his mistake, the marksman shot a Kalmuck for good measure.

The assailants left as suddenly as they had arrived. As they rode off, they thrust their lances into the backs of bodies, occasionally striking an infantryman who was pretending to be dead. A scream of pain told them when they had been ‘lucky’.

Fanselin was engaged in a lance duel with a regular Cossack officer. The Russian was swiftly whirling his lance around to parry an attack. When he had deflected his opponent’s weapon sufficiently, he stopped flourishing his own and thrust its point towards the Frenchman’s chest. With surprising agility, Fanselin leapt to the side before counterattacking. Changing tactics, Fanselin pretended to attack with the point of his lance only to suddenly turn it in an arc and strike his opponent with the other end. The Cossack received a violent blow to the chin and fell from his horse. A chorus of explosions stopped the fleeing horse dead in its tracks. They were not going to let such a heap of meat get away. Fanselin kept the prisoner at bay with his lance.

‘Long live our Red Cossack!’ exclaimed Margont weakly.

More shouts greeted the ‘Red Cossack’ and Fanselin smiled at the compliment. The Cossack exclaimed ‘Huzza!’ and to general amazement hurled himself at the lance to impale himself. Fanselin immediately withdrew the point but it was too late.

Everyone rushed for the carcasses of the horses to eat their fill, gnawing on the bones like dogs, without even taking the time to cook them because the Cossacks were still prowling around.

Margont opened the Bashkir’s bag. Inside it he found black bread mixed with bits of straw. The loaf had been baked any old how: it had been placed in an overheated oven and the outside was burnt and the middle still doughy. Margont bit right into it. He couldn’t believe that he had almost tortured this Bashkir. Was suffering making him mad? He needed to build up some protection against insanity for himself. Instead of repeating that he was marching to the Duchy of Warsaw – which was still so far away – his thoughts turned to Colonel Pirgnon. Don’t let him out of your sight. Keep your monster on a leash, he thought. He said to himself that he didn’t have the right to let himself die or to lose his sanity, and that managed to put some life back into those aching blocks of wood that were his legs. The march resumed. Yet again. *

Colonel Pirgnon was cursing the fog that was hiding the full scale of the disaster from him. In his opinion it was all up for the Emperor. The Russian armies were going to cut off the retreat and that would sound the death knell. The irony of the situation amused him, because while everything around him was dying, he himself felt reborn. His future at last seemed crystal clear. He went up to the soldiers in his escort who, blue with cold, were shivering near a fire. The frozen branches were bad for burning as they produced a sort of smoke but no fire or heat. However, the colonel felt a surge of contentment well up inside him.

On 25 November, the Grande Armée found itself opposite the Berezina. It was here that the Russians had planned to crush it. The Berezina, a huge tributary of the Dnieper, had not in fact frozen over. A hundred and fifty paces wide, almost ten feet deep and bordered by marshes and forest, it cut off the retreat. By now the Emperor only had at his disposal twelve thousand soldiers, half of whom made up the Guard. He could also count on reinforcements of twenty thousand men led by Victor, Oudinot and Dombrovski. In addition to these troops there were forty thousand civilians and stragglers, for the most part unarmed. The Russians, who numbered one hundred and twenty thousand men divided into three armies, had also been weakened by the fighting and the winter. Admiral Chichagov held the west bank of the Berezina and was supposed to prevent the French from getting through. To the north was Wittgenstein and to the east and south, Kutuzov. But the latter, still more than sixty miles away from the French, was not urging his army on. It was Napoleon’s unprecedented prestige that had led the Russian generalissimo to commit this blunder, much to the consternation of his general staff. Napoleon had won so many victories that Kutuzov greatly underestimated the disorganised and weakened state of the Grande Armée. So, once more, he sought to avoid direct confrontation and to let the climate and the hardships do their work.