War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [704]
To understand the degree of exhaustion of the Russian army, one need only understand clearly the meaning of the fact that, having lost no more than five thousand wounded and killed since Tarutino, and no more than a hundred as prisoners, the Russian army, which had numbered a hundred thousand when it left Tarutino, numbered fifty thousand when it reached Krasnoe.
The swift movement of the Russians after the French had the same disastrous effect on the Russian army as the flight of the French on theirs. The only difference was that the Russian army moved voluntarily, without the threat of destruction which hung over the French army, and that the French sick, lagging behind, remained in the foe’s hands, while the Russian sick remained at home. The chief cause of the diminution of Napoleon’s army was the swiftness of its movement, and the corresponding diminution of the Russian army serves as an unquestionable proof of it.
Kutuzov’s whole activity, as at Tarutino and Vyazma, was aimed only at not stopping, insofar as it was in his power, this movement so destructive for the French (as the Russian generals in Petersburg and in the army wanted to do), but at contributing to it, and at making the movement of his own troops easier.
But, besides that, once the troops had shown the fatigue and enormous losses caused by swiftness of movement, Kutuzov had one more reason for slowing down and waiting. The aim of the Russian army was to follow the French. The path of the French was unknown, and therefore, the more closely our troops followed on the heels of the French, the greater the distance they covered. Only by following at a certain distance could they make shortcuts in the zigzag path the French took. All the skillful maneuvering proposed by the generals was expressed in terms of moving troops and multiplying marches, while the only reasonable goal consisted in diminishing the marches. And it was towards this goal that Kutuzov’s activity was directed throughout the campaign, from Moscow to Vilno—not accidentally, not temporarily, but so consistently that he never once betrayed it.
Kutuzov knew, not by reason or science, but with all his Russian being he knew and felt what every Russian soldier felt, that the French were defeated, that the foe was fleeing and had to be driven out; but along with that he felt, together with the soldiers, all the difficulty of this march, of unheard-of swiftness and at such a time of year.
But to the generals, especially the non-Russian ones, who wished to distinguish themselves, to astonish someone, to take prisoner, God knows why, some duke or king—to these generals it seemed that now, when any battle was both nasty and senseless, was just the right time to give battle and defeat someone or other. Kutuzov merely shrugged his shoulders when presented with projects, one after another, for maneuvers involving those ill-shod, coatless, half-starved soldiers, who in a month, without any battles, had melted away by half, and who, under the best conditions for the continuing flight, would have to cover more space to reach the border than what they had already gone through.
This striving to be distinguished and to maneuver, to overrun and cut off, was especially manifest when the Russian troops ran across the French.
It happened that way at Krasnoe, where they thought they would find one of the three French columns and stumbled onto Napoleon himself with sixteen thousand men. Despite all the means employed by Kutuzov to avoid this disastrous clash and spare his troops, the worn-out men of the Russian army spent three days at Krasnoe finishing off the beaten mob of the French.
Toll wrote a disposition: die erste Kolonne marschiert, and so on. And, as always, everything was done not according to the disposition. Prince Eugene of Württemberg fired from a hill at crowds of Frenchmen running by and called for reinforcements, which did not come. The French, going around the Russians by night, scattered, hid in the forests, and made their