War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [697]
If the aim of the Russians consisted in cutting off and capturing Napoleon and the marshals, and that aim was not only not achieved, but all the attempts to achieve it were thwarted each time in the most shameful way, then the last period of the campaign is quite correctly presented by the French as a series of victories, and is quite incorrectly presented by Russian military historians as victorious.
Russian military historians, insofar as they are bound by logic, involuntarily come to this conclusion, and, despite lyrical proclamations of courage and devotion, and so on, have had involuntarily to admit that the retreat of the French from Moscow was a series of victories for Napoleon and of defeats for Kutuzov.
But, leaving national vanity completely aside, one feels that this conclusion contains an inner contradiction, because the series of French victories brought them to total destruction, while the series of Russian defeats led them to the total destruction of the foe and the purging of the fatherland.
The source of this contradiction lies in the fact that historians who study the events from the letters of sovereigns and generals, from relations, reports, plans, and so on, posit a false, never-existing aim for the last period of the war of 1812—an aim which supposedly consisted in cutting off and capturing Napoleon with his marshals and his army.
This aim never existed and could not exist, because it made no sense and to achieve it was totally impossible.
This aim made no sense, first, because Napoleon’s disordered army was fleeing Russia with all possible speed, that is, carrying out the very thing that any Russian could desire. What, then, was the need of performing various operations on the French, who were simply fleeing as fast as they could?
Second, it was senseless to stand in the way of people who had put all their energy into flight.
Third, it was senseless to waste our troops on the destruction of the French army, which was being annihilated without any external causes in such a progression that, without any blocking of the path, they were unable to bring across the border more than what they brought across in the month of December, that is, one hundredth of the entire army.
Fourth, it was senseless to wish to take prisoner the emperor, the kings, the dukes—people whose capture would have hampered the actions of the Russians in the highest degree, as was recognized by the most skillful diplomats of that time (Joseph de Maistre and others). Still more senseless would have been the wish to capture whole corps of the French, when our own troops had melted away by half before reaching Krasnoe, and for corps of prisoners it would have been necessary to detach divisions as a convoy, and when our own soldiers did not always receive full rations and the prisoners already taken were starving to death.
The whole profound plan of cutting off and capturing Napoleon and his army was like the plan of a farmer who, while driving out the cattle who were trampling his vegetable garden, would run to the gate and start beating those cattle on the head. The one thing that might be said to justify the farmer is that he was very angry. But it would be impossible to say even that about the devisers of this project, because it was not they who suffered from the trampled vegetable patch.
But, besides the fact that the cutting off of Napoleon and his army was senseless, it was also impossible.
It was impossible, first, because, as is clear from experience, in battle the movement of columns over a stretch of three miles never conforms to plans, so that the probability of Chichagov, Kutuzov, and Wittgenstein coming together on time in the appointed place would have been so slight that it was next to impossible, as Kutuzov thought, who, on receiving the plan, said that diversions over long distances do not bring the desired results.
Second, it was impossible because, in order to paralyze that force of inertia with which Napoleon’s troops were moving