War And Peace

‘They’re men like us,’ said one, snuggling down inside his coat. ‘Even wormwood grows from a root.’

‘God in heaven! Look at all them stars! Means a hard frost.’

And then everybody was silent.

The stars, as if they knew they could do it without being seen, danced across the black sky. Flaring up and dying down, and trembling as they did so, they seemed to be sharing some happy whispered mystery.

CHAPTER 10

The French army was melting away with the regularity of a mathematical progression. And the crossing of the Berezina, about which so much has been written, far from being the decisive episode in the campaign, was only one of the intermediate stages on the army’s road to destruction. On the French side the reason so much has been written about the Berezina is that it was there, at the broken-down bridge across the river, that the disasters raining down on the French in a kind of steady progression were suddenly concentrated in a single moment – a single tragic, never-to-be-forgotten catastrophe. On the Russian side, the reason so much has been made of the Berezina was simply that far away in Petersburg a plan had been devised (by Pfuel, of course) for the capture of Napoleon in a strategic trap on the banks of the Berezina. Everyone was so sure in advance that the trap would work exactly as planned that they were all insistent: it was indeed the crossing of the Berezina that finished off the French. In point of fact, statistics show that in terms of guns and men lost the results of the Berezina were less disastrous to the French than the fighting at Krasnoye.

The sole significance of the Berezina crossing lies in the fact that it proved conclusively and beyond a shadow of doubt the wrongness of all those plans for cutting off the enemy’s retreat, and the rightness of the only possible policy – the one demanded by Kutuzov and the mass of the Russian army – which was to follow on behind the enemy. The horde of French soldiers was fleeing and constantly accelerating as it did so, with all its energies directed towards the attainment of a single goal. It was fleeing unstoppably, like a wounded beast. This was demonstrated not so much by the arrangements that existed for crossing as by what happened at the bridges themselves. When the bridges were broken down, unarmed soldiers, people from Moscow, even women with children who were travelling with the French transport, were all propelled forward by the force of inertia. Instead of surrendering they made a rush for the boats, or plunged into the ice-covered water.

This impulse was a reasonable one. The situation was equally fraught for fugitives and pursuers alike. By sticking with his own kind each fleeing individual might be able to rely on help from his comrades in misfortune, and finding a definite place of his own among them. By surrendering to the Russians he would find himself in the same miserable plight, but lower down the order when it came to the satisfaction of his basic needs. The French didn’t have to wait for incontrovertible evidence that half the prisoners – men that the Russians simply couldn’t handle, however much they wanted to save them – were dying of cold and starvation. They sensed that it couldn’t be otherwise. The most compassionate and pro-French Russian generals, even Frenchmen serving in the Russian army, could do nothing for the prisoners. The French were perishing in the same catastrophe that the Russians themselves were involved in. There could be no question of taking bread and clothing away from our starving, much-needed soldiers to give it to Frenchmen who, although they were not hated, not dangerous, and in no way to blame, were simply superfluous to requirements. Sometimes this was actually done, though it was the exception rather than the rule.

Behind the French lay certain destruction; ahead lay hope. They had burnt their boats; massed flight was their only salvation, and it was on massed flight that the French concentrated all their efforts.

The further they fled the more wretched became the plight of those who remained, especially after the Berezina, which the Russians had set great store by because of the Petersburg plan, and the more virulently the Russian generals railed against each other, and especially against Kutuzov. The assumption was that the failure of the Petersburg plan would be laid at his door, so the dissatisfaction with him, the derision and mockery he had to put up with, became more and more pronounced. Naturally enough, the mockery and derision were always couched in terms of respect, in such terms that made it impossible for Kutuzov even to ask what he stood accused of. They didn’t take him seriously, they submitted their reports and asked for his decisions like men going through the motions of some sad ritual, they winked at one another behind his back, and at every step they did their best to pull the wool over his eyes.