War And Peace

But at no stage in his war career did this man who was so casual with words ever come out with a single expression that went against the one aim he was working towards throughout all the hostilities. On a number of occasions, under a wide range of circumstances, he did spell out his real thoughts, though evidently with the greatest reluctance and a weary certainty that he was bound to be misunderstood. He first fell out with those around him by being the only person to state that they had won the battle of Borodino, a claim he continued to assert both verbally and in reports and dispatches till the day he died. He was the only one who claimed that the loss of Moscow did not mean the loss of Russia. When Lauriston sued for peace, his reply was, There can be no peace, for this is the will of the people. As the French retreated he was the only one to say that all our manœuvres were pointless, everything would happen on its own better than we could desire, the enemy must be allowed to march to destruction across a ‘golden bridge’, the battles of Tarutino, Vyazma and Krasnoye were totally unnecessary, we must hold something back to reach the frontier with, and he wouldn’t give a single Russian for ten Frenchmen.

And beyond that he alone, this scheming man of the court, as he is commonly portrayed, capable of lying to Arakcheyev to keep the Tsar happy, he, this courtier, was the only man in Vilna willing to risk the Tsar’s displeasure by telling him that taking the war abroad would be a wrong and harmful thing to do.

But words alone would be insufficient proof that he understood the significance of what was happening at the time. His actions, all of them without the slightest exception, were focused on a single aim, and they can be reduced to three: (1) to gather maximum strength for a confrontation with the French; (2) to defeat them; and (3) to drive them out of Russia, minimizing the suffering of the people and the soldiers.

It is he, Kutuzov the ditherer, whose motto, ‘Patience and Time’, never varied, this sworn enemy of precipitate action, who gives battle at Borodino, making fastidious preparations with unheard-of solemnity. It is he, Kutuzov, the man who predicted defeat before the battle of Austerlitz had even started, who now, at Borodino, stands out against the generals and the fact that for the first time in history a victorious army is having to retreat, and defies them all by alone insisting that this has been a victory, not a defeat, and goes on saying it to his dying day. He is the only man, during the long period of retreat, to insist that battle should now be avoided since it is now pointless, the Russians should not go beyond their borders, and no new war should be entered into.

Now that all the events and their consequences lie exposed to our view it is all too easy to grasp their significance, provided we resist the temptation to invest the participating masses with aims that never existed outside the minds of a dozen men.

But how did it happen that this old man, standing alone in the teeth of universal opposition, managed to gauge the popular sense of all that was happening so accurately that he never once deviated from it while he was in charge?

The source of this amazingly intuitive insight into the significance of events as they were unfolding lay in a feeling for the people that filled his heart with rare purity and strength.

It was their recognition of this feeling in him that led the people to flout the will of the Tsar and in such a strange way light upon him, an old man out of favour, as their chosen leader in the national war. And it was this feeling alone that raised him to such an exalted position among men, to heights from which he could exert all his powers as commander-in-chief not towards killing and maiming, but towards saving and sparing them.

This simple, modest, and therefore truly great figure could never fit the false mould invented by history for the European hero, the putative leader of men.

No man is great to his valet because the valet has his own special concept of greatness.

CHAPTER 6