War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [654]
In respect of raising the spirits of the troops and the people, reviews were constantly held and rewards distributed. The emperor rode about the streets and comforted the inhabitants; and, despite all his concern with state affairs, he personally visited the theaters established by his order.
In respect of philanthropy, the best virtue of monarchs, Napoleon also did all that depended on him. He ordered Maison de ma mère*690 written on the almshouses, combining in this act a tender filial feeling with the grandeur of a sovereign’s virtue.7 He visited the orphanage, and, having allowed the orphans he had saved to kiss his helping hands, conversed graciously with Tutolmin. Then, according to Thiers’s eloquent account, he ordered his troops to be paid in counterfeit Russian money he had made. “Relevant l’emploi de ces moyens par un acte digne de lui et de l’armée française, il fit distribuer des secours aux incendiés. Mais les vivres étant trop précieux pour être donnés à des étrangers la plupart ennemis, Napoléon aima mieux leur fournir de l’argent afin qu’ils se fournissent au dehors, et il leur fit distribuer des roubles papiers.”†691
In respect of army discipline, orders were constantly issued about severe punishments for the non-fulfillment of duty and about putting an end to looting.
X
But, strangely enough, all these instructions, concerns, and plans, while being by no means worse than others issued in similar cases, did not touch the essence of the matter, but, like the hands of a clock with the mechanism removed, turned arbitrarily and aimlessly, without catching the gears.
In the military respect, the brilliant plan of campaign, of which Thiers says, “que son génie n’avait jamais rien imaginé de plus profond, de plus habile et de plus admirable,”‡692 and concerning which Thiers, getting into polemics with Mr. Fain,8 proves that the drawing up of this brilliant plan should be dated not to the fourth but to the fifteenth of October—this plan never was and never could have been carried out, because nothing in it was close to reality. The fortifying of the Kremlin, for which la Mosquée (as Napoleon called the church of Basil the Blessed) was to be razed, proved totally useless. The mining of the Kremlin only went towards fulfilling the emperor’s wish that, as he left Moscow, the Kremlin should be blown up—that is, that the floor against which the little child hurt himself should be given a beating. The pursuit of the Russian army, which so preoccupied Napoleon, produced an unheard-of phenomenon. The French generals lost the sixty-thousand-man Russian army, and, in Thiers’s words, it was only owing to the skill and, it seems, the genius of Murat that they managed to find, like a pin, this sixty-thousand-man Russian army.
In the diplomatic respect, all Napoleon’s arguments about his magnanimity and fairness, both before Tutolmin and before Yakovlev, who was mostly concerned with acquiring an overcoat and a wagon, proved useless: Alexander did not receive these ambassadors or reply to their ambassage.
In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down.
In the administrative respect, the establishment of the municipality did not put an end to the looting and proved useful only to certain persons who took part in it and who, under the pretext of maintaining order, were themselves looting Moscow or saving their own property from being looted.
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