The so-called partisan war began with the entry of the French into Smolensk. Before the government officially recognised it, thousands of enemy stragglers, marauders, and foragers had been destroyed by Cossacks and peasants, who killed them off as instinctively as dogs worry a stray mad dog. Denis Davydov, with his Russian instinct, was the first to recognise the value of this terrible cudgel which, regardless of the rules of military science, destroyed the French, and to him belongs the credit for taking the first step toward regularising the method. On August the twenty-fourth Davydov's first partisan detachment was formed, then others were recognised. The further the campaign progressed the more numerous these detachments became. They gathered the fallen leaves that dropped of themselves from that withered tree, the French army, and sometimes shook the tree itself. By October, when the French were fleeing toward Smolensk, there were hundreds of companies of various sizes: some with infantry, artillery, staffs, and comforts; some solely Cossack cavalry; scratch groups of foot and horse; unknown parties of peasants and landowners. A sacristan commanded one party that captured several hundred prisoners in a month; Vasilisa, wife of a village elder, slew hundreds of the French.
The warfare flamed up most fiercely in the latter days of October. Its first period had passed, when the partisans themselves, amazed at their own boldness, feared every minute to be surrounded, hid in the forests without unsaddling, and hardly dared dismount. By the end of October the shape was definite. Commanders of large detachments with staffs, moving according to rules at a distance from the French, still regarded many things as impossible. Small bands that had watched closely considered possible what the big commanders dared not contemplate. Cossacks and peasants who crept in among the French now considered everything possible.
On October the twenty-second Denisov, one of the irregulars, was at the height of that enthusiasm. All day he watched from the forest skirting the highroad a large French convoy of cavalry baggage and Russian prisoners, separated from the rest, moving under a strong escort to Smolensk. Dolokhov led a small party nearby. Commanders of large divisions, a Pole and a German, sent invitations almost simultaneously asking Denisov to join them. No, brother, I have grown moustaches myself, he said, and wrote to each that he was already under the other. He and Dolokhov intended, without reporting to higher command, to seize the convoy with their own small forces as it moved from Mikulino to Shamshevo. Forests on the left sometimes ran up to the road. That morning Cossacks had carried off two wagons of cavalry saddles stuck in the mud. They would let the French reach Shamshevo quietly, join Dolokhov at a watchman's hut, and fall on them at dawn from two sides. They reckoned fifteen hundred French against perhaps four hundred. All Denisov needed was a tongue. The morning attack had killed the wagon escort; only a little drummer boy remained, a straggler who knew nothing definite. Afraid a second attack would alert the column, Denisov sent Tikhon Shcherbaty, a peasant of his party, to Shamshevo to seize at least one quartermaster sent on in advance.
