《War And Peace》 Book15 CHAPTER V
by Leo Tolstoy
IN 1812 AND 1813 Kutuzov was openly accused of blunders. The Tsar was
dissatisfied with him. And in a recent history inspired by promptings from the
highest quarters, Kutuzov is spoken of as a designing, intriguing schemer, who
was panic-stricken at the name of Napoleon, and guilty through his blunders at
Krasnoe and Berezina of robbing the Russian army of the glory of complete
victory over the French. Such is the lot of men not recognised by Russian
intelligence as “GREat men,” grands hommes; such is the destiny of those
rare and always solitary men who divining the will of Providence submit their
personal will to it. The hatred and contempt of the crowd is the punishment of
such men for their comprehension of higher laws.
Strange and terrible to say, Napoleon, the most insignificant tool of
history, who never even in exile displayed one trait of human dignity, is the
subject of the admiration and enthusiasm of the Russian historians; in their
eyes he is a grand homme.
Kutuzov, the man who from the beginning to the end of his command in 1812,
from Borodino to Vilna, was never in one word or deed false to himself, presents
an example exceptional in history of self-sacrifice and recognition in the
present of the relative value of events in the future. Kutuzov is conceived of
by the historians as a nondescript, pitiful sort of creature, and whenever they
speak of him in the year 1812, they seem a little ashamed of him.
And yet it is difficult to conceive of an historical character whose energy
could be more invariably directed to the same unchanging aim. It is difficult to
imagine an aim more noble and more in harmony with the will of a whole people.
Still more difficult would it be to find an example in history where the aim of
any historical personage has been so completely attained as the aim towards
which all Kutuzov's efforts were devoted in 1812.
Kutuzov never talked of “forty centuries looking down from the Pyramids,” of
the sacrifices he was making for the fatherland, of what he meant to do or had
done. He did not as a rule talk about himself, played no sort of part, always
seemed the plainest and most ordinary man, and said the plainest and most
ordinary things. He wrote letters to his daughters and to Madame de Staël, read
novels, liked the company of pretty women, made jokes with the generals, the
officers, and the soldiers, and never contradicted the people, who tried to
prove anything to him. When Count Rastoptchin galloped up to him at Yautsky
bridge, and reproached him personally with being responsible for the loss of
Moscow, and said: “Didn't you promise not to abandon Moscow without a battle?”
Kutuzov answered: “And I am not abandoning Moscow without a battle,” although
Moscow was in fact already abandoned. When Araktcheev came to him from the Tsar
to say that Yermolov was to be appointed to the command of the artillery,
Kutuzov said: “Yes, I was just saying so myself,” though he had said just the
opposite a moment before. What had he, the one man who grasped at the time all
the vast issues of events, to do in the midst of that dull-witted crowd? What
did he care whether Count Rastoptchin put down the disasters of the capital to
him or to himself? Still less could he be concerned by the question which man
was appointed to the command of the artillery.
This old man, who through experience of life had reached the conviction that
the thoughts and words that serve as its expression are never the motive force
of men, frequently uttered words, which were quite meaningless—the first words
that occurred to his mind.
But heedless as he was of his words, he never once throughout all his career
uttered a single word which was inconsistent with the sole aim for the
attainment of which he was working all through the war. With obvious
unwillingness, with bitter conviction that he would not be understood, he more
than once, under the most different circumstances, gave expression to his real
thought. His first differed from all about him after the battle of Borodino,
which he alone persisted in calling a victory, and this view he continued to
assert verbally and in reports and to his dying day. He alone said that the
loss of Moscow is not the loss of Russia. In answer to the overtures for
peace, his reply to Lauriston was: There can be no peace, for such is the
people's will. He alone during the retreat of the French said that all
our manœuvres are unnecessary; that everything is being done of itself better
than we could desire; that we must give the enemy a “golden bridge”; that the
battles of Tarutino, of Vyazma, and of Krasnoe, were none of them necessary;
that we must keep some men to reach the frontier with; that he wouldn't give one
Russian for ten Frenchmen. And he, this intriguing courtier, as we are told,
who lied to Araktcheev to propitiate the Tsar, he alone dared to face the Tsar's
displeasure by telling him at Vilna that to carry the war beyond the frontier
would be mischievous and useless.
But words alone would be no proof that he grasped the significance of events
at the time. His actions—all without the slightest deviation— were directed
toward the one threefold aim: first, to concentrate all his forces to strike a
blow at the French; secondly, to defeat them; and thirdly, to drive them out of
Russia, alleviating as far as was possible the sufferings of the people and the
soldiers in doing so.
He, the lingerer Kutuzov, whose motto was always “Time and Patience,” the
sworn opponent of precipitate action, he fought the battle of Borodino, and made
all his preparations for it with unwonted solemnity. Before the battle of
Austerlitz he foretold that it would be lost, but at Borodino, in spite of the
conviction of the generals that the battle was a defeat, in spite of the fact,
unprecedented in history, of his army being forced to retreat after the victory,
he alone declared in opposition to all that it was a victory, and persisted in
that opinion to his dying day. He was alone during the whole latter part of the
campaign in insisting that there was no need of fighting now, that it was a
mistake to cross the Russian frontier and to begin a new war. It is easy enough
now that all the events with their consequences lie before us to grasp their
significance, if only we refrain from attributing to the multitude the aims that
only existed in the brains of some dozen or so of men.
But how came that old man, alone in opposition to the opinion of all, to
gauge so truly the importance of events from the national standard, so that he
never once was false to the best interests of his country?
The source of this extraordinary intuition into the significance of
contemporary events lay in the purity and fervour of patriotic feeling in his
heart.
It was their recognition of this feeling in him that led the people in such a
strange manner to pick him out, an old man out of favour, as the chosen leader
of the national war, against the will of the Tsar. And this feeling alone it was
to which he owed his exalted position, and there he exerted all his powers as
commander-in-chief not to kill and maim men, but to save them and have mercy on
them.
This simple, modest, and therefore truly GREat figure, could not be cast into
the false mould of the European hero, the supposed leader of men, that history
has invented.
To the flunkey no man can be GREat, because the flunkey has his own flunkey
conception of greatness.
