Your Life as Every Rank in Napoleon's Army

Your life as every rank in Napoleon's army. Level one, the conscript. The jeandarmms arrive in your village on a Tuesday morning in March.

You're 18, maybe 19. The records are imprecise in rural France. They read names from a list.

Yours is among them. You have 3 days to report to the depot in Lion. Your mother cries.

Your father says nothing. just grips your shoulder once and walks away. He survived the Revolutionary Wars.

He knows what you're walking into. The depot is chaos. 2,000 men crammed into barracks built for 500.

Most can't read. Half never been more than 20 km from where they were born. You're issued a uniform that doesn't fit.

The coat is too long. The shoes are too small. Someone wore them before you.

You can see the outline of their feet pressed into the leather. You get a musket that's older than you are. A Charville model 1777.

It weighs 9 lb and fires a ball that could punch through a man at 100 paces, assuming you can hit anything at 100 paces, which you can't. Training lasts six weeks. You learn to march in formation, left, right, left, right for hours until your feet bleed and your legs cramp.

And you stop thinking about the rhythm because the rhythm is just what your body does now. You learn to load and fire. Tear the cartridge with your teeth.

Taste the gunpowder. Pour it down the barrel. Ram the ball.

Prime the pan. Present arms. Fire.

Reload. The drill sergeants want you doing this four times per minute. You manage three on a good day.

You learn the basics of camp life. How to cook over an open fire when there's food to cook. How to sleep in the rain when there's no shelter.

How to march 20 m in a day carrying 60 lbs of equipment. You learn that the army feeds you sporadically, pays you irregularly, and expects you to die efficiently. Then comes the march.

Your regiment moves east toward the Rine. The roads turn to mud under the weight of 30,000 boots. You walk 15, sometimes 20 m per day.

Your feet develop blisters that pop and bleed and develop new blisters underneath. The shoes that were too small become torture devices. Men start discarding equipment, spare shirts, cooking pots, anything that adds weight.

The officers don't stop them. They know what's coming. Your first battle happens before you're ready.

They're all before you're ready. The Austrians are dug in on a ridge. Your regiment forms up in columns.

The drums start. You march forward because the men beside you march forward. Someone near you is praying.

Someone else is crying. You're just trying to keep your legs moving. The Austrians open fire at 300 paces.

Musk balls make a sound when they pass close. a sharp crack like someone snapping a stick next to your ear. The man in front of you drops.

You step over him. You don't look down. At 200 paces, your own line stops and fires.

The smoke is immediate and blinding. You reload mechanically. Tear, pour, ram, prime, fire.

You can't see what you're shooting at. Nobody can. Volifier at this distance is about putting lead in the air and hoping probability does the rest.

The Austrian line breaks first. You advance through the smoke and find the ridge empty except for the bodies. Some are moving, most aren't.

You're ordered to collect musketss from the dead. You find a clean one on an Austrian corporal who doesn't need it anymore. His face is young.

Younger than yours, maybe. That night, you sleep on the ground with your new musket and try not to think about where it came from. The veterans are already asleep.

They've learned to shut down the thinking part and just exist between moments of violence. You'll learn that, too, assuming you survive long enough. Level two, the fuselier.

You survive. 6 months, eight battles, three sieges. enough time for the army to stop seeing you as expendable and start seeing you as experienced.

You march in the second rank now instead of the third. You know how to keep your powder dry in the rain. You know which officers will get you killed through incompetence and which ones might actually keep you alive.

A new kind of warfare is emerging and you're right in the middle of it. The old way of fighting is dying. For centuries, European armies fought in rigid lines.

Stand shouldertosh shoulder, fire in volleys, advance in step. Napoleon is breaking every rule. His armies move faster than anyone thought possible.

They break into divisions that operate independently, converge on targets from multiple directions, isolate and destroy enemy forces before reinforcements arrive. You see it happening at Ostitz. The allies think they have Napoleon trapped.

Their army is larger, their position stronger. They maneuver to cut off what they believe is a desperate retreat. Instead, they're walking into a trap.

Napoleon has hidden an entire core in dead ground. Your division moves at dawn through morning fog so thick you can barely see the man beside you. No drums now, no shouting, just thousands of men moving in practice silence toward a position the enemy doesn't know you're approaching.

When the fog lifts, you're already there. The Allied center collapses in hours. Their army doesn't retreat, it disintegrates.

You capture 20,000 prisoners and watch an empire's military power evaporate in a single afternoon. You march through Vienna and see what victory looks like from the inside. The city is intact.

No siege, no storming. The Austrians surrendered rather than see their capital destroyed. You're billeted in homes that still have food on the tables.

The occupants are terrified but alive. This is the carrot. You've seen the stick.

After astralitz, the Holy Roman Empire ceases to exist. 1,000 years of history erased because the military force that sustained it is gone. You don't fully understand the politics, but you understand that something enormous just ended and you were part of the ending.

Level three, the corporal. You're promoted after the Austrian campaign. Corporal.

Four men under your direct command. It's not leadership exactly. It's more like survival management.

Keep them fed. Keep them moving. Keep them from doing anything stupid enough to get the whole squad killed.

One of your men is a farmer's son from Proce named Marcus. He arrived with the last batch of replacements, ignorant and scared like they all are. But Marcus is different.

He listens. He watches the veterans and copies what works. While other replacements complain about the food and the cold, Marcus is already learning to forage without getting caught.

By the second week, he's the best shot in your squad. By the fourth, he's the one the others look to when you're not around. You teach Marcus what the veterans taught you.

How to sleep while marching. How to tell the difference between artillery fire that's dangerous and artillery fire that's just loud. How to identify the moment a battle turns and the difference between a retreat that's strategic and a route that's fatal.

He absorbs everything with a quiet intensity that reminds you of yourself 6 months ago. Marcus has a sister back home. He talks about her at night when the fires are low and the army is quiet.

She's 12. He sends half his pay to her through a sergeant who has connections with a postal route. He doesn't know if the money arrives.

He sends it anyway because the alternative is admitting that the connection to home is already severed. Spain changes everything. The veterans warned you.

Different terrain, different enemy, different kind of war. In Austria and Prussia, you fought armies. In Spain, you fight a country.

The Spanish regulars are disorganized, but the gorillas are something else entirely. They attack supply lines, ambush patrols, vanish into mountains that look empty until they're shooting at you. For every battle you win, you lose three convoys.

Marcus proves himself in Spain. During a guerilla ambush on your supply column, half your squad panics. Marcus doesn't.

He grabs two men, pushes them behind a wagon, and returns fire with the calm precision of someone who's been doing this for years instead of months. The gorillas withdraw. Marcus has a graze wound on his arm that he wraps with a strip torn from his shirt.

He doesn't mention it again. You recommend Marcus for promotion. He becomes a corporal 3 weeks later.

His own squad, his own four men to keep alive. You see him teaching them the same things you taught him. How to forage, how to sleep in the rain, how to stay alive in a machine that runs on their bodies.

The army is getting larger, but the quality is diluting. Conscription is pulling in men from every corner of the empire. Farm boys from Normandy, clerks from Paris, criminals given the choice between prison and service.

Each campaign burns through men faster than replacement can fill the gaps. You understand something? The replacements don't yet.

This isn't going to end. Each victory creates the conditions for the next war. Napoleon's empire is built on military success, which means it requires continuous military success to survive.

The moment the victories stop, everything unravels. But that's strategic thinking. Your world is tactical.

The next march, the next battle, the next winter that needs surviving. Level four, the veteran. Russia.

The word passes through the ranks like a disease. 600,000 men marching east in June of 1812. The Grand Arme, the largest military force Europe has seen since the Romans.

You're part of it. Marcus is beside you. His squad marching next to yours like they've done for two years across Spain, Portugal, and half of southern France.

The march into Russia is wrong from the start. Not the fighting. There isn't any fighting at first.

The Russians retreat. They burn their own villages. They poison their own wells.

They destroy their own food stores. The army marches into a void that swallows everything. The supply lines stretch thin, then break.

Food that was supposed to arrive from depots 300 miles back never comes. Horses die by the thousands. Men start eating horse meat raw because there's no wood dry enough to burn.

You reach Moscow in September. The city is empty. Not abandoned.

Emptied. The Russians left and took everything. Then they set fire to what remained.

You march into a burning capital that offers nothing except shelter from the wind. Napoleon waits for a surrender that never comes. Thesar doesn't negotiate.

He doesn't need to. Winter is his ally, and it's already coming. The retreat begins in October.

600,000 men went east. The road back west becomes a graveyard. The temperature drops to minus30.

Men freeze standing up. They stop walking and simply solidify where they stand. Becoming landmarks for the men behind them.

Your boots disintegrate. You wrap your feet in strips of cloth torn from dead men's uniforms. The cloth freezes to your skin.

Marcus keeps your squad together through sheer will. When men fall behind, Marcus goes back for them. When rations run out, Marcus finds something.

A frozen potato in an abandoned field, a dead horse that hasn't been completely stripped. He distributes everything evenly, taking the smallest portion himself every time. You cross the Barazina River in late November.

The bridges are improvised. Men fall into water so cold it stops their hearts in seconds. You cross by stepping on the bodies of men who fell before you.

The engineering corps stands waist deep in the freezing water holding the bridge planks together. Most of them will die within hours. They know this.

They do it anyway. On the other side of the river, Marcus sits down. just sits down in the snow and doesn't get back up.

You pull at his arm, you shout his name, he looks up at you and his eyes are different. Not scared, not in pain, empty. The light that drove him through Spain and across half of Europe has finally gone out.

He reaches into his coat and pulls out a folded letter. It's addressed to his sister. He's been carrying it since Moscow.

He wrote it by fire light and the burned out remains of a church. Not knowing if he'd survive long enough to send it, he pushes it into your hands. His fingers are black from frostbite.

He says one thing. Tell her I tried. You put the letter inside your coat against your chest.

You try to lift Marcus to his feet. He doesn't move. You try again.

A sergeant behind you grabs your shoulder and pulls you forward. The column can't stop. Stopping means dying.

You look back once. Marcus is already disappearing behind the veil of snow that follows the army like a shroud. You keep walking because walking is the only thing left.

The letter against your chest is the heaviest thing you carry, heavier than the musket, heavier than the pack, heavier than every mile between here and France. Level five, the survivor. 100,000 men returned from Russia.

You are one of them. The number should mean something, but it doesn't. Number stopped meaning anything somewhere around the 15th day of the retreat when you stopped counting the dead because counting them took energy you needed for breathing.

France barely recognizes the army that comes back. Skeleton men in rags, frostbitten, holloweyed, carrying weapons they no longer have the strength to lift. The depot at Lion, where you started, receives the survivors, the same barracks, the same drillard, but the men filling it now look like ghosts wearing uniforms.

Napoleon rebuilds. He always rebuilds. Fresh conscriptions pull in boys younger than you were when the Jearmms came.

16 now 15. The empire is running out of men and lowering the age to compensate. You're a sergeant.

The promotions come fast when most of the men above you are dead. You train the new conscripts and see your own face and theirs from four years ago. Scared, ignorant, wondering what they've walked into.

You fight at Leipig in October 1813, the Battle of Nations. 300,000 allies against less than 200,000 French. For three days, the battle rages across a landscape that stops being geography and becomes just mud and smoke and noise.

The French fight well because the French always fight well. But well isn't enough against those numbers. The army retreats across the Rine.

The empire is shrinking. You're wounded at Leipzig. Shrapnel from a cannon that burst 300 yards away.

metal fragments in your left shoulder and arm. The field surgeon removes what he can with pliers and no anesthesia. You bite a leather strap and try not to scream.

The fragments he can't reach stay inside you. They'll work their way out over years. Small pieces of iron emerging through your skin like your body rejecting the memory of the battle one shard at a time.

The Empire falls in stages after that. Paris falls in March 1814. Napoleon abdicates.

He's exiled to Elba. The war is over. Except it isn't.

He comes back in 1815. The 100 days. The veterans rally because that's what veterans do.

You don't rally. Your shoulder won't let you hold a musket properly anymore. You watch from Lion as the army marches north toward Belgium, toward Waterlue.

The news comes back in pieces. Victory at Lini, then defeat at Waterlue, then surrender, then exile again, this time to St. Helena, an island so remote that even Napoleon can't escape it.

The empire ends not with a siege or a decisive battle, but with a man on a ship sailing toward the edge of the map. You go home. The village looks the same as the day the Jearmms came.

smaller maybe or maybe you're just seeing it with different eyes. Your mother is older. Your father is dead.

Died the winter you were in Russia. Nobody told you because there was no way to reach you. The letter is still inside your coat.

Marcus's letter to his sister. You've carried it across Russia, through Germany, across France. Four years against your chest.

The paper is soft from body heat and wear. The ink has faded, but the words are still legible. You find Marcus's village.

It takes three days of walking. His sister is 16 now. She looks like him.

Same quiet eyes. Same way of standing still and watching before she speaks. You hand her the letter.

She reads it in front of you. She doesn't cry. She just folds it carefully and puts it against her chest, exactly where you kept it.

She asks you to tell her about her brother. You tell her he was brave, that he saved men's lives, that he was the best soldier you ever served with. You don't tell her about the snow.

You don't tell her about the empty eyes or the black fingers or the way he just sat down and stopped. You give her the version of Marcus that lets her sleep at night. Walking home, the road is quiet.

No drums, no marching boots, no artillery in the distance, just bird song and wind and the sound of your own footsteps on a road that isn't leading you toward a battle for the first time in four years. The Empire lasted 14 years. You served for six of them.

The conscript who couldn't march 20 miles became the fuselier who fought at Sterlitz. Became the corporal who taught others how to stay alive. became the veteran who walked out of Russia carrying a dead friend's last words against his heart.

You're 24 years old. You feel 60. The shrapnel in your shoulder aches when it rains.

The faces of men who died come back at night when the house is quiet. The letter is delivered. The war is over.

You're alive. That's supposed to be enough. Most days you're still deciding if it is.

Your life as every rank in Napoleon's army. Level one, the conscript. The jeandarmms arrive in your village on a Tuesday morning in March.

You're 18, maybe 19. The records are imprecise in rural France. They read names from a list.

Yours is among them. You have 3 days to report to the depot in Lion. Your mother cries.

Your father says nothing. just grips your shoulder once and walks away. He survived the Revolutionary Wars.

He knows what you're walking into. The depot is chaos. 2,000 men crammed into barracks built for 500.

Most can't read. Half never been more than 20 km from where they were born. You're issued a uniform that doesn't fit.

The coat is too long. The shoes are too small. Someone wore them before you.

You can see the outline of their feet pressed into the leather. You get a musket that's older than you are. A Charville model 1777.

It weighs 9 lb and fires a ball that could punch through a man at 100 paces, assuming you can hit anything at 100 paces, which you can't. Training lasts six weeks. You learn to march in formation, left, right, left, right for hours until your feet bleed and your legs cramp.

And you stop thinking about the rhythm because the rhythm is just what your body does now. You learn to load and fire. Tear the cartridge with your teeth.

Taste the gunpowder. Pour it down the barrel. Ram the ball.

Prime the pan. Present arms. Fire.

Reload. The drill sergeants want you doing this four times per minute. You manage three on a good day.

You learn the basics of camp life. How to cook over an open fire when there's food to cook. How to sleep in the rain when there's no shelter.

How to march 20 m in a day carrying 60 lbs of equipment. You learn that the army feeds you sporadically, pays you irregularly, and expects you to die efficiently. Then comes the march.

Your regiment moves east toward the Rine. The roads turn to mud under the weight of 30,000 boots. You walk 15, sometimes 20 m per day.

Your feet develop blisters that pop and bleed and develop new blisters underneath. The shoes that were too small become torture devices. Men start discarding equipment, spare shirts, cooking pots, anything that adds weight.

The officers don't stop them. They know what's coming. Your first battle happens before you're ready.

They're all before you're ready. The Austrians are dug in on a ridge. Your regiment forms up in columns.

The drums start. You march forward because the men beside you march forward. Someone near you is praying.

Someone else is crying. You're just trying to keep your legs moving. The Austrians open fire at 300 paces.

Musk balls make a sound when they pass close. a sharp crack like someone snapping a stick next to your ear. The man in front of you drops.

You step over him. You don't look down. At 200 paces, your own line stops and fires.

The smoke is immediate and blinding. You reload mechanically. Tear, pour, ram, prime, fire.

You can't see what you're shooting at. Nobody can. Volifier at this distance is about putting lead in the air and hoping probability does the rest.

The Austrian line breaks first. You advance through the smoke and find the ridge empty except for the bodies. Some are moving, most aren't.

You're ordered to collect musketss from the dead. You find a clean one on an Austrian corporal who doesn't need it anymore. His face is young.

Younger than yours, maybe. That night, you sleep on the ground with your new musket and try not to think about where it came from. The veterans are already asleep.

They've learned to shut down the thinking part and just exist between moments of violence. You'll learn that, too, assuming you survive long enough. Level two, the fuselier.

You survive. 6 months, eight battles, three sieges. enough time for the army to stop seeing you as expendable and start seeing you as experienced.

You march in the second rank now instead of the third. You know how to keep your powder dry in the rain. You know which officers will get you killed through incompetence and which ones might actually keep you alive.

A new kind of warfare is emerging and you're right in the middle of it. The old way of fighting is dying. For centuries, European armies fought in rigid lines.

Stand shouldertosh shoulder, fire in volleys, advance in step. Napoleon is breaking every rule. His armies move faster than anyone thought possible.

They break into divisions that operate independently, converge on targets from multiple directions, isolate and destroy enemy forces before reinforcements arrive. You see it happening at Ostitz. The allies think they have Napoleon trapped.

Their army is larger, their position stronger. They maneuver to cut off what they believe is a desperate retreat. Instead, they're walking into a trap.

Napoleon has hidden an entire core in dead ground. Your division moves at dawn through morning fog so thick you can barely see the man beside you. No drums now, no shouting, just thousands of men moving in practice silence toward a position the enemy doesn't know you're approaching.

When the fog lifts, you're already there. The Allied center collapses in hours. Their army doesn't retreat, it disintegrates.

You capture 20,000 prisoners and watch an empire's military power evaporate in a single afternoon. You march through Vienna and see what victory looks like from the inside. The city is intact.

No siege, no storming. The Austrians surrendered rather than see their capital destroyed. You're billeted in homes that still have food on the tables.

The occupants are terrified but alive. This is the carrot. You've seen the stick.

After astralitz, the Holy Roman Empire ceases to exist. 1,000 years of history erased because the military force that sustained it is gone. You don't fully understand the politics, but you understand that something enormous just ended and you were part of the ending.

Level three, the corporal. You're promoted after the Austrian campaign. Corporal.

Four men under your direct command. It's not leadership exactly. It's more like survival management.

Keep them fed. Keep them moving. Keep them from doing anything stupid enough to get the whole squad killed.

One of your men is a farmer's son from Proce named Marcus. He arrived with the last batch of replacements, ignorant and scared like they all are. But Marcus is different.

He listens. He watches the veterans and copies what works. While other replacements complain about the food and the cold, Marcus is already learning to forage without getting caught.

By the second week, he's the best shot in your squad. By the fourth, he's the one the others look to when you're not around. You teach Marcus what the veterans taught you.

How to sleep while marching. How to tell the difference between artillery fire that's dangerous and artillery fire that's just loud. How to identify the moment a battle turns and the difference between a retreat that's strategic and a route that's fatal.

He absorbs everything with a quiet intensity that reminds you of yourself 6 months ago. Marcus has a sister back home. He talks about her at night when the fires are low and the army is quiet.

She's 12. He sends half his pay to her through a sergeant who has connections with a postal route. He doesn't know if the money arrives.

He sends it anyway because the alternative is admitting that the connection to home is already severed. Spain changes everything. The veterans warned you.

Different terrain, different enemy, different kind of war. In Austria and Prussia, you fought armies. In Spain, you fight a country.

The Spanish regulars are disorganized, but the gorillas are something else entirely. They attack supply lines, ambush patrols, vanish into mountains that look empty until they're shooting at you. For every battle you win, you lose three convoys.

Marcus proves himself in Spain. During a guerilla ambush on your supply column, half your squad panics. Marcus doesn't.

He grabs two men, pushes them behind a wagon, and returns fire with the calm precision of someone who's been doing this for years instead of months. The gorillas withdraw. Marcus has a graze wound on his arm that he wraps with a strip torn from his shirt.

He doesn't mention it again. You recommend Marcus for promotion. He becomes a corporal 3 weeks later.

His own squad, his own four men to keep alive. You see him teaching them the same things you taught him. How to forage, how to sleep in the rain, how to stay alive in a machine that runs on their bodies.

The army is getting larger, but the quality is diluting. Conscription is pulling in men from every corner of the empire. Farm boys from Normandy, clerks from Paris, criminals given the choice between prison and service.

Each campaign burns through men faster than replacement can fill the gaps. You understand something? The replacements don't yet.

This isn't going to end. Each victory creates the conditions for the next war. Napoleon's empire is built on military success, which means it requires continuous military success to survive.

The moment the victories stop, everything unravels. But that's strategic thinking. Your world is tactical.

The next march, the next battle, the next winter that needs surviving. Level four, the veteran. Russia.

The word passes through the ranks like a disease. 600,000 men marching east in June of 1812. The Grand Arme, the largest military force Europe has seen since the Romans.

You're part of it. Marcus is beside you. His squad marching next to yours like they've done for two years across Spain, Portugal, and half of southern France.

The march into Russia is wrong from the start. Not the fighting. There isn't any fighting at first.

The Russians retreat. They burn their own villages. They poison their own wells.

They destroy their own food stores. The army marches into a void that swallows everything. The supply lines stretch thin, then break.

Food that was supposed to arrive from depots 300 miles back never comes. Horses die by the thousands. Men start eating horse meat raw because there's no wood dry enough to burn.

You reach Moscow in September. The city is empty. Not abandoned.

Emptied. The Russians left and took everything. Then they set fire to what remained.

You march into a burning capital that offers nothing except shelter from the wind. Napoleon waits for a surrender that never comes. Thesar doesn't negotiate.

He doesn't need to. Winter is his ally, and it's already coming. The retreat begins in October.

600,000 men went east. The road back west becomes a graveyard. The temperature drops to minus30.

Men freeze standing up. They stop walking and simply solidify where they stand. Becoming landmarks for the men behind them.

Your boots disintegrate. You wrap your feet in strips of cloth torn from dead men's uniforms. The cloth freezes to your skin.

Marcus keeps your squad together through sheer will. When men fall behind, Marcus goes back for them. When rations run out, Marcus finds something.

A frozen potato in an abandoned field, a dead horse that hasn't been completely stripped. He distributes everything evenly, taking the smallest portion himself every time. You cross the Barazina River in late November.

The bridges are improvised. Men fall into water so cold it stops their hearts in seconds. You cross by stepping on the bodies of men who fell before you.

The engineering corps stands waist deep in the freezing water holding the bridge planks together. Most of them will die within hours. They know this.

They do it anyway. On the other side of the river, Marcus sits down. just sits down in the snow and doesn't get back up.

You pull at his arm, you shout his name, he looks up at you and his eyes are different. Not scared, not in pain, empty. The light that drove him through Spain and across half of Europe has finally gone out.

He reaches into his coat and pulls out a folded letter. It's addressed to his sister. He's been carrying it since Moscow.

He wrote it by fire light and the burned out remains of a church. Not knowing if he'd survive long enough to send it, he pushes it into your hands. His fingers are black from frostbite.

He says one thing. Tell her I tried. You put the letter inside your coat against your chest.

You try to lift Marcus to his feet. He doesn't move. You try again.

A sergeant behind you grabs your shoulder and pulls you forward. The column can't stop. Stopping means dying.

You look back once. Marcus is already disappearing behind the veil of snow that follows the army like a shroud. You keep walking because walking is the only thing left.

The letter against your chest is the heaviest thing you carry, heavier than the musket, heavier than the pack, heavier than every mile between here and France. Level five, the survivor. 100,000 men returned from Russia.

You are one of them. The number should mean something, but it doesn't. Number stopped meaning anything somewhere around the 15th day of the retreat when you stopped counting the dead because counting them took energy you needed for breathing.

France barely recognizes the army that comes back. Skeleton men in rags, frostbitten, holloweyed, carrying weapons they no longer have the strength to lift. The depot at Lion, where you started, receives the survivors, the same barracks, the same drillard, but the men filling it now look like ghosts wearing uniforms.

Napoleon rebuilds. He always rebuilds. Fresh conscriptions pull in boys younger than you were when the Jearmms came.

16 now 15. The empire is running out of men and lowering the age to compensate. You're a sergeant.

The promotions come fast when most of the men above you are dead. You train the new conscripts and see your own face and theirs from four years ago. Scared, ignorant, wondering what they've walked into.

You fight at Leipig in October 1813, the Battle of Nations. 300,000 allies against less than 200,000 French. For three days, the battle rages across a landscape that stops being geography and becomes just mud and smoke and noise.

The French fight well because the French always fight well. But well isn't enough against those numbers. The army retreats across the Rine.

The empire is shrinking. You're wounded at Leipzig. Shrapnel from a cannon that burst 300 yards away.

metal fragments in your left shoulder and arm. The field surgeon removes what he can with pliers and no anesthesia. You bite a leather strap and try not to scream.

The fragments he can't reach stay inside you. They'll work their way out over years. Small pieces of iron emerging through your skin like your body rejecting the memory of the battle one shard at a time.

The Empire falls in stages after that. Paris falls in March 1814. Napoleon abdicates.

He's exiled to Elba. The war is over. Except it isn't.

He comes back in 1815. The 100 days. The veterans rally because that's what veterans do.

You don't rally. Your shoulder won't let you hold a musket properly anymore. You watch from Lion as the army marches north toward Belgium, toward Waterlue.

The news comes back in pieces. Victory at Lini, then defeat at Waterlue, then surrender, then exile again, this time to St. Helena, an island so remote that even Napoleon can't escape it.

The empire ends not with a siege or a decisive battle, but with a man on a ship sailing toward the edge of the map. You go home. The village looks the same as the day the Jearmms came.

smaller maybe or maybe you're just seeing it with different eyes. Your mother is older. Your father is dead.

Died the winter you were in Russia. Nobody told you because there was no way to reach you. The letter is still inside your coat.

Marcus's letter to his sister. You've carried it across Russia, through Germany, across France. Four years against your chest.

The paper is soft from body heat and wear. The ink has faded, but the words are still legible. You find Marcus's village.

It takes three days of walking. His sister is 16 now. She looks like him.

Same quiet eyes. Same way of standing still and watching before she speaks. You hand her the letter.

She reads it in front of you. She doesn't cry. She just folds it carefully and puts it against her chest, exactly where you kept it.

She asks you to tell her about her brother. You tell her he was brave, that he saved men's lives, that he was the best soldier you ever served with. You don't tell her about the snow.

You don't tell her about the empty eyes or the black fingers or the way he just sat down and stopped. You give her the version of Marcus that lets her sleep at night. Walking home, the road is quiet.

No drums, no marching boots, no artillery in the distance, just bird song and wind and the sound of your own footsteps on a road that isn't leading you toward a battle for the first time in four years. The Empire lasted 14 years. You served for six of them.

The conscript who couldn't march 20 miles became the fuselier who fought at Sterlitz. Became the corporal who taught others how to stay alive. became the veteran who walked out of Russia carrying a dead friend's last words against his heart.

You're 24 years old. You feel 60. The shrapnel in your shoulder aches when it rains.

The faces of men who died come back at night when the house is quiet. The letter is delivered. The war is over.

You're alive. That's supposed to be enough. Most days you're still deciding if it is.