erals and the fact that for the first time in history a victorious army is having to retreat, and defies them all by alone insisting that this has been a victory, not a defeat, and goes on saying it to his dying day. He is the only man, during the long period of retreat, to insist that battle should now be avoided since it is now pointless, the Russians should not go beyond their borders, and no new war should be entered into.
Now that all the events and their consequences lie exposed to our view it is all too easy to grasp their significance, provided we resist the temptation to invest the participating masses with aims that never existed outside the minds of a dozen men.
But how did it happen that this old man, standing alone in the teeth of universal opposition, managed to gauge the popular sense of all that was happening so accurately that he never once deviated from it while he was in charge?
The source of this amazingly intuitive insight into the significance of events as they were unfolding lay in a feeling for the people that filled his heart with rare purity and strength.
It was their recognition of this feeling in him that led the people to flout the will of the Tsar and in such a strange way light upon him, an old man out of favour, as their chosen leader in the national war. And it was this feeling alone that raised him to such an exalted position among men, to heights from which he could exert all his powers as commander-in-chief not towards killing and maiming, but towards saving and sparing them.
This simple, modest, and therefore truly great figure could never fit the false mould invented by history for the European hero, the putative leader of men.
No man is great to his valet because the valet has his own special concept of greatness.
CHAPTER 6
The 5th of November was the first day of the skirmishing that has become known as the battle of Krasnoye. By late afternoon - after much arguing and blundering by generals who never arrived where they were sent, after a day when orders and counter-orders had been flying about everywhere, borne by the adjutants - it became clear that with the enemy in full flight there would not and could not be a battle, and only then did Kutuzov leave Krasnoye for Dobroye, where the new headquarters had been set up that very day.
It had been a clear, frosty day. Kutuzov was riding towards Dobroye on his tubby little white horse, with an enormous entourage of disgruntled generals murmuring behind his back. As they went along they kept coming across groups of French prisoners - seven thousand had been taken in a single day - crowding round camp-fires to get warm. Not far from Dobroye they heard the dull roar of a huge crowd of men talking, prisoners dressed in rags, bandaged and wrapped up in whatever had come to hand, standing on the road beside a long line of unharnessed French cannons. At the approach of the commander-in-chief the roar died down, and all eyes turned to Kutuzov, who was wending his way down the road, wearing his white cap with its red band, and a padded overcoat that sat awkwardly on his hunched shoulders. One of the generals was explaining where the guns and prisoners had been captured.
Kutuzov seemed too preoccupied to take in what the general was saying. He was wincing with displeasure as he stared very closely at the figures of the most wretched-looking prisoners. Most of them had cheeks and noses disfigured by frostbite, and almost all had red, swollen and festering eyes.
A group of Frenchmen standing at the roadside contained two soldiers, one with sores all over his face, who were tearing at a piece of raw meat with their bare hands. There was something brutal and horrible in the cursory glance they bestowed on the passing party, and the savage glare that the soldier with the sore face launched at Kutuzov before turning away and going on with what he was doing.
Kutuzov stared long and hard at these two soldiers. Frowning more than ever, he screwed up his eyes, and shook his head thoughtfully. Further on, he noticed a Russian soldier saying something friendly to a French prisoner, laughing and clapping him on the shoulder. Kutuzov shook his head again with the same expression on his face.
'What's that? What were you saying?' he asked the general, who was still explaining away and trying to get the commander-in-chief to look at the French colours that had been set up in front of the Preobrazhensky regiment.
'Oh yes, the flags!' said Kutuzov, who was clearly having difficulty in dragging his mind back from what it was preoccupied with. He looked about vaguely.
Thousands of eyes were on him from all sides, waiting for him to pronounce.
He came to a standstill before the Preobrazhensky regiment, gave a deep sigh, and closed his eyes. At a signal from one member of the suite the soldiers holding the flags came forward and set them up round the commander-in-chief. Kutuzov said nothing for a second or two, then, with obvious reluctance, yielding to necessity, he looked up and spoke. Crowds of officers gathered round him. He scanned the circle of officers with a close eye, recognizing some of them.
'Thank you one and all!' he said, addressing the soldiers before turning back to the officers. Silence reigned, broken only by his words, carefully enunciated so as to be distinctly audible. 'Thank you one and all for your hard and faithful service. Victory is assured, and Russia will not forget you. Your glory will live for ever!'
He paused and looked round.
'Further down. Drop it further down,' he said to a soldier holding the French eagle, who had inadvertently lowered it in front of the Preobrazhensky colours.
'A bit further. Yes, that's it. Hurrah, boys!' he said, turning back to the soldiers with a flick of his chin.
'Hurrah-ah-ah!' came the roar from thousands of voices.
While the soldiers were cheering, Kutuzov leant forward in the saddle and bowed his head, his one good eye glinting with what looked like gentle humour.
'Listen, men . . .' he said, when the cheering had died away.
And then suddenly his face and expression looked different. It was not the commander-in-chief speaking now, it was a simple man, getting on in years, who evidently had something important to say to his comrades.
'Listen, men . . . I know you're having a rough time, but it can't be helped! Please be patient. It won't last much longer. Let's see these visitors off - then we can have a rest. The Tsar won't forget your services. You're having a rough time, but you are on home ground. Look at them. See what they've been reduced to,' he said, pointing to the prisoners. 'Lower than the meanest beggars. When they were strong we didn't spare ourselves, but now we can afford to spare them. They're men like us, aren't they, boys?'
He gazed round. And in the unflinching stare of those eyes trained on him with a mixture of respect and bemusement he could read sympathy for what he had said. His face grew brighter and brighter as a gentle smile of old age wrinkled out into starlike clusters at the corners of his mouth and his eyes. He paused and looked down uncertainly.
'But when all's said and done, who told them to come? They asked for it, the fucking bastards!' he said suddenly, looking up at them. And with a flourish of his riding-whip he rode away, seen galloping for the first time in the entire campaign, with gleeful guffaws and roars of hurrah echoing through the breaking ranks of men.
Much of what Kutuzov had said went over the heads of the men. Not one of them could have summarized the field-marshal's speech, which had begun with such solemnity and ended with an old man's warmth and simplicity, but the heartfelt meaning underlying his words was something they did understand, along with a new feeling of solemn triumph in victory combined with pity for the enemy and also a sense of righteousness - a feeling conveyed even by the old man's colourful language - and this feeling, lurking deep in the heart of every soldier, had expressed itself in the huge cheer that went on for so long. A little later, when one of the generals came to the commander-in-chief and asked if he wanted his carriage, a visibly moved Kutuzov surprised them by responding with a sob.
CHAPTER 7
The 8th of November saw the last of the skirmishes at Krasnoye. Darkness had fallen by the time the soldiers got to where they were halting for the night. All day it had been still and frosty, with the occasional sprinkling of snowflakes. By evening the clouds had gone, a purplish, starry sky could be seen through the last of the snowflakes, and the frost was hardening.
A regiment of musketeers, three thousand strong when it left Tarutino but now down to nine hundred, was among the first to reach its assigned halting-place, a village on the main road. The quartermasters who received the regiment reported that all the cottages were full of sick and dead Frenchmen, cavalrymen and staff-officers. There was only one hut left, and that was for the colonel.
The colonel rode on to his hut. The regiment went right through the village, and the soldiers stacked their arms near the last cottages along the road.
Like some huge, many-limbed beast the regiment got down to the business of preparing food and shelters to sleep in. One party of soldiers trudged off knee-deep in the snow and disappeared into a birch copse to the right of the village, which was soon ringing with the sounds of axes and long knives, the snap and crack of breaking branches and the loud voices of happy men. Another lot got down to work in among the regimental wagons and horses, which had been drawn up altogether, getting the cooking-pots and biscuits out, and foddering the horses. A third detachment scattered about the village, getting quarters ready for the staff-officers, carrying out the bodies of any dead Frenchmen left in the huts, and walking back with bits of board, dry wood and straw from the thatched roofs to feed their fires, and lengths of wattle for their shelters.
Behind the cottages at the end of the village more than a dozen soldiers were shouting away merrily as they worked at the high wattle wall of a barn that had already lost its roof and got it rocking.
'Come on, boys, altogether - heave!' came the voices, and in the darkness a huge section of snow-dusted wattle wall began to rock with a frosty creak. The bottom stakes creaked more and more until eventually the whole wall came crashing down, along with the soldiers who had been heaving against it, to a great roar of coarse laughter.
'Pair off, boys! Give us that crowbar! That's it. Where the hell are you going?'
'No, we'll have to work together . . . Hang on, boys! . . . Get them singing!'
They all kept quiet, and a soft, velvety voice started singing. At the end of the third verse, chiming in with the last note, twenty voices blending together roared out, 'Oo-oo-oo-oo! It's coming! All together! Come on, boys, one more heave!' But despite their combined efforts the wall hardly moved, and in the silence that followed the men could be heard breathing heavily.
'Hey, you boys in the Sixth! Come on you devils! Give us a hand . . . We'll do the same for you.'
A couple of dozen men of the Sixth Company, who were on their way into the village, joined in with their struggling comrades, and soon the wattle wall, thirty-five feet long, seven feet wide and bending under its own weight, was being heaved along the village street, weighing them all down and cutting into the shoulders of the gasping soldiers.
'Go on . . . Keep at it . . . Get on with you . . . Don't stop now! . . . Hey! . . .'
The banter and the shouting and swearing went on and on.
'What's all this?' came an authoritative voice. A sergeant came running over to them as they struggled along. 'There's gentry here. The gineral's in that there 'ut. Rowdy devils! Foul-mouthed scum! I'll soon sort you lot out!' roared the sergeant, and he went straight up to the first soldier and smashed him hard in the back. 'Can't you make less noise?'
The soldiers were quiet. The man he had hit grunted and rubbed his face; it was bleeding from being bashed against the wattle.
'Packs a punch, that bastard does! Blood all over me face,' he said in a quiet whisper as the sergeant walked away. 'You know you like it!' said a bantering voice. The soldiers moved on, keeping their voices down, though once they had got through the village they went back to talking just as loud as before, with many a meaningless swearword thrown in.
All the top brass were there inside the hut that the soldiers had just gone past, enjoying a drink of tea and a lively conversation about that day's doings and the manoeuvres planned for tomorrow. They had in mind a flanking movement round to the left designed to isolate Murat, the viceroy, and take him prisoner.
By the time the soldiers had struggled back with the big piece of wattle, camp-fires were blazing on all sides and they were cooking supper. The firewood crackled, the snow was melting, and the black shadows of soldiers nipped about all over the ground they had occupied and trampled down.
Axes and big knives were at work on all sides. Nobody gave any orders, but the work got done. Enough wood was brought in to last through the night, rough shanties were thrown up for the officers, pots were boiling, guns and ammunition were being checked.
The wattle wall brought in by the men of the Eighth was bent round in a north-facing semicircle and secured against musket-stands; then they built a camp-fire in front of it. There was a drum-roll, names were checked, then they had supper and settled down for the night around the fires, some repairing their foot-gear, some smoking their pipes, while others stripped naked and steamed their clothes to get rid of the lice.
CHAPTER 8
One might have expected that under the unimaginably awful conditions endured by the Russian soldiers at that time - no warm boots, no thick coats, no roof over their heads, deep snow and eighteen degrees of frost, no regular rations because supplies often lagged behind - they must have presented a thoroughly miserable and depressing spectacle.
Quite the reverse. Never, not even when their material circumstances were at their best, had the army presented a more buoyant and lively spectacle. This was due to the fact that with every day that passed anything that smacked of dejection or feebleness was being flushed out of the army. Anything physically and morally under strength had been left behind long ago, leaving only the flower of the army, strong in body and spirit.
The camp-fire of the Eighth Company, screened by their wattle fence, became most people's preferred place. Two sergeants had moved in on them, and their fire blazed brighter than any. They had had to contribute some logs for the privilege of sitting there.
'Hey, Makeyev, did you get fucking lost, or have the wolves been at you? Get some wood,' yelled a red-faced, red-haired soldier, screwing up his eyes and blinking because of the smoke, but not moving an inch away from the fire.
'You. Don't just stand there gaping. Go and get some wood,' he shouted to another soldier. The red-haired man was no sergeant, not even a corporal, but he was a tough customer, and he gave orders to anybody weaker than himself. The thin little soldier with a sharp nose who had been accused of gaping got to his feet obediently, and was about to do what he'd been told, but at that moment into the firelight stepped the slender, handsome figure of a young soldier carrying a load of wood.
'Chuck it down here. Hey, that's not a bad lot!'
They broke the wood up and piled it on the fire, blew on it and fanned it with the flaps of their greatcoats while the flames hissed and crackled. The soldiers came up closer and lit their pipes. The handsome young soldier who had brought the wood put his hands on his hips and stamped up and down on his frozen feet.
'Oh, Mother dear, the dew's cold here, but I'm all right, I'm a musketeer! . . .' he warbled, chopping off each syllable with a kind of hiccup.
'Them soles'll come off!' cried the red-haired man, noticing that the dancing man's soles were dangling loose. 'He likes his bloody dancing!'
The dancer stopped, ripped the loose piece of leather off and threw it into the fire.
'You're right there, me old pal,' said he. He sat down, took a strip of French blue cloth out of his knapsack, and started wrapping it round his foot. 'It's the steam what does it,' he added, stretching his feet out towards the fire.
'We're due for some new ones. They say when we've gone through them, we're all gettin' a double issue of everythin'.'
'I see that son of a bitch, Petrov, 'as dropped out, then,' said one of the sergeants.
'I've had me eye on 'im for some time,' said the other.
'Oh, well, not much of a soldier . . .'
'Aye, an' they do say the Third Company was nine short at roll-call yesterday.'
'Well, when your feet gets frozen you can't walk much further.'
'What stupid drivel!' said the sergeant.
'So, you fancy doin' the same, do you?' said an old soldier, rounding on the man who had talked about feet being frozen.
'Well, what do you expect?' burst in the sharp-nosed 'gaping' soldier in a trembling, squeaky voice, half-sitting up on the other side of the fire. 'If you 'ave a bit of fat on you, you got somethin' to lose. For us thin 'uns it's death. Just look at me. Ain't got no strength left,' he said with sudden determination, looking straight at the sergeant. 'You ought to get me in the 'ospital. 'Ad it with me rheumatics, I 'ave. I'll get left behind anyway . . .'
'Come on, son, come on,' said the sergeant calmly.
The soldier said no more, though the conversation went on.
'We've took 'undreds of them Froggies today, and not a pair of decent boots between 'em. Nothing worth talkin' about,' put in one of the soldiers, changing the subject.
'No, them Cossacks 'as 'ad the lot. We was cleanin' a hut for the colonel, and we 'ad to carry 'em out. 'Orrible sight, boys,' said the dancer. 'Kept turnin' 'em over, we did. One was still alive. You wouldn't believe it. Jabberin' away 'e was, in their lingo.'
'Keeps 'emselves real clean, they does,' the first man went on. 'They'm all white, you know - 'e were as white as a birch-tree - and there's some grand boys among 'em. Real gentlemen they be.'
'I'm not surprised. They 'as their soldiers from all classes.'
'And they don't understand a word we says,' put in the dancer, with a smile of bemusement. 'I says to 'im, "What be your kingdom?" and'e comes out with all that foreign stuff. They're a rum lot!'
'I'll tell you one thing, boys. Bloody marvellous,' went on the man who had been so taken with their whiteness. 'Some o' them peasants down Mozhaysk way was telling me 'ow they was shiftin' dead bodies where the big battle 'ad been, an' them dead bodies - their lot - 'ad been there a good