War and Peace (192 page)

It seemed as though now when they had come to a standstill in the midst of the open country, in the cold twilight of the autumn evening, all these men were experiencing the same feeling of unpleasant awakening from the hurry and eager impulse forward that had carried them all away at setting off. Now standing still, all as it were grasped that they knew not where they were going, and that there was much pain and hardship in store for them on the journey.

At this halting-place, the prisoners were even more roughly treated by their escort than at starting. They were for the first time given horseflesh to eat.

In every one of the escort, from the officers to the lowest soldier, could be seen a sort of personal spite against every one of the prisoners, in surprising contrast with the friendly relations that had existed between them before.

This spite was increased when, on counting over the prisoners, it was discovered that in the bustle of getting out of Moscow one Russian soldier had managed to run away by pretending to be seized with colic. Pierre had seen a Frenchman beat a Russian soldier unmercifully for moving too far from the road, and heard the captain, who had been his friend, reprimanding an under-officer for the escape of the prisoner, and threatening him with court-martial. On the under-officer’s urging that the prisoner was ill and could not walk, the officer said that their orders were to shoot those who should lag behind. Pierre felt that that fatal force which had crushed him at the execution, and had been imperceptible during his imprisonment, had now again the mastery of his existence. He was afraid; but he felt too, that as that fatal force strove to crush him, there was growing up in his soul and gathering strength a force of life that was independent of it. Pierre supped on soup made of rye flour and horseflesh, and talked a little with his companions.

Neither Pierre nor any of his companions talked of what they had seen in Moscow, nor of the harsh treatment they received from the French, nor of the orders to shoot them, which had been announced to them. As though in reaction against their more depressing position, all were particularly gay and lively. They talked of personal reminiscences, of amusing incidents they had seen as they marched, and avoided touching on their present position.

The sun had long ago set. Stars were shining brightly here and there
in the sky; there was a red flush, as of a conflagration on the horizon, where the full moon was rising, and the vast, red ball seemed trembling strangely in the grey darkness. It became quite light. The evening was over, but the night had not yet begun. Pierre left his new companions and walked between the camp-fires to the other side of the road, where he had been told that the common prisoners were camping. He wanted to talk to them. On the road a French sentinel stopped him and bade him go back.

Pierre did go back, but not to the camp-fire where his companions were, but to an unharnessed waggon where there was nobody. Tucking his legs up under him, and dropping his head, he sat down on the cold ground against the waggon wheel, and sat there a long while motionless, thinking. More than an hour passed by. No one disturbed Pierre. Suddenly he burst into such a loud roar of his fat, good-humoured laughter, that men looked round on every side in astonishment at this strange and obviously solitary laughter. “Ha, ha, ha!” laughed Pierre. And he talked aloud to himself. “The soldier did not let me pass. They have taken me—shut me up. They keep me prisoner. Who is ‘me’? Me? Me—my immortal soul! ha, ha, ha!… Ha, ha, ha!…” he laughed, with the tears starting into his eyes.

A man got up and came to see what this strange, big man was laughing at all by himself. Pierre left off laughing, got up, walked away from the inquisitive intruder, and looked about him.

The immense, endless bivouac, which had been full of the sound of crackling fires and men talking, had sunk to rest; the red camp-fires burnt low and dim. High overhead in the lucid sky stood the full moon. Forests and fields, that before could not be seen beyond the camp, came into view now in the distance. And beyond those fields and forests could be seen the bright, shifting, alluring, boundless distance. Pierre glanced at the sky, at the far-away, twinkling stars. “And all that is mine, and all that is in me, and all that is I!” thought Pierre. “And all this they caught and shut up in a shed closed in with boards!” He smiled and went to lie down to sleep beside his companions.

Early in October another messenger came to Kutuzov from Napoleon with overtures for peace and a letter, falsely professing to come from
Moscow, though Napoleon was in fact not far ahead of Kutuzov on the old Kaluga road. Kutuzov answered this letter as he had done the first one, brought him by Lauriston; he said that there could be no question of peace.

Soon after this Dorohov’s irregulars, which were moving on the left of Tarutino, sent a report that French troops had appeared at Fominskoe, that these troops were of Broussier’s division, and that that division, being separate from the rest of the army, might easily be cut to pieces. The soldiers and officers again clamoured for action. The staff generals, elated by the easy victory of Tarutino, urged on Kutuzov that Dorohov’s suggestion should be acted upon.

Kutuzov did not consider any action necessary. A middle course, as was inevitable, was adopted; a small detachment was sent to Fominskoe to attack Broussier.

By strange chance this appointment, a most difficult and most important one, as it turned out to be later, was given to Dohturov, that modest little general, whom no one has depicted to us making plans of campaign, dashing at the head of regiments, dropping crosses about batteries, or doing anything of the kind; whom people looked on and spoke of as lacking decision and penetration, though all through the Russian wars with the French, from Austerlitz to the year 1813, we always find him in command where the position is particularly difficult. At Austerlitz he was the last to remain at the ford of Augest, rallying the regiments, saving what he could, when all was flight and ruin, and not a single other general was to be found in the rearguard. When ill with fever, he marched with twenty thousand men to Smolensk to defend the town against the whole of Napoleon’s army. In Smolensk he had only just fallen asleep at the Malahovsky gates in a paroxysm of fever when he was waked by the cannonade of Smolensk, and Smolensk held out a whole day. At Borodino when Bagration was killed, and nine-tenths of the men of our left flank had been slain, and the fire of all the French artillery was turned upon it, Kutuzov made haste to recall another general he had sent by mistake, and sent there no other than Dohturov, who was said to be lacking in decision and penetration. And unpretentious little Dohturov went there, and Borodino became the greatest glory of the Russian arms. And many of its heroes have been celebrated in prose and verse, but of Dohturov hardly a word. Again Dohturov was sent to Fominskoe, and from there to Maley Yaroslavets, the place where the last battle was fought with the French, and where it is plain the final
destruction of the French army really begun. And again many heroes and men of genius are described to us in accounts of this period of the campaign, but of Dohturov nothing is said, or but few words of dubious praise. This silence in regard to Dohturov is the plainest testimony to his merits.

It is natural that a man who does not understand the working of a machine should suppose, when he sees it in action, that a shaving that has fallen into it by chance, and flaps about in it, hindering its progress, is the most important part of the mechanism. Any one who does not understand the construction of the machine cannot conceive that this shaving is only clogging and spoiling it, while the little cog-wheel, which turns noiselessly, is one of the most essential parts of the machine.

On the 10th of October Dohturov had marched halfway to Fominskoe, and halted at the village of Aristovo, making every preparation for exactly carrying out the orders given him. On the same day the whole French army, after reaching in its spasmodic rush as far as Murat’s position, seemingly with the object of giving battle, suddenly, with no apparent cause, turned off to the left to the new Kaluga road, and began marching into Fominskoe, where Broussier had before been alone. Dohturov had under his command at the time only Dorohov’s troops and the two small detachments of Figner and Seslavin.

On the evening of the 11th of October, Seslavin came to the general at Aristovo with a French prisoner of the guards. The prisoner said that the troops that had reached Fominskoe that day were the advance guard of the whole army; that Napoleon was with them; that the whole army had marched out of Moscow five days before. The same evening a house-serf coming from Borovsk brought word that he had seen an immense army entering that town. Dorohov’s Cossacks reported that they had seen the French guards marching along the road to Borovsk. From all this it was evident that where they had expected to find one division there was now the whole army of the French, marching from Moscow in an unexpected direction—along the old Kaluga road. Dohturov was unwilling to take any action, as it was not clear to him now where his duty lay. He had received instructions to attack Fominskoe. But there had then been only Broussier at Fominskoe, and now the whole French army was there. Yermolov wanted to act on his own judgment, but Dohturov insisted that he must have instructions from his highness the commander-in-chief. It was resolved to send a report to the staff.

For this purpose they chose a capable officer, Bolhovitinov, who was to take a written report, and to explain the whole matter verbally. At midnight Bolhovitinov received his despatch and his verbal instructions, and galloped off to headquarters, accompanied by a Cossack with spare horses.

It was a dark, warm autumn night. Rain had been falling for the last four days. Changing horses twice, Bolhovitinov galloped in an hour and a half thirty versts over a muddy, slippery road. He reached Letashevko after one o’clock in the night. Dismounting at a hut, on the hurdle fence of which was the inscription “Headquarters of the Staff,” and letting his horse go, he walked into the dark entry.

“The general on duty at once! Very important!” he cried to some one, who jumped up, wheezing in the darkness.

“His honour has been very unwell since the evening; he has not slept for three nights,” an orderly’s voice whispered, interposing. “You must wake the captain first.”

“Very important from General Dohturov,” said Bolhovitinov, feeling for the opened door and going in.

The orderly went in before him, and began waking some one up. “Your honour, your honour, a courier.”

“What? what? from whom?” said a sleepy voice.

“From Dohturov and from Alexey Petrovitch. Napoleon is at Fominskoe,” said Bolhovitinov, not seeing the speaker in the darkness, but assuming from the voice that it was not Konovnitsyn.

The man who had been waked yawned and stretched. “I don’t want to wake him,” he said, fumbling for something. “He’s ill! Perhaps it’s only a rumour.”

“Here is the report,” said Bolhovitinov. “My instructions are to give it at once to the general on duty.”

“Wait a minute, I’ll strike a light. What do you do with things, damn you!” said the sleepy voice addressing the orderly. The speaker was Shtcherbinin, Konovnitsyn’s adjutant. “I have found it, I have found it,” he added.

The orderly struck a light, Shtcherbinin felt for a candlestick.

“Ah, the nasty beasts!” he said with disgust.

By the light of the sparks in the tinderbox Bolhovitinov had a glimpse
of Shtcherbinin’s youthful face, and in a corner another man asleep. This was Konovnitsyn.

When the tinder broke first into a blue and then into a red flame, Shtcherbinin lighted a tallow candle—the cockroaches that had been gnawing it ran away in all directions—and looked at the messenger. Bolhovitinov was bespattered all over, and on rubbing his face with his sleeve, had smudged that too with mud.

“But who sends the report?” said Shtcherbinin, taking the packet.

“The news is certain,” said Bolhovitinov. “Prisoners and Cossacks and spies, all tell the same story.”

“Well there’s no help for it, we must wake him,” said Shtcherbinin, getting up and going to the sleeping man who wore a nightcap and was covered up with a military cloak. “Pyotr Petrovich!” he said. Konovnitsyn did not stir. “Wanted at headquarters!” he said with a smile, knowing these words would be sure to wake him. And the head in the nightcap was in fact lifted at once. Konovnitsyn’s strong, handsome face, with feverishly swollen cheeks, still wore for an instant a far-away dreamy look, but he gave a sudden start and his face resumed its customary expression of calmness and strength.

“Well, what is it? From whom?” he asked at once, but with no haste, blinking at the light. Hearing what the officer had to tell him, Konovnitsyn broke open the packet and read it. He had hardly read it before he dropped his feet in worsted stockings on to the earth floor and began putting on his boots. Then he took off the nightcap, and combing his hair, put on a forage cap.

“Did you get here quickly? Let us go to his highness.”

Konovnitsyn understood at once that the news was of great importance, and that they must lose no time. As to whether it were good news or bad, he had no opinion and did not even put the question to himself. That did not interest him. He looked at the whole subject of the war, not with his intellect, not with his reason, but with something different. In his heart he had a deep, unaltered conviction that all would be well, yet that he ought not to believe in this, and still more ought not to say so, but ought simply to do his duty. And that he did do, giving all his energies to it.

Pyotr Petrovich Konovnitsyn, like Dohturov, is simply as a formality included in the list of the so-called heroes of 1812 with the Barclays, Raevskys, Yermolovs, Platovs and Miloradovitchs. Like Dohturov, he had the reputation of being a man of very limited capacities and information;
and, like Dohturov, he never proposed plans of campaign, but was always to be found in the most difficult position. Ever since he had been appointed the general on duty, he had slept with his door open, and given orders to be waked on the arrival of any messenger. In battle he was always under fire, so that Kutuzov even reproached him for it, and was afraid to send him to the front. Like Dohturov, he was one of those inconspicuous cogwheels, which, moving without creaking or rattling, make up the most essential part of the machine.