War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [669]
This army could not set itself to rights anywhere. Since the battle of Borodino and the looting of Moscow, it had borne within itself, as it were, the chemical conditions of its decomposition.
The men of this former army fled with their leaders, not knowing where themselves, wishing (Napoleon and every soldier) for only one thing: to extricate themselves personally as quickly as possible from the hopeless situation which they were all, albeit dimly, aware of.
It was only because of this, at the council in Maloyaroslavets, when the generals, pretending to confer, offered various opinions, that the last opinion, given by the simple soldier Mouton,10 who said what they all thought, that they only had to get away as quickly as possible, sealed all their lips, and no one, not even Napoleon, could say anything against this truth which they were all aware of.
But though they all knew they had to get away, there still remained the shame of the awareness that they had to flee. And they needed an external push which would overcome that shame. And that push came at the right moment. It was what the French called le Hourra de l’Empereur.
The day after the council, early in the morning, pretending that he wanted to inspect the troops and the field of the past and future battles, Napoleon rode with his suite of marshals and an escort through the middle of the line of deployed troops. Some Cossacks poking around for booty ran into the emperor and nearly caught him. If the Cossacks did not catch Napoleon that time, what saved him was the very thing that destroyed the French: the plunder which, at Tarutino and here, the Cossacks fell upon, letting the men go. Paying no attention to Napoleon, they fell upon the booty, and Napoleon managed to get away.
If les enfants du Don*712 could all but catch the emperor himself in the middle of his army, it was clear that there was nothing else to do but flee as quickly as possible down the nearest known road. Napoleon, with his forty-year-old’s potbelly, feeling himself no longer as nimble and brave as before, understood that hint. And under the influence of the scare the Cossacks had given him, he promptly agreed with Mouton and gave, as the historians say, the order to retreat back to the Smolensk road.
That Napoleon agreed with Mouton and that the troops marched back does not prove that he ordered it, but that the forces acting upon the whole army, in the sense of directing it down the Mozhaisk road, acted simultaneously upon Napoleon.
XIX
When a man finds himself in motion, he always thinks up a goal for that motion. In order to walk a thousand miles, a man needs to think that there is something good at the end of those thousand miles. One needs a vision of the promised land in order to have the strength to move.
The promised land for the advancing French was Moscow; for the retreat it was their native land. But their native land was too far away, and a man walking a thousand miles must say to himself, forgetting the final goal: “Today I will walk thirty miles to a resting place and spend the night,” and during this first march, the resting place overshadows the final goal and concentrates all desires and hopes on itself. The yearnings manifested in a separate man are always magnified in a crowd.
For the French going back down the old Smolensk road, the final goal of their native land was too distant, and the nearest goal, the one towards which all their desires and hopes, increased in great proportion in the crowd, were directed—was Smolensk. Not because the men knew that there were abundant provisions and fresh troops in Smolensk, not because they were told so (on the contrary, the higher ranks of the army and Napoleon himself knew that there were few provisions there), but because that alone could give them the strength to move and to endure the present privations. They, both those who knew and those who did not know, equally deceiving themselves, yearned for Smolensk as for the promised land.
Coming out onto the high road, the French, with striking energy,