end to them!'
The open question of whether the wound administered at Borodino was or was not a mortal wound had been hanging over Kutuzov's head for a whole month. On the one hand, the French had taken possession of Moscow. On the other hand, it was surely beyond doubt, and Kutuzov felt this with every fibre of his being, that the terrible blow that he had summoned all his strength to administer, along with all the Russians, must have been a deadly one. But in the last analysis proof was needed, and he had been waiting for it for a whole month, getting more and more impatient as time went by. As he lay there night after night unable to sleep he did the very thing these whipper-snapper generals were always doing, the very thing he criticized them for. He kept going over all the possible ways in which Napoleon's downfall might come about, given that his downfall was now a certainty, even a fait accompli. He ran through them, just as the younger generation did, but with two provisos: he refused to draw any conclusions from these suppositions, and he saw the possible contingencies not in twos or threes, but in thousands. The more he thought about them, the more he saw. He imagined Napoleon's army making all sorts of movements, acting as a whole or dividing into sections, marching on Petersburg, or against him, or right round him. He also imagined the possibility (and this scared him most of all) that Napoleon might fight against him with his own weapons, that he would stay on in Moscow and wait for him to make a move. Kutuzov even imagined Napoleon's army marching back via Medyn and Yukhnova. The one thing he could not have foreseen was what actually happened, the crazy, lurching stampede of Napoleon's army during the first eleven days of its march from Moscow, a stampede that raised a possibility Kutuzov had never dared to dream of, the complete annihilation of the French. Dorokhov's report on Broussier's division, the news brought in by guerrillas about the miseries suffered by Napoleon's army, rumours of preparations being made for the evacuation of Moscow, everything confirmed the idea that the French army was beaten and getting ready to go. But it was no more than supposition, and however important it was to the youngsters, it cut no ice with Kutuzov. With sixty years' experience behind him he knew how much weight to attach to rumours, he knew that men who want something are only too ready to arrange all the evidence to suit their wishful thinking and willingly exclude anything that contradicts it. And the more Kutuzov wanted it to be true, the less he allowed himself to believe it. This question had been absorbing all his spiritual energy. And everything else was everyday routine. Everyday routine took in conversations with his staff-officers, letters written from Tarutino to Madame de Stael, reading novels, bestowing honours on people, correspondence with Petersburg, and so on. But the destruction of the French, foreseen by him alone, was the one desire of his heart.
On the night of the 11th of October he was lying there leaning on one arm, thinking about that very thing.
There was a stir in the next room, and he heard the approaching footsteps of Toll, Konovnitsyn and Bolkhovitinov.
'Who's that then? Come on in, come on in! Anything new to report?' the commander-in-chief called out.
While a footman was lighting a candle, Toll put him in the picture.
'Who brought this news?' asked Kutuzov. As the candle flared up Toll saw a face that impressed him by its cold severity.
'There's no doubt about it, your Highness.'
'Get him. Bring him in!'
Kutuzov sat there with one leg out of bed and his big belly flopping down all over the other leg that was still bent under him. He screwed up his one good eye to get a better view of the messenger, as if he was hoping to read in his features the one thing that was on his mind.
'My dear fellow, tell me the whole story,' he said to Bolkhovitinov in his weak old man's voice, pulling his shirt together where it had fallen open over his chest. 'Come on. Come a bit nearer. So what's all this news about? Eh? Napoleon's left Moscow, has he? Has he really? Eh?'
Bolkhovitinov went through every detail of what he had been told to say.
'Come on, get on with it. Don't leave me in agony,' Kutuzov interrupted him.
Bolkhovitinov told him everything and then stopped, waiting for orders. Toll was on the point of saying something, but Kutuzov checked him. He tried to say something himself, but suddenly his face wrinkled and crumpled. Waving at Toll, he turned away to the far corner of the hut, which was blackened with candle-smoke around the holy icons. 'Lord, my Creator! Thou hast heard our prayer . . .' he said in a trembling voice with his hands clasped together. 'Russia is saved. I thank Thee, O Lord.' And he burst into tears.
CHAPTER 18
From the time he received this news to the end of the campaign Kutuzov limited his activity to nothing more than using all his authority, skill and powers of persuasion to restrain his army from any useless attacks, manoeuvres and encounters with the doomed enemy. Whereas Dokhturov goes marching off to Maloyaroslavets, Kutuzov is in no hurry with the main army, issuing orders for the evacuation of Kaluga, on the grounds that retreat beyond that town seems like a real possibility. Kutuzov pulls back on all sides, but the enemy, without waiting for him to withdraw, flees in the opposite direction.
Napoleon's historians describe his tactical skill at Tarutino and Maloyaroslavets, and speculate about what might have happened if Napoleon had managed to get through to the rich provinces of the south.
But, apart from the fact that there was nothing to stop Napoleon marching straight down into these southern provinces (since the Russian army had left the road open), these historians forget that Napoleon's army was beyond salvation by now because it carried within itself the germ of inevitable ruin. How could that army - which had come across plentiful supplies in Moscow but had trampled them underfoot instead of conserving them, and went in for random looting rather than careful management of provisions when they got to Smolensk - how could this army have suddenly come to its senses in the province of Kaluga, where the inhabitants were of the same Russian stock as in Moscow, and where fire was still fire, consuming anything that is set alight?
The army could never have come to its senses. Ever since the battle of Borodino and the sacking of Moscow it had carried within itself what you might call the chemical elements of decomposition.
This relic of an army, the men and their leaders, fled with no idea where they were going. All of them from Napoleon down to the last of his soldiers had but one thing in mind: to extricate themselves as fast as they could from a hopeless situation which they all acknowledged, however dimly.
And for this reason, when the French generals met in council at Maloyaroslavets and went through the motions of exchanging opinions in serious debate, the last contribution - from an ingenuous soul, General Mouton, who put into words what they had all been thinking, that the only thing to do was to get out as fast as they could - closed every mouth, and no one, not even Napoleon, had anything to say against a truth they all acknowledged.
But though everybody knew they had to go, there was a lingering feeling of shame at having to flee. What they needed was some external impulse strong enough to overcome the shame. And in due course the impulse came. It was what the French called 'the Emperor's Hurrah'.
On the day after the council, early in the morning, on the pretext of reviewing the troops and the scene of a past and future battle, Napoleon rode out with a suite of marshals and an escort right in the middle of his army lines. A party of marauding Cossacks stumbled across the Emperor and very nearly took him prisoner. What prevented the Cossacks from capturing Napoleon that day was the very thing that was bringing down the French army - the question of loot, which the Cossacks dived on here, as at Tarutino, in preference to pursuing people. Ignoring Napoleon, they dashed straight at the loot, and Napoleon managed to get away.
If the children of the Don could come within an ace of capturing the Emperor himself in the middle of his army, it was clear that the only thing to do was run away as fast as they could down the nearest known road. Napoleon, with forty years on his back and a big paunch to carry around, was not the nimble adventurer of old, and he soon took the hint. The Cossacks had given him a real scare. He agreed at once with Mouton, and historians tell us he ordered the army to backtrack and go down the road through Smolensk.
The fact that Napoleon agreed with Mouton, and the army went back on its tracks, does not prove that his orders made this happen; all it shows is that certain forces acting on the army as a whole and diverting it down the Mozhaysk road were also acting at the same time on Napoleon.
CHAPTER 19
When a man finds himself moving forwards, he never fails to think of a goal to aim at. If he is to walk a thousand miles a man must believe there is something good waiting at the end of the thousand miles. You need the vision of a promised land to keep on moving. Moscow had been the promised land for the French on their way into Russia; on their way out it was home. But home was too far away. A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.' During this first stage of the journey the resting-place eclipses any idea of the ultimate goal, and all his hopes and desires are focused on that alone. And any impulses manifested in an individual are always magnified in a crowd.
For the French army marching back down the old Smolensk road, the ultimate goal of getting back home was too far away, and the short-term goal, the focus of all their hopes and desires, greatly magnified by the crowd effect, was Smolensk. Not that they expected to find Smolensk teeming with supplies and reinforcements, or that anyone had told them so (on the contrary, the high command and Napoleon himself knew full well there was a shortage of supplies there), but this was the only thing that buoyed them up, kept them moving and enabled them to bear the ills they had. All of them, those who knew and those who didn't, pulled the wool over their own eyes and looked on Smolensk as a promised land.
Once out on the high road the French fled towards their mythical goal with amazing energy and incredible speed. Apart from the common impulse that brought hordes of Frenchmen together into a single whole and gave them a certain momentum there was something else that held them together - their huge numbers. As with the law of gravity in physics, their very mass, huge as it was, attracted the men like individual atoms. On they went in their hundreds of thousands, like an entire state, moving with their collective mass.
Every man jack of them shared a single desire: to give himself up and escape from all his present horrors and disasters. But on the one hand, the momentum set up by the general onward drive towards the goal of Smolensk was pulling every individual in the same direction. On the other hand, a whole corps couldn't possibly surrender to a division, and although the French made the most of every opportunity to separate and find the slightest decent pretext to be taken prisoner, opportunities like these didn't always arise. They were deprived of such possibilities by sheer numbers, and meanwhile the speed of their densely packed onward movement, with all its associated mass and energy, made it more than difficult for the Russians to stop the French - in fact, it was impossible. No mechanical dismembering of the body could have accelerated beyond a certain limit the process of decomposition that was underway on the inside.
A snowball cannot be melted instantaneously. There is a fixed time limit beyond which no amount of heat can thaw the snow. It works the other way round: the more heat you apply, the harder the snow that is left.
Kutuzov was alone among the Russian generals in his understanding of this principle. Once the flight of the French army had been determined - down the road to Smolensk - the very thing Konovnitsyn had anticipated on the night of the 11th of October started to happen. All the top brass of the Russian army began looking for glory by cutting them off, intercepting, taking prisoners, overrunning the French. They were all spoiling for a fight.
Kutuzov alone used all his powers (and the powers of any commander-in-chief are very limited) to avoid a fight.
He couldn't have told them what we can say now. He couldn't have asked them what purpose was served by fighting, barring their way, losing more of our men and callously finishing the poor devils off, especially when a third of that army melted away of its own accord between Moscow and Vyazma without any battle being fought. But, drawing on his store of aged wisdom and finding something they might be able to get into their heads, he told them about the golden bridge, but they mocked and maligned him, raging and rampaging over the dead beast.
Not far from Vyazma, Yermolov, Miloradovich, Platov and others happened to find themselves near to the French, and they couldn't resist the urge to isolate two French corps and launch an attack on them. As a way of announcing their intentions to Kutuzov instead of a proper message they sent him a blank piece of paper in an envelope.
And in spite of Kutuzov's best efforts to restrain the army, the army attacked the French and tried to bar their way. The infantry regiments, so we are told, marched into battle to music and rolling drums in order to slay and be slain in their thousands.
But as for cutting off the enemy's retreat - nobody was cut off or overrun. And the French army, more united than ever because of the danger, continued on its disastrous journey to Smolensk, melting away steadily as it went.
PART III
CHAPTER 1
The battle of Borodino, along with the subsequent occupation of Moscow and the flight of the French without further conflict, is one of the most instructive phenomena in history.
Historians agree that the external activity of states and peoples when they are at odds with each other finds an outlet in warfare, and that the political power of states and peoples waxes or wanes in direct proportion to success or failure on the battlefield.
We may find it strange when history describes the process by which some king or emperor falls out with another king or emperor, raises an army, fights and wins a battle against the enemy, killing three, five or ten thousand men, and thus subjugates a state and a whole nation running to millions; we may find it hard to understand how the defeat of an army, a mere hundredth part of a nation's strength, somehow forces the whole people into submission, yet all the facts of history (as far as we can know history) justify the general belief that the success or failure of one nation's army against another nation's army is the cause, or at least a major indication, of the waxing or waning of a nation's power. An army wins a battle, and the winners' rights are immediately increased at the expense of the losers'. An army suffers a defeat, and the people are immediately deprived of their rights according to the magnitude of defeat, and if defeat is total, they fall into total submission. It has been like this (history would have us believe) from ancient times right up to the present day. All of Napoleon's earlier wars serve to confirm this principle. As the Austrian armies went down to defeat, Austria was more and more deprived of her rights, while the rights and power of France grew and grew. French victories at Jena and Auerstadt destroyed Prussia as an independent state.
Then suddenly, in 1812, the French gained a victory just outside Moscow. Moscow was taken, yet subsequently, with no more battles being fought, it was not Russia that ceased to exist, but the six-hundred-thousand-strong French army, and then Napoleonic France itself. Any stretching of the truth to accommodate the laws of history by claiming that it was the Russians who won the day at Borodino, or that after Moscow there were other battles that destroyed Napoleon's army, is out of the question.
After the French victory at Borodino there were no more general engagements, not even a skirmish of any significance, yet the French army ceased to exist. What is the meaning of this? If this example had come from the history of China we could have labelled it 'unhistorical' (the sort of thing historians fall back on when the facts don't fit). If it had been a small-scale event with only a few troops involved, we might have treated it as an exception. But our fathers watched it happen with their own eyes; for them and their country it was a matter of life and death. This war was on a larger scale than any that we know of.
The aftermath of the 1812 campaign, from Borodino to the final expulsion of the French, proved that the winning of battles does not necessarily lead to conquest, and may not be a reliable indication of conquest. It proved that the determining force in the destiny of nations lies not in successful military leaders, nor even armies and battles; it lies somewhere else.
French historians, describing the situation of the French troops before they marched out of Moscow, claim that everything was all right with the Great French Army except for the cavalry, artillery and transport, and a shortage of forage for the horses and cattle. This was a calamity that couldn't be helped because the peasants in the surrounding countryside were burning their hay rather than hand it over to the French.
Victory did not lead to the usual results, because your Russian peasants, Karp and Vlas, hardly the personification of heroic behaviour, came into Moscow on their carts to grab what they could once the French had gone, and countless numbers of others like them decided not to bring their hay to Moscow, but burn it instead.
Let us imagine two men fighting a duel with swords and following all the rules laid down for the art of swordsmanship. The fencing goes on for quite some time. Suddenly one of the combatants realizes he has been wounded, and the wound is serious, life-threatening, so he throws his sword away, grabs the first club that comes to hand and weighs in with it. Then let us imagine that this duellist, having been bright enough to find the best and easiest method of getting his way but also being a champion of old-fashioned chivalry, decides to cover up what really happened and now insists he won by fighting fair. Imagine the confusion and obscurity that would arise in his description of the duel!
The duellist who fought by the rules was the French army; his opponent, who threw his sword away and grabbed a club, was the Russian army, and those who attempt to explain everything by the rule-book are the historians who have written about this event.
The burning of Smolensk was followed by a w