War And Peace

But as for cutting off the enemy’s retreat – nobody was cut off or overrun. And the French army, more united than ever because of the danger, continued on its disastrous journey to Smolensk, melting away steadily as it went.

PART III

CHAPTER 1

The battle of Borodino, along with the subsequent occupation of Moscow and the flight of the French without further conflict, is one of the most instructive phenomena in history.

Historians agree that the external activity of states and peoples when they are at odds with each other finds an outlet in warfare, and that the political power of states and peoples waxes or wanes in direct proportion to success or failure on the battlefield.

We may find it strange when history describes the process by which some king or emperor falls out with another king or emperor, raises an army, fights and wins a battle against the enemy, killing three, five or ten thousand men, and thus subjugates a state and a whole nation running to millions; we may find it hard to understand how the defeat of an army, a mere hundredth part of a nation’s strength, somehow forces the whole people into submission, yet all the facts of history (as far as we can know history) justify the general belief that the success or failure of one nation’s army against another nation’s army is the cause, or at least a major indication, of the waxing or waning of a nation’s power. An army wins a battle, and the winners’ rights are immediately increased at the expense of the losers’. An army suffers a defeat, and the people are immediately deprived of their rights according to the magnitude of defeat, and if defeat is total, they fall into total submission. It has been like this (history would have us believe) from ancient times right up to the present day. All of Napoleon’s earlier wars serve to confirm this principle. As the Austrian armies went down to defeat, Austria was more and more deprived of her rights, while the rights and power of France grew and grew. French victories at Jena and Auerstadt destroyed Prussia as an independent state.

Then suddenly, in 1812, the French gained a victory just outside Moscow. Moscow was taken, yet subsequently, with no more battles being fought, it was not Russia that ceased to exist, but the six-hundred-thousand-strong French army, and then Napoleonic France itself. Any stretching of the truth to accommodate the laws of history by claiming that it was the Russians who won the day at Borodino, or that after Moscow there were other battles that destroyed Napoleon’s army, is out of the question.

After the French victory at Borodino there were no more general engagements, not even a skirmish of any significance, yet the French army ceased to exist. What is the meaning of this? If this example had come from the history of China we could have labelled it ‘unhistorical’ (the sort of thing historians fall back on when the facts don’t fit). If it had been a small-scale event with only a few troops involved, we might have treated it as an exception. But our fathers watched it happen with their own eyes; for them and their country it was a matter of life and death. This war was on a larger scale than any that we know of.

The aftermath of the 1812 campaign, from Borodino to the final expulsion of the French, proved that the winning of battles does not necessarily lead to conquest, and may not be a reliable indication of conquest. It proved that the determining force in the destiny of nations lies not in successful military leaders, nor even armies and battles; it lies somewhere else.

French historians, describing the situation of the French troops before they marched out of Moscow, claim that everything was all right with the Great French Army except for the cavalry, artillery and transport, and a shortage of forage for the horses and cattle. This was a calamity that couldn’t be helped because the peasants in the surrounding countryside were burning their hay rather than hand it over to the French.

Victory did not lead to the usual results, because your Russian peasants, Karp and Vlas, hardly the personification of heroic behaviour, came into Moscow on their carts to grab what they could once the French had gone, and countless numbers of others like them decided not to bring their hay to Moscow, but burn it instead.