War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [650]
“I’m not going to take lessons from anybody, and I can die with my soldiers no worse than anybody else,” he said and marched on with a single division.
Coming out into the field under French fire, the agitated and brave Bagovut, without considering whether his going into action now, and with only one division, was useful or useless, marched straight ahead and led his troops under fire. Danger, cannonballs, bullets were what he needed in his wrathful state. One of the first bullets killed him, the bullets that followed killed many of his soldiers. And for some time his division went on standing uselessly under fire.
VII
Meanwhile, another column was supposed to attack the French on the front, but Kutuzov was with that column. He knew very well that nothing but confusion would come of this battle begun against his will, and, as far as was in his power, tried to hold back the troops. He did not move.
Kutuzov rode along silently on his little gray horse, lazily responding to the suggestions to attack.
“You’ve got attack on your tongue all the time, and don’t see that we can’t perform complicated maneuvers,” he said to Miloradovich, who was asking to advance.
“We were unable to take Murat alive this morning and get in place on time: now there’s nothing to do!” he replied to another.
When word came to Kutuzov that in the French rear, where, according to a Cossack report, there had previously been no one, there were now two battalions of Poles, he glanced sidelong at Ermolov behind him (he had not spoken to him since the previous day).
“Here they’re asking to go on the offensive, suggest several plans, but we barely get down to business, and nothing’s ready, and the alerted enemy takes his measures.”
Ermolov narrowed his eyes and smiled slightly, hearing these words. He understood that the storm was over for him and that Kutuzov would limit himself to this hint.
“He’s having fun at my expense,” Ermolov said softly, nudging Raevsky, who was standing next to him, with his knee.
Soon after that, Ermolov stepped up to Kutuzov and reported respectfully:
“There’s still time, Your Serenity, the enemy hasn’t gone away yet. What if you order an offensive? Otherwise the guards won’t see any smoke.”
Kutuzov said nothing, but when it was reported to him that Murat’s troops were retreating, he ordered an offensive; but at every hundred paces, he halted for three quarters of an hour.
The whole battle consisted in what Orlov-Denisov’s Cossacks had done; the rest of the troops merely lost several hundred men for nothing.
As a result of this battle, Kutuzov received a diamond decoration, Bennigsen also got diamonds and a hundred thousand roubles, others, according to their rank, also received many pleasant things, and after this battle there were more new transfers in the staff.
“That’s how it’s always done with us, all the wrong way round!” the Russian officers and generals said after the battle of Tarutino, just as people speak now, letting it be felt that some fool somewhere does things that way, the wrong way round, but we would not do things that way. But people who talk like that either do not know what they are talking about, or are deliberately deceiving themselves. No battle—Tarutino, Borodino, Austerlitz—comes off the way its organizers supposed. That is an essential condition.
A countless number of free forces (for nowhere is a man more free than in a battle, where it is a question of life and death) influence the direction of the battle, and that direction can never be known beforehand and never coincides with the direction of some one force.
If many simultaneous and variously directed forces act upon some body, the direction of that body’s movement cannot coincide with any one of those forces; there will always be the shortest median direction, which in mechanics is expressed by the diagonal of the