War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [415]
From all these parties, one more, the ninth party, emerged and began to raise its voice just as Prince Andrei came to the army. This was a party of older people, intelligent, experienced in statesmanship, and who were able, without sharing any of these contradictory opinions, to look at everything that went on at headquarters abstractly, and to reflect on the means of getting out of this uncertainty, irresolution, confusion, and weakness.
The people of this party said and thought that all the harm came primarily from the presence of the sovereign and his military court in the army; that it brought into the army that indefinite, conditional, and fluctuating instability of relations which was suitable to the court, but bad for the army; that the sovereign ought to rule and not command troops; that the only way out of this situation was the departure of the sovereign and his court from the army; that the mere presence of the sovereign paralyzed the fifty thousand troops needed to ensure his personal safety; that the very worst, but independent, commander in chief would be better than the very best, but bound by the presence and authority of the sovereign.
At the time when Prince Andrei was living unoccupied on the Drissa, Shishkov, the secretary of state, who was one of the chief representatives of this party, wrote a letter to the sovereign which Balashov and Arakcheev agreed to sign. In this letter, taking advantage of the permission granted him by the sovereign to discuss the general course of affairs, he respectfully suggested that the sovereign leave the army under the pretext that it was necessary for him to inspire the people of the capital for war.
The sovereign’s inspiring of the people and calling them to the defense of the fatherland—that very inspiring of the people (insofar as it was produced by the sovereign’s presence in Moscow) which was the chief cause of Russia’s triumph—was presented to and accepted by the sovereign as a pretext for leaving the army.
X
This letter had not yet been given to the sovereign when Barclay told Bolkonsky at dinner that the sovereign would like to see Prince Andrei in person, in order to question him about Turkey, and that Prince Andrei was to go to Bennigsen’s quarters at six o’clock in the evening.
On that same day information was received in the sovereign’s quarters about new movements of Napoleon that might prove dangerous to the army—information which subsequently proved incorrect. And that same morning Colonel Michaud, making the round of the Drissa fortifications with the sovereign, tried to persuade the sovereign that this fortified camp, set up by Pfuel, which till then had been considered a tactical chef-d’oeuvre that would be the destruction of Napoleon—that this camp was absurd and would be the destruction of the Russian army.
Prince Andrei arrived at the quarters of General Bennigsen, who occupied a small manor house right on the bank of the river. Neither Bennigsen nor the sovereign was there; but Chernyshov, the imperial adjutant, received Bolkonsky and announced to him that the sovereign had ridden with General Bennigsen and Marquis Paulucci to make a second round of the fortifications of the Drissa camp, the suitability of which had become a subject of strong doubts.
Chernyshov was sitting with a French novel by a window in the first room. This room was probably once the reception room; an organ still stood there, with some sort of rugs piled on it, and in one corner stood the camp bed of Bennigsen’s adjutant.