War and Peace
shouted something breathlessly with emphatic intonations and gestures.
Coming abreast of the calèche he ran beside it.
“Thrice have they slain me, thrice have I risen from the dead. They
stoned me, crucified me... I shall rise... shall rise... shall rise.
They have torn my body. The kingdom of God will be overthrown... Thrice
will I overthrow it and thrice re-establish it!” he cried, raising his
voice higher and higher.
Count Rostopchín suddenly grew pale as he had done when the crowd closed
in on Vereshchágin. He turned away. “Go fas... faster!” he cried in a
trembling voice to his coachman. The calèche flew over the ground as
fast as the horses could draw it, but for a long time Count Rostopchín
still heard the insane despairing screams growing fainter in the
distance, while his eyes saw nothing but the astonished, frightened,
bloodstained face of “the traitor” in the fur-lined coat.
Recent as that mental picture was, Rostopchín already felt that it had
cut deep into his heart and drawn blood. Even now he felt clearly that
the gory trace of that recollection would not pass with time, but that
the terrible memory would, on the contrary, dwell in his heart ever more
cruelly and painfully to the end of his life. He seemed still to hear
the sound of his own words: “Cut him down! I command it....”
“Why did I utter those words? It was by some accident I said them....
I need not have said them,” he thought. “And then nothing would have
happened.” He saw the frightened and then infuriated face of the dragoon
who dealt the blow, the look of silent, timid reproach that boy in the
fur-lined coat had turned upon him. “But I did not do it for my own
sake. I was bound to act that way.... The mob, the traitor... the public
welfare,” thought he.
Troops were still crowding at the Yaúza bridge. It was hot. Kutúzov,
dejected and frowning, sat on a bench by the bridge toying with his
whip in the sand when a calèche dashed up noisily. A man in a general’s
uniform with plumes in his hat went up to Kutúzov and said something
in French. It was Count Rostopchín. He told Kutúzov that he had come
because Moscow, the capital, was no more and only the army remained.
“Things would have been different if your Serene Highness had not told
me that you would not abandon Moscow without another battle; all this
would not have happened,” he said.
Kutúzov looked at Rostopchín as if, not grasping what was said to him,
he was trying to read something peculiar written at that moment on the
face of the man addressing him. Rostopchín grew confused and became
silent. Kutúzov slightly shook his head and not taking his penetrating
gaze from Rostopchín’s face muttered softly:
“No! I shall not give up Moscow without a battle!”
Whether Kutúzov was thinking of something entirely different when
he spoke those words, or uttered them purposely, knowing them to be
meaningless, at any rate Rostopchín made no reply and hastily left him.
And strange to say, the Governor of Moscow, the proud Count Rostopchín,
took up a Cossack whip and went to the bridge where he began with shouts
to drive on the carts that blocked the way.
CHAPTER XXVI
Toward four o’clock in the afternoon Murat’s troops were entering
Moscow. In front rode a detachment of Württemberg hussars and behind
them rode the King of Naples himself accompanied by a numerous suite.
About the middle of the Arbát Street, near the Church of the Miraculous
Icon of St. Nicholas, Murat halted to await news from the advanced
detachment as to the condition in which they had found the citadel, le
Kremlin.
Around Murat gathered a group of those who had remained in Moscow. They
all stared in timid bewilderment at the strange, long-haired commander
dressed up in feathers and gold.
“Is that their Tsar himself? He’s not bad!” low voices could be heard
saying.
An interpreter rode up to the group.
“Take off your cap... your caps!” These words went from one to another
in the crowd. The interpreter addressed an old porter and asked if
it was far to the Krémlin. The porter, listening in perplexity to the
unfamiliar Polish accent and not realizing that the interpreter was
speaking Russian, did not understand what was being said to him and
slipped behind the others.
Murat approached the interpreter and told him to ask where the Russian
army was. One of the Russians understood what was asked and several
voices at once began answering the interpreter. A French officer,
returning from the advanced detachment, rode up to Murat and reported
that the gates of the citadel had been barricaded and that there was
probably an ambuscade there.
“Good!” said Murat and, turning to one of the gentlemen in his suite,
ordered four light guns to be moved forward to fire at the gates.
The guns emerged at a trot from the column following Murat and advanced
up the Arbát. When they reached the end of the Vozdvízhenka Street they
halted and drew in the Square. Several French officers superintended the
placing of the guns and looked at the Krémlin through field glasses.
The bells in the Krémlin were ringing for vespers, and this sound
troubled the French. They imagined it to be a call to arms. A few
infantrymen ran to the Kutáfyev Gate. Beams and wooden screens had been
put there, and two musket shots rang out from under the gate as soon as
an officer and men began to run toward it. A general who was standing
by the guns shouted some words of command to the officer, and the latter
ran back again with his men.
The sound of three more shots came from the gate.
One shot struck a French soldier’s foot, and from behind the screens
came the strange sound of a few voices shouting. Instantly as at a
word of command the expression of cheerful serenity on the faces of
the French general, officers, and men changed to one of determined
concentrated readiness for strife and suffering. To all of them from
the marshal to the least soldier, that place was not the Vozdvízhenka,
Mokhaváya, or Kutáfyev Street, nor the Tróitsa Gate (places familiar in
Moscow), but a new battlefield which would probably prove sanguinary.
And all made ready for that battle. The cries from the gates ceased. The
guns were advanced, the artillerymen blew the ash off their linstocks,
and an officer gave the word “Fire!” This was followed by two whistling
sounds of canister shot, one after another. The shot rattled against
the stone of the gate and upon the wooden beams and screens, and two
wavering clouds of smoke rose over the Square.
A few instants after the echo of the reports resounding over the
stone-built Krémlin had died away the French heard a strange sound above
their head. Thousands of crows rose above the walls and circled in the
air, cawing and noisily flapping their wings. Together with that sound
came a solitary human cry from the gateway and amid the smoke appeared
the figure of a bareheaded man in a peasant’s coat. He grasped a musket
and took aim at the French. “Fire!” repeated the officer once more,
and the reports of a musket and of two cannon shots were heard
simultaneously. The gate was again hidden by smoke.
Nothing more stirred behind the screens and the French infantry soldiers
and officers advanced to the gate. In the gateway lay three wounded and
four dead. Two men in peasant coats ran away at the foot of the wall,
toward the Známenka.
“Clear that away!” said the officer, pointing to the beams and the
corpses, and the French soldiers, after dispatching the wounded, threw
the corpses over the parapet.
Who these men were nobody knew. “Clear that away!” was all that was said
of them, and they were thrown over the parapet and removed later on that
they might not stink. Thiers alone dedicates a few eloquent lines to
their memory: “These wretches had occupied the sacred citadel, having
supplied themselves with guns from the arsenal, and fired” (the
wretches) “at the French. Some of them were sabered and the Krémlin was
purged of their presence.”
Murat was informed that the way had been cleared. The French entered
the gates and began pitching their camp in the Senate Square. Out of the
windows of the Senate House the soldiers threw chairs into the Square
for fuel and kindled fires there.
Other detachments passed through the Krémlin and encamped along
the Moroséyka, the Lubyánka, and Pokróvka Streets. Others quartered
themselves along the Vozdvízhenka, the Nikólski, and the Tverskóy
Streets. No masters of the houses being found anywhere, the French were
not billeted on the inhabitants as is usual in towns but lived in it as
in a camp.
Though tattered, hungry, worn out, and reduced to a third of their
original number, the French entered Moscow in good marching order. It
was a weary and famished, but still a fighting and menacing army. But
it remained an army only until its soldiers had dispersed into their
different lodgings. As soon as the men of the various regiments began
to disperse among the wealthy and deserted houses, the army was lost
forever and there came into being something nondescript, neither
citizens nor soldiers but what are known as marauders. When five weeks
later these same men left Moscow, they no longer formed an army. They
were a mob of marauders, each carrying a quantity of articles which
seemed to him valuable or useful. The aim of each man when he left
Moscow was no longer, as it had been, to conquer, but merely to keep
what he had acquired. Like a monkey which puts its paw into the narrow
neck of a jug, and having seized a handful of nuts will not open its
fist for fear of losing what it holds, and therefore perishes, the
French when they left Moscow had inevitably to perish because they
carried their loot with them, yet to abandon what they had stolen was as
impossible for them as it is for the monkey to open its paw and let
go of its nuts. Ten minutes after each regiment had entered a Moscow
district, not a soldier or officer was left. Men in military uniforms
and Hessian boots could be seen through the windows, laughing and
walking through the rooms. In cellars and storerooms similar men were
busy among the provisions, and in the yards unlocking or breaking open
coach house and stable doors, lighting fires in kitchens and kneading
and baking bread with rolled-up sleeves, and cooking; or frightening,
amusing, or caressing women and children. There were many such men both
in the shops and houses—but there was no army.
Order after order was issued by the French commanders that day
forbidding the men to disperse about the town, sternly forbidding any
violence to the inhabitants or any looting, and announcing a roll call
for that very evening. But despite all these measures the men, who had
till then constituted an army, flowed all over the wealthy, deserted
city with its comforts and plentiful supplies. As a hungry herd of
cattle keeps well together when crossing a barren field, but gets out
of hand and at once disperses uncontrollably as soon as it reaches rich
pastures, so did the army disperse all over the wealthy city.
No residents were left in Moscow, and the soldiers—like water
percolating through sand—spread irresistibly through the city in all
directions from the Krémlin into which they had first marched. The
cavalry, on entering a merchant’s house that had been abandoned and
finding there stabling more than sufficient for their horses, went on,
all the same, to the next house which seemed to them better. Many of
them appropriated several houses, chalked their names on them, and
quarreled and even fought with other companies for them. Before they had
had time to secure quarters the soldiers ran out into the streets to
see the city and, hearing that everything had been abandoned, rushed
to places where valuables were to be had for the taking. The officers