War And Peace полностью

‘That’s our way of doing things, always the wrong way round!’ said the Russian officers and generals after the battle of Tarutino. They still say it nowadays, on the assumption that some idiot has got everything the wrong way round, and that’s something we would never have done. But people who say things like this either don’t know what they are talking about, or they are deliberately fooling themselves. Every single battle – Tarutino, Borodino, Austerlitz – works out differently from the way it was scheduled by the planners. This is inevitable.

The course of a battle is affected by an infinite number of freely operating forces (there being no greater freedom of operation than on a battlefield, where life and death are at stake), and this course can never be known in advance; nor does it ever correspond with the direction of any one particular force.

If there are many forces acting simultaneously and from different directions on a given body, the direction of its motion can never correspond with any one of the forces; it will always turn out to be the middle way, the shortest route, the line defined in mechanics by the diagonal of a parallelogram of the forces involved.

If in the accounts provided by historians, especially the French ones, we find a claim that wars and battles tend to follow a predetermined plan, we can only conclude that the accounts are untrue.

The battle of Tarutino obviously failed to achieve Toll’s purpose, which was to lead the army into action in strict accordance with his troop dispositions; or perhaps that of Count Orlov-Denisov, who wanted to capture Murat; or the destruction of the whole corps at a stroke, which was perhaps the purpose of Bennigsen and others; or the purpose of an individual officer eager to get into battle and cover himself with glory; or the Cossack who was hoping for more loot than he actually got, and so on. But if we regard the purpose of the battle as what was actually achieved, and what was the universal desire of every Russian (the expulsion of the French from Russian soil, and the destruction of their army), it will be perfectly clear that the battle of Tarutino, not in spite of, but because of, its inconsistencies, was exactly what was needed at that point in the campaign. It would be difficult, nay impossible, to imagine any outcome of that battle more expedient than the one that occurred. With only the slightest effort, despite maximum confusion, and at the cost of the most trifling losses, we got the best results of the whole campaign, we saw retreat turn into attack, we exposed the weakness of the French, and gave them a shock, the one thing needed to put Napoleon’s army to flight.

CHAPTER 8

Napoleon enters Moscow after a brilliant triumph, the victory de la Moskowa; there can be no doubt about this since the French emerge as masters of the field. The Russians retreat, abandoning their capital city. Moscow, replete with provisions, arms, ammunition and untold riches, is in Napoleon’s clutches. The Russian army, half the strength of the French, lets a whole month go by without making the slightest effort to attack. Napoleon’s position couldn’t be more brilliant. One would have thought it called for no great genius to fall upon a Russian army of half your strength and finish them off; or negotiate an advantageous peace; or, should they refuse, make a threatening move towards Petersburg; or, if that fails, go back to Smolensk or Vilna; or just stay on in Moscow – in other words, to maintain the brilliant position in which the French army now found themselves. To do all this it was only necessary to take the simplest and easiest of steps: prevent the soldiers from looting, prepare winter clothing, of which Moscow had enough for the whole army, and requisition provisions on a regular basis – according to French historians there was enough food in Moscow to feed the entire army for more than six months. Napoleon, that genius of geniuses who, according to the historians, enjoyed control of his army, did none of these things.