The Age of Ice: A Novel (39 page)

Every horseman of ours who stopped, who jerked his horse right and left, looking disoriented—every one of them that my spyglass ripped out of the melee—was Andrei.
Do not stop, just keep moving. Do not look for another chance—someone’s back wide open, someone’s arm outstretched—to use your saber. Do not think how you missed on your last five swings. Most of them miss, thank God. And please do not think how one of them didn’t miss, how you felt flesh on your blade, a crunchy tug of meat, a rebound of bone. Please, Andrei, just pass through, rally behind infantry, please, behind their guns, right there, I see it clearly, a safe haven, no, it’s not too far, please, Son.

More and more were coming. Nine battalions of the French. A curtain of gunfire for their cavalry to hide behind and catch their breath.
This is how it’s done, Andrei, no gallantry, no miracle, just sheer numbers.
We did not have that much infantry left. I saw it so clearly from my hill. Only three battalions of the Ismailovsky Guard were finally scrambling to Andrei’s rescue.
Please, please listen to me!

Where the hell is all of Kutuzov’s army?! Where are the damn Austrians? Does Bagration really have his hands so full he can’t do anything for my Andrei? Is this really it? Anna, if you are out there and watching, please, please save him!

• • •

The French chose not to pursue us all the way to where the train still stood, on the east bank of the Rausnitz stream. I stood in the way of
returning cavalry. I looked at every man, endless faces made alike by battle grime and fatigue.
Have you seen Colonel Velitzyn? The commander of the second squadron?
One Cavalier Guard officer told me he must have been away all this time, because—didn’t I know?—the eagle standard of the
Quatrième Ligne
had been taken during the first attack on the vineyards. The second squadron took it. “Won’t matter now . . . but they must have made a point of sending it right away to His Majesty’s headquarters. Wherever that is.”

Andrei may have avoided the whole battle! My spirits soared. But then the officer eyed my lit-up face and remarked, “But wait. The second charged one more time. It did, I am fairly sure. Later on, after us. No, he must have been around.”

I no longer cared if Andrei saw me. Someone advised me to find the brigade commander, Depreradovich—although they knew not where he was. Someone else said the second squadron no longer existed. A third man warned that there was no time to dilly-dally, the French reached as far as due straight north of us, Bagration was thrown back all the way past Welleschowitz, and we all had to move east or we’d get cut off.

My trajectory drew me toward the surgeons’ wagons as a whirlpool draws in a paddle boat. The measure of pull was outmatched only by the measure of despair. I made my way through the crowds of waiting wounded. I looked for Andrei. It smelled of turpentine and vinegar, blood and burned meat. Sheets of canvas were stretched to screen out a surgical station, and I recognized the surgeon who came out—he had been next to me earlier, when we waited for the action to commence. The sketcher. He announced to no one in particular, “Thirty-fourth in a ham!” He stretched his back, took his gloves off, and made a note in his sketchbook. “Next!”

“Any Horse Guard officers here?” I asked.

He gave me a glance and kept busy. Still, I latched onto him as if he was a solution. He was reciting his rules of admission,
Guardsmen first! Unless it keeps bleeding!
“There”—he pointed—“you, sir. Did you apply your sleeve as I told you? Is it tight?” The paling cornet he addressed gave an extra twist to an improvised tourniquet on his forearm, and swooned momentarily. The surgeon bent over for a closer look. “Let’s go. I can cut it off.”

“No, no, just dress—maybe—cut later—”

The cornet’s wrist was badly shattered and blood percolated through like a spring brook.

“Later you’ll bleed out. I’m doing you a favor, young man. On your feet, let’s go.”

“Are you from the Horse Guard?” I asked the cornet.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know Colonel Velitzyn?”

“Prince Andrei Andreevich?” The cornet began to raise himself from the ground and I gave him a hand. “Yes, him.”

“Thank you. I do, yes.” He cringed, and it suddenly made me certain Andrei was dead. Or maybe it was the patronymic he used, based on my brother’s first name, not mine.

The surgeon eyed me—“You were next to me before the battle”—and goaded the cornet in. I tagged behind, my next question lying on my tongue like a lead ball. They sat the cornet on an ammunitions caisson and propped his arm on some others, stacked two high. Nearby a tin tub—like ones at the barber’s, only full of cinders not suds—pumped heat. “Just to dress, maybe?” said the cornet.

“My son had taken the eagle of the Fourth Line Infantry,” I said, “and now he’s missing.”

“Doesn’t mean he’s dead,” the surgeon said. “Unless there was an eyewitness. And even then. Two-thirds of people out there in the field are not dead. With a spyglass you’ll see them crawl . . . Cornet, don’t stare at it. Look away. Look at this gentleman. Tell him, did you see Colonel Velitzyn die? I’ll be done in under two minutes.”

The cornet shook his head in the negative as they cinched his arm almost to hourglass shape with a leather belt. “Numb enough yet? Now let’s pull that skin up your forearm.”

“My son commands the second squadron of the Horse Guard,” I insisted with the leaden logic of an obsessive. “You’d think people would know where their squadron commander is, if he was still around.”

“Are you his father?” the cornet asked and grabbed at me with his left, shaking hand. He was just out of boyhood, seventeen at most. “I am,” I said.

“Cornet, let’s hear ladies’ names in alphabetical order,” said the surgeon.

“Alexandra—”

“Louder, I can’t hear you!”

“Agraphoena! Alexandra, Anastasia, Anna! Avdotia—”

The surgeon slit through the cornet’s arm in two semicircles at angles to the bones so that the flaps of flesh opened like jaws of a fish mouth
from whose throat the ulna and radius stuck out like foreign objects; the surgeon’s mate peeled those meaty jaws back—
Arina! Axinia!
—the surgeon pinched one artery then the other with smoking-hot forceps, then took a hacksaw to the bones, and
Valentina-Varvara-Vera
became one yowl, the cornet’s ashen, perspiring face squeezed into my hip and I wrapped my arm over his ears and eyes,
keep going,
but before the expulsion of
Galina
and
Darya,
both bones were sawn off, followed by a polishing touch-up of a file—and the patient parted with
Ekaterina, Elizaveta, Elena, Evdokia, Evgenia—
a pinch of vitriol dusted the fish mouth—
Zinaida—
the wretch groaned and the mate let the fish-mouth close and the surgeon sutured it shut.

“—Claudia, Ludmila, Maria, Nadya—”

“That’s it,” the surgeon said. “Well done, young man. Every one of these ladies and girls hereby so gallantly named now prays to nurse you to health and grace your long days.”

He headed out, his patient briefly rendered inarticulate. When I joined him, he was making another note in his sketchbook. “One minute thirty-nine seconds plus suturing.” He turned, said, “I am Semyon Kessler. And you—”

I named myself and he said, “Pleased to meet you,” then shouted, “Next!”

“Who is going out to the field to collect the wounded?” said I.

He squinted into the distance. “We’re losing daylight . . . Look at this crowd, Sir Velitzyn. And these are the
walking
wounded. Going out to the field? Right now—no one is.”

“My son may be there. If I can help—”

The cornet staggered out on his own two feet, buoyed by God knows what power and showing off his bandaged pollard of an arm to the waiting crowd. “I’m good to go! It’s nothing, gentlemen! It’s nothing!” And seeing me, “You, sir. Did I tell you Depreradovich sent Prince Andrei to His Majesty to deliver the trophy, the Fourth Line’s eagle?”

“No . . . when?”

“After we came back, of course! The trophy and the news of our upset. Lucky man, your son . . .”

I don’t remember ever thanking that poor cornet. I took leave of him and Kessler to follow Andrei’s tracks. About then, the news spread that the French had halted north and west of us. In all likelihood this was it for our contingent—though not for the rest of the army.

Southwest of us, at the village of Sokolnitz, Buxhoeveden’s divisions
were still holding their ground, unmoved from where they had advanced early in the morning. Buxhoeveden either did not know that he was left alone in the field, or did not care. Perhaps an aide-de-camp dispatched with the news had been killed en route. Perhaps this aide-de-camp could not get through. Perhaps none was sent. The fact is: none of ours, nor Bagration’s, nor Kutuzov’s main forces moved an inch to bail Buxhoeveden out. Even when we could still hear guns in the distance, even when in our plain sight the French started drawing south—all the forces that’d just opposed us in the vineyard. They went on while we stayed.

Some of Buxhoeveden’s contingent was slaughtered to a man, some taken prisoner, and some . . . If only any of us kept on moving at least, never mind fighting, just showing up—it would not have happened. If only—

This is how it went down. I reunited with my horse and followed the road south to the village of Austerlitz—this was the route Andrei must have taken an hour before. There, I ran into the other half of Preobrazhensky and into Subcolonel Nastyrtzev; and when I asked, many had heard about a horseman with the Fourth Line’s trophy. Andrei had made an impression: the white knight, the battle-worn cuirassier who rode in with the enemy’s colors flapping at his stirrup: the prize, a gilded eagle rousant on the tip of a pike dangling head-down like a snared partridge. A gesture, to be sure, but so forgivable and making it easier for me, besides, to track him. Thereby I learned (once I reached the headquarters) that he had not stayed. The evasive white knight had moved again. Where to, in God’s name?

To Buxhoeveden’s divisions.

What pushed him? The sadness on the face of our defeated emperor? Thoughts of Nadya? Of me?

The point is, he had volunteered to ride farther south and reach the last troops left fighting as the French were drawing all their forces around them. Reach them, and tell them to fall back lest they’d be encircled. The point is, he didn’t have to go to the other side of the battlefield, three miles away, but he went. And doggedly, I followed.

By the time he arrived, the retreat was already on the way—as a disoriented, mad dash, for the survivors did not know which way to turn, where to connect with the rest of the army. The infamous
flight across ice
was already happening, when remnants of Dokhturov’s and Langeron’s columns were retreating over frozen ponds—the Sachan. Napoléon later claimed that 20,000 Russians drowned in those—what propaganda hogwash,
they couldn’t bloody
hold
twenty thousand bodies; and what kind of ice they were covered with—an
early-December-in-Western-Europe ice,
it could not have held, no one could have thought that it would hold, now could they! They just had nowhere else to go! And most of them made it, trudged right through; artillery and ice took only a couple of hundred, no more, not the least because—

Because my godson was there. He beheld it—and everything must have become so clear, so self-evident, so beautiful.
This
was his purpose, the reason for his existence, the reason he had just survived the mash of the vineyards without so much as a scratch.
This
was why there was the brotherhood of ice, and why he was an ice-swimmer, the true John the Baptist of the North, the one who rescues people from cold water, not lures them into it!

I found him by going toward the greatest clamor and commotion. The ponds stretched far right and left, and were a hundred, maybe more, yards wide. On the far side, a mass of troops was pressing right to left along the bank toward a far-off causeway—a roundabout route under shellfire—and some were spilling onto the ice, perceiving it as a coveted shortcut. When I reached the shore, the ice had already given way under them—and many were made into helpless pups, ice-shocked and thrashing. When I reached the shore, I saw Andrei’s horse, just released by his rider and bounding out of shallows, flanks steaming, and Andrei—charging toward the melee, still impossibly on top of the failing crust like a magical tightrope walker, shouting, “Fear not, fella-a-as! Don’t climb it, break it, water is warm!”

Cannonballs fell on the other bank, bouncing, rolling onto ice, sizzling, plunking into the water. More screaming—impact explosions—
canister? shells? was the enemy getting closer?
—and another crazed swath broke off the fleeing mass and fell into the pond; the water writhed and swarmed with bodies now, bubbled with human heads; too many of them in a hole of water, no going back nor forward, a razor edge of ice all around and no outlet made fast enough, and Andrei shouted, “Who on horseback—break the way! On foot—follow!”

Some horsemen pushed forth and some would have, were not their mounts besieged by desperate souls—swarming, clinging from all sides like sea monsters roused from the deep. Whips flew, beasts and humans screamed—somebody tangled up in a stirrup, somebody disoriented pushed the wrong way—Andrei grabbed a rolling cannonball and used
it to smash ice, and when he sank, finally sank himself into that man-ice mash, he turned around and attacked the ice, shouldered it, cracked it, opening a passage, leading, making way for men; and I was halfway across the pond when I broke through with one leg, ice ever a trickster trying to slow me down, but I pulled out and just then hot air swished at my face and a cannonball burst through ice not two steps ahead. “Andrei Velitzyn!” I bellowed. “Careful, they’ll drown you!” and then I was next to him at last, and he cried, “You?!” and I, “Who else, damnit!” and he, “Then stop fortune-telling and help!”

And it was good. No matter the fears (I a weak swimmer), the pushing, mashing crowd no matter—it was good, my feet could feel the bottom, we were together, Andrei and I, and I laughed, oh I laughed. So happy to break ice for my Andrei, I was. So elated to lock arms with him and shout, “Just the shivering humans, hear that?”