War and Peace
observe the enemy. Thirdly, as proof that the position on which the
battle was fought had not been foreseen and that the Shevárdino Redoubt
was not an advanced post of that position, we have the fact that up to
the twenty-fifth, Barclay de Tolly and Bagratión were convinced that the
Shevárdino Redoubt was the left flank of the position, and that Kutúzov
himself in his report, written in hot haste after the battle, speaks of
the Shevárdino Redoubt as the left flank of the position. It was much
later, when reports on the battle of Borodinó were written at leisure,
that the incorrect and extraordinary statement was invented (probably to
justify the mistakes of a commander in chief who had to be represented
as infallible) that the Shevárdino Redoubt was an advanced post—whereas
in reality it was simply a fortified point on the left flank—and that
the battle of Borodinó was fought by us on an entrenched position
previously selected, whereas it was fought on a quite unexpected spot
which was almost unentrenched.
The case was evidently this: a position was selected along the river
Kolochá—which crosses the highroad not at a right angle but at an acute
angle—so that the left flank was at Shevárdino, the right flank near the
village of Nóvoe, and the center at Borodinó at the confluence of the
rivers Kolochá and Vóyna.
To anyone who looks at the field of Borodinó without thinking of how
the battle was actually fought, this position, protected by the river
Kolochá, presents itself as obvious for an army whose object was to
prevent an enemy from advancing along the Smolénsk road to Moscow.
Napoleon, riding to Valúevo on the twenty-fourth, did not see (as the
history books say he did) the position of the Russians from Utítsa
to Borodinó (he could not have seen that position because it did not
exist), nor did he see an advanced post of the Russian army, but while
pursuing the Russian rearguard he came upon the left flank of the
Russian position—at the Shevárdino Redoubt—and unexpectedly for the
Russians moved his army across the Kolochá. And the Russians, not having
time to begin a general engagement, withdrew their left wing from the
position they had intended to occupy and took up a new position which
had not been foreseen and was not fortified. By crossing to the other
side of the Kolochá to the left of the highroad, Napoleon shifted the
whole forthcoming battle from right to left (looking from the Russian
side) and transferred it to the plain between Utítsa, Semënovsk, and
Borodinó—a plain no more advantageous as a position than any other plain
in Russia—and there the whole battle of the twenty-sixth of August took
place.
Had Napoleon not ridden out on the evening of the twenty-fourth to the
Kolochá, and had he not then ordered an immediate attack on the redoubt
but had begun the attack next morning, no one would have doubted that
the Shevárdino Redoubt was the left flank of our position, and the
battle would have taken place where we expected it. In that case
we should probably have defended the Shevárdino Redoubt—our left
flank—still more obstinately. We should have attacked Napoleon in the
center or on the right, and the engagement would have taken place on the
twenty-fifth, in the position we intended and had fortified. But as the
attack on our left flank took place in the evening after the retreat of
our rear guard (that is, immediately after the fight at Gridnëva), and
as the Russian commanders did not wish, or were not in time, to begin a
general engagement then on the evening of the twenty-fourth, the first
and chief action of the battle of Borodinó was already lost on the
twenty-fourth, and obviously led to the loss of the one fought on the
twenty-sixth.
After the loss of the Shevárdino Redoubt, we found ourselves on the
morning of the twenty-fifth without a position for our left flank, and
were forced to bend it back and hastily entrench it where it chanced to
be.
Not only was the Russian army on the twenty-sixth defended by weak,
unfinished entrenchments, but the disadvantage of that position was
increased by the fact that the Russian commanders—not having fully
realized what had happened, namely the loss of our position on the left
flank and the shifting of the whole field of the forthcoming battle from
right to left—maintained their extended position from the village of
Nóvoe to Utítsa, and consequently had to move their forces from right to
left during the battle. So it happened that throughout the whole battle
the Russians opposed the entire French army launched against our left
flank with but half as many men. (Poniatowski’s action against Utítsa,
and Uvárov’s on the right flank against the French, were actions
distinct from the main course of the battle.) So the battle of Borodinó
did not take place at all as (in an effort to conceal our commanders’
mistakes even at the cost of diminishing the glory due to the Russian
army and people) it has been described. The battle of Borodinó was not
fought on a chosen and entrenched position with forces only slightly
weaker than those of the enemy, but, as a result of the loss of the
Shevárdino Redoubt, the Russians fought the battle of Borodinó on an
open and almost unentrenched position, with forces only half as numerous
as the French; that is to say, under conditions in which it was not
merely unthinkable to fight for ten hours and secure an indecisive
result, but unthinkable to keep an army even from complete
disintegration and flight.
CHAPTER XX
On the morning of the twenty-fifth Pierre was leaving Mozháysk. At the
descent of the high steep hill, down which a winding road led out of the
town past the cathedral on the right, where a service was being held and
the bells were ringing, Pierre got out of his vehicle and proceeded on
foot. Behind him a cavalry regiment was coming down the hill preceded by
its singers. Coming up toward him was a train of carts carrying men who
had been wounded in the engagement the day before. The peasant drivers,
shouting and lashing their horses, kept crossing from side to side. The
carts, in each of which three or four wounded soldiers were lying
or sitting, jolted over the stones that had been thrown on the steep
incline to make it something like a road. The wounded, bandaged with
rags, with pale cheeks, compressed lips, and knitted brows, held on to
the sides of the carts as they were jolted against one another. Almost
all of them stared with naïve, childlike curiosity at Pierre’s white hat
and green swallow-tail coat.
Pierre’s coachman shouted angrily at the convoy of wounded to keep to
one side of the road. The cavalry regiment, as it descended the hill
with its singers, surrounded Pierre’s carriage and blocked the road.
Pierre stopped, being pressed against the side of the cutting in which
the road ran. The sunshine from behind the hill did not penetrate into
the cutting and there it was cold and damp, but above Pierre’s head was
the bright August sunshine and the bells sounded merrily. One of the
carts with wounded stopped by the side of the road close to Pierre. The
driver in his bast shoes ran panting up to it, placed a stone under one
of its tireless hind wheels, and began arranging the breech-band on his
little horse.
One of the wounded, an old soldier with a bandaged arm who was following
the cart on foot, caught hold of it with his sound hand and turned to
look at Pierre.
“I say, fellow countryman! Will they set us down here or take us on to
Moscow?” he asked.
Pierre was so deep in thought that he did not hear the question. He was
looking now at the cavalry regiment that had met the convoy of wounded,
now at the cart by which he was standing, in which two wounded men
were sitting and one was lying. One of those sitting up in the cart had
probably been wounded in the cheek. His whole head was wrapped in rags
and one cheek was swollen to the size of a baby’s head. His nose
and mouth were twisted to one side. This soldier was looking at the
cathedral and crossing himself. Another, a young lad, a fair-haired
recruit as white as though there was no blood in his thin face, looked
at Pierre kindly, with a fixed smile. The third lay prone so that his
face was not visible. The cavalry singers were passing close by:
Ah lost, quite lost... is my head so keen,
Living in a foreign land...
they sang their soldiers’ dance song.
As if responding to them but with a different sort of merriment, the
metallic sound of the bells reverberated high above and the hot rays of
the sun bathed the top of the opposite slope with yet another sort of
merriment. But beneath the slope, by the cart with the wounded near the
panting little nag where Pierre stood, it was damp, somber, and sad.
The soldier with the swollen cheek looked angrily at the cavalry
singers.
“Oh, the coxcombs!” he muttered reproachfully.
“It’s not the soldiers only, but I’ve seen peasants today, too....
The peasants—even they have to go,” said the soldier behind the cart,
addressing Pierre with a sad smile. “No distinctions made nowadays....
They want the whole nation to fall on them—in a word, it’s Moscow! They
want to make an end of it.”
In spite of the obscurity of the soldier’s words Pierre understood what
he wanted to say and nodded approval.
The road was clear again; Pierre descended the hill and drove on.
He kept looking to either side of the road for familiar faces, but only
saw everywhere the unfamiliar faces of various military men of different
branches of the service, who all looked with astonishment at his white
hat and green tail coat.
Having gone nearly three miles he at last met an acquaintance and
eagerly addressed him. This was one of the head army doctors. He was
driving toward Pierre in a covered gig, sitting beside a young surgeon,
and on recognizing Pierre he told the Cossack who occupied the driver’s
seat to pull up.
“Count! Your excellency, how come you to be here?” asked the doctor.
“Well, you know, I wanted to see...”
“Yes, yes, there will be something to see....”
Pierre got out and talked to the doctor, explaining his intention of
taking part in a battle.
The doctor advised him to apply direct to Kutúzov.
“Why should you be God knows where out of sight, during the battle?” he
said, exchanging glances with his young companion. “Anyhow his Serene
Highness knows you and will receive you graciously. That’s what you must
do.”
The doctor seemed tired and in a hurry.
“You think so?... Ah, I also wanted to ask you where our position is
exactly?” said Pierre.
“The position?” repeated the doctor. “Well, that’s not my line. Drive
past Tatárinova, a lot of digging is going on there. Go up the hillock
and you’ll see.”
“Can one see from there?... If you would...”
But the doctor interrupted him and moved toward his gig.
“I would go with you but on my honor I’m up to here”—and he pointed to
his throat. “I’m galloping to the commander of the corps. How do matters
stand?... You know, Count, there’ll be a battle tomorrow. Out of an army
of a hundred thousand we must expect at least twenty thousand wounded,
and we haven’t stretchers, or bunks, or dressers, or doctors enough for
six thousand. We have ten thousand carts, but we need other things as
well—we must manage as best we can!”
The strange thought that of the thousands of men, young and old, who
had stared with merry surprise at his hat (perhaps the very men he had
noticed), twenty thousand were inevitably doomed to wounds and death
amazed Pierre.
“They may die tomorrow; why are they thinking of anything but death?”
And by some latent sequence of thought the descent of the Mozháysk hill,
the carts with the wounded, the ringing bells, the slanting rays of the