A spiritual wound, one that comes from a laceration of the spirit, is much like a physical wound; after it has healed and knitted together on the outside, strange as it may seem, a spiritual wound behaves like a physical injury in continuing the healing process on the inside under pressure from the life force pushing up from within.
And this was how Natasha's wound was healing. She had believed her life was over. But suddenly love for her mother had showed her that the essence of her life - love - was still alive within her. When love reawakened, life reawakened.
Prince Andrey's last days had created a very close bond between Natasha and Princess Marya. This new disaster brought them even closer together. Princess Marya delayed her departure, and for the last three weeks she had been taking care of Natasha as if she was a sick child. These recent weeks spent by Natasha in her mother's room had taken their toll on her physical strength.
One day Princess Marya noticed that Natasha was shivering feverishly, so she took her off to her own room, and tucked her up in her bed in the middle of the day. Natasha lay there, but when Princess Marya let the blinds down and started walking out of the room, Natasha called her back.
'I don't feel sleepy, Marie. Stay with me, please.'
'You must be tired. Try to get some sleep.'
'No, no. Why did you bring me away? She'll want to know where I am.'
'No, she's a lot better. She's been making sense today,' said Princess Marya.
Natasha lay there on the bed, looking closely at Princess Marya's face in the semi-darkness.
'Is she like him?' Natasha wondered. 'Well, she is and she isn't. But she is somebody special, different, original, mysterious. And she does love me. What is she feeling deep in her heart? Nothing but goodness. But what does she actually feel? What does she think? How does she look on me? Oh yes, she's a wonderful woman!'
'Masha,' she said, timidly pulling her hand towards her. 'Masha, please don't think badly of me. You won't, will you? Masha, darling! I do love you. Can we be good friends, always good friends?'
Natasha gave her a hug, and started kissing her on the hands and face. Princess Marya felt embarrassed, though this demonstration of emotion gave her great pleasure.
That day marked the beginning of a new friendship between Princess Marya and Natasha, one of those tender and passionate friendships that can exist only between women. They never stopped kissing each other and saying nice things to each other, and they spent most of their time together. If one of them went away the other felt restless and soon went off to join her. They had a greater sense of harmony together than they ever did when they were separated and on their own. The feeling between them turned into something stronger than friendship, a unique sensation that life was possible only when they were together.
Sometimes they didn't speak for hours on end. Sometimes they would start chatting as they lay in bed and not stop till morning. They talked mostly about the distant past. Princess Marya would talk about her childhood, her mother, her father, and her dreams. And Natasha, who had once turned away in blissful ignorance from that life of devotion and resignation, all the poetry of Christian self-sacrifice, now felt such deep affection for Princess Marya that she came to love her past life, and she now understood the side of her that had seemed so perplexing before. She had no intention of applying the same kind of resignation and self-sacrifice to her own life, because she had got used to seeking out other delights, but now she could understand in somebody else the kind of virtue that had previously been beyond her comprehension. And Princess Marya too, as she listened to Natasha telling stories about her childhood and adolescence, gained a new insight into a side of life she knew nothing about, a belief in the goodness of living and the enjoyment of life.
They still avoided him as a topic of conversation, because mere words were liable to detract from what they saw as an exalted feeling in their hearts. This reluctance to talk about him meant that they were gradually forgetting him, though they would never have believed it.
Natasha had grown thin and pale, and so weak physically that the state of her health was on everybody's lips, and this pleased her. Yet sometimes she had sudden feelings of dread, not just of dying but of being ill and feeble, and losing her looks. Sometimes she would catch herself examining her bare arm, marvelling at its thinness, or getting up in the morning, glancing in the mirror at her face, and finding it pitifully pinched and drawn. This was how things had to be, she felt, yet she was left with a feeling of sadness and dread.
One day she ran upstairs too quickly, and stood gasping for breath at the top. Her immediate and instinctive reaction was to invent some excuse for going back downstairs so she could run up again, watching how she did and testing her strength.
On another occasion her voice cracked as she called for Dunyasha, so she called her again, even though she could hear her coming; she used her deepest voice, the one normally reserved for singing, and listened to how it sounded.
What she did not know, and would never have believed, was that though her soul seemed to have been grown over with an impenetrable layer of mould, some delicate blades of grass, young and tender, were already pushing their way upwards, destined to take root and send out living shoots so effectively that her all-consuming grief would soon be lost and forgotten. The wound was healing from inside.
At the end of January Princess Marya left for Moscow, and at the count's insistence Natasha went with her to consult the doctors.
CHAPTER 4
After the engagement at Vyazma, where Kutuzov had not managed to contain his troops' burning desire to rout the enemy, isolate them and so on, the onward march of the fleeing French and the fast-chasing Russians continued as far as Krasnoye without any pitched battle. The pace was so fast that the pursuing Russian army couldn't catch up with the French, the horses of the cavalry and artillery kept falling by the wayside, and any intelligence concerning the movements of the French was always unreliable.
The Russian soldiers were so exhausted by more than twenty-five miles a day of constant marching that they couldn't go any faster.
To appreciate the degree of exhaustion suffered by the Russian army all we have to do is take in the full meaning of one simple fact: the Russians lost no more than five thousand dead and wounded on the long march from Tarutino, and barely a hundred were taken prisoner, yet the army that set out with a hundred thousand men had been reduced to fifty thousand by the time it got to Krasnoye.
The speed of the Russian pursuit had the same kind of devastating effect on the Russian army as the flight of the French had on theirs, the only difference being that the Russian army was moving freely, without the threat of annihilation that hung over the French, and any sick stragglers of the French fell into enemy hands, whereas Russian stragglers found themselves on home ground among their own people. The main reason for the reduction in Napoleon's army was the sheer speed of their retreat, conclusive proof of which is provided by a corresponding reduction in the Russian army.
As before at Tarutino and Vyazma, Kutuzov (unlike the Russian generals in Petersburg, and also in the army) did everything in his power to concentrate on not getting in the way of the disastrous French retreat, indeed positively encouraging it, and slowing the pace of his own army.
Apart from the increasingly apparent exhaustion of the men and the immense losses caused by the sheer speed of their movement, Kutuzov was presented with another reason for slowing down and waiting to see how things turned out. The object of the Russian army was to pursue the French. The route taken by the French was uncertain, which meant that the more closely our men followed on the heels of the French, the more miles they covered. Only by following at a fair distance could they take short cuts and iron out the ziz-zags performed by the French. All the skilful manoeuvres proposed by the generals were based on moving the troops on ever-longer forced marches, whereas the only sensible aim would have been to shorten them. So this was the one aim that Kutuzov concentrated on all the way from Moscow to Vilna, not casually, not in fits and starts, but with such consistency that he never once lost sight of it.
With all his Russian heart and soul rather than by dint of reason or science Kutuzov knew and felt what every Russian soldier felt: the French were beaten, the enemy had been put to flight, and all they had to do was see them off. He was also at one with his men in appreciating all the terrible demands of that march, an unprecedented undertaking at such speed and at that time of year.
But the generals, especially the non-Russian ones, out for glory, hoping to dazzle the world by capturing the odd duke or king for some obscure reason - these generals believed that now, the very moment when any battle would have been a senseless and disgusting spectacle, was a good time to go on the attack and bring somebody down. Kutuzov responded with nothing more than a shrug when they paraded before him one after another with their plans involving new manoeuvres to be executed by ill-shod, badly clothed, half-starved soldiers whose numbers had been halved in a single month without any fighting, and who, even if the chase that was under way had the best possible outcome, would have had further to go before they got to the frontier than the distance they had already covered.
This would-be dash for glory by manoeuvring, routing the foe and cutting them off came to the fore whenever the Russian army happened to stumble across the French.
This is what happened at Krasnoye, where instead of finding one of the three French columns as expected, they ran into Napoleon in person accompanied by sixteen thousand troops. Despite Kutuzov's best efforts to avoid this disastrous confrontation and keep his men safe, for three solid days at Krasnoye the exhausted soldiers of the Russian army went about the systematic slaughter of the scattered mobs of French soldiers.
Toll wrote his usual disposition: 'First column to advance to this spot . . .' and all the rest. As always, nothing took place in accordance with this disposition. From the hill-top Prince Eugene of Wurttemberg kept up a barrage of fire on the French hordes as they scurried by, and asked for reinforcements that never came. The French used the hours of darkness to disperse and find a way round the Russians by slinking through the woods, after which anyone who could struggled on down the road.
Miloradovich, famous for telling the world he hadn't the slightest interest in the domestic arrangements of his detachment, a man who could never be found when he was wanted, the self-styled 'chevalier beyond fear and reproach' who was always ready for a parley with the French, wasted a lot of time sending messengers over with demands for surrender and carried out none of the orders received.
'Have that column with my compliments, boys,' said he, riding over to his men and pointing out the French to his cavalry. And the cavalrymen applied spur and sabre to skinny nags that could hardly move, badgered them to something like a trot, and with a huge effort managed to reach the gift-wrapped column, which is to say a mob of frozen, numb, starving Frenchmen. Whereupon all the men in the column laid down their arms and surrendered, something they had been longing to do for many a long week.
At Krasnoye twenty-six thousand prisoners were taken, along with hundreds of field-guns and a kind of stick that was promptly dubbed a 'marshal's baton', and then the arguments started, to determine who had covered himself with the greatest glory. They were well pleased, though there was some regret at the failure to capture Napoleon or some marshal of heroic standing, for which they blamed one another, and Kutuzov in particular.
These men, carried away by their passions, were nothing more than the blind executors of the saddest law of necessity; but they saw themselves as heroes, and mistook their doings for achievements of the highest virtue and honour. They kept on blaming Kutuzov, claiming that from the outset he had prevented them from conquering Napoleon, he thought of nothing but the comforts of the flesh, he had delayed leaving the Linen Mills because he was nice and comfortable there, he had stopped the advance at Krasnoye out of sheer panic when he heard Napoleon was there, you might almost think he was in league with Napoleon, he had been suborned by him (see Sir Robert Wilson's Diary),1 and so on and so forth.
As if it was not enough for contemporaries, carried away by their passions, to have spoken along these lines, posterity and history have labelled Napoleon 'a great man', and as for Kutuzov, foreign writers have him down as a crafty debauchee and feeble old courtier; whereas Russians see him as a rather nondescript character, a kind of puppet with the sole virtue of having a good Russian name . . .
CHAPTER 5
In 1812 and 1813 Kutuzov was openly accused of bungling. The Tsar was dissatisfied with him. And a recent historyb inspired by promptings from on high, presents Kutuzov as a lying, scheming man of the court, frightened by the very name of Napoleon, whose bungling at Krasnoye and the Berezina deprived the Russian army of glory through total victory over the French.
Such is the lot, not of 'great men', since that term remains unacknowledged by the Russian mind, but of those rare and always solitary men who can divine the will of Providence and submit their personal will to it. Such men are castigated by the mob with hatred and contempt for their intuition of the higher laws.
For Russian historians (strange and terrible to relate) Napoleon, the least significant instrument of history, who never once in any place, not even in exile, displayed a trace of human virtue, is an object of admiration and enthusiasm; he is one of their 'great men'.
By contrast, Kutuzov, the man who from start to finish during his period of command in 1812, from Borodino to Vilna, never once let himself down by word or deed, an unparalleled example of self-sacrifice and the ability to see today's events with tomorrow's significance, this Kutuzov is conceived of by the same historians as a rather pathetic, nondescript character, and any mention of him in relation to the year 1812 always causes a stir of embarrassment.
And yet it is difficult to think of any historical figure whose activity shows a greater determination to focus continuously on a single aim. It is difficult to imagine a more noble aim, or one more closely attuned to the will of an entire nation. And it would be even more difficult to find an example anywhere in history of a historical personage accomplishing his declared aim more completely than Kutuzov did after total commitment to it in 1812.
Kutuzov never talked about forty centuries looking down from the Pyramids, or the sacrifices he was making for his country, or what he intended to achieve or had already achieved. In fact he never talked about himself at all, he never indulged in histrionics, and he always seemed like the simplest and most ordinary man around, saying the simplest and most ordinary things. He wrote to his daughters and Madame de Stael, read novels, enjoyed the company of pretty women, liked a little banter with the generals, officers and men, and he never raised any objections when people were trying to make a point with him. When Count Rostopchin galloped up to him at the Yauza bridge to accuse him of being personally responsible for the loss of Moscow, and said, 'I thought you promised not to abandon Moscow without a battle,' Kutuzov answered, 'I'm not going to abandon Moscow without a battle,' even though Moscow had already been abandoned. When Arakcheyev came to him from the Tsar with the news that Yermolov was to be given command of the artillery, Kutuzov said, 'Yes, just what I was saying myself,' even though he had just said the exact opposite. What difference did it make to him, a man in a crowd of simpletons, the only one who understood the enormous significance of what was happening? What difference did it make to him whether Count Rostopchin attributed the disastrous fate of the capital to Kutuzov or himself? It made even less difference whether one particular man was to be given command of the artillery. And it wasn't only under circumstances like these that this old man, who had convinced himself from a lifetime of experience that thoughts and the words used to express them are never prime movers, trotted out utterly meaningless words, blurting out the first thing that came into his head - it happened all the time.
But at no stage in his war career did this man who was so casual with words ever come out with a single expression that went against the one aim he was working towards throughout all the hostilities. On a number of occasions, under a wide range of circumstances, he did spell out his real thoughts, though evidently with the greatest reluctance and a weary certainty that he was bound to be misunderstood. He first fell out with those around him by being the only person to state that they had won the battle of Borodino, a claim he continued to assert both verbally and in reports and dispatches till the day he died. He was the only one who claimed that the loss of Moscow did not mean the loss of Russia. When Lauriston sued for peace, his reply was, There can be no peace, for this is the will of the people. As the French retreated he was the only one to say that all our manoeuvres were pointless, everything would happen on its own better than we could desire, the enemy must be allowed to march to destruction across a 'golden bridge', the battles of Tarutino, Vyazma and Krasnoye were totally unnecessary, we must hold something back to reach the frontier with, and he wouldn't give a single Russian for ten Frenchmen.
And beyond that he alone, this scheming man of the court, as he is commonly portrayed, capable of lying to Arakcheyev to keep the Tsar happy, he, this courtier, was the only man in Vilna willing to risk the Tsar's displeasure by telling him that taking the war abroad would be a wrong and harmful thing to do.
But words alone would be insufficient proof that he understood the significance of what was happening at the time. His actions, all of them without the slightest exception, were focused on a single aim, and they can be reduced to three: (1) to gather maximum strength for a confrontation with the French; (2) to defeat them; and (3) to drive them out of Russia, minimizing the suffering of the people and the soldiers.
It is he, Kutuzov the ditherer, whose motto, 'Patience and Time', never varied, this sworn enemy of precipitate action, who gives battle at Borodino, making fastidious preparations with unheard-of solemnity. It is he, Kutuzov, the man who predicted defeat before the battle of Austerlitz had even started, who now, at Borodino, stands out against the gen