الفصل الفصل 229 · 第229章

Several tens of thousands of the slain lay in diverse postures and

various uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the Davýdov

family and to the crown serfs—those fields and meadows where for

hundreds of years the peasants of Borodinó, Górki, Shevárdino, and

Semënovsk had reaped their harvests and pastured their cattle. At the

dressing stations the grass and earth were soaked with blood for a space

of some three acres around. Crowds of men of various arms, wounded and

unwounded, with frightened faces, dragged themselves back to Mozháysk

from the one army and back to Valúevo from the other. Other crowds,

exhausted and hungry, went forward led by their officers. Others held

their ground and continued to fire.

Over the whole field, previously so gaily beautiful with the glitter of

bayonets and cloudlets of smoke in the morning sun, there now spread a

mist of damp and smoke and a strange acid smell of saltpeter and blood.

Clouds gathered and drops of rain began to fall on the dead and wounded,

on the frightened, exhausted, and hesitating men, as if to say: “Enough,

men! Enough! Cease... bethink yourselves! What are you doing?”

To the men of both sides alike, worn out by want of food and rest,

it began equally to appear doubtful whether they should continue to

slaughter one another; all the faces expressed hesitation, and the

question arose in every soul: “For what, for whom, must I kill and be

killed?... You may go and kill whom you please, but I don’t want to do

so any more!” By evening this thought had ripened in every soul. At any

moment these men might have been seized with horror at what they were

doing and might have thrown up everything and run away anywhere.

But though toward the end of the battle the men felt all the horror of

what they were doing, though they would have been glad to leave off,

some incomprehensible, mysterious power continued to control them, and

they still brought up the charges, loaded, aimed, and applied the match,

though only one artilleryman survived out of every three, and though

they stumbled and panted with fatigue, perspiring and stained with blood

and powder. The cannon balls flew just as swiftly and cruelly from both

sides, crushing human bodies, and that terrible work which was not done

by the will of a man but at the will of Him who governs men and worlds

continued.

Anyone looking at the disorganized rear of the Russian army would have

said that, if only the French made one more slight effort, it would

disappear; and anyone looking at the rear of the French army would have

said that the Russians need only make one more slight effort and the

French would be destroyed. But neither the French nor the Russians made

that effort, and the flame of battle burned slowly out.

The Russians did not make that effort because they were not attacking

the French. At the beginning of the battle they stood blocking the

way to Moscow and they still did so at the end of the battle as at the

beginning. But even had the aim of the Russians been to drive the French

from their positions, they could not have made this last effort, for all

the Russian troops had been broken up, there was no part of the Russian

army that had not suffered in the battle, and though still holding their

positions they had lost ONE HALF of their army.

The French, with the memory of all their former victories during

fifteen years, with the assurance of Napoleon’s invincibility, with the

consciousness that they had captured part of the battlefield and had

lost only a quarter of their men and still had their Guards intact,

twenty thousand strong, might easily have made that effort. The French

who had attacked the Russian army in order to drive it from its position

ought to have made that effort, for as long as the Russians continued to

block the road to Moscow as before, the aim of the French had not been

attained and all their efforts and losses were in vain. But the French

did not make that effort. Some historians say that Napoleon need only

have used his Old Guards, who were intact, and the battle would have

been won. To speak of what would have happened had Napoleon sent his

Guards is like talking of what would happen if autumn became spring. It

could not be. Napoleon did not give his Guards, not because he did not

want to, but because it could not be done. All the generals, officers,

and soldiers of the French army knew it could not be done, because the

flagging spirit of the troops would not permit it.

It was not Napoleon alone who had experienced that nightmare feeling

of the mighty arm being stricken powerless, but all the generals and

soldiers of his army whether they had taken part in the battle or not,

after all their experience of previous battles—when after one tenth of

such efforts the enemy had fled—experienced a similar feeling of terror

before an enemy who, after losing HALF his men, stood as threateningly

at the end as at the beginning of the battle. The moral force of the

attacking French army was exhausted. Not that sort of victory which is

defined by the capture of pieces of material fastened to sticks, called

standards, and of the ground on which the troops had stood and were

standing, but a moral victory that convinces the enemy of the moral

superiority of his opponent and of his own impotence was gained by the

Russians at Borodinó. The French invaders, like an infuriated animal

that has in its onslaught received a mortal wound, felt that they were

perishing, but could not stop, any more than the Russian army, weaker

by one half, could help swerving. By impetus gained, the French army was

still able to roll forward to Moscow, but there, without further effort

on the part of the Russians, it had to perish, bleeding from the mortal

wound it had received at Borodinó. The direct consequence of the battle

of Borodinó was Napoleon’s senseless flight from Moscow, his retreat

along the old Smolénsk road, the destruction of the invading army of

five hundred thousand men, and the downfall of Napoleonic France, on

which at Borodinó for the first time the hand of an opponent of stronger

spirit had been laid.