War And Peace

When a man finds himself moving forwards, he never fails to think of a goal to aim at. If he is to walk a thousand miles a man must believe there is something good waiting at the end of the thousand miles. You need the vision of a promised land to keep on moving. Moscow had been the promised land for the French on their way into Russia; on their way out it was home. But home was too far away. A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.’ During this first stage of the journey the resting-place eclipses any idea of the ultimate goal, and all his hopes and desires are focused on that alone. And any impulses manifested in an individual are always magnified in a crowd.

For the French army marching back down the old Smolensk road, the ultimate goal of getting back home was too far away, and the short-term goal, the focus of all their hopes and desires, greatly magnified by the crowd effect, was Smolensk. Not that they expected to find Smolensk teeming with supplies and reinforcements, or that anyone had told them so (on the contrary, the high command and Napoleon himself knew full well there was a shortage of supplies there), but this was the only thing that buoyed them up, kept them moving and enabled them to bear the ills they had. All of them, those who knew and those who didn’t, pulled the wool over their own eyes and looked on Smolensk as a promised land.

Once out on the high road the French fled towards their mythical goal with amazing energy and incredible speed. Apart from the common impulse that brought hordes of Frenchmen together into a single whole and gave them a certain momentum there was something else that held them together – their huge numbers. As with the law of gravity in physics, their very mass, huge as it was, attracted the men like individual atoms. On they went in their hundreds of thousands, like an entire state, moving with their collective mass.

Every man jack of them shared a single desire: to give himself up and escape from all his present horrors and disasters. But on the one hand, the momentum set up by the general onward drive towards the goal of Smolensk was pulling every individual in the same direction. On the other hand, a whole corps couldn’t possibly surrender to a division, and although the French made the most of every opportunity to separate and find the slightest decent pretext to be taken prisoner, opportunities like these didn’t always arise. They were deprived of such possibilities by sheer numbers, and meanwhile the speed of their densely packed onward movement, with all its associated mass and energy, made it more than difficult for the Russians to stop the French – in fact, it was impossible. No mechanical dismembering of the body could have accelerated beyond a certain limit the process of decomposition that was underway on the inside.

A snowball cannot be melted instantaneously. There is a fixed time limit beyond which no amount of heat can thaw the snow. It works the other way round: the more heat you apply, the harder the snow that is left.

Kutuzov was alone among the Russian generals in his understanding of this principle. Once the flight of the French army had been determined – down the road to Smolensk – the very thing Konovnitsyn had anticipated on the night of the 11th of October started to happen. All the top brass of the Russian army began looking for glory by cutting them off, intercepting, taking prisoners, overrunning the French. They were all spoiling for a fight.

Kutuzov alone used all his powers (and the powers of any commander-in-chief are very limited) to avoid a fight.

He couldn’t have told them what we can say now. He couldn’t have asked them what purpose was served by fighting, barring their way, losing more of our men and callously finishing the poor devils off, especially when a third of that army melted away of its own accord between Moscow and Vyazma without any battle being fought. But, drawing on his store of aged wisdom and finding something they might be able to get into their heads, he told them about the golden bridge, but they mocked and maligned him, raging and rampaging over the dead beast.

Not far from Vyazma, Yermolov, Miloradovich, Platov and others happened to find themselves near to the French, and they couldn’t resist the urge to isolate two French corps and launch an attack on them. As a way of announcing their intentions to Kutuzov instead of a proper message they sent him a blank piece of paper in an envelope.

And in spite of Kutuzov’s best efforts to restrain the army, the army attacked the French and tried to bar their way. The infantry regiments, so we are told, marched into battle to music and rolling drums in order to slay and be slain in their thousands.