War and Peace
a regiment would ruin him. Pierre listened to him, scarcely able to
repress a smile.
“Well then, sell it,” said he. “What’s to be done? I can’t draw back
now!”
The worse everything became, especially his own affairs, the better
was Pierre pleased and the more evident was it that the catastrophe he
expected was approaching. Hardly anyone he knew was left in town. Julie
had gone, and so had Princess Mary. Of his intimate friends only the
Rostóvs remained, but he did not go to see them.
To distract his thoughts he drove that day to the village of Vorontsóvo
to see the great balloon Leppich was constructing to destroy the foe,
and a trial balloon that was to go up next day. The balloon was not yet
ready, but Pierre learned that it was being constructed by the Emperor’s
desire. The Emperor had written to Count Rostopchín as follows:
As soon as Leppich is ready, get together a crew of reliable and
intelligent men for his car and send a courier to General Kutúzov to let
him know. I have informed him of the matter.
Please impress upon Leppich to be very careful where he descends for
the first time, that he may not make a mistake and fall into the enemy’s
hands. It is essential for him to combine his movements with those of
the commander in chief.
On his way home from Vorontsóvo, as he was passing the Bolótnoe Place
Pierre, seeing a large crowd round the Lóbnoe Place, stopped and got out
of his trap. A French cook accused of being a spy was being flogged. The
flogging was only just over, and the executioner was releasing from the
flogging bench a stout man with red whiskers, in blue stockings and
a green jacket, who was moaning piteously. Another criminal, thin and
pale, stood near. Judging by their faces they were both Frenchmen. With
a frightened and suffering look resembling that on the thin Frenchman’s
face, Pierre pushed his way in through the crowd.
“What is it? Who is it? What is it for?” he kept asking.
But the attention of the crowd—officials, burghers, shopkeepers,
peasants, and women in cloaks and in pelisses—was so eagerly centered on
what was passing in Lóbnoe Place that no one answered him. The stout man
rose, frowned, shrugged his shoulders, and evidently trying to appear
firm began to pull on his jacket without looking about him, but suddenly
his lips trembled and he began to cry, in the way full-blooded grown-up
men cry, though angry with himself for doing so. In the crowd people
began talking loudly, to stifle their feelings of pity as it seemed to
Pierre.
“He’s cook to some prince.”
“Eh, mounseer, Russian sauce seems to be sour to a Frenchman... sets his
teeth on edge!” said a wrinkled clerk who was standing behind Pierre,
when the Frenchman began to cry.
The clerk glanced round, evidently hoping that his joke would be
appreciated. Some people began to laugh, others continued to watch in
dismay the executioner who was undressing the other man.
Pierre choked, his face puckered, and he turned hastily away, went back
to his trap muttering something to himself as he went, and took his
seat. As they drove along he shuddered and exclaimed several times so
audibly that the coachman asked him:
“What is your pleasure?”
“Where are you going?” shouted Pierre to the man, who was driving to
Lubyánka Street.
“To the Governor’s, as you ordered,” answered the coachman.
“Fool! Idiot!” shouted Pierre, abusing his coachman—a thing he rarely
did. “Home, I told you! And drive faster, blockhead!” “I must get away
this very day,” he murmured to himself.
At the sight of the tortured Frenchman and the crowd surrounding the
Lóbnoe Place, Pierre had so definitely made up his mind that he could no
longer remain in Moscow and would leave for the army that very day that
it seemed to him that either he had told the coachman this or that the
man ought to have known it for himself.
On reaching home Pierre gave orders to Evstáfey—his head coachman who
knew everything, could do anything, and was known to all Moscow—that
he would leave that night for the army at Mozháysk, and that his saddle
horses should be sent there. This could not all be arranged that day,
so on Evstáfey’s representation Pierre had to put off his departure till
next day to allow time for the relay horses to be sent on in advance.
On the twenty-fourth the weather cleared up after a spell of rain, and
after dinner Pierre left Moscow. When changing horses that night
in Perkhúshkovo, he learned that there had been a great battle that
evening. (This was the battle of Shevárdino.) He was told that there in
Perkhúshkovo the earth trembled from the firing, but nobody could answer
his questions as to who had won. At dawn next day Pierre was approaching
Mozháysk.
Every house in Mozháysk had soldiers quartered in it, and at the hostel
where Pierre was met by his groom and coachman there was no room to be
had. It was full of officers.
Everywhere in Mozháysk and beyond it, troops were stationed or on the
march. Cossacks, foot and horse soldiers, wagons, caissons, and cannon
were everywhere. Pierre pushed forward as fast as he could, and the
farther he left Moscow behind and the deeper he plunged into that sea
of troops the more was he overcome by restless agitation and a new and
joyful feeling he had not experienced before. It was a feeling akin
to what he had felt at the Slobóda Palace during the Emperor’s visit—a
sense of the necessity of undertaking something and sacrificing
something. He now experienced a glad consciousness that everything that
constitutes men’s happiness—the comforts of life, wealth, even
life itself—is rubbish it is pleasant to throw away, compared with
something... With what? Pierre could not say, and he did not try to
determine for whom and for what he felt such particular delight in
sacrificing everything. He was not occupied with the question of what to
sacrifice for; the fact of sacrificing in itself afforded him a new and
joyous sensation.
CHAPTER XIX
On the twenty-fourth of August the battle of the Shevárdino Redoubt was
fought, on the twenty-fifth not a shot was fired by either side, and on
the twenty-sixth the battle of Borodinó itself took place.
Why and how were the battles of Shevárdino and Borodinó given and
accepted? Why was the battle of Borodinó fought? There was not the least
sense in it for either the French or the Russians. Its immediate result
for the Russians was, and was bound to be, that we were brought nearer
to the destruction of Moscow—which we feared more than anything in
the world; and for the French its immediate result was that they were
brought nearer to the destruction of their whole army—which they feared
more than anything in the world. What the result must be was quite
obvious, and yet Napoleon offered and Kutúzov accepted that battle.
If the commanders had been guided by reason, it would seem that it must
have been obvious to Napoleon that by advancing thirteen hundred miles
and giving battle with a probability of losing a quarter of his army,
he was advancing to certain destruction, and it must have been equally
clear to Kutúzov that by accepting battle and risking the loss of a
quarter of his army he would certainly lose Moscow. For Kutúzov this was
mathematically clear, as it is that if when playing draughts I have one
man less and go on exchanging, I shall certainly lose, and therefore
should not exchange. When my opponent has sixteen men and I have
fourteen, I am only one eighth weaker than he, but when I have exchanged
thirteen more men he will be three times as strong as I am.
Before the battle of Borodinó our strength in proportion to the French
was about as five to six, but after that battle it was little more than
one to two: previously we had a hundred thousand against a hundred and
twenty thousand; afterwards little more than fifty thousand against a
hundred thousand. Yet the shrewd and experienced Kutúzov accepted the
battle, while Napoleon, who was said to be a commander of genius,
gave it, losing a quarter of his army and lengthening his lines of
communication still more. If it is said that he expected to end the
campaign by occupying Moscow as he had ended a previous campaign by
occupying Vienna, there is much evidence to the contrary. Napoleon’s
historians themselves tell us that from Smolénsk onwards he wished
to stop, knew the danger of his extended position, and knew that the
occupation of Moscow would not be the end of the campaign, for he had
seen at Smolénsk the state in which Russian towns were left to him, and
had not received a single reply to his repeated announcements of his
wish to negotiate.
In giving and accepting battle at Borodinó, Kutúzov acted involuntarily
and irrationally. But later on, to fit what had occurred, the historians
provided cunningly devised evidence of the foresight and genius of the
generals who, of all the blind tools of history were the most enslaved
and involuntary.
The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes furnish
the whole interest of the story, and we are still unable to accustom
ourselves to the fact that for our epoch histories of that kind are
meaningless.
On the other question, how the battle of Borodinó and the preceding
battle of Shevárdino were fought, there also exists a definite and
well-known, but quite false, conception. All the historians describe the
affair as follows:
The Russian army, they say, in its retreat from Smolénsk sought out
for itself the best position for a general engagement and found such a
position at Borodinó.
The Russians, they say, fortified this position in advance on the left
of the highroad (from Moscow to Smolénsk) and almost at a right angle
to it, from Borodinó to Utítsa, at the very place where the battle was
fought.
In front of this position, they say, a fortified outpost was set up on
the Shevárdino mound to observe the enemy. On the twenty-fourth, we
are told, Napoleon attacked this advanced post and took it, and, on the
twenty-sixth, attacked the whole Russian army, which was in position on
the field of Borodinó.
So the histories say, and it is all quite wrong, as anyone who cares to
look into the matter can easily convince himself.
The Russians did not seek out the best position but, on the contrary,
during the retreat passed many positions better than Borodinó. They did
not stop at any one of these positions because Kutúzov did not wish to
occupy a position he had not himself chosen, because the popular demand
for a battle had not yet expressed itself strongly enough, and because
Milorádovich had not yet arrived with the militia, and for many other
reasons. The fact is that other positions they had passed were stronger,
and that the position at Borodinó (the one where the battle was fought),
far from being strong, was no more a position than any other spot one
might find in the Russian Empire by sticking a pin into the map at
hazard.
Not only did the Russians not fortify the position on the field of
Borodinó to the left of, and at a right angle to, the highroad (that
is, the position on which the battle took place), but never till the
twenty-fifth of August, 1812, did they think that a battle might be
fought there. This was shown first by the fact that there were no
entrenchments there by the twenty fifth and that those begun on the
twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth were not completed, and secondly, by the
position of the Shevárdino Redoubt. That redoubt was quite senseless
in front of the position where the battle was accepted. Why was it
more strongly fortified than any other post? And why were all efforts
exhausted and six thousand men sacrificed to defend it till late at
night on the twenty-fourth? A Cossack patrol would have sufficed to