egan to run away only when suddenly seized by a panic caused by the
capture of transport trains on the Smolensk road, and by the battle of
Tarutino. The news of that battle of Tarutino, unexpectedly received
by Napoleon at a review, evoked in him a desire to punish the Russians
(Thiers says), and he issued the order for departure which the whole
army was demanding.

Fleeing from Moscow the soldiers took with them everything they had
stolen. Napoleon, too, carried away his own personal tresor, but on
seeing the baggage trains that impeded the army, he was (Thiers says)
horror-struck. And yet with his experience of war he did not order all
the superfluous vehicles to be burned, as he had done with those of a
certain marshal when approaching Moscow. He gazed at the caleches and
carriages in which soldiers were riding and remarked that it was a very
good thing, as those vehicles could be used to carry provisions, the
sick, and the wounded.

The plight of the whole army resembled that of a wounded animal which
feels it is perishing and does not know what it is doing. To study the
skillful tactics and aims of Napoleon and his army from the time it
entered Moscow till it was destroyed is like studying the dying leaps
and shudders of a mortally wounded animal. Very often a wounded animal,
hearing a rustle, rushes straight at the hunter's gun, runs forward and
back again, and hastens its own end. Napoleon, under pressure from his
whole army, did the same thing. The rustle of the battle of Tarutino
frightened the beast, and it rushed forward onto the hunter's gun,
reached him, turned back, and finally--like any wild beast--ran back
along the most disadvantageous and dangerous path, where the old scent
was familiar.

During the whole of that period Napoleon, who seems to us to have been
the leader of all these movements--as the figurehead of a ship may
seem to a savage to guide the vessel--acted like a child who, holding a
couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it.

CHAPTER XI

Early in the morning of the sixth of October Pierre went out of the
shed, and on returning stopped by the door to play with a little
blue-gray dog, with a long body and short bandy legs, that jumped about
him. This little dog lived in their shed, sleeping beside Karataev at
night; it sometimes made excursions into the town but always returned
again. Probably it had never had an owner, and it still belonged to
nobody and ha