In this way Europe would soon have come to be truly a single people, and everyone who travelled around would always have found himself in one common fatherland. They would have insisted that all rivers be open to everyone, and the seas common to all, and the great standing armies reduced henceforth simply to the role of royal bodyguards.
Back in France, in the bosom of the great, strong, magnificent, peaceful and glorious fatherland, I would have declared its frontiers immutable, any future war purely
Paris would have been the capital of the world, and the French the envy of the nations! . . .
My leisure and my declining years would then have been devoted, in company with the Empress and during the royal apprenticeship of my son, to taking our own horses, like a real couple from the country, on a leisurely tour of every corner of the Empire, receiving complaints, redressing wrongs and scattering monuments and great works on every side.
This man, predestined by Providence for the unhappy, involuntary role of butcher of nations, actually convinced himself that the motivation behind his deeds had been the welfare of nations, and that he could control the destinies of millions, and bring them benefits by the exercise of power. Subsequently he wrote as follows about the Russian war:
Of the four hundred thousand men who crossed the Vistula, half were Austrians, Prussians, Saxons, Poles, Bavarians, Württembergers, Mecklenburgers, Spaniards, Italians, Neapolitans. The Imperial Army, which lived up to its name, was one-third composed of Dutch, Belgians, inhabitants of the Rhineland, Piedmontese, Swiss, Genevese, Tuscans, Romans, inhabitants of the Thirty-second military division, of Bremen, Hamburg, etc. It included barely a hundred and forty thousand French-speakers. The Russian expedition cost France itself less than fifty thousand men. In the various battles during the retreat from Vilna to Moscow the Russian army lost four times as many men as the French army. The burning of Moscow cost the lives of one hundred thousand Russians, who died of cold and hunger in the forests; and finally, in its march from Moscow to the Oder, the Russian army also suffered the inclemency of the season: it numbered no more than fifty thousand men on reaching Vilna, and less than eighteen thousand at Kalisch.
He really imagined that the war with Russia had come about by his will, and the horror of what was done left no impression on his soul. He boldly assumed full responsibility for what had occurred, and in his darkened mind found justification in the fact that of the men who perished in their hundreds of thousands there were fewer Frenchmen than Hessians and Bavarians.
CHAPTER 39
Tens of thousands of men lay dead in various attitudes and different uniforms all over the fields and meadows belonging to the Davydov family and a few crown serfs, fields and meadows where for hundreds of years the peasants of Borodino, Gorki, Shevardino and Semyonovsk had harvested their crops and grazed their cattle. For a couple of acres around the dressing-stations the grass and earth were soaked with blood. Hordes of scared-looking men of various allegiances, wounded and unwounded, were shambling away from the scene, back to Mozhaysk on one side, on the other back to Valuyevo. Other hordes, weary and famished, were being led forward by their officers. There were others too who still stood their ground and had not stopped firing.
The whole plain, which had looked so lovely and bright earlier in the day with all those puffs of smoke and the bayonets glinting in the morning sunshine, was now shrouded in a cloud of dark, damp mist and smoke reeking with the strange, pungent smell of saltpetre and blood. One or two dark clouds had come up, and a fine drizzle was sprinkling the dead, the wounded, the fearful, the weary and the wavering. ‘Good people, that’s enough,’ it seemed to say. ‘Stop and think. What are you doing?’
The men on both sides, exhausted and in need of food and rest, began to have the same kind of doubts about whether they should go on slaughtering each other; hesitation was written on every face, and in every soul the same question asked itself: ‘Why – for whose benefit – should I kill and be killed? Go on, kill who you want, do what you want – I’ve had enough!’ By late afternoon this same thought had dawned on every spirit there. Any minute now all of these men might suddenly see the horror of what they were doing, pack it in and run off anywhere.
