________________________________________________
_ A man in motion always devises an aim for that motion. To be able to
go a thousand miles he must imagine that something good awaits him
at the end of those thousand miles. One must have the prospect of a
promised land to have the strength to move.
The promised land for the French during their advance had been
Moscow, during their retreat it was their native land. But that native
land was too far off, and for a man going a thousand miles it is
absolutely necessary to set aside his final goal and to say to
himself: "Today I shall get to a place twenty-five miles off where I
shall rest and spend the night," and during the first day's journey
that resting place eclipses his ultimate goal and attracts all his
hopes and desires. And the impulses felt by a single person are always
magnified in a crowd.
For the French retreating along the old Smolensk road, the final
goal- their native land- was too remote, and their immediate goal
was Smolensk, toward which all their desires and hopes, enormously
intensified in the mass, urged them on. It was not that they knew that
much food and fresh troops awaited them in Smolensk, nor that they
were told so (on the contrary their superior officers, and Napoleon
himself, knew that provisions were scarce there), but because this
alone could give them strength to move on and endure their present
privations. So both those who knew and those who did not know deceived
themselves, and pushed on to Smolensk as to a promised land.
Coming out onto the highroad the French fled with surprising
energy and unheard-of rapidity toward the goal they had fixed on.
Besides the common impulse which bound the whole crowd of French
into one mass and supplied them with a certain energy, there was
another cause binding them together- their great numbers. As with
the physical law of gravity, their enormous mass drew the individual
human atoms to itself. In their hundreds of thousands they moved
like a whole nation.
Each of them desired nothing more than to give himself up as a
prisoner to escape from all this horror and misery; but on the one
hand the force of this common attraction to Smolensk, their goal, drew
each of them in the same direction; on the other hand an army corps
could not surrender to a company, and though the French availed
themselves of every convenient opportunity to detach themselves and to
surrender on the slightest decent pretext, such pretexts did not
always occur. Their very numbers and their crowded and swift
movement deprived them of that possibility and rendered it not only
difficult but impossible for the Russians to stop this movement, to
which the French were directing all their energies. Beyond a certain
limit no mechanical disruption of the body could hasten the process of
decomposition.
A lump of snow cannot be melted instantaneously. There is a
certain limit of time in less than which no amount of heat can melt
the snow. On the contrary the greater the heat the more solidified the
remaining snow becomes.
Of the Russian commanders Kutuzov alone understood this. When the
flight of the French army along the Smolensk road became well defined,
what Konovnitsyn had foreseen on the night of the eleventh of
October began to occur. The superior officers all wanted to
distinguish themselves, to cut off, to seize, to capture, and to
overthrow the French, and all clamored for action.
Kutuzov alone used all his power (and such power is very limited
in the case of any commander in chief) to prevent an attack.
He could not tell them what we say now: "Why fight, why block the
road, losing our own men and inhumanly slaughtering unfortunate
wretches? What is the use of that, when a third of their army has
melted away on the road from Moscow to Vyazma without any battle?" But
drawing from his aged wisdom what they could understand, he told
them of the golden bridge, and they laughed at and slandered him,
flinging themselves on, rending and exulting over the dying beast.
Ermolov, Miloradovich, Platov, and others in proximity to the French
near Vyazma could not resist their desire to cut off and break up
two French corps, and by way of reporting their intention to Kutuzov
they sent him a blank sheet of paper in an envelope.
And try as Kutuzov might to restrain the troops, our men attacked,
trying to bar the road. Infantry regiments, we are told, advanced to
the attack with music and with drums beating, and killed and lost
thousands of men.
But they did not cut off or overthrow anybody and the French army,
closing up more firmly at the danger, continued, while steadily
melting away, to pursue its fatal path to Smolensk. _
Read next: Book Fourteen: 1812: Chapter 1
Read previous: Book Thirteen: 1812: Chapter 18
Table of content of War and Peace
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
