War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [643]
This flanking march might not only have failed to produce any advantages, but might have destroyed the Russian army, had it not been accompanied by a coincidence of other conditions. What would have happened if Moscow had not burned down? If Murat had not lost sight of the Russians? If Napoleon had not remained inactive? If at Krasnaya Pakhra the Russian army, on the advice of Bennigsen and Barclay, had offered battle? What would have happened if the French had attacked the Russians as they moved beyond the Pakhra? What would have happened if Napoleon, later, coming to Tarutino, had attacked the Russians with at least one tenth of the energy with which he had attacked at Smolensk? What would have happened if the French had marched on Petersburg?…With all these suppositions, the salutariness of the flanking march might have turned to destruction.
The third and most incomprehensible thing consists in the fact that the people who study history deliberately refuse to see that the flanking march cannot possibly be ascribed to any one man, that no one ever foresaw it, that at that time this maneuver, just like the retreat from Fili, was never pictured by anyone in its entirety, but proceeded step by step, event by event, moment by moment, from a countless number of the most diverse conditions, and only presented itself in its entirety when it had been accomplished and become past.
At the council in Fili, the predominant thought of the Russian command was that a retreat straight back, that is, down the Nizhni Novgorod road, went without saying. The proofs of it are the fact that the majority of voices at the council voted in that sense, and, above all, the well-known conversation after the council between the commander in chief and Lanskoy, who was in charge of provisions. Lanskoy reported to the commander in chief that provender for the army was collected mainly along the Oka, in Tula and Kaluga provinces, and that in case of a retreat towards Nizhni, the supplies of provisions would be separated from the army by the large river Oka, transport across which was usually impossible at the beginning of winter. This was the first sign of the need to deviate from heading straight for Nizhni, the direction which had previously seemed most natural. The army kept more to the south, down the Ryazan road, and closer to the supplies. Later on, the inactivity of the French, who had even lost sight of the Russian army, the concern with defending the Tula factory,2 and, above all, the advantages of being closer to the supplies, made the army deviate still further to the south, to the Tula road. In moving to the Tula road, in a desperate push beyond the Pakhra, the commanders of the Russian army had in mind staying near Podolsk, and there was no thought of the Tarutino position; but a countless number of circumstances, and the reappearance of French troops, who had previously lost sight of the Russians, and the plans for battle, and, above all, the abundance of provisions in Kaluga, made our army deviate still more to the south, and move to the middle of its supply lines, from the Tula to the Kaluga road, to Tarutino. Just as it is impossible to answer the question of when Moscow was abandoned, so it is impossible to answer precisely when and by whom it was decided to move to Tarutino. Only when the troops had already reached Tarutino, owing to countless differential forces, only then did people begin to assure themselves that they had wanted it and had long foreseen it.
II
The famous flanking march consisted only in that the Russian army, retreating straight back in the opposite direction of its advance, once the advance of the French stopped, deviated from the straight direction it had first followed and, not seeing anyone pursuing it, naturally tended towards the side it was drawn to by the abundance of provisions.
If we picture to ourselves, not commanders of genius at the head of the Russian army, but simply the army alone without any leaders, that army could not have done anything other than make a reverse movement