War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [543]
During one such pause, Kutuzov sighed deeply, as if he was about to speak. They all turned to look at him.
“Eh bien, messieurs! Je vois que c’est moi qui payerai les pots cassés,”*511 he said. And, slowly getting up, he went to the table. “Gentlemen, I’ve heard your opinions. Some will disagree with me. But I,” (he stopped), “by the power entrusted in me by my sovereign and the fatherland, I—order a retreat.”
After that, the generals began to disperse with the same solemn and silent discretion as people dispersing after a funeral.
Some of the generals, in low voices, in quite a different register than when they were speaking at the council, conveyed something to the commander in chief.
Malasha, who had long been expected at supper, carefully climbed down backwards from her stove shelf, resting her bare little feet on the ledges of the stove, and, getting tangled between the legs of the generals, darted through the door.
Having dismissed the generals, Kutuzov sat for a long time, his elbow leaning on the table, and thought about the same terrible question: “When, when was it decided, finally, to abandon Moscow? When was the thing done that decided this question, and who is to blame for it?”
“This, this I didn’t expect,” he said to the adjutant Schneider, who came into the room when it was already late at night, “this I didn’t expect! This never occurred to me!”
“You must get some rest, Your Serenity,” said Schneider.
“But no! They’ll eat horseflesh, like the Turks,” Kutuzov shouted, without replying, banging the table with his plump hand, “that they will, if only…”
V
In contrast to Kutuzov, at that same time, in an event still more important than the army’s retreat without a battle, in the abandoning and burning of Moscow, Rastopchin, whom we picture as the guiding hand of this event, acted quite differently.
This event—the abandoning and burning of Moscow—was as inevitable as the army’s retreat beyond Moscow without a battle, after the battle of Borodino.
Every Russian, not on the basis of reasoning, but on the basis of the feeling that is inside us and was inside our fathers, could have predicted what was to take place.
Beginning with Smolensk, the same thing that happened in Moscow had been happening in all the towns and villages on Russian soil, without the participation of Rastopchin and his posters. People nonchalantly awaited the enemy, did not riot, did not fret, did not tear anyone to pieces, but calmly awaited their fate, feeling themselves strong enough to find, at the most difficult moment, what needed to be done. And as soon as the enemy approached, the wealthiest elements of the population left, abandoning their property; the poorest stayed and set fire to and destroyed what remained.
The consciousness that it would be so and always would be so lay and lies in the soul of every Russian. And that consciousness and, what is more, the foreboding that Moscow would be taken, lay in Russian Moscow society in the year twelve. Those who started leaving Moscow already in July and the beginning of August showed that they expected it. Those who left, taking along whatever they could, abandoning houses and half their property, acted that way because of the hidden (latent) patriotism which is expressed not in phrases, not in the killing of children to save the fatherland, and similar unnatural acts, but inconspicuously, simply, organically, and therefore always produces the strongest results.
“It is shameful to flee from danger, only cowards are fleeing Moscow,” they were told. Rastopchin in his little posters kept instilling in them that to leave Moscow was disgraceful. People were ashamed to be called cowards, were ashamed to go, but all the same they went, knowing that it had to be so. Why did they go? It is impossible to suppose that Rastopchin had frightened them with the horrors Napoleon had committed in conquered lands. The first to leave were the rich, educated people, who knew very well that Vienna and Berlin remained