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Toward four o'clock in the afternoon Murat's troops were entering
Moscow. In front rode a detachment of Wurttemberg hussars and
behind them rode the King of Naples himself accompanied by a numerous
suite.
About the middle of the Arbat 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 Kremlin. 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 Arbat. When they reached the end of the Vozdvizhenka
Street they halted and drew in the Square. Several French officers
superintended the placing of the guns and looked at the Kremlin
through field glasses.
The bells in the Kremlin 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 Kutafyev 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 Vozdvizhenka, Mokhavaya, or Kutafyev Street, nor the
Troitsa 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 Kremlin 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 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 Znamenka.
"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 Kremlin 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 Kremlin and encamped
along the Moroseyka, the Lubyanka, and Pokrovka Streets. Others
quartered themselves along the Vozdvizhenka, the Nikolski, and
the Tverskoy 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 Kremlin 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 caleches 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 feroce
de Rostopchine,* 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 feroce de Rostopchine" 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 Rostopchin's ferocious patriotism.
However tempting it might be for the French to blame Rostopchin'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.
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