The beekeeper opens the top section of the hive and examines the super. Instead of tightly packed rows of bees sealing every gap in the combs and keeping the brood warm, he sees the cunning complexity of the combs themselves, without the virginal purity of their earlier days. It is a picture of filthy neglect. Black scavenger-bees buzz around busily looking for plunder while the home bees, a desiccated, shrunken, shrivelled up and listless lot, old before their time, drag themselves about, putting up no opposition, having lost all desire and any sense of being alive. Drones, hornets, bumblebees and butterflies flit about aimlessly, their wings tapping against the walls of the hive. Now and then the cells containing the dead brood and honey are stirred by an angry buzzing; somewhere a couple of bees have reverted to their old ways without knowing why and started cleaning the hive, straining every nerve to drag away dead bees and bumblebees, and it is all beyond their strength. In a different corner another pair of old bees are going through the motions of fighting or cleaning themselves or feeding each other, though they don’t know whether they are taking on friends or enemies. Somewhere else a crowd of bees squeezes up close together and picks on a victim, beating it and smothering it. The victim, dead or dying, then drops slowly down, light as a feather, on to a pile of corpses. The beekeeper parts the two centre frames to look in on the nursery. Instead of seeing thousands of black bees sitting back to back in tightly packed rings guarding the lofty mysteries of generation, all he sees are miserable shells, a few hundred somnolent bees more dead than alive. Almost all of them have died unawares, sitting there in the sanctuary which was once theirs to guard but has now ceased to exist. They reek of death and decay. One or two of them manage to stir themselves and rise up to fly across feebly and settle on the hand of the invader, but they lack the will to sting him and die. The rest are dead; they flutter down as airy as fish-scales. The beekeeper closes the section and puts a chalk-mark on the hive; in his own good time he will return to break it open and burn it out.
Moscow was as empty as this, and Napoleon, weary, restless and scowling, could be seen pacing up and down under the Kamer-Kollezhsky rampart as he waited to perform that purely formal but (to his mind) very necessary ritual – the receiving of a deputation.
There were still a few people stirring themselves in odd corners of Moscow, aimlessly reverting to their old ways without knowing what they were doing.
When, with all due delicacy, Napoleon was informed that Moscow was empty, he glared at his informant, turned his back on him and went on pacing up and down in silence.
‘My carriage,’ he said.
He got in beside the duty adjutant, and drove through into the suburbs.
‘Moscow deserted! What an incredible thing to happen!’ he said to himself.
Instead of driving straight into town he put up at an inn in the Dorogomilov suburb.
His
CHAPTER 21
The long march of the Russian troops through Moscow went on from two o’clock at night to two o’clock the following afternoon, and they took with them the last departing citizens and the wounded soldiers.
The greatest crush during the troop movement took place on the Kamenny, Moskva and Yauza bridges. With the troops dividing into two streams to go round the Kremlin and backing up from the Moskva and Kamenny bridges, a huge number of soldiers took advantage of the hold-up and congestion to turn back, steal past St Basil’s and through the Borovitsky gate, and sneak uphill into Red Square, where instinct told them there would be easy pickings. It was like sale-time at the Gostiny Bazaar with every aisle and alley swarming with crowds. But there were none of the usual honeyed voices tempting and cajoling the passer-by, no hawkers, no crowds of brightly dressed women shoppers – just uniforms and greatcoats everywhere (no guns), as the soldiers went in empty-handed and came back out tight-lipped and loaded with plunder. The traders and salesmen (what few there were) wandered among the soldiers in a kind of daze, opening their stalls, relocking them, even helping the war heroes to carry things away. Outside in the square a military drummer summoned them to muster. But the drum-roll did not affect the rampaging soldiers as once it had; instead of bringing them in it made them run away. Dotted among the soldiers in the shops and aisles were some men with the grey coats and shaven heads of convicts. Two officers, one with a scarf over his uniform, astride a scraggy dark grey horse, the other on foot, dressed in a military overcoat, stood talking on the Ilyinka corner. A third officer rode up.
‘Orders from the general. Whatever we do, we’ve got to get them moving. It’s outrageous! Half the men have run away.’
