The French attributed the burning of Moscow to Rostopchin and his ‘ferocious patriotism’; the Russians to French barbarism. In point of fact, there never has been, and never could be, any satisfactory explanation of the burning of Moscow, not in terms of attributing responsibility to any one person or group of people. Moscow burnt because she found herself in a situation in which any town of wooden construction was bound to burn, whether or not it had a hundred and thirty pretty useless fire-appliances at its disposal. Once her inhabitants had gone away Moscow was bound to burn, just as a pile of wood-shavings is bound to catch fire if you scatter sparks all over it for days on end. A town of wooden buildings where something catches fire almost every day during the summer, even when the owners are still there and the police are at hand, is sure to burn when the property-owners have gone away and been replaced by pipe-smoking soldiers who use Senate House chairs as firewood in Senate Square and cook themselves a meal twice a day. Even in peace-time whenever troops are billeted in villages the number of fires in the district goes up straightaway. How much greater the likelihood of fire in an abandoned town built of wood and occupied by foreign troops! There is no point in blaming it on Rostopchin’s ‘ferocious patriotism’ or French savagery. Moscow was set on fire by men smoking pipes, kitchen stoves and camp-fires, by the careless behaviour of enemy soldiers living in houses they didn’t own. If there was any arson (which is very doubtful because no one had any reason to go round starting fires, and in any case that is a tricky business and also very dangerous), we cannot claim this as the real cause because the same thing would have happened without it.
However convenient it may have been for the French to blame the ferocious Rostopchin, and for the Russians to the blame that villain Napoleon, or at a later date to hand the heroic torch to their patriot peasantry, we cannot hide the fact that there could never be one single reason behind the fire, because Moscow was as certain to burn as any village, factory or house abandoned by its owners and taken over by strangers to live in and cook their porridge. Yes, it is true that Moscow was burnt by its inhabitants, but it was burnt by those who went away rather than those who stayed behind. Moscow was not like Berlin, Vienna and other cities that emerged unscathed from the enemy occupation. The difference was that her inhabitants, instead of welcoming the French with the keys of the city and the traditional bread and salt, preferred to walk away.
CHAPTER 27
It was not until the evening of the 2nd of September that the process of absorbing the French into Moscow by spreading out starwise finally reached the district where Pierre was staying.
After two days spent in isolation and unusual circumstances Pierre was in a state bordering on insanity. He was wholly obsessed by a single idea. He didn’t know when or how it had come about, but he was now so completely obsessed that he remembered nothing from the past, and understood nothing of the present. Everything he saw and heard seemed dreamlike as it passed before him.
