War And Peace

But the generals, especially the non-Russian ones, out for glory, hoping to dazzle the world by capturing the odd duke or king for some obscure reason – these generals believed that now, the very moment when any battle would have been a senseless and disgusting spectacle, was a good time to go on the attack and bring somebody down. Kutuzov responded with nothing more than a shrug when they paraded before him one after another with their plans involving new manœuvres to be executed by ill-shod, badly clothed, half-starved soldiers whose numbers had been halved in a single month without any fighting, and who, even if the chase that was under way had the best possible outcome, would have had further to go before they got to the frontier than the distance they had already covered.

This would-be dash for glory by manœuvring, routing the foe and cutting them off came to the fore whenever the Russian army happened to stumble across the French.

This is what happened at Krasnoye, where instead of finding one of the three French columns as expected, they ran into Napoleon in person accompanied by sixteen thousand troops. Despite Kutuzov’s best efforts to avoid this disastrous confrontation and keep his men safe, for three solid days at Krasnoye the exhausted soldiers of the Russian army went about the systematic slaughter of the scattered mobs of French soldiers.

Toll wrote his usual disposition: ‘First column to advance to this spot . . .’ and all the rest. As always, nothing took place in accordance with this disposition. From the hill-top Prince Eugene of Württemberg kept up a barrage of fire on the French hordes as they scurried by, and asked for reinforcements that never came. The French used the hours of darkness to disperse and find a way round the Russians by slinking through the woods, after which anyone who could struggled on down the road.

Miloradovich, famous for telling the world he hadn’t the slightest interest in the domestic arrangements of his detachment, a man who could never be found when he was wanted, the self-styled ‘chevalier beyond fear and reproach’ who was always ready for a parley with the French, wasted a lot of time sending messengers over with demands for surrender and carried out none of the orders received.

‘Have that column with my compliments, boys,’ said he, riding over to his men and pointing out the French to his cavalry. And the cavalrymen applied spur and sabre to skinny nags that could hardly move, badgered them to something like a trot, and with a huge effort managed to reach the gift-wrapped column, which is to say a mob of frozen, numb, starving Frenchmen. Whereupon all the men in the column laid down their arms and surrendered, something they had been longing to do for many a long week.

At Krasnoye twenty-six thousand prisoners were taken, along with hundreds of field-guns and a kind of stick that was promptly dubbed a ‘marshal’s baton’, and then the arguments started, to determine who had covered himself with the greatest glory. They were well pleased, though there was some regret at the failure to capture Napoleon or some marshal of heroic standing, for which they blamed one another, and Kutuzov in particular.

These men, carried away by their passions, were nothing more than the blind executors of the saddest law of necessity; but they saw themselves as heroes, and mistook their doings for achievements of the highest virtue and honour. They kept on blaming Kutuzov, claiming that from the outset he had prevented them from conquering Napoleon, he thought of nothing but the comforts of the flesh, he had delayed leaving the Linen Mills because he was nice and comfortable there, he had stopped the advance at Krasnoye out of sheer panic when he heard Napoleon was there, you might almost think he was in league with Napoleon, he had been suborned by him (see Sir Robert Wilson’s Diary),¹ and so on and so forth.

As if it was not enough for contemporaries, carried away by their passions, to have spoken along these lines, posterity and history have labelled Napoleon ‘a great man’, and as for Kutuzov, foreign writers have him down as a crafty debauchee and feeble old courtier; whereas Russians see him as a rather nondescript character, a kind of puppet with the sole virtue of having a good Russian name . . .

CHAPTER 5

In 1812 and 1813 Kutuzov was openly accused of bungling. The Tsar was dissatisfied with him. And a recent history^b inspired by promptings from on high, presents Kutuzov as a lying, scheming man of the court, frightened by the very name of Napoleon, whose bungling at Krasnoye and the Berezina deprived the Russian army of glory through total victory over the French.