War And Peace полностью

But even though the battle was nearing its end and the men could sense all the horror of their actions, even though they would have been glad to stop, they were still in the grip of an inexplicable, mysterious force which kept the surviving gunners – they were down to one in three – running with sweat, filthy with powder and blood, stumbling about and gasping with exhaustion, as they went on bringing up charges, loading the guns, taking aim and lighting the fuses, so that the cannonballs, as fast and as vicious as ever, flew across from both sides to splatter human flesh, keeping the whole ghastly business going – not by the will of man, but by the will of the one who governs men and worlds.

Anyone looking at the disarrayed rear of the Russian army would have said that with one last push from the French the Russian army would have been done for, but anyone looking at the rear of the French army would have said that one last push from the Russians would have finished off the French army. Neither French nor Russians mounted that last push, and the flame of battle burnt slowly down.

The Russians never made the push because they were not attacking the French. At the start of hostilities all they had done was stand across the Moscow road, blocking it off to the French; and here they were at the end of the battle standing their ground just as they had done at the beginning. But even if it had been the aim of the Russians to drive the French back, they could never have mounted this final push, because the Russian troops were shattered, no part of the army had avoided losses during the battle, and the Russians, by standing their ground, had lost one half of their entire army.

As for the French – with fifteen years of military success behind them, confident of Napoleon’s invincibility, happy in the knowledge that they had taken part of the battlefield without losing more than a quarter of their men, and still with a reserve of twenty thousand untouched guardsmen – they could have made this last push with something to spare. The French had attacked the Russian army with the aim of displacing it, and they ought to have made this last push, because, while ever the Russians continued to bar the way to Moscow, their aim had not been achieved, and all their efforts and losses had been in vain. But they did not. Some historians claim that all Napoleon had to do was send in the old guard, and victory would have been assured. To talk about what might have happened if Napoleon had sent his guard in is to talk about spring coming in autumn. It could never have happened. It wasn’t a case of Napoleon choosing not to send the guards in; he could not possibly have done so. Every general, officer and man in the French army knew it could not be done, because the spirit of the army had failed and wouldn’t allow it.

Napoleon wasn’t alone in his nightmare sensation of a mighty arm losing its power; every general, every soldier in the French army, combatants and non-combatants, with all their experience of previous battles (when they had made only one-tenth of the present effort but the enemy had always run away), was equally horrified to encounter an enemy that could lose one half of its strength and still stand its ground with undiminished ferocity. The morale of the attacking French army had been sapped. The victory that was won was not marked by the capture of a few tattered rags on sticks called colours, or by measuring the ground where the troops stood before and after; it was a moral victory – the kind that forces the enemy to acknowledge the moral superiority of his opponent, and his own impotence – and at Borodino that victory was won by the Russians. The French invaders were like a mortally wounded ravening beast that knew its end was near, though it couldn’t stop, any more than the Russian army, half as strong, could have helped giving way. The French army still had just enough impetus to struggle on to Moscow, but there, with no new challenge from the Russian army, it was bound to perish, bleeding to death from the wound sustained at Borodino. The direct consequences of the battle of Borodino were these: Napoleon’s unprovoked flight from Moscow, his return down the old Smolensk road, the destruction of his five-hundred-thousand-strong invading force, and the collapse of Napoleonic rule in France, a country on which, at Borodino, for the very first time, the hand of an opponent stronger in spirit had been laid.

PART III

CHAPTER 1

For the human mind absolute continuity of motion is inconceivable. The laws behind any motion become comprehensible to man only when he breaks that motion down into arbitrarily selected units and subjects these to examination. But at the same time this arbitrary sub-division of continuous motion into discontinuous units is the cause of much human error.