War and Peace
then, testing her strength, ran upstairs again, observing the result.
Another time when she called Dunyásha her voice trembled, so she called
again—though she could hear Dunyásha coming—called her in the deep chest
tones in which she had been wont to sing, and listened attentively to
herself.
She did not know and would not have believed it, but beneath the layer
of slime that covered her soul and seemed to her impenetrable, delicate
young shoots of grass were already sprouting, which taking root would so
cover with their living verdure the grief that weighed her down that
it would soon no longer be seen or noticed. The wound had begun to heal
from within.
At the end of January Princess Mary left for Moscow, and the count
insisted on Natásha’s going with her to consult the doctors.
CHAPTER IV
After the encounter at Vyázma, where Kutúzov had been unable to hold
back his troops in their anxiety to overwhelm and cut off the enemy and
so on, the farther movement of the fleeing French, and of the Russians
who pursued them, continued as far as Krásnoe without a battle. The
flight was so rapid that the Russian army pursuing the French could
not keep up with them; cavalry and artillery horses broke down, and the
information received of the movements of the French was never reliable.
The men in the Russian army were so worn out by this continuous marching
at the rate of twenty-seven miles a day that they could not go any
faster.
To realize the degree of exhaustion of the Russian army it is only
necessary to grasp clearly the meaning of the fact that, while not
losing more than five thousand killed and wounded after Tarútino and
less than a hundred prisoners, the Russian army which left that place a
hundred thousand strong reached Krásnoe with only fifty thousand.
The rapidity of the Russian pursuit was just as destructive to our army
as the flight of the French was to theirs. The only difference was that
the Russian army moved voluntarily, with no such threat of destruction
as hung over the French, and that the sick Frenchmen were left behind
in enemy hands while the sick Russians left behind were among their
own people. The chief cause of the wastage of Napoleon’s army was
the rapidity of its movement, and a convincing proof of this is the
corresponding decrease of the Russian army.
Kutúzov as far as was in his power, instead of trying to check the
movement of the French as was desired in Petersburg and by the Russian
army generals, directed his whole activity here, as he had done at
Tarútino and Vyázma, to hastening it on while easing the movement of our
army.
But besides this, since the exhaustion and enormous diminution of the
army caused by the rapidity of the advance had become evident, another
reason for slackening the pace and delaying presented itself to Kutúzov.
The aim of the Russian army was to pursue the French. The road the
French would take was unknown, and so the closer our troops trod on
their heels the greater distance they had to cover. Only by following
at some distance could one cut across the zigzag path of the French. All
the artful maneuvers suggested by our generals meant fresh movements of
the army and a lengthening of its marches, whereas the only reasonable
aim was to shorten those marches. To that end Kutúzov’s activity was
directed during the whole campaign from Moscow to Vílna—not casually or
intermittently but so consistently that he never once deviated from it.
Kutúzov felt and knew—not by reasoning or science but with the whole of
his Russian being—what every Russian soldier felt: that the French were
beaten, that the enemy was flying and must be driven out; but at the
same time he like the soldiers realized all the hardship of this march,
the rapidity of which was unparalleled for such a time of the year.
But to the generals, especially the foreign ones in the Russian army,
who wished to distinguish themselves, to astonish somebody, and for some
reason to capture a king or a duke—it seemed that now—when any battle
must be horrible and senseless—was the very time to fight and conquer
somebody. Kutúzov merely shrugged his shoulders when one after
another they presented projects of maneuvers to be made with those
soldiers—ill-shod, insufficiently clad, and half starved—who within a
month and without fighting a battle had dwindled to half their number,
and who at the best if the flight continued would have to go a greater
distance than they had already traversed, before they reached the
frontier.
This longing to distinguish themselves, to maneuver, to overthrow, and
to cut off showed itself particularly whenever the Russians stumbled on
the French army.
So it was at Krásnoe, where they expected to find one of the three
French columns and stumbled instead on Napoleon himself with sixteen
thousand men. Despite all Kutúzov’s efforts to avoid that ruinous
encounter and to preserve his troops, the massacre of the broken mob
of French soldiers by worn-out Russians continued at Krásnoe for three
days.
Toll wrote a disposition: “The first column will march to so and so,”
etc. And as usual nothing happened in accord with the disposition.
Prince Eugène of Württemberg fired from a hill over the French crowds
that were running past, and demanded reinforcements which did not
arrive. The French, avoiding the Russians, dispersed and hid themselves
in the forest by night, making their way round as best they could, and
continued their flight.
Milorádovich, who said he did not want to know anything about the
commissariat affairs of his detachment, and could never be found when
he was wanted—that chevalier sans peur et sans reproche * as he styled
himself—who was fond of parleys with the French, sent envoys demanding
their surrender, wasted time, and did not do what he was ordered to do.
* Knight without fear and without reproach.
“I give you that column, lads,” he said, riding up to the troops and
pointing out the French to the cavalry.
And the cavalry, with spurs and sabers urging on horses that could
scarcely move, trotted with much effort to the column presented
to them—that is to say, to a crowd of Frenchmen stark with cold,
frost-bitten, and starving—and the column that had been presented to
them threw down its arms and surrendered as it had long been anxious to
do.
At Krásnoe they took twenty-six thousand prisoners, several hundred
cannon, and a stick called a “marshal’s staff,” and disputed as to who
had distinguished himself and were pleased with their achievement—though
they much regretted not having taken Napoleon, or at least a marshal or
a hero of some sort, and reproached one another and especially Kutúzov
for having failed to do so.
These men, carried away by their passions, were but blind tools of the
most melancholy law of necessity, but considered themselves heroes and
imagined that they were accomplishing a most noble and honorable
deed. They blamed Kutúzov and said that from the very beginning of the
campaign he had prevented their vanquishing Napoleon, that he thought of
nothing but satisfying his passions and would not advance from the Linen
Factories because he was comfortable there, that at Krásnoe he checked
the advance because on learning that Napoleon was there he had quite
lost his head, and that it was probable that he had an understanding
with Napoleon and had been bribed by him, and so on, and so on.
Not only did his contemporaries, carried away by their passions, talk
in this way, but posterity and history have acclaimed Napoleon as grand,
while Kutúzov is described by foreigners as a crafty, dissolute, weak
old courtier, and by Russians as something indefinite—a sort of puppet
useful only because he had a Russian name.
CHAPTER V
In 1812 and 1813 Kutúzov was openly accused of blundering. The Emperor
was dissatisfied with him. And in a history recently written by order
of the Highest Authorities it is said that Kutúzov was a cunning court
liar, frightened of the name of Napoleon, and that by his blunders at
Krásnoe and the Berëzina he deprived the Russian army of the glory of
complete victory over the French. *
* History of the year 1812. The character of Kutúzov and
reflections on the unsatisfactory results of the battles at
Krásnoe, by Bogdánovich.
Such is the fate not of great men (grands hommes) whom the Russian mind
does not acknowledge, but of those rare and always solitary individuals
who, discerning the will of Providence, submit their personal will to
it. The hatred and contempt of the crowd punish such men for discerning
the higher laws.
For Russian historians, strange and terrible to say, Napoleon—that most
insignificant tool of history who never anywhere, even in exile, showed
human dignity—Napoleon is the object of adulation and enthusiasm; he
is grand. But Kutúzov—the man who from the beginning to the end of his
activity in 1812, never once swerving by word or deed from Borodinó to
Vílna, presented an example exceptional in history of self-sacrifice
and a present consciousness of the future importance of what was
happening—Kutúzov seems to them something indefinite and pitiful, and
when speaking of him and of the year 1812 they always seem a little
ashamed.
And yet it is difficult to imagine an historical character whose
activity was so unswervingly directed to a single aim; and it would be
difficult to imagine any aim more worthy or more consonant with the
will of the whole people. Still more difficult would it be to find
an instance in history of the aim of an historical personage being so
completely accomplished as that to which all Kutúzov’s efforts were
directed in 1812.
Kutúzov never talked of “forty centuries looking down from the
Pyramids,” of the sacrifices he offered for the fatherland, or of
what he intended to accomplish or had accomplished; in general he
said nothing about himself, adopted no pose, always appeared to be
the simplest and most ordinary of men, and said the simplest and most
ordinary things. He wrote letters to his daughters and to Madame de
Staël, read novels, liked the society of pretty women, jested with
generals, officers, and soldiers, and never contradicted those who tried
to prove anything to him. When Count Rostopchín at the Yaúza bridge
galloped up to Kutúzov with personal reproaches for having caused the
destruction of Moscow, and said: “How was it you promised not to abandon
Moscow without a battle?” Kutúzov replied: “And I shall not abandon
Moscow without a battle,” though Moscow was then already abandoned. When
Arakchéev, coming to him from the Emperor, said that Ermólov ought to
be appointed chief of the artillery, Kutúzov replied: “Yes, I was
just saying so myself,” though a moment before he had said quite the
contrary. What did it matter to him—who then alone amid a senseless
crowd understood the whole tremendous significance of what was
happening—what did it matter to him whether Rostopchín attributed the
calamities of Moscow to him or to himself? Still less could it matter to
him who was appointed chief of the artillery.
Not merely in these cases but continually did that old man—who by
experience of life had reached the conviction that thoughts and the
words serving as their expression are not what move people—use quite
meaningless words that happened to enter his head.
But that man, so heedless of his words, did not once during the whole
time of his activity utter one word inconsistent with the single aim
toward which he moved throughout the whole war. Obviously in spite of
himself, in very diverse circumstances, he repeatedly expressed his real
thoughts with the bitter conviction that he would not be understood.
Beginning with the battle of Borodinó, from which time his disagreement