War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [110]
“Ah, from Vienna? Very well. Later, later!”
Kutuzov and Bagration stepped out to the porch.
“Well, good-bye, Prince,” he said to Bagration. “Christ be with you. I bless you for a great deed.”
Kutuzov’s face suddenly softened, and tears welled up in his eyes. He pulled Bagration to him with his left hand, and with his right, which had a ring on it, making an obviously habitual gesture, crossed him and offered him his plump cheek, instead of which Bagration kissed him on the neck.
“Christ be with you!” Kutuzov repeated and went to his carriage. “Get in with me,” he said to Bolkonsky.
“Your Excellency, I should like to be of use here. Allow me to stay in Prince Bagration’s detachment.”
“Get in,” said Kutuzov, and noticing that Bolkonsky hung back, said: “I need good officers myself.”
They got into the carriage and rode for several minutes in silence.
“There is still much before us, much of everything,” he said, with an old man’s perceptive expression, as though he understood everything that was going on in Bolkonsky’s soul. “If one tenth of his detachment comes back tomorrow, I’ll thank God,” Kutuzov added, as if speaking to himself.
Prince Andrei looked at Kutuzov and his eyes were involuntarily struck by the carefully washed creases of the scar on Kutuzov’s temple, a foot away from him, where the Izmail bullet had pierced his head and put out his eye. “Yes, he has the right to speak so calmly about the deaths of these people!” thought Bolkonsky.
“That is why I am asking you to send me to that detachment,” he said.
Kutuzov did not reply. He seemed to have forgotten what he had said, and sat deep in thought. After five minutes, rocking smoothly on the soft springs of the carriage, Kutuzov turned to Prince Andrei. There was no trace of emotion on his face. With fine irony he questioned the prince about the details of his meeting with the emperor, about the opinions he had heard at court concerning the action at Krems, and about several women of their mutual acquaintance.
XIV
On the first of November Kutuzov received information through one of his scouts that placed the army he commanded in an almost hopeless position. The scout had reported that the French in enormous force, having crossed the bridge in Vienna, were heading towards Kutuzov’s line of communications with the troops coming from Russia. If Kutuzov decided to stay in Krems, the one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-man army of Napoleon would cut him off from all communications, surround his exhausted forty-thousand-man army, and he would find himself in the position of Mack at Ulm. If Kutuzov decided to abandon the road leading to communications with the troops from Russia, he would have to enter with no road into the unknown territory of the Bohemian Mountains, defending himself from the superior numbers of the enemy, and abandoning any hope of communications with Buxhöwden. If Kutuzov decided to retreat down the road from Krems to Olmütz to unite with the troops from Russia, he would risk being forestalled on that road by the French, who had crossed the bridge in Vienna, and thus being forced to accept battle on the march, with all his heavy baggage and transport, and to deal with an enemy that outnumbered him three to one and surrounded him on both sides.
Kutuzov chose this last course.
The French, as the scout reported, had crossed the bridge in Vienna and by forced marches were making for Znaim, which lay on the path of Kutuzov’s retreat, more than sixty miles ahead of him. To reach Znaim before the French meant to gain great hope of saving the army; to let the French forestall them in Znaim meant certainly to subject the whole army to a disgrace similar to that at Ulm, or to total destruction. To forestall the French with his entire army was impossible. The road from Vienna to Znaim was shorter and better than the Russians’ road from Krems to Znaim.
The night he received this information, Kutuzov sent Bagration’s four-thousand-man vanguard to the right