War And Peace

During this phase of the campaign soldiers went without boots or fur-lined coats, they were on depleted rations with no vodka, they camped out every night in the snow month after month when the temperature stood at fifteen below, there were only seven or eight hours of daylight, and the rest was night-time, when discipline goes by the board, and men went in fear of death (which again put them beyond discipline) not for a few hours, as in battle, but for months on end, struggling every moment against cold and starvation. And it is this phase of the campaign, when half the army perished in a single month, that historians refer to when they claim that Miloradovich ought to have executed a flanking manœuvre in one direction, and Tormasov in another, while Chichagov ought to have transferred his forces to such-and-such a place (knee-deep in snow, of course), and so-and-so ‘destroyed the French opposition’, somebody else ‘cut them off’, and so on and so forth.

The Russian soldiers did everything they could or should have done to achieve an aim worthy of the people, and half of them died in the attempt. It is hardly their fault if other Russians, at home in the warmth, kept coming out with proposals for them to achieve the impossible.

This curious lack of correspondence, which we now find incomprehensible, between the facts as they were and the way they have gone down in history, arises purely and simply from the tendency of historians writing about this event to describe the history of various generals, with their noble sentiments and splendid words, rather than the history of the events themselves.

They set great store by things said by Miloradovich, honours conferred on this or that general and the propositions they all put forward, but they completely ignore the question of fifty thousand men left behind in hospitals and graves, claiming that this issue is beyond the scope of their research.

Meanwhile, all we have to do is take a break from researching the reports and plans of the generals and look into the movements of those hundred thousand men who were directly involved in the events themselves, and all the apparently insoluble questions can be resolved once and for all with extraordinary ease and simplicity.

The plan of isolating Napoleon and his army never existed outside the imagination of a dozen men. It couldn’t have existed because it was absurd and impracticable.

The people had only one aim: to rid their country of the invading army. This aim was in the process of being achieved quite independently, since the French were running away, and all they had to do was not get in the way of the retreat. That was the first point. Secondly, this aim was in the process of being achieved because of the action of the guerrilla forces that were gradually destroying the French, and thirdly, a big Russian army was following close behind the French, ready to resort to force if anything held up their retreat.

The Russian army had to act like a whip used against an animal in full flight. Any driver worth his salt knew it was better to keep the whip in the air and use it as a threat than to lash the running animal about the head.

PART IV

CHAPTER 1

When a man sees an animal dying he is seized with horror. What he himself consists of, his own substance, is being visibly destroyed, ceasing to exist before his very eyes. But when the dying creature is a man, and a man deeply loved, there is more to it than the horror experienced at the extinction of life: it feels like a laceration, a spiritual wound, which, like a physical wound, may heal up or may prove fatal, but it always hurts and it shrinks away from any abrasive external contact.

After Prince Andrey’s death Natasha and Princess Marya both felt like this. Feeling totally demoralized, they winced and shrank away from the menacing cloud of death that hovered above them, and they could not bring themselves to look life in the face. They shielded their open wounds with great care from any rough and painful contact. Everything – a carriage driving quickly down the street, a summons to dinner, a maid asking which dress to put out; worse still, any perfunctory and obviously insincere expression of sympathy – would set the wound hurting again; it would seem like an affront, an intrusion into that silence which both of them needed as they strove to listen to the harsh and terrible chorus still ringing in their minds. It would set up a barrier between them and the deep mysteries and endless vistas that had briefly opened before them.

The only time they felt safe from such outrage and pain was when they were alone together. Not that they said much. When they did speak, it was about the most trivial things. And both of them in equal measure avoided any reference to the future.