‘Europe would soon in that way have made in fact but one people, and every one, travelling all over it, would always have found himself! in the common fatherland. I should have required all the rivers to be open for the navigation of all; the seas to be common to all; and the great standing armies to be reduced henceforth simply to the bodyguard of the sovereigns.
‘Returning to France, to the bosom of the great, strong, magnificent, tranquil, and glorious fatherland, I should have proclaimed its frontiers immutable, all future war purely defensive, all fresh aggrandisement. anti-national. I should have associated my son in the empire; my dictatorship would have been over, and his constitutional reign would have begun . . .
‘Paris would have been the capital of the world, and the French the envy of the nations! . . .
‘My leisure then and my old age would have been consecrated, in company with the Empress, and during the royal apprenticeship of my son, to visiting in leisurely fashion with our own horses, like a genuine country couple, every corner of the empire, receiving complaints, redress-j ing wrongs, scattering monuments and benefits on all sides.’
He, predestined by Providence to the gloomy, slavish part of executioner of the peoples, persuaded himself that the motive of his acts had: been the welfare of the peoples, and that he could control the destinies 1 of millions, and make their prosperity by the exercise of his power.
‘Of the four hundred thousand men who crossed the Vistula,’ he wrote later of the Russian war^ ‘half were Austrians, Prussians, Saxons, Poles,; Bavarians, Wiirtembergers, Mecklenburgers, Spaniards, Italians, Neapolitans. The Imperial army, properly so-called, was one third composed
of Dutch, Belgians, inhabitants of the Rhineland, Piedmontese, Swiss, Genevese, Tuscans, Romans, inhabitants of the thirty-second military division, of Bremen, Hamburg, etc. It reckoned barely a hundred and forty thousand men speaking French. The Russian expedition cost France itself less than fifty thousand men. The Russian army in the retreat from Vilna to Moscow in the different battles lost four times as many men as the French army. The fire in Moscow cost the lives of one hundred thousand Russians, dead of cold and want in the woods; lastly, in its march from Moscow to the Oder, the Russian army, too, suffered from the inclemency of the season: it only reckoned fifty thousand men on reaching Vilna, and less than eighteen thousand at Kalisch.’
He imagined that the war with Russia was entirely due to his will, and the horror of what was done made no impression on his soul. He boldly assumed the whole responsibility of it all; and his clouded intellect found justification in the fact that among the hundreds of thousands of men who perished, there were fewer Frenchmen than Hessians and Bavarians.
XXXIX
Some tens of thousands of men lay sacrificed in various postures and uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the Davidov family and the Crown serfs, on those fields and meadows where for hundreds of years the peasants of Borodino, Gorky, Shevardino, and Semyonovskoye had harvested their crops and grazed their cattle. At the ambulance stations the grass and earth were soaked with blood for two acres round. Crowds of men, wounded and unwounded, of various arms, with panic- stricken faces, dragged themselves, on one side back to Mozhaisk, on the other to Valuev. Other crowds, exhausted and hungry, were led forward by their officers. Others still held their ground, and went on firing.
Over all the plain, at first so bright and gay with its glittering bayonets and puffs of smoke in the morning sunshine, there hung now a dark cloud of damp mist and smoke, and a strange, sour smell of saltpetre and blood. Storm clouds had gathered, and a drizzling rain began to fall on the dead, on the wounded, on the panic-stricken, and exhausted, and hesitating soldiers. It seemed to say: 'Enough, enough; cease. . . . Consider. What are you doing?’
To the men on both sides, alike exhausted from want of food and rest, the doubt began to come whether they should still persist in slaughtering one another; and in every face could be seen hesitation, and in every heart alike there rose the question: ‘For what, for whom am I to slay and be slain? Slay whom you will, do what you will, but I have had enough!’ This thought took shape towards evening in every heart alike. Any minute all those men might be horror-stricken at what they were doing, might throw up everything and run anywhere.
But though towards the end of the battle the men felt all the horror
772 WAR AND PEACE
