native land
was too far off, and for a man going a thousand miles it is absolutely
necessary to set aside his final goal and to say to himself: "Today I
shall get to a place twenty-five miles off where I shall rest and
spend the night," and during the first day's journey that resting place
eclipses his ultimate goal and attracts all his hopes and desires. And
the impulses felt by a single person are always magnified in a crowd.

For the French retreating along the old Smolensk road, the final
goal--their native land--was too remote, and their immediate goal
was Smolensk, toward which all their desires and hopes, enormously
intensified in the mass, urged them on. It was not that they knew that
much food and fresh troops awaited them in Smolensk, nor that they were
told so (on the contrary their superior officers, and Napoleon himself,
knew that provisions were scarce there), but because this alone could
give them strength to move on and endure their present privations. So
both those who knew and those who did not know deceived themselves, and
pushed on to Smolensk as to a promised land.

Coming out onto the highroad the French fled with surprising energy
and unheard-of rapidity toward the goal they had fixed on. Besides the
common impulse which bound the whole crowd of French into one mass and
supplied them with a certain energy, there was another cause binding
them together--their great numbers. As with the physical law of gravity,
their enormous mass drew the individual human atoms to itself. In their
hundreds of thousands they moved like a whole nation.

Each of them desired nothing more than to give himself up as a prisoner
to escape from all this horror and misery; but on the one hand the force
of this common attraction to Smolensk, their goal, drew each of them in
the same direction; on the other hand an army corps could not surrender
to a company, and though the French availed themselves of every
convenient opportunity to detach themselves and to surrender on the
slightest decent pretext, such pretexts did not always occur. Their
very numbers and their crowded and swift movement deprived them of that
possibility and rendered it not only difficult but impossible for the
Russians to stop this movement, to which the French were directing all
their energies. Beyond a certain limit no mechanical disruption of the
body could hasten the process of decomposition.

A lump of snow cannot be melted instantaneously. There