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Several tens of thousands of the slain lay in diverse postures
and various uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the
Davydov family and to the crown serfs- those fields and meadows
where for hundreds of years the peasants of Borodino, Gorki, Shevardino,
and Semenovsk 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 Mozhaysk from the one army and back to Valuevo
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 anymore!" 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 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
permitit.
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 Borodino. 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 Borodino.
The direct consequence of the battle of Borodino was Napoleon's
senseless flight from Moscow, his retreat along the old Smolensk
road, the destruction of the invading army of five hundred thousand
men, and the downfall of Napoleonic France, on which at Borodino
for the first time the hand of an opponent of stronger spirit
had been laid.
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