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THE COMBINATION of causes of phenomena is beyond the grasp of the human
intellect. But the impulse to seek causes is innate in the soul of man. And the
human intellect, with no inkling of the immense variety and complexity of
circumstances conditioning a phenomenon, any one of which may be separately
conceived of as the cause of it, snatches at the first and most easily
understood approximation, and says here is the cause. In historical events,
where the actions of men form the subject of observation, the most primitive
conception of a cause was the will of the gods, succeeded later on by the will
of those men who stand in the historical foreground—the heroes of history. But
one had but to look below the surface of any historical event, to look, that is,
into the movement of the whole mass of men taking part in that event, to be
convinced that the will of the hero of history, so far from controlling the
actions of the multitude, is continually controlled by them. It may be thought
that it is a matter of no importance whether historical events are interpreted
in one way or in another. But between the man who says that the peoples of the
West marched into the East, because Napoleon willed they should do so, and the
man who says that that movement came to pass because it was bound to come to
pass, there exists the same difference as between the men who maintained that
the earth was stationary and the planets revolved about it, and the men who said
that they did not know what holds the earth in its place, but they did know that
there were laws controlling its motions and the motions of the other planets.
Causes of historical events—there are not and cannot be, save the one cause of
all causes. But there are laws controlling these events; laws partly unknown,
partly accessible to us. The discovery of these laws is only possible when we
entirely give up looking for a cause in the will of one man, just as the
discovery of the laws of the motions of the planets has only become possible
since men have given up the conception of the earth being stationary.
After the battle of Borodino, and the taking and burning of Moscow,
historians consider the most important episode of the war of 1812 to be the
movement of the Russian army from the Ryazan to the Kaluga road and to the
Tarutino camp, the so-called oblique march behind Krasnaya Pahra. Historians
ascribe the credit of this stroke of genius to various persons, and dispute to
whom it is rightfully due. Even foreign, even French historians, admit the
genius of the Russian generals when they mention this flank march. But why
military writers, and others following their lead, assume this oblique movement
to be a project profoundly planned by some one person for the deliverance of
Russia and the overthrow of Napoleon it is very difficult to see. It is
difficult in the first place to see wherein the profound wisdom and genius of
this march lies; for no great intellectual effort is needed to guess that the
best position for an army, when not being attacked, is where supplies are most
plentiful. And every one, even a stupid boy of thirteen, could have guessed that
the most advantageous position for the army in 1812, after the retreat from
Moscow, would be on the Kaluga road. And so one cannot understand, in the first
place, what conclusions led the historians to see some deep wisdom in this
manœuvre. Secondly, it is even more difficult to understand why the historians
ascribe to this manœuvre the deliverance of Russia and the overthrow of the
French; for, had other circumstances preceded, accompanied, or followed it, this
flank movement might as well have led to the destruction of the Russian army and
the deliverance of the French. If the position of the Russian army did, in fact,
begin to improve from the time of that march, it does not at all follow that the
improvement was caused by it.
That oblique march might have been not simply of no use; it might have led to
the destruction of the Russian army, but for the conjunction of other
circumstances. What would have happened if Moscow had not been burnt? If Murat
had not lost sight of the Russians? If Napoleon had not remained inactive? If,
as Bennigsen and Barclay advised, the Russians had given battle near Krasnaya
Pahra? What would have happened if the French had attacked the Russians when
they were marching behind Pahra? What would have happened if later on Napoleon,
on reaching Tarutino, had attacked the Russians with one-tenth of the energy
with which he had attacked them at Smolensk? What would have happened if the
French had marched to Petersburg? … On any of these hypotheses, the oblique
march might have led to ruin instead of to safety.
The third point, most difficult of all to understand, is that students of
history seem intentionally to refuse to see that this march cannot be ascribed
to any one man, that no one foresaw it at any time, that, like the retreat to
Fili, the manœuvre was, in reality, never conceived of by any one in its
entirety, but arose step by step, incident by incident, moment by moment from a
countless multitude of the most diverse circumstances, and is only conceived of
in its entirety, when it is an accomplished fact, and has become the past.
At the council at Fili the accepted idea among the Russians—the course taken
for granted in fact—was retreat in a direct line back, that is, along the Nizhni
road. Evidence of this is that the majority of votes at the council were for
adopting this course, and the commander-in-chief's famous conversation after the
council with Lansky, the head of the commissariat department, is an even more
striking proof of it. Lansky submitted to the commander-in-chief that the chief
supplies for the army were stored along the Oka, in the Tula and Kazan
provinces, and that if they retreated along the Nizhni road, the army would be
cut off from its supplies by the broad river Oka, across which transport in the
early winter was impossible. This was the first proof of the necessity of
departing from the course that had at first seemed the most natural one, the
retreat along the Nizhni road. The army kept more to the south along the Ryazan
road, closer to its supplies. Later on the inactivity of the French, who
positively lost sight of the Russian army, anxiety for the defence of the Tula
arsenal, and above all, the advantage of being near their supplies led the army
to turn even more to the south, to the Tula road. After crossing by a forced
march behind Pahra to the Tula road, the generals of the Russian army intended
to remain at Podolsk, and had no idea of the Tarutino position. But an infinite
number of circumstances, among them the reappearance of French troops on the
scene, and plans for giving battle, and most of all, the abundance of supplies
in Kaluga, led our army to turn even more to the south, and to pass from the
Tula to the Kaluga road to Tarutino, a central position between their lines of
communication with their supplies. Just as it is impossible to answer the
question what date Moscow was abandoned, it is impossible too to say precisely
when and by whom it was decided to move the army to Tarutino. It was only after
the army, through the action of innumerable infinitesimally small forces, had
been brought to Tarutino, that people began to protest to themselves that that
was the course they had desired, and had long foreseen as the right one.
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