War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [535]
But though by the end of the battle the men felt all the horror of their actions, though they would have been glad to stop, some incomprehensible, mysterious power still went on governing them, and the artillery men, sweaty, covered with powder and blood, reduced to one in three, though stumbling and gasping from fatigue, kept bringing charges, loaded, aimed, applied the slow match; and the cannonballs, with the same speed and cruelty, flew from both sides and crushed human bodies flat, and the terrible thing continued to be accomplished, which was accomplished not by the will of men, but by the will of Him who governs people and worlds.
Anyone looking at the disordered rear of the Russian army would have said that the French needed to make one more little effort and the Russian army would have vanished; and anyone looking at the French rear would have said that the Russians needed to make one more little effort and the French would have perished. But neither the French nor the Russians made that effort, and the flame of battle slowly burned out.
The Russians did not make that effort, because it was not they who were attacking the French. At the beginning of the battle, they merely stood on the way to Moscow, shielding it, and they went on standing in the same way at the end of the battle as they had at the beginning. But even if the goal of the Russians had consisted in bringing down the French, they could not have made that last effort, because all the Russian troops were battered, there was not a single army unit that had not suffered in the battle, and the Russians, while staying in their places, had lost half their troops.
For the French, with the memory of all the previous fifteen years of victories, with their confidence in Napoleon’s invincibility, with the awareness that they had taken part of the battlefield, that they had lost only a quarter of their men, and that they still had the intact twenty-thousand-man guard, it would have been easy to make that effort. The French, who had attacked the Russian army with the goal of dislodging it from its position, ought to have made that effort, because as long as the Russians barred the road to Moscow, as they had done before the battle, the goal of the French had not been attained, and all their efforts and losses were in vain. But the French did not make that effort. Some historians say that Napoleon needed only to send in his intact old guard for the battle to be won. To talk of what would have happened if Napoleon had sent in his guard is the same as talking about what would happen if autumn became spring. It could not be. It is not that Napoleon did not send in his guard because he did not want to, but that it could not be done. All the generals, officers, and soldiers of the French army knew that it could not be done, because the army’s fallen spirits did not allow it.
It was not Napoleon alone who experienced that dreamlike feeling that the terrible swing of the arm fell strengthless, but all the generals, all the participating and nonparticipating soldiers of the French army, after all their experience of previous battles (where the enemy had fled after ten times less effort), experienced the same feeling of terror before an enemy who, having lost half his army, stood as formidably at the end as at the beginning of the battle. The moral strength of the attacking French army was exhausted. It was not the sort of victory that is determined by captured pieces of cloth on sticks, known as standards, and by the amount of ground the troops stood and stand on, but a moral victory, the sort that convinces the adversary of the moral superiority of his enemy and of his own impotence, that was gained by the Russians at Borodino. The French invasion, like an enraged beast mortally wounded as it charges, sensed its destruction; but