Yesterday evening, on the last stage of the march, an order had been received: the commander-in-chief would inspect the regiment on the march. The wording of the order was not quite clear to the commanding officer, leaving open the question of whether or not the men should be in battle dress or in full dress uniform. It was decided after consultation with the battalion commanders to present the regiment in full dress; as they say, better to bow too low than not low enough. And after marching twenty-five miles the men had been kept up all night mending and cleaning, while the staff officers checked numbers and gave orders. By morning the regiment, a straggling shambles on the eve of the last march, looked like an orderly formation of two thousand men, everyone knowing his place and his duty, buttons firm and straps tight, everything spick and span and gleaming. And not only on the surface; if it should occur to the commander-in-chief to check underneath the uniform he would see that every man was wearing a clean shirt, and in every knapsack he would find the regulation number of articles, the complete soldier’s ‘soap and sewing kit’. There was only one thing that no one could be happy with – their foot-gear. More than half the boots had holes in them. This was no fault of the commanding officer; in spite of repeated demands the Austrian authorities had left him under-supplied, and the regiment had now marched over seven hundred miles.
The regimental commander was an ageing ruddy-faced general with grizzled whiskers and eyebrows, rather portly, broader from front to back than from side to side. His uniform was brand new and still nicely creased, with great big golden epaulettes which wouldn’t lie down properly on his big shoulders. He had the air of a man who was happily fulfilling one of life’s most solemn duties. He paraded up and down the front rank and as he did so his body quivered and his back was arched. Here was a general unmistakably proud of his regiment, happy with it and serving it with all his energy and spirit. Even so, his quivering walk seemed to suggest that his personal interests extended well beyond the military to include good society and the fair sex.
‘Well now, my good Mikhail Mitrich,’ he said, addressing one of the battalion commanders who had stepped forward with a smile on his face. (They were clearly in good spirits, both of them.) ‘Last night kept us on our toes, didn’t it? . . . Still, the regiment’s not too bad now . . . Must be one or two worse than ours, eh?’
The major understood this ironical banter and he laughed.
‘Fit for the best parade ground, even Tsaritsyn Field.’2
‘What’s that?’ said the commander.
Two riders had come into view down the road from the town where signalmen had been posted. They were an aide-de-camp with a Cossack riding along behind him. The aide had been sent from staff headquarters to confirm what had not been clearly stated in the previous order, that the commander-in-chief wished to inspect the regiment just as it was on the road – in greatcoats, carrying rucksacks and with no special preparation. A member of the Hofkriegsrath from Vienna had come to Kutuzov the previous day with a proposal, nay a demand, that he proceed as soon as possible to join forces with the army of Archduke Ferdinand and General Mack. Kutuzov considered this inadvisable, and now, as part of his supporting argument, he wanted to demonstrate to the Austrian general the pitiable condition the troops were in after marching all the way from Russia. With this in mind he intended to ride out and meet them on the road: the worse the regiment looked, the more delighted the commander-in-chief would be. The aide was not privy to all the details, but he did communicate the commander-in-chief’s categorical insistence that the men be in greatcoats and marching order, and that anything other than that would incur his displeasure.
At these words the commanding officer’s head sank down; he gave a shrug, and flung up his arms with some passion.
‘Now we’ve done it!’ he said. ‘Mikhail Mitrich, I told you “on the march” meant dressed in greatcoats,’ he rebuked the major. ‘Oh, my God!’ he added, but then he stepped forward resolutely. ‘Company captains!’ he roared in a voice well used to bawling commands. ‘Sergeant-majors! . . . When will his Excellency be here?’ he asked, turning to the aide with an expression of obsequious deference that was really meant for the person he was referring to.
‘In an hour’s time, I believe.’
‘Have we time to change?’
‘I couldn’t say, General . . .’
