The Russian soldiers did all that could or ought to have been done to attain an end worthy of the people, and half of them died in doing it. They are not to blame because other Russians, sitting in warm rooms at home, proposed that they should do the impossible.

All this strange discrepancy between the facts and the accounts of historians, so difficult to understand to-day, arises simply from this, that the historians wrote the history of the noble sentiments and fine speeches of various generals, and not the history of the events themselves.

They attach great consequence to the words of Miloradovitch, to the honours bestowed on this general or that, and the proposals made by them. But the question of the fifty thousand men who lay in the hospitals and graveyards does not even interest them, for it does not come within the scope of their researches.

And yet we have but to turn away from researches among the reports and plans of the generals, and to look into the movements of those hundred thousand men who took direct immediate part in the events; and all the questions that seemed insoluble before can be readily and certainly explained with extraordinary ease and simplicity.

The plan of cutting off Napoleon and his army never existed save in the imagination of some dozen men. It could not have existed because it was absurd and could not be carried out.

The people had a single aim: to clear their country of the invaders. That aim was effected primarily of itself, since the French were flying, and all that was necessary was not to check their flight. It was promoted, too, by the irregular warfare kept up by the people destroying the French army piecemeal; and thirdly, by the great Russian army following in the rear of the French, ready to use force in case there were any pause in their retreat.

The Russian army had to act as a whip urging on a fleeing animal. And the experienced driver knew that it was better to keep the whip raised as a menace than to bring it down on the creature’s back.


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