17

WE ENTERED SMOLENSK AFTER BIVOUACKING against the rampart. Napoleon and the Royal Guard were already there, and this time the city looked like a replica of Moscow, but on a smaller scale. Like Moscow, it had it been burned and evacuated by the Russians before being sacked by our own troops, and was now swarming with vendors and buyers conducting their business in improvised markets. Since it had been chosen as a hub for communications between Moscow and Vilna, I knew that it would be heavily fortified, with convalescent hospitals, and large stores of ammunition and provisions. Although it was now much more crowded, its appearance was every bit as lamentable as a few months before. Its colors were the black of charred ruins, the gray of stone walls, and the white of snow that blanketed its streets and rooftops.

It all happened very quickly. I was on my way to the General Staff Headquarters when a mob of foot soldiers wielding battle axes and fixed bayonets streamed into a side street and began assaulting a provisions depot with such violence and clamor it was as through they were attacking an enemy position. Cheval spooked, I tried to bring him under control, he reared up, slipped on the ice and that’s where my memory goes blank. I came to in a hospital ward, lying on a straw-stuffed pallet situated between a wall and a Russian with compresses over his eyes. My astrakhan coat had disappeared and I was covered by a green cloth which, once upon a time, had lined a billiard table. My head hurt horribly and I could barely move my left arm. I was also cold and nauseated, but above all I could feel a growing panic rising within me: had the doctor who had attended to me discovered my secret?

Uneasy, I nevertheless drifted back to sleep, awaking in the middle of the night with a terrible need to urinate. I raised myself up on my good elbow and lifted my head, which still hurt terribly. I noted that it was bandaged and I could feel a large swollen place above my ear. The ward was poorly lit, but I could make out various women attending to the patients. I called out several times and one of them hurried over to me, almost at a run. She helped me to stand and took me to the latrine. Walking brought on such dizziness that, without her help, I would never have managed even a single step. She asked me my name and to which regiment I belonged. I didn’t answer. At that moment I could remember only that my name was Henriette Faber-Cavent and that I shouldn’t say so. She continued talking without pause, speaking in a classical, old-fashioned French. She wore a faded ball gown, very outdated, with a chestnut-colored velvet bodice, and over that, nothing to keep her warm but a silk shawl wrapped about her head and neck. Her name was Nadezhda and she told me that my arm was not broken; the worst of my injuries was the contusion on my head, although I was fortunate that the skin had not been broken. I guessed that my hat had cushioned the blow, and I asked after my coat and horse. She claimed to know nothing. They had brought me in along with two others who’d been wounded and, like them, all I had been wearing were the clothes currently on my back.

“Did they, by any chance, leave a painting, a portrait of a woman wearing a shako?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Those who brought you here left nothing.”

I remembered that my fictitious name was Enrique Fuenmayor, from Havana.

“My name is Enrique Fuenmayor, from Havana, on the island of Cuba. I’m with the General Staff. I’m an assistant to Baron Larrey.”

“We shall sort everything out tomorrow. I’ll see to making the proper inquiries,” she said, smiling tenderly, then gave me a sip of water and a spoonful of cognac.

I awoke before dawn. The Russian was also awake. He was humming the same song over and over again. He didn’t seem to feel the cold. He was a sergeant with an Uhlan regiment. My head and arm still hurt and, although I wasn’t hungry, I felt a dull ache in my stomach. Trusting that the day would bring good news, I sank lazily into a torpor, quite placid, despite the delirious cries of someone in the center of the ward who carried on a conversation, almost at a shout, with his wife and children.

I saw him come in with Nadezhda, navigating the rows of pallets, and I thought I might weep with happiness.

“Henriette . . . dear girl! Thank God you’re alive!” he exclaimed. Abruptly, he dropped a large bundle to the floor, held out his arms in his customary gesture of resignation, and squatted down next to me. He was wearing an enormous bearskin coat and a hat with earflaps. He looked well.

“Oh, Uncle!” I whispered and, unable to control myself, I began to cry.

“I’ve found you at last, my child! Oh, thank goodness!” he said, clearly moved.

“Here I am,” I said, trying to smile through the tears. “I fell off my horse.”

“I’ve already spoken with the doctor who attended to you. It could have been worse,” he said, beginning to remove my bandages. “A contusion. Are you nauseated? How is your vision?”

“It’s not serious. I was able to get up last night. My arm hurts too.”

“I’ll bleed you a bit. Then we’ll have a look at your arm. I’ll be right back.”

With Nadezhda’s assistance, he let blood from a vein in my wounded arm. Afterwards, he gave me wine from his canteen and we talked awhile, catching up. Petit was alive. He had managed to join with the General Staff and was now traveling with Larrey, transferring wounded Guardsmen to hospitals. Doubtlessly, we would soon see them arrive here. The campaign was going from bad to worse. Vitebsk had been lost and it was no longer possible to stay in Smolensk.

“We are only waiting for Prince Eugène to return before we begin our retreat,” he explained. He was surprised to learn that Alfred was with the Vistula Legion and he asked me if I wanted to see him. I said no. I preferred to go see him myself, once I had recovered. I begged him not to send for him. I didn’t want him to see me like that.

“When will I be better? Tomorrow, the day after?” I asked.

“You don’t appear to have broken anything, but the blow to your head was powerful. We shall see, child. We shall see. You should stay warm. I’ve brought you my cloak and a wool blanket,” he said, indicating the bundle he’d brought with him.

“One more thing, Uncle,” I said, feigning nonchalance. “Has my secret been discovered?”

“That’s not important now. The important thing is that you recover.”

“Tell me, Uncle. Please.”

“The doctor said nothing to me about it. As you know, it’s not that unusual to see women dressed as soldiers. If a problem arises, I’ll speak with him. The woman who came to find me, the one who helped with the bloodletting . . . she knows. But I’ll pay her to stay quiet.”

“What will become of me?” I said, dejected, ignoring his words. “They’ll throw me out of the army. I won’t be able to finish my studies. This is a disaster!” I wailed.

“I already told you,” he insisted. “Everything will be all right. I’ll have Larrey put me in charge of this hospital. You must calm down. The most important thing is that you recover quickly,” he added. Then he folded the green cloth several times, placed it under my head, and covered me with the blanket and cloak.

But after he had gone I couldn’t stop thinking of the consequences my unmasking could bring. If only the Uhlan would stop humming that same song!

Nadezhda came at noon with a cup of horse broth and a small piece of sweet bread.

“This is all you should eat for now. Doctor Cavent gave me wine, caviar, and peach compote for you. . . . Perhaps tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow I’ll be leaving here,” I muttered, scarcely looking at her.

“Very well. We shall celebrate the occasion,” she said in a low, soft voice, a voice that Enrique Fuenmayor would have liked to have. “The doctor will be by to see you in a little while, Henriette,” she added, raising her eyebrows in a signal that it was useless to go on pretending. “Doctor Muret.”

“I suppose he knows everything.”

“Doctor Cavent has already spoken with him. You have nothing to fear from him.”

“And from you?”

“Of course not. Consider me your friend, an old friend. I know what difficulties you’ve had to overcome. . . . But here comes Doctor Muret.”

Suddenly, upon seeing her face from a different angle, I recognized the woman from my painting. The same Byzantine nose, though the green of her eyes was not quite as intense and maybe the corner of her lip. . . .

“Enrique Fuenmayor. Am I correct?” said the surgeon, stopping at the foot of my pallet. “How do you feel?”

“I feel fine,” I said, grateful for his tact. “Although my head still hurts . . . and my arm.”

“I have some tobacco. It helps with the pain.”

“No, thank you.”

“Cognac?”

“Cognac is fine. But I’d sell my soul to the devil for a bit of laudanum.”

“So would I,” he smiled. His outfit made him look like a buffoon in a theater company: Russian boots made of black felt, a Dutch lancer’s red culottes, a sheepskin jacket and a white cape like the ones worn by our cuirassiers, except with an insignia from a corps I didn’t recognize. He laid his hand across my forehead and said, “You don’t have a fever. Eat sparingly and stay bundled up. The arm is nothing. Tonight I’ll bleed it and massage it with arnica.”

“When do you think—”

“Three or four days if all goes well,” he said, abruptly concluding his exam, crouching now over the Uhlan.

“Ask him if he remembers his name yet,” he said to Nadezhda, who immediately began speaking in Russian.

The man shook his head no. Then he said a few words.

“He has remembered another song.”

The Uhlan began humming the same tune I had been hearing for hours on end. A sad and monotonous melody, in a minor key.

“It’s a lullaby,” said Nadezhda, surprised. “A Siberian song that I know well,” and she began to sing it quietly in her beautiful voice.

“Well, something’s better than nothing. That’s six songs, counting this one. I’d appreciate it if you’d translate the words and record them in my notebook. Perhaps they’ll provide us with a clue,” said Doctor Muret. “Now, bring me some fresh compresses.”

While Nadezhda went to carry out the order, the doctor delicately uncovered the man’s eyes. I expected to see empty eye-sockets or a scar from burns or shrapnel, but no, his grayish-brown eyes appeared healthy. When he turned his head toward me, I saw his pupils slide across mine and fix upon the wall beside me. His Asiatic face became animated and he whispered something.

“What is he saying?” Muret asked Nadezhda, who had just returned.

“More or less the same as always.”

“Tell me exactly.”

Nadezhda looked at me and raised her eyebrows, warning me of something.

“He says he has just greeted a French Hussar, a handsome young man, and a tall, plump woman with gray hair. It’s the first time he’s seen them and he assumes that they are new on the ward.”

I was startled.

“Are these people you know?” Muret asked me, anxiously. “Answer me, please!”

“Two loved ones I’ve lost forever,” I said, trembling. Muret returned his gaze to the wall and shrugged his shoulders. Then he poured a musk-scented oil onto the new compresses and placed them over the Uhlan’s eyes. He stood up and said to me: “A fascinating case. I am keeping this man under my protection. He complains of pain in his eyes. He says it’s from seeing. . . . In any case, do not be afraid. He won’t bother you. Try to sleep,” he advised me, and continued making his rounds with Nadezhda.

After the bloodletting and the warm prickle of the arnica, already deep into the night, I felt a body at my side. I turned. It was Nadezhda. I was happy to have her near me, lying next to me; I couldn’t sleep and now at least I’d have someone to talk to.

“I need to rest for a while,” she said. “I feel a bit weak at night.”

I propped myself up on one elbow. “It doesn’t surprise me. It must be late, although I’ve slept so much that I’m not tired.” The clairvoyant Uhlan had stopped humming. No one was ranting, snoring, or coughing, and an icy silence floated around us.

“Do you feel any better? “ she asked me.

“I think so.”

“You loved the Hussar, didn’t you?”

“Very much. He was my husband. How is it possible for this man to know?”

“There is nothing physically wrong with him, but his vision reaches into the world of the dead. He doesn’t know who he is. He has no memories. Only songs. He was already here in the hospital when Doctor Muret and I arrived. He complains of pain in his eyes. He says it’s from seeing the dead. It’s not so rare a case as you might think. I have met people with similar gifts. Usually it’s poor people, monks and peasants. Although sometimes. . . . These things have always happened in Russia. They will go on happening.”

“What are you doing here, among the French?”

“I learned French as a child. Almost my entire family died in Smolensk. I wanted to come see them before they died. The youngest died at the other end of this ward. I have remained here because I am waiting for something. Something is coming. Something that will arrive accompanied by wind and light. It will arrive after you have already left. You would understand me better had you been born in my country. . . . I’ve always wanted to go to Paris. Hopefully I’ll go one day yet. Have you been to Paris?”

I nodded. I was cold. I couldn’t understand how the Uhlan could sleep uncovered. I touched Nadezhda’s cheek. It was frozen.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“Why did you look at me so strangely, you know, this morning? Do I remind you of someone?”

“You look like the woman in my painting. It’s of a woman wearing an officer’s shako. But I’ve lost it. Someone stole it from me. That painting meant a great deal to me. I liked the title the painter had given it.”

“Woman in Battle Dress,” she whispered.

I felt a chill run down my spine. I felt my arm hairs stand on end. I looked away from her and lay my head back against the pallet. It occurred to me that I was dreaming, that Nadezhda didn’t really exist, and that the Uhlan who had seen Robert and Aunt Margot was part of the dream as well.

“I have frightened you,” she said, brushing my forehead with an icy finger. “Do not be afraid. If I am here beside you it is because it is meant to be this way.”

“Are you the woman in my painting?”

“I am Nadezhda Ivánova. I come from far away. I have nothing to do with the woman in your painting,” she said, in a teasing tone. “They are selling your painting in the square, right here, in front of the hospital.”

“Is that true?” I said, sitting up again.

“I’ll buy it tomorrow. Your uncle gave me some money. It’s a beautiful painting. Very striking. Do you really think that I look like her?”

The Uhlan sergeant took up his tune again. But this time it was all right. Now everything about the night was just fine.

“Your hands are very cold,” I said. “If you want, you may put them under my cloak.”

“Yes.”

I felt her frigid fingers above my heart. I felt them skillfully unbutton my vest and seek out my nipples through my shirt. I felt my nipples swell. I moved closer to her, face to face. Her breath caressed me. I kissed her.

Though it’s true that for some time we had counted our losses by the thousands: thousands dead, thousands wounded, thousands taken prisoner, thousands of deserters, thousands of stragglers, thousands of horses, thousands of carriages . . . until the Battle of Berezina the Grande Armée, despite flagging discipline, was still a more or less functional army. After Berezina it became nothing more than a roving pack of wolves that stayed together out of pure instinct, a band of starving and desperate vagabonds dragging themselves through the snow in time to La Boîteuse.

But I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. The time of La Boîteuse had yet to arrive. First, I should relate our retreat from Smolensk through the Krasnoye gate, all of us together again in a caravan of ambulances: Uncle Charles, Larrey and Petit, and me, with my painting and my magical memory of Nadezhda and the Uhlan’s song, my head still swollen and my arm in a sling, furiously disappointed at not having found Alfred. I had just learned that his regiment was a day’s march ahead, escorting the twenty-four carriages that held Napoleon’s treasury.

Kutuzov had spread his army out along the length of the road on the right hand bank of the Dnieper; the Cossacks were on the other side, with their little horses and small cannons mounted on sleds. We fought at half a dozen places, losing more men, more horses, more cannons. We lost cities to the north and to the south, Polotsk, Minsk. . . . And so, dripping trails of blood, and followed by tens of thousands of stragglers—some of them deserters who, upon learning of our retreat, now hurried to rejoin the ranks they had abandoned during the summer—all of the companies began to converge on Berezina. Plainly, I have nothing good to say of the deserters. The stragglers were a different story since, in general, they had fallen behind involuntarily. A wound, a frozen foot, or the pitiless combination of cold, hunger, and exhaustion could prevent even the most loyal of soldiers from keeping up with his regiment. First he would lag a few hours behind, catching up to the bivouac at seven or eight in the evening; the next day he would lag four or five hours, finding the bivouac near midnight; the next day he would be unable to rise at the sounding of reveille, and little by little, he’d be lost. First he’d see his company’s rearguard pass by, the cannons and the supply wagons, the ambulances, the various conveyances full of women, children, and the elderly, merchants and refugees; then he’d join the long and ever-narrowing line of forgotten men, men who survived by any means necessary, even stealing from one another, and finally, he’d disappear to the east, amid fog banks and whirling snow.

After Krasnoye we went by foot—even Uncle Charles, whose limp was not too painful—aided by walking sticks fashioned from pine branches. Larrey had observed that those who traveled by horseback or carriage succumbed first to the white death. In order to survive, one had to walk and walk and walk, and sleep as little as possible, since very few ever awoke from a slumber that lasted longer than four hours. We traveled with the Old Guard. This was not a matter of coincidence. We could do nothing now for the wounded in the ambulances and, after a brief deliberation, Larrey and my uncle decided it would be advantageous, as their names were not only known, but revered in the Guard, to march with the company in which they had both served for so many years.

“We’ll fare better alongside those old rapscallions than anywhere else,” said Larrey.

“The Emperor will protect them; without the Old Guard he’ll never be able to build a new army,” pronounced Uncle Charles. “The new officers will come from its ranks.”

Suddenly, the temperature rose. First the water melted, followed shortly by the wine, which until then had been but a dark block of ice that had to be hacked into pieces so that it could be melted. It seemed miraculous that such a thing should happen in the middle of winter. But then came days of rain and then the cold returned, fiercer than ever, and the wet mud turned to stone in the wheels and axels of carriages, wet clothing froze stiff, icicles hung from beards and mustaches, and then the pneumonia set in, the incessant coughing, fever, chills, and chattering teeth. Then there was nothing left to do but lean against the shaft of an overturned carriage and await death, or hasten it with a bullet to the head.

We entered a town where we found stores of flour and barrels of cognac. There I learned that the cavalry of the Vistula Legion was marching just ahead of the Old Guard and, again, I let myself hope that I might see Alfred. We made bread, drank, and continued on.

It was snowing when we reached Studienka and three Russian regiments, on both sides of the Berezina, threatened to surround us. Our engineers constructed two bridges to span the gray water, now nearly frozen and churning with heavy chunks of ice. The larger bridge was as wide as an officer’s carriage; the smaller one was a precarious footpath suspended above the river. Neither had side rails. The first to cross were Oudinot and Ney’s battalions, followed by the Guard’s artillery command. The next day, from our bivouac, we saw the Vistula regiments passing at a distance, the red pennants on their lances parading slowly by, with Alfred surely among them, leading his horse by the reins. I almost asked Larrey for the telescope he was using to watch the bridges, but decided against it. (Larrey also had, among other implements, a Réaumur thermometer hanging from his buttonhole, which allowed him to later record in his memoirs the exact daily temperature during our retreat.) Presently, we began to move out toward the river. Stragglers and the provisions belonging to the columns that had already crossed blocked both ends of the bridge, and the Guard had to open a path with sabers and bayonets drawn. Confusion reigned, although it was nothing compared to the mayhem that was about to ensue. Having made it to the right bank, we gathered rank at the edge of a snowy forest of birch and pine, and began to wait for Napoleon. Completely exhausted, I spread my cloak over the snow and sat down, wrapping myself from head to toe in the billiard cloth. I took a long swig of cognac and immediately began to doze inside my green refuge. I don’t know how long I stayed like that, sitting cross-legged, hovering between sleep and wakefulness, my imagination producing the faces of strangers that would appear for an instant and then vanish, only to be replaced by others; brief visions that were not quite dreams, they would disappear with each nod of my head, until little by little I sought out the image of Alfred, gloriously naked beside his white bed.

I should say that my mysterious night with Nadezhda was marked by tenderness. Although it’s true that our kisses and caresses were driven by erotic desire, more than anything we were moved by a mutual longing to give and to receive a mother’s love, the love of the Madonna, the love of Demeter for Kore; the love that is distilled from rage, grief, adoration, belonging. That night I felt that ancient and secret love manifest in me and I knew that all women are mothers and daughters, and that every mother holds her daughter within her, as every daughter holds her mother, and that every woman extends backwards in time through her mother and reaches forward into the future through her daughter. First I was mother to her, sharing my blanket and cape, and offering her my breast while I stroked her head with my good arm; in turn, she offered me hers, which I delicately bathed with my tongue while the Uhlan hummed his distant lullaby. That night we were Mother and Daughter; Daughter and Mother. And the woman in my painting is the symbol that unites my two sides, She and I, I and She, forever. (Where could you be, Nadezhda Ivánova, my beloved matrioshka? Did you go to France as you wanted, or did you remain forever in your Russia of icons and church bells, of servants and princes and troikas and empty steppes? Why didn’t I take you with me? Why did I leave you, serious and enigmatic, your hand describing a slow and immense cross in the air, meant to bless me for all my days? Oh, Nadezhda, my Nadezhda, how I would have loved to see you sing and dance, how I would have loved to show you Paris, the Arch du Carrousel and the grand Arch de Triomphe, the rose window at Notre Dame and the Théâtre Le Temple and the Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, to dine together at Le Procope and drink at Le Coq Audacieux, to take a boat along the Seine and then stretch out by the fire to make love, oh, and so many other things! Why don’t I ever dream of you? Could it be that the moment of our encounter is complete, that you already were my dream, and I, a part of yours in that frigid hospital in Smolensk, peopled by bizarre doctors and intimate visions?)

Comforted, consoled, caressed, and suckled; now integrated and complete, my desire for Alfred had became an obsession, just as it had with Bousquet. I took it for granted that, seeing me now as a defender of his cause rather than an obstacle, he would be eager to repeat the night of the dance and the fireworks. Knowing that he was so close, perhaps only a few hundred meters away, perhaps in the forest or posted with the Guard’s cavalry, only heightened my ardor. My desire for Alfred became so intense that there, upon the snow in the minimal privacy afforded me by the green cloth, I sank my hand between my thighs, something I hadn’t done since my days in Paris. I would have continued like that too, had the sound of cannon fire not begun to howl over my head. I leaped to my feet.

“They’re firing at the bridges,” said Larrey, extending his telescope.

In the distance I saw a cannonball fall into the water, followed by another. “Did the Emperor already cross?” I asked.

“A little while ago,” answered Petit.

“Damn it all to hell!” exclaimed Larrey, passing the telescope to my uncle. “What a disaster!”

“This is going to be a bloodbath,” murmured Uncle Charles. “Many will never make it across.”

“If you’ll allow me to look for a moment, Surgeon Major,” said Petit impatiently. But Uncle Charles, pretending not to have heard him, passed the telescope to me. Terrorized by the Russian cannon fire, throngs of people were running toward the bridges. Unable to withstand the weight, the larger of the two sank into the river, taking everyone who had been crossing along with it. The people still on the bank ran to the other bridge, tangling with those who were already there waiting. Men and horses fell into the river and struggled to stay afloat among the blocks of ice. I raised the telescope a little; the sun was already setting, and I saw thousands and thousands of stragglers crossing the steppe like rows of ants, forming a line that got wider and wider the closer it came to the river.

“Let me see!” said Petit, yanking the telescope from my hands. He had only looked through it for a moment when Larrey asked for it back.

“The ambulances won’t be able to cross,” said Larrey, his eye glued to the lens. “No, they won’t be able to cross,” he repeated, resolute, and passed the telescope to Uncle Charles.

“We’ll lose all of the wounded and many more besides,” sighed my uncle. “And worse still, all of our crates of bandages and medicine, and all of our surgical instruments. With what knives and saws and probes are we to operate now?”

“Vive l’Empereur!” shouted the men of the Guard, repeating the cry again and again. It was Napoleon. He was riding an Arabian horse and was wearing white breeches and a leather hat with a feather. I had never seen him so close, not even in Borodino. His face was a pallid mask, a tad soft, yet determined. Larrey hurried off to speak with him and Napoleon leaned down from his saddle to listen. Whatever it was that Larrey requested, it was met with an immediate nod from the Emperor. Napoleon turned directly to Field Marshall Lefèvbre, the Commander of the Old Guard, who was riding alongside him. After issuing him an order, Napoleon continued on, impassively surveying the troops, as though the shouts of “Vive l’Empereur” were meant for someone else.

“The Emperor has granted me a small squadron of men to accompany us to the left bank tomorrow,” Larrey told us. “We’ll go across to the ambulances as many times as we can and bring back as much as we can carry.”

What had seemed utterly unimaginable would prove possible after all: we crossed the river three times, salvaging what supplies we could. How did we manage it? I don’t know. I remember only the fear and the urgency of making it to one bank and then to the other. I see only fragmented, explosive scenes, as when I try to reconstruct that afternoon in Germany when Claudette died; hazy scenes smudged through with the fur caps of the Old Guard, blue greatcoats and snowflakes and bayonets, and further off I see the blood and the gaping mouths, and the terror and the fury and the pain in the faces. In my memories, I don’t hear what I know I heard: the screaming, the neighing, the pleading, the shells exploding, the hissing of the shrapnel, the undulating creaking of the bridges, the thud of cannonballs hitting bodies and carriages. I hear only a general noise, confused, disorganized, continuous, dominated by the thundering of cannon fire, which sounded as if many people were playing organs all at once inside an echo chamber; a sound with texture, three-dimensional, like a box or a drum. And through the center of this all-consuming cacophony float what scenes I can remember.

There, on the left bank, the military police can no longer detain the carriages trying to reach the bridges, plowing a path through men and horses until forced by the sheer multitude of their own numbers to stop. . . . In the water, to my right, I see people swimming and cavalrymen trying to ford the river, struggling against the current; among them I see the camp-follower who gave birth on the road to Krasnoye, holding her baby above her head with one hand. . . . I don’t see the ambulances, only the men of the Guard who open a path for me through enraged faces and the enormous eyes of the horses. . . . The wounded men in the ambulances think that we are coming to save them and some even help us with the crates of sutures and bandages. . . . There, on the right bank, cannon fire thunders, and the Swiss and Polish soldiers move into the snowy forest to try to push back the Russian onslaught. . . . And there, on the left bank, more cannon fire and bullets rain down on the human sea plunging toward the bridges. . . . Near the ambulances, a wounded man with a long beard and rabid eyes seizes Uncle Charles by the throat and a foot soldier chops the man’s hand off with a single blow of his saber. . . . Crossing back with the crates I see a battalion of the Guard open fire against the Russian positions on the bank I’ve just left behind. . . . The iron bullets penetrate the dense mass of people and open bloody furrows in the snow. . . . My arm hurts worse and worse and I can barely hold onto the crate I am carrying tight against my chest. . . . The bridge we are heading for collapses again and we turn back, aiming for the other one. . . . There, on the left bank, I see the head of the useless bridge, ringed by a semicircle of crushed bodies lying on the blood-stained snow. . . . With sabers and bayonets drawn, the foot soldiers clash with the people coming in the opposite direction; Larrey falls to his knees and gets up again, never dropping the crate he is carrying. . . . The Russian musketeers open fire and the foot soldier to my right raises his hand to his forehead and disappears from sight. . . . I leave a box of bandages next to the pile we’ve already brought over, turn, and run toward the bridge again. . . . The dead and wounded make the way nearly impassible and in front of me there is a woman on horseback carrying a little girl between the reins; the animal becomes tangled up with other horses dragging a cart behind them; one of them falls, its eye shattered by musket fire, and another bullet lodges in the woman’s thigh, causing a spurting gush of blood. . . . Some of the wounded have thrown the crates down onto the snow and are sitting on them; they wait for us, hoping we will take them with us; I try to help a Cuirassier who has lost both an arm and a leg and is hopping grotesquely, but my strength gives out. . . . The Russians spray grape-shot and the bridge begins to sink until it hangs a few scant centimeters above the water; it rocks and jostles with the impact of huge floating pieces of ice. . . . On one side of the river I see a line of nearly submerged horses, their riders already drowned; they have gone over there to await an icy death, their heads resting on the wooden slats of the bridge. . . . Larrey is pushed into the water and manages to grab onto a cross-timber; two foot-soldiers drop their weapons and rescue him. . . .

We did not cross the river again.

At nightfall, the remnants of Field Marshall Victor’s battalion, charged with protecting the rearguard, passed by. At dawn, Napoleon ordered the bridges destroyed and a massive segment of stragglers and provisions remained on the other side of the Berezina.