‘Ha, ha, ha!’ laughed Pierre. And he talked to himself out loud. ‘The soldier wouldn’t let me through. They’ve taken me and locked me up. They keep me prisoner. Me?
A man got up and came over to see what this strange, big fellow was laughing about all by himself. Pierre stopped laughing, got to his feet and walked away from the inquisitive intruder, taking a good look round.
The vast makeshift camp that seemed to go on for ever had been abuzz with the sounds of fires crackling and men talking, but now it was settling down. The red camp-fires were burning down and going out. The full moon stood high in the limpid sky. Far away forests and fields that had been invisible beyond the confines of the camp were now coming into sight. And out there beyond the forests and fields lay all the shimmering, beckoning distance of infinity. Pierre glanced up at the sky and the play of the stars receding into the depths. ‘And it’s all mine, and it’s all within me, and it all adds up to
He smiled as he walked back to bed down with his companions.
CHAPTER 15
At the beginning of October another messenger came to Kutuzov from Napoleon bearing overtures for peace in a letter purporting to have been written from Moscow, though in fact Napoleon was slightly ahead of Kutuzov down the old Kaluga road. Kutuzov’s response was the same as before, when Lauriston had been the messenger: peace was out of the question.
Soon after this a report came in from Dorokhov’s guerrilla army to the left of Tarutino claiming that French troops had been spotted at Fominsk, troops belonging to Broussier’s division, which was cut off from the rest of the army and could be easily destroyed. The soldiers and officers were spoiling for a fight. The staff generals, buoyed up by the memory of an easy victory at Tarutino, urged Kutuzov to act on Dorokhov’s proposal. Kutuzov could see no reason to go on the attack. The inevitable compromise was decided on, and a small detachment was sent to Fominsk to attack Broussier.
By a strange turn of events this task, which would turn out to be both difficult and highly significant, was entrusted to Dokhturov, a modest little general, nobody’s idea of a master planner or a regimental commander, who dashed around showering military crosses on batteries, and such like, a man looked on and spoken of as indecisive and ineffective, even though in every Russian war against the French, from Austerlitz to the year 1813, we always find him taking command where the situation is at its toughest. At Austerlitz he was the last to abandon the Augezd dam, and he rallied the regiments, saving what he could from flight and disaster when there were no other generals left in the rearguard. Stricken with fever, he marched twenty thousand men over to Smolensk to defend the town and take on the whole of Napoleon’s army. Once there, he had barely nodded off at the Molokhov gate, shivering with fever, when he was woken up by the roar of a cannonade directed against Smolensk, and he held the city for a whole day. At Borodino, with Bagration killed and nine-tenths of our left flank lying dead, and the full fire of the French artillery raining down on them, it is our indecisive and ineffective Dokhturov who is sent there by a Kutuzov only too anxious to make up for sending the wrong man in the first place. Off he goes, the quiet little Dokhturov, and Borodino ends up as the greatest glory in Russian military history with many of its heroes celebrated in poetry and prose, but scarcely a word about Dokhturov.
So Dokhturov is now sent to Fominsk, and then to Maloyaroslavets, where the French are engaged for the last time, and where, quite clearly, the final downfall of the French army really begins. And once again we have many accounts of heroes and geniuses at this point in the campaign, but of Dokhturov nothing – a few words at the most, and those of faint praise. The silence surrounding Dokhturov is the clearest endorsement of his merit.
It is natural for a man who doesn’t understand how a machine works to imagine, when he sees it in action, that a chip that has fallen in by accident and is now jumping about and stopping things working properly is the most important part of the whole mechanism. Anyone who doesn’t understand the construction of the machine cannot conceive that this chip is just jamming up the works and reining them, unlike one little cog-wheel, spinning away quietly, which is one of the most essential parts of the machine.
