War and Peace (202 page)

Fourthly, it was absurd to desire to take prisoners the Emperor, kings, and dukes, since the possession of such prisoners would have greatly enhanced the difficulty of the Russian position, as was recognised by the most clear-sighted diplomatists of the time (J. Maistre and others). Still more absurd would have been the desire to capture the French army when it had dwindled to one-half before reaching Krasnoe, and a division of convoys had to be given up to guard a corps of prisoners, while the Russian soldiers themselves had not always full rations, and the prisoners they did take died of hunger.

Any plan of cutting off and capturing Napoleon and his army, however carefully thought out, would have been like the action of a gardener who, after driving out a herd of cattle that had been trampling his beds, should run out to belabour the cattle about the head. The only thing that could be said in justification of his proceeding would be that he was greatly incensed. But the authors of this supposed plan cannot plead even this excuse, since theirs were not the gardens that had been trampled.

And, besides being absurd, to cut off the retreat of Napoleon’s army was also impossible.

It was impossible, in the first place, because, since experience shows that the movement of columns in a single battlefield at five versts’ distance never coincides with the plan of their movements, the probability that Tchitchagov, Kutuzov, and Wittgenstein would all reach an appointed spot in time was so remote that it practically amounted to impossibility. As Kutuzov in fact regarded it when he said that manœuvres planned at great distances do not produce the results expected of them.

Secondly, it was impossible, because to paralyse the force of inertia with which Napoleon’s army was rebounding back along its track,
incomparably greater forces were needed than those the Russians had at their command.

Thirdly, it was impossible, because the military expression, to cut off, was really no meaning. One may cut off a slice of bread, but not an army. To cut off an army—that is, to bar its road—is impossible, because there are always many places by which the men can make a circuit to get out, and there is always the night, during which nothing can be done; a fact of which the military strategists might have been convinced by the examples of Krasnoe and Berezina. One can never take a prisoner unless he agrees to be taken, just as one can never catch a swallow, though of course it is possible if it settles on one’s hand. One can take a prisoner who will surrender, as the Germans did, in accordance with the rules of strategy and tactics. But the French soldiers very wisely did not feel it incumbent on them to do so, since death from cold and hunger awaited them as much if taken prisoner, as if persisting in their flight.

The fourth and chief reason why it was impossible is that war was waged in 1812 under conditions more terrible than ever since the world has existed; and the Russian troops strained every nerve in the pursuit of the French, and could not have done more without perishing themselves.

The Russian army lost in its march from Tarutino to Krasnoe fifty thousand sick or stragglers, that is, a number equal to the population of a large provincial town. Half of the army was lost without a battle.

At this period of the campaign the soldiers were without boots or furlined coats, on half rations, without vodka, camping out at night for months in the snow with fifteen degrees of frost; while there were only seven or eight hours of daylight, and the rest was night; where discipline could not exert the same influence, and men were put in peril of death, not for a few hours, as on the field of battle, but for whole months together were keeping up a struggle every moment with death from cold and hunger. And of this period of the campaign, when half the army perished in one month, the historians tell us that Miloradovitch ought to have made an oblique march in one direction, and Tormasov in another, and Tchitchagov ought to have advanced to this point (the men advancing knee-deep in the snow), and that so and so pushed through and cut the French off, and so on, and so on.

The Russian soldiers did all that could or ought to have been done to attain an end worthy of the people, and half of them died in doing it. They are not to blame because other Russians, sitting in warm rooms at home, proposed that they should do the impossible.

All this strange discrepancy between the facts and the accounts of historians, so difficult to understand to-day, arises simply from this, that the historians wrote the history of the noble sentiments and fine speeches of various generals, and not the history of the events themselves.

They attach great consequence to the words of Miloradovitch, to the honours bestowed on this general or that, and the proposals made by them. But the question of the fifty thousand men who lay in the hospitals and graveyards does not even interest them, for it does not come within the scope of their researches.

And yet we have but to turn away from researches among the reports and plans of the generals, and to look into the movements of those hundred thousand men who took direct immediate part in the events; and all the questions that seemed insoluble before can be readily and certainly explained with extraordinary ease and simplicity.

The plan of cutting off Napoleon and his army never existed save in the imagination of some dozen men. It could not have existed because it was absurd and could not be carried out.

The people had a single aim: to clear their country of the invaders. That aim was effected primarily of itself, since the French were flying, and all that was necessary was not to check their flight. It was promoted, too, by the irregular warfare kept up by the people destroying the French army piecemeal; and thirdly, by the great Russian army following in the rear of the French, ready to use force in case there were any pause in their retreat.

The Russian army had to act as a whip urging on a fleeing animal. And the experienced driver knew that it was better to keep the whip raised as a menace than to bring it down on the creature’s back.

PART FIFTEEN

W
hen a man sees an animal dying, a horror comes over him. What he is himself—his essence, visibly before his eyes, perishes—ceases to exist. But when the dying creature is a man and a man dearly loved, then, besides the horror at the extinction of life, what is felt is a rending of the soul, a spiritual wound, which, like a physical wound, is sometimes mortal, sometimes healed, but always aches and shrinks from contact with the outer world, that sets it smarting.

After Prince Andrey’s death, Natasha and Princess Marya both alike felt this. Crushed in spirit, they closed their eyes under the menacing cloud of death that hovered about them, and dared not look life in the face. Carefully they guarded their open wounds from every rough and painful touch. Everything—the carriage driving along the street, the summons to dinner, the maid asking which dress to get out; worse still—words of faint, feigned sympathy—set the wound smarting, seemed an insult to it, and jarred on that needful silence in which both were trying to listen to the stern, terrible litany that had not yet died away in their ears, and to gaze into the mysterious, endless vistas that seemed for a moment to have been unveiled before them.

Only alone together were they safe from such outrage and pain. They said little to one another. When they did speak, it was about the most trivial subjects. And both equally avoided all mention of anything connected with the future.

To admit the possibility of a future seemed to them an insult to his memory. Still more circumspectly did they avoid in their talk all that could be connected with the dead man. It seemed to them that what they had felt and gone through could not be expressed in words. It seemed to them that every allusion in words to the details of his life was an outrage on the grandeur and holiness of the mystery that had been accomplished before their eyes.

The constant restraint of speech and studious avoidance of everything that might lead to words about him, these barriers, fencing off on all sides what could not be spoken of, brought what they were feeling even more clearly and vividly before their minds.

But pure and perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy.
From the isolation of her position, as the guardian and foster-mother of her nephew, and independent mistress of her own destinies, Princess Marya was the first to be called back to life from that world of mourning in which she lived for the first fortnight. She received letters from her relations which had to be answered; the room in which Nikolushka had been put was damp, and he had begun to cough. Alpatitch came to Yaroslavl with accounts. He had suggestions to make, and advised Princess Marya to move to Moscow to the house in Vozdvizhenka, which was uninjured, and only needed some trifling repairs. Life would not stand still, and she had to live. Painful as it was for Princess Marya to come out of that world of solitary contemplation, in which she had been living till then, and sorry, and, as it were, conscience-stricken, as she felt at leaving Natasha alone, the duties of daily life claimed her attention, and against her own will she had to give herself up to them. She went through the accounts with Alpatitch, consulted Dessalle about her little nephew, and began to make preparations for moving to Moscow.

Natasha was left alone, and from the time that Princess Marya began to busy herself with preparations for her journey, she held aloof from her too.

Princess Marya asked the countess to let Natasha come to stay with her in Moscow; and both mother and father eagerly agreed to her suggestion, for they saw their daughter’s physical strength failing every day, and they hoped that change of scene and the advice of Moscow doctors might do her good.

“I am not going anywhere,” answered Natasha, when the suggestion was made to her; “all I ask is, please let me alone,” she said, and she ran out of the room, hardly able to restrain tears more of vexation and anger than of sorrow.

Since she felt herself deserted by Princess Marya, and alone in her grief, Natasha had spent most of her time alone in her room, huddled up in a corner of her sofa. While her slender, nervous fingers were busy twisting or tearing something, she kept her eyes fixed in a set stare on the first object that met them. This solitude exhausted and tortured her; but it was what she needed. As soon as any one went in to her, she got up quickly, changed her attitude and expression, and picked up a book or some needlework, obviously waiting with impatience for the intruder to leave her.

It seemed to her continually that she was on the very verge of understanding,
of penetrating to the mystery on which her spiritual vision was fastened with a question too terrible for her to bear.

One day towards the end of December, Natasha, thin and pale in a black woollen gown, with her hair fastened up in a careless coil, sat perched up in the corner of her sofa, her fingers nervously crumpling and smoothing out the ends of her sash, while she gazed at the corner of the door.

She was inwardly gazing whither he had gone, to that further shore. And that shore, of which she had never thought in old days, which had seemed to her so far away, so incredible, was now closer to her, and more her own, more comprehensible than this side of life, in which all was emptiness and desolation or suffering and humiliation.

She was gazing into that world where she knew he was. But she could not see him, except as he had been here on earth. She was seeing him again as he had been at Mytishtchy, at Troitsa, at Yaroslavl.

She was seeing his face, hearing his voice, and repeating his words, and words of her own that she had put into his mouth; and sometimes imagining fresh phrases for herself and him which could only have been uttered in the past.

Now she saw him as he had once been, lying on a low chair in his velvet, fur-lined cloak, his head propped on his thin, pale hand. His chest looked fearfully hollow, and his shoulders high. His lips were firmly closed, his eyes shining, and there was a line on his white brow that came and vanished again. There was a rapid tremor just perceptible in one foot. Natasha knew he was struggling to bear horrible pain. “What was that pain like? Why was it there? What was he feeling? How did it hurt?” Natasha had wondered. He had noticed her attention, raised his eyes, and, without smiling, began to speak.