here was not a single battle. The French did not move. As a bleeding,
mortally wounded animal licks its wounds, they remained inert in Moscow
for five weeks, and then suddenly, with no fresh reason, fled back:
they made a dash for the Kaluga road, and (after a victory--for at
Malo-Yaroslavets the field of conflict again remained theirs) without
undertaking a single serious battle, they fled still more rapidly back
to Smolensk, beyond Smolensk, beyond the Berezina, beyond Vilna, and
farther still.

On the evening of the twenty-sixth of August, Kutuzov and the whole
Russian army were convinced that the battle of Borodino was a victory.
Kutuzov reported so to the Emperor. He gave orders to prepare for a
fresh conflict to finish the enemy and did this not to deceive anyone,
but because he knew that the enemy was beaten, as everyone who had taken
part in the battle knew it.

But all that evening and next day reports came in one after another
of unheard-of losses, of the loss of half the army, and a fresh battle
proved physically impossible.

It was impossible to give battle before information had been collected,
the wounded gathered in, the supplies of ammunition replenished, the
slain reckoned up, new officers appointed to replace those who had been
killed, and before the men had had food and sleep. And meanwhile, the
very next morning after the battle, the French army advanced of itself
upon the Russians, carried forward by the force of its own momentum now
seemingly increased in inverse proportion to the square of the distance
from its aim. Kutuzov's wish was to attack next day, and the whole
army desired to do so. But to make an attack the wish to do so is not
sufficient, there must also be a possibility of doing it, and that
possibility did not exist. It was impossible not to retreat a day's
march, and then in the same way it was impossible not to retreat another
and a third day's march, and at last, on the first of September when
the army drew near Moscow--despite the strength of the feeling that had
arisen in all ranks--the force of circumstances compelled it to retire
beyond Moscow. And the troops retired one more, last, day's march, and
abandoned Moscow to the enemy.

For people accustomed to think that plans of campaign and battles are
made by generals--as any one of us sitting over a map in his study may
imagine how he would have arranged things in this or that battle--the
questions present themselves: Why did