War and Peace (188 page)

One desperate, frightened scream from the first Frenchman who caught sight of the Cossacks, and every creature in the camp, undressed and half-asleep, was running away, abandoning cannons, muskets, and horses.

If the Cossacks had pursued the French without regard to what they left all around and behind them, they could have captured Murat and all there was there. Their commanding officers tried to make them do so. But there was no making the Cossacks budge when they had got booty and prisoners. No one heeded the word of command. They had taken fifteen hundred prisoners, thirty-eight cannons, flags, and, what was of most consequence in the eyes of the Cossacks, horses, saddles, coverings and various other objects. All of this they wanted to see after, to secure the prisoners and the cannons, to divide the booty, to shout at and even fight with one another over the spoils; and all this absorbed the Cossacks’ attention. The Frenchmen, finding themselves not pursued further, began to rally; they formed into companies and began firing. Orlov-Denisov still expected the other columns to arrive, and did not advance further.

Meanwhile, in accordance with the disposition—“
die erste Colonne marschirt
,” and so on—the infantry regiments of the belated columns, under the command of Bennigsen and the direction of Toll, had started off in due course, and had, in the usual way, arrived somewhere, but not where they were intended to arrive. In the usual way too, the soldiers who had set off gaily, began to halt; there were murmurs of dissatisfaction and a sense of muddle, and they were marched back to some point. Adjutants and generals galloped to and fro, shouting angrily, quarrelling, declaring they had come utterly wrong and were too late, upbraiding some one, and so on; and finally, all washed their hands of the business in despair, and marched on simply in order to get somewhere. “We must arrive somewhere sooner or later!” And so they did, in fact, arrive somewhere, but not where they were wanted. And some did even reach their destination, but reached it so late that their doing so was of no use at all, and only resulted in their being fired at for nothing. Toll, who in this battle played the part of Weierother in the battle of Austerlitz, galloped with unflagging energy from one part of the field to another, and found everything at sixes and sevens everywhere. So,
for instance, he found Bagovut’s corps in the wood, when it was broad daylight, though the corps ought to have been there long before, and to have gone to support Orlov-Denisov. Disappointed and excited at the failure, and supposing some one must be to blame for it, Toll galloped up to the general in command of the corps, and began sternly reprimanding him, declaring that he deserved to be shot. Bagovut, a sturdy old general of placid disposition, had been worried too by all the delays, the muddles, and the contradictory orders, and, to the amazement of everybody, he flew into a violent rage, quite out of keeping with his character, and said some very nasty things to Toll.

“I am not going to be taught my duty by anybody, but I can face death with my men as well as any one,” he said, and he marched forward with one division. The valiant Bagovut, not considering in his excitement whether his advance into action now with a single division was likely to be of use or not, marched his men straight forward into the enemy’s fire. Danger, shells, and bullets were just what he wanted in his fury. One of the first bullets killed him, the other bullets killed many of his men. And his division remained for some time under fire for no object whatever.

Meanwhile another column was to have fallen upon the French in the centre, but of this column Kutuzov was in command. He knew very well that nothing but muddle would come of this battle, begun against his will, and, as far as it was in his power, he held his forces back. He did not move.

Kutuzov rode mutely about on his grey horse, making languid replies to the suggestions for an attack.

“You can all talk about attacking, but you don’t see that we don’t know how to execute complicated manœuvres,” he said to Miloradovitch, who was begging to be allowed to advance.

“We couldn’t take Murat alive in the morning, nor be in our places in time; now there’s nothing to be done!” he said to another.

When it was reported to Kutuzov that there were now two battalions of Poles in the rear of the French, where according to the earlier reports of the Cossacks there had been none, he took a sidelong glance behind him at Yermolov, to whom he had not spoken since the previous day.

“Here they are begging to advance, proposing projects of all sorts, and as soon as you get to work, there’s nothing ready, and the enemy, forewarned, takes his measures.”

Yermolov half closed his eyelids, and faintly smiled, as he heard those words. He knew that the storm had blown over him, and that Kutuzov would not go beyond that hint.

“That’s his little joke at my expense,” said Yermolov softly, poking Raevsky, near him, with his knee.

Soon after that, Yermolov moved forward to Kutuzov and respectfully submitted:

“The time has not passed, your highness; the enemy has not gone away. If you were to command an advance? Or else the guards won’t have a sight of smoke.”

Kutuzov said nothing, but when news was brought him that Murat’s troops were in retreat, he gave orders for an advance; but every hundred paces he halted for three-quarters of an hour.

The whole battle was confined to what had been done by the Cossacks of Orlov-Denisov; the rest of the troops simply lost a few hundreds of men for nothing.

In consequence of this battle, Kutuzov received a diamond decoration; Bennigsen, too, was rewarded with diamonds and a hundred thousand roubles; and the other generals, too, received agreeable recognition according to their rank, and more changes were made on the staff.

“That’s how things are always done among us, everything topsyturvy!” the Russian officers and generals said after the battle of Tarutino; just as they say it nowadays, with an assumption that some stupid person had muddled everything, while we would have managed quite differently. But the men who speak like this either do not understand what they are talking of, or intentionally deceive themselves. Every battle—Tarutino, Borodino, Austerlitz—fails to come off as those who planned it expected it to do. That is inevitable.

An innumerable collection of freely acting forces (and nowhere is a man freer than on the field of battle, where it is a question of life and death) influence the direction taken by a battle, and that can never be known beforehand and never corresponds with the direction of any one force.

If many forces are acting simultaneously in different directions on any body, the direction of its motion will not correspond with any one of the forces, but will always follow a middle course, the summary of
them, what is expressed in mechanics by the diagonal of the parallelogram of forces.

If in the accounts given us by historians, especially by French ones, we find that wars and battles appear to follow a definite plan laid down beforehand, the only deduction we can make from that is that these accounts are not true.

The battle of Tarutino obviously failed to attain the aim which Toll had in view: to lead the army into action in accordance with his disposition of the troops, or the aim which Count Orlov-Denisov may have had: to take Murat prisoner; or the aim of destroying at one blow the whole corps, which Bennigsen and others may have entertained; or the aim of the officer who desired to distinguish himself under fire; or the Cossack, who wanted to obtain more booty than he did attain, and so on. But if we regard the object of the battle as what was actually accomplished by it, and what was the universal desire of all Russians (the expulsion of the French from Russia and the destruction of their army), it will be perfectly evident that the battle of Tarutino, precisely in consequence of its incongruities, was exactly what was wanted at that period of the campaign. It is difficult or impossible to imagine any issue of that battle more in accordance with that object than its actual result. With the very smallest effort, in spite of the greatest muddle, and with the most trifling loss, the most important results in the whole campaign were obtained—the transition was made from retreat to attack, the weakness of the French was revealed, and the shock was given which was all that was needed to put Napoleon’s army to flight.

Napoleon enters Moscow after the brilliant victory
de la Moskowa:
there can be no doubt of the victory, since the French are left in possession of the field of battle. The Russians retreat and leave Moscow—well stocked with provisions, arms, implements, and countless riches—in the hands of Napoleon. The Russian army, of one-half the strength of the French, during the course of a whole month makes no effort to attack. Napoleon’s position is most brilliant. One would have supposed that no great genius was needed with an army of double the strength to fall upon the Russian forces and destroy them, to negotiate an advantageous peace; or, in case of negotiations being refused, to make a menacing march upon
Petersburg, or even, in case of failure in this, to return to Smolensk or to Vilna, or to remain in Moscow, to retain, in short, the brilliant position in which the French army now found themselves. To do all this it was only necessary to take the simplest and easiest measures: to keep the soldiers from pillage, to prepare winter clothes (of which there was a supply in Moscow amply sufficient for the whole army), and regularly to collect the provisions, of which the supply in Moscow was, on the showing of the French historians, sufficient to feed the whole army for six months. Napoleon, the greatest of all military geniuses, with absolute power, as historians assert, over the army, did nothing of all this.

Far from doing anything of the sort, he used his power to select out of all the various courses open to him the stupidest and most pernicious of all. Of all the different things Napoleon might have done—spending the winter in Moscow, going to Petersburg, going to Nizhni-Novgorod, going back a little more to the north or to the south, by the road Kutuzov afterwards took—no course one can imagine could have been more ruinous for his army (as the sequel proved) than the one Napoleon actually did adopt; that is, the course of staying in Moscow till October, letting the troops plunder the town, then in hesitation leaving a garrison behind, marching out of Moscow, going to meet Kutuzov and not giving battle, turning to the right and going as far as Maley Yaroslavets, again refusing to risk a battle, and finally retreating, not by the road Kutuzov had taken, but by Mozhaisk and the Smolensk route through devastated country. Let the most skilful tacticians, supposing that Napoleon’s object was the destruction of his army, try and devise a series of actions which could, apart from any measures that might be taken by the Russian forces, have ensured with such certainty the complete destruction of the whole French army as the course taken by Napoleon.

This the genius Napoleon did. But to say that Napoleon ruined his army because he wanted to do so, or because he was very stupid, would be just as unjust as to say that Napoleon got his troops to Moscow because he wanted to, and because he was very clever and a great genius.

In both cases his personal activity, having no more force than the personal activity of every soldier, was merely coincidental with the laws by which the event was determined.

Quite falsely (and simply because the sequel did not justify Napoleon’s actions) do historians represent Napoleon’s faculties as flagging at Moscow. Just as before, and afterwards in the year 1813, he used all his powers and faculties to do the best for himself and his army, Napoleon’s
activity at this time was no less marvellous than in Egypt, in Italy, in Austria, and in Prussia. We do not know with any certainty how real was the genius of Napoleon in Egypt, where forty centuries looked down upon his greatness, because all his great exploits there are recounted to us by none but Frenchmen. We cannot judge with certainty of his genius in Austria and Prussia, as the accounts of his doings there must be drawn from French and German sources. And the unaccountable surrender of corps of soldiers without a battle, and of fortresses without a siege, must dispose Germans to postulate Napoleon’s genius as the unique explanation of the war as it was waged in Germany. But we have, thank God, no need to plead his genius to cloak our shame. We have paid for the right to look facts simply and squarely in the face, and that right we will not give up.

His activity in Moscow was as marvellous and as full of genius as anywhere else. Command upon command and plan upon plan was continually being issued by him from the time he entered Moscow to the time he left it. The absence of the citizens and of a deputation, and even the burning of Moscow, did not daunt him. He did not lose sight of the welfare of his army, nor of the doings of the enemy, nor of the welfare of the people of Russia, nor of the conduct of affairs at Paris, nor of diplomatic negotiations as to the terms of peace.

On the military side, immediately on entering Moscow, Napoleon gives General Sebastiani strict orders to keep a watch on the movements of the Russian army, sends detachments along the various roads, and charges Murat to find Kutuzov. Then he gives careful instructions for the fortification of the Kremlin; then he makes a plan of the coming campaign over the whole map of Russia; that was a work of genius, indeed. On the diplomatic side, Napoleon summons to his presence Captain Yakovlev, who had been robbed and reduced to rags and did not know how to get out of Moscow, expounds to him minutely his whole policy and his magnanimity; and after writing a letter to the Emperor Alexander, in which he considers it his duty to inform his friend and brother that Rastoptchin had performed his duties very badly in Moscow, he despatches Yakovlev with it to Petersburg.

Expounding his views and his magnanimity with equal minuteness
to Tutolmin, he despatches that old man too to Petersburg to open negotiations.

On the judicial side, orders were issued, immediately after the fires broke out, for the guilty persons to be found and executed. And the miscreant Rastoptchin was punished by the order to set fire to his houses.