War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [670]
Each man of them desired only one thing—to give himself up as a prisoner, to be delivered from all horrors and misfortunes. But, on the one hand, the force of their general yearning towards the goal of Smolensk drew each of them in one and the same direction; on the other hand, it was impossible for a corps to give itself up to a company, and though the French used every opportunity to get rid of each other and on every decent pretext gave themselves up as prisoners, those pretexts did not always occur. Their very numbers and compact, quick movement deprived them of that possibility and made it not only difficult but impossible for the Russians to stop that movement, to which all the energy of the mass of the French was directed. Beyond a certain limit, the mechanical rending of the body could not hasten the ongoing process of decomposition.
It is impossible to melt a ball of snow instantly. There exists a certain time limit before which no efforts at heating can melt the snow. On the contrary, the greater the heat, the more solid the remaining snow becomes.
Of the Russian military leaders, no one but Kutuzov understood that. When the direction of the flight of the French army down the Smolensk road became definite, what Konovnitsyn had foreseen on the night of the eleventh of October began to come true. All the higher ranks in the army wanted to distinguish themselves, to cut off, to intercept, to capture, to overrun the French, and they all called for an offensive.
Kutuzov alone used all his powers (those powers are not very great in any commander in chief) to oppose an offensive.
He could not tell them what we say now: why battles, why the blocking of roads, and the loss of our own men, and the inhuman finishing off of the unfortunate? Why all that, when from Moscow to Vyazma a third of that army melted away without any battle? But, guided by his old man’s wisdom, he told them what they could understand—he spoke to them of the golden bridge, and they laughed at him, slandered him, stormed and raged, and swaggered over the slain beast.
At Vyazma, Ermolov, Miloradovich, Platov, and others, finding themselves in proximity to the French, could not restrain their desire to cut off and overrun two French corps. To inform Kutuzov of their intention, they sent him an envelope containing, instead of a message, a blank sheet of paper.
And however much Kutuzov tried to hold the troops back, our troops attacked, trying to block the way. Infantry regiments, as it was told, went into the attack with music and beating drums, and destroyed and lost thousands of men.
But as for cutting off—they cut off and overran nobody. And the French army, having drawn up more tightly in the face of danger, continued, melting away regularly, along their same fatal path to Smolensk.
Part Three
I
The battle of Borodino, with the subsequent occupation of Moscow by the French and their flight without any new battles, is one of the most instructive phenomena in history.
All historians agree that the external activity of states and nations, in their conflicts among themselves, is expressed in wars; that the political power of states and nations increases or decreases owing directly to their greater or lesser military successes.
However strange the historical descriptions of how some king or emperor, having quarreled with another emperor or king, raised an army, fought with the army of the enemy, defeated it, killed three, five, ten thousand men, and as a result subjugated a state and a whole nation of several millions; however incomprehensible the reason why the defeat of one army, one hundredth