War and Peace (201 page)

“I think it my duty to report to your majesty the condition of the various corps under my observation on the march the last two or three days. They are almost disbanded. Hardly a quarter of the men remain with the flags of their regiments; the rest wander off on their own account in different directions, trying to seek food and to escape discipline. All think only of Smolensk, where they hope to recover. During the last few days many soldiers have been observed to throw away their cartridges and muskets. In such a condition of affairs, whatever your further plans may be, the interests of your majesty’s service make it essential to muster the army at Smolensk, and to rid them of ineffectives, such as cavalry men without horses, as well as of superfluous baggage and a part of the artillery, which is now out of proportion with the numbers of the effective army. Supplies and some days’ rest are essential: the soldiers are exhausted by hunger and fatigue; during the last few days many have died by the roadside or in the bivouacs. This state of things is growing continually worse, and if steps are not quickly taken for averting the danger, we shall be exposed to the risk of being unable to control the army in the event of a battle.

“November 9. Thirty versts from Smolensk.”

After struggling into Smolensk, the promised land of their dreams, the French killed one another fighting over the food there, sacked their own stores, and when everything had been pillaged, they ran on further. All hastened on, not knowing whither or for what end they were going; least of all knew that great genius, Napoleon, since there was no one to give him orders. But still he and those about him clung to their old habits: wrote commands, letters, reports, orders of the day; called each other your majesty,
mon frère, Prince d’Eckmühl, roi de Naples
, and so on. But the orders and reports were all on paper: no attempt was made to carry them out, because they could not be carried out. And although they addressed each other as “majesty,” “highness,” and “
mon cousin
,” they all felt that they were pitiful and loathsome creatures, who
had done a great wrong, for which they had now to pay the penalty. And in spite of their pretence of caring for the army, each was thinking only of himself, and how to make his escape as quickly as possible to safety.

The actions of the Russian and French armies during the retreat from Moscow to the Niemen resemble a game of Russian blindman’s buff, in which there are two players, both with their eyes bandaged, and one rings a bell at intervals to let the other know of his whereabouts. At first he rings his bell with no fear of his opponent; but when he begins to find himself in a difficult position, he runs away as noiselessly as he can from his opponent, and often supposing he is running away from him, walks straight into his arms.

At first Napoleon’s army made its whereabouts known—that was in the early period of the retreat along the Kaluga road—but afterwards, when they had taken to the Smolensk road, they ran holding the tongue of the bell; and often supposing they were running away, ran straight towards the Russians.

Owing to the rapidity of the flight of the French, and of the Russians after them, and the consequent exhaustion of the horses, the chief means of keeping a close watch on the enemy’s position—by means of charges of cavalry—was out of the question. Moreover, in consequence of the frequent and rapid changes of position of both armies, what news did come always came too late. If information arrived on the second that the army of the enemy had been in a certain place on the first, by the third, when the information could be acted upon, the army was already two days’ march further, and in quite a different position.

One army fled, the other pursued. From Smolensk, there were a number of different roads for the French to choose from; and one would have thought that, as they stayed there four days, the French might have found out where the enemy was, have thought out some advantageous plan, and undertaken something new. Yet, after a halt of four days, the crowds of them ran back; again not to right or to left, but, with no manœuvres or plans, along their old road—the worst one—by Krasnoe and Orsha, along their beaten track.

Expecting the enemy in their rear and not in front, the French ran,
straggling out, and getting separated as far as twenty-four hours’ march from one another. In front of all fled the Emperor, then the kings, then the dukes. The Russian army, supposing Napoleon would take the road to the right beyond the Dnieper—the only sensible course—turned also to the right, and came out on the high road at Krasnoe. And here, just as in the game of blindman, the French came bearing straight down on our vanguard. Seeing the enemy unexpectedly, the French were thrown into confusion, stopped short from the suddenness of the fright, but then ran on again, abandoning their own comrades in their rear. Then for three days, the separate parts of the French army passed, as it were, through the lines of the Russian army: first the viceroy’s troops, then Davoust’s, and then Ney’s. They all abandoned one another, abandoned their heavy baggage, their artillery, and half their men, and fled, making semicircles to the right to get round the Russians by night.

Ney was the last, because in spite, or perhaps in consequence, of their miserable position, with a child’s impulse to beat the floor that has bruised it, he lingered to demolish the walls of Smolensk, which had done nobody any harm. Ney, who was the last to pass with his corps of ten thousand, reached Napoleon at Orsha with only a thousand men, having abandoned all the rest, and all his cannons, and made his way by stealth at night, under cover of the woods, across the Dnieper.

From Orsha they fled on along the road to Vilna, still playing the same game of blindman with the pursuing army. At Berezina again, they were thrown into confusion, many were drowned, many surrendered, but those that got across the river, fled on.

Their chief commander wrapped himself in a fur cloak, and getting into a sledge, galloped off alone, deserting his companions. Whoever could, ran away too, and those who could not—surrendered or died.

One might have supposed that the historians, who ascribe the actions of the masses to the will of one man, would have found it impossible to explain the retreat of the French on their theory, considering that they did everything possible during this period of the campaign to bring about their own ruin, and that not a single movement of that rabble of men, from their turning into the Kaluga road up to the flight of the commander from his army, showed the slightest trace of design.

But no! Mountains of volumes have been written by historians upon this campaign, and in all of them we find accounts of Napoleon’s masterly arrangements and deeply considered plans; of the strategy with which the soldiers were led, and the military genius showed by the marshals.

The retreat from Maley Yaroslavets, when nothing hindered Napoleon from passing through a country abundantly furnished with supplies, and the parallel road was open to him, along which Kutuzov afterwards pursued him—this wholly unnecessary return by a road through devastated country is explained to us as due to various sagacious considerations. Similar reasons are given us for Napoleon’s retreat from Smolensk to Orsha. Then we have a description of his heroism at Krasnoe, when he is reported to have prepared to give battle, and to take the command, and coming forward with a birch stick in his hand, to have said:

“Long enough I have been an emperor, it is time now to be a general!”

Yet in spite of this, he runs away immediately afterwards, abandoning the divided army in the rear to the hazards of destiny.

Then we have descriptions of the greatness of some of the marshals, especially of Ney—a greatness of soul that culminated in his taking a circuitous route by the forests across the Dnieper, and fleeing without his flags, his artillery, and nine-tenths of his men into Orsha.

And lastly, the final departure of the great Emperor from his heroic army is represented by the historians as something great—a stroke of genius.

Even that final act of running away—which in homely language would be described as the lowest depth of baseness, such as every child is taught to feel ashamed of—even that act finds justification in the language of the historians.

When it is impossible to stretch the elastic thread of historical argument further, when an action is plainly opposed to what all humanity is agreed in calling right and justice, the historians take refuge in the conception of greatness. Greatness would appear to exclude all possibility of applying standards of right and wrong. For the great man—nothing is wrong. There is no atrocity which could be made a ground for blaming a great man.

“
C’est grand!
” cry the historians; and at that word good and bad have ceased to be, and there are only “
grand
” and not “
grand
.” “
Grand
” is
equivalent to good, and not “
grand
” to bad. To be
grand
is to their notions the characteristic of certain exceptional creatures, called by them heroes. And Napoleon, wrapping himself in his warm fur cloak and hurrying home away from men, who were not only his comrades, but (in his belief) brought there by his doing, feels
que c’est grand
; and his soul is content.

“
Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas
,” he says (he sees something grand in himself). And the whole world has gone on for fifty years repeating: Sublime! Grand! Napoleon the Great.

“
Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas
.”

And it never enters any one’s head that to admit a greatness, immeasurable by the rule of right and wrong, is but to accept one’s own nothingness and immeasurable littleness.

For us, with the rule of right and wrong given us by Christ, there is nothing for which we have no standard. And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

What Russian reader has not known an irksome feeling of annoyance, dissatisfaction, and perplexity, when he reads the accounts of the latter period of the campaign of 1812? Who has not asked himself: How was it all the French were not captured or cut to pieces, when all the three Russian armies were surrounding them in superior numbers, when the French were a disorderly, starving, and freezing rabble, and the whole aim of the Russians (so history tells us) was to check, to cut off, and to capture all the French?

How was it that the Russian army, that with inferior numbers had fought the battle of Borodino, failed in its aim of capturing the French, when the latter were surrounded on three sides? Can the French be so immensely superior to us that we are not equal to beating them, when we have surrounded them with forces numerically superior? How could that have come to pass? History (what passes by that name) answers these questions by saying that that came to pass because Kutuzov, and Tormasov, and Tchitchagov, and this general and that failed to carry out certain manœuvres.

But why did they fail to carry them out? And how was it, if they really were responsible for not attaining the aim set before them, that they
were not tried and punished for their shortcomings? But even if we admit that Kutuzov and Tchitchagov and the others were responsible for the non-success of the Russians, it is still impossible to understand why, in the position the Russian troops were in at Krasnoe and the Berezina, on both occasions with numerically superior forces, the French army and marshals were not taken prisoners, if that really was the aim of the Russians.

The explanation of this phenomenon given by the Russian military historians—that Kutuzov hindered the attack—is insufficient, because we know that Kutuzov was not able to restrain the troops from attacking at Vyazma and Tarutino. Why was it that the Russian army, that with inferior forces gained a victory at Borodino over the enemy in full strength, was unsuccessful at Krasnoe and the Berezina, when fighting in superior numbers against the undisciplined crowds of the French?

If the aim of the Russians really was to cut off Napoleon and his marshals, and to take them prisoners, and that aim was not only frustrated, but all attempts at attaining it were every time defeated in the most shameful way, this last period of the war is quite correctly represented by the French as a series of victories for them, and quite incorrectly represented by the Russians as redounding to our glory.

The Russian military historians, so far as they recognise the claims of logic, are forced to this conclusion, and in spite of their lyric eulogies of Russian gallantry and devotion, and all the rest of it, they are reluctantly obliged to admit that the retreat of the French from Moscow was a series of victories for Napoleon and of defeats for Kutuzov.

But putting patriotic vanity entirely aside, one cannot but feel that there is an inherent discrepancy in this conclusion, seeing that the series of French victories led to their complete annihilation, while the series of Russian defeats was followed by the destruction of their enemy, and the deliverance of their country.

The source of this discrepancy lies in the fact that historians, studying events in the light of the letters of the sovereigns and of generals, of narratives, reports, projects, and so on, have assumed quite falsely that the plan of that period of the campaign of 1812 was to cut off and capture Napoleon and his marshals and his army.

Such a plan never was, and could not have been, the aim of the Russian army, because it had no meaning, and its attainment was utterly out of the question.

There was no object in such a plan. In the first place, because
Napoleon’s army was flying in disorder at its utmost possible speed out of Russia; that is to say, doing the very thing that every Russian most desired. What object was there in conducting all sorts of operations against the French when they were running away as fast as they could already? Secondly, it would have been idle to stop men on the road, whose whole energies were bent on flight. Thirdly, it would have been absurd to lose men in destroying the French army when it was already, without external interference, perishing at such a rate that, without any obstruction of their road, not more than one hundredth of its original number succeeded in crossing the frontier in December.