SHTETL ELEGY
DECEMBER 1812
It had snowed for days, and it felt like the snow would never stop. It felt like none of this would ever stop – the snow falling through the pine and spruce, the hunger that would neither go away nor let itself be ignored, the cold that was as far below freezing as a summer day was above, the partisans that ambushed every foraging party and seemed to lurk behind every tree. This was the way the world had always been, the way it would always be; this was the way the retreating Grand Army was fated to live until, inevitably, it died.
Brigadier General Henri Rottembourg had brought a full brigade into Russia. He had about a battalion’s worth of troops left, and at that, his brigade was one of the fortunate ones. He’d kept them together, kept them disciplined, fought off the partisans, made sure that whatever the foragers brought back was distributed fairly, found what shelter from the storm he could. But still, on a good day, ten more of his men would be dead or missing at every halt; on a bad day, fifty.
The Grand Duchy of Warsaw was, he estimated, eight or ten days’ march away. If he had half a battalion left when he got there, he’d consider it a greater victory than Borodino had been – it would at least be a victory that promised life, rather than death and more death.
Dusk was falling, and a shadow loomed ahead of him in the darkness – a soldier in a greatcoat wrapped against the cold, a scout returning. “There’s a village ahead, sir. A kilometer, maybe a little more.”
“Still standing?” Rottembourg’s voice held a touch of surprise; few of the villages along the line of retreat remained intact. The ones the Russian army hadn’t burned to scorch the earth had been destroyed by the peasants themselves before they fled, or by the factions in the shadowy civil war that was swirling within the main war. If God was smiling on France, there would be some food left, or a few houses intact enough to provide some shelter from the wind. But the scout had said “a village,” not “a ruin,” and that promised something more.
“Most of it, sir. I didn’t go in, but it looked like the houses were still there, and the barns too. And there were lights. Someone had a fire going.”
Someone had a fire going. That could mean Russians, partisans, deserters – it could mean more straggling French soldiers, though Rottembourg had seen no sign of any. Whoever it was would likely be dangerous, and it might be best to skirt the village and find another place to camp. But he’d face mutiny if he did, and the chance of someplace warm and dry to spend the night was worth the chance of having to fight for it.
He raised a closed fist over his head for a halt, and sent the scout running to gather what remained of his officers. “We’ll go in as fast as we can,” he said. “Let them see we’ve got a battalion. Maybe they won’t fight us. But make sure everyone fixes their bayonets, just in case.” It would be sword and bayonet work if it came to a fight – there was no keeping a musket primed in this weather.
They halted again at the edge of the forest, fifty meters from the village. It
was intact, or mostly so; a few burned buildings and a fresh-dug ditch surrounding the outer fence gave mute testament that it hadn’t entirely escaped the war, but it was still an inhabited place, not the ghost of one. And there
was smoke rising from chimneys through the snow. Someone was there.
An inhabited place was a defended place. “Ware loopholes,” Rottembourg said, and peered through the darkness at the holes that had been cut in the fence at just the right height to fire a musket through. They weren’t sophisticated defenses, and whoever was in the village would no more be firing any muskets tonight than Rottembourg’s troopers, but there was reason to be quick and reason to be wary. “In through there,” he said, pointing to the main gate. “Knock it down. Get into the center as fast as we can and form square, but if anyone attacks from one of the houses, don’t wait. Now!”
He was off at a run, and his men with him. The pioneer troop – what was left of the pioneer troop, got to the gate first, hacking with their axes, and then it was down. The soldiers poured into the village and, seeing a deserted green ahead of them, made for it. In a moment, they had formed a square, bayonets bristling outward in all directions.
So far, no one had attacked. But there were fires – Rottembourg could see the glow through shuttered windows – and surely, by now, whoever was in the houses knew he was there. Were they planning an assault? Or barring their doors and getting ready to ambush anyone who might try to enter?
“Should we try talking to them, sir?” asked Captain Guillou – not an officer from Rottembourg’s original brigade, but one who’d joined them for the long retreat. “I speak some Russian.”
“Me too. I’ll go.” The captain raised a hand in protest, but Rottembourg waved him down – this was something he had to do himself. The square opened ranks at his command, and he walked toward the nearest of the houses; he had no white flag, but he opened his hands and raised them above his head. One of the shutters that faced him was slightly ajar, and he stared into it, hoping to catch some movement and get some sign of who was inside.
What he saw, flashing past the gap in the shutter, was a man’s ear and the sidelock that hung in front of it.
A Jew. There were Jews and Jews in Russia, and many of them weren’t friendly – he’d learned that a lifetime ago, in the earliest days of the invasion – but this didn’t look like the stronghold of one of the Hasidic sects that fought for the Tsar. Those, Rottembourg had found, were more heavily defended, and their territories were patrolled; there had been no signs of such patrols near here, nor were there any of the kabbalistic symbols that they typically put on their houses to avert the evil eye.
He stopped in his tracks and cried out a sentence that was not in Russian:
Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai ehad. And then another word:
chaverim.
The officers and men in the village square looked at him as if he’d grown wings, but there were suddenly voices within the house as well. The shutter opened slowly, barely more than a crack; a man’s head appeared at the window and looked at him with piercing eyes, taking in his uniform, the sword at his belt, the absence of sidelocks and fringes.
“Zhid?” he said. “You?” He sounded disbelieving, but his next words were in Yiddish. “Soldiers, are you? Napoleon? What do you want?”
Rottembourg’s recognized the name “Napoleon” and some spoke German, so they could tell that peace had at least begun to be made, and he could almost feel the relaxation of tension, the loosening of their grip on bayoneted muskets. “We want shelter for the night. Food, if you have it – we can pay. We’ll be gone in the morning.”
“If you’re against the bastard Romanov, you’re welcome here,” said the man in the house. “And we’d welcome you for more than a day, if we could feed you that long. What the Tsar’s soldiers haven’t done to us, the rabbis who fight for him do, and for the time you’re here, at least, they won’t.”
“Good enough, then. I am Rottembourg; I speak for my men, and you have my word of honor on behalf of the Emperor.”
“Dovid. And no emperor has honor, but I’ll trust in yours.”
That, it seemed, was enough. The doors opened; men, women and children came out of the houses to stare at the soldiers and to unlock barns and sheds. Officers divided the buildings between the troops; a lucky few found space in the houses themselves, where there were dry floors and fires burning.
“Sentries,” said Rottembourg to Guillou. “Get twenty men up on rooftops, two to a post; twenty more at the fence. But change them every hour.” It would be cruel to leave anyone up there longer than that, and besides, in this cold, a sentry left out too long was liable to fall asleep or worse.
Rottembourg and his staff, such as it was, found places in Dovid’s house. More people lived there than he’d thought: Dovid’s wife Malka, his parents, a widowed sister, and a dozen children who stared at Rottembourg and couldn’t believe he was a Jew. “There are many Jews in France who look like me, and some of them are also officers in the army,” he said, and they believed him even less.
The adults did believe him, and they spoke of the Tsar they hated and the Emperor who’d promised emancipation. “Though we don’t want that either,” Dovid cautioned. “Your Emperor’s Sanhedrin would change things too much.” Rottembourg nodded; unlike the urban Jews who’d supported the invasion and even enlisted in the Grand Army in the early days, these village mitnagdim were deeply traditional. But they still saw, in emancipation, the promise that they might be left alone, and that had been enough for them to hope for a French victory.
“But your Emperor lost, and now all the scores are being settled,” said Malka. And the other men and women told stories of raids and counter-raids; the Chabad Regiment and the other Hasidic militias who fought for the Tsar ambushed the mitnagdim and rival Hasidim as well as French troops, and were willing enough to enact the Tsar’s scorched-earth decree against their own pro-French coreligionists. Thus, Rottembourg gathered, this village’s new-built defenses; thus the burned settlements that he’d seen to the north and east.
“Some of them are gone – to Odessa, to the towns in the south where there’s no fighting,” said Dovid. “One village went to Astrakhan – can you believe it? ‘It’s one of the places allowed to us, and it’s a long way from anywhere,’ they said. We thought about going too, but now it’s too late – not in this weather, not with soldiers all around.”
“Maybe we can leave you some muskets,” said Rottembourg – what was left of his brigade had far more guns than men to carry them, and he’d seen the ancient, rusty weapons that Dovid’s family had. “To see you to the war’s end.”
“If it stops then.” But the food the women had cooked for the troops was ready now – kasha and potatoes and onions and turnips, the food of poverty but filling all the same – and silence fell as they ate. After, the family stretched out to sleep and Rottembourg sat and stared into the fire. The silence continued.
Then it was broken by the shout of a sentry from the rooftop, followed by a gunshot and the sound of running men.
Rottembourg rushed to the shutter and saw them: bearded raiders in snow-covered black coats and fur hats, who’d wrapped their muskets in oilskin to keep the priming dry and who were kicking doors open and firing through the doorways.
They must have heard we were here, Rottembourg thought, or maybe, as Malka had said, they were settling scores, but he needed to form his men up now.
He ran into the snow, followed by his startled officers and, to his surprise, by Dovid, shouting for his men to gather on the green as they had before. A musket ball cracked past his head. Sounds of fighting came from a few of the barns, where the partisans had shot their way in and were now struggling with the Frenchmen hand to hand.
He reached the green, surrounded by a protective knot of soldiers and villagers, and took stock. The best he could tell was that there were about a hundred partisans; not nearly enough to overcome a force the size of his now that the surprise had passed. His men were already massing in the square and their sergeants were shouting them into formation; soon enough, they’d root the raiders out of the barns and sheds one at a time. Or…
“Cease fire!” he shouted in Yiddish. “Whoever’s leading you, come and talk. We have a brigade here and you don’t have enough men to fight us. Come and talk before anyone else dies.”
He heard more shouting and gunfire and clashing of steel, and for a moment, he was sure he’d have to root them out after all. But then someone called out an order, the fighting abruptly stopped, and one of the partisans stepped forward on the rutted street.
“I am Yossel,” he said. “You can talk to me.”
“Captain Yossel? Colonel Yossel?”
“Reb Yossel is enough.”
“All right, Reb Yossel,” said Rottembourg. “You have a hundred men here, and you can see that I have many more – enough to handle the men you’ve got with you
and the others that you’ve got coming around to attack from the north.” A very badly-hidden look of surprise crossed Yossel’s face; evidently, Rottembourg had guessed right. “I could kill you all, but many of my men would die too, and I’d rather get them home. You have five minutes to give me your oath that you will leave this place and let my brigade go unmolested in the morning. If you do, we will let you leave and not pursue you.” He took a pocket-watch from his greatcoat, the one Napoleon had given him when he’d become the only Jew in the French army to hold general’s rank. “The five minutes starts now.”
Yossel called other men to his side and held a whispered conference in the swirling snowfall. “What about your oath, Tzarfati?” he said. “Do you swear that you and your godless Emperor will quit this country and seduce no more Jews from the path of Ribono Shel Olam?”
“I can’t swear for my Emperor. You know that. But I think you can see that France isn’t likely to pass this way again.”
“But you will leave this land?”
“That’s what I’m trying to do. To leave it in peace.”
Another whispered conference, and Yossel spoke again. “If you can’t give an oath, then neither will I. But you have my word, if you care to trust it. A commander of the Chabad Regiment doesn’t lie.”
Rottembourg’s eyes flashed to Dovid’s face and saw no objection in it; evidently lying, at least, was not among the sins with which the mitnagdim charged the Chabad partisans. “Yes, then. Your word for mine. You will leave now, and I will leave at dawn.”
Yossel gave another order and the partisans flowed out of the village and through the broken gate; one of them went running to warn off the men in the north. Rottembourg looked at his watch; it had been three minutes.
“Find out how many wounded and dead,” he told Guillou; he was already certain that this wouldn’t be one of the good days. “At least we’re in a village; the women will have needles and thread to sew up wounds.”
Dovid nodded. “We’ll do what we can,” he said. “I could wish that you’d also asked for Yossel’s word not to attack this village again, but if you had, he wouldn’t have given it.” He stood in silence for a moment more, and said, “Let us leave with you tomorrow.”
“All of you? Women and children?”
“It won’t be safe here anymore, now that they know we’ve paid host to a battalion of you. Not even with a ditch and loopholes. And we have sixty able-bodied men – you’ll have that many more guns to protect you.”
And that many more mouths to feed, Rottembourg thought. But after the shelter the villagers had given him, he couldn’t honorably refuse.
“How far will you come with us? To Warsaw? Surely not to France.”
“No, not France.” Humor rippled through Dovid’s voice – humor, at least, of a sort. “As I said, we have no desire to become like you. And Warsaw is full, and the people there aren’t kind to us. We’ll get across the border and then think of where to go.”
“Odessa? Astrakhan, like the other village?”
“Maybe. Maybe someplace farther.”
Farther than Astrakhan. Right now even the border seemed farther than Astrakhan, in this endless winter of war. But Rottembourg would know where he was going when he got there. Dovid would know too.