War And Peace: Book 9 - CHAPTER XI

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PRINCE ANDREY had hardly seen the last of Pfuhl when Count Bennigsen came

hurrying into the room, and bestowing a nod on Bolkonsky, went straight through

to the study, giving some instruction to his adjutant. The Tsar was following

him, and Bennigsen had hurried on to prepare something, and to be in readiness

to meet him. Tchernishev and Prince Andrey went out into the porch. The Tsar,

looking tired out, was dismounting from his horse. Marchese Paulucci was saying

something to him. Turning his head to the left, the Tsar was listening with a

look of displeasure to Paulucci, who was speaking with peculiar warmth. The Tsar

moved, evidently anxious to end the conversation; but the Italian, flushed and

excited, followed him, still talking, and oblivious of etiquette.

“As for the man who has counselled the camp at Drissa,” Paulucci was saying

just as the Tsar, mounting the steps and noticing Prince Andrey, was looking

more intently at his unfamiliar face. “As for him, sire,” Paulucci persisted

desperately, as though unable to restrain himself, “I see no alternative but the

madhouse or the gallows.”

Not attending, and appearing not to hear the Italian, the Tsar recognised

Bolkonsky and addressed him graciously:

“I am very glad to see you. Go in where they are meeting and wait for

me.”

The Tsar passed on into the study. He was followed by Prince Pyotr

Mihalovitch Volkonsky and Baron Stein, and the study door was closed after them.

Prince Andrey, taking advantage of the Tsar's permission to do so, accompanied

Paulucci, whom he had met in Turkey, into the drawing-room where the council had

assembled.

Prince Pyotr Mihalovitch Volkonsky was performing the duties of a sort of

informed head of the Tsar's staff. Volkonsky came out of the study and bringing

out maps laid them on the table, and mentioned the questions on which he wished

to hear the opinion of the gentlemen present. The important fact was that news

(which afterwards proved to be false) had been received in the night of

movements of the French with the object of making a circuit round the camp at

Drissa.

The first to begin speaking was General Armfeldt, who unexpectedly proposed,

as a means of avoiding the present difficulty, a quite new project, inexplicable

except as a proof of his desire to show that he, too, had a suggestion of his

own. His idea was that the army should move into a position away from the

Petersburg and Moscow roads, and, united there, await the enemy.It was evident

that this project had been formed by Armfeldt long before, and that he brought

it forward now not so much with the object of meeting the present problem, to

which it presented no solution, as of seizing the opportunity of explaining its

merits. It was one of the millions of suggestions which might be made, one as

reasonable as another, so long as no one had any idea what form the war would

take. Some of those present attacked his idea, others supported it. The young

Colonel Toll criticised the Swedish general's project with more heat than any

one; and in the course of his remarks upon it drew out of a side pocket a

manuscript, which he asked leave to read aloud. In this somewhat diffuse note,

Toll proposed another plan of campaign—entirely opposed to Armfeldt's, and also

to Pfuhl's plan. Paulucci, in raising objections to Toll's scheme, proposed a

plan of direct advance and attack, which he declared to be the only means of

extricating us from our present precarious position, and from the trap (so he

called the Drissa camp) in which we were placed. During all this discussion,

Pfuhl and his interpreter Woltzogen (who was his mouth-piece in the court world)

were silent. Pfuhl merely snorted contemptuously and turned his back to indicate

that he would never stoop to reply to the rubbish he was hearing. But when

Prince Volkonsky, who presided over the debate, called upon him to give his

opinion, he simply said: “Why ask me? General Armfeldt has proposed an excellent

position with the rear exposed to the enemy. Or why not the attack suggested by

this Italian gentleman? A fine idea! Or a retreat? Excellent, too. Why ask me?”

said he. “You all know better than I do, it appears.”

But when Volkonsky, frowning, said that it was in the Tsar's name that he

asked his opinion, Pfuhl rose, and growing suddenly excited, began to

speak:

“You have muddled and spoilt it all. You would all know better than I, and

now you come to me to ask how to set things right. There is nothing that needs

setting right. The only thing is to carry out in exact detail the plan laid down

by me,” he said, rapping his bony fingers on the table. “Where's the difficulty?

It's nonsense; child's play!” He went up to the map, and began talking rapidly,

pointing with his wrinkled finger about the map, and proving that no sort of

contingency could affect the adaptability of the Drissa camp to every emergency,

that every chance had been foreseen, and that if the enemy actually did make a

circuit round it, then the enemy would infallibly be annihilated.

Paulucci, who did not know German, began to ask him questions in French.

Woltzogen came to the assistance of his leader, who spoke French very badly, and

began translating his utterances, hardly able to keep pace with Pfuhl, who was

proceeding at a great rate to prove that everything, everything, not only what

was happening, but everything that possibly could happen, had been provided for

in his plan, and that if difficulties had arisen now, they were due simply to

the failure to carry out that plan with perfect exactitude. He was continually

giving vent to a sarcastic laugh as he went on proving, and at last scornfully

abandoned all attempt to prove, his position, as a mathematician will refuse to

establish by various different methods a problem he has once for all proved to

be correctly solved. Woltzogen took his place, continuing to explain his views

in French, and occasionally referring to Pfuhl himself: “Is that not true, your

excellency?” But Pfuhl, as a man in the heat of the fray will belabour those of

his own side, shouted angrily at his own follower—at Woltzogen, too.

“To be sure, what is there to explain in that?”

Paulucci and Michaud fell simultaneously on Woltzogen in French. Armfeldt

addressed Pfuhl himself in German. Toll was interpreting to Prince Volkonsky in

Russian. Prince Andrey listened and watched them in silence.

Of all these men the one for whom Prince Andrey felt most sympathy was the

exasperated, determined, insanely conceited Pfuhl. He was the only one of all

the persons present who was unmistakably seeking nothing for himself, and

harbouring no personal grudge against anybody else. He desired one thing

only—the adoption of his plan, in accordance with the theory that was the fruit

of years of toil. He was ludicrous; he was disagreeable with his sarcasm, but

yet he roused an involuntary feeling of respect from his boundless devotion to

an idea.

Apart from this, with the single exception of Pfuhl, every speech of every

person present had one common feature, which Prince Andrey had not seen at the

council of war in 1805—that was, a panic dread of the genius of Napoleon, a

dread which was involuntarily betrayed in every utterance now, in spite of all

efforts to conceal it. Anything was assumed possible for Napoleon; he was

expected from every quarter at once, and to invoke his terrible name was enough

for them to condemn each other's suggestions. Pfuhl alone seemed to look on him

too, even Napoleon, as a barbarian, like every other opponent of his theory; and

Pfuhl roused a feeling of pity, too, as well as respect, in Prince Andrey. From

the tone with which the courtiers addressed him, from what Paulucci had ventured

to say to the Tsar, and above all from a certain despairing expression in Pfuhl

himself, it was clear that others knew, and he himself, that his downfall was at

hand. And for all his conceit and his German grumpy irony, he was pitiful with

his flattened locks on his forehead and his wisps of uncombed hair sticking out

behind. Though he tried to conceal it under a semblance of anger and contempt,

he was visibly in despair that the sole chance left him of testing his theory on

a vast scale and proving its infallibility to the whole world was slipping away

from him.

The debate lasted a long while, and the longer it continued the hotter it

became, passing into clamour and personalities, and the less possible it was to

draw any sort of general conclusion from what was uttered. Prince Andrey simply

wondered at what they were all saying as he listened to the confusion of

different tongues, and the propositions, the plans, the shouts, and the

objections. The idea which had long ago and often occurred to him during the

period of his active service, that there was and could be no sort of military

science, and that therefore there could not be such a thing as military genius,

seemed to him now to be an absolutely obvious truth. “What theory and science

can there be of a subject of which the conditions and circumstances are

uncertain and can never be definitely known, in which the strength of the active

forces engaged can be even less definitely measured? No one can, or possibly

could, know the relative positions of our army and the enemy's in another

twenty-four hours, and no one can gauge the force of this or the other

detachment. Sometimes when there is no coward in front to cry, ‘We are cut off!'

and to run, but a brave, spirited fellow leads the way, shouting ‘Hurrah!' a

detachment of five thousand is as good as thirty thousand, as it was at

Sch

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1. Ebooks list page : 83
2. War And Peace: Book 4 - CHAPTER V
3. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER III
4. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER II
5. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER I
6. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER IV
7. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XIX
8. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XVI
9. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XV
10. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XIV
11. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER V
12. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER VI
13. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XIX
14. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XVI
15. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XIV
16. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XV