War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [707]
If we do not apply to the activity of the masses goals that existed only in the heads of a few dozen persons, it is easy now to understand the significance of the event, because the whole event and its consequences lie before us.
But how was it that this old man, alone, contrary to the opinion of all, could then guess so correctly the significance of the national meaning of the event that, during his whole activity, he never once betrayed it?
The source of this extraordinary power of penetration into the meaning of events taking place lay in that national feeling, which he bore within himself in all its purity and force.
Only the recognition of that feeling in him made the people choose him in such a strange way—him, an old man in disgrace—against the will of the tsar, as representative of the national war. And only that feeling placed him on that loftiest human height, from which he, the commander in chief, directed all his powers, not at killing and destroying people, but at sparing and pitying them.
This simple, modest, and therefore truly majestic figure could not fit into that false form of the European hero, the imaginary ruler of the people, which history has invented.
For a lackey there can be no great man, because a lackey has his own idea of greatness.
VI
The fifth of November was the first day of the so-called battle of Krasnoe. Before evening, already after many disputes and mistakes of the generals, who had not gone where they were supposed to, after the sending out of adjutants with counterorders, when it had already become clear that the enemy was fleeing everywhere, and there could not and would not be any battle, Kutuzov left Krasnoe and rode to Dobroe, where the headquarters had been transferred that day.
The day was clear, frosty. Kutuzov, with an enormous suite of generals, who were displeased with him and whispered behind his back, rode towards Dobroe mounted on his fat white horse. Parties of French prisoners taken that day (seven thousand had been taken), crowded along the road, warming up by fires. Not far from Dobroe, an enormous crowd of ragged prisoners, wrapped and covered up in whatever they could find, buzzed with talk, standing on the road by a long line of unhitched French guns. As the commander in chief approached, the talk ceased, and all eyes were fixed on Kutuzov, who, in his white cap with the red band and a padded greatcoat that hunched up on his stooping shoulders, slowly moved along the road. One of the generals was reporting to Kutuzov about where the guns and prisoners had been taken.
Kutuzov seemed to be preoccupied with something and was not listening to the general’s words. He narrowed his eyes with displeasure and peered attentively and fixedly at the figures of the prisoners, who were a particularly pathetic sight. The greater part of the French soldiers’ faces were disfigured by frostbitten noses and cheeks, and almost all of them had red, swollen, and festering eyes.
One bunch of Frenchmen was standing close to the road, and two soldiers—the face of one was covered with sores—were tearing a piece of raw meat with their hands. There was something terrible and animal-like in the fleeting glance they cast at the passersby and in the spiteful expression with which the soldier with the sores, having glanced at Kutuzov, immediately turned away and went on with what he was doing.
Kutuzov gazed long and attentively at these two soldiers; wrinkling his face still more, he narrowed his eyes and shook his head pensively. In another place he noticed a Russian soldier who was saying something affectionately to a Frenchman, laughing and patting him on the back. Kutuzov again shook his head with the same expression.
“What were you saying? What’s that?” he asked the general, who went on reporting and was drawing the commander in chief’s attention to the captured French standards