Why Perfect Plans Always Fail — War and Peace

What Russian, Tolstoy asks, has not felt regret that Napoleon was not captured when three armies surrounded a starving French mob? Historians blame Kutuzov, Tormasov, and Chichagov for failed maneuvers, yet never explain why those men were not tried if guilt were real. If the aim was to cut off the Emperor and his marshals, the last stretch of 1812 looks like a string of French victories. That conclusion collides with the facts: those victories destroyed the French, and those Russian defeats freed the country. The contradiction, Tolstoy says, comes from letters and reports that invent an aim which never existed except in a dozen imaginations.

Cutting them off would have been senseless. The French were already fleeing as every Russian wished. Blocking men whose whole energy was flight would have spent Russian lives to finish what winter and hunger were doing. Capturing emperors and dukes would have embarrassed diplomacy, and convoying army corps would have starved prisoners already dying while the Russian army itself had melted to half before Krasnoe. The gardener who runs to the gate to hit a cow after it has trampled the beds is angry; the planners of encirclement had not even suffered the beds. Junctions over vast distances were impossible, Kutuzov knew. To cut off an army is a phrase without meaning: there is always night and space. Men surrender only if they agree, as the Germans did; the French would not, because hunger and cold waited in flight and captivity alike.

During the pursuit from Tarutino to Krasnoe the Russians lost fifty thousand sick or stragglers without a battle. Historians in warm rooms still write how Miloradovich should have flanked and Chichagov should have crossed knee-deep in snow. The people's real aim was to free the land: let the French run, harry them with partisans, follow with a whip raised as menace rather than strike the running animal on the head. Success judged by results sits beside maps that never happened, and Tolstoy leaves both on the table.