The Retreat

A gripping historical novel focused on Napoleon's dramatic invasion of Russia, The Retreat is a stirring follow-up to the award-winning The Battle. The Retreat opens in September 1812, with the French army at the gates of Moscow. Exhausted, famished, and demoralized, they are only a quarter of the 400,000-strong force that crossed the river Niemen three months before. But the sight of this famous city feels like a triumph and a chance, at last, to enjoy a conqueror's spoils.Moscow, however, has been evacuated, and all its supplies removed. Suddenly fires break out, and the burning city becomes a trap. And yet the French stay to pursue their disparate aims amid an air of complete unreality. Henri Beyle -- better known as Stendhal -- goes about his duties as a functionary while thinking of Nero. The soldiers fill their pockets with diamonds but still don't have enough money to buy bread. And all the while, oblivious to their predicament, Napoleon sends to Paris for comic novels and imagines that it is only a matter of time before Tsar Alexander sues for peace. Finally, a month later, the Grande Armee retraces its steps toward the Berezina. Harassed by Cossacks decimated by fighting, the cold, and starvation, the French endure their most brutal test.With the same extraordinary gift for evocation and dramatic power he showed in The Battle, Rambaud brings this disastrous campaign to a brilliant, near-hallucinatory life.