War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [698]
Third, it was impossible because the military term “to cut off” has no meaning. One can cut off a piece of bread, but not an army. To cut off an army—to bar its way—is quite impossible, because there is always plenty of room for it to go around, and there is the night, during which nothing can be seen, of which military historians could satisfy themselves if only from the examples of Krasnoe and the Berezina. To take a prisoner is quite impossible, unless the one being taken prisoner agrees to it, just as it is impossible to catch a swallow, though you can catch one if it settles on your hand. It is possible to take prisoner someone who surrenders, like the Germans, according to the rules of strategy and tactics. But the French troops quite rightly did not find that suitable, since death from hunger and cold awaited them equally in flight and in captivity.
Fourth, and chiefly, it was impossible because never, as long as the world has existed, has there been a war under such terrible conditions as those in which the war of 1812 took place, and the Russian troops strained all their forces in their pursuit of the French and could not do more without destroying themselves.
In its movement from Tarutino to Krasnoe, the Russian army lost fifty thousand men, sick or fallen behind, which is a number equal to the population of a large provincial town. Half the men dropped out of the army without any battles.
And of this period of the campaign, when troops without boots and warm coats, without sufficient rations, without vodka, for months spending nights in the snow at fifteen degrees of frost; when the day is only seven or eight hours long, and the rest is night, during which discipline can have no influence; when, not as in a battle, in which men enter the realm of death, where there is no longer any discipline, for only a few hours, but when men live for months, fighting every moment with death from hunger and cold; when half the army perishes within a month—of this period of the campaign we are told by historians how Miloradovich was to have made a flanking movement here, and Tormasov there, and how Chichagov was to have moved over there (to move knee-deep in snow), and how so-and-so overran and cut off, and so on, and so forth.
The Russians, dying by half, did all they could do and should have done to achieve an aim worthy of the nation, and are not to blame if other Russian people, sitting in warm rooms, proposed doing what was impossible.
This whole strange, now incomprehensible contradiction between facts and historical descriptions comes only from the fact that the historians who wrote about this event wrote the history of the beautiful feelings and words of various generals, and not the history of the events themselves.
They find very interesting the words of Miloradovich, the decorations received by this or that general, and their own speculations; and the question of those fifty thousand men left in hospitals and graves does not even interest them, because it is not subject to their study.
And yet one need only turn from the study of reports and general plans and look into the movement of those hundreds of thousands of men who took a direct, immediate part in the event, and all the questions that previously seemed insoluble suddenly, with extraordinary ease and simplicity, receive an unquestionable solution.
The aim of cutting off Napoleon and his army never existed, except in the imaginations of several dozen people. It could not exist, because it was senseless, and to achieve it was impossible.
The aim of the people was one: to clear their land of the invasion. That aim was being achieved, first of all, by itself, since the French were running away, and therefore it only followed that this movement should not be stopped. Second, this aim was achieved by the actions of the national war in obliterating the French, and third, by the fact that a large Russian army was following the French, ready to use force in case the movement of the