War And Peace: Book 10 - CHAPTER XXXIX

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• Author: Leo Tolstoy

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 of their

actions, though they would have been glad to cease, some unfathomable,

mysterious force still led them on, and the artillerymen—the third of them

left—soaked with sweat, grimed with powder and blood, and panting with

weariness, still brought the charges, loaded, aimed, and lighted the match; and

the cannon balls flew as swiftly and cruelly from each side and crushed human

flesh, and kept up the fearful work, which was done not at the will of men, but

at the will of Him who sways men and worlds.

Any one looking at the disorder in the rear of the Russian army would have

said that the French had but to make one slight effort more and the Russian army

would have been annihilated; and any one seeing the rear of the French army

would have said that the Russians need but make a slight effort more and the

French would be overthrown. But neither French nor Russians made that effort,

and the flame of the battle burnt slowly out.

The Russians did not make this effort, because they were not attacking the

French. At the beginning of the battle they merely stood on the road to Moscow,

barring it to the French; and they still stood at the end of the battle as they

had at the beginning. But even if it had been the aim of the Russians to drive

back the French, they could not have made this final effort, because all the

Russian troops had been routed; there was not a single part of the army that had

not suffered in the battle, and the Russians, without being driven from their

position, lost ONE HALF of their army.

For the French, with the memory of fifteen years of victories, with

confidence in Napoleon's all-vanquishing genius, with the consciousness of

having taken a part of the battlefield, of having only lost a fourth of their

men, and of having a body of twenty thousand—the Guards— intact—it would have

been an easy matter to make this effort. The French, attacking the Russian army

with the object of driving it from its position, ought to have made this effort,

because as long as the Russians still barred the way to Moscow, as before the

battle, the aim of the French had not been attained, and all losses and

exertions had been in vain. But the French did not make that effort. Some

historians assert that if Napoleon had only let his Old Guard advance, the

battle would have been gained. To talk of what might have happened if Napoleon

had let his Guard advance is much the same as to talk of what would happen if

spring came in autumn. That could not have been. Napoleon did not do so, not

because he did not want to, but because it was impossible to do so. All the

generals, officers, and soldiers of the French army knew that it was impossible

to make this final effort, because the flagging spirit of the troops did not

allow of it.

It was not Napoleon alone who had that nightmare feeling that the mighty arm

was stricken powerless: all the generals, all the soldiers of the French army,

those who fought and those who did not, after all their experiences of previous

battles (when after one-tenth of the effort the enemy had always run), showed

the feeling of horror before this foe, who, after losing ONE HALF of the army,

still stood its ground as dauntless at the end as at the beginning of the

battle. The moral force of the French, the attacking army, was exhausted. Not

the victory, signalised by the capture of rags on the end of sticks, called

flags, or of the ground on which the troops were standing, but a moral victory,

that which compels the enemy to recognise the moral superiority of his opponent,

and his own impotence, was won by the Russians at Borodino. The French invading

army, like a ravening beast that has received its death-wound in its onslaught,

felt its end near. But it could not stop, no more than the Russian army—of half

its strength—could help retreating. After that check, the French army could

still drag on to Moscow, but there, without fresh effort on the part of the

Russian army, its ruin was inevitable, as its life-blood ebbed away from the

deadly wound dealt it at Borodino. The direct consequence of the battle of

Borodino was Napoleon's cause-less flight from Moscow, his return by the old

Smolensk road, the ruin of the invading army of five hundred thousand men, and

the downfall of the Napoleonic rule, on which, for the first time at Borodino,

was laid the hand of a foe of stronger spirit.

1. Ebooks list page : 84
2. War And Peace: Book 10 - CHAPTER XXXIX
3. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER I
4. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER II
5. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER III
6. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER IV
7. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER V
8. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER VI
9. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER VII
10. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER VIII
11. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER IX
12. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER X
13. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XI
14. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XII
15. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XIII
16. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XIV
17. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XV
18. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XVI
19. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XVII
20. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XVIII
21. War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XIX

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