In a dream he sees himself lying there in the same room he is actually lying in, but he hasn't been wounded, he is fit and well. Lots of people, all different kinds, people who don't matter and aren't worried about him, appear before him. He is talking to them, arguing about nothing at all. They seem to be getting ready to go on a journey. Prince Andrey is vaguely aware that none of this matters, there are other things of much greater importance for him to bother about, but he keeps on talking, impressing them with his casual, witty comments. They begin to slip away imperceptibly one by one, and all that is left is the question of closing the door. He rises to his feet and goes over to the door to get it locked and bolted. Everything now depends on whether or not he will get there in time to shut it. He is walking forward, hurrying, but his legs won't move, and he knows he is not going to get the door locked, though he strains agonizingly to do so. And he is filled with a ghastly feeling of terror. This terror is the fear of death: beyond the door there is It. But while he is flailing helplessly towards the door, that horrible something is already pushing from the other side, forcing the door open. Something inhuman - death - is pushing on the door, and he must hold it back. With one last effort he grabs at the door - it can't now be shut - to try and hold it back, but his efforts are feeble and clumsy. Under pressure from the ghastly thing outside, the door opens and shuts again.
More pushing from the other side. His last, inhuman struggles are fruitless. Both leaves of the door open without a sound. It comes in. It is death. And Prince Andrey has died.
But at the very moment of death Prince Andrey realized he was dreaming; at the moment of death itself he summoned all his strength and forced himself back to consciousness.
'Yes, that was death. I have died and woken up again. But that's what death is - a reawakening!' His soul was suddenly ablaze with light, and the veil that had hidden the unknown from him was half lifted for his spirit to see beyond. He had sensed the releasing of pent-up forces within him, and he felt the curious lightness of being that had not left him since.
When he woke up in a cold sweat and stirred on the couch Natasha went over and asked him what was wrong. He didn't answer, he couldn't understand what she was saying, and he gazed at her with a strange look in his eyes.
This was the change that had come over him two days before Princess Marya's arrival. From that day on, according to the doctor, the wasting fever took a turn for the worse, but Natasha ignored him; she could see the terrible signs emanating from Andrey's spirit, and their message was beyond doubt.
For Prince Andrey that day marked more than a reawakening from sleep; it was a reawakening from life. And in relation to his own life-span it seemed to take no longer than waking up does in relation to the span of a dream. It was a relatively slow reawakening, but there was nothing violent or terrible about it.
His last days and hours were spent in a simple, down-to-earth way. Princess Marya and Natasha, who never left his side, both felt that. They did not weep; they did not shudder. And towards the end they both felt they were not looking after him (he was no more, he had gone away), they were cherishing the most immediate memory of him - his body. Both of them felt emotions so strong they were unaffected by the horrible outward aspect of death, and they felt no need to work at their grief. They never wept, with him or without him, and when they were together they didn't even talk about him. They felt that no words could express what they now understood.
They could both see him slowly and gently slipping further and further down into another realm. They knew this had to be, and it was goodbye. He received absolution and was given communion. Everybody came in to say goodbye. When his son was brought in to see him he pressed his lips to the boy's flesh and then turned away, not because he was in any pain or anguish (Princess Marya and Natasha could see this clearly), but simply because he thought he had done all that was necessary. When they told him to give the boy his blessing he did what was required of him and then looked round as if he was wondering whether there was anything else that needed to be done. When the body suffered its final spasms and gave up the ghost, Princess Marya and Natasha were there.
'It's all over, isn't it?' said Princess Marya, after the body had lain there, quite still, for some moments, going cold before their eyes. Natasha came up close, glanced down at the dead eyes, and closed them with a quick movement. She closed them without kissing them, hanging on to her closest memory of him.
'Where has he gone? Where is he now? . . .'
When the body lay washed and dressed in the coffin on the table, everybody came in to take leave of him, and everybody wept. Little Nikolay wept from agonizing, heart-breaking bewilderment. The countess and Sonya wept because they were sorry for Natasha, and because he had gone from them. The old count wept because he could see himself taking the same terrible step before much longer.
Natasha and Princess Marya now also gave way to tears, but not from personal sorrow. They wept with a melting sensation of reverence gripping their very souls as they contemplated the simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished before their eyes.
PART II
CHAPTER 1
The human intellect cannot grasp the full range of causes that lie behind any phenomenon. But the need to discover causes is deeply ingrained in the spirit of man. And so the human intellect ignores the infinite permutations and sheer complexity of all the circumstances surrounding a phenomenon, any one of which could be individually construed as the thing that caused it, latches on to the first and easiest approximation, and says, 'This is the cause!' When it comes to historical events, where the actions of men are the object of study, the will of the gods used to serve as a primeval approximation to underlying cause, though this was eventually superseded by the will of a few men occupying the historical foreground - the heroes of history. But one glance below the surface of any historical event, one glance at the actions of the mass of humanity involved in it, is enough to show that the will of the historical hero, far from controlling the actions of the masses, is itself subject to continual outside control. You might think it doesn't matter very much whether historical events are interpreted one way or another. But between the man who says that the peoples of the west marched on the east because Napoleon willed them to do so, and the man who says this movement took place because it was bound to take place, there is the same yawning gap as there is between men who used to claim that the earth stood still while the planets revolved around it, and other men who said they didn't know what keeps the earth in place, but they did know there were laws controlling its motion and the motion of the other planets. There are no single causes behind historical events, and there never can be, other than the one grand cause behind all causes. But there are laws controlling events, some of them beyond our ken, some of them within our groping grasp. The discovery of these laws becomes possible only when we stop looking for causes in the will of individual men, just as the discovery of the laws of planetary motion became possible only when men stopped believing in the earth as a fixed entity.
After the battle of Borodino, the enemy occupation of Moscow and the burning of the city, the most important episode of the war of 1812, according to the historians, was the movement of the Russian army across from the Ryazan to the Kaluga road and on to the camp at Tarutino, the so-called flanking manoeuvre beyond the river Krasnaya Pakhra. Historians credit a number of different people with this stroke of genius, and argument continues about its rightful attribution. Foreign historians, even the French, acknowledge the genius of the Russian military command when they discuss this flanking manoeuvre. But why military commentators, and all subsequent writers, should see this flanking manoeuvre as the profoundly significant brain-child of some individual, something that saved Russia and destroyed Napoleon, is very difficult to understand. For one thing, it is difficult to see any profound wisdom or genius in this manoeuvre: it requires little mental effort to work out that the best position for an army not under attack is where its supplies
are most readily available. And anybody, down to the stupidest thirteen-year-old boy, could have easily guessed that the most advantageous position for the army in 1812, after the retreat from Moscow, would be down the Kaluga road. So, in the first place, it is impossible to understand the thought processes that have led historians to descry deep wisdom in this ploy. Secondly, it is even more difficult to understand why historians treat this development as the saving of Russia and the destruction of the French; if the circumstances before, during and after this flanking manoeuvre had been slightly different it could well have led to the destruction of the Russian army and salvation for the French. Even if the position of the Russian army did begin to improve from the time of that manoeuvre, it doesn't follow that the improvement was necessarily caused by it.
The flanking manoeuvre might well have brought no advantage; worse than that, it could easily have led to the destruction of the Russian army if other circumstances had prevailed. What would have happened if Moscow had not burnt down? If Murat had not lost sight of the Russians? If Napoleon had decided to do something? If the Russians had followed the advice of Bennigsen and Barclay and gone into battle at the Krasnaya Pakhra? What would have happened if the French had attacked the Russians when they were marching on the other side of the Pakhra river? What would have happened later on if Napoleon had got to Tarutino and attacked the Russians with even a tenth of the energy he had put into the attack at Smolensk? What would have happened if the French had marched on Petersburg? . . . If any of these developments had occurred, the flanking manoeuvre could have led to disaster rather than salvation.
The third point is the most difficult to understand: students of history seem determined to ignore the possibility that this march cannot be attributed to any one individual; no one ever predicted it, and, like the retreat to Fili, this ploy was, in fact, never fully worked out in advance by anybody. It came about step by step, incident by incident, moment by moment, emerging from an infinitely varied set of unimaginably different circumstances, and was perceived in its entirety only when it had become a reality, a past event.
At the Fili council the idea uppermost in the minds of the Russian high command was the blindingly obvious course of retreat straight down the road to Nizhny Novgorod. Evidence of this can be seen in the council's majority vote in favour of this route, and especially the commander-in-chief's famous conversation afterwards with Lanskoy, the head of supplies. Lanskoy reported to the commander-in-chief that the main army stores were stockpiled along the river Oka in the provinces of Tula and Kazan, and if they retreated down the Nizhny road the army would be cut off from its supplies by the broad river, which couldn't be crossed in the early winter. This was the first signal of the need to abandon the route that had at first seemed the most natural one to take - retreat down the Nizhny road. The army was steered further south, down the Ryazan road, closer to its supplies. As time went by, the inactivity of the French, who actually lost sight of the Russian army, together with the worrying need to defend the ordnance factory at Tula, and especially the advantage of going in the direction of their own supplies, pushed the army even further south, down the Tula road. As they made their way in one desperate lunge over to the Tula road beyond the Pakhra, the generals of the Russian army were intending to call a halt at Podolsk. They never gave a thought to stopping at Tarutino. But our army was forced even further south by countless other developments, including the re-emergence of the French troops (who really had lost them), new battle plans and, most importantly, the availability of generous supplies in Kaluga, and they switched again from the Tula to the Kaluga road and marched on to Tarutino, right in the middle of their own supply lines. Just as there is no precise answer to the question, 'When was Moscow abandoned?' it is impossible to say exactly when the decision was taken to move the army to Tarutino, or who took it. It was only when the army had got there, impelled by a boundless variety of infinitesimally small forces, that people began to convince themselves this was what they had wanted and predicted all along.
CHAPTER 2
The famous flanking manoeuvre comes down to this: the Russian army had been retracing its steps in full retreat, and when the French stopped attacking, they deviated from the straight line they were following, saw they were not being pursued and moved off naturally in a new direction, attracted that way by the availability of plentiful supplies.
If we imagine, not generals of genius in charge of the Russian army, but a leaderless army acting alone, even that kind of army would have had no alternative but to head back towards Moscow, coming round in a big arc through the richest countryside to an area where maximum supplies were available.
So natural was this switching across from the Nizhny road to the Ryazan, Tula and Kaluga roads that this was the very direction taken by looting stragglers from the Russian army, and the very direction insisted on by the authorities in Petersburg for Kutuzov's next move. At Tarutino Kutuzov received what amounted to a reprimand from the Tsar for moving the army to the Ryazan road, and he was ordered into the very position across from Kaluga which he had taken up by the time the Tsar's letter reached him.
The Russian army reacted like a billiard ball: recoiling in the direction imparted by the shock of the whole campaign and particularly the battle of Borodino, the army absorbed the energy of the collision, encountered no further shocks and simply rolled away into the most natural position.
Kutuzov's merit had nothing to do with military genius, or what they call strategic manoeuvring; his merit was to have been the only person to grasp the full significance of what had happened. He was the only one who grasped the significance of the French army's lack of activity; he was the only one who kept on insisting they had won the battle of Borodino; he - the commander-in-chief who might have been expected to be thirsting for battle - was the only one who did everything in his power to restrain the Russian army from rushing into futile encounters.
The wild beast wounded at Borodino lay around where the fleeing huntsman had left him, but whether it was alive, and whether it still had any strength and was lying low, the huntsman didn't know. Suddenly a moan came from the creature. The moan from the wounded beast (the French army) that gave away the secret of its hopeless plight was the decision to send Lauriston to Kutuzov's camp with overtures for peace.
Napoleon, with his certainty that the right thing to say was not the right thing to say but the first thing that came into his head, wrote to Kutuzov the first words that came into his head, and these happened not to make any sense. They went as follows: Monsieur le Prince Kutuzov [he wrote],
I am sending one of my aides to discuss with you various topics of interest.
I beg your Highness to have faith in what he says, especially when he expresses the sentiments of esteem and particular consideration that I have long entertained for your person. This letter having no other object,
I pray God, Monsieur le Prince Kutuzov, to maintain you in His holy and powerful keeping.
(Signed) NAPOLEON.
Moscow, 3rd October 1812.
Kutuzov replied as follows: I should be cursed by posterity if I were regarded as the initiator of any kind of settlement. Such is the present spirit of my nation.
And he carried on doing everything in his power to hold the Russian army back from any attack.
A month of French army looting in Moscow, together with Russian army quietude at Tarutino, had brought about a change in the relative strengths of the two armies, a change in morale and sheer numbers, all of which told in favour of the Russians. Although the position of the French army and its numerical strength were unknown to the Russians, as soon as this change came about the inevitability of an eventual attack soon made itself felt in all manner of ways. These were: Lauriston's mission; the availability of generous supplies at Tarutino; persistent reports of inactivity and poor discipline in the French army; new recruitment bringing our regiments up to strength; the fine weather; the long spell of rest enjoyed by the Russian soldiers, and th
e usual eagerness of well-rested troops to finish the job they were there to do; curiosity about what was happening in the French army, which had been out of sight for so long; the sheer audacity shown by the Russian outposts nipping in and out among the French encamped at Tarutino; stories about easy victories over the French enjoyed by peasants and guerrilla groups, and the envy that this caused; a desire for revenge that lay in every heart while ever the French remained in Moscow; and, what mattered most of all, a vague awareness rising in every soldier's heart that there had been a shift in the relative strength of the armies, and the advantage now lay with us. A substantial change of this nature really had come about, and advance was now inevitable. And straightaway, as surely as a clock begins to chime and strike when the minute hand has completed a full circle, this change was reflected among the top brass in increased activity, the whirring of wheels within wheels.
CHAPTER 3
The Russian army was commanded by Kutuzov and his staff, and also by the Tsar from Petersburg. Before the news of the abandonment of Moscow reached Petersburg, a detailed plan for the whole campaign had been drawn up and sent to Kutuzov for him to follow. Even though this plan had been put together on the assumption that Moscow was still in our hands, it was endorsed by the staff and accepted as the basis for action. Kutuzov's response was limited to a comment that movements planned at a distance were always difficult to put into practice. In order to resolve any difficulties as and when they arose, further instructions were issued, and new staff were sent down to Kutuzov with the sole duty of keeping an eye on his movements and reporting back.
Besides this, the high command of the Russian army was completely reshuffled. The places of Bagration, who had been killed, and Barclay, who had stalked off in high dudgeon, had to be filled. Much serious thought went into consideration of the best thing to do: whether A should take over from B, and B from D, or whether it ought to be the other way round, with D taking over from A, and so on, as if this had an impact on anything at all beyond the self-esteem of A and B.