The Battle of Berezina functions in this passage as a past a person chooses and then must live up to. The retired soldier’s identity as a hero of Napoleon’s retreat from Russia is neither a deterministic force acting upon him nor a detached memory: it arises through his present commitment to the Emperor’s return, becomes visible to others, and helps govern the choices that keep him impoverished and embittered.

The Battle as a Chosen Past

The soldier is retired under the Bourbon Restoration, when Louis XVIII’s government and its new customs offer a political order he refuses to join. He continues to hope for Napoleon’s triumphal return and even conspires to hasten it. In choosing those commitments—and choosing retirement rather than active service—he chooses a past in which he is a hero of the retreat from Russia, associated with the crossing at Berezina.

The example establishes that the past does not act before it is taken up by a present project. A different soldier, choosing to go over to the new government, would not have chosen the same past. Berezina therefore matters here less as a recounted battle than as the historical identity through which the retired soldier understands and directs his life.

From Identity to Conduct

The soldier’s present circumstances give that identity its force. He lives in almost indecent poverty, is embittered, and longs for the Emperor’s return; the account connects this condition to the past he has chosen. Once he constitutes himself as the soldier of the Empire, his conduct realizes that past. Choosing it and making it real through behavior are not separate stages.

His past also takes on an intersubjective form. He tries to make his former glory an objective reality in the eyes of others, including officials who react to the danger represented by old soldiers. Their treatment of him helps place the imperial identity into the public world, where it is exposed to other people’s evaluation rather than remaining his private recollection.

The Burden of the Past

The soldier then acts to prove himself worthy of the identity he has claimed. He remains intransigent and thereby loses every chance of receiving a pension: he cannot, within this chosen identity, be unworthy of his past. The commitment that sustains his hope thus also narrows his practical prospects and compounds his present misery and failure.

This is the passage’s reversal: a person freely chooses a past in light of an end, but the past, once embodied in action and exposed to others, imposes itself upon him. It does not possess an independent power that determines him. Rather, it is the materialized form of the end he has made his own, embedded in the shared world and entangled with other people’s judgments. Berezina becomes at once a source of the soldier’s self-understanding and a standard that consumes his freedom of response.