It snowed. Their very victory had brought on their defeat.
For once, the eagle bowed its head. Dark days! In slow retreat
from smoking Moscow, emperor and men recrossed terrain
whose only feature now was snow: white plain, then more white plain.
A brief thaw, and an avalanche of water. In the spate
none knew his leader nor his flag; no-one could separate
the army’s centre from its flanks. How had it come to pass
that yesterday’s proud columns were today’s disordered mass?
The opened bellies of dead horses sheltered wounded men:
the only refuge on the road. The snow set in again.
Beside deserted bivouacs, the silent, frozen ghosts
of buglers, upright in the saddle, occupied their posts,
their copper instruments glued fast to mouths of stone. The sky
dropped cannon-ball and shell, mixed with its own artillery
of snowflakes, deathly white, which settled on the grenadiers,
who trembled as they marched, absorbed in private thoughts and fears,
their grey moustaches trimmed with ice.
Across the unknown lands
the north wind and the driving snow chased barefoot, starving bands
of former warriors, and broke their hearts. They were a dream
they’d wandered into, in the mist; a mystery, a stream
of shadows under leaden sky. The utter loneliness!
The sky’s revenge: a mighty army in a wilderness,
enwrapped in snow — a silent shroud the elements have sewn.
Each man imagined he was dying; knew he was alone.
Here, in a fateful realm, two enemies pronounced their curse.
The Czar was one; the North another, which was worse.
Gun-carriages chopped up for firewood; cannon thrown away;
men lying down to die; this was a mob, confused, astray,
in headlong flight, their bleak processions swallowed in the waste.
The folds and bulges where the snow had seemed to drift embraced
whole regiments. The fall of Hannibal was on this scale.
Attila left behind such dreadful scenes: the wholesale
rout of wounded, dying men, on stretchers, barrows, carts; the rush
to cross the bridges; death by suffocation in the crush.
Ten thousand closed their eyes to sleep; a hundred saw the day.
Great Marshal Ney, whom once an army followed, ran away.
He haggled with three Cossacks for his watch.
And every night
the French imagined Russian soldiers harrying their flight.
They grabbed their weapons. ‘Who goes there?’ In nightmare fantasies
came squadrons, whirlwinds of wild men, whose terrifying cries
were like the calls of bald-head vultures, harbingers of doom.
In panic one whole army fled, and vanished in the gloom.
*****
The emperor surveyed the scene, as if he were a tree,
a giant oak, about to taste the axe. Catastrophe,
the fatal axe man, who had spared his greatness until now,
had climbed up on him. Now he shuddered as each severed bough,
his officers and men, crashed round him one by one. He watched them die.
He paced inside his tent. A remnant of his company,
who’d loved him, trusting in his destiny, stood by outside.
Fate had betrayed him, surely. To and fro they saw his shadow stride.
Within, Napoleon was dazed and pale. Perhaps this was not fate?
Perhaps — he knew not what to think — he had some sin to expiate?
The man of glory trembled as a sudden unaccustomed dread
assailed his soul. He turned to God in anguish. ‘Lord of Hosts,’ he said,
‘is this my punishment, to see my legions scattered on the snow?’
He heard his name called in the dark. A voice said, ‘No.’
