WALKING TO MOSCOW

Grave of Jacques Danois at Varengeville

On one of the graves lay a bouquet of fresh flowers, carnations mainly, still in their florists’ wrapping of cellophane.  The card gave the sender’s name as ‘La Légion d’Honneur,’ the French order established by Napoleon in 1802 and still extant, at which time the man inside the tomb would still have been a young man of twenty-two.

He is now a ‘Chevalier’- the lowest rank of the order but still reflecting great merit and he died, so the inscription said, on 20 August.  The flowers had no doubt been left that day as they would have been left most years since Jacques Antoine Danois succumbed to the ravages of time back in 1857. In 154 years that is quite a lot of carnations.

We were in the graveyard of the church at Varengeville-sur-Mer, a sturdy medieval edifice at the edge  of the gigantic line of limestone cliffs that forms the coast of northern Normandy.  The cliffs are unstable, so we are told, and are eroding at the rate of a metre a year. By the 200th anniversary of his death, therefore, Danois may have fallen into the sea, taking his carnations with him.

He wouldn’t fall alone either for a great many other respectable folk are buried in this graveyard, including the painter, Georges Braque.  Indeed, there are so many painters, poets, musicians, writers, soldiers here that the place is beginning to resemble a mini Piere La Chaise, the great Parisian cemetery of the famous. All it lacks is some idol of the modern age, consumed by excess at some pitifully early age.

Danois certainly didn’t die young, though it was hardly for want of trying. In fact he was 77 before he finally packed it all in.  Which considering that he walked all the way to Moscow in the heat and disease of a Russian summer and then all the way back again in the cold and starvation of the Russian winter, is surprising.  Not only that but he hacked his way as an infantry man through many of Napoleon’s greatest victories as well as some of the awful stand-offs and defeats like Borodino and Leipzig. By rights he should have been dead many times over, sliced in two by a cavalry sabre or blown to pieces by an artillery piece, starved or drowned or frozen or diseased.

But somehow he cheated death for 14 years after which he appears to had enough of the business of laying waste to Prussia, Austria and Russia.  No doubt he thought that he had tempted fate enough. Having finally been raised to the rank of sub-lieutenant and granted everlasting status as a ‘Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur,’ he packed it in and became, because I suppose he had to do something, a tax inspector, back in Varengeville, his home town.

How very French, I thought, looking down at the tomb. I don’t suppose that in Britain even the Duke of Wellington still gets flowers on his anniversary.  If he does, I don’t know of it.

But what I really struggle to comprehend, standing there in the sunshine with the blue sea beyond,  is the idea of walking to Moscow, carrying your tent and belongings, firearm, cartridges, clean underwear and sandwiches with you.   The distance - to Moscow and back to Paris - is over 3,000 miles.  That’s like walking from Land’s End to John o’ Groats five times back to back.

Today if you walked from Paris to Moscow, even in relative comfort putting up in bed and breakfasts and with sufficient money to eat a decent cooked meal once a day, you would become a minor celebrity and be invited to appear on Big Brother.  Channel 4 might even give you a documentary.  But to do it as a soldier?  Imagine the number of times his boots must have needed repairing! Incredible!   Danois deserves his flowers, I thought, as I took his picture.  He’s the sort of thing I listen too on Radio 4 while printing labels, but brought to life here and weirder than fiction.

This bank holiday escape from printing and labels to an old university friend in Le Havre continued to Veules-sur-Mer, the next town along the coast and home to the shortest fleuve in all France - all 1,194 metres of it.  (Une fleuve flows into the sea, whereas une rivière flows into a fleuve, my friends tell me).  In this short one kilometre length, engineers managed to build five water mills though only four remain today, none of which are working. To build five mills in a kilometre of river seems almost as incredible as walking to Moscow, if you ask me.

Of course, I may have been dreaming.  For we passed a Statue of Liberty in the middle of a roundabout at Ourville-en-Caux  It was painted sky blue.  Somehow it seemed more improbable still.

Blue Statue of Liberty at Ourville