War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [585]
“Enlevez-moi ça,”†558 said the officer, pointing to the beams and the corpses; and the French, having finished off the wounded, threw the corpses down behind the fence. Who these men were, no one knew. “Enlevez-moi ça” was all that was said of them, and they were thrown out and taken away later so that they would not stink. Thiers alone devoted a few eloquent lines to their memory: “Ces misérables avaient envahi la citadelle sacrée, s’étaient emparés des fusils de l’arsenal, et tiraient (ces misérables) sur les Français. On en sabra quelques-uns et on purgea le Kremlin de leur présence.”‡559
It was reported to Murat that the way had been cleared. The French entered the gates and began setting up camp on Senate Square. Soldiers threw chairs out of the windows of the Senate onto the square and built campfires.
Other detachments passed through the Kremlin and settled along Maroseika, Lubyanka, and Pokrovka streets. Still others settled along Vzdvizhenka, Znamenka, Nikolskaya, and Tverskaya. The French, finding no owners, settled everywhere not as in quarters in a town, but as in a camp located in a town.
Though ragged, famished, exhausted, and reduced to a third of their former number, the French soldiers still entered Moscow in an orderly manner. This was an exhausted, emaciated, but still warlike and menacing army. But it was an army only until the moment when the soldiers of that army dispersed to quarters. As soon as the men of the regiments began to disperse among the empty and wealthy houses, the army was annihilated forever, and what emerged were neither inhabitants nor soldiers, but something between the two, known as looters. When the same men left Moscow five weeks later, they no longer constituted an army. They were a mob of looters, each of whom drove or carried with him a heap of things that seemed valuable or useful to him. The goal of each of these men, as they were leaving Moscow, did not consist, as before, in conquering, but only in keeping what they had acquired. Like the monkey who, putting its hand into the narrow mouth of a jug and seizing a handful of nuts, will not open its fist, so as not to lose what it has seized, and thereby perishes, so the French, in leaving Moscow, were obviously bound to perish as a result of dragging their loot with them, but to abandon that loot was as impossible for them as it is for the monkey to let go of its handful of nuts. Ten minutes after any French regiment entered some quarter of Moscow, there was not a single soldier or officer left. In the windows of the houses, people in greatcoats and leggings could be seen laughing and strolling through the rooms; in cellars and basements, the same sort of people were bustling about with provisions; in the courtyards, the same sort of people opened or broke down the gates of sheds and stables; in the kitchens they made fires and, with their sleeves rolled up, baked, kneaded, and cooked, frightened, amused, and fondled the women and children. And there were many of these people everywhere in the shops and houses; but there was no more army.
On that same day, the French commanders issued order after order forbidding the troops to disperse through the city, strictly forbidding looting and violence to the inhabitants, and announcing a general roll call for that very evening; but despite all such measures, the men who formerly constituted an army were spreading throughout the rich, empty city, abounding with comforts and supplies. As a hungry herd goes across a bare field in a group, but at once irrepressibly scatters as soon as it comes upon rich pasture, so the troops scattered as irrepressibly through the rich city.
There were no inhabitants in Moscow, and the soldiers were absorbed by it like water by sand, and irrepressibly spread starwise in all directions from the Kremlin, which they occupied first of all.