War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [523]
An adjutant came galloping from the flèches with a pale, frightened face to inform Napoleon that the attack had been repulsed and that Compans had been wounded and Davout killed, but meanwhile the flèches had been taken by another section of troops, just as the adjutant was being told that the French had been repulsed, and Davout was alive and only slightly bruised. On the weight of such unavoidably false reports, Napoleon gave his instructions, which either had been carried out before he even gave them or were not and could not be carried out.
The marshals and generals who were closer to the battlefield, but who, like Napoleon, did not take part in the battle itself, but only occasionally rode into the fire, gave their own instructions and orders about where to shoot and from where, and where the cavalry were to ride and the infantry to run, without asking Napoleon. But even their instructions were carried out as rarely and to as small a degree as Napoleon’s instructions. For the most part, what came out was the opposite of what they had ordered. Soldiers who were told to advance would come under canister shot and run back; soldiers who were told to stay where they were, suddenly seeing the Russians appear unexpectedly before them, sometimes ran back and sometimes rushed forward, and the cavalry galloped without orders in pursuit of the fleeing Russians. Thus, two cavalry regiments galloped through the Semyonovskoe gully and, as soon as they rode up the hill, turned and galloped back at top speed. The infantrymen acted in the same way, sometimes getting nowhere near where they were told to go. All instructions about where and when to move cannon, when to send foot soldiers to shoot, when mounted soldiers to trample the Russian foot—all these instructions were given by the commanders closest to the units, in the ranks, without even asking Ney, Davout, and Murat, not to mention Napoleon. They were not afraid of being punished for non-fulfillment of orders or for unauthorized instructions, because in battle it is a matter of what is dearest to a man—his own life—and it sometimes seems that salvation lies in running back, sometimes in running forward, and these people, finding themselves in the very heat of battle, acted in conformity with the mood of the moment. In reality, all these movements forward and backward did nothing to alleviate or alter the situation of the troops. All their assaults and attacks on each other caused almost no harm; the harm, death, and mutilation were caused by the cannonballs and bullets that flew everywhere through that space in which these men were rushing about. As soon as these men left that space through which the cannonballs and bullets flew, their commanders, who stood in the rear, formed them up, established discipline, and, under the effect of that discipline, again led them into the zone of fire, in which (under the effect of the fear of death) they again lost discipline and rushed about according to the chance mood of the crowd.
XXXIV
Napoleon’s generals—Davout, Ney, and Murat, who were in proximity to the zone of fire and even occasionally rode into it—several times led huge and orderly masses of troops into that zone of fire. But contrary to what had invariably happened in all previous battles, instead of the expected news of the enemy’s flight, the orderly masses of troops came back from there as disorderly, frightened crowds. They restored them to order, but the men were becoming fewer. Halfway through the day, Murat sent his adjutant to Napoleon to ask for reinforcements.
Napoleon was sitting at the foot of the barrow and drinking punch when Murat’s adjutant galloped up to him with assurances that the Russians would be crushed if his majesty gave them one more division.
“Reinforcements?” said Napoleon, with stern astonishment, as if failing to understand his words