Napoleon’s army enters Moscow, meeting only trivial resistance. Once dispersed in the city, the men forever cease being soldiers. They turn into mere marauders. Carelessness, not arson, results in Moscow’s burning.
Napoleon’s army enters Moscow, meeting only trivial resistance. Once dispersed in the city, the men forever cease being soldiers. They turn into mere marauders. Carelessness, not arson, results in Moscow’s burning.
Book 11, Chapter 26
Napoleon’s army enters Moscow, meeting only trivial resistance. Once dispersed in the city, the men forever cease being soldiers. They turn into mere marauders. Carelessness, not arson, results in Moscow’s burning.
Summary:
Murat’s troops enter Moscow followed by a detachment of hussars and behind them Napoleon and his suite. Still expecting a counter attack, the French ask some Russian civilians where the Russian army can be found. Someone reports the Krémlin is barricaded. Murat moves on the Krémlin where they encounter only a tiny group of patriotic defenders, who Murat quickly destroys. Although the French marched into Moscow as an organized army, five weeks later when these men left Moscow, they were no longer an army. They had become only a mob of marauders. They became looters, nothing more. French officers issued order after order to the men, which were ignored. The French officers could never again establish military order. And since Moscow’s buildings were wooden, it had no fire engines, and careless soldiers cooked on open campfires everywhere, the city burned. This wasn’t arson, just the accidental conflagrations unavoidable under such conditions.
quote from the chapter:
As soon as the men of the various regiments began to disperse among the wealthy and deserted houses, the army was lost forever and there came into being something nondescript, neither citizens nor soldiers but what are known as marauders. When five weeks later these same men left Moscow, they no longer formed an army. They were a mob of marauders, each carrying a quantity of articles which seemed to him valuable or useful. The aim of each man when he left Moscow was no longer, as it had been, to conquer, but merely to keep what he had acquired. Like a monkey which puts its paw into the narrow neck of a jug, and having seized a handful of nuts will not open its fist for fear of losing what it holds, and therefore perishes, the French when they left Moscow had inevitably to perish because they carried their loot with them, yet to abandon what they had stolen was as impossible for them as it is for the monkey to open its paw and let go of its nuts.
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