months, where they were every moment fighting death from hunger and
cold, when half the army perished in a single month - it is of this
period of the campaign that the historians tell us how Miloradovich
should have made a flank march to such and such a place, Tormasov to
another place, and Chichagov should have crossed (more than
knee-deep in snow) to somewhere else, and how so-and-so "routed" and
"cut off" the French and so on and so on.
The Russians, half of whom died, did all that could and should
have been done to attain an end worthy of the nation, and they are not
to blame because other Russians, sitting in warm rooms, proposed
that they should do what was impossible.
All that strange contradiction now difficult to understand between
the facts and the historical accounts only arises because the
historians dealing with the matter have written the history of the
beautiful words and sentiments of various generals, and not the
history of the events.
To them the words of Miloradovich seem very interesting, and so do
their surmises and the rewards this or that general received; but
the question of those fifty thousand men who were left in hospitals
and in graves does not even interest them, for it does not come within
the range of their investigation.
Yet one need only discard the study of the reports and general plans
and consider the movement of those hundreds of thousands of men who
took a direct part in the events, and all the questions that seemed
insoluble easily and simply receive an immediate and certain solution.
The aim of cutting off Napoleon and his army never existed except in
the imaginations of a dozen people. It could not exist because it
was senseless and unattainable.
The people had a single aim: to free their land from invasion.
That aim was attained in the first place of itself, as the French
ran away, and so it was only necessary not to stop their flight.
Secondly it was attained by the guerrilla warfare which was destroying
the French, and thirdly by the fact that a large Russian army was
following the French, ready to use its strength in case their movement
stopped.
The Russian army had to act like a whip to a running animal. And the
experienced driver knew it was better to hold the whip raised as a
menace than to strike the running animal on the head.
BOOK FIFTEEN: 1812 - 13
CHAPTER I
When seeing a dying animal a man feels a sense of horror:
substance similar to his own is perishing before his eyes. But when it
is a beloved and intimate human being that is dying, besides this
horror at the extinction of life there is a severance, a spiritual
wound, which like a physical wound is sometimes fatal and sometimes
heals, but always aches and shrinks at any external irritating touch.
After Prince Andrew's death Natasha and Princess Mary alike felt
this. Drooping in spirit and closing their eyes before the menacing
cloud of death that overhung them, they dared not look life in the
face. They carefully guarded their open wounds from any rough and
painful contact. Everything: a carriage passing rapidly in the street,
a summons to dinner, the maid's inquiry what dress to prepare, or
worse still any word of insincere or feeble sympathy, seemed an
insult, painfully irritated the wound, interrupting that necessary
quiet in which they both tried to listen to the stern and dreadful
choir that still resounded in their imagination, and hindered their
gazing into those mysterious limitless vistas that for an instant
had opened out before them.
Only when alone together were they free from such outrage and
pain. They spoke little even to one another, and when they did it
was of very unimportant matters.
Both avoided any allusion to the future. To admit the possibility of
a future seemed to them to insult his memory. Still more carefully did
they avoid anything relating to him who was dead. It seemed to them
that what they had lived through and experienced could not be
expressed in words, and that any reference to the details of his
life infringed the majesty and sacredness of the mystery that had been
accomplished before their eyes.
Continued abstention from speech, and constant avoidance of
everything that might lead up to the subject - this halting on all
sides at the boundary of what they might not mention - brought before
their minds with still greater purity and clearness what they were
both feeling.
But pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete
joy. Princess Mary, in her position as absolute and independent
arbiter of her own fate and guardian and instructor of her nephew, was
the first to be called back to life from that realm of sorrow in which
she had dwelt for the first fortnight. She received letters from her
relations to which she had to reply; the room in which little Nicholas
had been put was damp and he began to cough; Alpatych came to
Yaroslavl with reports on the state of their affairs and with advice
and suggestions that they should return to Moscow to the house on
the Vozdvizhenka Street, which had remained uninjured and needed
only slight repairs. Life did not stand still and it was necessary
to live. Hard as it was for Princess Mary to emerge from the realm
of secluded contemplation in which she had lived till then, and
sorry and almost ashamed as she felt to leave Natasha alone, yet the
cares of life demanded her attention and she involuntarily yielded
to them. She went through the accounts with Alpatych, conferred with
Dessalles about her nephew, and gave orders and made preparations
for the journey to Moscow.
Natasha remained alone and, from the time Princess Mary began making
preparations for departure, held aloof from her too.
Princess Mary asked the countess to let Natasha go with her to
Moscow, and both parents gladly accepted this offer, for they saw
their daughter losing strength every day and thought that a change
of scene and the advice of Moscow doctors would be good for her.
"I am not going anywhere," Natasha replied when this was proposed to
her. "Do please just leave me alone!" And she ran out of the room,
with difficulty refraining from tears of vexation and irritation
rather than of sorrow.
After she felt herself deserted by Princes Mary and alone in her
grief, Natasha spent most of the time in her room by herself,
sitting huddled up feet and all in the corner of the sofa, tearing and
twisting something with her slender nervous fingers and gazing
intently and fixedly at whatever her eyes chanced to fall on. This
solitude exhausted and tormented her but she was in absolute need of
it. As soon as anyone entered she got up quickly, changed her position
and expression, and picked up a book or some sewing, evidently waiting
impatiently for the intruder to go.
She felt all the time as if she might at any moment penetrate that
on which - with a terrible questioning too great for her strength-
her spiritual gaze was fixed.
One day toward the end of December Natasha, pale and thin, dressed
in a black woolen gown, her plaited hair negligently twisted into a
knot, was crouched feet and all in the corner of her sofa, nervously
crumpling and smoothing out the end of her sash while she looked at
a corner of the door.
She was gazing in the direction in which he had gone - to the other
side of life. And that other side of life, of which she had never
before thought and which had formerly seemed to her so far away and
improbable, was now nearer and more akin and more comprehensible
than this side of life, where everything was either emptiness and
desolation or suffering and indignity.
She was gazing where she knew him to be; but she could not imagine
him otherwise than as he had been here. She now saw him again as he
had been at Mytishchi, at Troitsa, and at Yaroslavl.
She saw his face, heard his voice, repeated his words and her own,
and sometimes devised other words they might have spoken.
There he is lying back in an armchair in his velvet cloak, leaning
his head on his thin pale hand. His chest is dreadfully hollow and his
shoulders raised. His lips are firmly closed, his eyes glitter, and
a wrinkle comes and goes on his pale forehead. One of his legs
twitches just perceptibly, but rapidly. Natasha knows that he is
struggling with terrible pain. "What is that pain like? Why does he
have that pain? What does he feel? How does it hurt him?" thought
Natasha. He noticed her watching him, raised his eyes, and began to
speak seriously:
"One thing would be terrible," said he: "to bind oneself forever
to a suffering man. It would be continual torture." And he looked
searchingly at her. Natasha as usual answered before she had time to
think what she would say. She said: "This can't go on - it won't. You
will get well - quite well."
She now saw him from the commencement of that scene and relived what
she had then felt. She recalled his long sad and severe look at
those words and understood the meaning of the rebuke and despair in
that protracted gaze.
"I agreed," Natasha now said to herself, "that it would be
dreadful if he always continued to suffer. I said it then only because
it would have been dreadful for him, but he understood it differently.
He thought it would be dreadful for me. He then still wished to live
and feared death. And I said it so awkwardly and stupidly! I did not
say what I meant. I thought quite differently. Had I said what I
thought, I should have said: even if he had to go on dying, to die
continually before my eyes, I should have been happy compared with
what I am now. Now there is nothing... nobody. Did he know that? No,
he did not and never will know it. And now it will never, never be
possible to put it right." And now he again seemed to be saying the
same words to her, only in her imagination Natasha this time gave
him a different answer. She stopped him and said: "Terrible for you,
but not for me! You know that for me there is nothing in life but you,
and to suffer with you is the greatest happiness for me," and he
took her hand and pressed it as he had pressed it that terrible
evening four days before his death. And in her imagination she said
other tender and loving words which she might have said then but
only spoke now: "I love thee!... thee! I love, love..." she said,
convulsively pressing her hands and setting her teeth with a desperate
effort...
She was overcome by sweet sorrow and tears were already rising in
her eyes; then she suddenly asked herself to whom she was saying this.
Again everything was shrouded in hard, dry perplexity, and again
with a strained frown she peered toward the world where he was. And
now, now it seemed to her she was penetrating the mystery.... But at
the instant when it seemed that the incomprehensible was revealing
itself to her a loud rattle of the door handle struck painfully on her
ears. Dunyasha, her maid, entered the room quickly and abruptly with a
frightened look on her face and showing no concern for her mistress.
"Come to your Papa at once, please!" said she with a strange,
excited look. "A misfortune... about Peter Ilynich... a letter," she
finished with a sob.
CHAPTER II
Besides a feeling of aloofness from everybody Natasha was feeling
a special estrangement from the members of her own family. All of
them - her father, mother, and Sonya - were so near to her, so familiar,
so commonplace, that all their words and feelings seemed an insult
to the world in which she had been living of late, and she felt not
merely indifferent to them but regarded them with hostility. She heard
Dunyasha's words about Peter Ilynich and a misfortune, but did not
grasp them.
"What misfortune? What misfortune can happen to them? They just live
their own old, quiet, and commonplace life," thought Natasha.
As she entered the ballroom her father was hurriedly coming out of
her mother's room. His face was puckered up and wet with tears. He had
evidently run out of that room to give vent to the sobs that were
choking him. When he saw Natasha he waved his arms despairingly and
burst into convulsively painful sobs that distorted his soft round
face.
"Pe... Petya... Go, go, she... is calling..." and weeping like a
child and quickly shuffling on his feeble legs to a chair, he almost
fell into it, covering his face with his hands.
Suddenly an electric shock seemed to run through Natasha's whole
being. Terrible anguish struck her heart, she felt a dreadful ache
as if something was being torn inside her and she were dying. But
the pain was immediately followed by a feeling of release from the
oppressive constraint that had prevented her taking part in life.
The sight of her father, the terribly wild cries of her mother that
she heard through the door, made her immediately forget herself and
her own grief.
She ran to her father, but he feebly waved his arm, pointing to
her mother's door. Princess Mary, pale and with quivering chin, came
out from that room and taking Natasha by the arm said something to
her. Natasha neither saw nor heard her. She went in with rapid
steps, pausing at the door for an instant as if struggling with
herself, and then ran to her mother.
The countess was lying in an armchair in a strange and awkward
position, stretching out and beating her head against the wall.
Sonya and the maids were holding her arms.
"Natasha! Natasha!..." cried the countess. "It's not true... it's
not true... He's lying... Natasha!" she shrieked, pushing those around
her away. "Go away, all of you; it's not true! Killed!... ha, ha,
ha!... It's not true!"
Natasha put one knee on the armchair, stooped over her mother,
embraced her, and with unexpected strength raised her, turned her face
toward herself, and clung to her.
"Mummy!... darling!... I am here, my dearest Mummy," she kept on
whispering, not pausing an instant.
She did not let go of her mother but struggled tenderly with her,
demanded a pillow and hot water, and unfastened and tore open her
mother's dress.
"My dearest darling... Mummy, my precious!..." she whispered
incessantly, kissing her head, her hands, her face, and feeling her
own irrepressible and streaming tears tickling her nose and cheeks.
The countess pressed her daughter's hand, closed her eyes, and
became quiet for a moment. Suddenly she sat up with unaccustomed
swiftness, glanced vacantly around her, and seeing Natasha began to
press her daughter's head with all her strength. Then she turned
toward her daughter's face which was wincing with pain and gazed
long at it.
"Natasha, you love me?" she said in a soft trustful whisper.
"Natasha, you would not deceive me? You'll tell me the whole truth?"
Natasha looked at her with eyes full of tears and in her look
there was nothing but love and an entreaty for forgiveness.
"My darling Mummy!" she repeated, straining all the power of her
love to find some way of taking on herself the excess of grief that
crushed her mother.
And again in a futile struggle with reality her mother, refusing
to believe that she could live when her beloved boy was killed in
the bloom of life, escaped from reality into a world of delirium.
Natasha did not remember how that day passed nor that night, nor the
next day and night. She did not sleep and did not leave her mother.
Her persevering and patient love seemed completely to surround the
countess every moment, not explaining or consoling, but recalling
her to life.
During the third night the countess kept very quiet for a few
minutes, and Natasha rested her head on the arm of her chair and
closed her eyes, but opened them again on hearing the bedstead
creak. The countess was sitting up in bed and speaking softly.
"How glad I am you have come. You are tired. Won't you have some
tea?" Natasha went up to her. "You have improved in looks and grown
more manly," continued the countess, taking her daughter's hand.
"Mamma! What are you saying..."
"Natasha, he is no more, no more!"
And embracing her daughter, the countess began to weep for the first
time.
CHAPTER III
Princess Mary postponed her departure. Sonya and the count tried
to replace Natasha but could not. They saw that she alone was able
to restrain her mother from unreasoning despair. For three weeks
Natasha remained constantly at her mother's side, sleeping on a lounge
chair in her room, making her eat and drink, and talking to her
incessantly because the mere sound of her tender, caressing tones
soothed her mother.
The mother's wounded spirit could not heal. Petya's
death had torn from her half her life. When the news of Petya's
death had come she had been a fresh and vigorous woman of fifty, but a
month later she left her room a listless old woman taking no
interest in life. But the same blow that almost killed the countess,
this second blow, restored Natasha to life.
A spiritual wound produced by a rending of the spiritual body is
like a physical wound and, strange as it may seem, just as a deep
wound may heal and its edges join, physical and spiritual wounds alike
can yet heal completely only as the result of a vital force from
within.
Natasha's wound healed in that way. She thought her life was
ended, but her love for her mother unexpectedly showed her that the
essence of life - love - was still active within her. Love awoke and
so did life.
Prince Andrew's last days had bound Princess Mary and Natasha
together; this new sorrow brought them still closer to one another.
Princess Mary put off her departure, and for three weeks looked
after Natasha as if she had been a sick child. The last weeks passed
in her mother's bedroom had strained Natasha's physical strength.
One afternoon noticing Natasha shivering with fever, Princess Mary
took her to her own room and made her lie down on the bed. Natasha lay
down, but when Princess Mary had drawn the blinds and was going away
she called her back.
"I don't want to sleep, Mary, sit by me a little."
"You are tired - try to sleep."
"No, no. Why did you bring me away? She will be asking for me."
"She is much better. She spoke so well today," said Princess Mary.
Natasha lay on the bed and in the semidarkness of the room scanned
Princess Mary's face.
"Is she like him?" thought Natasha. "Yes, like and yet not like. But
she is quite original, strange, new, and unknown. And she loves me.
What is in her heart? All that is good. But how? What is her mind
like? What does she think about me? Yes, she is splendid!"
"Mary," she said timidly, drawing Princess Mary's hand to herself,
"Mary, you mustn't think me wicked. No? Mary darling, how I love
you! Let us be quite, quite friends."
And Natasha, embracing her, began kissing her face and hands, making
Princess Mary feel shy but happy by this demonstration of her
feelings.
From that day a tender and passionate friendship such as exists only
between women was established between Princess Mary and Natasha.
They were continually kissing and saying tender things to one
another and spent most of their time together. When one went out the
other became restless and hastened to rejoin her. Together they felt
more in harmony with one another than either of them felt with herself
when alone. A feeling stronger than friendship sprang up between them;
an exclusive feeling of life being possible only in each other's
presence.
Sometimes they were silent for hours; sometimes after they were
already in bed they would begin talking and go on till morning. They
spoke most of what was long past. Princess Mary spoke of her
childhood, of her mother, her father, and her daydreams; and
Natasha, who with a passive lack of understanding had formerly
turned away from that life of devotion, submission, and the poetry
of Christian self-sacrifice, now feeling herself bound to Princess
Mary by affection, learned to love her past too and to understand a
side of life previously incomprehensible to her. She did not think
of applying submission and self-abnegation to her own life, for she
was accustomed to seek other joys, but she understood and loved in
another those previously incomprehensible virtues. For Princess
Mary, listening to Natasha's tales of childhood and early youth, there
also opened out a new and hitherto uncomprehended side of life: belief
in life and its enjoyment.
Just as before, they never mentioned him so as not to lower (as they
thought) their exalted feelings by words; but this silence about him
had the effect of making them gradually begin to forget him without
being conscious of it.
Natasha had grown thin and pale and physically so weak that they all
talked about her health, and this pleased her. But sometimes she was
suddenly overcome by fear not only of death but of sickness, weakness,
and loss of good looks, and involuntarily she examined her bare arm
carefully, surprised at its thinness, and in the morning noticed her
drawn and, as it seemed to her, piteous face in her glass. It seemed
to her that things must be so, and yet it was dreadfully sad.
One day she went quickly upstairs and found herself out of breath.
Unconsciously she immediately invented a reason for going down, and
then, testing her strength, ran upstairs again, observing the result.
Another time when she called Dunyasha her voice trembled, so she
called again - though she could hear Dunyasha coming - called her in the
deep chest tones in which she had been wont to sing, sing, and
listened attentively to herself.
She did not know and would not have believed it, but beneath the
layer of slime that covered her soul and seemed to her impenetrable,
delicate young shoots of grass were already sprouting, which taking
root would so cover with their living verdure the grief that weighed
her down that it would soon no longer be seen or noticed. The wound
had begun to heal from within.
At the end of January Princess Mary left for Moscow, and the count
insisted on Natasha's going with her to consult the doctors.
CHAPTER IV
After the encounter at Vyazma, where Kutuzov had been unable to hold
back his troops in their anxiety to overwhelm and cut off the enemy
and so on, the farther movement of the fleeing French, and of the
Russians who pursued them, continued as far as Krasnoe without a
battle. The flight was so rapid that the Russian army pursuing the
French could not keep up with them; cavalry and artillery horses broke
down, and the information received of the movements of the French
was never reliable.
The men in the Russian army were so worn out by this continuous
marching at the rate of twenty-seven miles a day that they could not
go any faster.
To realize the degree of exhaustion of the Russian army it is only
necessary to grasp clearly the meaning of the fact that, while not
losing more than five thousand killed and wounded after Tarutino and
less than a hundred prisoners, the Russian army which left that
place a hundred thousand strong reached Krasnoe with only fifty
thousand.
The rapidity of the Russian pursuit was just as destructive to our
army as the flight of the French was to theirs. The only difference
was that the Russian army moved voluntarily, with no such threat of
destruction as hung over the French, and that the sick Frenchmen
were left behind in enemy hands while the sick Russians left behind
were among their own people. The chief cause of the wastage of
Napoleon's army was the rapidity of its movement, and a convincing
proof of this is the corresponding decrease of the Russian army.
Kutuzov as far as was in his power, instead of trying to check the
movement of the French as was desired in Petersburg and by the Russian
army generals, directed his whole activity here, as he had done at
Tarutino and Vyazma, to hastening it on while easing the movement of
our army.
But besides this, since the exhaustion and enormous diminution of
the army caused by the rapidity of the advance had become evident,
another reason for slackening the pace and delaying presented itself
to Kutuzov. The aim of the Russian army was to pursue the French.
The road the French would take was unknown, and so the closer our
troops trod on their heels the greater distance they had to cover.
Only by following at some distance could one cut across the zigzag
path of the French. All the artful maneuvers suggested by our generals
meant fresh movements of the army and a lengthening of its marches,
whereas the only reasonable aim was to shorten those marches. To
that end Kutuzov's activity was directed during the whole campaign
from Moscow to Vilna - not casually or intermittently but so
consistently that he never once deviated from it.
Kutuzov felt and knew - not by reasoning or science but with the
whole of his Russian being - what every Russian soldier felt: that
the French were beaten, that the enemy was flying and must be driven
out; but at the same time he like the soldiers realized all the
hardship of this march, the rapidity of which was unparalleled for
such a time of the year.
But to the generals, especially the foreign ones in the Russian
army, who wished to distinguish themselves, to astonish somebody,
and for some reason to capture a king or a duke - it seemed that now-
when any battle must be horrible and senseless - was the very time to
fight and conquer somebody. Kutuzov merely shrugged his shoulders when
one after another they presented projects of maneuvers to be made with
those soldiers - ill-shod, insufficiently clad, and half starved - who
within a month and without fighting a battle had dwindled to half
their number, and who at the best if the flight continued would have
to go a greater distance than they had already traversed, before
they reached the frontier.
This longing to distinguish themselves, to maneuver, to overthrow,
and to cut off showed itself particularly whenever the Russians
stumbled on the French army.
So it was at Krasnoe, where they expected to find one of the three
French columns and stumbled instead on Napoleon himself with sixteen
thousand men. Despite all Kutuzov's efforts to avoid that ruinous
encounter and to preserve his troops, the massacre of the broken mob
of French soldiers by worn-out Russians continued at Krasnoe for three
days.
Toll wrote a disposition: "The first column will march to so and
so," etc. And as usual nothing happened in accord with the
disposition. Prince Eugene of Wurttemberg fired from a hill over the
French crowds that were running past, and demanded reinforcements
which did not arrive. The French, avoiding the Russians, dispersed and
hid themselves in the forest by night, making their way round as
best they could, and continued their flight.
Miloradovich, who said he did not want to know anything about the
commissariat affairs of his detachment, and could never be found
when he was wanted - that chevalier sans peur et sans reproche* as he
styled himself - who was fond of parleys with the French, sent envoys
demanding their surrender, wasted time, and did not do what he was
ordered to do.
*Knight without fear and without reproach.
"I give you that column, lads," he said, riding up to the troops and
pointing out the French to the cavalry.
And the cavalry, with spurs and sabers urging on horses that could
scarcely move, trotted with much effort to the column presented to
them - that is to say, to a crowd of Frenchmen stark with cold,
frost-bitten, and starving - and the column that had been presented
to them threw down its arms and surrendered as it had long been
anxious to do.
At Krasnoe they took twenty-six thousand prisoners, several
hundred cannon, and a stick called a "marshal's staff," and disputed
as to who had distinguished himself and were pleased with their
achievement - though they much regretted not having taken Napoleon,
or at least a marshal or a hero of some sort, and reproached one
another and especially Kutuzov for having failed to do so.
These men, carried away by their passions, were but blind tools of
the most melancholy law of necessity, but considered themselves heroes
and imagined that they were accomplishing a most noble and honorable
deed. They blamed Kutuzov and said that from the very beginning of the
campaign he had prevented their vanquishing Napoleon, that he
thought nothing but satisfying his passions and would not advance from
the Linen Factories because he was comfortable there, that at
Krasnoe he checked the advance because on learning that Napoleon was
there he had quite lost his head, and that it was probable that he had
an understanding with Napoleon and had been bribed by him, and so
on, and so on.
Not only did his contemporaries, carried away by their passions,
talk in this way, but posterity and history have acclaimed Napoleon as
grand, while Kutuzov is described by foreigners as a crafty,
dissolute, weak old courtier, and by Russians as something indefinite-
a sort of puppet useful only because he had a Russian name.
CHAPTER V
In 1812 and 1813 Kutuzov was openly accused of blundering. The
Emperor was dissatisfied with him. And in a history recently written
by order of the Highest Authorities it is said that Kutuzov was a
cunning court liar, frightened of the name of Napoleon, and that by
his blunders at Krasnoe and the Berezina he deprived the Russian
army of the glory of complete victory over the French.*
*History of the year 1812. The character of Kutuzov and
reflections on the unsatisfactory results of the battles at Krasnoe,
by Bogdanovich.
Such is the fate not of great men (grands hommes) whom the Russian
mind does not acknowledge, but of those rare and always solitary
individuals who, discerning the will of Providence, submit their
personal will to it. The hatred and contempt of the crowd punish
such men for discerning the higher laws.
For Russian historians, strange and terrible to say, Napoleon-
that most insignificant tool of history who never anywhere, even in
exile, showed human dignity - Napoleon is the object of adulation and
enthusiasm; he is grand. But Kutuzov - the man who from the beginning
to the end of his activity in 1812, never once swerving by word or
deed from Borodino to Vilna, presented an example exceptional in
history of self-sacrifice and a present consciousness of the future
importance of what was happening - Kutuzov seems to them something
indefinite and pitiful, and when speaking of him and of the year
1812 they always seem a little ashamed.
And yet it is difficult to imagine an historical character whose
activity was so unswervingly directed to a single aim; and it would be
difficult to imagine any aim more worthy or more consonant with the
will of the whole people. Still more difficult would it be to find
an instance in history of the aim of an historical personage being
so completely accomplished as that to which all Kutuzov's efforts were
directed in 1812.
Kutuzov never talked of "forty centuries looking down from the
Pyramids," of the sacrifices he offered for the fatherland, or of what
he intended to accomplish or had accomplished; in general he said
nothing about himself, adopted no prose, always appeared to be the
simplest and most ordinary of men, and said the simplest and most
ordinary things. He wrote letters to his daughters and to Madame de
Stael, read novels, liked the society of pretty women, jested with
generals, officers, and soldiers, and never contradicted those who
tried to prove anything to him. When Count Rostopchin at the Yauza
bridge galloped up to Kutuzov with personal reproaches for having
caused the destruction of Moscow, and said: "How was it you promised
not to abandon Moscow without a battle?" Kutuzov replied: "And I shall
not abandon Moscow without a battle," though Moscow was then already
abandoned. When Arakcheev, coming to him from the Emperor, said that
Ermolov ought to be appointed chief of the artillery, Kutuzov replied:
"Yes, I was just saying so myself," though a moment before he had said
quite the contrary. What did it matter to him - who then alone amid a
senseless crowd understood the whole tremendous significance of what
was happening - what did it matter to him whether Rostopchin attributed
the calamities of Moscow to him or to himself? Still less could it
matter to him who was appointed chief of the artillery.
Not merely in these cases but continually did that old man - who by
experience of life had reached the conviction that thoughts and the
words serving as their expression are not what move people - use
quite meaningless words that happened to enter his head.
But that man, so heedless of his words, did not once during the
whole time of his activity utter one word inconsistent with the single
aim toward which he moved throughout the whole war. Obviously in spite
of himself, in very diverse circumstances, he repeatedly expressed his
real thoughts with the bitter conviction that he would not be
understood. Beginning with the battle of Borodino, from which time his
disagreement with those about him began, he alone said that the battle
of Borodino was a victory, and repeated this both verbally and in
his dispatches and reports up to the time of his death. He alone
said that the loss of Moscow is not the loss of Russia. In reply to
Lauriston's proposal of peace, he said: There can be no peace, for
such is the people's will. He alone during the retreat of the French
said that all our maneuvers are useless, everything is being
accomplished of itself better than we could desire; that the enemy
must be offered "a golden bridge"; that neither the Tarutino, the
Vyazma, nor the Krasnoe battles were necessary; that we must keep some
force to reach the frontier with, and that he would not sacrifice a
single Russian for ten Frenchmen.
And this courtier, as he is described to us, who lies to Arakcheev
to please the Emperor, he alone - incurring thereby the Emperor's
displeasure - said in Vilna that to carry the war beyond the frontier
is useless and harmful.
Nor do words alone prove that only he understood the meaning of
the events. His actions - without the smallest deviation - were all
directed to one and the same threefold end: (1) to brace all his
strength for conflict with the French, (2) to defeat them, and (3)
to drive them out of Russia, minimizing as far as possible the
sufferings of our people and of our army.
This procrastinator Kutuzov, whose motto was "Patience and Time,"
this enemy of decisive action, gave battle at Borodino, investing
the preparations for it with unparalleled solemnity. This Kutuzov
who before the battle of Austerlitz began said that it would be
lost, he alone, in contradiction to everyone else, declared till his
death that Borodino was a victory, despite the assurance of generals
that the battle was lost and despite the fact that for an army to have
to retire after winning a battle was unprecedented. He alone during
the whole retreat insisted that battles, which were useless then,
should not be fought, and that a new war should not be begun nor the
frontiers of Russia crossed.
It is easy now to understand the significance of these events - if
only we abstain from attributing to the activity of the mass aims that
existed only in the heads of a dozen individuals - for the events and
results now lie before us.
But how did that old man, alone, in opposition to the general
opinion, so truly discern the importance of the people's view of the
events that in all his activity he was never once untrue to it?
The source of that extraordinary power of penetrating the meaning of
the events then occuring lay in the national feeling which he
possessed in full purity and strength.
Only the recognition of the fact that he possessed this feeling
caused the people in so strange a manner, contrary to the Tsar's wish,
to select him - an old man in disfavor - to be their representative in
the national war. And only that feeling placed him on that highest
human pedestal from which he, the commander in chief, devoted all
his powers not to slaying and destroying men but to saving and showing
pity on them.
That simple, modest, and therefore truly great, figure could not
be cast in the false mold of a European hero - the supposed ruler of
men - that history has invented.
To a lackey no man can be great, for a lackey has his own conception
of greatness.
CHAPTER VI
The fifth of November was the first day of what is called the battle
of Krasnoe. Toward evening - after much disputing and many mistakes
made by generals who did not go to their proper places, and after
adjutants had been sent about with counterorders - when it had become
plain that the enemy was everywhere in flight and that there could and
would be no battle, Kutuzov left Krasnoe and went to Dobroe whither
his headquarters had that day been transferred.
The day was clear and frosty. Kutuzov rode to Dobroe on his plump
little white horse, followed by an enormous suite of discontented
generals who whispered among themselves behind his back. All along the
road groups of French prisoners captured that day (there were seven
thousand of them) were crowding to warm themselves at campfires.
Near Dobroe an immense crowd of tattered prisoners, buzzing with
talk and wrapped and bandaged in anything they had been able to get
hold of, were standing in the road beside a long row of unharnessed
French guns. At the approach of the commander in chief the buzz of
talk ceased and all eyes were fixed on Kutuzov who, wearing a white
cap with a red band and a padded overcoat that bulged on his round
shoulders, moved slowly along the road on his white horse. One of
the generals was reporting to him where the guns and prisoners had
been captured.
Kutuzov seemed preoccupied and did not listen to what the general
was saying. He screwed up his eyes with a dissatisfied look as he
gazed attentively and fixedly at these prisoners, who presented a
specially wretched appearance. Most of them were disfigured by
frost-bitten noses and cheeks, and nearly all had red, swollen and
festering eyes.
One group of the French stood close to the road, and two of them,
one of whom had his face covered with sores, were tearing a piece of
raw flesh with their hands. There was something horrible and bestial
in the fleeting glance they threw at the riders and in the
malevolent expression with which, after a glance at Kutuzov, the
soldier with the sores immediately turned away and went on with what
he was doing.
Kutuzov looked long and intently at these two soldiers. He
puckered his face, screwed up his eyes, and pensively swayed his head.
At another spot he noticed a Russian soldier laughingly patting a
Frenchman on the shoulder, saying something to him in a friendly
manner, and Kutuzov with the same expression on his face again
swayed his head.
"What were you saying?" he asked the general, who continuing his
report directed the commander in chief's attention to some standards
captured from the French and standing in front of the Preobrazhensk
regiment.
"Ah, the standards!" said Kutuzov, evidently detaching himself
with difficulty from the thoughts that preoccupied him.
He looked about him absently. Thousands of eyes were looking at
him from all sides awaiting a word from him.
He stopped in front of the Preobrazhensk regiment, sighed deeply,
and closed his eyes. One of his suite beckoned to the soldiers
carrying the standards to advance and surround the commander in