NAPOLEON: EMPEROR OF FRANCE, MASTER OF EUROPE.
1812. On the eve of the invasion of Russia, half-French, half-English Matthieu Carrey finds himself in the ranks of Napoleon's five hundred thousand strong army. With Tsar Alexander seemingly ill-prepared, a French victory seems certain. The Grande Armee will obliterate everything in its path.
Carrey's purpose is less clear. Blackmailed into becoming a spy in the emperor's army, he hopes to follow his lover, a French actress who has gone to work in the Moscow theatre.
Food and fodder grow scarce. The countryside teems with Cossacks, Russia's fearsome light cavalry, forcing imperial messenger Carrey to run a lethal daily gauntlet. Closer to home, he is increasingly pressured by his English handler to pass information to the Russians, and receives endless challenges to duel from another enemy, an arrogant cavalry officer.
On the battlefield of Borodino, Carrey undergoes a baptism of fire. Caught up in the maelstrom of war, threatened by cannon and musket fire, he is thrown into the midst of the bitter hand-to-hand fighting that sees tens of thousands of men slain by the day's end.
Days later, the army reaches Moscow. Carrey and his comrades feast and make merry in the abandoned city. He embarks on a frantic search for his actress, but after a month, the order to withdraw is finally given. Temperatures are plummeting, and the Russians circling like hungry wolves.
Hundreds of miles lie between Carrey and the French border.
To reach it seems utterly impossible.
