《War And Peace》　Book13 　CHAPTER VII
　　　　by Leo Tolstoy

MEANWHILE another column was to have fallen upon the French in the centre,
but of this column Kutuzov was in command. He knew very well that nothing but
muddle would come of this battle, begun against his will, and, as far as it was
in his power, he held his forces back. He did not move.

Kutuzov rode mutely about on his grey horse, making languid replies to the
suggestions for an attack.

"You can all talk about attacking, but you don't see that we don't know how
to execute complicated manœuvres," he said to Miloradovitch, who was begging to
be allowed to advance.

"We couldn't take Murat alive in the morning, nor be in our places in time;
now there's nothing to be done!" he said to another.

When it was reported to Kutuzov that there were now two battalions of Poles
in the rear of the French, where according to the earlier reports of the
Cossacks there had been none, he took a sidelong glance behind him at Yermolov,
to whom he had not spoken since the previous day.

"Here they are begging to advance, proposing projects of all sorts, and as
soon as you get to work, there's nothing ready, and the enemy, forewarned, takes
his measures."

Yermolov half closed his eyelids, and faintly smiled, as he heard those
words. He knew that the storm had blown over him, and that Kutuzov would not go
beyond that hint.

"That's his little joke at my expense," said Yermolov softly, poking Raevsky,
near him, with his knee.

Soon after that, Yermolov moved forward to Kutuzov and respectfully
submitted:

"The time has not passed, your highness; the enemy has not gone away. If you
were to command an advance? Or else the guards won't have a sight of
smoke."

Kutuzov said nothing, but when news was brought him that Murat's troops were
in retreat, he gave orders for an advance; but every hundred paces he halted for
three-quarters of an hour.

The whole battle was confined to what had been done by the Cossacks of
Orlov-Denisov; the rest of the troops simply lost a few hundreds of men for
nothing.

In consequence of this battle, Kutuzov received a diamond decoration;
Bennigsen, too, was rewarded with diamonds and a hundred thousand roubles; and
the other generals, too, received agreeable recognition according to their rank,
and more changes were made on the staff.

"That's how things are always done among us, everything topsy-turvy!" the
Russian officers and generals said after the battle of Tarutino; just as they
say it nowadays, with an assumption that some stupid person had muddled
everything, while we would have managed quite differently. But the men who speak
like this either do not understand what they are talking of, or intentionally
deceive themselves. Every battle-Tarutino, Borodino, Austerlitz-fails to come
off as those who planned it expected it to do. That is inevitable.

An innumerable collection of freely acting forces (and nowhere is a man freer
than on the field of battle, where it is a question of life and death) influence
the direction taken by a battle, and that can never be known beforehand and
never corresponds with the direction of any one force.

If many forces are acting simultaneously in different directions on any body,
the direction of its motion will not correspond with any one of the forces, but
will always follow a middle course, the summary of them, what is expressed in
mechanics by the diagonal of the parallelogram of forces.

If in the accounts given us by historians, especially by French ones, we find
that wars and battles appear to follow a definite plan laid down beforehand, the
only deduction we can make from that is that these accounts are not true.

The battle of Tarutino obviously failed to attain the aim which Toll had in
view: to lead the army into action in accordance with his disposition of the
troops, or the aim which Count Orlov-Denisov may have had: to take Murat
prisoner; or the aim of destroying at one blow the whole corps, which Benningsen
and others may have entertained; or the aim of the officer who desired to
distinguish himself under fire; or the Cossack, who wanted to obtain more booty
than he did attain, and so on. But if we regard the object of the battle as what
was actually accomplished by it, and what was the universal desire of all
Russians (the expulsion of the French from Russia and the destruction of their
army), it will be perfectly evident that the battle of Tarutino, precisely in
consequence of its incongruities, was exactly what was wanted at that period of
the campaign. It is difficult or impossible to imagine any issue of that battle
more in accordance with that object than its actual result. With the very
smallest effort, in spite of the greatest muddle, and with the most trifling
loss, the most important results in the whole campaign were obtained-the
transition was made from retreat to attack, the weakness of the French was
revealed, and the shock was given which was all that was needed to put
Napoleon's army to flight.