The Age of Ice: A Novel (38 page)

The hour seemed earlier than it was, the cold stronger. The darkness of an early, indecisive winter—only a thin cover of snow rested on the fields and many areas were quite bare. Pale, frozen dirt of the road, iced-up water in the ruts, hoarfrost sparkling—and yet the air was saturated with moisture. Two or three riders joined me—Nastyrtzev was headed the same way I was, but other officers had even farther south to go—to Pratzen, to Miloradovich’s column—and it was surprising that they weren’t bivouacking with their troops this late in the game. One of them, a young infantry lieutenant, said, yawning, “I swore to those villagers the fighting would never get this far east. But the simpletons don’t have a perception of distances and topography, I’m afraid.”

• • •

I had feared that some rule-bound soul would chase me away as I appeared by the troops. In reality, however, once a couple of thousand
people are left to camp in the open field, the oddity of an older gentleman in a droopy bicorne and vaguely military greatcoat went unnoticed. Nastyrtzev and I struggled to find the right troops in the dark, even though he had left his battalion in this very place just the night before. Once we came upon the Preobrazhensky tents, the amicable subcolonel was so overwhelmed by the matters that needed his immediate attention, that he could spare me only a short blessing and a set of directions to the Guard cavalry.

Funny how the small things stay with you. The weight of kneaded-up, half-thawed dirt that stuck to my boots as I headed away from one firelit area toward another clump of fires, some hundred yards ahead of me across a raw field. Mounting my horse, my boot slipped as the stirrup shaved off a thick hunk of dirt. My hip hurt. I was an old man.

When I found Andrei’s squadron, all I could do was hover and wait. They were only just now brushing and saddling. Checking horseshoes:
Ivan, Ivan, will this one hold?—Yeah, it’ll hold all right—Shoulda changed it—Nah, it’ll hold—Ah, hard lot, didn’t look this bad even yesternight!
Final pat-downs—no colics, no lameness? Have you eaten your fill? Will you hold me? Will you carry me through? A subaltern pulled out an amulet, kissed it, pressed it to his horse’s forehead. A private finished a little braid in his mount’s mane, woven just so, complete with a little red ribbon.

I saw a group of officers conferring about the disposition, several of them reading a sheet of paper over another’s shoulder. One or two gesticulated, anchoring the instructions in the foggy, barely visible terrain ahead of them. My Andrei could have been one of them, but it was so hard to see in the dark. Then suddenly everyone was ordered to move—the grand prince wished the troops to set out due west and he was intent on riding with the squadrons.

So we moved. Cavalry formed into columns and took off, while I was able to mix in with the rear guard, somewhere among the spare horses, ammunition carts, gunpowder wagon, and Grand Prince Constantin’s field lavatory. We descended a gentle slope to the bed of the Rausnitz stream, crossed it, and went up the western slope. We heard guns and cannon just after sunrise. They were far off to the south of us. We stopped east of Blasewitz village, the squadrons in full formation atop a shallow hill, our rear guard in a hollow behind it. The Guard infantry was way behind still. We waited. Some of our jaegers and the early arrivals of the Semenovsky regiment were sent ahead to take Blasewitz. Then Prince
Lichtenstein’s cavalry came up from the southeast and had to work its way through us on the way to Bagration’s column’s left flank—they were supposed to pass here hours earlier, but didn’t. This caused much annoyance and also entertainment. From what they were saying, it seemed they were going straight in to attack. We wished them luck. After they were through, we went on waiting.

I settled next to the Horse Guard’s regimental surgeon. He was sketching in a small leather-bound book, perhaps capturing anything that caught his eye, such as the two youngsters on the slope ahead of us, cavalry adjutants. Both were thoroughbreds, and mounted on likewise. They were bored, they made their mounts walk in loops, they stood up in stirrups to see farther. One showed off his brand-new saber to another, it was a fancy import, “a British blade, my friend, swish, swoosh! None of that poking, isn’t it what the French are apparently taught to do? They poke! Imagine the poking French! We, my friend, shall slice and dice!”

Cannon started blasting south of us, probably a mile or so away. I had a spyglass, but my position was too low for a good line of sight. I only saw through smoke and fog that several lines of ours, in attack formation, some with clumps of artillery close behind, advanced east to west, haltingly, and disappeared out of my view. Then, northwest of us, less than a mile off, it sounded as though Bagration’s cavalry engaged—a great wave of hoofbeats came and went. It was sometime before ten in the morning—and then almost immediately, volleys of musket fire erupted, too much in unison to be cavalry. French infantry? Ours? Then cannonade started, and everyone was guessing: did discharge blasts sound closer than impact hits? Was it howitzer shells? Was it balls (not too bad) or canister (worse)? Why didn’t we soften them up first? Why open with cavalry? I wanted to crest the hill and see for myself, but all I could do was listen.

We waited.

An aide-de-camp galloped in from the south. Out of breath, no hat. He acknowledged us by slowing down.

“Grand Prince?” he panted.

“Over there.”

“Sir, your right ear is shot off,” my surgeon called after him, and he probed his head—fingertips only, fastidiously. Then he snickered, “Figures,” and spurred his horse up the hill.

Shortly after that a couple of battalions of fusiliers from Semenovsky
and my alma mater realigned and started marching due south; my friend Subcolonel Nastyrtzev rode past me in grim urgency. “Where to?” I shouted. He noticed me, replied, “To Pratzen, all to Pratzen!”

Pratzen plateau was where our army center was supposed to be, the headquarters, Kutuzov, the emperor. “Why?” I ventured. He was already ahead of me and only extended his hand in a farewell or a
don’t ask
gesture. Not five minutes later, several low-ranking officers and the two adjutants I had seen before descended upon our rear guard from the hilltop, shouting orders, urging us to turn around, expand, contract, regroup, give way, let the infantry through, and go. Where? Back east, across the stream, back to where we came from, infantry first, artillery next, cavalry covering the wagons, and “make haste, be snappy, by Jesus Lord and the saints, move it already!”

• • •

As we crossed the stream back and climbed the height of its eastern bank, the whole front line unfolded before me. What I saw—let me explain it: in those days, what you were trained to look for was geometry. A long, handsomely thick
bar
with puffs of smoke erupting along its one side—a battalion of infantry attacks, fires, holds its ground. Better yet if this bar is supported by two or three shorter bars behind it—reserve lines that would be switched to the front when the first bar runs out of ammunition or melts away under fire. To see
squares
on the other hand is worrisome. When bars join into a square—look for a cavalry attack or worse yet for enemy reinforcements approaching from the flank or rear. Fast-moving, rippling lines—charging cavalry. These pass through other geometrical objects like water, dissolving them, or break like waves against these same objects. If you’ve been in this business for long, you can’t help trying to predict from the mere appearances of these figures whether their collision will be elastic and repulsive, as they say in physics, and whether it’ll destroy one or both. If you are
a Napoléon,
you are certain you can predict it, and this is all you operate in—squares, rectangles, lines. The outcomes of their interactions become as assured to a Napoléon as axioms of Euclidean geometry—parallel lines will never cross. But if you are like me, you still remember standing at the end of one of those “bars” and shouting,
Link up!
so that your soldiers would close the man-size gaps opened in their line by musket fire, grenades, canister. You don’t want them to look down at those on the ground—it may dispirit them. In fact you don’t even want them to look ahead, at the enemy. You want them to
look at you or their muskets and do as you say.
Load. Close your eyes and shoot
. All they need to do is shoot. It’s your job to look down, make sure those on the ground are truly wounded and dead, and not simply afraid to stand up.

What you don’t want to see when you climb atop a hill and behold the battle lines, as I did then, is
non-Euclidean
geometry. Your tactical equations being invaded by extra dimensions. Bars buckling, curving. Parallel lines of infantry meeting and crossing. Turning into swarms. Into clouds that rain droplets of people onto the ground as they move. Swarms are trouble. Swarms can advance, but they can also retreat. And such reversals happen in an instant.

I could not even understand it at first. Southwest of us the field was full of people, but these were facing the wrong way! And more were drawing in from the west, the French side, and those who now stood as far east as our waiting ground just an hour ago—did not fire at the new arrivals, therefore—they
were
the French. Had we not moved back behind the stream, we would have been hit from the left flank or even encircled! But where was Kutuzov’s army? It was supposed to be west of where the French now stood, it
had been there
in the morning! The whole army! Was it behind us now? Where was Subcolonel Nastyrtzev, who had gone to reinforce our position on the Pratzen plateau, which was now under the French?

North of us, beyond the straight line of the Brun-Olmutz road, Bagration was now lined up, still holding. Ahead of his infantry—five? eight? squadrons—a great mass of our cavalry was charging straight into a great mass of their cavalry—and connect they did, flesh on metal, passing, impossible as it seemed, through each other. Only a fraction remained engaged, milling around, swinging blades, and those who galloped all the way through were now turning around, appearing hesitant and stunned—must we rush back into the slicing and hacking knot of it? Already past the village of Blasewitz that our jaeger had taken earlier, battalions of the French were advancing—on their way to ram into Bagration’s left flank. And ahead of the French, our jaeger, our Semenovsky detachment, and some cavalry of Bagration’s were in full retreat, swarming toward us.

What would we do: retreat? Engage on the right, at Bagration’s flank? Or in the center? The line of our cavalry rippled like a flexed muscle and moved to cross the stream, again. I saw that those riders who still had their greatcoats and pelisses on rolled them up and fastened them to their saddles.
This, more than anything else, bode inevitability for me. My heart was already sinking into my permafrost:
this is it
. Then ammunition-laden wagons started moving forward. There were people shouting, officers running back and forth; the parts of that fleeing swarm I’d just seen made it to our side of the stream; I saw some tattered uhlans—Russian, Austrian—I saw a crowd forming at my sketching surgeon’s wagon. I snapped my eyes back: where was Andrei’s squadron? Still across the stream, but was it my Preobrazhensky forming in front of the cavalry?
Yes, this is much better, have Andrei in the second line, send in the infantry first.
French troops were saturating the field ahead and to the south of us, loading it heavily like water would load a sponge, the vast vineyard where old grapevines lined east to west, their scraggly arms locked together.
Please don’t send the cavalry there,
I prayed,
they’ll be trapped in this, they’ll be destroyed!

Grand Prince Constantin sent in the jaeger. Then my Preobrazhensky, along with Semenovsky, took off, running full speed into attack, launched like a released coil of a spring that was compressed for much too long. Plumes of their shakos rode militantly over their heads. They flooded the vineyard. They were not shooting, they were at bayonet point. The French were shooting. Musket fire. Then artillery. The plumes were bobbing, diving, swaying, sinking.
Get out of there!
Our squadrons were already on the move—more than ten at once, and Andrei’s among them. All standards, the grand prince’s entourage, polished brass and silver. Majestically slow, not even in trot. Behind them rolled a battery of artillery. Across the field they advanced, toward the vineyard, which our infantry, those who could, now abandoned. The French were squaring up. Our cannon unlimbered and went on to blast them. The squadrons went into a trot.
Too soon, wait, wait some more!
Then two of them charged, one after another. Was Andrei in the front one? Galloping through a gauntlet of grapevines when a volley of musket fire crushed into him head-on! Veering away, if he could, if there was an opening in the vines, if his horse could jump over them, if it didn’t stumble, if Andrei’s left hand was steady to guide it while his right hand still raised a saber, his mouth still screaming,
For God, the czar, and Russia
!

The second squadron came charging after the first—reached the square, and stomped it into the ground—only black plumes of Horse Guards danced over the vines now. More French infantry was running in from the west; our cavalry pulled out, gathered behind those squadrons still in wait, then three of these charged into the incoming French. French
cavalry arrived next, some—black bearskin busbies, red plumes, golden and red shakos, some—gilded helmets, long black horsetail plumes—Napoléon’s Guard, the fearsome veterans, the best of the best, the
Black Horses
Nastyrtzev had spoken about . . .

I longed to be there—just to take a measure of death next to Andrei. Just to know that it was no more painful or frightening than to be thrown off one’s horse and lie quietly, bleeding, arms and legs drawn in, eyes closed. The boiling sore of the vineyard now reached as far as where our squadrons had stood before the attack—and where now the battered Preobrazhensky snapped at the spatters of French cavalry that pushed all the way to our side. Our artillery limbered up and retreated while the horrible vineyard sucked in fresh forces like a maelstrom—I saw our Horse Guard’s upright plumes, the Cavalier Guard’s curved plumes, the enemy’s bearskins, horsetailed helmets, and more, shakos and helmets, outlandish, vicious turbans that I could not even recognize.