It was terrible, but he felt that in proportion to the efforts of
that fatal force to crush him, there grew and strengthened
in his soul a power of life independent of it.
He ate his supper of buckwheat soup with horseflesh and
chatted with his comrades.
Neither Pierre nor any of the others spoke of what they
had seen in Moscow, or of the roughness of their treatment
by the French, or of the order to shoot them which had been
announced to them. As if in reaction against the worsen1914
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ing of their position they were all particularly animated
and gay. They spoke of personal reminiscences, of amusing
scenes they had witnessed during the campaign, and avoided all talk of their present situation.
The sun had set long since. Bright stars shone out here
and there in the sky. A red glow as of a conflagration spread
above the horizon from the rising full moon, and that vast
red ball swayed strangely in the gray haze. It grew light. The
evening was ending, but the night had not yet come. Pierre
got up and left his new companions, crossing between the
campfires to the other side of the road where he had been
told the common soldier prisoners were stationed. He wanted to talk to them. On the road he was stopped by a French
sentinel who ordered him back.
Pierre turned back, not to his companions by the campfire, but to an unharnessed cart where there was nobody.
Tucking his legs under him and dropping his head he sat
down on the cold ground by the wheel of the cart and remained motionless a long while sunk in thought. Suddenly
he burst out into a fit of his broad, good-natured laughter,
so loud that men from various sides turned with surprise to
see what this strange and evidently solitary laughter could
mean.
‘Ha-ha-ha!’ laughed Pierre. And he said aloud to himself: ‘The soldier did not let me pass. They took me and shut
me up. They hold me captive. What, me? Me? My immortal
soul? Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha!…’ and he laughed till tears started to his eyes.
A man got up and came to see what this queer big fellow
1915
was laughing at all by himself. Pierre stopped laughing, got
up, went farther away from the inquisitive man, and looked
around him.
The huge, endless bivouac that had previously resounded with the crackling of campfires and the voices of many
men had grown quiet, the red campfires were growing paler and dying down. High up in the light sky hung the full
moon. Forests and fields beyond the camp, unseen before,
were now visible in the distance. And farther still, beyond
those forests and fields, the bright, oscillating, limitless distance lured one to itself. Pierre glanced up at the sky and
the twinkling stars in its faraway depths. ‘And all that is
me, all that is within me, and it is all I!’ thought Pierre. ‘And
they caught all that and put it into a shed boarded up with
planks!’ He smiled, and went and lay down to sleep beside
his companions.
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War and Peace
Chapter XV
In the early days of October another envoy came to Kutuzov with a letter from Napoleon proposing peace and falsely
dated from Moscow, though Napoleon was already not far
from Kutuzov on the old Kaluga road. Kutuzov replied to
this letter as he had done to the one formerly brought by
Lauriston, saying that there could be no question of peace.
Soon after that a report was received from Dorokhov’s
guerrilla detachment operating to the left of Tarutino that
troops of Broussier’s division had been seen at Forminsk
and that being separated from the rest of the French army
they might easily be destroyed. The soldiers and officers
again demanded action. Generals on the staff, excited by the
memory of the easy victory at Tarutino, urged Kutuzov to
carry out Dorokhov’s suggestion. Kutuzov did not consider
any offensive necessary. The result was a compromise which
was inevitable: a small detachment was sent to Forminsk to
attack Broussier.
By a strange coincidence, this task, which turned out
to be a most difficult and important one, was entrusted
to Dokhturovthat same modest little Dokhturov whom
no one had described to us as drawing up plans of battles,
dashing about in front of regiments, showering crosses on
batteries, and so on, and who was thought to be and was
spoken of as undecided and undiscerningbut whom we find
1917
commanding wherever the position was most difficult all
through the Russo-French wars from Austerlitz to the year
- At Austerlitz he remained last at the Augezd dam, rallying the regiments, saving what was possible when all were
flying and perishing and not a single general was left in the
rear guard. Ill with fever he went to Smolensk with twenty
thousand men to defend the town against Napoleon’s whole
army. In Smolensk, at the Malakhov Gate, he had hardly
dozed off in a paroxysm of fever before he was awakened by
the bombardment of the townand Smolensk held out all day
long. At the battle of Borodino, when Bagration was killed
and nine tenths of the men of our left flank had fallen and
the full force of the French artillery fire was directed against
it, the man sent there was this same irresolute and undiscerning DokhturovKutuzov hastening to rectify a mistake
he had made by sending someone else there first. And the
quiet little Dokhturov rode thither, and Borodino became
the greatest glory of the Russian army. Many heroes have
been described to us in verse and prose, but of Dokhturov
scarcely a word has been said.
It was Dokhturov again whom they sent to Forminsk
and from there to Malo-Yaroslavets, the place where the last
battle with the French was fought and where the obvious
disintegration of the French army began; and we are told of
many geniuses and heroes of that period of the campaign,
but of Dokhturov nothing or very little is said and that dubiously. And this silence about Dokhturov is the clearest
testimony to his merit.
It is natural for a man who does not understand the
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workings of a machine to imagine that a shaving that has
fallen into it by chance and is interfering with its action
and tossing about in it is its most important part. The man
who does not understand the construction of the machine
cannot conceive that the small connecting cogwheel which
revolves quietly is one of the most essential parts of the machine, and not the shaving which merely harms and hinders
the working.
On the tenth of October when Dokhturov had gone halfway to Forminsk and stopped at the village of Aristovo,
preparing faithfully to execute the orders he had received,
the whole French army having, in its convulsive movement,
reached Murat’s position apparently in order to give battlesuddenly without any reason turned off to the left onto the
new Kaluga road and began to enter Forminsk, where only
Broussier had been till then. At that time Dokhturov had
under his command, besides Dorokhov’s detachment, the
two small guerrilla detachments of Figner and Seslavin.
On the evening of October 11 Seslavin came to the Aristovo headquarters with a French guardsman he had captured.
The prisoner said that the troops that had entered Forminsk
that day were the vanguard of the whole army, that Napoleon was there and the whole army had left Moscow four
days previously. That same evening a house serf who had
come from Borovsk said he had seen an immense army entering the town. Some Cossacks of Dokhturov’s detachment
reported having sighted the French Guards marching along
the road to Borovsk. From all these reports it was evident
that where they had expected to meet a single division there
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was now the whole French army marching from Moscow in
an unexpected directionalong the Kaluga road. Dokhturov
was unwilling to undertake any action, as it was not clear
to him now what he ought to do. He had been ordered to
attack Forminsk. But only Broussier had been there at that
time and now the whole French army was there. Ermolov
wished to act on his own judgment, but Dokhturov insisted
that he must have Kutuzov’s instructions. So it was decided
to send a dispatch to the staff.
For this purpose a capable officer, Bolkhovitinov, was
chosen, who was to explain the whole affair by word of
mouth, besides delivering a written report. Toward midnight Bolkhovitinov, having received the dispatch and
verbal instructions, galloped off to the General Staff accompanied by a Cossack with spare horses.
1920
War and Peace
Chapter XVI
It was a warm, dark, autumn night. It had been raining
for four days. Having changed horses twice and galloped
twenty miles in an hour and a half over a sticky, muddy
road, Bolkhovitinov reached Litashevka after one o’clock
at night. Dismounting at a cottage on whose wattle fence
hung a signboard, GENERAL STAFF, and throwing down
his reins, he entered a dark passage.
‘The general on duty, quick! It’s very important!’ said he
to someone who had risen and was sniffing in the dark passage.
‘He has been very unwell since the evening and this is the
third night he has not slept,’ said the orderly pleadingly in a
whisper. ‘You should wake the captain first.’
‘But this is very important, from General Dokhturov,’
said Bolkhovitinov, entering the open door which he had
found by feeling in the dark.
The orderly had gone in before him and began waking
somebody.
‘Your honor, your honor! A courier.’
‘What? What’s that? From whom?’ came a sleepy voice.
‘From Dokhturov and from Alexey Petrovich. Napoleon is at Forminsk,’ said Bolkhovitinov, unable to see in
the dark who was speaking but guessing by the voice that it
was not Konovnitsyn.
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The man who had wakened yawned and stretched himself.
‘I don’t like waking him,’ he said, fumbling for something. ‘He is very ill. Perhaps this is only a rumor.’
‘Here is the dispatch,’ said Bolkhovitinov. ‘My orders are
to give it at once to the general on duty.’
‘Wait a moment, I’ll light a candle. You damned rascal,
where do you always hide it?’ said the voice of the man who
was stretching himself, to the orderly. (This was Shcherbinin, Konovnitsyn’s adjutant.) ‘I’ve found it, I’ve found it!’
he added.
The orderly was striking a light and Shcherbinin was
fumbling for something on the candlestick.
‘Oh, the nasty
