The Hollow Victory at Borodinó — War and Peace

Several tens of thousands of the slain lie in diverse postures and various uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the Davydov family and to the crown serfs, fields where for hundreds of years the peasants of Borodino, Gorki, Shevardino, and Semenovsk had reaped harvests and pastured cattle. At the dressing stations the grass and earth are soaked with blood for some three acres around. Crowds of men, wounded and unwounded, with frightened faces, drag themselves back to Mozhaysk from one army and back to Valuevo from the other. Other crowds, exhausted and hungry, go forward led by their officers. Others hold their ground and continue to fire. Over the whole field, so gaily beautiful that morning with glittering bayonets and cloudlets of smoke, there now spreads a mist of damp and smoke and a strange acid smell of saltpetre and blood. Clouds gather. Drops of rain begin to fall on the dead and wounded, on the frightened, exhausted, and hesitating men, as if to say: enough, cease, bethink yourselves, what are you doing?

To the men of both sides, worn out by want of food and rest, it begins to appear doubtful whether they should continue to slaughter one another. The question arises in every soul: for what, for whom, must I kill and be killed? You may go and kill whom you please, but I do not want to do so any more. By evening this thought has ripened. At any moment these men might have been seized with horror and thrown up everything. Yet some incomprehensible, mysterious power continues to control them. They still bring up the charges, load, aim, and apply the match, though only one artilleryman survives out of every three, though they stumble and pant with fatigue, perspiring and stained with blood and powder. The cannon balls fly just as swiftly and cruelly from both sides. That terrible work, not done by the will of a man but at the will of Him who governs men and worlds, continues.

Anyone looking at the disorganised Russian rear would have said that one more slight French effort would make it disappear. Anyone looking at the French rear would have said the same of the Russians. Neither army makes that effort, and the flame of battle burns slowly out. The Russians were not attacking; they stood blocking the way to Moscow at the beginning and still do so at the end, though they have lost half their army and could not have made a last push even had they wished to drive the French from their positions. The French, with fifteen years of victories, the assurance of Napoleon's invincibility, part of the field captured, only a quarter of their men lost, and the Guards intact twenty thousand strong, ought to have made that effort, for as long as the Russians still block the road their aim is unattained. They do not. Historians say Napoleon need only have used his Old Guards. Tolstoy answers that to speak of what would have happened had he sent them is like talking of autumn becoming spring. It could not be. The flagging spirit of the troops would not permit it. All the French generals and soldiers feel that nightmare of the mighty arm stricken powerless before an enemy who, after losing half his men, stands as threateningly at the end as at the beginning. The moral force of the attacking army is exhausted. Not the capture of standards and ground, but a moral victory that convinces the enemy of his opponent's superiority, is gained by the Russians at Borodino. The French invaders, like an infuriated animal that has received a mortal wound, still roll forward to Moscow by impetus gained, but there, without further effort on the Russian side, that army has to perish. The direct consequence, Tolstoy says, will be Napoleon's senseless flight, the destruction of the invading army of five hundred thousand, and the downfall of Napoleonic France.