War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [713]
“They’re also people,” one of them said, wrapping himself in his greatcoat. “Even wormwood grows on its root.”
“Ohh! Lord, Lord! What an awful lot of stars! It’ll be freezing cold…” And everything became still.
The stars, as if knowing that no one could see them now, frolicked in the black sky. Now flaring up, now going out, now quivering, they busily whispered among themselves about something joyful but mysterious.
X
The French troops uniformly melted away in a mathematically regular progression. And the crossing of the Berezina, of which so much has been written, was only one of the intermediate steps in the destruction of the French army, and not at all a decisive episode of the campaign. If so much has been written and is being written about the Berezina, that is so on the French side only because, on the broken bridge over the Berezina, the calamities that the French army had formerly been undergoing regularly, here suddenly grouped together in one moment and in one tragic spectacle that stayed in everyone’s memory. On the Russian side, there has been so much talking and writing about the Berezina only because, away from the theater of the war, in Petersburg, a plan was drawn up (by the same Pfuel) for catching Napoleon in a strategic trap on the river Berezina. Everyone was confident that in reality everything would be done exactly as in the plan, and therefore insisted that it was precisely the crossing of the Berezina that destroyed the French. As a matter of fact, the results of the crossing of the Berezina were far less destructive for the French in losses of ordnance and prisoners than Krasnoe, as the numbers show.
The sole significance of the crossing of the Berezina lies in the fact that this crossing proved obviously and unquestionably the fallacy of all the plans for cutting off and the correctness of the sole possible course of action, demanded by Kutuzov and the entire mass of troops—of merely following the enemy. The crowd of the French was running at a constantly increasing force of speed, with all its energy directed at achieving its goal. It ran like a wounded animal, and it was impossible to stand in its way. This was proved not so much by the arrangement of the crossing as by the movement on the bridges. When the bridges were broken down, the unarmed soldiers, the Moscow inhabitants, the women with children who were in the French transport—everyone, borne on by the force of inertia, did not surrender but ran ahead into the boats, into the freezing water.
That impulse was reasonable. The position of both fleers and pursuers was equally bad. Remaining with their own, each of them in his distress hoped for help from his comrades, hoped to occupy a definite place among his own. Surrendering to the Russians, he would be in the same situation of distress, but would stand on a lower step in sharing the satisfaction of the necessities of life. The French did not need to have correct information about the fact that half the prisoners, whom no one knew what to do with, perished of cold and hunger, despite all the desire of the Russians to save them; they sensed that it could not be otherwise. The most compassionate Russian commanders and lovers of the French, even the French in Russian service, could do nothing for the prisoners. The French perished from the distress in which the Russian army found itself. It was impossible to take bread and clothing from hungry and much-needed soldiers in order to give it to the not harmful, not hated, not guilty, but simply unneeded French. Some did so, but that was only an exception.
Behind lay certain destruction; ahead lay hope. The boats were burned; there was no other salvation except joint flight, and all the forces of the French were directed at that joint flight.
The further the French fled, the more pathetic their remnants, especially after the Berezina, in which, owing to the Petersburg plan, special hopes were placed,