ally the one who was cutting across them. Wobbling along on his long, spindly legs, with his dressing-gown flapping behind him, this madman ran flat out with his eyes glued on Rostopchin, shouting something in a hoarse voice and waving him down. He had a dark and solemn look on his thin, sallow face with its patchy bits of straggly beard. His agate-black eyes with their rolling saffron whites jumped and jerked. 'Stop! I tell you! Stop!' came his thin, shrill voice, and he followed this up with another wheezy call accompanied by other weird sounds and insistent hand-movements.
He caught up with the carriage and ran alongside.
'Thrice they have slain me. Thrice did I rise again from the dead. I have been stoned and crucified . . . I shall rise again . . . rise again . . . rise again . . . My body they have torn to pieces. The kingdom of heaven shall be cast down . . . Thrice shall I cast it down, and thrice shall I raise it up again,' he wailed, his voice getting higher and louder. Suddenly Count Rostopchin turned as white as he had done when the crowd had fallen upon Vereshchagin. He looked away. 'G-g-get going, faster!' he called to his driver in a quavering voice.
The carriage put on all speed. But Count Rostopchin kept on hearing somewhere at his back the mindless scream of despair as it echoed away into the far distance, while up ahead his eyes saw nothing but the shocked and scared, bleeding face of the traitor in the fur-lined coat.
For all the newness of that image, Rostopchin suddenly realized it was deeply imprinted on his heart, etched in blood. He knew the bloody imprint of that memory would never be healed, and the more distant it became, the more cruelly and viciously the dreaded memory would survive in his heart to the end of his days. He seemed to hear the sound of his own words coming back: 'Kill him, or you'll answer with your heads!' 'Why did I utter those words? They just came out . . . I needn't have said them,' he thought, 'and then nothing at all would have happened.' He saw again the face of the dragoon who had struck the first blow, scared to begin with but then suddenly roused to a frenzy, and the diffident glance of unspoken reproach levelled at him by that young man in the fur-lined coat. 'But I didn't do it for myself. I was duty bound to do what I did. The rabble . . . the traitor . . . the public good,' he thought to himself.
There were still hordes of troops near the bridge over the Yauza. It was hot. Kutuzov cut a weary, brooding figure as he sat on a bench not far from the bridge, and he was doodling with his whip in the sand when a noisy carriage came rattling up. A man in a general's uniform complete with plumed hat came over to Kutuzov and spoke to him in French, his eyes darting about between fury and fear. It was Count Rostopchin. He told Kutuzov he had had to come here, because Moscow was no more, the capital city had gone, and only the army was left. 'It might have been different if your Serene Highness had not assured me you would never surrender Moscow without a fight. None of this would have happened!'
Kutuzov stared at Rostopchin as if he couldn't make head or tail of what he was saying and had to concentrate hard in the hope of picking out some special meaning flickering for a moment on the face of the man addressing him. Rostopchin wound down in some embarrassment. Kutuzov gave a slight shake of his head and murmured quietly, with his searching eyes still glued on Rostopchin's face, 'No, I won't surrender Moscow without a fight.' Whether Kutuzov was otherwise preoccupied when he uttered these words, or said them deliberately, knowing how meaningless they were, Count Rostopchin hurried away without replying. And lo and behold! The governor-general of Moscow, the proud Count Rostopchin, picked up a whip, walked over to the bridge, and began directing the carts that were blocking the way.
CHAPTER 26
It was getting on for four o'clock in the afternoon when Murat's troops entered Moscow. Out in front rode a detachment of the Wurttemberg hussars; behind them came the King of Naples himself with a large suite of men.
Half-way down the Arbat, near to St Nicholas's Church, Murat called a halt and waited for a report from the advance detachment on the present situation at le Kremlin, the Moscow citadel.
A little knot of remaining Muscovites gathered round Murat. They stared in polite bemusement at the curious figure of the long-haired commander all decked out in feathers and gold.
'What's 'e supposed to be then? Is it 'im? Is 'e their Tsar? Not bad, is 'e?' came a few quiet voices.
An interpreter came over to the group of onlookers.
'Hey, caps . . . take your caps off,' went the word in the little crowd as people turned to each other. The interpreter asked an old porter how far it was to the Kremlin. The porter listened blankly to a stream of Russian coming at him with a weird Polish accent, couldn't tell that the interpreter was speaking his language and didn't understand a word of it, so he dived behind the others for safety.
Murat came over to the interpreter and told him to ask where the Russian troops had gone. One of the Russians understood what they were after, and soon several voices were answering the interpreter all at the same time. A French officer from the advance detachment then rode up to Murat and reported that the gates into the citadel had been barricaded, and there was probably an ambush there.
'Good,' said Murat. He turned to one of the gentlemen of his suite and ordered him to bring up four light cannons and open fire on the gates.
The artillery came trotting out from the column of troops behind Murat, and rode off down the Arbat. When they got to the end of Vozdvizhenka the artillery came to a halt and formed up in the square. Several French officers supervised the siting and spacing of the cannons, and looked across at the Kremlin through a telescope.
The Kremlin bells were ringing for evening service, and the sound of them worried the French. They could only take this as a call to arms. A few infantrymen ran over to the Kutafyev gate. The entry was barricaded with beams and planks. Two musket shots rang out from the gateway the moment it was approached by an officer with some of his men. The general standing by the cannons yelled across some words of command, and the officer and the soldiers ran back.
Three more shots came from the gate. One grazed the leg of a French soldier, and a few voices could be heard uttering strange cries from behind the barricade. The faces of the French general, the officers and men changed in a flash, as if someone had given an order, expressions of quiet good humour giving way to looks of grim determination, close concentration and readiness for action and suffering. To every last man from the marshal to the humblest soldier, this was now not one of the streets in Moscow or the Trinity gate; it was another battlefield, and bloodshed was likely. They all stood ready to fight. The shouting on the other side of the gateway died down. The cannons were brought forward. The gunners blew the ash off their burnt-down linstocks. An officer shouted 'Fire!' and two canister-shots whistled over one after another. The shot rattled against the stone gateway, the beams and barriers, and two wavering smoke-clouds rose above the square.
A few seconds after the echoes of the shots had died away over the stonework of the Kremlin, the French heard a strange sound overhead. Thousands of jackdaws soared up from the walls and circled round in the air with raucous cawing and a great flapping of wings. Along with this sound a solitary human cry was heard from the gate, and through the smoke emerged the figure of a bare-headed man wearing a long peasant's coat. He held up his musket and took aim at the French. 'Fire!' repeated the artillery officer, and a musket shot and two cannon shots rang out simultaneously. Once again the gate was enveloped in smoke.
There was now no movement from behind the barricade, and the French infantrymen approached the gate with their officers. There in the gateway lay seven Russians, three wounded and four dead. Two men in long peasant coats were seen running away along the walls down towards Znamenka.
'Get rid of this lot,' said the officer, pointing to the beams and the dead bodies. The French soldiers finished off the wounded, and threw the dead bodies over the parapet. Who these men were nobody knew. They were dismissed in a few words, 'Get rid of this lot', thrown down below and later cleared away to avoid a stink. The historian Thiers is unique in devoting a few eloquent lines to their memory: 'These wretched men had invaded the sacred citadel, taken weapons from the arsenal and fired on the French (the wretches). Some of them were dispatched with swords, and the Kremlin was purged of their presence.'
Murat was informed that the way had been cleared. The French came in through the gate and began to set up camp on Senate Square. The soldiers threw chairs down into the square from the Senate House windows and lit fires with them.
Other detachments marched past the Kremlin and pitched camp along Moroseyka, Lubyanka and Pokrovka. Others set themselves up in Vozdvizhenka, Znamenka, Nikolsky and Tverskoy. With no hosts available, the French decided not to take over any houses; instead, they pitched camp as normal, but out in the town.
The French were a ragged lot, hungry and exhausted, and their numbers were down by two-thirds, but their soldiers entered Moscow in good order. It was a harassed and exhausted army, though still ready for action and a real threat. But it remained an army only up to the point when its soldiers scattered themselves all over the town. Once the soldiers began to find their various ways into wealthy, deserted houses, the army had gone for ever, to be replaced by men who were neither citizens nor soldiers, but in-between creatures of the type known as looters. Five weeks later these same men would set out from Moscow, and by then they had ceased to be an army. They were a mob of looters, all of them carrying or wheeling piles of things they considered valuable or useful. The aim of these departing men was not what it had been before, to acquit themselves well in battle, but simply to keep all the loot they had managed to get their hands on. Like a monkey who slips his hand down the narrow neck of a jug and grabs a handful of nuts, and then refuses to open his fist for fear of dropping his treasure, even if it costs him his life, the departing French were obviously bound to come to grief because of all the loot they were carrying, and it was no more possible for them to abandon their loot than for the monkey to let go of his handful of nuts. Ten minutes after the dispersal of the French regiments all over the various districts of Moscow, not a soldier or officer was left. At the windows of houses men in greatcoats and Hessian boots could be seen laughing as they strolled about the rooms. Down in the cellars and out in the store-rooms the same sort of men were taking over any provisions; in the yards the same sort of men were unlocking or breaking into coach-houses and stables; in the kitchens they were lighting fires, and rolling up their sleeves to start mixing, kneading and baking, and they were either scaring the women and children out of their wits or amusing them and being nice. And men like these were all over the place, in all the shops and houses. They existed in great numbers, but there wasn't any army.
Throughout that first day the French commanders issued order after order forbidding the troops to disperse about the town, strictly prohibiting violent behaviour towards any inhabitants and looting, and calling everybody to a general roll-call that evening. But in defiance of all such measures the men who had so recently made up an army drained away all over this wealthy, deserted city, so richly supplied with goods and luxuries. Like a ravening herd of cattle that sticks together while crossing a barren plain but scatters unstoppably in all directions as soon as they get to green pastures, the army scattered unstoppably throughout this wealthy town.
Moscow had no inhabitants, and the soldiers were rapidly absorbed like water soaking into sand, as they drained away unstoppably in all directions radiating out starwise from the Kremlin, their first point of entry. Cavalry soldiers would find their way into a merchant's house abandoned with all its belongings, where there was more than enough stabling for their horses, yet still go on to occupy another house because it seemed better. Many took several houses, chalking the occupier's name outside, there were quarrels with other companies over possession and they even came to blows. The soldiers had barely settled in before they rushed out to have a look round the town, and when they heard about places where everything had been abandoned they charged off to pick up valuable items that could be had for the taking. Officers who followed on to stop this behaviour couldn't help getting involved themselves. In Carriage Row there were shops still stocked with carriages, and generals flocked there to choose coaches and carriages for their own use. The few remaining citizens invited officers into their homes in the hope of protecting themselves against robbery. These were days of bonanza, with no end to the wealth available. Everywhere, in all the places surrounding the districts occupied by the French, there were new regions as yet unexplored and unoccupied which the French imagined to be teeming with more good things. And Moscow steadily absorbed them. But it was like water flowing over dry soil when the water and the soil mingle into mud; when the ravenous army entered the wealthy, deserted city, both the army and the wealth soon disappeared, and the result was a place of filth, burning buildings and gangs of looters.
The French attributed the burning of Moscow to Rostopchin and his 'ferocious patriotism'; the Russians to French barbarism. In point of fact, there never has been, and never could be, any satisfactory explanation of the burning of Moscow, not in terms of attributing responsibility to any one person or group of people. Moscow burnt because she found herself in a situation in which any town of wooden construction was bound to burn, whether or not it had a hundred and thirty pretty useless fire-appliances at its disposal. Once her inhabitants had gone away Moscow was bound to burn, just as a pile of wood-shavings is bound to catch fire if you scatter sparks all over it for days on end. A town of wooden buildings where something catches fire almost every day during the summer, even when the owners are still there and the police are at hand, is sure to burn when the property-owners have gone away and been replaced by pipe-smoking soldiers who use Senate House chairs as firewood in Senate Square and cook themselves a meal twice a day. Even in peace-time whenever troops are billeted in villages the number of fires in the district goes up straightaway. How much greater the likelihood of fire in an abandoned town built of wood and occupied by foreign troops! There is no point in blaming it on Rostopchin's 'ferocious patriotism' or French savagery. Moscow was set on fire by men smoking pipes, kitchen stoves and camp-fires, by the careless behaviour of enemy soldiers living in houses they didn't own. If there was any arson (which is very doubtful because no one had any reason to go round starting fires, and in any case that is a tricky business and also very dangerous), we cannot claim this as the real cause because the same thing would have happened without it.
However convenient it may have been for the French to blame the ferocious Rostopchin, and for the Russians to the blame that villain Napoleon, or at a later date to hand the heroic torch to their patriot peasantry, we cannot hide the fact that there could never be one single reason behind the fire, because Moscow was as certain to burn as any village, factory or house abandoned by its owners and taken over by strangers to live in and cook their porridge. Yes, it is true that Moscow was burnt by its inhabitants, but it was burnt by those who went away rather than those who stayed behind. Moscow was not like Berlin, Vienna and other cities that emerged unscathed from the enemy occupation. The difference was that her inhabitants, instead of welcoming the French with the keys of the city and the traditional bread and salt, preferred to walk away.
CHAPTER 27
It was not until the evening of the 2nd of September that the process of absorbing the French into Moscow by spreading out starwise finally reached the district where Pierre was staying.
After two days spent in isolation and unusual circumstances Pierre was in a state bordering on insanity. He was wholly obsessed by a single idea. He didn't know when or how it had come about, but he was now so completely obsessed that he remembered nothing from the past, and understood nothing of the present. Everything he saw and heard seemed dreamlike as it passed before him.
Pierre had left his own house simply to escape from the challenging and complex tangle of everyday demands that he could not unravel in his current state of mind. He had gone to Osip Bazdeyev's house ostensibly to sort out the dead man's books and papers, but actually in search of peace and quiet amidst all the turmoil of his life. In his heart and memory he associated Bazdeyev with a different realm of quietude and ideas that seemed solemn and eternal, the exact opposite of the tangled web of anxiety that he could feel himself being drawn into. He sought a quiet refuge, and he certainly found one in Bazdeyev's study. Sitting there in the deathlike stillness of the study with his head in his hands and his elbows on the dead man's dusty desk, one by one he brought back to mind all the impressions of the last few days, considering them calmly and with full understanding, especially the battle of Borodino and that overwhelming sense of his own insignificance and hollowness compared with the righteousness, simplicity and strength of character of those few people who had left a mark on his soul and whom he thought of as 'them'. When Gerasim had interrupted his reverie Pierre's first thought was that he might go out and join the people in their defence of Moscow. (He knew such a proposal was in the air.) This was why he had asked Gerasim to get him a peasant's coat and a pistol, and why he told him he was going to hide his identity and stay on in Bazdeyev's house. Then throughout his first day of solitude and idleness (Pierre made several attempts to concentrate on the masonic manuscripts, but to no avail) his mind had been drawn back repeatedly to a vague recollection of an idea that had been nagging at him for some time: the cabbalistic significance that linked his name with Napoleon's. But as yet the idea that he, l'russe Besuhof, was fated to put an end to the power of the Beast, was nothing more than one of those dreams that pop up in the mind spontaneously and are immediately gone without trace. When Pierre had bought the peasant's coat, with the sole object of joining the people in the defence of Moscow, and then met the Rostovs, and Natasha had said, 'Are you are staying on? I think it's wonderful!' it occurred to him that it really might be wonderful, even if they took Moscow, for him to s