War and Peace
It was impossible first because—as experience shows that a three-mile
movement of columns on a battlefield never coincides with the plans—the
probability of Chichagóv, Kutúzov, and Wittgenstein effecting a junction
on time at an appointed place was so remote as to be tantamount to
impossibility, as in fact thought Kutúzov, who when he received the plan
remarked that diversions planned over great distances do not yield the
desired results.
Secondly it was impossible, because to paralyze the momentum with which
Napoleon’s army was retiring, incomparably greater forces than the
Russians possessed would have been required.
Thirdly it was impossible, because the military term “to cut off” has no
meaning. One can cut off a slice of bread, but not an army. To cut off
an army—to bar its road—is quite impossible, for there is always plenty
of room to avoid capture and there is the night when nothing can be
seen, as the military scientists might convince themselves by the
example of Krásnoe and of the Berëzina. It is only possible to capture
prisoners if they agree to be captured, just as it is only possible
to catch a swallow if it settles on one’s hand. Men can only be taken
prisoners if they surrender according to the rules of strategy and
tactics, as the Germans did. But the French troops quite rightly did not
consider that this suited them, since death by hunger and cold awaited
them in flight or captivity alike.
Fourthly and chiefly it was impossible, because never since the world
began has a war been fought under such conditions as those that obtained
in 1812, and the Russian army in its pursuit of the French strained its
strength to the utmost and could not have done more without destroying
itself.
During the movement of the Russian army from Tarútino to Krásnoe it
lost fifty thousand sick or stragglers, that is a number equal to the
population of a large provincial town. Half the men fell out of the army
without a battle.
And it is of this period of the campaign—when the army lacked boots
and sheepskin coats, was short of provisions and without vodka, and
was camping out at night for months in the snow with fifteen degrees
of frost, when there were only seven or eight hours of daylight and
the rest was night in which the influence of discipline cannot be
maintained, when men were taken into that region of death where
discipline fails, not for a few hours only as in a battle, but for
months, where they were every moment fighting death from hunger and
cold, when half the army perished in a single month—it is of this period
of the campaign that the historians tell us how Milorádovich should have
made a flank march to such and such a place, Tormásov to another place,
and Chichagóv should have crossed (more than knee-deep in snow) to
somewhere else, and how so-and-so “routed” and “cut off” the French and
so on and so on.
The Russians, half of whom died, did all that could and should have been
done to attain an end worthy of the nation, and they are not to blame
because other Russians, sitting in warm rooms, proposed that they should
do what was impossible.
All that strange contradiction now difficult to understand between the
facts and the historical accounts only arises because the historians
dealing with the matter have written the history of the beautiful words
and sentiments of various generals, and not the history of the events.
To them the words of Milorádovich seem very interesting, and so do their
surmises and the rewards this or that general received; but the question
of those fifty thousand men who were left in hospitals and in graves
does not even interest them, for it does not come within the range of
their investigation.
Yet one need only discard the study of the reports and general plans and
consider the movement of those hundreds of thousands of men who took a
direct part in the events, and all the questions that seemed insoluble
easily and simply receive an immediate and certain solution.
The aim of cutting off Napoleon and his army never existed except in
the imaginations of a dozen people. It could not exist because it was
senseless and unattainable.
The people had a single aim: to free their land from invasion. That aim
was attained in the first place of itself, as the French ran away,
and so it was only necessary not to stop their flight. Secondly it was
attained by the guerrilla warfare which was destroying the French, and
thirdly by the fact that a large Russian army was following the French,
ready to use its strength in case their movement stopped.
The Russian army had to act like a whip to a running animal. And the
experienced driver knew it was better to hold the whip raised as a
menace than to strike the running animal on the head.
BOOK FIFTEEN: 1812 - 13
CHAPTER I
When seeing a dying animal a man feels a sense of horror: substance
similar to his own is perishing before his eyes. But when it is a
beloved and intimate human being that is dying, besides this horror at
the extinction of life there is a severance, a spiritual wound, which
like a physical wound is sometimes fatal and sometimes heals, but always
aches and shrinks at any external irritating touch.
After Prince Andrew’s death Natásha and Princess Mary alike felt this.
Drooping in spirit and closing their eyes before the menacing cloud of
death that overhung them, they dared not look life in the face. They
carefully guarded their open wounds from any rough and painful contact.
Everything: a carriage passing rapidly in the street, a summons to
dinner, the maid’s inquiry what dress to prepare, or worse still any
word of insincere or feeble sympathy, seemed an insult, painfully
irritated the wound, interrupting that necessary quiet in which
they both tried to listen to the stern and dreadful choir that still
resounded in their imagination, and hindered their gazing into those
mysterious limitless vistas that for an instant had opened out before
them.
Only when alone together were they free from such outrage and pain.
They spoke little even to one another, and when they did it was of very
unimportant matters.
Both avoided any allusion to the future. To admit the possibility of
a future seemed to them to insult his memory. Still more carefully did
they avoid anything relating to him who was dead. It seemed to them that
what they had lived through and experienced could not be expressed in
words, and that any reference to the details of his life infringed the
majesty and sacredness of the mystery that had been accomplished before
their eyes.
Continued abstention from speech, and constant avoidance of everything
that might lead up to the subject—this halting on all sides at the
boundary of what they might not mention—brought before their minds with
still greater purity and clearness what they were both feeling.
But pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
Princess Mary, in her position as absolute and independent arbiter of
her own fate and guardian and instructor of her nephew, was the first to
be called back to life from that realm of sorrow in which she had dwelt
for the first fortnight. She received letters from her relations to
which she had to reply; the room in which little Nicholas had been put
was damp and he began to cough; Alpátych came to Yaroslávl with reports
on the state of their affairs and with advice and suggestions that they
should return to Moscow to the house on the Vozdvízhenka Street, which
had remained uninjured and needed only slight repairs. Life did not
stand still and it was necessary to live. Hard as it was for Princess
Mary to emerge from the realm of secluded contemplation in which she
had lived till then, and sorry and almost ashamed as she felt to leave
Natásha alone, yet the cares of life demanded her attention and she
involuntarily yielded to them. She went through the accounts with
Alpátych, conferred with Dessalles about her nephew, and gave orders and
made preparations for the journey to Moscow.
Natásha remained alone and, from the time Princess Mary began making
preparations for departure, held aloof from her too.
Princess Mary asked the countess to let Natásha go with her to Moscow,
and both parents gladly accepted this offer, for they saw their daughter
losing strength every day and thought that a change of scene and the
advice of Moscow doctors would be good for her.
“I am not going anywhere,” Natásha replied when this was proposed to
her. “Do please just leave me alone!” And she ran out of the room, with
difficulty refraining from tears of vexation and irritation rather than
of sorrow.
After she felt herself deserted by Princes Mary and alone in her grief,
Natásha spent most of the time in her room by herself, sitting huddled
up feet and all in the corner of the sofa, tearing and twisting
something with her slender nervous fingers and gazing intently and
fixedly at whatever her eyes chanced to fall on. This solitude exhausted
and tormented her but she was in absolute need of it. As soon as anyone
entered she got up quickly, changed her position and expression, and
picked up a book or some sewing, evidently waiting impatiently for the
intruder to go.
She felt all the time as if she might at any moment penetrate that
on which—with a terrible questioning too great for her strength—her
spiritual gaze was fixed.
One day toward the end of December Natásha, pale and thin, dressed in a
black woolen gown, her plaited hair negligently twisted into a knot, was
crouched feet and all in the corner of her sofa, nervously crumpling and
smoothing out the end of her sash while she looked at a corner of the
door.
She was gazing in the direction in which he had gone—to the other side
of life. And that other side of life, of which she had never before
thought and which had formerly seemed to her so far away and improbable,
was now nearer and more akin and more comprehensible than this side of
life, where everything was either emptiness and desolation or suffering
and indignity.
She was gazing where she knew him to be; but she could not imagine him
otherwise than as he had been here. She now saw him again as he had been
at Mytíshchi, at Tróitsa, and at Yaroslávl.
She saw his face, heard his voice, repeated his words and her own, and
sometimes devised other words they might have spoken.
There he is lying back in an armchair in his velvet cloak, leaning
his head on his thin pale hand. His chest is dreadfully hollow and his
shoulders raised. His lips are firmly closed, his eyes glitter, and a
wrinkle comes and goes on his pale forehead. One of his legs twitches
just perceptibly, but rapidly. Natásha knows that he is struggling with
terrible pain. “What is that pain like? Why does he have that pain? What
does he feel? How does it hurt him?” thought Natásha. He noticed her
watching him, raised his eyes, and began to speak seriously:
“One thing would be terrible,” said he: “to bind oneself forever to a
suffering man. It would be continual torture.” And he looked searchingly
at her. Natásha as usual answered before she had time to think what she
would say. She said: “This can’t go on—it won’t. You will get well—quite
well.”
She now saw him from the commencement of that scene and relived what she
had then felt. She recalled his long sad and severe look at those words
and understood the meaning of the rebuke and despair in that protracted
gaze.
“I agreed,” Natásha now said to herself, “that it would be dreadful if
he always continued to suffer. I said it then only because it would have
been dreadful for him, but he understood it differently. He thought it
would be dreadful for me. He then still wished to live and feared death.
And I said it so awkwardly and stupidly! I did not say what I meant.