A hussar arrived at a gentle trot as his horse had been slowed down by the hand-to-hand fighting. Margont left the musketeer in order to hit the cavalryman in the stomach with the musket butt. The horse decided to take its master back towards his lines, bent double. The pounding of horses’ hoofs could be heard. Its intensity was increasing rapidly until it became deafening. Murat’s lancers were charging, flying to the rescue of the artillerymen and the Huard Brigade. The Russian infantry were well and truly run through. By flinging themselves flat on their stomachs they were beyond reach of the cavalry’s sabres but not of the lances, which struck them in the back. The 92nd of the Line arrived in a column and enthusiastically joined in the fray. Then it was the turn of the 8th Hussars to charge. The Russians were at last pushed back after suffering considerable losses.

CHAPTER 15

THERE were dead and wounded everywhere, as far as the eye could see. Margont, still suffering from concussion, was leaning against a weeping willow – a bittersweet irony. In some places, bodies were lying still locked in a deadly embrace. A magnificent grey horse was lying on its side, scraping the ground with its hoofs, trying to get back on its feet. All that was left of its forelegs was stumps. Everywhere men were groaning, crying, calling for help, pleading with the survivors or insulting them for their indifference. Many of the wounded were clamouring for a drink. Margont began to wander among them, tossing aside an empty gourd here and picking up a full one there from a dead body where it was no longer needed. He wondered about this question of thirst. Was this how the body tried to make up for the loss of blood? Or was it a psychological reaction? People often said, ‘If you’re wounded, drink some wine.’ Did they think the body short-sighted enough to mistake one sort of red liquid for another?

‘Thank yer, officer, sir. Will yer ’ave some wine as well?’ asked a French grenadier, handing his gourd to Margont.

His thick blond moustache glistened with drops of water. He was clenching his stomach to stanch the flow of blood.

‘Sorry, too much wine is bad for the health,’ Margont answered him.

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.