Victor Hugo’s poem “L’expiation” on Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow in 1812

The French have their own “Borodino”: a poem no less piercing and significant about the events of 1812. This is L’expiation (“The Expiation”), written by Victor Hugo in exile and describing the retreat of Napoleon's army from burnt Moscow. Since the poem is very long, only an extract is published here.

It was snowing. Struck down by their own victory,
The French eagles for the first time bowed their necks.
He was retreating — oh, dreadful dream made waking! —
Leaving behind him a blazing Moscow.
It was snowing. The whole winter had come down like an avalanche.
A white plain, and beyond it a white plain.
Not long since an army, now a crowd of vagrants,
No longer knowing where their leader was, where their standard,
Where the main force, where the right flank, where the left…
It was snowing. For the wounded the belly of dead horses
Served as a roof. At the entrance to the void
Of abandoned bivouacs there could be seen at their posts
Dead buglers, frozen into a white vision,
Their mouths frozen fast to the icy horns.
A mixture of grenades, grapeshot and bombs poured through the blizzard,
And a regiment of grenadiers, for the first time finding out
What a shiver means, marched on, breathing into their grey moustaches.
It snowed without end. Evil winds were whistling.
Treading barefoot over the black ice,
Without bread, the men walked in a land foreign to them.
They were not troops, they were not soldiers,
They were the phantom of a crowd, some accursed dream,
A procession of lifeless shades in the mist,
And loneliness, more terrible with every hour,
Appeared everywhere to them, like a mute fury…
The silent firmament, heaping up the snowdrifts,
Sewed an enormous shroud for an enormous army —
And the hour of approaching death parted man from man.
Where, at last, will the realm of frost come to its end?
Both the Tsar and the North are enemies, but the North is worse.
Having thrown away their guns, they began to burn the gun-carriages.
Whoever lay down, died. Bereft of thought and speech,
They fled without looking back from the snowy maw,
And it would have been clear to anyone who counted the folds
Of the drifts that whole regiments had fallen asleep in them.
Oh, the death of Hannibal! The rout of cruel Attila!
A bloody jam of fugitives, wounded, stretchers and wagons
Formed at every river crossing.
A whole regiment lay down to sleep, only a platoon rose.
Ney, having lost his troops, barely found a way out
Of Russian captivity, giving his watch to a Cossack.
An alarm every night: to arms! to the assault! attack!
And the phantoms took up their muskets, and upon them,
Amid the cries of kites, like a flock of steppe birds,
Flew the cavalry of half-wild Mongols,
A whirlwind of dark-faced monsters came crashing down.
So armies perished without trace by night,
And the Emperor himself saw all this, himself,
Like a tree condemned to the axe.
To the titan whom no one in the world dared to match,
Disaster, like a woodcutter, had already come up close,
And he, a flourishing oak, felt the axe,
And, shuddering, wholly in the power of the apparition,
He saw the branches falling all around him.
Leaders, soldiers, all closed their eyes for ever.
Meanwhile those close to him, crowding about his tent,
Watched on the canvas his moving shadow,
Faithful to his star, murmuring against providence
At the insult to majesty, while at the bottom
Of his own soul he was himself doubly struck.
Crushed by calamity and seeing a bloody dream,
He turned his face to God. The darling of glory
Trembled. Napoleon grasped that he was bearing
The penalty for some guilt, and so, before
The host that lay so thickly spread over the snows:
“Is this not a punishment, almighty God?” he asked.
Then, calling him by name, in answer
Out of the darkness came a certain voice: “No!”