War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [705]
Miloradovich, who used to say that he did not want to know anything about the material affairs of his detachment, who could never be found when he was needed, “chevalier sans peur et sans reproche,”*739 1 as he called himself, and a great lover of parleys with the French, kept sending envoys calling for surrender, and lost time, and did not do what he was ordered to do.
“I make you a gift of that column, lads,” he would say, riding up to the troops and pointing out the French to his cavalrymen. And the cavalrymen, urging on their scrawny, battered, barely moving horses with spurs and sabers, after mighty exertions trotted up to the column given to them, that is, to a crowd of frostbitten, numb-with-cold, and hungry Frenchmen; and the column given to them dropped its weapons and surrendered, something it had long been wanting to do.
At Krasnoe they took twenty-six thousand prisoners, hundreds of cannon, some stick which was called a marshal’s baton, and disputed over who had distinguished himself there, and were pleased with that, but very much regretted that they had not taken Napoleon or at least some hero or marshal, and for that reproached each other and especially Kutuzov.
These people, carried away by their passions, were merely the blind executors of the most grievous law of necessity; but they considered themselves heroes and imagined that what they had done was a most worthy and noble thing. They accused Kutuzov and said that, from the very start of the campaign, he had prevented them from defeating Napoleon, that he thought only about satisfying his passions and did not want to leave Polotnyany Zavody, because he felt comfortable there; that he had stopped moving at Krasnoe, because, having learned of Napoleon’s presence, he was completely at a loss; that it was conceivable that he was in conspiracy with Napoleon, that he had been bribed by him,2 and so on and so forth.
It is not enough that contemporaries, carried away by their passions, spoke this way—Napoleon has been recognized as grand by posterity and history, and Kutuzov, by the foreigners, as a cunning, depraved, feeble old courtier; by the Russians, as something indefinite, a sort of puppet, useful only because of his Russian name…
V
In the years twelve and thirteen, Kutuzov was directly accused of blunders. The sovereign was displeased with him. And in a history written not long ago at the highest injunction, it is said that Kutuzov was a cunning court liar, fearful of the name of Napoleon, who, through his blunders at Krasnoe and the Berezina, deprived the Russian army of the glory of a complete victory over the French.*740
Such is the destiny, not of great men, not of the grands hommes, whom the Russian mind does not recognize, but of those rare, always solitary men who, discerning the will of Providence, submit their personal will to it. The hatred and contempt of the crowd punish these men for their insight into the higher law.
For Russian historians—strange and terrible to say—Napoleon, that most insignificant instrument of history, who never and nowhere, even in exile, displayed any human dignity—Napoleon is the object of admiration and enthusiasm; he is grand. While Kutuzov, a man who, from the beginning to the end of his activity in 1812, from Borodino to Vilno, while always being true to himself in all his acts and words, shows an example uncommon in history of self-denial and awareness in the present of the future significance of the event—Kutuzov seems to them something indefinite and pathetic, and when they speak of Kutuzov and the year twelve, it is as if they are always slightly embarrassed.
And yet it is hard to imagine a historical figure whose activity was so invariably and constantly directed towards one and the same goal. It is hard to imagine a goal more worthy and more concurrent with the will of the whole people. It is harder still to find another example in history in which the goal that the historical figure set for himself was so perfectly attained as the goal towards which the entire activity