Whatever plans I might have been able to formulate, I was interrupted by the sound of cannon fire. To the east, the Russian forces were much closer now. The French rearguard, which had been holding off the main body of the Russian army, was beginning to disengage. New swarms of men came down the banks of the river and tried to get on to the bridges. From the far bank, shells from French cannon were now screaming over our heads to rain down on the unseen Russian troops beyond the trees. With the fall of darkness, there was to be no cessation in the flow of people across the river as there had been the previous night.
As more and more soldiers crushed on to the narrow bridge, a sense began to fill the air that the end was coming; that if we did not get across now, then the Russians would be upon us and there would be no further chance to escape. Officers and men all around, who had been maintaining some slight degree of order, abandoned their posts and joined the mêlée that pushed and shoved around the bridges. Others decided to forget about the bridges and risk the river itself.
Close to the bank, the water remained frozen, and men began gingerly to walk out as far as they could. One reached the edge of the ice sheet and leapt into the water. Because of the thaw, the river was full and fast. He was swept away downstream. Others were luckier. I saw two or three who stripped themselves of guns, swords and boots – anything that weighed them down – and who thereby managed to swim across. How much further they would get without boots, I had to wonder, but on either side of the river there was a plentiful supply of dead men who had no further requirement for their footwear. One man who jumped in was again swept away, his head disappearing instantly beneath the turbulent water, only to emerge way, way downstream on the far side of the river and scramble thankfully on to dry land.
Upstream of the bridge, a group of a dozen or so were edging out across the ice. The man at the front turned to the others and began screaming at them, urging them to go back because their weight would break the fragile shelf. The vigour of his gesticulation unbalanced him and he slipped over on the ice. With the impact of his fall I heard a cracking sound as the whole sheet splintered away from the bank. Almost immediately it capsized, tipping the men into the water. The current took them rapidly downstream and dashed them into the side of the bridge. Some began to climb up on to the structure and were kicked back by those already desperately scrambling across it. Others remained in the water, clinging to the piles that supported the bridge until the sheet of ice itself slammed into the bridge, crushing those who clung beneath it and knocking several who were on the bridge into the water.
Memories of Austerlitz and the horrible mass of men drowned at Lake Satschan came rushing to me – memories that I had been fighting off ever since I had arrived at this place, ever since winter had begun to fall. At Austerlitz it had been Russian and Austrian lives, but now the score was evened. This time there had been no need to fire upon the ice to break it, as Bonaparte had at Satschan. That is not to say that there was no Russian cannon fire, only that it killed by more traditional means.
Terror finally overcame my desire to confront Iuda. It was time for me to leave, but even that was not going to be easy. Close to the bridge I was protected from the crowd, which travelled with a single mind and in a single direction. It would have been easier for me simply to get into the crowd and let it carry me across the river, but the bridge was now so swelled with bodies that I doubted whether more than half those who got on to it made it to the other side without falling into the water. I remembered crossing the Moskva Bridge, back when Moscow was being evacuated and when I again had found myself the only person wanting to travel against the flow. That had been an easier bridge to cross than this, but then the French crossing here were a hundred times more certain of their defeat than those Russians had been. I started out away from the river, against the direction that every other man on the bank was heading. They were not concerned or inquisitive about the direction I was going, they did not deliberately try to take me with them, but however much I pressed onward away from the icy water, still I found myself carried closer and closer towards it.
I grabbed men's arms and their coats and tried to push them aside to get past them, climbing against the flow of human bodies.
As I grabbed one man's lapel to throw him out of my way he looked at me with cold, familiar, grey eyes. For once he had not been looking for me, and I had only just then abandoned my search for him, and yet still Iuda and I had found one another.
CHAPTER XXXII
IT WAS ALMOST A WALTZ THAT WE ENGAGED IN AS WE MADE OUR way through the morass of panicking men to the edge of the crowd. Each of us had grabbed hold of the other, not in the conventional pose to dance but holding tightly so that the other would not escape. We each pushed the other, neither realizing it, but both with the same intent; to be free of the crowd so that we could deal with one another alone.
As we emerged, we were released from the supporting pressure of the men and women around us and fell to the ground. We rolled down the steep bank towards the river's edge, with first one man on top and then the other, coming to rest in an icy puddle, which the tread of thousands of feet had kept liquid despite the freezing temperature all around. By luck, I ended up on top of Iuda, and gave him a blow to the jaw with my fist which I hoped would subdue any further fighting spirit in him. He was still in the uniform of a chef de bataillon, whereas I was a mere soldat – each of us overdressed in comparison with the multitude around us – but no one around seemed to question whether I should be treating my superior officer in such a way. On the far side of the river, the military hierarchy might reassert itself, but here, each man's soul was his own.
'I presume by now you're beyond believing me,' shouted Iuda, striving to be heard above the chaos around us.
'I've long been beyond that,' I lied. Suddenly a body of men erupted from the main throng like a hernia, redrawing the arbitrary lines that partitioned the crowd from the empty space around it. Hundreds surged through us and past us and out on to the ice, knocking me over and knocking Iuda from my grasp. I hauled myself up to my feet and, feeling the slippery surface beneath them, realized with dread that I too had been forced out on to the frozen river. Seven years ago, on Lake Satschan, I had felt the same terror. Today, supported above the waves not like Saint Peter by the will of God, but by a flimsy layer of frozen water, I stood my ground.
I looked around to try to recapture Iuda before he could disappear into the mob, but, through the thinning veil of frightened men and women who slipped and slid their way to the shore, I could see him, facing me and approaching me.
'But are you yet beyond disbelieving me?' he shouted through the crowd. He had not read my mind; he had simply understood it perfectly. I once heard a story of a chess-player – who was said to have studied under Philidor – who could write down his opponent's play for five moves ahead, but only if that opponent was a great player. Against a weaker opponent, he was consistently wrong. In truth, it was the opponent who was wrong, the master who was right. Iuda knew that at some point I would have come to the conclusion that his word was valueless in terms of the truth it represented, and therefore all the more powerful in the ideas that it suggested.
'I have to know,' I said. We were now face to face.
'I can't tell you,' he replied, with a smile of mischievous delight.