Chương Chương 255 · 第255章

Toward four o’clock in the afternoon Murat’s troops were entering

Moscow. In front rode a detachment of Württemberg hussars and behind

them rode the King of Naples himself accompanied by a numerous suite.

About the middle of the Arbát Street, near the Church of the Miraculous

Icon of St. Nicholas, Murat halted to await news from the advanced

detachment as to the condition in which they had found the citadel, le

Kremlin.

Around Murat gathered a group of those who had remained in Moscow. They

all stared in timid bewilderment at the strange, long-haired commander

dressed up in feathers and gold.

“Is that their Tsar himself? He’s not bad!” low voices could be heard

saying.

An interpreter rode up to the group.

“Take off your cap... your caps!” These words went from one to another

in the crowd. The interpreter addressed an old porter and asked if

it was far to the Krémlin. The porter, listening in perplexity to the

unfamiliar Polish accent and not realizing that the interpreter was

speaking Russian, did not understand what was being said to him and

slipped behind the others.

Murat approached the interpreter and told him to ask where the Russian

army was. One of the Russians understood what was asked and several

voices at once began answering the interpreter. A French officer,

returning from the advanced detachment, rode up to Murat and reported

that the gates of the citadel had been barricaded and that there was

probably an ambuscade there.

“Good!” said Murat and, turning to one of the gentlemen in his suite,

ordered four light guns to be moved forward to fire at the gates.

The guns emerged at a trot from the column following Murat and advanced

up the Arbát. When they reached the end of the Vozdvízhenka Street they

halted and drew in the Square. Several French officers superintended the

placing of the guns and looked at the Krémlin through field glasses.

The bells in the Krémlin were ringing for vespers, and this sound

troubled the French. They imagined it to be a call to arms. A few

infantrymen ran to the Kutáfyev Gate. Beams and wooden screens had been

put there, and two musket shots rang out from under the gate as soon as

an officer and men began to run toward it. A general who was standing

by the guns shouted some words of command to the officer, and the latter

ran back again with his men.

The sound of three more shots came from the gate.

One shot struck a French soldier’s foot, and from behind the screens

came the strange sound of a few voices shouting. Instantly as at a

word of command the expression of cheerful serenity on the faces of

the French general, officers, and men changed to one of determined

concentrated readiness for strife and suffering. To all of them from

the marshal to the least soldier, that place was not the Vozdvízhenka,

Mokhaváya, or Kutáfyev Street, nor the Tróitsa Gate (places familiar in

Moscow), but a new battlefield which would probably prove sanguinary.

And all made ready for that battle. The cries from the gates ceased. The

guns were advanced, the artillerymen blew the ash off their linstocks,

and an officer gave the word “Fire!” This was followed by two whistling

sounds of canister shot, one after another. The shot rattled against

the stone of the gate and upon the wooden beams and screens, and two

wavering clouds of smoke rose over the Square.

A few instants after the echo of the reports resounding over the

stone-built Krémlin had died away the French heard a strange sound above

their head. Thousands of crows rose above the walls and circled in the

air, cawing and noisily flapping their wings. Together with that sound

came a solitary human cry from the gateway and amid the smoke appeared

the figure of a bareheaded man in a peasant’s coat. He grasped a musket

and took aim at the French. “Fire!” repeated the officer once more,

and the reports of a musket and of two cannon shots were heard

simultaneously. The gate was again hidden by smoke.

Nothing more stirred behind the screens and the French infantry soldiers

and officers advanced to the gate. In the gateway lay three wounded and

four dead. Two men in peasant coats ran away at the foot of the wall,

toward the Známenka.

“Clear that away!” said the officer, pointing to the beams and the

corpses, and the French soldiers, after dispatching the wounded, threw

the corpses over the parapet.

Who these men were nobody knew. “Clear that away!” was all that was said

of them, and they were thrown over the parapet and removed later on that

they might not stink. Thiers alone dedicates a few eloquent lines to

their memory: “These wretches had occupied the sacred citadel, having

supplied themselves with guns from the arsenal, and fired” (the

wretches) “at the French. Some of them were sabered and the Krémlin was

purged of their presence.”

Murat was informed that the way had been cleared. The French entered

the gates and began pitching their camp in the Senate Square. Out of the

windows of the Senate House the soldiers threw chairs into the Square

for fuel and kindled fires there.

Other detachments passed through the Krémlin and encamped along

the Moroséyka, the Lubyánka, and Pokróvka Streets. Others quartered

themselves along the Vozdvízhenka, the Nikólski, and the Tverskóy

Streets. No masters of the houses being found anywhere, the French were

not billeted on the inhabitants as is usual in towns but lived in it as

in a camp.

Though tattered, hungry, worn out, and reduced to a third of their

original number, the French entered Moscow in good marching order. It

was a weary and famished, but still a fighting and menacing army. But

it remained an army only until its soldiers had dispersed into their

different lodgings. As soon as the men of the various regiments began

to disperse among the wealthy and deserted houses, the army was lost

forever and there came into being something nondescript, neither

citizens nor soldiers but what are known as marauders. When five weeks

later these same men left Moscow, they no longer formed an army. They

were a mob of marauders, each carrying a quantity of articles which

seemed to him valuable or useful. The aim of each man when he left

Moscow was no longer, as it had been, to conquer, but merely to keep

what he had acquired. Like a monkey which puts its paw into the narrow

neck of a jug, and having seized a handful of nuts will not open its

fist for fear of losing what it holds, and therefore perishes, the

French when they left Moscow had inevitably to perish because they

carried their loot with them, yet to abandon what they had stolen was as

impossible for them as it is for the monkey to open its paw and let

go of its nuts. Ten minutes after each regiment had entered a Moscow

district, not a soldier or officer was left. Men in military uniforms

and Hessian boots could be seen through the windows, laughing and

walking through the rooms. In cellars and storerooms similar men were

busy among the provisions, and in the yards unlocking or breaking open

coach house and stable doors, lighting fires in kitchens and kneading

and baking bread with rolled-up sleeves, and cooking; or frightening,

amusing, or caressing women and children. There were many such men both

in the shops and houses—but there was no army.

Order after order was issued by the French commanders that day

forbidding the men to disperse about the town, sternly forbidding any

violence to the inhabitants or any looting, and announcing a roll call

for that very evening. But despite all these measures the men, who had

till then constituted an army, flowed all over the wealthy, deserted

city with its comforts and plentiful supplies. As a hungry herd of

cattle keeps well together when crossing a barren field, but gets out

of hand and at once disperses uncontrollably as soon as it reaches rich

pastures, so did the army disperse all over the wealthy city.

No residents were left in Moscow, and the soldiers—like water

percolating through sand—spread irresistibly through the city in all

directions from the Krémlin into which they had first marched. The

cavalry, on entering a merchant’s house that had been abandoned and

finding there stabling more than sufficient for their horses, went on,

all the same, to the next house which seemed to them better. Many of

them appropriated several houses, chalked their names on them, and

quarreled and even fought with other companies for them. Before they had

had time to secure quarters the soldiers ran out into the streets to

see the city and, hearing that everything had been abandoned, rushed

to places where valuables were to be had for the taking. The officers

followed to check the soldiers and were involuntarily drawn into doing

the same. In Carriage Row carriages had been left in the shops, and

generals flocked there to select calèches and coaches for themselves.

The few inhabitants who had remained invited commanding officers to

their houses, hoping thereby to secure themselves from being plundered.

There were masses of wealth and there seemed no end to it. All around

the quarters occupied by the French were other regions still unexplored

and unoccupied where, they thought, yet greater riches might be found.

And Moscow engulfed the army ever deeper and deeper. When water is

spilled on dry ground both the dry ground and the water disappear and

mud results; and in the same way the entry of the famished army into the

rich and deserted city resulted in fires and looting and the destruction

of both the army and the wealthy city.

The French attributed the Fire of Moscow au patriotisme féroce de

Rostopchíne, * the Russians to the barbarity of the French. In reality,

however, it was not, and could not be, possible to explain the burning

of Moscow by making any individual, or any group of people, responsible

for it. Moscow was burned because it found itself in a position in which

any town built of wood was bound to burn, quite apart from whether it

had, or had not, a hundred and thirty inferior fire engines. Deserted

Moscow had to burn as inevitably as a heap of shavings has to burn on

which sparks continually fall for several days. A town built of wood,

where scarcely a day passes without conflagrations when the house owners

are in residence and a police force is present, cannot help burning when

its inhabitants have left it and it is occupied by soldiers who smoke

pipes, make campfires of the Senate chairs in the Senate Square, and

cook themselves meals twice a day. In peacetime it is only necessary to

billet troops in the villages of any district and the number of fires in

that district immediately increases. How much then must the probability

of fire be increased in an abandoned, wooden town where foreign troops

are quartered. “Le patriotisme féroce de Rostopchíne” and the barbarity

of the French were not to blame in the matter. Moscow was set on fire by

the soldiers’ pipes, kitchens, and campfires, and by the carelessness of

enemy soldiers occupying houses they did not own. Even if there was any

arson (which is very doubtful, for no one had any reason to burn the

houses—in any case a troublesome and dangerous thing to do), arson

cannot be regarded as the cause, for the same thing would have happened

without any incendiarism.

* To Rostopchín’s ferocious patriotism.

However tempting it might be for the French to blame Rostopchín’s

ferocity and for Russians to blame the scoundrel Bonaparte, or later

on to place an heroic torch in the hands of their own people, it is

impossible not to see that there could be no such direct cause of the

fire, for Moscow had to burn as every village, factory, or house must

burn which is left by its owners and in which strangers are allowed to

live and cook their porridge. Moscow was burned by its inhabitants, it

is true, but by those who had abandoned it and not by those who remained

in it. Moscow when occupied by the enemy did not remain intact like

Berlin, Vienna, and other towns, simply because its inhabitants

abandoned it and did not welcome the French with bread and salt, nor

bring them the keys of the city.