The third point, most difficult of all to understand, is that students of history seem intentionally to refuse to see that this march cannot be ascribed to any one man, that no one foresaw it at any time, that, like the retreat to Fili, the manoeuvre was, in reality, never conceived of by any one in its entirety, but arose step by step, incident by incident, moment by moment from a countless multitude of the most diverse circumstances, and is only conceived of in its entirety, when it is an accomplished fact, and has become the past.
At the council at Fili the accepted idea among the Russians—the course taken for granted in fact—was retreat in a direct line back, that is, along the Nizhni road. Evidence of this is that the majority of votes at the council were for adopting this course, and the commander-in-chief’s famous conversation after the council with Lansky, the head of the commissariat department, is an even more striking proof of it. Lansky submitted to the commander-in-chief that the chief supplies for the army were stored along the Oka, in the Tula and Kazan provinces, and that if
they retreated along the Nizhni road, the army would be cut off from its supplies by the broad river Oka, across which transport in the early winter was impossible. This was the first proof of the necessity of departing from the course that had at first seemed the most natural one, the retreat along the Nizhni road. The army kept more to the south along the Ryazan road, closer to its supplies. Later on the inactivity of the French, who positively lost sight of the Russian army, anxiety for the defence of the Tula arsenal, and above all, the advantage of being near their supplies led the army to turn even more to the south, to the Tula road. After crossing by a forced march behind Pahra to the Tula road, the generals of the Russian army intended to remain at Podolsk, and had no idea of the Tarutino position. But an infinite number of circumstances, among them the reappearance of French troops on the scene, and plans for giving battle, and most of all, the abundance of supplies in Kaluga, led our army to turn even more to the south, and to pass from the Tuia to the Kaluga road to Tarutino, a central position between their lines of communication with their supplies. Just as it is impossible to answer the question at what date Moscow was abandoned, it is impossible too to say precisely when and by whom it was decided to move the army to Tarutino. It was only after the army, through the action of innumerable infinitesimally small forces, had been brought to Tarutino, that people began to protest to themselves that that was the course they had desired, and had long foreseen as the right one.
II
The famous oblique movement consisted simply in this. The Russian troops, which had been retreating directly back from the French, as soon as the French attack ceased, turned off from that direction, and seeing they were not pursued, moved naturally in the direction where they were drawn by the abundance of supplies.
If we imagine, instead of generals of genius at the head of the Russian army, an army acting alone, without leadership of any kind, such an army could have done nothing else but move back again towards Moscow, describing a semicircle through the country that was best provided with necessaries, and where supplies were most plentiful.
So natural was this oblique movement from the Nizhni to the Ryazan, Tula, and Kaluga road, that that direction was the one taken by the flying bands of marauders from the Russian army, and the one which the authorities in Petersburg insisted upon Kutuvoz’s taking. At Tarutino Kutuzov received what was almost a reprimand from the Tsar for moving the army to the Ryazan road, and he was directed to take up the very position facing Kaluga, in which he was encamped at the time when the Tsar’s letter reached him.
After recoiling in the direction of the shock received during the whole campaign, and at the battle of Borodino, the ball of the Russian army,
as the force of that blow spent itself, and no new blow came, took the direction that was natural for it.
Kutuzov’s merit lay in no sort of military genius, as it is called, in no strategic manoeuvre, but in the fact that he alone grasped the significance of what had taken place. He alone grasped even then the significance of the inactivity of the French army; he alone persisted in maintaining that the battle of Borodino was a victory; he alone—the man who from his position as commander-in-chief might have been expected to be the first to be eager for battle—he alone did everything in his power to hold the Russian army back from useless fighting.
