The soldier began to laugh but pain contorted his smile. ‘That’s a good one, Captain!’
Margont only had to stretch out his arm to open the knapsack of a Russian musketeer lying flat on his stomach. He took out a flask, opened it, tasted the contents and handed it to the grenadier.
‘Vodka?’
The man’s moustache twitched with pleasure. ‘Is it Russian wine?’
‘Stronger stuff than that.’
The grenadier downed what was left in the flask in one gulp.
‘I feel like searching all the kitbags on this bloody plain!’
Margont patted him on the shoulder and moved on, motioning to some exhausted stretcher-bearers.
He stopped in front of a young hussar. He had been slashed across the chest with a sabre. Something was poking out of his slit coat. Intrigued, Margont took hold of the object. It was a small Russian icon of a slender Virgin Mary holding the newborn Christ in her arms. Strangely, the look on the mother’s face was uncertain: her joy seemed tinged with sadness, as if she had an intuition that her happiness would end in suffering. Margont replaced the icon on the corpse’s heart. A little further on he came across the body of the musketeer he had struck. The Russian was breathing oddly, breathing in and out in short gasps, as if wanting to taste life a little longer, on the tip of his tongue, before dying. Margont again motioned to the stretcher-bearers and moved on. He was lucky enough to find his sword, then spent the night going from one wounded soldier to the next, giving them a drink, promising to have a letter delivered to a wife or relative …
Just before dawn, he was so exhausted that he could hardly keep his eyes open, so he slowly made his way back to his regiment. Despite all his efforts and those of the numerous volunteers, there seemed to be just as many calls for help. He passed a dozen or so infantrymen of the 92nd attempting to put out a fire by urinating on it in one concerted effort. But the men were so drunk that the spurts of urine merely soaked their trousers, giving rise to screams of laughter or scuffles. This scene encouraged Margont to indulge in his favourite game: watching people.
Many others had also decided to give some meaning to their lives by helping the wounded. Some acted out of high-mindedness; others out of superstition, to thank Heaven or fate for having spared them; others out of a sense of guilt, to justify having survived. Margont called them the ‘saviours’. But a considerable number of soldiers preferred to avoid this harsh reality by drinking themselves into a stupor or deserting. Some even ended up committing suicide. These were the ‘runaways’. There were other categories: the profiteers, who stole from the dead and the wounded who were too weak to defend themselves.
Margont sat down against a birch tree, utterly spent. A few feet away a strange spectacle was unfolding: in front of other lancers and laughing French hussars, a Polish lancer was embracing a Russian hussar. The two men were not fighting but dancing, albeit clumsily. A waltz. The Russian appeared to be dead drunk. Another Pole also wanted to dance with the hussar but he accidentally let go of him and he collapsed. He was not so much dead drunk as dead. The second Pole got him back on his feet, grabbed him around the waist and in turn began to dance, egged on by the audience. These belonged to the category of the ‘exorcists’. They indulged in morbid games and their imagination was boundless. But the rule was always the same: to poke fun at death, to demystify it, to debunk it. By acting like this they were less afraid. However, they sacrificed some of their humanity in the process. Were they really winners in the end? Then there were the ‘dumbstruck’, who wandered about aimlessly, silent, cut off from the world, unable to take the slightest initiative; the ‘desperate’, who wept endlessly and who needed to be watched in case they blew their brains out; the ‘believers’, who prayed, hoping to find a mystical meaning in this chaos … Then, to bring this incomplete catalogue to a temporary conclusion, there was the vast group of those who thanked one another for having provided mutual support, who celebrated the baptism of fire of the younger ones, who boasted of their exploits … These Margont dubbed the ‘reckless but harmless’ or the ‘humane’, because one way or another everyone belonged in part to this group.
Margont slid slowly down the tree trunk and stretched himself out on the ground. The grass stroked his face. Sleep felled him more effectively than the gunfire from a whole Russian battery.
The Russians withdrew the following day. It was not the titanic confrontation between the two armies that the Emperor so greatly longed for. It was ‘only’ the fighting at Ostrovno.
*
Margont felt himself being unceremoniously lifted up. He mumbled something, was dropped and went crashing to the ground. He leapt back up, his hand on the pommel of his sword. Two infantrymen in bloodstained uniforms were staring at him in consternation, open-mouthed and pale-faced with huge purple rings around their eyes.
‘We had no idea, Captain …’
‘Yes, we had no idea …’
‘But we would have realised, Captain …’
‘You had no idea what?’ yelled Margont.
His anger paralysed the two men. Then he noticed a cart on which French corpses were being piled up. There was another for the Russians.
‘You wanted to throw me into that cart, didn’t you?’ he shouted.
‘But the thing is … you were lying there like that …’
‘But we would have realised that you weren’t … that you weren’t you know what,’ the second gravedigger assured him.
Margont looked at his uniform. It was spattered with blood, the blood of those he had wounded or killed, the bodily remains of men blown to pieces by round shot.
‘Check that all those you’ve put in that wretched cart really are dead,’ he ordered, more by way of punishment than in the vain hope of saving anyone.
The soldiers carried out the order, still terrified by what they had superstitiously thought was someone rising from the dead.
Margont ascertained the whereabouts of his regiment. On his way there he looked at his watch, an extravagance that had cost him a fortune but whose mathematical precision was in keeping with his own methodical mind. It was four o’clock. He did not grasp immediately what the two hands were stubbornly telling him. He called out to a cavalryman from the 9th Chasseurs who was wandering about in search of a comrade. The fellow confirmed that it was already late afternoon. Margont also learnt that more fighting had taken place that very morning, near Vitebsk, though it had not lasted long.
Margont bought a handsome horse with a brown coat and a black mane from a crafty mounted chasseur, who swore that he had set off on the campaign with a spare mount. The beast was surprisingly robust and well fed.
‘He’s called Wagram,’ the seller explained.
‘For the price you’re charging me, you could have included its Russian saddle.’
‘Not at all, Captain! It’s my horse! He’s called Wagram!’
‘That horse is more likely to be called Ostrovno than Wagram.’
At that moment Lefine arrived.
‘So you’ve just joined the hussars of the Russian Guard, have you, Captain?’
‘He’s called Wagram!’ the chasseur stubbornly maintained.
Margont shrugged his shoulders. ‘Wagram or Jena, as long as it’s not called Eylau or Spain.’
The chasseur walked away grumbling about his poor old father who’d bled himself dry, struggling to plough a barren field in order to be able to buy Wagram for his son from the meagre proceeds of his hard toil. His poor father must now be turning in his grave, hearing today the insults of ‘certain people’.
Lefine felt the horse’s flanks. ‘I’ve never seen such a fat horse.’
‘But all our horses were like that before the start of the campaign.’
Lefine continued to stroke the animal’s belly. He was envious of this stomach, which was so much fuller than his own.
‘He’s so impressive that next to him our cavalry look as if they’re mounted on dogs. What’s he to be called, then?’
‘Macbeth.’
‘Macbeth. What gibberish is that? I prefer Wagram. I can show you a good shop for a saddle,’ he added, indicating the battlefield with a broad sweep of his arm.
