War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [667]
XVII
Kutuzov, like all old people, slept little at night. During the day he often dozed off unexpectedly, but at night, lying on his bed without undressing, he was for the most part sleepless and thinking.
So he was lying in bed now, propping his big, heavy, disfigured head on his plump hand and thinking, his one open eye peering into the darkness.
Since Bennigsen, who corresponded with the sovereign and had the most power on the staff, had been avoiding him, Kutuzov had been more at ease with regard to the fact that he and his troops would not be forced again to take part in useless offensive action. The lesson of the battle of Tarutino and its eve, painfully memorable to Kutuzov, should also have its effect, he thought.
“They should understand that we can only lose by going on the offensive. Patience and time, these are my mighty warriors!” thought Kutuzov. He knew that an apple should not be picked while it is green. It will fall by itself when it is ripe, but if you pick it green, you will spoil the apple and the tree, and you will set your teeth on edge. Like an experienced hunter, he knew that the beast was wounded, wounded as badly as the whole Russian force could wound it, but whether mortally or not was still an unclarified question. Now, by the dispatches of Lauriston and Barthélemy, and by the reports of the partisans, Kutuzov almost knew that it was mortally wounded. But more proofs were needed; he had to wait.
“They want to run and look at how they’ve killed him. Wait, you’ll see. All this maneuvering, all this advancing!” he thought. “What for? All to distinguish themselves. As if there’s something amusing in fighting. They’re just like children whom you cannot get to tell you how the thing went, because all they want is to prove that they know how to fight. But that’s not the point now.
“And what artful maneuvers all of them suggest to me! It seems to them that if they think up two or three cases (the general plan from Petersburg came to his mind), they’ve thought of them all. But there’s no counting them!”
The unresolved question of whether the wound inflicted at Borodino was mortal or not had been hanging over Kutuzov’s head for a whole month. On the one hand, the French had occupied Moscow. On the other hand, Kutuzov felt unquestionably with his whole being that that terrible blow, in which he together with all the Russian people had strained all his forces, must be mortal. But in any case, proofs were needed, and he had been waiting for them for a month already, and the more time that passed, the more impatient he became. Lying on his bed during his sleepless nights, he did the same thing that all these young generals were doing, the same thing for which he reproached them. He thought up all the possible occasions in which this certain, already accomplished destruction of Napoleon could be manifested. He thought of them all, just as the young men did, but with the difference that he based no suppositions on them and saw not two or three of them but thousands. The longer he thought, the more of them he imagined. He thought up all sorts of movements of the Napoleonic army, as a whole or in parts—towards Petersburg, against him, skirting around him; thought up as well the case (which he was most afraid of) that Napoleon would start fighting him with his own weapon, that he would remain in Moscow waiting for him. Kutuzov even thought up the movement of the Napoleonic army back towards Medyn and Yukhnov; but the one thing he was unable to foresee was the thing that happened, that insane, convulsive rushing about of Napoleon’s troops in the course of the first eleven days after leaving Moscow—a rushing about which made possible what Kutuzov did not yet dare to think of at that time: the total extermination of the French. Dorokhov’s reports about Broussier’s division, the news from the partisans about the distress of Napoleon’s army, the