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By Root 3746 0

Cavalrymen, entering a merchant’s house abandoned with all its goods, and finding stalls there not only for their own horses but extra ones as well, still went to occupy the house next door, which seemed better to them. Many occupied several houses, writing on them in chalk who the occupier was, and quarreled and even fought with other units. Before they had time to settle, the soldiers ran outside to look over the city, and, hearing that everything had been abandoned, rushed wherever valuable things could be had for nothing. Officers went to stop the soldiers and were involuntarily drawn into the same acts. In Carriage Row there were abandoned shops with vehicles, and generals crowded there, picking out caleches and carriages for themselves. The remaining inhabitants invited the officers to stay with them, hoping to protect themselves from being looted. There was an abundance of riches and no end of them in sight; everywhere around the area occupied by the French, there were other areas, unknown and unoccupied, in which, as it seemed to the French, there were still greater riches. And Moscow absorbed them into itself more and more. Just as when water is poured onto dry ground, the result is that both water and dry ground disappear, so when the famished army entered the abundant, empty city, the result was that the army was annihilated and the abundant city was annihilated; there was mud, there were fires and looting.

The French ascribed the burning of Moscow au patriotisme féroce de Rastopchine;*560 the Russians—to the savagery of the French. Yet in reality, with regard to the burning of Moscow, there were not and could not be any reasons for placing the responsibility for it on one or several persons. Moscow burned down because it was put into conditions in which any wooden town would have to burn down, regardless of whether the town had or did not have a hundred and thirty poor-quality fire pumps. Moscow had to burn down, because its inhabitants left it, and as inevitably as a pile of wood chips has to catch fire if sparks pour down on it for several days. A wooden town in which, in the presence of the inhabitants who own the houses and of the police, there are fires almost every day during the summer, cannot help burning down when there are no inhabitants there, but troops smoking pipes, making campfires on Senate Square out of the Senate’s chairs, and cooking meals twice a day. Billet troops in the villages of some area during peacetime, and the number of fires in that area increases at once. How much greater, then, is the possibility of fires in an empty wooden town in which foreign troops are billeted? Le patriotisme féroce de Rastopchine and the savagery of the French are not to blame for anything here. Moscow caught fire from the pipes, the kitchens, the carelessness of enemy soldiers, who were living in houses they did not own. If there was arson (which is very doubtful, because no one had any reason for it, and in any case it was troublesome and dangerous), that arson cannot be taken as the cause, since without any arson it would have been the same.

Flattering as it was for the French to blame the brutality of Rastopchin and for the Russians to blame the villain Bonaparte, or later to place the heroic torch in the hands of their own people, it is impossible not to see that there could be no such immediate causes for the burning, because Moscow had to burn down, just as any village, any factory, any house has to burn down which has been left by its owners, and in which strangers are allowed to take over and start cooking kasha for themselves. Moscow was burned by its inhabitants, true; but not by the inhabitants who stayed in it, but by those who left it. Occupied by the enemy, Moscow did not remain intact like Berlin, Vienna, and other cities, only because its inhabitants did not bring out bread and salt and the keys to the city for the French, but left it.

XXVII

The absorption of the French, which spread starwise over Moscow, reached the neighborhood where Pierre was living only by the evening of the