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By Root 3658 0

rumors about preparations for abandoning Moscow—everything confirmed the supposition that the French army was beaten and preparing to flee; but these were only suppositions, which seemed important to the young men, but not to Kutuzov. With his sixty years of experience, he knew what weight should be ascribed to rumors, knew how capable people who desire something are of grouping all the information in such a way that it seems to confirm what they desire, and knew how willingly on such occasions they omit all that contradicts it. And the more Kutuzov desired it, the less he allowed himself to believe it. This question occupied all his inner forces. All the rest was for him only the habitual acting out of life. His conversations with the staff, his letters to Mme de Staël,9 which he wrote from Tarutino, his reading of novels, distribution of rewards, correspondence with Petersburg, and so on, were the same habitual acting out of and submission to life. But the destruction of the French, foreseen by him alone, was his heartfelt, his sole desire.

On the night of the eleventh of October, he was lying propped on his hand and thinking about that.

There was a stir in the next room, and the footsteps of Toll, Konovnitsyn, and Bolkhovitinov were heard.

“Hey, who’s there? Come in, come in! What’s new?” the field marshal called to them.

While the footman was lighting a candle, Toll told him the content of the news.

“Who brought it?” asked Kutuzov, with a face that struck Toll, once the candle was lit, by its cold sternness.

“There can be no doubt, Your Serenity.”

“Call him, call him here!”

Kutuzov sat up, one leg lowered from the bed and his big belly leaning on the other, bent leg. His good eye was narrowed the better to see the messenger, as if he wanted to read in his features what so preoccupied him.

“Tell me, tell me, friend,” he said to Bolkhovitinov in his quiet, old man’s voice, closing the shirt that had opened on his chest. “Come, come closer. What’s the word you’ve brought me? Eh? Has Napoleon left Moscow? Truly? Eh?”

Bolkhovitinov first reported in detail what he had been ordered to.

“Speak, speak quicker, don’t torment my soul,” Kutuzov interrupted him.

Bolkhovitinov told him everything and fell silent, awaiting orders. Toll began to say something, but Kutuzov interrupted him. He wanted to say something, but suddenly his face shriveled, wrinkled; waving his hand at Toll, he turned the other way, to the corner of the room with its blackened icons.

“Lord, my Creator! Thou hast heeded our prayer…” he said in a trembling voice, clasping his hands. “Russia is saved. I thank Thee, Lord!” And he wept.

XVIII

From the time of this news until the end of the campaign, Kutuzov’s entire activity consists only of restraining his troops, by power, cunning, and entreaties, from useless attacks, maneuvers, and clashes with the perishing enemy. Dokhturov goes to Maloyaroslavets, but Kutuzov hangs back with the whole army and gives orders to vacate Kaluga and retreat beyond it, which seems quite possible to him.

Kutuzov retreats everywhere, but the enemy, without waiting for him to retreat, flees back in the opposite direction.

Napoleon’s historians describe to us his skillful maneuver towards Tarutino and Maloyaroslavets and make conjectures as to what would have happened if Napoleon had managed to penetrate to the rich southern provinces.

But, not to speak of the fact that nothing prevented Napoleon from going to those southern provinces (since the Russian army gave way to him), the historians forget that Napoleon’s army could not have been saved by anything, because by then it already bore within itself the conditions of inevitable destruction. Why should this army, which found abundant provisions in Moscow and could not keep them, but trampled them underfoot, this army which, on coming to Smolensk, did not distribute provisions, but looted them—why should this army have been able to set itself to rights in Kaluga province, populated by the same Russians as in Moscow and where fire had the same property of burning up