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By Root 3517 0

battlefield and returned to the Shevardino barrow. Yellow, bloated, heavy, with dull eyes, a red nose, and a hoarse voice, he sat on a camp chair, involuntarily listening to the sounds of gunfire and not raising his eyes. With sickly anguish he awaited the end of this action, of which he considered himself the cause, but which he was unable to stop. Personal human feeling for a brief moment got the upper hand over that artificial phantom of life which he had served so long. He transferred to himself the sufferings and death he had seen on the battlefield. The heaviness in his head and chest reminded him of the possibility of his own suffering and death. At that moment he wanted for himself neither Moscow, nor victory, nor glory. (What more glory did he need?) The only thing he wished for now was rest, tranquillity, and freedom. But when he was on the Semyonovskoe heights, the artillery commander had suggested placing several batteries on those heights to increase the fire on the Russian troops crowding before Knyazkovo. Napoleon had agreed and ordered them to let him know what effect those batteries had.

An adjutant came riding to tell him that, on the emperor’s orders, two hundred guns had been turned on the Russians, but the Russians still stood firm.

“Our fire takes them out by whole ranks, but they stand firm,” said the adjutant.

“Ils en veulent encore!…”*505 Napoleon said in a hoarse voice.

“Sire?” said the adjutant, who had not caught what he said.

“Ils en veulent encore,” Napoleon, frowning, rasped in a husky voice, “donnez-leur-en.”†506

And even without his order they were doing what he wanted, and he gave the instruction only because he thought an order was expected of him. And again he was transferred to his former artificial world of phantoms of some sort of greatness, and again (as a horse walking about a slanting treadmill imagines it is doing something for itself), he began to obediently fulfill that cruel, sad, oppressive, and inhuman role which had been assigned to him.

And not only for that hour and day were reason and conscience darkened in this man who, more than all the other participants in this affair, bore upon himself the whole weight of what was happening; but never to the end of his life was he able to understand goodness, or beauty, or truth, or the meaning of his own actions, which were too much the opposite of goodness and truth, and too far removed from everything human for him to be able to grasp their meaning. He could not renounce his actions, extolled by half the world, and therefore he had to renounce truth and goodness and everything human.

Not only on that day, riding around the battlefield strewn with dead and mutilated men (by his will, as he thought), did he, looking at these men, count how many Russians there were to one Frenchman, and, deceiving himself, find cause to rejoice that for every Frenchman there were five Russians. Not only on that day did he write in a letter to Paris that le champ de bataille a été superbe,*507 because there were fifty thousand corpses on it; but also on the island of St. Helena, in the quiet of solitude, where he said he intended to devote his leisure to setting forth the great deeds he had done, he wrote:

La guerre de Russie eût dû être la plus populaire des temps modernes: c’était celle du bon sens and des vrais intérêts, celle du repos et de la sécurité de tous; elle était purement pacifique et conservatrice.†508

C’était pour la grande cause, la fin des hasards et le commencement de la sécurité. Un nouvel horizon, de nouveaux travaux allaient se dérouler, tout plein du bien-être et de la prospérité de tous. Le système européen se trouvait fondé il n’était plus question que de l’organiser.

Satisfait sur ces grands points et tranquille partout, j’aurais eu aussi mon congrès et ma sainte-alliance. Ce sont des idées qu’on m’a volées. Dans cette réunion de grands souverains, nous eussions traités de nos intérêts en famille et compté de clerc à maître avec les peuples.

L’Europe n’eût bientôt fait de la sorte véritablement qu’un même peuple,