Natasha had grown thin and pale, and so weak physically that the state of her health was on everybody’s lips, and this pleased her. Yet sometimes she had sudden feelings of dread, not just of dying but of being ill and feeble, and losing her looks. Sometimes she would catch herself examining her bare arm, marvelling at its thinness, or getting up in the morning, glancing in the mirror at her face, and finding it pitifully pinched and drawn. This was how things had to be, she felt, yet she was left with a feeling of sadness and dread.
One day she ran upstairs too quickly, and stood gasping for breath at the top. Her immediate and instinctive reaction was to invent some excuse for going back downstairs so she could run up again, watching how she did and testing her strength.
On another occasion her voice cracked as she called for Dunyasha, so she called her again, even though she could hear her coming; she used her deepest voice, the one normally reserved for singing, and listened to how it sounded.
What she did not know, and would never have believed, was that though her soul seemed to have been grown over with an impenetrable layer of mould, some delicate blades of grass, young and tender, were already pushing their way upwards, destined to take root and send out living shoots so effectively that her all-consuming grief would soon be lost and forgotten. The wound was healing from inside.
At the end of January Princess Marya left for Moscow, and at the count’s insistence Natasha went with her to consult the doctors.
CHAPTER 4
After the engagement at Vyazma, where Kutuzov had not managed to contain his troops’ burning desire to rout the enemy, isolate them and so on, the onward march of the fleeing French and the fast-chasing Russians continued as far as Krasnoye without any pitched battle. The pace was so fast that the pursuing Russian army couldn’t catch up with the French, the horses of the cavalry and artillery kept falling by the wayside, and any intelligence concerning the movements of the French was always unreliable.
The Russian soldiers were so exhausted by more than twenty-five miles a day of constant marching that they couldn’t go any faster.
To appreciate the degree of exhaustion suffered by the Russian army all we have to do is take in the full meaning of one simple fact: the Russians lost no more than five thousand dead and wounded on the long march from Tarutino, and barely a hundred were taken prisoner, yet the army that set out with a hundred thousand men had been reduced to fifty thousand by the time it got to Krasnoye.
The speed of the Russian pursuit had the same kind of devastating effect on the Russian army as the flight of the French had on theirs, the only difference being that the Russian army was moving freely, without the threat of annihilation that hung over the French, and any sick stragglers of the French fell into enemy hands, whereas Russian stragglers found themselves on home ground among their own people. The main reason for the reduction in Napoleon’s army was the sheer speed of their retreat, conclusive proof of which is provided by a corresponding reduction in the Russian army.
As before at Tarutino and Vyazma, Kutuzov (unlike the Russian generals in Petersburg, and also in the army) did everything in his power to concentrate on not getting in the way of the disastrous French retreat, indeed positively encouraging it, and slowing the pace of his own army.
Apart from the increasingly apparent exhaustion of the men and the immense losses caused by the sheer speed of their movement, Kutuzov was presented with another reason for slowing down and waiting to see how things turned out. The object of the Russian army was to pursue the French. The route taken by the French was uncertain, which meant that the more closely our men followed on the heels of the French, the more miles they covered. Only by following at a fair distance could they take short cuts and iron out the ziz-zags performed by the French. All the skilful manœuvres proposed by the generals were based on moving the troops on ever-longer forced marches, whereas the only sensible aim would have been to shorten them. So this was the one aim that Kutuzov concentrated on all the way from Moscow to Vilna, not casually, not in fits and starts, but with such consistency that he never once lost sight of it.
With all his Russian heart and soul rather than by dint of reason or science Kutuzov knew and felt what every Russian soldier felt: the French were beaten, the enemy had been put to flight, and all they had to do was see them off. He was also at one with his men in appreciating all the terrible demands of that march, an unprecedented undertaking at such speed and at that time of year.
