At the Fili council the idea uppermost in the minds of the Russian high command was the blindingly obvious course of retreat straight down the road to Nizhny Novgorod. Evidence of this can be seen in the council’s majority vote in favour of this route, and especially the commander-in-chief’s famous conversation afterwards with Lanskoy, the head of supplies. Lanskoy reported to the commander-in-chief that the main army stores were stockpiled along the river Oka in the provinces of Tula and Kazan, and if they retreated down the Nizhny road the army would be cut off from its supplies by the broad river, which couldn’t be crossed in the early winter. This was the first signal of the need to abandon the route that had at first seemed the most natural one to take – retreat down the Nizhny road. The army was steered further south, down the Ryazan road, closer to its supplies. As time went by, the inactivity of the French, who actually lost sight of the Russian army, together with the worrying need to defend the ordnance factory at Tula, and especially the advantage of going in the direction of their own supplies, pushed the army even further south, down the Tula road. As they made their way in one desperate lunge over to the Tula road beyond the Pakhra, the generals of the Russian army were intending to call a halt at Podolsk. They never gave a thought to stopping at Tarutino. But our army was forced even further south by countless other developments, including the re-emergence of the French troops (who really had lost them), new battle plans and, most importantly, the availability of generous supplies in Kaluga, and they switched again from the Tula to the Kaluga road and marched on to Tarutino, right in the middle of their own supply lines. Just as there is no precise answer to the question, ‘When was Moscow abandoned?’ it is impossible to say exactly when the decision was taken to move the army to Tarutino, or who took it. It was only when the army had got there, impelled by a boundless variety of infinitesimally small forces, that people began to convince themselves this was what they had wanted and predicted all along.
CHAPTER 2
The famous flanking manœuvre comes down to this: the Russian army had been retracing its steps in full retreat, and when the French stopped attacking, they deviated from the straight line they were following, saw they were not being pursued and moved off naturally in a new direction, attracted that way by the availability of plentiful supplies.
If we imagine, not generals of genius in charge of the Russian army, but a leaderless army acting alone, even that kind of army would have had no alternative but to head back towards Moscow, coming round in a big arc through the richest countryside to an area where maximum supplies were available.
So natural was this switching across from the Nizhny road to the Ryazan, Tula and Kaluga roads that this was the very direction taken by looting stragglers from the Russian army, and the very direction insisted on by the authorities in Petersburg for Kutuzov’s next move. At Tarutino Kutuzov received what amounted to a reprimand from the Tsar for moving the army to the Ryazan road, and he was ordered into the very position across from Kaluga which he had taken up by the time the Tsar’s letter reached him.
The Russian army reacted like a billiard ball: recoiling in the direction imparted by the shock of the whole campaign and particularly the battle of Borodino, the army absorbed the energy of the collision, encountered no further shocks and simply rolled away into the most natural position.
Kutuzov’s merit had nothing to do with military genius, or what they call strategic manœuvring; his merit was to have been the only person to grasp the full significance of what had happened. He was the only one who grasped the significance of the French army’s lack of activity; he was the only one who kept on insisting they had won the battle of Borodino; he – the commander-in-chief who might have been expected to be thirsting for battle – was the only one who did everything in his power to restrain the Russian army from rushing into futile encounters.
The wild beast wounded at Borodino lay around where the fleeing huntsman had left him, but whether it was alive, and whether it still had any strength and was lying low, the huntsman didn’t know. Suddenly a moan came from the creature. The moan from the wounded beast (the French army) that gave away the secret of its hopeless plight was the decision to send Lauriston to Kutuzov’s camp with overtures for peace.
Napoleon, with his certainty that the right thing to say was not the right thing to say but the first thing that came into his head, wrote to Kutuzov the first words that came into his head, and these happened not to make any sense. They went as follows:
Monsieur le Prince Kutuzov [he wrote],
I am sending one of my aides to discuss with you various topics of interest.
