War And Peace: Book 11 - CHAPTER XXVI

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AT FOUR O'CLOCK in the afternoon, Murat's troops entered Moscow. In front

rode a detachment of Würtemberg hussars, behind, with an immense suite, rode the

King of Naples himself.

Near the middle of Arbaty, close to Nikola Yavlenny, Murat halted to await

information from the detachment in advance as to the condition in which the

citadel of the city, “le Kremlin,” had been found.

A small group of inhabitants of Moscow had gathered about Murat. All stared

with timid astonishment at the strange figure of the long-haired commander,

decked in gold and feathers.

“Why, is this their Tsar himself? Nought amiss with him,” voices were heard

saying softly.

An interpreter approached the group of gazers.

“Caps … caps off,” they muttered, turning to each other in the little crowd.

The interpreter accosted one old porter, and asked him if it were far to the

Kremlin. The porter, listening with surprise to the unfamiliar Polish accent,

and not recognising the interpreter's words for Russian, had no notion what was

being said to him, and took refuge behind the others.

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

troops. One of the Russians understood this question, and several voices began

answering the interpreter simultaneously. A French officer from the detachment

in advance rode up to Murat and reported that the gates into the citadel were

blocked up, and that probably there was an ambush there.

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

commanded four light cannons to be moved forward, and the gates to be shelled

upon.

The artillery came trotting out from the column following Murat, and advanced

along Arbaty. When they reached the end of Vosdvizhenka the artillery halted and

drew up in the square. Several French officers superintended the placing of the

cannon some distance apart, and looked at the Kremlin through a field-glass. A

bell was ringing in the Kremlin for evening service, and that sound troubled the

French. They supposed that it was the call to arms. Several infantry soldiers

ran to the Kutafyev gateway. A barricade of beams and planks lay across the

gateway. Two musket shots rang out from the gates, just as an officer with some

men were running up to them. The general standing by the cannons shouted some

words of command to the officer, and the officer and the soldiers ran

back.

Three more shots were heard from the gate. One shot grazed the leg of a

French soldier, and a strange shout of several voices rose from behind the

barricade. Instantaneously, as though at the word of command, the expression of

good humour and serenity on the faces of the French general, officers, and men

was replaced by a stubborn, concentrated expression of readiness for conflict

and suffering. To all of them, from the marshal to the lowest soldier, this

place was not Vosdvizhenka, Mohova, Kutaf, and the Troitsky gates; it was a new

battlefield, likely to be the scene of a bloody conflict. And all were ready for

that conflict. The shouts from the gates died away. The cannons were moved

forward. The artillerymen quenched the burning linstocks. An officer shouted

“Fire!” and two whistling sounds of clinking tin rang out one after another. The

grapeshot fell rattling on the stone of the gateway, on the beams and screens of

planks, and two clouds of smoke rolled over the square.

Some instants after the echoes of the shots had died away over the stone

Kremlin, a strange sound was heard over the heads of the French. An immense

flock of jackdaws rose above the walls and swept round in the air with loud

caws, and the whir of thousands of wings. Together with this sound, there rose a

solitary human cry at the gate, and the figure of a man bareheaded, in a long

peasant's coat, came into sight through the smoke. Holding a gun up, he took aim

at the French. “Fire!” repeated the artillery officer, and at the same instant

one rifle shot and two cannon shots were heard. The gate was again hidden in

smoke.

Nothing more stirred behind the barricade, and the French infantry soldiers

with their officers passed in at the gate. In the gateway lay three men wounded

and four dead. Two men in long peasant-coats had run away along the walls toward

Znamenka.

“Clear this away,” said the officer, pointing to the beams and the corpses;

and the French soldiers finished off the wounded, and flung the corpses over the

fence below. Who these men were nobody knew. “Clear this away!” was all that was

said of them, and they were flung away that they might not stink. Thiers has

indeed devoted some eloquent lines to their memories. “These wretches had

invaded the sacred citadel, had taken possession of the guns of the arsenal, and

fired (the wretches) on the French. Some of them were sabred, 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 on Senate-house Square. The soldiers flung

the chairs out of the windows of the Senate-house into the square, and began

making fires.

Other detachments marched across the Kremlin and encamped in Moroseyka,

Lubyanka, and Pokrovka. Others pitched their camps in Vosdvizhenka, Znamenka,

Nikolskaya, and Tverskaya. Not finding citizens to entertain them, the French

everywhere bivouacked as in a camp pitched in a town, instead of quartering

themselves on the houses.

Tattered, hungry, and exhausted, as they were, and dwindled to one-third

their original numbers, the French soldiers yet entered Moscow in good

discipline. It was a harassed and exhausted, yet still active and menacing army.

But it was an army only up to the moment when the soldiers of the army dispersed

all over the town. As soon as the soldiers began to disperse about the wealthy,

deserted houses, the army was lost for ever, and in its place was a multitude of

men, neither citizens nor soldiers, but something nondescript between, known as

marauders. When five weeks later these same men set out from Moscow, they no

longer made up an army. They were a mob of marauders, each of whom carried or

dragged along with him a mass of objects he regarded as precious and useful. The

aim of each of these men on leaving Moscow was not, as it had been, to fight as

a soldier, but simply to keep the booty he had obtained. Like the ape, who

slipping his hand into the narrow neck of a pitcher, and snatching up a handful

of nuts inside it, will not open his fist for fear of losing his prize, even to

his own ruin, the French on leaving Moscow were inevitably bound to come to

ruin, because they dragged their plunder along with them, and it seemed as

impossible to them to fling away their booty as it seems to the ape to let go of

the nuts. Ten minutes after the several French regiments had dispersed about the

various quarters of Moscow, not a soldier nor an officer was left among them. At

the windows of the houses men could be seen in military coats and Hessian boots,

laughing and strolling through the rooms. In the cellars, in the storerooms

similar men were busily looking after the provisions; in the courtyards they

were unlocking or breaking open the doors of sheds and stables; in the kitchens

they were making up fires, and with bare arms mixing, kneading, and baking, and

frightening, or trying to coax and amuse, women and children. Men there were in

plenty everywhere, in all the shops and houses; but the army was no more.

That day one order after another was issued by the French commanders

forbidding the troops to disperse about the town, sternly forbidding violence to

the inhabitants, and pillaging, and proclaiming that a general roll-call was to

take place that evening. But in spite of all such measures the men, who had made

up an army, flowed about the wealthy, deserted city, so richly provided with

luxuries and comforts. Like a starved herd, that keeps together crossing a

barren plain, but at once on reaching rich pastures inevitably strays apart and

scatters over them, the army was irresistibly lured into scattering over the

wealthy town.

Moscow was without its inhabitants, and the soldiers were sucked up in her,

like water into sand, as they flowed away irresistibly in all directions from

the Kremlin, which they had entered first. Cavalry soldiers who had entered a

merchant's house abandoned with all its belongings, and finding stabling for

their horses and to spare, yet went on to take the house next door, which seemed

to them better. Many took several houses, chalking their names on them, and

quarrelled and even fought with other companies for their possession. Soldiers

had no sooner succeeded in securing quarters than they ran along the street to

look at the town, and on hearing that everything had been abandoned, hurried off

where objects of value could be carried off for nothing. The officers followed

to check the soldiers, and were involuntarily lured into doing the same. In

Carriage Row shops had been abandoned stocked with carriages, and the generals

flocked thither to choose coaches and carriages for themselves. The few

inhabitants who had stayed on invited the officers into their houses, hoping

thereby to secure themselves against being robbed. Wealth there was in

abundance: there seemed no end to it. Everywhere all round the parts occupied by

the French there were unexplored regions unoccupied beyond, in which the French

fancied there were even more riches to be found. And Moscow absorbed them

further and further into herself. Just as when water flows over dry land, water

and dry land alike disappear and are lost in mud, so when the hungry army

entered the wealthy, deserted city, the army and the wealth of the city both

perished; and fires and marauding bands sprang up where they had been.

The French ascribed the burning of Moscow au patriotisme féroce de

Rastoptchine; the Russians to the savagery of the French. In reality,

explanations of the fire of Moscow, in the sense of the conflagration being

brought home to the door of any one person or group of persons, there have never

been, and never could be. Moscow was burned because she was placed in conditions

in which any town built of wood was bound to be burned, quite apart from the

question whether there were or were not one hundred and thirty inefficient

fire-engines in the town. Moscow was sure to be burned, because her inhabitants

had gone away, as inevitably as a heap of straw is sure to be burned where

sparks are scattered on it for several days in succession. A town of wooden

houses, in which when the police and the inhabitants owning the houses are in

possession of it, fires are of daily occurrence, cannot escape being burned when

its inhabitants are gone and it is filled with soldiers smoking pipes, making

fires in Senate-house Square of the Senate-house chairs, and cooking themselves

meals twice a day. In times of peace, whenever troops are quartered on villages

in any district, the number of fires in the district at once increases. How

greatly must the likelihood of fires be increased in an abandoned town, built of

wood, and occupied by foreign soldiers! Le patriotisme féroce de

Rastoptchine and the savagery of the French do not come into the question.

Moscow was burned through the pipes, the kitchen stoves, and camp-fires, through

the recklessness of the enemy's soldiers, who lived in the houses without the

care of householders. Even if there were cases of incendiarism (which is very

doubtful, because no one had any reason for incendiarism, and in any case such a

crime is a troublesome and dangerous one), there is no need to accept

incendiarism as the cause, for the conflagration would have been inevitable

anyway without it.

Soothing as it was to the vanity of the French to throw the blame on the

ferocity of Rastoptchin, and to that of the Russians to throw the blame on the

miscreant Bonaparte, or later on to place the heroic torch in the hand of its

patriot peasantry, we cannot disguise from ourselves that there could be no such

direct cause of the fire, since Moscow was as certain to be burned as any

village, factory, or house forsaken by its owners, and used as a temporary

shelter and cooking-place by strangers. Moscow was burned by her inhabitants, it

is true; but not by the inhabitants who had lingered on, but by the inhabitants

who had abandoned her. Moscow did not, like Berlin, Vienna, and other towns,

escape harm while in the occupation of the enemy, simply because her inhabitants

did not receive the French with the keys, and the bread and salt of welcome, but

abandoned her.

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1. Ebooks list page : 84
2. War And Peace: Book 6 - CHAPTER XXVI
3. War And Peace: Book 10 - CHAPTER XXVI
4. War And Peace: Book 1 - CHAPTER IV
5. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER V
6. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER VI
7. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER VII
8. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER IX
9. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER X
10. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XII
11. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XI
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13. War And Peace: Book 1 - CHAPTER VI
14. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XIV
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