War And Peace

‘The Emperor is exceedingly displeased that, in defiance of strict orders to stop all looting, bands of pillaging guardsmen can be seen continually returning to the Kremlin. In the old guards, indiscipline and looting have been worse than ever last night and today. The Emperor notes with regret that soldiers of the elite, appointed to guard his person, who ought to be setting an example to the other ranks, are so lax in their discipline that they have started breaking into cellars and store-rooms prepared for the army. Others have sunk so low they have been ignoring sentries and officers on guard duty and even swearing at them and hitting them.’

‘The grand marshal of the palace complains bitterly [wrote the governor] that despite repeated prohibitions the soldiers continue to obey the call of nature in all the courtyards, and even under the Emperor’s own windows.’

The army, like a herd of cattle running wild and trampling underfoot the very fodder that might have saved them from dying of hunger, was falling apart and getting closer to disaster with every extra day that passed as they stayed on in Moscow.

But it never stirred.

It panicked and ran only when it was suddenly shocked and horrified by the capture of wagon-trains on the Smolensk road and the battle of Tarutino. News of the battle of Tarutino reached Napoleon unexpectedly in mid-parade, and, according to Thiers, filled him with an urge to punish the Russians, and he gave the army the marching orders they had long been clamouring for.

In their flight from Moscow the soldiers took with them everything they had been able to lay their hands on. Even Napoleon took his own personal treasure-trove. Thiers tells us he was shocked to see all those wagons groaning under army loot, but, for all his experience of war, he decided against ordering all the extra wagons to be burnt, as he had done with a marshal’s baggage on the way to Moscow. He took one look at all these carts and carriages filled with soldiers, and said it was all right, these vehicles would come in handy for transporting food and also the sick and the wounded.

The plight of the army was like the plight of a wounded beast that realizes the end is near, but doesn’t know what it’s doing. Studying the subtle manœuvres and general aims of Napoleon and his army from the time they entered Moscow to the moment of their destruction is rather like looking for meaning in the jumping and twitching of a mortally wounded animal. Very often the wounded creature will hear a slight movement and rush towards the shooting huntsman, lurching forward, then back again, hastening its own end. This is what Napoleon was now doing, under pressure from his entire army. Rumours of the battle of Tarutino shocked the wild beast into action, and it rushed headlong towards the shooting, got as far as the huntsman, darted back, then forward again, and eventually, like any wild beast, ran away down a familiar track that happened to be the worst and most disastrous of all ways out.

The Napoleon that comes down to us as the motive force behind this movement (just as primitive people saw the figurehead on the prow of a ship as the motive force driving the ship), the Napoleon who was active at this time was like a child in a carriage who pulls on the straps inside and thinks he is doing the driving.

CHAPTER 11

Early in the morning of the 6th of October Pierre walked out of the shed, turned back and stood in the doorway playing with the lavender-grey mongrel bitch with a long body and short bandy legs that was frisking round him. She lived in their shed, sleeping with Karatayev; now and then she took herself off into town, though she always came back again. She had probably never belonged to anybody, she was nobody’s now, and she didn’t even have a name. The French called her Azor, the story-telling soldier called her Femgalka, but Karatayev called her Greycoat, or sometimes Floppy. She was just a lavender-grey dog, apparently quite unconcerned at having no master, no name, no particular breed, not even a definite colour. She had a fluffy tail that stood up straight in a little round tuft; her bandy legs served her so well she seemed not to need all four of them, because quite often she would gracefully cock a back-leg up, and nip around expertly on three. For her, everything was a source of fun. One moment you would catch her rolling on her back yelping with joy, then you would see her basking in the sunshine, looking all dreamy and solemn, then she was off again, frisking around with a splinter of wood or a bit of straw.