The Russian soldiers did all that could or ought to have been done
o attain an end worthy of the people, and half of them died in doing it. They are not to blame because other Russians, sitting in warm rooms at lome, proposed that they should do the impossible.
All this strange discrepancy between the facts and the accounts of listorians, so difficult to understand to-day, arises simply from this, that he historians wrote the history of the noble sentiments and fine speeches >f various generals, and not the history of the events themselves.
They attach great consequence to the words of Miloradovitch, to the lonours bestowed on this general or that, and the proposal made bv them. 3 ut the question of the fifty thousand men who lay in the hospitals and graveyards does not even interest them, for it does not come within the scope of their researches.
And yet we have but to turn away from researches among the reports ind plans of the generals, and to look into the movements of those hun- Ired thousand men who took direct immediate part in the events; and ill the questions that seemed insoluble before can be readily and cer- ainly explained with extraordinary ease and simplicity.
The plan of cutting off Napoleon and his army never existed save in he imagination of some dozen men. It could not have existed because it vas absurd and could not be carried out.
The people had a single aim: to clear their country of the invaders. That aim was effected primarily of itself, since the French were flying, md all that was necessary was not to check their flight. It was promoted, oo, by the irregular warfare kept up by the people destroying the French irmy piecemeal; and thirdly, by the great Russian army following in the ear of the French, ready to use force in case there were any pause in :heir retreat.
The Russian army had to act as a whip urging on a fleeing animal. \nd the experienced driver knew that it was better to keep the whip •aised as a menace than to bring it down on the creature’s back.
PART XV
I
When a man sees an animal dying, a horror comes over him. What he i himself—his essence, visibly before his eyes, perishes—ceases to exist But when the dying creature is a man and a man dearly loved, then besides the horror at the extinction of life, what is felt is a rending o the soul, a spiritual wound, which, like a physical wound, is sometime mortal, sometimes healed, but always aches and shrinks from contact witl the outer world, that sets it smarting.
After Prince Andrey’s death, Natasha and Princess Marya both alike felt this. Crushed in spirit, they closed their eyes under the menacin' cloud of death that hovered about them, and dared not look life in thi face. Carefully they guarded their open wounds from every rough am painful touch. Everything—the carriage driving along the street, the sum mons to dinner, the maid asking which dress to get out; worse still- words of faint, feigned sympathy—set the wound smarting, seemed ai insult to it, and jarred on that needful silence in which both were trying to listen to the stern, terrible litany that had not yet died away in theiiI ears, and to gaze into the mysterious, endless vistas that seemed for i moment to have been unveiled before them.
Only alone together were they safe from such outrage and pain. The\ said little to one another. When they did speak, it was about the mos trivial subjects. And both equally avoided all mention of anything con nected with the future.
To admit the possibility of a future seemed to them an insult to hi; memory. Still more circumspectly did they avoid in their talk all tha could be connected with the dead man. It seemed to them that what thej had felt and gone through could not be expressed in words. It seemed tq them that every allusion in words to the details of his life was an outrage on the grandeur and holiness of the mystery that had been accomplishec before their eyes.
The constant restraint of speech and studious avoidance of everything that might lead to words about him, these barriers, fencing off on all side: what could not be spoken of, brought what they were feeling even mor<' clearly and vividly before their minds.
But pure and perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joyi From the isolation of her position, as the guardian and foster-mother o her nephew, and independent mistress of her own destinies, Princes:' Marya was the first to be called back to life from that world of mourning in which she lived for the first fortnight. She received letters from he
