to convoy the corps of prisoners, and when our men were
not always getting full rations and the prisoners already
taken were perishing of hunger.
All the profound plans about cutting off and capturing
Napoleon and his army were like the plan of a market gardener who, when driving out of his garden a cow that had
trampled down the beds he had planted, should run to the
gate and hit the cow on the head. The only thing to be said
in excuse of that gardener would be that he was very angry. But not even that could be said for those who drew up
this project, for it was not they who had suffered from the
trampled beds.
But besides the fact that cutting off Napoleon with his
army would have been senseless, it was impossible.
It was impossible first becauseas experience shows that
a three-mile movement of columns on a battlefield never
coincides with the plansthe probability of Chichagov, Kutuzov, and Wittgenstein effecting a junction on time at
an appointed place was so remote as to be tantamount to
impossibility, as in fact thought Kutuzov, 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
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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 armyto bar its roadis 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
Krasnoe and of the Berezina. 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 Tarutino to Krasnoe 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 campaignwhen 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
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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 monthit is of this period of the campaign that the historians tell us how Miloradovich should have made a flank
march to such and such a place, Tormasov to another place,
and Chichagov 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 Miloradovich 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
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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.
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BOOK FIFTEEN: 1812 13
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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 Natasha 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
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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 subjectthis
halting on all sides at the boundary of what they might not
mentionbrought 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; Alpatych
came to Yaroslavl with reports on the state of their affairs
and with advice and suggestions that they should return to
Moscow to the house on the Vozdvizhenka 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 Natasha alone,
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untarily yielded to them. She went through the accounts
with Alpatych, conferred with Dessalles about her nephew,
and gave orders and made preparations for the journey to
Moscow.
Natasha 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 Natasha 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,’ Natasha 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, Natasha 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
