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.