‘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
The consequences for the Grande Armee 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 Armee 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.
By 15 July, Lefine had been able to draw up a preliminary list of a dozen or so names. It included two that Margont would have preferred not to see: Colonel Pegot, who was in charge of the 84th of the Line, and Colonel Delarse, one of General Huard’s aides-de-camp. Delarse commanded the 1st Brigade of the Delzons Division, which included the 84th, together with the 8th Regiment of Light Infantry and the 1st Croat Regiment.
Lefine and his men had then begun to reconstruct the movements of the suspects on the night of the murder. The fact that Margont had always been exasperated by the question of shoes in the French army had given him an idea. One of a French soldier’s best weapons was indeed his shoes. The imperial troops were second to none in their ability to cover long distances in record time. Napoleon had brilliantly incorporated this advantage of speed into his strategic calculations when launching his infantrymen on frenzied, crazed, hellish marches. As a result, in 1805, on the way to Austerlitz, Margont had seen soldiers literally die of exhaustion. Others fell into such a deep sleep that the officers could not wake them, even by prodding them with the points of their sabres. They had nevertheless continued to advance with the result that, thanks to some skilful manoeuvres, Napoleon had succeeded in preventing the Austrian army of General Mack from linking up with the bulk of his forces. The Austrian army had finally been encircled in the city of Ulm. The Austrians had lost twenty-five thousand men, whom they sorely missed a few days later during the battle of Austerlitz …
Yet, despite the obvious importance of mobility for the regiments, the shoes used by the Grande Armee were very badly designed. There was no difference between right or left: the soldiers’ feet shaped the shoes during the march. There were only three sizes: small, medium and large, so it was hard for feet of other lengths. The shoes were supposed to last for five hundred miles, but many of the suppliers swindled the army and often, if you set off from Paris with new shoes, you ended up in Brussels barefoot.
Margont had decided to take advantage of this paradox. He had suggested that Jean-Quenin should write a letter asking the regimental cobblers to answer a list of questions. The medical officer claimed he wanted to do some research into the shoes in order to rethink their design. Lefine met the cobblers, read them the letter and immediately drowned them in a sea of words. He talked on and on. Sometimes his slick talk endeared him to them and he obtained all the information he wanted; other times he infuriated them and people said all they knew just to get rid of this wretched sergeant. Casually slipped in among the questions was one about the shoe sizes of the senior officers …
But this painstaking task proved to be unbearably slow.
The complete translation of the private diary had taught Margont nothing new. Maria Dorlovna suffered from loneliness. Being of a sensitive and dreamy disposition, she fed her hopes by reading romantic literature. Her writing was steeped in poetic melancholy, a feature that was all the more remarkable given that few women of her class had the opportunity to learn to read and write. She had believed that a miracle was possible. What had her murderer done to seduce her so quickly? What, then, could a Prince Charming possibly be like?
July 21 started badly for Margont as that morning bore an annoying resemblance to the preceding ones.
