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By Root 3400 0

been left to the enemy. It is painful, sad, and the whole army is in despair that the most important place has been abandoned to no purpose. I, for my part, begged him most insistently in person and finally in writing; but nothing moved him to agree. I swear to you on my honor that Napoleon was in such a sack as never before, and he could have lost half his army, but not taken Smolensk. Our troops fought and are fighting as never before. I held out with fifteen thousand men for more than thirty-five hours and beat them; but he did not want to stay even fourteen hours. It is shameful, and a blot on our army; and he himself, it seems to me, should not even be alive in the world. If he reports that the losses were great—it is not true; maybe around four thousand, not more, and not even that. Even if it was ten, what can be done, it is war! But the enemy lost endless numbers…

What would it have cost to stay two more days? At least they would have withdrawn on their own; for they had no water for their men and horses. He gave me his word that he would not retreat, but suddenly sent a disposition that he would leave during the night. It is impossible to make war that way, and we may soon bring the enemy to Moscow…

The rumor is going around that you are thinking about peace. God forbid that we make peace! After all the sacrifices, and after such muddleheaded retreats—to make peace: you will set the whole of Russia against you, and every one of us will think it a shame to wear a uniform. If things have gone this way, we must fight as long as Russia can and as long as there are men left standing…

One person must be in command, not two. Your minister may be good as ministers go; but as a general, he is not merely bad but trash, and to him the fate of our whole Fatherland was entrusted…I am truly going out of my mind with vexation; forgive me that I write so boldly. Clearly, one who advises the concluding of peace and puts a minister in command of an army does not love the sovereign and wishes the destruction of us all. And so I am writing you the truth: call out the militia. For the minister, in a most masterly way, is bringing a guest with him to the capital. The great suspicion of the whole army falls on Mister Imperial Adjutant Wolzogen. They say he is more Napoleon’s than ours, and he is the minister’s adviser in everything. I am not merely polite with him, but I obey him like a corporal, though I am his senior. This is painful; but, loving my benefactor and sovereign, I obey. Only it is too bad that the sovereign entrusts our fine army to the likes of him. Imagine that on our retirade we lost over fifteen thousand men from fatigue and in hospitals; if we had been on the offensive, that would not have happened. Tell me, for God’s sake, what will our Russia—our mother—say, seeing that we are so frightened, and that we are giving up such a good and zealous Fatherland to such rabble and instilling hatred and disgrace in every subject? Why are we cowardly, and who are we afraid of? It is not my fault that the minister is irresolute, cowardly, muddleheaded, temporizing, and has every bad quality. The whole army is completely in tears and scolds him to death…

VI

Among the innumerable subdivisions that can be made in the phenomena of life, one can subdivide them all into those in which content predominates and those in which form predominates. Among the latter, as opposed to the life of a village, a zemstvo, a province, even of Moscow, can be counted the life of Petersburg, especially its salon life. That life is unchanging.

Since 1805 we had made peace and quarreled with Bonaparte, we had made constitutions and unmade them, yet the salon of Anna Pavlovna and the salon of Hélène were exactly the same as they had been—the one seven years earlier, the other five years earlier. In just the same way, people at Anna Pavlovna’s talked with perplexity about Bonaparte’s successes, and saw both in his successes and in the indulgence shown him by European sovereigns a malicious conspiracy aimed solely at causing unpleasantness and anxiety