‘What do you say when you move your body about?’ asked the Pole, shaking his fists.

‘“Struggle” or “defend yourself”. Don’t stop at every word you have difficulty with: carry on reading.’

‘Then a man arrived. He said something and the soldier let me go. The one who’d attacked me was shouting but my saviour remained calm. He was tall and well dressed. The soldier wanted to punch him but my saviour hit him with his cane and the other man fell over. Then he gave me his arm to accompany me back home. He did not speak Polish but knew a little German and we were able to talk. He is called Pierre Acosavan. He’s kind, polite and told jokes that made me laugh. He also loves poetry. He seemed to like me. He told me that he had to follow the army but promised that after the campaign he would come back to Tresno to see me. I don’t know who came up with the idea first, but we’ve arranged to meet again at my place tomorrow evening. I still blush at having agreed. But there’s nowhere else to go: everywhere there are soldiers who’ve had too much to drink. I made it clear to him that it was just to talk. My God, how could I have invited a stranger back to my room? There’ll be lots of people at the inn. If he behaves badly, all I have to do is scream. But I always worry about everything and I’m sure all will be well. On the way home, something incredible happened. A trooper came trotting up. He looked all around him. Suddenly he rushed up to Monsieur Acosavan, saluted him and called him “colonel”. I couldn’t make out the rest but I’m sure I heard “colonel”. Monsieur Acosavan interrupted him, smiled, said goodbye to me, promising to come back the following day, and went off with the trooper. My saviour’s a colonel! I can hardly believe it. I hope he’ll come back tomorrow.

The Pole looked up and smiled, pleased with himself.

‘Is that all?’ Margont asked him.

‘Yes. There’s no continuation.’

Margont thanked him and left, accompanied by Lefine.

‘To the best of my knowledge there’s no Colonel Acosavan in IV Corps. It’s definitely a false name but I want you to check it out all the same.’

Lefine had turned pale.

‘We’re looking for a colonel, are we? You must tell Prince Eugène that he needs to replace you.’

Margont spun round to face his friend. ‘Certainly not. The prince would have had a captain arrested for such a crime, but a colonel …’

‘It could be a colonel without much of a reputation so he’ll go to prison. In fact, he’ll be advised to commit suicide before the trial to avoid a scandal that would damage the army. Or it could be a famous and respected colonel and … he’ll get a rap on the knuckles and be let off.’

‘I sincerely hope you’re mistaken. Perhaps someone very important may be asked to sort out the problem he presents. But I have my doubts and I don’t want to take risks. So we won’t inform the prince; we’ll just carry on.’

Lefine had by no means reached the same conclusion.

‘It’s a colonel! A colonel! Rabbits never attack bulls.’

Margont walked away without answering him.

CHAPTER 9

MARCHING on and on – there was no end to the marching. For days the Russians had been falling back, abandoning large tracts of territory. A stray voltigeur, his musket slung over his shoulder and munching an apple, could inadvertently capture a whole village, or rather what was left of it, because the enemy was employing a scorched-earth policy. The Russian soldiers and peasants were setting fire to everything: fields, dwellings, stables, barns … and all this with the blessing of the Orthodox priests, who were setting their own churches alight. The population would then take refuge in the forests or follow the retreating troops.

The consequences for the Grande Armée were catastrophic. Until then the French had been able to live off the villagers during their campaigns. Italian, Austrian, Prussian or Polish peasants had welcomed them with varying degrees of enthusiasm, according to the country. In Russia, the French could rely only on military supplies but these supplies were too far behind. Napoleon led one forced march after another in his attempt to catch up with the Russians, and the heavy wagons laden with food and forage were lagging far behind, bogged down and jammed together. Thousands of men and horses were stricken with hunger, exhaustion and disease. Deserters, marauders, wanderers and stragglers hovered around the army in their tens of thousands, more on the look-out for chickens than for Russians, even though they came across the latter more often and were massacred in ambushes. A quarter of the army had been lost in this way but, despite the suffering, the morale of the troops remained high because they did not question the Emperor’s genius. They grumbled but kept advancing.

Everyone in the Grande Armée wondered why the Russians kept falling back. The Russians were wondering too. Alexander’s forces were impatient to engage in combat and were bemused by the retreat, but the massive exodus continued. The combatants found it demoralising to abandon large portions of their country without a struggle, knowing that their villages were being burnt to cinders and their families exiled to some as yet unknown destination.

There were two possible explanations for this pull-back. Some supported this strategy, which weakened the French and was easy to implement, thanks to the sheer size of the country and the paucity of its resources. It was a procedure that had proved effective in the past. The Scythians, semi-nomadic tribes who lived in the area between the Danube and the Don, had used it centuries earlier against the Romans. Peter the Great had done the same to weaken the Swedish army of Charles XII before crushing him at Poltava in 1709. Napoleon had procured documents about this war. The most distinguished supporters of this point of view were General Barclay de Tolly, the commander-in-chief of the Russian forces, and Tsar Alexander I himself. But the pressure of those in favour of a direct encounter was becoming such that they would have won the argument had it not been for another factor: the state of the Russian army.

Against Napoleon’s four hundred thousand men, including sixty thousand cavalry and twelve hundred guns, the Russians could line up six hundred thousand men … on paper. In reality, after deducting the auxiliaries, and the phantom soldiers, who existed only for the purpose of embezzling their pay, there were just over four hundred thousand men. And these were very scattered: facing the invading army in Finland, in Moldavia, on the Turkish border, on the Dvina and the Dnieper, in the garrisons, in the interior of the country … The immediately available forces amounted to two hundred thousand men but the crowning misfortune for the Russians was that they were divided in two: the western army, commanded by General Prince Barclay de Tolly, consisting of fifty thousand men, and the southern army, under the orders of General Prince Bagration. Napoleon had attacked with bewildering speed and since then he had been urging his troops on in order to defeat these two armies separately, a tactic he had employed brilliantly in the past. So the Russians were pulling back hurriedly in order to link up before deciding on a possible confrontation on favourable ground.

The monotony and inaction of the interminable days of marching preyed on Margont’s mind. What was worse was that his investigation was advancing as laboriously as this campaign. He had been obliged to go back to the 84th to avoid arousing suspicion with his repeated absences. He had given Lefine the task of using any pretext to recruit a handful of reliable soldiers to gather information discreetly about all the colonels in IV Corps. There were about forty of them. None, of course, was called Acosavan. No witnesses could be found to a brawl involving a tall, ginger-haired soldier and a civilian, or to the sighting of a colonel in civilian clothes in Tresno. The investigation had quickly eliminated any who were too small, too tall, left-handed, invalids (of which there were plenty, since a colonel was duty-bound to lead his regiment into battle, which inevitably brought down a hail of bullets on him) and those who were known to have spent the night of 28 June in the company of such and such a person.