War And Peace полностью

The Russians fall back through Moscow and end up eighty miles beyond the city; the French reach Moscow and come to a halt. Five weeks pass without so much as a skirmish. The French don’t make a move. Like a wild beast mortally wounded, bleeding and licking its wounds, they stay there in Moscow for five weeks without actually doing anything, and then suddenly, with no new reason for leaving, they are up and off, scurrying down the Kaluga road, with a victory to their credit too, for they win the field after the battle of Maloyaro-slavets, after which they avoid all other confrontations and run off as fast as their legs will carry them, first to Smolensk, then Vilna, the Berezina and beyond.

On the evening of the 26th of August Kutuzov and the whole Russian army were convinced they had won the battle of Borodino. Kutuzov wrote as much to the Tsar. He ordered the troops to prepare for another battle to finish off the enemy, not because he was trying to fool people but because he knew the enemy was beaten, as did anyone who had been in the battle.

But that evening and all the next day one report after another came in, telling of unheard-of losses, the loss of half the army; another battle was a physical impossibility.

There could be no question of going into battle before all the information was in, before the wounded had been picked up, the ammunition stores replenished, the dead counted, new officers appointed to replace those who had been killed, and the men had been given food and time to sleep. Meanwhile, the very next morning after the battle, the French army moved against the Russians, carried along by its own impetus, now accelerating in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from its goal. Kutuzov had wanted to attack that next day, and the whole army wanted to as well. But in order to mount an attack it is not enough to want to do it; there must also be the possibility of doing it, and now there was no such possibility. It was impossible to do anything but fall back a day’s march, after which it was as impossible to do anything but fall back a second and a third day’s march, until finally, on the 1st of September, when the army got to Moscow, despite a growing strength of feeling in the troops, sheer force of circumstances compelled the troops to fall back beyond Moscow. And the troops fell back one last day’s march, abandoning Moscow to the enemy.

Anyone disposed to imagine that campaign strategy and battle-plans are drawn up by the high command the way one of us might do it, sitting in his study poring over a map and working out what he would have done and how he would have done it under the various circumstances of war, must face some awkward questions. Why didn’t Kutuzov do this or that when he was forced to retreat? Why didn’t he dig in somewhere before Fili? Why didn’t he miss out on Moscow and go straight down the Kaluga road? And so on . . . People who think like that forget – or maybe they never knew – the extent to which commanders-in-chief are constrained by circumstances. The circumstances encountered by a commander-in-chief in the field bear no resemblance to any circumstances we may dream up as we sit at home in a cosy study, going over a campaign on the map with a given number of soldiers on either side, in a known locality, and starting out at a specific moment in time. The general never experiences anything like the beginning of an event, which we are always privy to. The general always finds himself in the midst of events as they unfold, which means he is never at any moment in a position to contemplate the full significance of what is taking place. Each event carves out its own significance imperceptibly, moment by moment, and at any point in this gradual and uninterrupted carving-out of events the commander-in-chief finds himself in the very midst of a most complex interplay of intrigue and worry, dependence and authority, planning, advice, threats and trickery; he finds himself constantly called upon to respond to an endless flow of suggestions, all contradictory.