War and Peace

oward four o’clock in the afternoon Murat’s troops were entering
Moscow. In front rode a detachment of Württemberg hussars and behind
them rode the King of Naples himself accompanied by a numerous suite.

About the middle of the Arbát Street, near the Church of the Miraculous
Icon of St. Nicholas, Murat halted to await news from the advanced
detachment as to the condition in which they had found the citadel, le
Kremlin.

Around Murat gathered a group of those who had remained in Moscow. They
all stared in timid bewilderment at the strange, long-haired commander
dressed up in feathers and gold.

“Is that their Tsar himself? He’s not bad!” low voices could be heard
saying.

An interpreter rode up to the group.

“Take off your cap... your caps!” These words went from one to another
in the crowd. The interpreter addressed an old porter and asked if
it was far to the Krémlin. The porter, listening in perplexity to the
unfamiliar Polish accent and not realizing that the interpreter was
speaking Russian, did not understand what was being said to him and
slipped behind the others.

Murat approached the interpreter and told him to ask where the Russian
army was. One of the Russians understood what was asked and several
voices at once began answering the interpreter. A French officer,
returning from the advanced detachment, rode up to Murat and reported
that the gates of the citadel had been barricaded and that there was
probably an ambuscade there.

“Good!” said Murat and, turning to one of the gentlemen in his suite,
ordered four light guns to be moved forward to fire at the gates.

The guns emerged at a trot from the column following Murat and advanced
up the Arbát. When they reached the end of the Vozdvízhenka Street they
halted and drew in the Square. Several French officers superintended the
placing of the guns and looked at the Krémlin through field glasses.

The bells in the Krémlin were ringing for vespers, and this sound
troubled the French. They imagined it to be a call to arms. A few
infantrymen ran to the Kutáfyev Gate. Beams and wooden screens had been
put there, and two musket shots rang out from under the gate as soon as
an officer and men began to run toward it. A general who was standing
by the guns shouted some words of command to the officer, and the latter
ran back again with his men.

The sound of three more shots came from the gate.

One shot struck a French soldier’s foot, and from behind the screens
came the strange sound of a few voices shouting. Instantly as at a
word of command the expression of cheerful serenity on the faces of
the French general, officers, and men changed to one of determined
concentrated readiness for strife and suffering. To all of them from
the marshal to the least soldier, that place was not the Vozdvízhenka,
Mokhaváya, or Kutáfyev Street, nor the Tróitsa Gate (places familiar in
Moscow), but a new battlefield which would probably prove sanguinary.
And all made ready for that battle. The cries from the gates ceased. The
guns were advanced, the artillerymen blew the ash off their linstocks,
and an officer gave the word “Fire!” This was followed by two whistling
sounds of canister shot, one after another. The shot rattled against
the stone of the gate and upon the wooden beams and screens, and two
wavering clouds of smoke rose over the Square.

A few instants after the echo of the reports resounding over the
stone-built Krémlin had died away the French heard a strange sound above
their head. Thousands of crows rose above the walls and circled in the
air, cawing and noisily flapping their wings. Together with that sound
came a solitary human cry from the gateway and amid the smoke appeared
the figure of a bareheaded man in a peasant’s coat. He grasped a musket
and took aim at the French. “Fire!” repeated the officer once more,
and the reports of a musket and of two cannon shots were heard
simultaneously. The gate was again hidden by smoke.

Nothing more stirred behind the screens and the French infantry soldiers
and officers advanced to the gate. In the gateway lay three wounded and
four dead. Two men in peasant coats ran away at the foot of the wall,
toward the Známenka.

“Clear that away!” said the officer, pointing to the beams and the
corpses, and the French soldiers, after dispatching the wounded, threw
the corpses over the parapet.

Who these men were nobody knew. “Clear that away!” was all that was said
of them, and they were thrown over the parapet and removed later on that
they might not stink. Thiers alone dedicates a few eloquent lines to
their memory: “These wretches had occupied the sacred citadel, having
supplied themselves with guns from the arsenal, and fired” (the
wretches) “at the French. Some of them were sabered and the Krémlin was
purged of their presence.”

Murat was informed that the way had been cleared. The French entered
the gates and began pitching their camp in the Senate Square. Out of the
windows of the Senate House the soldiers threw chairs into the Square
for fuel and kindled fires there.

Other detachments passed through the Krémlin and encamped along
the Moroséyka, the Lubyánka, and Pokróvka Streets. Others quartered
themselves along the Vozdvízhenka, the Nikólski, and the Tverskóy
Streets. No masters of the houses being found anywhere, the French were
not billeted on the inhabitants as is usual in towns but lived in it as
in a camp.

Though tattered, hungry, worn out, and reduced to a third of their
original number, the French entered Moscow in good marching order. It
was a weary and famished, but still a fighting and menacing army. But
it remained an army only until its soldiers had dispersed into their
different lodgings. As soon as the men of the various regiments began
to disperse among the wealthy and deserted houses, the army was lost
forever and there came into being something nondescript, neither
citizens nor soldiers but what are known as marauders. When five weeks
later these same men left Moscow, they no longer formed an army. They
were a mob of marauders, each carrying a quantity of articles which
seemed to him valuable or useful. The aim of each man when he left
Moscow was no longer, as it had been, to conquer, but merely to keep
what he had acquired. Like a monkey which puts its paw into the narrow
neck of a jug, and having seized a handful of nuts will not open its
fist for fear of losing what it holds, and therefore perishes, the
French when they left Moscow had inevitably to perish because they
carried their loot with them, yet to abandon what they had stolen was as
impossible for them as it is for the monkey to open its paw and let
go of its nuts. Ten minutes after each regiment had entered a Moscow
district, not a soldier or officer was left. Men in military uniforms
and Hessian boots could be seen through the windows, laughing and
walking through the rooms. In cellars and storerooms similar men were
busy among the provisions, and in the yards unlocking or breaking open
coach house and stable doors, lighting fires in kitchens and kneading
and baking bread with rolled-up sleeves, and cooking; or frightening,
amusing, or caressing women and children. There were many such men both
in the shops and houses—but there was no army.

Order after order was issued by the French commanders that day
forbidding the men to disperse about the town, sternly forbidding any
violence to the inhabitants or any looting, and announcing a roll call
for that very evening. But despite all these measures the men, who had
till then constituted an army, flowed all over the wealthy, deserted
city with its comforts and plentiful supplies. As a hungry herd of
cattle keeps well together when crossing a barren field, but gets out
of hand and at once disperses uncontrollably as soon as it reaches rich
pastures, so did the army disperse all over the wealthy city.

No residents were left in Moscow, and the soldiers—like water
percolating through sand—spread irresistibly through the city in all
directions from the Krémlin into which they had first marched. The
cavalry, on entering a merchant’s house that had been abandoned and
finding there stabling more than sufficient for their horses, went on,
all the same, to the next house which seemed to them better. Many of
them appropriated several houses, chalked their names on them, and
quarreled and even fought with other companies for them. Before they had
had time to secure quarters the soldiers ran out into the streets to
see the city and, hearing that everything had been abandoned, rushed
to places where valuables were to be had for the taking. The officers
followed to check the soldiers and were involuntarily drawn into doing
the same. In Carriage Row carriages had been left in the shops, and
generals flocked there to select calèches and coaches for themselves.
The few inhabitants who had remained invited commanding officers to
their houses, hoping thereby to secure themselves from being plundered.
There were masses of wealth and there seemed no end to it. All around
the quarters occupied by the French were other regions still unexplored
and unoccupied where, they thought, yet greater riches might be found.
And Moscow engulfed the army ever deeper and deeper. When water is
spilled on dry ground both the dry ground and the water disappear and
mud results; and in the same way the entry of the famished army into the
rich and deserted city resulted in fires and looting and the destruction
of both the army and the wealthy city.

The French attributed the Fire of Moscow au patriotisme féroce de
Rostopchíne, * the Russians to the barbarity of the French. In reality,
however, it was not, and could not be, possible to explain the burning
of Moscow by making any individual, or any group of people, responsible
for it. Moscow was burned because it found itself in a position in which
any town built of wood was bound to burn, quite apart from whether it
had, or had not, a hundred and thirty inferior fire engines. Deserted
Moscow had to burn as inevitably as a heap of shavings has to burn on
which sparks continually fall for several days. A town built of wood,
where scarcely a day passes without conflagrations when the house owners
are in residence and a police force is present, cannot help burning when
its inhabitants have left it and it is occupied by soldiers who smoke
pipes, make campfires of the Senate chairs in the Senate Square, and
cook themselves meals twice a day. In peacetime it is only necessary to
billet troops in the villages of any district and the number of fires in
that district immediately increases. How much then must the probability
of fire be increased in an abandoned, wooden town where foreign troops
are quartered. “Le patriotisme féroce de Rostopchíne” and the barbarity
of the French were not to blame in the matter. Moscow was set on fire by
the soldiers’ pipes, kitchens, and campfires, and by the carelessness of
enemy soldiers occupying houses they did not own. Even if there was any
arson (which is very doubtful, for no one had any reason to burn the
houses—in any case a troublesome and dangerous thing to do), arson
cannot be regarded as the cause, for the same thing would have happened
without any incendiarism.

* To Rostopchín’s ferocious patriotism.

However tempting it might be for the French to blame Rostopchín’s
ferocity and for Russians to blame the scoundrel Bonaparte, or later
on to place an heroic torch in the hands of their own people, it is
impossible not to see that there could be no such direct cause of the
fire, for Moscow had to burn as every village, factory, or house must
burn which is left by its owners and in which strangers are allowed to
live and cook their porridge. Moscow was burned by its inhabitants, it
is true, but by those who had abandoned it and not by those who remained
in it. Moscow when occupied by the enemy did not remain intact like
Berlin, Vienna, and other towns, simply because its inhabitants
abandoned it and did not welcome the French with bread and salt, nor
bring them the keys of the city.