War and Peace (AmazonClassics Edition)

“She is well, but sad. But do you know who rescued her? It is quite a romance. Nicholas Rostóv. She was surrounded, and they wanted to kill her, and had wounded some of her people. He rushed in and saved her . . .”

“Another romance,” said the militia officer. “Really this general flight has been arranged to get all the old maids married off. Catiche is one and Princess Bolkónskaya another.”

“Do you know, I really believe she is un petit peu amoureuse du jeune homme?”⁸⁹

“Forfeit, forfeit, forfeit!”

“But how could one say that in Russian?”

CHAPTER 18

When Pierre returned home he was handed two of Rostopchín’s broadsheets that had been brought that day.

The first declared that the report that Count Rostopchín had forbidden people to leave Moscow was false; on the contrary he was glad that ladies and tradesmen’s wives were leaving the city. “There will be less panic and less gossip,” ran the broadsheet, “but I will stake my life on it that that scoundrel will not enter Moscow.” These words showed Pierre clearly for the first time that the French would enter Moscow. The second broadsheet stated that our headquarters were at Vyázma, that Count Wittgenstein had defeated the French, but that as many of the inhabitants of Moscow wished to be armed, weapons were ready for them at the arsenal: sabres, pistols, and muskets, which could be had at a low price. The tone of the proclamation was not as jocose as in the former Chigírin talks. Pierre pondered over these broadsheets. Evidently the terrible storm-cloud he had desired with the whole strength of his soul, but which yet aroused involuntary horror in him, was drawing near.

“Shall I join the army and enter the service or wait?” he asked himself for the hundredth time. He took a pack of cards that lay on the table and began to lay them out for a game of patience.

“If this patience comes out,” he said to himself after shuffling the cards, holding them in his hand and lifting his head, “if it comes out, it means . . . what does it mean?”

He had not decided what it should mean when he heard the voice of the eldest princess at the door asking whether she might come in.

“Then it will mean that I must go to the army,” said Pierre to himself. “Come in, come in!” he added to the princess.

Only the eldest princess, the one with the stony face and long waist, was still living in Pierre’s house. The two younger ones had both married.

“Excuse my coming to you, Cousin,” she said in a reproachful and agitated voice. “You know some decision must be come to. What is going to happen? Everyone has left Moscow and the people are rioting. How is it that we are staying on?”

“On the contrary things seem satisfactory, ma cousine,” said Pierre in the bantering tone he habitually adopted towards her, always feeling uncomfortable in the role of her benefactor.

“Satisfactory, indeed! Very satisfactory! Barbara Ivánovna told me today how our troops are distinguishing themselves. It certainly does them credit! And the people, too, are quite mutinous—they no longer obey, even my maid has taken to being rude. At this rate they will soon begin beating us. One can’t walk in the streets. But, above all, the French will be here any day now, so what are we waiting for? I ask just one thing of you, cousin,” she went on, “arrange for me to be taken to Petersburg. Whatever I may be, I can’t live under Buonaparte’s rule.”

“Oh, come, ma cousine! Where do you get your information from? On the contrary . . .”

“I won’t submit to your Napoleon! Others may if they please . . . If you don’t want to do this . . .”

“But I will, I’ll give the order at once.”

The princess was apparently vexed at not having anyone to be angry with. Muttering to herself, she sat down on a chair.

“But you have been misinformed,” said Pierre. “Everything is quiet in the city and there is not the slightest danger. See! I’ve just been reading . . .” He showed her the broadsheet. “Count Rostopchín writes that he will stake his life on it that the enemy will not enter Moscow.”

“Oh, that Count of yours!” said the princess malevolently. “He is a hypocrite, a rascal who has himself roused the people to riot. Didn’t he write in those idiotic broadsheets that anyone ‘whoever it might be, should be dragged to the lock-up by his hair’? (How silly!) ‘And honour and glory to whoever captures him,’ he says. This is what his cajolery has brought us to! Barbara Ivánovna told me the mob near killed her because she said something in French.”

“Oh, but it’s so . . . You take everything so to heart,” said Pierre, and began laying out his cards for patience.

Although that patience did come out, Pierre did not join the army, but remained in deserted Moscow ever in the same state of agitation, irresolution, and alarm, yet at the same time joyfully expecting something terrible.

Next day towards evening the princess set off, and Pierre’s head steward came to inform him that the money needed for the equipment of his regiment could not be found without selling one of the estates. In general the head steward made out to Pierre that his project of raising a regiment would ruin him. Pierre listened to him, scarcely able to repress a smile.

“Well then, sell it,” said he. “What’s to be done? I can’t draw back now!”

The worse everything became, especially his own affairs, the better was Pierre pleased and the more evident was it that the catastrophe he expected was approaching. Hardly anyone he knew was left in town. Julie had gone, and so had Princess Mary. Of his intimate friends only the Rostóvs remained, but he did not go to see them.

To distract his thoughts he drove that day to the village of Vorontsóvo to see the great balloon Leppich was constructing to destroy the foe, and a trial balloon that was to go up next day. The balloon was not yet ready, but Pierre learnt that it was being constructed by the Emperor’s desire. The Emperor had written to Count Rostopchín as follows:

“As soon as Leppich is ready, get together a crew of reliable and intelligent men for his car and send a courier to General Kutúzov to let him know. I have informed him of the matter.

“Please impress upon Leppich to be very careful where he descends for the first time, that he may not make a mistake and fall into the enemy’s hands. It is essential for him to combine his movements with those of the commander-in-chief.”

On his way home from Vorontsóvo, as he was passing the Bolótnone Place, Pierre, seeing a large crowd round the Lóbnoe Place, stopped and got out of his trap. A French cook accused of being a spy was being flogged. The flogging was only just over, and the executioner was releasing from the flogging-bench a stout man with red whiskers, in blue stockings and a green jacket, who was moaning piteously. Another criminal, thin and pale, stood near. Judging by their faces they were both Frenchmen. With a frightened and suffering look resembling that on the thin Frenchman’s face, Pierre pushed his way in through the crowd.

“What is it? Who is it? What is it for?” he kept asking.

But the attention of the crowd—officials, burghers, shopkeepers, peasants, and women in cloaks and in pelisses—was so eagerly centred on what was passing in Lóbnoe Place that no one answered him. The stout man rose, frowned, shrugged his shoulders, and evidently trying to appear firm began to pull on his jacket without looking about him, but suddenly his lips trembled and he began to cry, in the way full-blooded grown-up men cry, though angry with himself for doing so. In the crowd people began talking loudly, to stifle their feelings of pity as it seemed to Pierre.

“He’s cook to some prince.”

“Eh, mounseer, Russian sauce seems to be sour to a Frenchman . . . sets his teeth on edge!” said a wrinkled clerk who was standing behind Pierre, when the Frenchman began to cry.

The clerk glanced round, evidently hoping that his joke would be appreciated. Some people began to laugh, others continued to watch in dismay the executioner who was undressing the other man.

Pierre choked, his face puckered, and he turned hastily away, went back to his trap muttering something to himself as he went, and took his seat. As they drove along he shuddered, and exclaimed several times so audibly that the coachman asked him:

“What is your pleasure?”

“Where are you going?” shouted Pierre to the man, who was driving to Lubyánka Street.

“To the Governor’s, as you ordered,” answered the coachman.

“Fool! Idiot!” shouted Pierre, abusing his coachman—a thing he rarely did. “Home, I told you! And drive faster, blockhead!” “I must get away this very day,” he murmured to himself.

At the sight of the tortured Frenchman and the crowd surrounding the Lóbnoe Place, Pierre had so definitely made up his mind that he could no longer remain in Moscow, and would leave for the army that very day, that it seemed to him that either he had told the coachman this or that the man ought to have known it of himself.

On reaching home Pierre gave orders to Evstáfey—his head coachman who knew everything, could do anything, and was known to all Moscow—that he would leave that night for the army at Mozháysk, and that his saddle-horses should be sent there. This could not all be arranged that day, so on Evstáfey’s representation Pierre had to put off his departure till next day to allow time for the relay horses to be sent on in advance.

On the 24th the weather cleared up after a spell of rain, and after dinner Pierre left Moscow. When changing horses that night, in Perkhúshkovo, he learnt that there had been a great battle that evening. (This was the battle of Shevárdino.) He was told that there in Perkhúshkovo the earth trembled from the firing, but nobody could answer his questions as to who had won. At dawn next day Pierre was approaching Mozháysk.

Every house in Mozháysk had soldiers quartered in it, and at the hostel where Pierre was met by his groom and coachman there was no room to be had. It was full of officers.

Everywhere in Mozháysk and beyond it troops were stationed or on the march. Cossacks, foot and horse soldiers, wagons, caissons, and cannon, were everywhere. Pierre pushed forward as fast as he could, and the farther he left Moscow behind and the deeper he plunged into that sea of troops the more was he overcome by restless agitation and a new and joyful feeling he had not experienced before. It was a feeling akin to what he had felt at the Slobóda Palace during the Emperor’s visit—a sense of the necessity of undertaking something and sacrificing something. He now experienced a glad consciousness that everything that constitutes men’s happiness—the comforts of life, wealth, even life itself—is rubbish it is pleasant to throw away, compared with something . . . With what? Pierre could not say, and he did not try to determine for whom and for what he felt such particular delight in sacrificing everything. He was not occupied with the question of what to sacrifice for, the fact of sacrificing in itself afforded him a new and joyous sensation.

CHAPTER 19

On the 24th of August the battle of the Shevárdino Redoubt was fought, on the 25th not a shot was fired by either side, and on the 26th the battle of Borodinó itself took place.

Why and how were the battles of Shevárdino and Borodinó given and accepted? Why was the battle of Borodinó fought? There was not the least sense in it for either the French or the Russians. Its immediate result for the Russians was, and was bound to be, that we were brought nearer to the destruction of Moscow—which we feared more than anything in the world; and for the French its immediate result was that they were brought nearer to the destruction of their whole army—which they feared more than anything in the world. What the result must be was quite obvious, and yet Napoleon offered and Kutúzov accepted that battle.

If the commanders had been guided by reason it would seem that it must have been obvious to Napoleon that by advancing thirteen hundred miles and giving battle with a probability of losing a quarter of his army, he was advancing to certain destruction, and it must have been equally clear to Kutúzov that by accepting battle and risking the loss of a quarter of his army he would certainly lose Moscow. For Kutúzov this was mathematically clear as it is that if when playing draughts, I have one man less and go on exchanging, I shall certainly lose, and therefore should not exchange. When my opponent has sixteen men and I have fourteen, I am only one-eighth weaker than he, but when I have exchanged thirteen more men he will be three times as strong as I am.

Before the battle of Borodinó, our strength in proportion to the French was approximately as five to six, but after that battle as one to two: that is to say, before the battle we had a hundred thousand against a hundred and twenty thousand, and after the battle fifty thousand against a hundred thousand. Yet the shrewd and experienced Kutúzov accepted the battle, while Napoleon, who was said to be a commander of genius, gave it, losing a quarter of his army and lengthening his lines of communication still more. If it is said that he expected to end the campaign by occupying Moscow, as he had ended a previous campaign by occupying Vienna, there is much evidence to the contrary. Napoleon’s historians themselves tell us that from Smolénsk onwards he wished to stop, knew the danger of his extended position, and knew that the occupation of Moscow would not be the end of the campaign, for he had seen at Smolénsk the state in which Russian towns were left to him, and had not received a single reply to his repeated announcements of his wish to negotiate.

In giving and accepting battle at Borodinó Kutúzov acted involuntarily and irrationally. But later on, to fit what had occurred, the historians provided cunningly devised evidence of the foresight and genius of the generals who of all the blind tools of history were the most enslaved and involuntary.

The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes furnish the whole interest of the story, and we are still unable to accustom ourselves to the fact that for our epoch histories of that kind are meaningless.

On the other question, how the battle of Borodinó and the preceding battle of Shevárdino were fought, there also exists a definite and well-known, but quite false, conception. All the historians describe the affair as follows:

The Russian army, they say, in its retreat from Smolénsk sought out for itself the best position for a general engagement and found such a position at Borodinó.

The Russians, they say, fortified this position in advance on the left of the high road (from Moscow to Smolénsk) and almost at a right angle to it, from Borodinó to Utítsa, at the very place where the battle was fought.

In front of this position, they say, a fortified outpost was set up on the Shevárdino mound to observe the enemy. On the 24th, we are told, Napoleon attacked this advanced post and took it, and on the 26th attacked the whole Russian army, which was in position on the field of Borodinó.

So the histories say, and it is all quite wrong, as anyone who cares to look into the matter can easily convince himself.

The Russians did not seek out the best position but on the contrary during the retreat passed many positions better than Borodinó. They did not stop at any one of these positions because Kutúzov did not wish to occupy a position he had not himself chosen, because the popular demand for a battle had not yet expressed itself strongly enough, and because Milorádovich had not yet arrived with the militia, and for many other reasons. The fact is that other positions they had passed were stronger, and that the position at Borodinó (the one where the battle was fought) far from being strong, was no more a position than any other spot one might find in the Russian Empire by sticking a pin into the map at hazard.

Not only did the Russians not fortify the position on the field of Borodinó to the left of, and at a right angle to, the high road (that is, the position on which the battle took place) but never till the 25th of August 1812, did they think that a battle might be fought there. This is shown first by the fact that there were no entrenchments there by the 25th, and that those begun on the 25th and 26th were not completed, and secondly, by the position of the Shevárdino Redoubt. That redoubt was quite senseless in front of the position where the battle was accepted. Why was it more strongly fortified than any other post? And why were all efforts exhausted and six thousand men sacrificed to defend it till late at night on the 24th? A Cossack patrol would have sufficed to observe the enemy. Thirdly, as proof that the position on which the battle was fought had not been foreseen and that the Shevárdino Redoubt was not an advanced post of that position, we have the fact that up to the 25th, Barclay de Tolly and Bagratión were convinced that the Shevárdino Redoubt was the left flank of the position, and that Kutúzov himself in his report written in hot haste after the battle, speaks of the Shevárdino Redoubt as the left flank of the position. It was much later, when reports on the battle of Borodinó were written at leisure, that the incorrect and extraordinary statement was invented (probably to justify the mistakes of a commander-in-chief who had to be represented as infallible) that the Shevárdino Redoubt was an advanced post—whereas in reality it was simply a fortified point on the left flank—and that the battle of Borodinó was fought by us on an entrenched position previously selected whereas it was fought on a quite unexpected spot which was almost unentrenched.

The case was evidently this: a position was selected along the river Kolochá—which crosses the high road not at a right angle but at an acute angle—so that the left flank was at Shevárdino, the right flank near the village of Nóvoe, and the centre at Borodinó at the confluence of the rivers Kolochá and Vóyna.

To anyone who looks at the field of Borodinó without thinking of how the battle was actually fought, this position, protected by the river Kolochá, presents itself as obvious for an army whose object was to prevent an enemy from advancing along the Smolénsk road to Moscow.

Napoleon, riding to Valúevo on the 24th, did not see (as the history books say he did) the position of the Russians from Utítsa to Borodinó (he could not have seen that position because it did not exist) nor did he see an advanced post of the Russian army, but while pursuing the Russian rearguard he came upon the left flank of the Russian position—at the Shevárdino Redoubt—and unexpectedly for the Russians moved his army across the Kolochá. And the Russians, not having time to begin a general engagement, withdrew their left wing from the position they had intended to occupy and took up a new position which had not been foreseen and was not fortified. By crossing to the other side of the Kolochá to the left of the high road, Napoleon shifted the whole forthcoming battle from right to left (looking from the Russian side) and transferred it to the plain between Utítsa, Semënovsk, and Borodinó—a plain no more advantageous as a position than any other plain in Russia—and there the whole battle of the 26th of August took place.

Had Napoleon not ridden out on the evening of the 24th to the Kolochá, and had he not then ordered an immediate attack on the redoubt but had begun the attack next morning, no one would have doubted that the Shevárdino Redoubt was the left flank of our position, and the battle would have taken place where we expected it. In that case we should probably have defended the Shevárdino Redoubt—our left flank—still more obstinately. We should have attacked Napoleon in the centre or on the right, and the general engagement would have taken place on the 25th, on the position we intended and had fortified. But as the attack on our left flank took place in the evening after the retreat of our rearguard (that is, immediately after the fight at Gridnëva), and as the Russian commanders did not wish, or were not in time, to begin a general engagement then on the evening of the 24th, the first and chief action of the battle of Borodinó was already lost on the 24th, and obviously led to the loss of the one fought on the 26th.

After the loss of the Shevárdino Redoubt we found ourselves on the morning of the 25th without a position for our left flank, and were forced to bend it back and hastily entrench it where it chanced to be.

But not only was the Russian army on the 26th defended by weak, unfinished entrenchments, the disadvantage of that position was increased by the fact that the Russian commanders—not having fully realized what had happened, namely, the loss of our position on the left flank and the shifting of the whole field of the forthcoming battle from right to left—maintained their extended position from the village of Nóvoe to Utítsa, and consequently had to move their forces from right to left during the battle. So it happened that throughout the whole battle the Russians opposed the entire French army launched against our left flank with but half as many men. (Poniatowski’s action against Utítsa, and Uvárov’s on the right flank against the French, were actions distinct from the main course of the battle.) So the battle of Borodinó did not take place at all as (in an effort to conceal our commanders’ mistakes even at the cost of diminishing the glory due to the Russian army and people) it has been described. The battle of Borodinó was not fought on a chosen and entrenched position with forces only slightly weaker than those of the enemy, but, as a result of the loss of the Shevárdino Redoubt, the Russians fought the battle of Borodinó on an open and almost unentrenched position, with forces only half as numerous as the French; that is to say, under conditions in which it was not merely unthinkable to fight for ten hours and secure an indecisive result, but unthinkable to keep an army even from complete disintegration and flight.

CHAPTER 20

On the morning of the 25th, Pierre was leaving Mozháysk. At the descent of the high steep hill, down which a winding road led out of the town past the cathedral on the right, where a service was being held and the bells were ringing, Pierre got out of his vehicle and proceeded on foot. Behind him a cavalry regiment was coming down the hill preceded by its singers. Coming up towards him was a train of carts carrying men who had been wounded in the engagement the day before. The peasant drivers, shouting and lashing their horses, kept crossing from side to side. The carts, in each of which three or four wounded soldiers were lying or sitting, jolted over the stones that had been thrown on the steep incline to make it something like a road. The wounded, bandaged with rags, with pale cheeks, compressed lips, and knitted brows, held on to the sides of the carts as they were jostled and jolted against one another. Almost all of them stared with naïve, childlike curiosity at Pierre’s white hat and green swallow-tail coat.

Pierre’s coachman shouted angrily at the convoy of wounded to keep to one side of the road. The cavalry regiment, as it descended the hill with its singers, surrounded Pierre’s carriage and blocked the road. Pierre stopped, being pressed against the side of the cutting in which the road ran. The sunshine from behind the hill did not penetrate into the cutting, and there it was cold and damp, but above Pierre’s head was the bright August sunshine and the bells sounded merrily. One of the carts with wounded stopped by the side of the road close to Pierre. The driver in his bast shoes ran panting up to it, placed a stone under one of its tyreless hind wheels, and began arranging the breeching on his little horse, which had stopped.

One of the wounded, an old soldier with a bandaged arm, who was following the cart on foot, caught hold of it with his sound hand and turned to look at Pierre.

“I say, fellow countryman, will they set us down here or take us on to Moscow?” he asked.

Pierre was so deep in thought that he did not hear the question. He was looking, now at the cavalry regiment that had met the convoy of wounded, now at the cart by which he was standing, in which two wounded men were sitting and one was lying. One of those sitting up in the cart had probably been wounded in the cheek. His whole head was wrapped in rags and one cheek was swollen to the size of a baby’s head. His nose and mouth were twisted to one side. This soldier was looking at the cathedral and crossing himself. Another, a young lad, a fair-haired recruit as white as though there was no blood in his thin face, looked at Pierre kindly, with a fixed smile. The third lay prone so that his face was not visible. The cavalry singers were passing close by:

“Ah lost, quite lost . . . is my head so keen,

Living in a foreign land . . .”

they sang their soldiers’ dance-song.

As if responding to them, but with a different sort of merriment, the metallic sound of the bells reverberated high above, and the hot rays of the sun bathed the top of the opposite slope with yet another sort of merriment. But beneath the slope, by the cart with the wounded near the panting little nag where Pierre stood, it was damp, sombre, and sad.

The soldier with the swollen cheek looked angrily at the cavalry singers.

“Oh, the coxcombs!” he muttered reproachfully.

“It’s not the soldiers only, but I’ve seen peasants today, too . . . The peasants—even they have to go,” said the soldier behind the cart, addressing Pierre with a sad smile. “No distinctions made nowadays . . . They want the whole nation to fall on them—in a word, it’s Moscow! They want to make an end of it.”

In spite of the obscurity of the soldier’s words Pierre understood what he wanted to say, and nodded approval.

The road was clear again; Pierre descended the hill and drove on.

He kept looking to either side of the road for familiar faces, but only saw everywhere the unfamiliar faces of various military men of different branches of the service who all looked with astonishment at his white hat and green tail-coat.

Having gone nearly three miles he at last met an acquaintance and eagerly addressed him. This was one of the head army-doctors. He was driving towards Pierre in a covered gig, sitting beside a young surgeon, and on recognising Pierre he told the Cossack who occupied the driver’s seat to pull up.

“Count! Your Excellency, how come you to be here?” asked the doctor.

“Well, you know, I wanted to see . . .”

“Yes, yes, there will be something to see . . .”

Pierre got out and talked to the doctor, explaining his intention of taking part in the battle.

The doctor advised him to apply direct to Kutúzov.

“Why should you be God knows where, out of sight, during the battle?” he said, exchanging glances with his young companion. “Anyhow, his Serene Highness knows you and will receive you graciously. That’s what you must do.”

The doctor seemed tired and in a hurry.

“You think so? . . . Ah, I also wanted to ask you where our position is exactly?” said Pierre.

“The position?” repeated the doctor. “Well! that’s not my line. Drive past Tatárinova, a lot of digging is going on there. Go up the hillock and you’ll see.”

“Can one see from there? . . . If you would . . .”

But the doctor interrupted him and moved towards his gig.

“I would go with you but on my honour I’m up to here”—and he pointed to his throat. “I’m galloping to the commander of the corps. How do matters stand? . . . You know, Count, there’ll be a battle tomorrow. Out of an army of a hundred thousand we must expect at least twenty thousand wounded, and we haven’t stretchers, or bunks, or dressers, or doctors enough for six thousand. We have ten thousand carts, but we need other things as well—we must manage as best we can!”

The strange thought, that of the thousands of men, young and old, who had stared with merry surprise at his hat (perhaps the very men he had noticed) twenty thousand were inevitably doomed to wounds and death, amazed Pierre.

“They may die tomorrow; why are they thinking of anything but death?” And by some latent sequence of thought the descent of the Mozháysk hill, the carts with the wounded, the ringing bells, the slanting rays of the sun, and the songs of the cavalrymen, vividly recurred to his mind.

“The cavalry ride to battle and meet the wounded and do not for a moment think of what awaits them, but pass by, winking at the wounded. Yet from among these men twenty thousand are doomed to die, and they wonder at my hat! Strange!” thought Pierre, continuing his way to Tatárinova.

In front of a landowner’s house to the left of the road stood carriages, wagons, and crowds of orderlies and sentinels. The commander-in-chief was putting up there, but just when Pierre arrived he was not in, and hardly any of the staff were there—they had gone to the church service. Pierre drove on towards Górki.

When he had ascended the hill and reached the little village street, he saw for the first time peasant militiamen in their white shirts and with crosses on their caps, who, talking and laughing loudly, animated and perspiring, were at work on a huge knoll overgrown with grass to the right of the road.

Some of them were digging, others were wheeling barrow-loads of earth along planks, while others stood about doing nothing.

Two officers were standing on the knoll, directing the men. On seeing these peasants, who were evidently still amused by the novelty of their position as soldiers, Pierre once more thought of the wounded men at Mozháysk, and understood what the soldier had meant when he said: “They want the whole nation to fall on them.” The sight of these bearded peasants at work on the battlefield, with their queer, clumsy boots and perspiring necks, and their shirts, opening from the left towards the middle, unfastened, exposing their sunburnt collar-bones, impressed Pierre more strongly with the solemnity and importance of the moment than anything he had yet seen or heard.

CHAPTER 21

Pierre stepped out of his carriage and, passing the toiling militiamen, ascended the knoll from which according to the doctor the battle-field could be seen.

It was about eleven o’clock. The sun shone somewhat to the left and behind him, and brightly lit up the enormous panorama which, rising like an amphitheatre, extended before him in the clear rarefied atmosphere.

From above on the left, bisecting that amphitheatre, wound the Smolénsk high road, passing through a village with a white church some five hundred paces in front of the knoll and below it. This was Borodinó. Below the village the road crossed the river by a bridge, and winding down and up, rose higher and higher to the village of Valúevo visible about four miles away, where Napoleon was then stationed. Beyond Valúevo the road disappeared into a yellowing forest on the horizon. Far in the distance in that birch and fir forest to the right of the road, the cross and belfry of the Kolochá Monastery gleamed in the sun. Here and there over the whole of that blue expanse, to right and left of the forest and the road, smoking camp-fires could be seen and indefinite masses of troops—ours and the enemy’s. The ground to the right—along the course of the Kolochá and Moskvá rivers—was broken and hilly. Between the hollows the villages of Bezzúbova and Zakhárino showed in the distance. On the left the ground was more level; there were fields of grain, and the smoking ruins of Semënovsk, which had been burnt down, could be seen.

All that Pierre saw was so indefinite that neither the left nor the right side of the field fully satisfied his expectations. Nowhere could he see the battle-field he had expected to find, but only fields, meadows, troops, woods, the smoke of camp-fires, villages, mounds, and streams; and try as he would he could descry no military “position” in this place which teemed with life, nor could he even distinguish our troops from the enemy’s.

“I must ask someone who knows,” he thought, and addressed an officer who was looking with curiosity at his huge unmilitary figure.

“May I ask you,” said Pierre, “what village that is in front?”

“Búrdino, isn’t it?” said the officer, turning to a companion.

“Borodinó,” the other corrected him.

The officer, evidently glad of an opportunity for a talk, moved up to Pierre.

“Are those our men there?” Pierre inquired.

“Yes, and there further on are the French,” said the officer. “There they are, there, you can see them.”

“Where? Where?” asked Pierre.

“One can see them with the naked eye . . . Why, there!”

The officer pointed with his hand to the smoke visible on the left beyond the river, and the same stern and serious expression that Pierre had noticed on many of the faces he had met came into his face.

“Ah, so those are the French! And over there? . . .” Pierre pointed to a knoll on the left, near which some troops could be seen.

“Those are ours.”

“Ah ours! And there? . . .” Pierre pointed to another knoll in the distance with a big tree on it, near a village that lay in a hollow where some camp-fires were smoking too, and something black was visible.

“That’s his again,” said the officer. (It was the Shevárdino Redoubt.) “It was ours yesterday, but now it is his.”

“Then how about our position?”

“Our position?” replied the officer with a smile of satisfaction. “I can tell you quite clearly, because I constructed nearly all our entrenchments. There, you see? There’s our centre, at Borodinó, just there,” and he pointed to the village in front of them with the white church. “That’s where one crosses the Kolochá. You see down there where the rows of hay are lying in the hollow, there’s the bridge. That’s our centre. Our right flank is over there”—he pointed sharply to the right, far away in the broken ground—“That’s where the Moskvá river is, and we have thrown up three redoubts there, very strong ones. The left flank . . .” here the officer paused. “Well, you see, that’s difficult to explain . . . Yesterday our left flank was there at Shevárdino, you see, where the oak is, but now we have withdrawn our left wing—now it is over there, do you see that village and the smoke? That’s Semënovsk, yes, there,” he pointed to Raévski’s knoll. “But the battle will hardly be there. His having moved his troops there is only a ruse; he will probably pass round to the right of the Moskvá. But wherever it may be, many a man will be missing tomorrow!” he remarked.

An elderly sergeant who had approached the officer while he was giving these explanations had waited in silence for him to finish speaking, but at this point, evidently not liking the officer’s remark, interrupted him.

“Gabions must be sent for,” said he sternly.

The officer appeared abashed, as though he understood that one might think of how many men would be missing tomorrow but ought not to speak of it.

“Well, send number three company again,” the officer replied hurriedly.

“And you, are you one of the doctors?”

“No, I’ve come on my own,” answered Pierre, and he went down the hill again passing the militiamen.

“Oh, those damned fellows!” muttered the officer, who followed him holding his nose as he ran past the men at work.

“There they are . . . bringing her, coming . . . There they are . . . They’ll be here in a minute . . .” voices were suddenly heard saying; and officers, soldiers, and militiamen began running forward along the road.

A church procession was coming up the hill from Borodinó. First along the dusty road came the infantry in ranks, bareheaded and with arms reversed. From behind them came the sound of church singing.

Soldiers and militiamen ran bareheaded past Pierre towards the procession.

“They are bringing her, our Protectress! . . . The Iberian Mother of God!” someone cried.

“The Smolénsk Mother of God,” another corrected him.

The militiamen, both those who had been in the village and those who had been at work on the battery, threw down their spades and ran to meet the church procession. Following the battalion that marched along the dusty road, came priests in their vestments—one little old man in a hood with attendants and singers. Behind them soldiers and officers bore a large, dark-faced icon with an embossed metal cover. This was the icon that had been brought from Smolénsk and had since accompanied the army. Behind, before, and on both sides, crowds of militiamen with bared heads walked, ran, and bowed to the ground.

At the summit of the hill they stopped with the icon; the men who had been holding it up by the linen bands attached to it were relieved by others, the chanters relit their censers and service began. The hot rays of the sun beat down vertically, and a fresh soft wind played with the hair of the bared heads and with the ribbons decorating the icon. The singing did not sound loud under the open sky. An immense crowd of bare-headed officers, soldiers, and militiamen, surrounded the icon. Behind the priest and a chanter stood the notabilities, on a spot reserved for them. A bald general with a St. George’s Cross on his neck stood just behind the priest’s back, and without crossing himself (he was evidently a German) patiently awaited the end of the service, which he considered it necessary to hear to the end, probably to arouse the patriotism of the Russian people. Another general stood in a martial pose, crossing himself by shaking his hand in front of his chest while looking about him. Standing among the crowd of peasants, Pierre recognised several acquaintances among these notables, but did not look at them—his whole attention was absorbed in watching the serious expression on the faces of the crowd of soldiers and militiamen who were all gazing eagerly at the icon. As soon as the tired chanters, who were singing the service for the twentieth time that day, began lazily and mechanically to sing: “Save from calamity Thy servants, O Mother of God,” and the priest and deacon chimed in: “For to Thee under God we all flee as to an inviolable bulwark and protection,” there again kindled in all those faces the same expression of consciousness of the solemnity of the impending moment that Pierre had seen on the faces at the foot of the hill at Mozháysk, and momentarily on many faces he had met that morning; and heads were bowed more frequently and hair tossed back, and sighs and the sound men made as they crossed themselves were heard.

The crowd round the icon suddenly parted, and pressed against Pierre. Someone, a very important personage judging by the haste with which way was made for him, was approaching the icon.

It was Kutúzov, who had been riding round the position and on his way back to Tatárinova had stopped where the service was being held. Pierre recognised him at once by his peculiar figure, which distinguished him from everybody else.

With a long overcoat on his exceedingly stout, round-shouldered body, with uncovered white head and puffy face showing the white ball of the eye he had lost, Kutúzov walked with plunging, swaying gait into the crowd and stopped behind the priest. He crossed himself with an accustomed movement, bent till he touched the ground with his hand, and bowed his white head with a deep sigh. Behind Kutúzov was Bennigsen and the suite. Despite the presence of the commander-in-chief who attracted the attention of all the superior officers, the militiamen and soldiers continued their prayers without looking at him.

When the service was over Kutúzov stepped up to the icon, sank heavily to his knees, bowed to the ground, and for a long time tried vainly to rise, but could not do so on account of his weakness and weight. His white head twitched with the effort. At last he rose, kissed the icon as a child does with naïvely pouting lips, and again bowed till he touched the ground with his hand. The other generals followed his example, then the officers, and after them with excited faces, pressing on one another, crowding, panting, and pushing, scrambled the soldiers and militiamen.

CHAPTER 22

Staggering amid the crush Pierre looked about him.

“Count Peter Kirílovich! How did you get here?” said a voice.

Pierre looked round. Borís Drubetskóy, brushing his knees with his hand (he had probably soiled them when he, too, had knelt before the icon) came up to him smiling. Borís was elegantly dressed, with a slightly martial touch appropriate to a campaign. He wore a long coat, and like Kutúzov had a whip slung across his shoulder.

Meanwhile Kutúzov had reached the village and seated himself in the shade of the nearest house, on a bench which one Cossack had run to fetch and another had hastily covered with a rug. An immense and brilliant suite surrounded him.

The icon was carried further, accompanied by the throng. Pierre stopped some thirty paces from Kutúzov, talking to Borís.

He explained his wish to be present at the battle and to see the position.

“This is what you must do,” said Borís. “I will do the honours of the camp for you. You will see everything best from where Count Bennigsen will be. I am in attendance on him, you know; I’ll mention it to him. But if you want to ride round the position, come along with us. We are just going to the left flank. Then when we get back, do spend the night with me and we’ll arrange a game of cards. Of course you know Dmítri Sergéevich? Those are his quarters,” and he pointed to the third house in the village of Górki.

“But I should like to see the right flank. They say it’s very strong,” said Pierre. “I should like to start from the Moskvá river and ride round the whole position.”

“Well, you can do that later, but the chief thing is the left flank.”

“Yes, yes. But where is Prince Bolkónski’s regiment? Can you point it out to me?”

“Prince Andrew’s? We shall pass it and I’ll take you to him.”

“What about the left flank?” asked Pierre.

“To tell you the truth, between ourselves, God only knows what state our left flank is in,” said Borís, confidentially lowering his voice. “It is not at all what Count Bennigsen intended. He meant to fortify that knoll quite differently but . . .” Borís shrugged his shoulders “his Serene Highness would not have it, or someone persuaded him. You see . . .” but Borís did not finish, for at that moment Kaysárov, Kutúzov’s adjutant, came up to Pierre. “Ah, Kaysárov!” said Borís, addressing him with an unembarrassed smile, “I was just trying to explain our position to the Count. It is amazing how his Serene Highness could so foresee the intentions of the French!”

“You mean the left flank?” asked Kaysárov.

“Yes, exactly; the left flank is now extremely strong.”

Though Kutúzov had dismissed all unnecessary men from the staff, Borís had contrived to remain at headquarters after the changes. He had established himself with Count Bennigsen, who, like all on whom Borís had been in attendance, considered young Prince Drubetskóy an invaluable man.

In the higher command there were two sharply defined parties: Kutúzov’s party and that of Bennigsen, the chief of staff. Borís belonged to the latter, and no one else, while showing servile respect to Kutúzov, could so create an impression that the old fellow was not much good, and that Bennigsen managed everything. Now the decisive moment of battle had come when Kutúzov would be destroyed and the power pass to Bennigsen, or even if Kutúzov won the battle it would be felt that everything was done by Bennigsen. In any case many great rewards would have to be given for tomorrow’s action, and new men would come to the front. So Borís was full of nervous vivacity all day.

After Kaysárov, others whom Pierre knew came up to him, and he had not time to reply to all the questions about Moscow that were showered upon him, or to listen to all that was told him. The faces all expressed animation and apprehension, but it seemed to Pierre that the cause of the excitement shown in some of these faces lay chiefly in questions of personal success; his mind, however, was occupied by the different expression he saw on other faces—an expression that spoke not of personal matters but of the universal questions of life and death. Kutúzov noticed Pierre’s figure and the group gathered round him.

“Call him to me,” said Kutúzov.

An adjutant told Pierre of his Serene Highness’s wish, and Pierre went towards Kutúzov’s bench. But a militiaman got there before him. It was Dólokhov.

“How did that fellow get here?” asked Pierre.

“He’s a creature that wriggles in anywhere!” was the answer. “He has been degraded, you know. Now he wants to bob up again. He’s been proposing some scheme or other and has crawled into the enemy’s picquet line at night . . . He’s a brave fellow.”

Pierre took off his hat and bowed respectfully to Kutúzov.

“I concluded that if I reported to your Serene Highness, you might send me away or say that you knew what I was reporting, but then I shouldn’t lose anything . . .” Dólokhov was saying.

“Yes, yes.”

“But if I were right, I should be rendering a service to my Fatherland for which I am ready to die.”

“Yes, yes.”

“And should your Serene Highness require a man who will not spare his skin, please think of me . . . Perhaps I may prove useful to your Serene Highness.”

“Yes . . . Yes . . .” Kutúzov repeated, his laughing eye narrowing more and more as he looked at Pierre.

Just then Borís, with his courtier-like adroitness, stepped up to Pierre’s side near Kutúzov, and in a most natural manner, without raising his voice, said to Pierre as though continuing an interrupted conversation:

“The militia have put on clean white shirts to be ready to die. What heroism, Count!”

Borís evidently said this to Pierre in order to be overheard by his Serene Highness. He knew Kutúzov’s attention would be caught by those words, and so it was.

“What are you saying about the militia?” he asked Borís.

“Preparing for tomorrow, your Serene Highness—for death—they have put on clean shirts.”

“Ah . . . a wonderful, a matchless people!” said Kutúzov; and he closed his eyes and swayed his head. “A matchless people!” he repeated with a sigh.

“So you want to smell gunpowder?” he said to Pierre. “Yes, it’s a pleasant smell. I have the honour to be one of your wife’s adorers. Is she well? My quarters are at your service.”

And as often happens with old people, Kutúzov began looking about absent-mindedly as if forgetting all he wanted to say or do.

Then, evidently remembering what he wanted, he beckoned to Andrew Kaysárov, his adjutant’s brother.

“Those verses . . . those verses of Márin’s . . . how do they go, eh? Those he wrote about Gerákov: ‘Lectures for the corps inditing’ . . . Recite them, recite them!” said he, evidently preparing to laugh.

Kaysárov recited . . . Kutúzov smilingly nodded his head to the rhythm of the verses.

When Pierre had left Kutúzov, Dólokhov came up to him and took his hand.

“I am very glad to meet you here, Count,” he said aloud, regardless of the presence of strangers and in a particularly resolute and solemn tone. “On the eve of a day when God alone knows who of us is fated to survive, I am glad of this opportunity to tell you that I regret the misunderstandings that occurred between us, and should wish you not to have any ill feeling for me. I beg you to forgive me.”

Pierre looked at Dólokhov with a smile, not knowing what to say to him. With tears in his eyes Dólokhov embraced Pierre and kissed him.

Borís said a few words to his general, and Count Bennigsen turned to Pierre and proposed that he should ride with him along the line.

“It will interest you,” said he.

“Yes, very much,” replied Pierre.

Half an hour later Kutúzov left for Tatárinova, and Bennigsen and his suite, with Pierre among them, set out on their ride along the line.

CHAPTER 23

From Górki Bennigsen descended the high road to the bridge which, when they had looked at it from the hill, the officer had pointed out as being the centre of our position and where rows of fragrant new-mown hay lay by the riverside. They rode across that bridge into the village of Borodinó and thence turned to the left, passing an enormous number of troops and guns, and came to a high knoll where militiamen were digging. This was the redoubt, as yet unnamed, which afterwards became known as the Raévski Redoubt, or the Knoll Battery, but Pierre paid no special attention to it. He did not know that it would become more memorable to him than any other spot on the plain of Borodinó.

They then crossed the hollow to Semënovsk, where the soldiers were dragging away the last logs from the huts and barns. Then they rode downhill and uphill, across a rye-field trodden and beaten down as if by hail, following a track freshly made by the artillery over the furrows of the ploughed land, and reached some flèches⁹⁰ which were still being dug.

At the flèches Bennigsen stopped, and began looking at the Shevárdino Redoubt opposite, which had been ours the day before and where several horsemen could be descried. The officers said that either Napoleon or Murat was there, and they all gazed eagerly at this little group of horsemen. Pierre also looked at them, trying to guess which of the scarcely discernible figures was Napoleon. At last those mounted men rode away from the mound and disappeared.

Bennigsen spoke to a general who approached him, and began explaining the whole position of our troops. Pierre listened to him, straining each faculty to understand the essential points of the impending battle, but was mortified to feel that his mental capacity was inadequate for the task. He could make nothing of it. Bennigsen stopped speaking, and noticing that Pierre was listening, suddenly said to him:

“I don’t think this interests you?”

“On the contrary it’s very interesting!” replied Pierre not quite truthfully.

From the flèches they rode still farther to the left, along a road winding through a thick, low-growing birch wood. In the middle of the wood a brown hare with white feet sprang out and, scared by the tramp of the many horses, grew so confused that it leapt along the road in front of them for some time, arousing general attention and laughter, and only when several voices shouted at it did it dart to one side and disappear in the thicket. After going through the wood for about a mile and a half they came out on a glade where troops of Túchkov’s corps were stationed to defend the left flank.

Here, at the extreme left flank, Bennigsen talked a great deal and with much heat, and, as it seemed to Pierre, gave orders of great military importance. In front of Túchkov’s troops was some high ground not occupied by troops. Bennigsen loudly criticized this mistake, saying that it was madness to leave a height which commanded the country around unoccupied and to place troops below it. Some of the generals expressed the same opinion. One in particular declared with martial heat that they were put there to be slaughtered. Bennigsen on his own authority ordered the troops to occupy the high ground.

This disposition on the left flank increased Pierre’s doubt of his own capacity to understand military matters. Listening to Bennigsen and the generals criticizing the position of the troops behind the hill, he quite understood them and shared their opinion, but for that very reason he could not understand how the man who put them there behind the hill could have made so gross and palpable a blunder.

Pierre did not know that these troops were not, as Bennigsen supposed, put there to defend the position, but were in a concealed position, as an ambush, that they should not be seen and might be able to strike an approaching enemy unexpectedly. Bennigsen did not know this, and moved the troops forward according to his own ideas without mentioning the matter to the commander-in-chief.

CHAPTER 24

On that bright evening of August the 25th, Prince Andrew lay leaning on his elbow in a broken-down shed in the village of Knyazkóvo at the further end of his regiment’s encampment. Through a gap in the broken wall he could see, beside the wooden fence, a row of thirty-year-old birches with their lower branches lopped off, a field on which shocks of oats were standing, and some bushes near which rose the smoke of camp-fires—the soldiers’ kitchens.

Narrow and burdensome and useless to anyone as his life now seemed to him, Prince Andrew on the eve of battle felt agitated and irritable, as he had done seven years before at Austerlitz.

He had received and given the orders for next day’s battle, and had nothing more to do. But his thoughts—the simplest, clearest, and therefore most terrible thoughts—would give him no peace. He knew that tomorrow’s battle would be the most terrible of all he had taken part in, and for the first time in his life the possibility of death presented itself to him—not in relation to any worldly matter or with reference to its effect on others, but simply in relation to himself, to his own soul—vividly, plainly, terribly, and almost as a certainty. And from the height of this perception all that had previously tormented and preoccupied him suddenly became illumined by a cold white light without shadows, without perspective, and without distinction of outline. All life appeared to him like magic-lantern pictures at which he had long been gazing by artificial light through a glass. Now he suddenly saw those badly daubed pictures in clear daylight and without a glass. “Yes, yes! There they are, those false images that agitated, enraptured, and tormented me,” said he to himself, passing in review the principal pictures of the magic lantern of life and regarding them now in the cold white daylight of his clear perception of death. “There they are, those rudely painted figures that once seemed splendid and mysterious. Glory, the good of society, love of a woman, the Fatherland itself—how important these pictures appeared to me, with what profound meaning they seemed to be filled! And it is all so simple, pale, and crude in the cold white light of this morning which I feel is dawning for me.” The three great sorrows of his life held his attention in particular: his love for a woman, his father’s death, and the French invasion which had overrun half Russia. “Love! . . . that little girl who seemed to me brimming over with mystic forces! Yes, indeed I loved her. I made romantic plans of love and happiness with her! Oh, what a boy I was!” he said aloud bitterly. “Ah me! I believed in some ideal love which was to keep her faithful to me for the whole year of my absence! Like the gentle dove in the fable she was to pine apart from me . . . But it was much simpler really . . . It was all very simple and horrible.”

“When my father built Bald Hills he thought the place was his, his land, his air, his peasants. But Napoleon came and swept him aside, unconscious of his existence, as he might brush a chip from his path, and his Bald Hills and his whole life fell to pieces. Princess Mary says it is a trial sent from above. What is the trial for, when he is not here and will never return? He is not here! For whom then is the trial intended? The Fatherland, the destruction of Moscow! And tomorrow I shall be killed, perhaps not even by a Frenchman but by one of our own men, by a soldier discharging a musket close to my ear, as one of them did yesterday, and the French will come and take me by head and heels and fling me into a hole that I may not stink under their noses, and new conditions of life will arise, which will seem quite ordinary to others and about which I shall know nothing. I shall not exist . . .”

He looked at the row of birches shining in the sunshine with their motionless green and yellow foliage and white bark. “To die . . . to be killed tomorrow . . . That I should not exist . . . That all this should still be, but no me . . .”

And the birches with their light and shade, the curly clouds, the smoke of the camp-fires, and all that was around him, changed and seemed terrible and menacing. A cold shiver ran down his spine. He rose quickly, went out of the shed, and began to walk about.

After he had returned, voices were heard outside the shed. “Who’s that?” he cried.

The red-nosed Captain Timókhin, formerly Dólokhov’s squadron-commander, but now from lack of officers a battalion-commander, shyly entered the shed, followed by an adjutant and the regimental paymaster.

Prince Andrew rose hastily, listened to the business they had come about, gave them some further instructions, and was about to dismiss them when he heard a familiar, lisping voice behind the shed.

“Devil take it!” said the voice of a man stumbling over something.

Prince Andrew looked out of the shed and saw Pierre, who had tripped over a pole on the ground and had nearly fallen, coming his way. It was unpleasant to Prince Andrew to meet people of his own set in general, and Pierre especially, for he reminded him of all the painful moments of his last visit to Moscow.

“You? What a surprise!” said he. “What brings you here? This is unexpected!”

As he said this his eyes and face expressed more than coldness—they expressed hostility, which Pierre noticed at once. He had approached the shed full of animation, but on seeing Prince Andrew’s face he felt constrained and ill at ease.

“I have come . . . simply . . . you know . . . come . . . it interests me,” said Pierre, who had so often that day senselessly repeated that word “interesting.” “I wish to see the battle.”

“Oh yes, and what do the Masonic brothers say about war? How would they stop it?” said Prince Andrew sarcastically. “Well, and how’s Moscow? And my people? Have they reached Moscow at last?” he asked seriously.

“Yes, they have. Julie Drubetskáya told me so. I went to see them, but missed them. They have gone to your estate near Moscow.”

CHAPTER 25

The officers were about to take leave, but Prince Andrew, apparently reluctant to be left alone with his friend, asked them to stay and have tea. Seats were brought in and so was the tea. The officers gazed with surprise at Pierre’s huge stout figure, and listened to his talk of Moscow and the position of our army, round which he had ridden. Prince Andrew remained silent, and his expression was so forbidding that Pierre addressed his remarks chiefly to Timókhin, the good-natured battalion-commander.

“So you understand the whole position of our troops?” Prince Andrew interrupted him.

“Yes—that is, how do you mean?” said Pierre. “Not being a military man I can’t say I have understood it fully, but I understand the general position.”

“Well, then, you know more than anyone else, be it who it may,” said Prince Andrew.

“Oh!” said Pierre, looking over his spectacles in perplexity at Prince Andrew. “Well, and what do you think of Kutúzov’s appointment?” he asked.

“I was very glad of his appointment, that’s all I know,” replied Prince Andrew.

“And tell me your opinion of Barclay de Tolly. In Moscow they are saying heaven knows what about him . . . What do you think of him?”

“Ask them,” replied Prince Andrew, indicating the officers.

Pierre looked at Timókhin with the condescendingly interrogative smile with which everybody involuntarily addressed that officer.

“We see light again, since his Serenity has been appointed, your Excellency,” said Timókhin, timidly and continually turning to glance at his colonel.

“Why so?” asked Pierre.

“Well, to mention only fire-wood and fodder, let me inform you. Why, when we were retreating from Sventsyáni we dare not touch a stick, or a wisp of hay or anything. You see, we were going away, so he would get it all; wasn’t it so, your Excellency?” and again Timókhin turned to the prince. “But we daren’t. In our regiment two officers were court-martialled for that kind of thing. But when his Serenity took command everything became straightforward. Now we see light . . .”

“Then why was it forbidden?”

Timókhin looked about in confusion, not knowing what or how to answer such a question. Pierre put the same question to Prince Andrew.

“Why, so as not to lay waste the country we were abandoning to the enemy,” said Prince Andrew with venomous irony. “It is very sound: one can’t permit the land to be pillaged and accustom the troops to marauding. At Smolénsk too he judged correctly that the French might outflank us, as they had larger forces. But he could not understand this,” cried Prince Andrew in a shrill voice that seemed to escape him involuntarily: “He could not understand that there, for the first time, we were fighting for Russian soil, and that there was a spirit in the men such as I had never seen before, that we had held the French for two days, and that that success had increased our strength tenfold. He ordered us to retreat, and all our efforts and losses went for nothing. He had no thought of betraying us, he tried to do the best he could, he thought out everything, and that is why he is unsuitable. He is unsuitable now, just because he plans out everything very thoroughly and accurately as every German has to. How can I explain? . . . Well, say your father has a German valet, and he is a splendid valet and satisfies your father’s requirements better than you could, then it’s all right to let him serve. But if your father is mortally sick you’ll send the valet away and attend to your father with your own unpractised, awkward hands, and will soothe him better than a skilled man who is a stranger could. So it has been with Barclay. While Russia was well, a foreigner could serve her and be a splendid Minister; but as soon as she is in danger she needs one of her own kin. But in your Club they have been making him out a traitor! They slander him as a traitor, and the only result will be that afterwards, ashamed of their false accusations, they will make him out a hero or a genius instead of a traitor, and that will be still more unjust. He is an honest and very punctilious German.”

“And they say he’s a skilful commander,” rejoined Pierre.

“I don’t understand what is meant by ‘a skilful commander,’” replied Prince Andrew ironically.

“A skilful commander?” replied Pierre. “Why, one who foresees all contingencies . . . and foresees the adversary’s intentions.”

“But that’s impossible,” said Prince Andrew as if it were a matter settled long ago.

Pierre looked at him in surprise.

“And yet they say that war is like a game of chess?” he remarked.

“Yes,” replied Prince Andrew, “but with this little difference, that in chess you may think over each move as long as you please and are not limited for time, and with this difference too, that a knight is always stronger than a pawn, and two pawns are always stronger than one, while in war a battalion is sometimes stronger than a division and sometimes weaker than a company. The relative strength of bodies of troops can never be known to anyone. Believe me,” he went on, “if things depended on arrangements made by the Staff, I should be there making arrangements, but instead of that I have the honour to serve here in the regiment with these gentlemen, and I consider that on us tomorrow’s battle will depend and not on those others . . . Success never depends, and never will depend, on position, or equipment, or even on numbers, and least of all on position.”

“But on what then?”

“On the feeling that is in me and in him,” he pointed to Timókhin, “and in each soldier.”

Prince Andrew glanced at Timókhin, who looked at his commander in alarm and bewilderment. In contrast to his former reticent taciturnity Prince Andrew now seemed excited. He could apparently not refrain from expressing the thoughts that had suddenly occurred to him.

“A battle is won by those who firmly resolve to win it! Why did we lose the battle at Austerlitz? The French losses were almost equal to ours, but very early we said to ourselves that we were losing the battle, and we did lose it. And we said so because we had nothing to fight for there, we wanted to get away from the battle-field as soon as we could. ‘We’ve lost, so let us run,’ and we ran. If we had not said that till the evening, heaven knows what might not have happened. But tomorrow we shan’t say it. You talk about our position, the left flank weak and the right flank too extended,” he went on. “That’s all nonsense, there’s nothing of the kind. But what awaits us tomorrow? A hundred million most diverse chances which will be decided on the instant by the fact that our men or theirs run or do not run, and that this man or that man is killed; but all that is being done at present is only play. The fact is that those men with whom you have ridden round the position not only do not help matters, but hinder. They are only concerned with their own petty interests.”

“At such a moment?” said Pierre reproachfully.

“At such a moment!” Prince Andrew repeated. “To them it is only a moment affording opportunities to undermine a rival and obtain an extra cross or ribbon. For me tomorrow means this: a Russian army of a hundred thousand and a French army of a hundred thousand have met to fight, and the thing is that these two hundred thousand men will fight and the side that fights more fiercely and spares itself least will win. And if you like I will tell you that whatever happens, and whatever muddles those at the top may make, we shall win tomorrow’s battle. Tomorrow, happen what may, we shall win!”

“There now, your Excellency! That’s the truth, the real truth,” said Timókhin. “Who would spare himself now? The soldiers in my battalion, believe me, wouldn’t drink their vodka! ‘It’s not the day for that!’ they say.”

All were silent. The officers rose. Prince Andrew went out of the shed with them, giving final orders to the adjutant. After they had gone, Pierre approached Prince Andrew and was about to start a conversation when they heard the clatter of three horses’ hoofs on the road not far from the shed, and looking in that direction Prince Andrew recognised Wolzogen and Clausewitz accompanied by a Cossack. They rode close by, continuing to converse, and Prince Andrew involuntarily heard these words:

“Der Krieg muss in Raum verlegt werden. Der Ansicht kann ich nicht genug Preis geben,”⁹¹ said one of them.

“Oh, ja,” said the other, “der Zweck ist nur den Feind zu schwächen, so kann man gewiss nicht den Verlust der Privat Personen in Achtung nehmen.”⁹²

“Oh, no,” agreed the other.

“Extend widely!” said Prince Andrew with an angry snort, when they had ridden past. “In that ‘extent’ were my father, son, and sister, at Bald Hills. That’s all the same to him! That’s what I was saying to you—those German gentlemen won’t win the battle tomorrow but will only make all the mess they can, because they have nothing in their German heads but theories not worth an empty egg-shell, and haven’t in their hearts the one thing needed tomorrow—that which Timókhin has. They have yielded up all Europe to him, and have now come to teach us. Fine teachers!” and again his voice grew shrill.

“So you think we shall win tomorrow’s battle?” asked Pierre.

“Yes, yes,” answered Prince Andrew absently. “One thing I would do if I had the power,” he began again, “I would not take prisoners. Why take prisoners? It’s chivalry! The French have destroyed my home and are on their way to destroy Moscow, they have outraged and are outraging me every moment. They are my enemies. In my opinion they are all criminals. And so thinks Timókhin and the whole army. They should be executed! Since they are my foes they cannot be my friends, whatever may have been said at Tilsit.”

“Yes, yes,” muttered Pierre, looking with shining eyes at Prince Andrew. “I quite agree with you!”

The question that had perturbed Pierre on the Mozháysk hill and all that day now seemed to him quite clear and completely solved. He now understood the whole meaning and importance of this war and of the impending battle. All he had seen that day, all the significant and stern expressions on the faces he had seen in passing, were lit up for him by a new light. He understood that latent heat (as they say in physics) of patriotism which was present in all these men he had seen, and this explained to him why they all prepared for death calmly, and as it were light-heartedly.

“Not take prisoners,” Prince Andrew continued. “That by itself would quite change the whole war and make it less cruel. As it is we have played at war—that’s what’s vile! We play at magnanimity and all that stuff. Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kind-hearted that she can’t look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce. They talk to us of the rules of war, of chivalry, of flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate, and so on. It’s all rubbish. I saw chivalry and flags of truce in 1805; they humbugged us and we humbugged them. They plunder other people’s houses, issue false paper money, and worst of all they kill my children and my father, and then talk of rules of war and magnanimity to foes! Take no prisoners, but kill and be killed! He who has come to this as I have through the same sufferings . . .”

Prince Andrew, who had thought it was all the same to him whether or not Moscow was taken as Smolénsk had been, was suddenly checked in his speech by an unexpected cramp in his throat. He paced up and down a few times in silence, but his eyes glittered feverishly and his lips quivered as he began speaking.

“If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worth while going to certain death, as now. Then there would not be war because Paul Ivánovich had offended Michael Ivánovich. And when there was a war, like this one, it would be war! And then the determination of the troops would be quite different. Then all these Westphalians and Hessians whom Napoleon is leading would not follow him into Russia, and we should not go to fight in Austria and Prussia without knowing why. War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that, and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favourite pastime of the idle and frivolous. The military calling is the most highly honoured.

“But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country’s inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone. All the kings, except the Chinese, wear military uniforms, and he who kills most people receives the highest rewards.

“They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they announce a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?” exclaimed Prince Andrew in a shrill, piercing voice. “Ah, my friend, it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to understand too much. And it doesn’t do for man to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil . . . Ah, well, it’s not for long!” he added.

“However, you’re sleepy, and it’s time for me to sleep. Go back to Górki!” said Prince Andrew suddenly.

“Oh, no!” Pierre replied, looking at Prince Andrew with frightened, compassionate eyes.

“Go, go! Before a battle one must have one’s sleep out,” repeated Prince Andrew.

He came quickly up to Pierre and embraced and kissed him.

“Goodbye, be off!” he shouted. “Whether we meet again or not . . .” and turning away hurriedly he entered the shed.

It was already dark, and Pierre could not make out whether the expression of Prince Andrew’s face was angry or tender.

For some time he stood in silence considering whether he should follow him or go away. “No, he does not want it!” Pierre concluded, “and I know that this is our last meeting!” He sighed deeply and rode back to Górki.

On re-entering the shed Prince Andrew lay down on a rug, but he could not sleep.

He closed his eyes. One picture succeeded another in his imagination. On one of them he dwelt long and joyfully. He vividly recalled an evening in Petersburg. Natásha with animated and excited face was telling him how she had gone to look for mushrooms the previous summer and had lost her way in the big forest. She incoherently described the depths of the forest, her feelings, and a talk with a bee-keeper she met, and constantly interrupted her story to say: “No, I can’t, I’m not telling it right; no, you don’t understand,” though he encouraged her by saying that he did understand, and he really had understood all she wanted to say. But Natásha was not satisfied with her own words: she felt that they did not convey the passionately poetic feeling she had experienced that day and wished to convey. “He was such a delightful old man, and it was so dark in the forest . . . and he had such kind . . . No, I can’t describe it,” she had said, flushed and excited. Prince Andrew smiled now the same happy smile as then when he had looked into her eyes. “I understood her,” he thought. “I not only understood her, but it was just that inner, spiritual force, that sincerity, that frankness of soul—that very soul of hers which seemed to be fettered by her body—it was that soul I loved in her . . . loved so strongly and happily . . .” and suddenly he remembered how his love had ended. “He did not need anything of that kind. He neither saw nor understood anything of the sort. He only saw in her a pretty and fresh young girl, with whom he did not deign to unite his fate. And I? . . . and he is still alive and gay!”

Prince Andrew jumped up as if someone had burnt him, and again began pacing up and down in front of the shed.

CHAPTER 26

On August 25th, the eve of the battle of Borodinó, M. de Beausset, prefect of the French Emperor’s palace, arrived at Napoleon’s quarters at Valúevo with Colonel Fabvier, the former from Paris and the latter from Madrid.

Donning his court uniform, M. de Beausset ordered a box he had brought for the Emperor to be carried before him, and entered the first compartment of Napoleon’s tent, where he began opening the box while conversing with Napoleon’s aides-de-camp who surrounded him.

Fabvier, not entering the tent, remained at the entrance talking to some generals of his acquaintance.

The Emperor Napoleon had not yet left his bedroom and was finishing his toilet. Slightly snorting and grunting, he presented now his back and now his plump hairy chest to the brush with which his valet was rubbing him down. Another valet, with his finger over the mouth of a bottle, was sprinkling eau-de-Cologne on the Emperor’s pampered body with an expression which seemed to say that he alone knew where and how much eau-de-Cologne should be sprinkled. Napoleon’s short hair was wet and matted on the forehead, but his face, though puffy and yellow, expressed physical satisfaction. “Go on, harder, go on!” he muttered to the valet who was rubbing him, slightly twitching and grunting. An aide-de-camp, who had entered the bedroom to report to the Emperor the number of prisoners taken in yesterday’s action, was standing by the door after delivering his message, awaiting permission to withdraw. Napoleon, frowning, looked at him from under his brows.

“No prisoners!” said he, repeating the aide-de-camp’s words. “They are forcing us to exterminate them. So much the worse for the Russian army . . . Go on . . . harder, harder!” he muttered, hunching his back and presenting his fat shoulders.

“All right. Let Monsieur de Beausset enter, and Fabvier too,” he said, nodding to the aide-de-camp.

“Yes, Sire,” and the aide-de-camp disappeared through the door of the tent.

Two valets rapidly dressed his Majesty, and wearing the blue uniform of the Guards he went with firm quick steps to the reception-room.

De Beausset’s hands meanwhile were busily engaged arranging the present he had brought from the Empress, on two chairs directly in front of the entrance. But Napoleon had dressed and come out with such unexpected rapidity that he had not time to finish arranging the surprise.

Napoleon noticed at once what they were about and guessed that they were not ready. He did not wish to deprive them of the pleasure of giving him a surprise, so he pretended not to see de Beausset and called Fabvier to him, listening silently and with a stern frown to what Fabvier told him of the heroism and devotion of his troops fighting at Salamanca, at the other end of Europe, with but one thought—to be worthy of their Emperor, and but one fear—to fail to please him. The result of that battle had been deplorable. Napoleon made ironic remarks during Fabvier’s account, as if he had not expected that matters could go otherwise in his absence.

“I must make up for that in Moscow,” said Napoleon. “I’ll see you later,” he added, and summoned de Beausset, who by that time had prepared the surprise, having placed something on the chairs and covered it with a cloth.

De Beausset bowed low, with that courtly French bow which only the old retainers of the Bourbons knew how to make, and approached him, presenting an envelope.

Napoleon turned to him gaily and pulled his ear.

“You have hurried here. I am very glad. Well, what is Paris saying?” he asked, suddenly changing his former stern expression for a most cordial tone.

“Sire, all Paris regrets your absence,” replied de Beausset as was proper.

But though Napoleon knew that de Beausset had to say something of this kind, and though in his lucid moments he knew it was untrue, he was pleased to hear it from him. Again he honoured him by touching his ear.

“I am very sorry to have made you travel so far,” said he.

“Sire, I expected nothing less than to find you at the gates of Moscow,” replied de Beausset.

Napoleon smiled, and lifting his head absent-mindedly looked to the right. An aide-de-camp approached with gliding steps and offered him a gold snuff-box, which he took.

“Yes, it has happened luckily for you,” he said, raising the open snuff-box to his nose. “You are fond of travel and in three days you will see Moscow. You surely did not expect to see that Asiatic capital. You will have a pleasant journey.”

De Beausset bowed gratefully at this regard for his taste for travel (of which he had not till then been aware).

“Ha, what’s this?” asked Napoleon, noticing that all the courtiers were looking at something concealed under a cloth.

With courtly adroitness de Beausset half turned, and without turning his back to the Emperor retired two steps, twitching off the cloth at the same time, and said:

“A present to your Majesty from the Empress.”

It was a portrait, painted in bright colours by Gérard, of the son borne to Napoleon by the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, the boy whom for some reason everyone called “The King of Rome.”

A very pretty curly-headed boy, with a look of the Christ in the Sistine Madonna, was depicted playing at stick and ball. The ball represented the terrestrial globe and the stick in his other hand a sceptre.

Though it was not clear what the artist meant to express by depicting the so-called King of Rome spiking the earth with a stick, the allegory apparently seemed to Napoleon, as it had done to all who had seen it in Paris, quite clear and very pleasing.

“The King of Rome!” he said, pointing to the portrait with a graceful gesture. “Admirable!”

With the natural capacity of an Italian for changing the expression of his face at will, he drew nearer to the portrait and assumed a look of pensive tenderness. He felt that what he said now and did would be historical, and it seemed to him that it would now be best for him—whose grandeur enabled his son to play stick and ball with the terrestrial globe—to show, in contrast to that grandeur, the simplest paternal tenderness. His eyes grew dim, he moved forward, glanced round at a chair (which seemed to place itself under him), and sat down on it before the portrait. At a single gesture from him everyone went out on tiptoe, leaving the great man to himself and his emotion.

Having sat still for a while he touched—himself not knowing why—the thick spot of paint representing the highest light in the portrait, rose, and recalled de Beausset and the officer on duty. He ordered the portrait to be carried outside his tent, that the Old Guard, stationed round it, might not be deprived of the pleasure of seeing the King of Rome, the son and heir of their adored monarch.

And while he was doing M. de Beausset the honour of breakfasting with him, they heard, as Napoleon had anticipated, the rapturous cries of the officers and men of the Old Guard who had run up to see the portrait.

“Vive l’Empereur! Vive le roi de Rome! Vive l’Empereur!” came those ecstatic cries.

After breakfast Napoleon in de Beausset’s presence dictated his order of the day to the army.

“Short and energetic!” he remarked when he had read over the proclamation which he had dictated straight off without corrections. It ran:

Soldiers! This is the battle you have so longed for. Victory depends on you. It is essential for us; it will give us all we need, comfortable quarters and a speedy return to our country. Behave as you did at Austerlitz, Friedland, Vítebsk, and Smolénsk. Let our remotest posterity recall your achievements this day with pride. Let it be said of each of you: “He was in the great battle before Moscow!”

“Before Moscow!” repeated Napoleon, and inviting M. de Beausset, who was so fond of travel, to accompany him on his ride, he went out of the tent to where the horses stood saddled.

“Your Majesty is too kind!” replied de Beausset to the invitation to accompany the Emperor: he wanted to sleep, did not know how to ride, and was afraid of doing so.

But Napoleon nodded to the traveller, and de Beausset had to mount. When Napoleon came out of the tent the shouting of the Guards before his son’s portrait grew still louder. Napoleon frowned.

“Take him away!” he said, pointing with a gracefully majestic gesture to the portrait. “It is too soon for him to see a field of battle.”

De Beausset closed his eyes, bowed his head, and sighed deeply, to indicate how profoundly he valued and comprehended the Emperor’s words.

CHAPTER 27

On the 25th of August, so his historians tell us, Napoleon spent the whole day on horseback inspecting the locality, considering plans submitted to him by his marshals, and personally giving commands to his generals.

The original line of the Russian forces along the river Kolochá had been dislocated by the capture of the Shevárdino Redoubt on the 24th, and part of the line—the left flank—had been drawn back. That part of the line was not entrenched and in front of it the ground was more open and level than elsewhere. It was evident to anyone, military or not, that it was here the French should attack. It would seem that not much consideration was needed to reach this conclusion, nor any particular care or trouble on the part of the Emperor and his marshals, nor was there any need of that special and supreme quality called genius, that people are so apt to ascribe to Napoleon; yet the historians who described the event later and the men who then surrounded Napoleon, and he himself, thought otherwise.

Napoleon rode over the plain and surveyed the locality with a profound air and in silence, nodded with approval or shook his head dubiously, and without communicating to the generals around him the profound course of ideas which guided his decisions merely gave them his final conclusions in the form of commands. Having listened to a suggestion from Davoût, who was now called Prince d’Eckmühl, to turn the Russian left wing, Napoleon said it should not be done, without explaining why not. To a proposal made by General Campan (who was to attack the flèches) to lead his division through the woods, Napoleon agreed, though the so-called Duke of Elchingen (Ney) ventured to remark that a movement through the woods was dangerous and might disorder the division.

Having inspected the country opposite the Shevárdino Redoubt, Napoleon pondered a little in silence and then indicated the spots where two batteries should be set up by the morrow to act against the Russian entrenchments, and the places where, in line with them, the field artillery should be placed.

After giving these and other commands he returned to his tent, and the dispositions for the battle were written down from his dictation.

These dispositions, of which the French historians write with enthusiasm and other historians with profound respect, were as follows:

At dawn the two new batteries established during the night on the plain occupied by the Prince d’Eckmühl will open fire on the opposing batteries of the enemy.

At the same time the commander of the artillery of the 1st Corps, General Pernetti, with thirty cannon of Campan’s division and all the howitzers of Dessaix’s and Friant’s divisions, will move forward, open fire, and overwhelm with shell-fire the enemy’s battery, against which will operate: 24 guns of the artillery of the Guards, 30 guns of Campan’s division and 8 guns of Friant’s and Dessaix’s divisions—in all 62 guns.

The commander of the artillery of the 3rd Corps, General Fouché, will place the howitzers of the 3rd and 8th Corps, sixteen in all, on the flanks of the battery that is to bombard the entrenchment on the left, which will have forty guns in all directed against it.

General Sorbier must be ready at the first order to advance with all the howitzers of the Guard’s artillery against either one or other of the entrenchments.

During the cannonade Prince Poniatowski is to advance through the wood on the village and turn the enemy’s position.

General Campan will move through the wood to seize the first fortification.

After the advance has begun in this manner, orders will be given in accordance with the enemy’s movements.

The cannonade on the left flank will begin as soon as the guns of the right wing are heard. The sharpshooters of Morand’s division and of the vice-King’s division will open a heavy fire on seeing the attack commence on the right wing.

The vice-King will occupy the village and cross by its three bridges, advancing to the same heights as Morand’s and Gérard’s divisions, which under his leadership will be directed against the redoubt and come into line with the rest of the forces.

All this must be done in good order (le tout se fera avec ordre et méthode) as far as possible retaining troops in reserve.

The Imperial Camp near Mozháysk, 6th September 1812.

These dispositions, which are very obscure and confused if one allows oneself to regard the arrangements without religious awe of his genius, related to Napoleon’s orders to deal with four points—four different orders. Not one of these was, or could be, carried out.

In the disposition it is said first, that the batteries placed on the spot chosen by Napoleon, with the guns of Pernetti and Fouché which were to come in line with them, 102 guns in all, were to open fire and shower shells on the Russian flèches and redoubts. This could not be done, as from the spots selected by Napoleon the projectiles did not carry to the Russian works, and those 102 guns shot into the air until the nearest commander, contrary to Napoleon’s instructions, moved them forward.

The second order was that Poniatowski, moving to the village through the wood, should turn the Russian left flank. This could not be done and was not done, because Poniatowski, advancing on the village through the wood, met Túchkov there barring his way, and could not and did not turn the Russian position.

The third order was: General Campan will move through the wood to seize the first fortification. General Campan’s division did not seize the first fortification, but was driven back, for on emerging from the wood it had to re-form under grape-shot, of which Napoleon was unaware.

The fourth order was: The vice-King will occupy the village (Borodinó) and cross by its three bridges, advancing to the same heights as Morand’s and Gérard’s divisions (for whose movements no directions are given), which under his leadership will be directed against the redoubt and come into line with the rest of the forces.

As far as one can make out, not so much from this unintelligible sentence as from the attempts the vice-King made to execute the orders given him, he was to advance from the left through Borodinó to the redoubt, while the divisions of Morand and Gérard were to advance simultaneously from the front.

All this, like the other parts of the disposition, was not and could not be executed. After passing through Borodinó the vice-King was driven back to the Kolochá and could get no farther; while the divisions of Morand and Gérard did not take the redoubt but were driven back, and the redoubt was only taken at the end of the battle by the cavalry (a thing probably unforeseen and not heard of by Napoleon). So not one of the orders in the disposition was, or could be, executed. But in the disposition it is said that, after the fight has commenced in this manner, orders will be given in accordance with the enemy’s movements, and so it might be supposed that all necessary arrangements would be made by Napoleon during the battle. But this was not and could not be done, for during the whole battle Napoleon was so far away that, as appeared later, he could not know the course of the battle, and not one of his orders during the fight could be executed.

CHAPTER 28

Many historians say that the French did not win the battle of Borodinó because Napoleon had a cold, and that if he had not had a cold the orders he gave before and during the battle would have been still more full of genius and Russia would have been lost and the face of the world have been changed. To historians who believe that Russia was shaped by the will of one man—Peter the Great—and that France from a republic became an empire and French armies went to Russia at the will of one man—Napoleon—to say that Russia remained a power because Napoleon had a bad cold on the 24th of August may seem logical and convincing.

If it had depended on Napoleon’s will to fight or not to fight the battle of Borodinó, and if this or that other arrangement depended on his will, then evidently a cold affecting the manifestation of his will might have saved Russia, and consequently the valet who omitted to bring Napoleon his waterproof-boots on the 24th would have been the saviour of Russia. Along that line of thought such a deduction is indubitable, as indubitable as the deduction Voltaire made in jest (without knowing what he was jesting at) when he said that the Massacre of St. Bartholomew was due to Charles the Ninth’s stomach being deranged. But to men who do not admit that Russia was formed by the will of one man, Peter I, or that the French Empire was formed and the war with Russia begun by the will of one man, Napoleon, that argument seems not merely untrue and irrational, but contrary to all human reality. To the question of what causes historic events, another answer presents itself, namely, that the course of human events is predetermined from on high—depends on the coincidence of the wills of all who take part in the events, and that a Napoleon’s influence on the course of these events is purely external and fictitious.

Strange as at first glance it may seem to suppose that the Massacre of St. Bartholomew was not due to Charles IX’s will, though he gave the order for it and thought it was done as a result of that order; and strange as it may seem to suppose that the slaughter of eighty thousand men at Borodinó was not due to Napoleon’s will, though he ordered the commencement and conduct of the battle and thought it was done because he ordered it; strange as these suppositions appear, yet human dignity—which tells me that each of us is, if not more, at least not less a man than the great Napoleon—demands the acceptance of that solution of the question, and historic investigation abundantly confirms it.

At the battle of Borodinó Napoleon shot at no one and killed no one. That was all done by the soldiers. Therefore it was not he who killed people.

The French soldiers went to kill and be killed at the battle of Borodinó not because of Napoleon’s orders, but by their own volition. The whole army—French, Italian, German, Polish, and Dutch—hungry, ragged, and weary of the campaign, felt at the sight of an army blocking their road to Moscow, that the wine was drawn and must be drunk. Had Napoleon then forbidden them to fight the Russians, they would have killed him and have proceeded to fight the Russians because it was inevitable.

When they heard Napoleon’s proclamation offering them, as compensation for mutilation and death, the words of posterity about their having been in the battle before Moscow, they cried “Vive l’Empereur!” just as they had cried “Vive l’Empereur!” at the sight of the portrait of the boy piercing the terrestrial globe with a toy stick, and just as they would have cried “Vive l’Empereur!” at any nonsense that might be told them. There was nothing left for them to do but cry “Vive l’Empereur!” and go to fight in order to get food and rest as conquerors in Moscow. So it was not because of Napoleon’s commands that they killed their fellow men.

And it was not Napoleon who directed the course of the battle, for none of his orders were executed and during the battle he did not know what was going on before him. So the way in which these people killed one another was not decided by Napoleon’s will but occurred independently of him, in accord with the will of hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the common action. It only seemed to Napoleon that it all took place by his will. And so the question whether he had or had not a cold has no more historic interest than the cold of the least of the transport soldiers.

Moreover the assertion made by various writers that his cold was the cause of his dispositions not being as well planned as on former occasions, and of his orders during the battle not being as good as previously, is quite baseless, which again shows that Napoleon’s cold on the 26th of August was unimportant.

The dispositions cited above are not at all worse, but are even better, than previous dispositions by which he had won victories. His pseudo-orders during the battle were also no worse than formerly, but much the same as usual. These dispositions and orders only seem worse than previous ones because the battle of Borodinó was the first Napoleon did not win. The profoundest and most excellent dispositions and orders seem very bad, and every learned militarist criticizes them with looks of importance, when they relate to a battle that has been lost, and the very worst dispositions and orders seem very good, and serious people fill whole volumes to demonstrate their merits, when they relate to a battle that has been won.

The dispositions drawn up by Weyrother for the battle of Austerlitz were a model of perfection for that kind of composition, but still they were criticized—criticized for their very perfection, for their excessive minuteness.

Napoleon at the battle of Borodinó fulfilled his office as representative of authority as well as, and even better than, at other battles. He did nothing harmful to the progress of the battle; he inclined to the most reasonable opinions, he made no confusion, did not contradict himself, did not get frightened or run away from the field of battle, but with his great tact and military experience carried out his role of appearing to command, calmly and with dignity.

CHAPTER 29

On returning from a second careful inspection of the lines, Napoleon remarked:

“The chessmen are set up, the game will begin tomorrow!”

Having ordered punch and summoned de Beausset, he began to talk to him about Paris and about some changes he meant to make in the Empress’s household, surprising the prefect by his memory of minute details relating to the Court.

He showed an interest in trifles, joked about de Beausset’s love of travel, and chatted carelessly, as a famous, self-confident surgeon who knows his job does when turning up his sleeves and putting on his apron while a patient is being strapped to the operating-table.

“The matter is in my hands and is clear and definite in my head. When the time comes to set to work I shall do it as no one else could, but now I can jest, and the more I jest and the calmer I am the more tranquil and confident you ought to be, and the more amazed at my genius.”

Having finished his second glass of punch, Napoleon went to rest before the serious business which, he considered, awaited him next day. He was so much interested in that task that he was unable to sleep, and in spite of his cold which had grown worse from the dampness of the evening, he went into the large division of the tent at three o’clock in the morning, loudly blowing his nose. He asked whether the Russians had not withdrawn, and was told that the enemy’s fires were still in the same places. He nodded approval.

The adjutant in attendance came into the tent.

“Well, Rapp, do you think we shall do good business today?” Napoleon asked him.

“Without doubt, Sire,” replied Rapp.

Napoleon looked at him.

“Do you remember, Sire, what you did me the honour to say at Smolénsk?” continued Rapp. “The wine is drawn and must be drunk.”

Napoleon frowned and sat silent for a long time leaning his head on his hand.

“This poor army!” he suddenly remarked. “It has diminished greatly since Smolénsk. Fortune is frankly a courtesan, Rapp. I have always said so and I am beginning to experience it. But the Guards, Rapp, the Guards are intact?” he remarked interrogatively.

“Yes, Sire,” replied Rapp.

Napoleon took a lozenge, put it in his mouth, and glanced at his watch. He was not sleepy and it was still not nearly morning. It was impossible to give further orders for the sake of killing time, for the orders had all been given and were now being executed.

“Have the biscuits and rice been served out to the regiments of the Guards?” asked Napoleon sternly.

“Yes, Sire.”

“The rice too?”

Rapp replied that he had given the Emperor’s order about the rice, but Napoleon shook his head in dissatisfaction as if not believing that his order had been executed. An attendant came in with punch. Napoleon ordered another glass to be brought for Rapp, and silently sipped his own.

“I have neither taste nor smell,” he remarked, sniffing at his glass. “This cold is tiresome. They talk about medicine—what is the good of medicine when it can’t cure a cold! Corvisart gave me these lozenges but they don’t help at all. What can doctors cure? One can’t cure anything. Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyse it by encumbering it with remedies. Our body is like a perfect watch that should go for a certain time; the watchmaker cannot open it, he can only adjust it by fumbling, and that blindfold . . . Yes, our body is just a machine for living, that is all.”

And having entered on the path of definition, of which he was fond, Napoleon suddenly and unexpectedly gave a new one.

“Do you know, Rapp, what military art is?” asked he. “It is the art of being stronger than the enemy at a given moment. That’s all.”

Rapp made no reply.

“Tomorrow we shall have to deal with Kutúzov!” said Napoleon. “We shall see! Do you remember at Braunau he commanded an army for three weeks and did not once mount a horse to inspect his entrenchments . . . We shall see!”

He looked at his watch. It was still only four o’clock. He did not feel sleepy. The punch was finished and there was still nothing to do. He rose, walked to and fro, put on a warm overcoat and a hat, and went out of the tent. The night was dark and damp, a scarcely perceptible moisture was descending from above. Near by, the campfires were dimly burning among the French Guards, and in the distance those of the Russian line shone through the smoke. The weather was calm, and the rustle and tramp of the French troops already beginning to move to take up their positions was clearly audible.

Napoleon walked about in front of his tent, looked at the fires, and listened to these sounds, and as he was passing a tall guardsman in a shaggy cap, who was standing sentinel before his tent and had drawn himself up like a black pillar at sight of the Emperor, Napoleon stopped in front of him.

“What year did you enter the service?” he asked with that affectation of military bluntness and geniality with which he always addressed the soldiers.

The man answered the question.

“Ah! One of the old ones! Has your regiment had its rice?”

“It has, your Majesty.”

Napoleon nodded and walked away.

At half-past five Napoleon rode to the village of Shevárdino.

It was growing light, the sky was clearing, only a single cloud lay in the east. The abandoned camp-fires were burning themselves out in the faint morning light.

On the right a single deep report of a cannon resounded and died away in the prevailing silence. Some minutes passed. A second and a third report shook the air, then a fourth and a fifth boomed solemnly near by on the right.

The first shots had not yet ceased to reverberate before others rang out and yet more were heard mingling with and overtaking one another.

Napoleon with his suite rode up to the Shevárdino Redoubt where he dismounted. The game had begun.

CHAPTER 30

On returning to Górki after having seen Prince Andrew, Pierre ordered his groom to get the horses ready and to call him early in the morning, and then immediately fell asleep behind a partition in a corner Borís had given up to him.

Before he was thoroughly awake next morning, everybody had already left the hut. The panes were rattling in the little windows and his groom was shaking him.

“Your Excellency! Your Excellency! Your Excellency!” he kept repeating pertinaciously while he shook Pierre by the shoulder without looking at him, having apparently lost hope of getting him to wake up.

“What? Has it begun? Is it time?” Pierre asked, waking up.

“Hear the firing,” said the groom, a discharged soldier. “All the gentlemen have gone out, and his Serene Highness himself rode past long ago.”

Pierre dressed hastily and ran out to the porch. Outside all was bright, fresh, dewy, and cheerful. The sun, just bursting forth from behind a cloud that had concealed it, was shining, with rays still half broken by the clouds, over the roofs of the street opposite, on the dew-besprinkled dust of the road, on the walls of the houses, on the windows, the fence, and on Pierre’s horses standing before the hut. The roar of guns sounded more distinct outside. An adjutant accompanied by a Cossack passed by at a sharp trot.

“It’s time, Count; it’s time!” cried the adjutant.

Telling the groom to follow him with the horses, Pierre went down the street to the knoll from which he had looked at the field of battle the day before. A crowd of military men was assembled there, members of the staff could be heard conversing in French, and Kutúzov’s grey head in a white cap with a red band was visible, his grey nape sunk between his shoulders. He was looking through a field-glass down the high road before him.

Mounting the steps to the knoll, Pierre looked at the scene before him, spellbound by its beauty. It was the same panorama he had admired from that spot the day before, but now the whole place was full of troops and covered by smoke-clouds from the guns, and the slanting rays of the bright sun, rising slightly to the left behind Pierre, cast upon it through the clear morning air penetrating streaks of rosy, golden-tinted light and long dark shadows. The forest at the farthest extremity of the panorama seemed carved in some precious stone of a yellowish-green colour, its undulating outline was silhouetted against the horizon and was pierced beyond Valúevo by the Smolénsk high road crowded with troops.

Nearer at hand glittered golden cornfields interspersed with copses. There were troops to be seen everywhere, in front and to the right and left. All this was vivid, majestic, and unexpected; but what impressed Pierre most of all was the view of the battle-field itself, of Borodinó and the hollows on both sides of the Kolochá.

Above the Kolochá, in Borodinó and on both sides of it, especially to the left where the Vóyna flowing between its marshy banks falls into the Kolochá, a mist had spread which seemed to melt, to dissolve and to become translucent when the brilliant sun appeared and magically coloured and outlined everything. The smoke of the guns mingled with this mist, and over the whole expanse and through that mist the rays of the morning sun were reflected, flashing back like lightning from the water, from the dew, and from the bayonets of the troops crowded together by the river banks and in Borodinó. A white church could be seen through the mist, and here and there the roofs of huts in Borodinó, as well as dense masses of soldiers, or green ammunition-chests and ordnance. And all this moved, or seemed to move, as the smoke and mist spread out over the whole space. Just as in the mist-enveloped hollow near Borodinó, so along the entire line outside and above it and especially in the woods and fields to the left, in the valleys and on the summits of the high ground, clouds of powder-smoke seemed continually to spring up out of nothing, now singly now several at a time, some translucent others dense, which, swelling, growing, rolling, and blending, extended over the whole expanse.

These puffs of smoke and (strange to say) the sound of the firing, produced the chief beauty of the spectacle.

“Puff!”—suddenly a round compact cloud of smoke was seen merging from violet into grey and milky-white, and “boom!” came the report a second later.

“Puff! puff!”—and two clouds arose pushing one another and blending together; and “boom, boom!” came the sounds confirming what the eye had seen.

Pierre glanced round at the first cloud, which he had seen as a round compact ball, and in its place already were balloons of smoke floating to one side, and—“puff” (with a pause)—“puff, puff!” three and then four more appeared and then from each, with the same interval—“boom—boom, boom!” came the fine, firm, precise sounds in reply. It seemed as if those smoke-clouds sometimes ran, and sometimes stood still while woods, fields, and glittering bayonets ran past them. From the left, over fields and bushes, those large balls of smoke were continually appearing followed by their solemn reports, while nearer still, in the hollows and woods, there burst from the muskets small cloudlets that had no time to become balls, but had their little echoes in just the same way. “Trakh-ta-ta-takh!” came the frequent crackle of musketry, but it was irregular and feeble in comparison with the reports of the cannon.

Pierre wished to be there with that smoke, those shining bayonets, that movement, and those sounds. He turned to look at Kutúzov and his suite, to compare his impressions with those of others. They were all looking at the field of battle as he was, and, as it seemed to him, with the same feelings. All their faces were now shining with that latent warmth of feeling Pierre had noticed the day before, and had fully understood after his talk with Prince Andrew.

“Go, my dear fellow, go . . . and Christ be with you!” Kutúzov was saying to a general who stood beside him, not taking his eye from the battle-field.

Having received this order the general passed by Pierre on his way down the knoll.

“To the crossing!” said the general coldly and sternly in reply to one of the Staff who asked where he was going.

“I’ll go there too, I too!” thought Pierre, and followed the general.

The general mounted a horse a Cossack had brought him. Pierre went to his groom who was holding his horses, and asking which was the quietest, clambered on to it, seized it by the mane, and turning out his toes, pressed his heels against its sides and, feeling that his spectacles were slipping off but unable to let go of the mane and reins, he galloped after the general, causing the staff officers to smile as they watched him from the knoll.

CHAPTER 31

Having descended the hill the general after whom Pierre was galloping turned sharply to the left, and Pierre, losing sight of him, galloped in among some ranks of infantry marching ahead of him. He tried to pass either in front of them or to the right or left, but there were soldiers everywhere, all with the same preoccupied expression and busy with some unseen but evidently important task. They all gazed with the same dissatisfied and inquiring expression at this stout man in a white hat, who for some unknown reason threatened to trample them under his horse’s hoofs.

“Why ride into the middle of the battalion?” one of them shouted at him.

Another prodded his horse with the butt-end of a musket, and Pierre, bending over his saddle-bow and hardly able to control his shying horse, galloped ahead of the soldiers where there was a free space.

There was a bridge ahead of him, where other soldiers stood firing. Pierre rode up to them. Without being aware of it he had come to the bridge across the Kolochá between Górki and Borodinó, which the French (having occupied Borodinó) were attacking in the first phase of the battle. Pierre saw that there was a bridge in front of him and that soldiers were doing something on both sides of it and in the meadow, among the rows of new-mown hay which he had taken no notice of amid the smoke of the camp-fires the day before; but despite the incessant firing going on there, he had no idea that this was the field of battle. He did not notice the sound of the bullets whistling from every side, or the projectiles that flew over him, did not see the enemy on the other side of the river, and for a long time did not notice the killed and wounded though many fell near him. He looked about him with a smile which did not leave his face.

“Why’s that fellow in front of the line?” shouted somebody at him again.

“To the left! . . . Keep to the right!” the men shouted to him.

Pierre went to the right, and unexpectedly encountered one of Raévski’s adjutants whom he knew. The adjutant looked angrily at him, evidently also intending to shout at him, but on recognising him he nodded.

“How have you got here?” he said, and galloped on.

Pierre, feeling out of place there, having nothing to do, and afraid of getting in someone’s way again, galloped after the adjutant.

“What’s happening here? May I come with you?” he asked.

“One moment, one moment!” replied the adjutant, and riding up to a stout colonel who was standing in the meadow, he gave him some message and then addressed Pierre.

“Why have you come here, Count?” he asked with a smile. “Still inquisitive?”

“Yes, yes,” assented Pierre.

But the adjutant turned his horse about and rode on.

“Here it’s tolerable,” said he, “but with Bagratión on the left flank they’re getting it frightfully hot.”

“Really?” said Pierre. “Where is that?”

“Come along with me to our knoll. We can get a view from there and in our battery it is still bearable,” said the adjutant. “Will you come?”

“Yes, I’ll come with you,” replied Pierre, looking round for his groom.

It was only now that he noticed wounded men, staggering along or being carried on stretchers. On that very meadow he had ridden over the day before, a soldier was lying athwart the rows of scented hay, with his head thrown awkwardly back and his shako off.

“Why haven’t they carried him away?” Pierre was about to ask, but seeing the stern expression of the adjutant who was also looking that way, he checked himself.

Pierre did not find his groom, and rode along the hollow with the adjutant to Raévski’s Redoubt. His horse lagged behind the adjutant’s and jolted him at every step.

“You don’t seem to be used to riding, Count?” remarked the adjutant.

“No, it’s not that, but her action seems so jerky,” said Pierre in a puzzled tone.

“Why . . . she’s wounded!” said the adjutant. “In the off foreleg above the knee. A bullet, no doubt. I congratulate you, Count, on your baptism of fire!”

Having ridden in the smoke past the Sixth Corps, behind the artillery which had been moved forward and was in action, deafening them with the noise of firing, they came to a small wood. There it was cool and quiet, with a scent of autumn. Pierre and the adjutant dismounted and walked up the hill on foot.

“Is the general here?” asked the adjutant on reaching the knoll.

“He was here a minute ago but has just gone that way,” someone told him, pointing to the right.

The adjutant looked at Pierre as if puzzled what to do with him now.

“Don’t trouble about me,” said Pierre. “I’ll go up on to the knoll if I may?”

“Yes, do. You’ll see everything from there and it’s less dangerous, and I’ll come for you.”

Pierre went to the battery and the adjutant rode on. They did not meet again, and only much later did Pierre learn that he lost an arm that day.

The knoll to which Pierre ascended was that famous one afterwards known to the Russians as the Knoll Battery or Raévski’s Redoubt, and to the French as la grande redoute, la fatale redoute, la redoute du centre, around which tens of thousands fell, and which the French regarded as the key to the whole position.

This redoubt consisted of a knoll, on three sides of which trenches had been dug. Within the entrenchment stood ten guns, that were being fired through openings in the earthwork.

In line with the knoll on both sides stood other guns which also fired incessantly. A little behind the guns stood infantry. When ascending that knoll Pierre had no notion that this spot, on which small trenches had been dug and from which a few guns were firing, was the most important point of the battle.

On the contrary, just because he happened to be there he thought it one of the least significant parts of the field.

Having reached the knoll, Pierre sat down at one end of a trench surrounding the battery, and gazed at what was going on around him with an unconsciously happy smile. Occasionally he rose and walked about the battery, still with that same smile, trying not to obstruct the soldiers who were loading, hauling the guns, and continually running past him with bags and charges. The guns of that battery were being fired continually one after another with a deafening roar, enveloping the whole neighbourhood in powder-smoke.

In contrast with the dread felt by the infantrymen placed in support, here in the battery where a small number of men busy at their work were separated from the rest by a trench, everyone experienced a common and as it were family feeling of animation.

The intrusion of Pierre’s non-military figure in a white hat made an unpleasant impression at first. The soldiers looked askance at him with surprise and even alarm as they went past him. The senior artillery officer, a tall, long-legged, pock-marked man, moved over to Pierre as if to see the action of the farthest gun, and looked at him with curiosity.

A young round-faced officer, quite a boy still and evidently only just out of the Cadet College, who was zealously commanding the two guns entrusted to him, addressed Pierre sternly.

“Sir,” he said, “permit me to ask you to stand aside. You must not be here.”

The soldiers shook their heads disapprovingly as they looked at Pierre. But when they had convinced themselves that this man in the white hat was doing no harm, but either sat quietly on the slope of the trench with a shy smile, or, politely making way for the soldiers, paced up and down the battery under fire as calmly as if he were on a boulevard, their feeling of hostile distrust gradually began to change into a kindly and bantering sympathy, such as soldiers feel for their dogs, cocks, goats, and in general for the animals that live with the regiment. The men soon accepted Pierre into their family, adopted him, gave him a nickname (“our gentleman”), and made kindly fun of him among themselves.

A shell tore up the earth two paces from Pierre and he looked around with a smile as he brushed from his clothes some earth it had thrown up.

“And how’s it you’re not afraid, sir, really now?” a red-faced, broad-shouldered soldier asked Pierre, with a grin that disclosed a set of sound white teeth.

“Are you afraid, then?” said Pierre.

“What else do you expect?” answered the soldier. “She has no mercy, you know! When she comes spluttering down, out go your innards. One can’t help being afraid,” he said laughing.

Several of the men, with bright kindly faces, stopped beside Pierre. They seemed not to have expected him to talk like anybody else, and the discovery that he did so delighted them.

“It’s the business of us soldiers. But in a gentleman it’s wonderful! There’s a gentleman for you!”

“To your places!” cried the young officer to the men gathered round Pierre.

The young officer was evidently exercising his duties for the first or second time, and therefore treated both his superiors and the men with great precision and formality.

The booming cannonade and the fusillade of musketry was growing more intense over the whole field, especially to the left where Bagratión’s flèches were, but where Pierre was the smoke of the firing made it almost impossible to distinguish anything. Moreover his whole attention was engrossed by watching the family circle—separated from all else—formed by the men in the battery. His first unconscious feeling of joyful animation produced by the sights and sounds of the battle-field was now replaced by another, especially since he had seen that soldier lying alone in the hayfield. Now, seated on the slope of the trench, he observed the faces of those around him.

By ten o’clock some twenty men had already been carried away from the battery; two guns were smashed and cannon-balls fell more and more frequently on the battery, and spent bullets buzzed and whistled around. But the men in the battery seemed not to notice this, and merry voices and jokes were heard on all sides.

“A live one!” shouted a man as a whistling shell approached.

“Not this way! To the infantry!” added another with loud laughter, seeing the shell fly past and fall into the ranks of the supports.

“Are you bowing to a friend, eh?” remarked another, chaffing a peasant who ducked low as a cannon-ball flew over.

Several soldiers gathered by the wall of the trench, looking out to see what was happening in front.

“They’ve withdrawn the front line, it has retired,” said they, pointing over the earthwork.

“Mind your own business,” an old sergeant shouted at them. “If they’ve retired it’s because there’s work for them to do farther back.”

And the sergeant, taking one of the men by the shoulders, gave him a shove with his knee. This was followed by a burst of laughter.

“To the fifth gun, wheel it up!” came shouts from one side.

“Now then, all together, like bargees!” rose the merry voices of those who were moving the gun.

“Oh, she nearly knocked our gentleman’s hat off!” cried the red-faced humourist, showing his teeth and chaffing Pierre. “Awkward baggage!” he added reproachfully to a cannon-ball that struck a cannon-wheel and a man’s leg.

“Now then, you foxes!” another said, laughing at some militiamen who, stooping low, entered the battery to carry away the wounded man.

“So this gruel isn’t to your taste? Oh, you crows! You’re scared!” they shouted at the militiamen who stood hesitating before the man whose leg had been torn off.

“There, lads . . . oh, oh!” they mimicked the peasants, “they don’t like it at all!”

Pierre noticed that after every ball that hit the redoubt and after every loss, the liveliness increased more and more.

As the flames of the fire hidden within come more and more vividly and rapidly from an approaching thundercloud, so, as if in opposition to what was taking place, the lightning of hidden fire growing more and more intense glowed in the faces of these men.

Pierre did not look out at the battle-field and was not concerned to know what was happening there, he was entirely absorbed in watching this fire which burnt ever more brightly and which he felt was flaming up in the same way in his own soul.

At ten o’clock the infantry that had been among the bushes in front of the battery and along the Kámenka streamlet retreated. From the battery they could be seen running back past it carrying their wounded on their muskets. A general with his suite came to the battery, and after speaking to the colonel gave Pierre an angry look and went away again having ordered the infantry supports behind the battery to lie down, so as to be less exposed to fire. After this from amid the ranks of infantry to the right of the battery came the sound of a drum and shouts of command, and from the battery one saw how those ranks of infantry moved forward.

Pierre looked over the wall of the trench, and was particularly struck by a pale young officer who, letting his sword hang down, was walking backwards and kept glancing uneasily around.

The ranks of the infantry disappeared amid the smoke but their long-drawn shout and rapid musketry firing could still be heard. A few minutes later crowds of wounded men and stretcher-bearers came back from that direction. Projectiles began to fall still more frequently in the battery. Several men were lying about who had not been removed. Around the cannon the men moved still more briskly and busily. No one any longer took notice of Pierre. Once or twice he was shouted at for being in the way. The senior officer moved with big, rapid strides from one gun to another with a frowning face. The young officer, with his face still more flushed, commanded the men more scrupulously than ever. The soldiers handed up the charges, turned, loaded, and did their business with strained smartness. They gave little jumps as they walked, as though they were on springs.

The storm-cloud had come upon them, and in every face the fire which Pierre had watched kindle burnt up brightly. Pierre was standing beside the commanding officer. The young officer, his hand to his shako, ran up to his superior.

“I have the honour to report, sir, that only eight rounds are left. Are we to continue firing?” he asked.

“Grape-shot!” the senior shouted, without answering the question, looking over the wall of the trench.

Suddenly something happened; the young officer gave a gasp, and bending double sat down on the ground like a bird shot on the wing. Everything became strange, confused, and misty in Pierre’s eyes.

One cannon-ball after another whistled by and struck the earthwork, a soldier, or a gun. Pierre, who had not noticed these sounds before, now heard nothing else. On the right of the battery soldiers shouting “Hurrah!” were running not forwards but backwards it seemed to Pierre.

A cannon-ball struck the very end of the earthwork by which he was standing, crumbling down the earth; a black ball flashed before his eyes and at the same instant plumped into something. Some militiamen who were entering the battery ran back.

“All with grape-shot!” shouted the officer.

The sergeant ran up to the officer and in a frightened whisper informed him (as a butler at dinner informs his master that there is no more of some wine asked for) that there were no more charges.

“The scoundrels! What are they doing?” shouted the officer, turning to Pierre.

The officer’s face was red and perspiring and his eyes glittered under his frowning brow.

“Run to the reserves and bring up the ammunition boxes!” he yelled, angrily avoiding Pierre with his eyes and speaking to his men.

“I’ll go,” said Pierre.

The officer, without answering him, strode across to the opposite side.

“Don’t fire . . . Wait!” he shouted.

The man who had been ordered to go for ammunition stumbled against Pierre.

“Eh, sir, this is no place for you,” said he, and ran down the slope.

Pierre ran after him, avoiding the spot where the young officer was sitting.

One cannon-ball, another, and a third, flew over him, falling in front, beside, and behind him. Pierre ran down the slope. “Where am I going?” he suddenly asked himself when he was already near the green ammunition wagons. He halted irresolutely, not knowing whether to return or go on. Suddenly a terrible concussion threw him backwards to the ground. At the same instant he was dazzled by a great flash of flame, and immediately a deafening roar, crackling and whistling, made his ears tingle.

When he came to himself he was sitting on the ground leaning on his hands; the ammunition-wagons he had been approaching no longer existed, only charred green boards and rags littered the scorched grass, and a horse, dangling fragments of its shaft behind it, galloped past, while another horse lay, like Pierre, on the ground, uttering prolonged and piercing cries.

CHAPTER 32

Beside himself with terror, Pierre jumped up and ran back to the battery, as to the only refuge from the horrors that surrounded him.

On entering the earthwork he noticed that there were men doing something there but that no shots were being fired from the battery. He had no time to realize who these men were. He saw the senior officer lying on the earth wall with his back turned as if he were examining something down below, and that one of the soldiers he had noticed before was struggling forward shouting “Brothers!” and trying to free himself from some men who were holding him by the arm. He also saw something else that was strange.

But he had not time to realize that the colonel had been killed, that the soldier shouting “Brothers!” was a prisoner, and that another man had been bayoneted in the back before his eyes, for hardly had he run into the redoubt before a thin, sallow-faced, perspiring man in a blue uniform rushed on him sword in hand, shouting something. Instinctively guarding against the shock—for they had been running together at full speed before they saw one another—Pierre put out his hands and seized the man (a French officer) by the shoulder with one hand and by the throat with the other. The officer, dropping his sword, seized Pierre by his collar.

For some seconds they gazed with frightened eyes at one another’s unfamiliar faces, and both were perplexed at what they had done and what they were to do next. “Am I taken prisoner or have I taken him prisoner?” each was thinking. But the French officer was evidently more inclined to think he had been taken prisoner, because Pierre’s strong hand, impelled by instinctive fear, squeezed his throat ever tighter and tighter. The Frenchman was about to say something, when just above their heads, terrible and low, a cannon-ball whistled, and it seemed to Pierre that the French officer’s head had been torn off, so swiftly had he ducked it.

Pierre too bent his head and let his hands fall. Without further thought as to who had taken whom prisoner, the Frenchman ran back to the battery and Pierre ran down the slope stumbling over the dead and wounded who, it seemed to him, caught at his feet. But before he reached the foot of the knoll he was met by a dense crowd of Russian soldiers who, stumbling, tripping up, and shouting, ran merrily and wildly towards the battery. (This was the attack for which Ermólov claimed the credit, declaring that only his courage and good luck made such a feat possible: it was the attack in which he was said to have thrown some St. George’s Crosses he had in his pocket into the battery, for the first soldiers to take who got there.)

The French who had occupied the battery fled, and our troops shouting “Hurrah!” pursued them so far beyond the battery that it was difficult to call them back.

The prisoners were brought down from the battery and among them was a wounded French general, whom the officers surrounded. Crowds of wounded—some known to Pierre and some unknown—Russians and French, with faces distorted by suffering, walked, crawled, and were carried on stretchers, from the battery. Pierre again went up on to the knoll where he had spent over an hour, and of that family circle which had received him as a member he did not find a single one. There were many dead whom he did not know, but some he recognised. The young officer still sat in the same way bent double, in a pool of blood at the edge of the earth wall. The red-faced man was still twitching, but they did not carry him away.

Pierre ran down the slope once more.

“Now they will stop it, now they will be horrified at what they have done!” he thought, aimlessly going towards a crowd of stretcher-bearers moving from the battle-field.

But behind the veil of smoke the sun was still high, and in front and especially to the left, near Semënovsk, something seemed to be seething in the smoke, and the roar of cannon and musketry did not diminish, but even increased to desperation like a man who, straining himself, shrieks with all his remaining strength.

CHAPTER 33

The chief action of the battle of Borodinó was fought within the seven thousand feet between Borodinó and Bagratión’s flèches. Beyond that space there was, on the one side a demonstration made by the Russians with Uvárov’s cavalry at midday, and on the other side, beyond Utítsa, Poniatowski’s collision with Túchkov; but these two were detached and feeble actions in comparison with what took place in the centre of the battle-field. On the field between Borodinó and the flèches, beside the wood, the chief action of the day took place on an open space visible from both sides, and was fought in the simplest and most artless way.

The battle began on both sides with a cannonade from several hundred guns.

Then when the whole field was covered with smoke, two divisions, Campan’s and Dessaix’s, advanced from the French right, while Murat’s troops advanced on Borodinó from their left.

From the Shevárdino Redoubt where Napoleon was standing the flèches were a verst away, and it was more two versts as the crow flies to Borodinó, so that Napoleon could not see what was happening there, especially as the smoke mingling with the mist hid the whole locality. The soldiers of Dessaix’s division advancing against the flèches could only be seen till they had entered the hollow that lay between them and the flèches. As soon as they had descended into that hollow the smoke of the guns and musketry on the flèches grew so dense that it covered the whole approach on that side of it. Through the smoke glimpses could be caught of something black—probably men—and at times the glint of bayonets. But whether they were moving or stationary, whether they were French or Russian, could not be discovered from the Shevárdino Redoubt.

The sun had risen brightly, and its slanting rays struck straight into Napoleon’s face as, shading his eyes with his hand, he looked at the flèches. The smoke spread out before them, and at times it looked as if the smoke were moving, at times as if the troops moved. Sometimes shouts were heard through the firing, but it was impossible to tell what was being done there.

Napoleon, standing on the knoll, looked through a field-glass, and in its small circlet saw smoke and men, sometimes his own and sometimes Russians, but when he looked again with the naked eye, he could not tell where what he had seen was.

He descended the knoll and began walking up and down before it.

Occasionally he stopped, listened to the firing, and gazed intently at the battle-field.

But not only was it impossible to make out what was happening from where he was standing down below, or from the knoll above on which some of his generals had taken their stand, but even from the flèches themselves—in which by this time there were now Russian and now French soldiers, alternately or together, dead, wounded, alive, frightened, or maddened—even at those flèches themselves it was impossible to make out what was taking place. There for several hours amid incessant cannon and musketry fire, now Russians were seen alone, now Frenchmen alone, now infantry and now cavalry—they appeared, fired, fell, collided not knowing what to do with one another, screamed, and ran back again.

From the battle-field adjutants he had sent out, and orderlies from his marshals, kept galloping up to Napoleon with reports of the progress of the action, but all these reports were false, both because it was impossible in the heat of battle to say what was happening at any given moment, and because many of the adjutants did not go to the actual place of conflict, but reported what they had heard from others; and also because while an adjutant was riding the couple of versts to Napoleon circumstances changed and the news he brought was already becoming false. Thus an adjutant galloped up from Murat with tidings that Borodinó had been occupied and the bridge over the Kolochá was in the hands of the French. The adjutant asked whether Napoleon wished the troops to cross it? Napoleon gave orders that the troops should form up on the farther side and wait. But before that order was given—almost as soon in fact as the adjutant had left Borodinó—the bridge had been retaken by the Russians and burnt, in the very skirmish at which Pierre had been present at the beginning of the battle.

An adjutant galloped up from the flèches with a pale and frightened face and reported to Napoleon that their attack had been repulsed, Campan wounded, and Davoût killed; yet at the very time the adjutant had been told that the French had been repulsed, the flèches had in fact been recaptured by other French troops, and Davoût was alive and only slightly bruised. On the basis of these necessarily untrustworthy reports Napoleon gave his orders, which had either been executed before he gave them, or could not be and were not executed.

The marshals and generals, who were nearer to the field of battle but, like Napoleon, did not take part in the actual fighting and only occasionally went within musket range, made their own arrangements without asking Napoleon and issued orders where and in what direction to fire, and where cavalry should gallop and infantry should run. But even their orders, like Napoleon’s, were seldom carried out, and then but partially. For the most part things happened contrary to their orders. Soldiers ordered to advance ran back on meeting grape-shot; soldiers ordered to remain where they were, suddenly, seeing Russians unexpectedly before them, sometimes rushed back and sometimes forward, and the cavalry dashed without orders in pursuit of the flying Russians. In this way two cavalry regiments galloped through the Semënovsk hollow and as soon as they reached the top of the incline turned round and galloped full speed back again. The infantry moved in the same way, sometimes running to quite other places than those they were ordered to go to. All orders as to where and when to move the guns, when to send infantry to shoot or horsemen to ride down the Russian infantry—all such orders were given by the officers on the spot nearest to the units concerned, without asking either Ney, Davoût, or Murat, much less Napoleon. They did not fear getting into trouble for not fulfilling orders or for acting on their own initiative, for in battle what is at stake is what is dearest to man—his own life, and it sometimes seems that safety lies in running back, sometimes in running forward; and these men who were right in the heat of the battle, acted according to the mood of the moment. In reality however all these movements forward and backward did not improve or alter the position of the troops. All their rushing and galloping at one another did little harm, the harm of disablement and death was caused by the balls and bullets that flew over the fields on which these men were floundering about. As soon as they left the place where the balls and bullets were flying about, their superiors, located in the background, re-formed them and brought them under discipline, and under the influence of that discipline led them back to the zone of fire, where under the influence of fear of death they lost their discipline and rushed about according to the chance promptings of the throng.

CHAPTER 34

Napoleon’s generals—Davoût, Ney, and Murat, who were near that region of fire and sometimes even entered it—repeatedly led into it huge masses of well-ordered troops. But contrary to what had always happened in their former battles, instead of the news they expected of the enemy’s flight, these orderly masses returned thence as disorganized and terrified mobs. The generals re-formed them, but their numbers constantly decreased. In the middle of the day Murat sent his adjutant to Napoleon to demand reinforcements.

Napoleon sat at the foot of the knoll, drinking punch, when Murat’s adjutant galloped up with an assurance that the Russians would be routed if his Majesty would let him have another division.

“Reinforcements?” said Napoleon in a tone of stern surprise, looking at the adjutant—a handsome lad with long black curls arranged like Murat’s own—as though he did not understand his words.

“Reinforcements!” thought Napoleon to himself. “How can they need reinforcements when they already have half the army directed against a weak, unentrenched Russian wing?”

“Tell the King of Naples,” said he sternly, “that it is not noon yet, and I don’t yet see my chess-board clearly. Go! . . .”

The handsome boy-adjutant with the long hair sighed deeply without removing his hand from his hat, and galloped back to where men were being slaughtered.

Napoleon rose, and having summoned Caulaincourt and Berthier began talking to them about matters unconnected with the battle.

In the midst of this conversation, which was beginning to interest Napoleon, Berthier’s eyes turned to look at a general with a suite who was galloping towards the knoll on a lathering horse. It was Belliard. Having dismounted he went up to the Emperor with rapid strides, and in a loud voice began boldly demonstrating the necessity of sending reinforcements. He swore on his honour that the Russians were lost if the Emperor would give another division.

Napoleon shrugged his shoulders and continued to pace up and down without replying. Belliard began talking loudly and eagerly to the generals of the suite around him.

“You are very fiery, Belliard,” said Napoleon when he again came up to the general. “In the heat of a battle it is easy to make a mistake. Go and have another look and then come back to me.”

Before Belliard was out of sight a messenger from another part of the battle-field galloped up.

“Now then, what do you want?” asked Napoleon in the tone of a man irritated at being continually disturbed.

“Sire, the Prince . . .” began the adjutant.

“Asks for reinforcements?” said Napoleon with an angry gesture.

The adjutant bent his head affirmatively and began to report, but the Emperor turned from him, took a couple of steps, stopped, came back, and called Berthier.

“We must give reserves,” he said, moving his arms slightly apart. “Who do you think should be sent there?” he asked of Berthier (whom he subsequently termed “that gosling I have made an eagle”).

“Send Claparède’s division, Sire,” replied Berthier who knew all the divisions, regiments, and battalions, by heart.

Napoleon nodded assent. The adjutant galloped to Claparède’s division and a few minutes later the Young Guards stationed behind the knoll moved forward. Napoleon gazed silently in that direction. “No!” he suddenly said to Berthier. “I can’t send Claparède. Send Friant’s division.”

Though there was no advantage in sending Friant’s division instead of Claparède’s, and even an obvious inconvenience and delay in stopping Claparède and sending Friant now, the order was carried out exactly. Napoleon did not notice that in regard to his army he was playing the part of a doctor who hinders by his medicines—a role he so justly understood and condemned.

Friant’s division disappeared, as the others had done, into the smoke of the battle-field. From all sides adjutants continued to arrive at a gallop, and as if by agreement all said the same thing. They all asked for reinforcements, and all said that the Russians were holding their positions and maintaining a hellish fire under which the French army was melting away. Napoleon sat on a camp-stool, wrapped in thought.

M. de Beausset, the man so fond of travel, having fasted since morning came up to the Emperor and ventured respectfully to suggest lunch to his Majesty.

“I hope I may now congratulate your Majesty on a victory?” said he.

Napoleon silently shook his head in negation. Assuming the negation to refer only to the victory and not to the lunch, M. de Beausset ventured with respectful jocularity to remark that there is no reason for not having lunch when one can get it.

“Go away . . .” exclaimed Napoleon suddenly and morosely, and turned aside.

A beatific smile of regret, repentance, and ecstasy, beamed on M. de Beausset’s face and he glided away to the other generals. Napoleon was experiencing a feeling of depression like that of an ever-lucky gambler who after recklessly flinging money about and always winning, suddenly, just when he has calculated all the chances of the game, finds that the more he considers his play the more surely he loses.

His troops were the same, his generals the same, the same preparations had been made, the same dispositions, and the same proclamation court et énergique, he himself was still the same, he knew that and knew that he was now even more experienced and skilful than before. Even the enemy was the same as at Austerlitz and Friedland—yet the terrible stroke of his arm had supernaturally become impotent.

All the old methods that had been unfailingly crowned with success: the concentration of batteries on one point, an attack by reserves to break the enemy’s lin and a cavalry attack by “the men of iron,” all these methods had already been employed, yet not only was there no victory, but from all sides came the same news of generals killed and wounded, of reinforcements needed, of the impossibility of driving back the Russians, and of disorganization among his own troops.

Formerly, after he had given two or three orders and uttered a few phrases, marshals and adjutants had come galloping up with congratulations and happy faces, announcing the trophies taken, the corps of prisoners, bundles of enemy eagles and standards, cannon and stores, and Murat had only begged leave to loose the cavalry to gather in the baggage-wagons. So it had been at Lodi, Marengo, Arcola, Jena, Austerlitz, Wagram, and so on. But now something strange was happening to his troops.

Despite news of the capture of the flèches, Napoleon saw that this was not the same, not at all the same, as what had happened in his former battles. He saw that what he was feeling was felt by all the men about him experienced in the art of war. All their faces looked dejected, and they all shunned one another’s eyes—only a de Beausset could fail to grasp the meaning of what was happening.

But Napoleon with his long experience of war well knew the meaning of a battle not gained by the attacking side in eight hours, after all efforts had been expended. He knew that it was a lost battle and that the least accident might now—with the fight balanced on such a strained centre—destroy him and his army.

When he ran his mind over the whole of this strange Russian campaign, in which not one battle had been won, and in which not a flag, or cannon, or army corps, had been captured in two months, when he looked at the concealed depression on the faces around him and heard reports of the Russians still holding their ground—a terrible feeling like a nightmare took possession of him, and all the unlucky accidents that might destroy him occurred to his mind. The Russians might fall on his left wing, might break through his centre, he himself might be killed by a stray cannon-ball. All this was possible. In former battles he had only considered the possibilities of success, but now innumerable unlucky chances presented themselves, and he expected them all. Yes, it was like a dream in which a man fancies that a ruffian is coming to attack him, and raises his arm to strike that ruffian a terrible blow which he knows should annihilate him, but then feels that his arm drops powerless and limp like a rag, and the horror of unavoidable destruction seizes him in his helplessness.

The news that the Russians were attacking the left flank of the French army aroused that horror in Napoleon. He sat silently on a camp-stool below the knoll, with head bowed and elbows on his knees. Berthier approached and suggested that they should ride along the line to ascertain the position of affairs.

“What? What do you say?” asked Napoleon. “Yes, tell them to bring me my horse.”

He mounted and rode towards Semënovsk.

Amid the powder-smoke slowly dispersing over the whole space through which Napoleon rode, horses and men were lying in pools of blood, singly or in heaps. Neither Napoleon nor any of his generals had ever before seen such horrors or so many slain in such a small area. The roar of guns, that had not ceased for ten hours, wearied the ear and gave a peculiar significance to the spectacle, as music does to tableaux vivants. Napoleon rode up the high ground at Semënovsk, and through the smoke saw ranks of men in uniforms of a colour unfamiliar to him. They were Russians.

The Russians stood in serried ranks behind Semënovsk village and its knoll, and their guns boomed incessantly along their line and sent forth clouds of smoke. It was no longer a battle: it was a continuous slaughter which could be of no avail either to the French or the Russians. Napoleon stopped his horse and again fell into the reverie from which Berthier had aroused him. He could not stop what was going on before him and around him and was supposed to be directed by him and to depend on him, and from its lack of success this affair, for the first time seemed to him unnecessary and horrible.

One of the generals rode up to Napoleon and ventured to offer to lead the Old Guard into action. Ney and Berthier, standing near Napoleon, exchanged looks and smiled contemptuously at this general’s senseless offer.

Napoleon bowed his head and remained silent a long time.

“At eight hundred leagues from France, I will not have my Guard destroyed!” he said, and turning his horse rode back to Shevárdino.

CHAPTER 35

On the rug-covered bench where Pierre had seen him in the morning sat Kutúzov, his grey head hanging, his heavy body relaxed. He gave no orders, but only assented to or dissented from what others suggested.

“Yes, yes, do that,” he replied to various proposals. “Yes, yes: go, dear boy, and have a look,” he would say to one or another of those about him; or, “No, don’t, we’d better wait!” He listened to the reports that were brought him, and gave directions when his subordinates demanded that of him; but when listening to the reports it seemed as if he were not interested in the import of the words spoken, but rather in something else—in the expression of face and the tone of voice of those who were reporting. By long years of military experience he knew, and with the wisdom of age understood, that it is impossible for one man to direct hundreds of thousands of others struggling with death, and he knew that the result of a battle is decided not by the orders of a commander-in-chief, nor the place where the troops are stationed, nor by the number of cannon or of slaughtered men, but by that intangible force called the spirit of the army, and he watched this force and guided it in as far as that was in his power.

Kutúzov’s general expression was one of concentrated quiet attention, and his face wore a strained look as if he found it difficult to master the fatigue of his old and feeble body.

At eleven o’clock they brought him news that the flèches captured by the French had been retaken, but that Prince Bagratión was wounded. Kutúzov groaned and swayed his head.

“Ride over to Prince Peter Ivánovich and find out about it exactly,” he said to one of his adjutants, and then turned to the Duke of Würtemberg who was standing behind him.

“Will your Highness, please, take command of the First Army?”

Soon after the Duke’s departure—before he could possibly have reached Semënovsk—his adjutant came back from him and told Kutúzov that the Duke asked for more troops.

Kutúzov made a grimace and sent an order to Dokhtúrov to take over the command of the First Army, and a request to the Duke—whom he said he could not spare at such an important moment—to return to him. When they brought him news that Murat had been taken prisoner, and the staff-officers congratulated him, Kutúzov smiled.

“Wait a little, gentlemen,” said he. “The battle is won, and there is nothing extraordinary in the capture of Murat. Still, it is better to wait before we rejoice.”

But he sent an adjutant to take the news round the army.

When Scherbínin came galloping from the left flank with news that the French had captured the flèches and the village of Semënovsk, Kutúzov, guessing by the sounds of the battle and by Scherbínin’s looks that the news was bad, rose as if to stretch his legs, and taking Scherbínin’s arm led him aside.

“Go, my dear fellow,” he said to Ermólov, “and see whether something can’t be done.”

Kutúzov was in Górki, near the centre of the Russian position. The attack directed by Napoleon against our left flank had been several times repulsed. In the centre the French had not got beyond Borodinó, and on their left flank Uvárov’s cavalry had put the French to flight.

Towards three o’clock the French attacks ceased. On the faces of all who came from the field of battle, and of those who stood around him, Kutúzov noticed an expression of extreme tension. He was satisfied with the day’s success—a success exceeding his expectation, but the old man’s strength was failing him. Several times his head dropped low as if it were falling, and he dozed off. Dinner was brought him.

Adjutant-General Wolzogen, the man who when riding past Prince Andrew had said, “the war should be extended widely,” and whom Bagratión so detested, rode up while Kutúzov was at dinner. Wolzogen had come from Barclay de Tolly to report on the progress of affairs on the left flank. The sagacious Barclay de Tolly, seeing crowds of wounded men running back and the disordered rear of the army, weighed all the circumstances, concluded that the battle was lost, and sent his favourite officer to the commander-in-chief with that news.

Kutúzov was chewing a piece of roast chicken with difficulty, and glanced at Wolzogen with eyes that brightened under their puckering lids.

Wolzogen, nonchalantly stretching his legs, approached Kutúzov with a half-contemptuous smile on his lips, scarcely touching the peak of his cap.

He treated his Serene Highness with a somewhat affected nonchalance intended to show that, as a highly trained military man, he left it to Russians to make an idol of this useless old man, but that he knew whom he was dealing with. “Der alte Herr” (as in their own set the Germans called Kutúzov) “is making himself very comfortable,” thought Wolzogen, and looking severely at the dishes in front of Kutúzov he began to report to “the old gentleman” the position of affairs on the left flank as Barclay had ordered him to and as he himself had seen and understood it.

“All the points of our position are in the enemy’s hands and we cannot dislodge them for lack of troops, the men are running away and it is impossible to stop them,” he reported.

Kutúzov ceased chewing and fixed an astonished gaze on Wolzogen, as if not understanding what was said to him. Wolzogen, noticing “the old gentleman’s” agitation, said with a smile:

“I have not considered it right to conceal from your Serene Highness what I have seen. The troops are in complete disorder . . .”

“You have seen? You have seen? . . .” Kutúzov shouted frowning, and rising quickly he went up to Wolzogen.

“How . . . how dare you! . . .” he shouted, choking and making a threatening gesture with his trembling arms: “How dare you, sir, say that to me? You know nothing about it. Tell General Barclay from me that his information is incorrect and that the real course of the battle is better known to me, the commander-in-chief, than to him.”

Wolzogen was about to make a rejoinder, but Kutúzov interrupted him.

“The enemy has been repulsed on the left and defeated on the right flank. If you have seen amiss, sir, do not allow yourself to say what you don’t know! Be so good as to ride to General Barclay and inform him of my firm intention to attack the enemy tomorrow,” said Kutúzov sternly.

All were silent, and the only sound audible was the heavy breathing of the panting old general.

“They are repulsed everywhere, for which I thank God and our brave army! The enemy is beaten, and tomorrow we shall drive him from the sacred soil of Russia,” said Kutúzov crossing himself, and he suddenly sobbed as his eyes filled with tears.

Wolzogen, shrugging his shoulders and curling his lips, stepped silently aside, marvelling at “the old gentleman’s” conceited stupidity.

“Ah, here he is, my hero!” said Kutúzov to a portly, handsome, dark-haired general, who was just ascending the knoll.

This was Raévski, who had spent the whole day at the most important part of the field of Borodinó.

Raévski reported that the troops were firmly holding their ground and that the French no longer ventured to attack.

After hearing him, Kutúzov said in French:

“Then you do not think like some others that we must retreat?”

“On the contrary, your Highness, in indecisive actions it is always the most stubborn who remain victors,” replied Raévski, “and in my opinion . . .”

“Kaysárov!” Kutúzov called to his adjutant. “Sit down and write out the order of the day for tomorrow. And you,” he continued, addressing another, “ride along the line and announce that tomorrow we attack.”

While Kutúzov was talking to Raévski and dictating the order of the day, Wolzogen returned from Barclay, and said that General Barclay de Tolly wished to have written confirmation of the order the field-marshal had given.

Kutúzov, without looking at Wolzogen, gave directions for the order to be written out which the former commander-in-chief, to avoid personal responsibility, very judiciously wished to receive.

And by means of that mysterious indefinable bond which maintains throughout an army one and the same temper, known as “the spirit of the army,” and which constitutes the chief sinew of war, Kutúzov’s words, his order for a battle next day, immediately became known from one end of the army to the other.

It was far from being the same words or the same order that reached the farthest links of that chain. The tales passing from mouth to mouth at different ends of the army did not even resemble what Kutúzov had said, but the sense of his words spread everywhere because what he said was not the outcome of cunning calculations, but of a feeling that lay in the commander-in-chief’s soul as in that of every Russian.

And on learning that tomorrow they were to attack the enemy, and hearing from the highest quarters a confirmation of what they wanted to believe, the exhausted wavering men felt comforted and inspirited.

CHAPTER 36

Prince Andrew’s regiment was among the reserves which till after one o’clock were stationed inactive behind Semënovsk under heavy artillery fire. Towards two o’clock the regiment, having already lost more than two hundred men, was moved forward into a trampled oatfield in the gap between Semënovsk and the Knoll Battery where thousands of men perished that day and on which an intense, concentrated fire from several hundred enemy guns was directed between one and two o’clock.

Without moving from that spot or firing a single shot the regiment here lost another third of its men. From in front and especially from the right, in the unlifting smoke the guns boomed, and out of the mysterious domain of smoke that overlay the whole space in front, quick hissing cannon-balls and slow whistling shells flew unceasingly. At times, as if to allow them a respite, a quarter of an hour passed during which the cannon-balls and shells all flew overhead, but sometimes several men were torn from the regiment in a minute, and the slain were continually being dragged away and the wounded carried off.

With each fresh blow less and less chance of life remained for those not yet killed. The regiment stood in columns of battalion three hundred paces apart, but nevertheless the men were always in one and the same mood. All alike were taciturn and morose. Talk was rarely heard in the ranks, and it ceased altogether every time the thud of a successful shot and the cry of “stretchers!” was heard. Most of the time, by their officers’ order, the men sat on the ground. One, having taken off his shako carefully loosened the gathers of its lining and drew them tight again; another, rubbing some dry clay between his palms, polished his bayonet; another fingered the strap and pulled the buckle of his bandolier, while another smoothed and refolded his leg-bands and put his boots on again. Some built little houses of the tufts in the ploughed ground, or plaited baskets from the straw in the cornfield. All seemed fully absorbed in these pursuits. When men were killed or wounded, when rows of stretchers went past, when some troops retreated, and when great masses of the enemy came into view through the smoke, no one paid any attention to these things. But when our artillery or cavalry advanced or some of our infantry were seen to move forward, words of approval were heard on all sides. But the liveliest attention was attracted by occurrences quite apart from, and unconnected with, the battle. It was as if the minds of these morally exhausted men found relief in everyday, commonplace occurrences. A battery of artillery was passing in front of the regiment. The horse of an ammunition cart put its leg over a trace. “Hey, look at the trace horse! . . . Get her leg out! She’ll fall . . . Ah, they don’t see it!” came identical shouts from the ranks all along the regiment. Another time general attention was attracted by a small brown dog, coming heaven knows whence, which trotted in a preoccupied manner in front of the ranks with tail stiffly erect till suddenly a shell fell close by, when it yelped, tucked its tail between its legs, and darted aside. Yells and shrieks of laughter rose from the whole regiment. But such distractions lasted only a moment, and for eight hours the men had been inactive, without food, in constant fear of death, and their pale and gloomy faces grew ever paler and gloomier.

Prince Andrew, pale and gloomy like everyone in the regiment, paced up and down from the border of one patch to another, at the edge of the meadow beside an oatfield, with head bowed and arms behind his back. There was nothing for him to do and no order to be given. Everything went on of itself. The killed were dragged from the front, the wounded carried away, and the ranks closed up. If any soldiers ran to the rear they returned immediately and hastily. At first Prince Andrew, considering it his duty to rouse the courage of the men and to set them an example, walked about among the ranks, but he soon became convinced that this was unnecessary and that there was nothing he could teach them. All the powers of his soul, as of every soldier there, were unconsciously bent on avoiding the contemplation of the horrors of their situation. He walked along the meadow, dragging his feet, rustling the grass, and gazing at the dust that covered his boots, now he took big strides trying to keep to the footprints left on the meadow by the mowers, then he counted his steps, calculating how often he must walk from one strip to another to walk a mile, then he stripped the flowers from the wormwood that grew along a boundary rut, rubbed them in his palms, and smelled their pungent sweetly bitter scent. Nothing remained of the previous day’s thoughts. He thought of nothing. He listened with weary ears to the ever-recurring sounds, distinguishing the whistle of flying projectiles from the booming of the reports, glanced at the tiresomely familiar faces of the men of the first battalion, and waited. “Here it comes . . . this one is coming our way again!” he thought, listening to the approaching whistle in the hidden region of smoke. “One, another! Again! It has hit . . .” He stopped and looked at the ranks. “No it has gone over. But this one has hit!” And again he started trying to reach the boundary strip in sixteen paces. A whizz and a thud! Five paces from him a cannon-ball tore up the dry earth and disappeared. A chill ran down his back. Again he glanced at the ranks. Probably many had been hit—a large crowd had gathered near the second battalion.

“Adjutant!” he shouted. “Order them not to crowd together.”

The adjutant, having obeyed this instruction, approached Prince Andrew. From the other side a battalion commander rode up.

“Look out!” came a frightened cry from a soldier and, like a bird whirring in rapid flight and alighting on the ground, a shell dropped with little noise within two steps of Prince Andrew and close to the battalion commander’s horse. The horse first, regardless of whether it was right or wrong to show fear, snorted, reared, almost throwing the major, and galloped aside. The horse’s terror infected the men.

“Lie down!” cried the adjutant, throwing himself flat on the ground.

Prince Andrew hesitated. The smoking shell spun like a top between him and the prostrate adjutant near a wormwood plant between the field and the meadow.

“Can this be death?” thought Prince Andrew, looking with a quite new, envious glance at the grass, the wormwood, and the streamlet of smoke that curled up from the rotating black ball. “I cannot, I do not wish to die. I love life—I love this grass, this earth, this air . . .” He thought this, and at the same time remembered that people were looking at him.

“It’s shameful, sir!” he said to the adjutant. “What . . .”

He did not finish speaking. At one and the same moment came the sound of an explosion, a whistle of splinters as from a breaking window frame, a suffocating smell of powder, and Prince Andrew started to one side, raising his arm, and fell on his chest. Several officers ran up to him. From the right side of his abdomen blood was welling out making a large stain on the grass.

The militiamen with stretchers, who were called up, stood behind the officers. Prince Andrew lay on his chest with his face in the grass, breathing heavily and noisily.

“What are you waiting for? Come along!”

The peasants went up and took him by his shoulders and legs, but he moaned piteously and, exchanging looks, they set him down again.

“Pick him up, lift him, it’s all the same!” cried someone.

They again took him by the shoulders and laid him on the stretcher.

“Ah God! My God! What is it? The stomach? That means death! My God!”—voices among the officers were heard saying.

“It flew a hair’s breadth past my ear,” said the adjutant.

The peasants, adjusting the stretcher to their shoulders, started hurriedly along the path they had trodden down, to the dressing-station.

“Keep in step! Ah . . . those peasants!” shouted an officer, seizing by their shoulders and checking the peasants, who were walking unevenly and jolting the stretcher.

“Get into step, Fëdor . . . I say, Fëdor!” said the foremost peasant.

“Now that’s right!” said the one behind joyfully, when he had got into step.

“Your Excellency! Eh, Prince!” said the trembling voice of Timókhin, who had run up and was looking down on the stretcher.

Prince Andrew opened his eyes and looked up at the speaker from the stretcher into which his head had sunk deep, and again his eyelids drooped.

The militiamen carried Prince Andrew to the dressing-station by the wood, where wagons were stationed. The dressing-station consisted of three tents with flaps turned back, pitched at the edge of a birch wood. In the wood, wagons and horses were standing. The horses were eating oats from their movable troughs and sparrows flew down and pecked the grains that fell. Some crows, scenting blood, flew among the birch trees cawing impatiently. Around the tents, over more than five acres, bloodstained men in various garbs stood, sat, or lay. Around the wounded stood crowds of soldier stretcher-bearers with dismal and attentive faces, whom the officers keeping order tried in vain to drive from the spot. Disregarding the officers’ orders the soldiers stood leaning against their stretchers and gazing intently, as if trying to comprehend the difficult problem of what was taking place before them. From the tents came now loud angry cries, and now plaintive groans. Occasionally dressers ran out to fetch water, or to point out those who were to be brought in next. The wounded men awaiting their turn outside the tents groaned, sighed, wept, screamed, swore, or asked for vodka. Some were delirious. Prince Andrew’s bearers stepping over the wounded who had not yet been bandaged, took him, as a regimental commander, close up to one of the tents and there stopped, awaiting instructions. Prince Andrew opened his eyes and for a long time could not make out what was going on around him. He remembered the meadow, the wormwood, the field, the whirling black ball, and his sudden rush of passionate love of life. Two steps from him, leaning against a branch and talking loudly and attracting general attention, stood a tall, handsome, black-haired non-commissioned officer with a bandaged head. He had been wounded in the head and leg by bullets. Around him, eagerly listening to his talk, a crowd of wounded and stretcher-bearers was gathered.

“We kicked him out from there so that he chucked everything, we grabbed the king himself!” cried he, looking around him with eyes that glittered with fever. “If only reserves had come up just then, lads, there wouldn’t have been nothing left of him! I tell you surely . . .”

Like all the others near the speaker, Prince Andrew looked at him with shining eyes and experienced a sense of comfort. “But isn’t it all the same now?” thought he. “And what will be there, and what has there been here? Why was I so reluctant to part with life? There was something in this life I did not and do not understand . . .”

CHAPTER 37

One of the doctors came out of the tent in a bloodstained apron, holding a cigar between the thumb and little finger of one of his small bloodstained hands, so as not to smear it. He raised his head and looked about him, but above the level of the wounded men. He evidently wanted a little respite. After turning his head from right to left for some time he sighed and looked down.

“All right, immediately,” he replied to a dresser who pointed Prince Andrew out to him, and he told them to carry him into the tent.

Murmurs arose among the wounded who were waiting.

“It seems that even in the next world only the gentry are to have a chance!” remarked one.

Prince Andrew was carried in and laid on a table that had only just been cleared, and which a dresser was washing down. Prince Andrew could not make out distinctly what was in that tent. The pitiful groans from all sides, and the torturing pain in his thigh, stomach, and back, distracted him. All he saw about him merged into a general impression of naked bleeding human bodies that seemed to fill the whole of the low tent, as a few weeks previously, on that hot August day, such bodies had filled the dirty pond beside the Smolénsk road. Yes, it was the same flesh, the same chair à canon, the sight of which had even then filled him with horror, as by a presentiment.

There were three operating tables in the tent. Two were occupied, and on the third they placed Prince Andrew. For a little while he was left alone and involuntarily witnessed what was taking place on the other two tables. On the nearest one sat a Tartar, probably a Cossack judging by the uniform thrown down beside him. Four soldiers were holding him, and a spectacled doctor was cutting into his muscular brown back.

“Ooh, ooh, ooh!” grunted the Tartar, and suddenly lifting up his swarthy snub-nosed face with its high cheekbones, and baring his white teeth, he began to wriggle and twitch his body and utter piercing, ringing, and prolonged yells. On the other table, round which many people were crowding, a tall well-fed man lay on his back with his head thrown back. His curly hair, its colour and the shape of his head, seemed strangely familiar to Prince Andrew. Several dressers were pressing on his chest to hold him down. One large white plump leg twitched rapidly all the time with a feverish tremor. The man was sobbing and choking convulsively. Two doctors—one of whom was pale and trembling—were silently doing something to this man’s other, gory leg. When he had finished with the Tartar, whom they covered with an overcoat, the spectacled doctor came up to Prince Andrew wiping his hands.

He glanced at Prince Andrew’s face and quickly turned away.

“Undress him! What are you waiting for?” he cried angrily to the dressers.

His very first remotest recollections of childhood came back to Prince Andrew’s mind when the dresser with sleeves rolled up began hastily to undo the buttons of his clothes and undressed him. The doctor bent down over the wound, felt it, and sighed deeply. Then he made a sign to someone, and the torturing pain in his abdomen caused Prince Andrew to lose consciousness. When he came to himself the splintered portions of his thigh-bone had been extracted, the torn flesh cut away, and the wound bandaged. Water was being sprinkled on his face. As soon as Prince Andrew opened his eyes, the doctor bent over, kissed him silently on the lips, and hurried away.

After the sufferings he had been enduring Prince Andrew enjoyed a blissful feeling such as he had not experienced for a long time. All the best and happiest moments of his life—especially his earliest childhood, when he used to be undressed and put to bed, and when leaning over him his nurse sang him to sleep and he, burying his head in the pillow, felt happy in the mere consciousness of life—returned to his memory, not merely as something past but as something present.

The doctors were busily engaged with the wounded man the shape of whose head seemed familiar to Prince Andrew: they were lifting him up and trying to quiet him.

“Show it to me . . . Oh, ooh . . . oh! Oh, ooh!” his frightened moans could be heard, subdued by suffering and broken by sobs.

Hearing those moans Prince Andrew wanted to weep. Whether because he was dying without glory, or because he was sorry to part with life, or because of those memories of a childhood that could not return, or because he was suffering and others were suffering and that man near him was groaning so piteously—he felt like weeping childlike, kindly, and almost happy, tears.

The wounded man was shown his amputated leg stained with clotted blood and with the boot still on.

“Oh! Oh, ooh!” he sobbed, like a woman.

The doctor who had been standing beside him, preventing Prince Andrew from seeing his face, moved away.

“My God! What is this? Why is he here?” said Prince Andrew to himself.

In the miserable, sobbing, enfeebled man whose leg had just been amputated, he recognised Anatole Kurágin. Men were supporting him in their arms and offering him a glass of water, but his trembling, swollen lips could not grasp its rim. Anatole was sobbing painfully. “Yes, it is he! Yes, that man is somehow closely and painfully connected with me,” thought Prince Andrew, not yet clearly grasping what he saw before him. “What is the connexion of that man with my childhood and life?” he asked himself, without finding an answer. And suddenly a new unexpected memory from that realm of pure and loving childhood presented itself to him. He remembered Natásha as he had seen her for the first time at the ball in 1810, with her slender neck and arms, and with a frightened happy face ready for rapture, and love and tenderness for her, stronger and more vivid than ever, awoke in his soul. He now remembered the connexion that existed between himself and this man who was dimly gazing at him through tears that filled his swollen eyes. He remembered everything, and ecstatic pity and love for that man overflowed his happy heart.

Prince Andrew could no longer restrain himself, and wept tender loving tears for his fellow men, for himself, and for his own and their errors.

“Compassion, love of our brothers, for those who love us and for those who hate us, love of our enemies; yes, that love which God preached on earth and which Princess Mary taught me and I did not understand—that is what made me sorry to part with life, that is what remained for me had I lived. But now it is too late. I know it!”

CHAPTER 38

The terrible spectacle of the battle-field covered with dead and wounded, together with the heaviness of his head and the news that some twenty generals he knew personally had been killed or wounded, and the consciousness of the impotence of his once mighty arm, produced an unexpected impression on Napoleon who usually liked to look at the killed and wounded, thereby, he considered, testing his strength of mind. This day the horrible appearance of the battle-field overcame that strength of mind which he thought constituted his merit and his greatness. He rode hurriedly from the battle-field and returned to the Shevárdino knoll, where he sat on his camp stool, his sallow face swollen and heavy, his eyes dim, his nose red, and his voice hoarse, involuntarily listening, with downcast eyes, to the sounds of firing. With painful dejection he awaited the end of this action, in which he regarded himself as a participant and which he was unable to arrest. A personal, human feeling for a brief moment got the better of the artificial phantasm of life he had served so long. He felt in his own person the sufferings and death he had witnessed on the battle-field. The heaviness of his head and chest reminded him of the possibility of suffering and death for himself. At that moment he did not desire Moscow, or victory, or glory (what need had he of more glory?). The one thing he wished for was rest, tranquillity, and freedom. But when he had been on the Semënovsk heights the artillery commander had proposed to him to bring several batteries of artillery up to those heights to strengthen the fire on the Russian troops crowded in front of Knyazkóvo. Napoleon had assented and had given orders that news should be brought to him of the effect those batteries produced.

An adjutant came now to inform him that the fire of two hundred guns had been concentrated on the Russians, as he had ordered, but that they still held their ground.

“Our fire is mowing them down by rows, but still they hold on,” said the adjutant.

“They want more! . . .” said Napoleon in a hoarse voice.

“Sire?” asked the adjutant who had not heard the remark.

“They want more!” croaked Napoleon frowning. “Let them have it!”

Even before he gave that order the thing he did not desire, and for which he only gave the order because he thought it was expected of him, was being done. And he fell back into that artificial realm of imaginary greatness, and again—as a horse walking a treadmill thinks it is doing something for itself—he submissively fulfilled the cruel, sad, gloomy, and inhuman role predestined for him.

And not for that day and hour alone were the mind and conscience of this man darkened on whom the responsibility for what was happening lay more than on all the others who took part in it. Never to the end of his life could he understand goodness, beauty, or truth, or the significance of his actions, which were too contrary to goodness and truth, too remote from everything human, for him ever to be able to grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded as they were by half the world, and so he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity.

Not only on that day, as he rode over the battle-field strewn with men killed and maimed (by his will as he believed) did he reckon as he looked at them how many Russians there were for each Frenchman and, deceiving himself, find reason for rejoicing in the calculation that there were five Russians for every Frenchman. Not on that day alone did he write in a letter to Paris, that “the battle field was superb,” because fifty thousand corpses lay there, but even on the island of St. Helena, in the peaceful solitude where he said he intended to devote his leisure to an account of the great deeds he had done, he wrote:

“The Russian war should have been the most popular war of modern times: it was a war of good sense, for real interests, for the tranquillity and security of all; it was purely pacific and conservative.

“It was a war for a great cause, the end of uncertainties and the beginning of security. A new horizon and new labours were opening out, full of well-being and prosperity for all. The European system was already founded; all that remained was to organize it.

“Satisfied on these great points, and with tranquillity everywhere, I too should have had my Congress and my Holy Alliance. Those ideas were stolen from me. In that reunion of great sovereigns we should have discussed our interests like one family, and have rendered account to the peoples as clerk to master.

“Europe would in this way soon have been, in fact, but one people, and anyone who travelled anywhere would have found himself always in the common fatherland. I should have demanded the freedom of all navigable rivers for everybody, that the seas should be common to all, and that the great standing armies should be reduced henceforth to mere guards for the sovereigns.

“On returning to France, to the bosom of the great, strong, magnificent, peaceful, and glorious fatherland, I should have proclaimed her frontiers immutable; all future wars purely defensive, all aggrandizement anti-national. I should have associated my son in the Empire; my dictatorship would have been finished, and his constitutional reign would have begun.

“Paris would have been the capital of the world, and the French the envy of the nations!

“My leisure then, and my old age, would have been devoted, in company with the Empress and during the royal apprenticeship of my son, to leisurely visiting, with our own horses and like a true country couple, every corner of the Empire, receiving complaints, redressing wrongs, and scattering public buildings and benefactions on all sides and everywhere.”

Napoleon, predestined by Providence for the gloomy role of executioner of the peoples, assured himself that the aim of his actions had been the peoples’ welfare, and that he could control the fate of millions and by the employment of power confer benefactions.

“Of four hundred thousand men who crossed the Vistula,” he wrote further of the Russian war, “half were Austrians, Prussians, Saxons, Poles, Bavarians, Würtembergers, Mecklenburgers, Spaniards, Italians, and Neapolitans. The Imperial army, strictly speaking, was one third composed of Dutch, Belgians, men from the borders of the Rhine, Piedmontese, Swiss, Genevese, Tuscans, Romans, inhabitants of the Thirty-Second Military Division, of Bremen, of Hamburg, and so on: it included scarcely a hundred and forty thousand who spoke French. The Russian expedition actually cost France less than fifty thousand men; the Russian army in its retreat from Vílna to Moscow lost in the various battles four times more men than the French army; the burning of Moscow cost the lives of a hundred thousand Russians who died of cold and want in the woods; finally, in its march from Moscow to the Oder the Russian army also suffered from the severity of the season—so that by the time it reached Vílna it numbered only fifty thousand and at Kalisch less than eighteen thousand.”

He imagined that the war with Russia came about by his will, and the horrors that occurred did not stagger his soul. He boldly took the whole responsibility for what happened, and his darkened mind found justification in the belief that among the hundreds of thousands who perished there were fewer Frenchmen than Hessians and Bavarians.

CHAPTER 39

Several tens of thousands of the slain lay in diverse postures and various uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the Davydov family and to the Crown serfs—those fields and meadows where for hundreds of years the peasants of Borodinó, Górki, Shevárdino, and Semënovsk had reaped their harvests and pastured their cattle. At the dressing-stations the grass and earth were soaked with blood for a space of some three acres around. Crowds of men of various arms wounded and unwounded, with frightened faces, dragged themselves back to Mozháysk from the one army and back to Valúevo from the other. Other crowds, exhausted and hungry, went forward led by their officers. Others held their ground and continued to fire.

Over the whole field, previously so gaily beautiful with the glitter of bayonets and cloudlets of smoke in the morning sun, there now spread a mist of damp and smoke and a strange acrid smell of saltpetre and blood. Clouds gathered, and drops of rain began to fall on the dead and wounded, on the frightened, exhausted, and hesitating men, as if to say: “Enough, men! Enough! Cease . . . bethink yourselves! What are you doing?”

To the men of both sides alike, worn out by want of food and rest, it began equally to appear doubtful whether they should continue to slaughter one another, all the faces expressed hesitation, and the question arose in every soul: “For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed? . . . You may go and kill whom you please, but I don’t want to do so any more!” By evening this thought had ripened in every soul. At any moment these men might have been seized with horror at what they were doing, and might have thrown up everything and run away anywhere.

But though towards the end of the battle the men felt all the horror of what they were doing, though they would have been glad to leave off, some incomprehensible, mysterious power continued to control them, and they still brought up the charges, loaded, aimed, and applied the match, though only one artilleryman survived out of every three, and though they stumbled and panted with fatigue, perspiring and stained with blood and powder. The cannon-balls flew just as swiftly and cruelly from both sides, crushing human bodies, and that terrible work, which was not done by the will of a man but at the will of Him who governs men and worlds, continued.

Anyone looking at the disorganized rear of the Russian army would have said that, if only the French made one more slight effort, it would disappear; and anyone looking at the rear of the French army would have said that the Russians need only make one more slight effort and the French would be destroyed. But neither the French nor the Russians made that effort, and the flame of battle burnt slowly out.

The Russians did not make that effort because they were not attacking the French. At the beginning of the battle they stood blocking the way to Moscow and they still did so at the end of the battle as at the beginning. But even had the aim of the Russians been to drive the French from their positions, they could not have made this last effort, for all the Russian troops had been broken up, there was no part of the Russian army that had not suffered in the battle, and though still holding their positions they had lost one half of their army.

The French, with the memory of all their former victories during fifteen years, with the assurance of Napoleon’s invincibility, with the consciousness that they had captured part of the battle-field and had lost only a quarter of their men and still had their Guards intact, twenty thousand strong, might easily have made that effort. The French who had attacked the Russian army in order to drive it from its position ought to have made that effort, for as long as the Russians continued to block the road to Moscow as before, the aim of the French had not been attained and all their efforts and losses were in vain. But the French did not make that effort. Some historians say that Napoleon need only have used his Old Guards, who were intact, and the battle would have been won. To speak of what would have happened had Napoleon sent his Guards is like talking of what would happen if autumn became spring. It could not be.

Napoleon did not give his Guards, not because he did not want to, but because it could not be done. All the generals, officers, and soldiers of the French army knew it could not be done, because the flagging spirit of the troops would not permit it.

It was not Napoleon alone who had experienced that nightmare feeling of the mighty arm being stricken powerless, but all the generals and soldiers of his army, whether they had taken part in the battle or not, after all their experience of previous battles—when after one-tenth of such efforts the enemy had fled—experienced a similar feeling of terror before an enemy who, after losing half his men, stood as threateningly at the end as at the beginning of the battle. The moral force of the attacking French army was exhausted. Not that sort of victory which is defined by the capture of pieces of material fastened to sticks, called standards, and of the ground on which the troops had stood and were standing, but a moral victory that convinces the enemy of the moral superiority of his opponent and of his own impotence, was gained by the Russians at Borodinó. The French invaders, like an infuriated animal that has in its onslaught received a mortal wound, felt that they were perishing, but could not stop, any more than the Russian army, weaker by one half, could help swerving. By impetus gained, the French army was still able to roll forward to Moscow, but there, without further effort on the part of the Russians, it had to perish, bleeding from the mortal wound it had received at Borodinó. The direct consequence of the battle of Borodinó was Napoleon’s senseless flight from Moscow, his retreat along the old Smolénsk road, the destruction of the invading army of five hundred thousand men, and the downfall of Napoleonic France, on which at Borodinó for the first time the hand of an opponent of stronger spirit had been laid.

81 Moscow, the Asiatic capital of this great empire, the sacred city of Alexander’s people, Moscow with its innumerable churches shaped like Chinese pagodas.

82 Child of the Don.

83 “Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.”

84 “Don’t see it that way, that’s the trouble.”

85 “When in doubt, my dear fellow, do nothing.”

86 “Think it over; get into the barque, and take care not to make it a barque of Charon.”

87 “It is the talk of all Moscow. My word, I admire you!”

88 “Who excuses himself, accuses himself.”

89 “A little bit in love with the young man.”

90 A kind of entrenchment.

91 “The war must be extended widely. I cannot sufficiently commend that view.”

92 “Oh, yes, the only aim is to weaken the enemy, so of course one cannot take into account the loss of private individuals.”