The French army begins to break up as it flees for Smolénsk. Kutúzov tries, not always successfully, to prevent Russian commanders from attacking the fleeing French so as to avoid unnecessary loss of life.
The French army begins to break up as it flees for Smolénsk. Kutúzov tries, not always successfully, to prevent Russian commanders from attacking the fleeing French so as to avoid unnecessary loss of life.
Book 13, Chapter 19
The French army begins to break up as it flees for Smolénsk. Kutúzov tries, not always successfully, to prevent Russian commanders from attacking the fleeing French so as to avoid unnecessary loss of life.
Summary:
Uppermost in the mind of the French was to reach Smolénsk. Even on this first leg of their long journey to Paris, however, the army began breaking up. Groups of men were peeling away from the main mass of the French army on the Smolénsk road. Conditions were hard, and in fact they would find only scant provisions waiting for them in Smolénsk. Many French wished to surrender, but could not find an opportunity to do so. Realizing that the French army was melting away on its own, Kutúzov tried his best to prevent the other Russian commanders from attacking. However, in some cases, there were Russian attacks on the French, which resulted only in the pointless loss of lives.
quote from the chapter:
For the French retreating along the old Smolénsk road, the final goal-their native land-was too remote, and their immediate goal was Smolénsk, 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 Smolénsk, 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 Smolénsk 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.
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