________________________________________________
_ Toward four o'clock in the afternoon Murat's troops were entering
Moscow. In front rode a detachment of Wurttemberg hussars and behind
them rode the King of Naples himself accompanied by a numerous suite.
About the middle of the Arbat Street, near the Church of the
Miraculous Icon of St. Nicholas, Murat halted to await news from the
advanced detachment as to the condition in which they had found the
citadel, le Kremlin.
Around Murat gathered a group of those who had remained in Moscow.
They all stared in timid bewilderment at the strange, long-haired
commander dressed up in feathers and gold.
"Is that their Tsar himself? He's not bad!" low voices could be
heard saying.
An interpreter rode up to the group.
"Take off your cap... your caps!" These words went from one to
another in the crowd. The interpreter addressed an old porter and
asked if it was far to the Kremlin. The porter, listening in
perplexity to the unfamiliar Polish accent and not realizing that
the interpreter was speaking Russian, did not understand what was
being said to him and slipped behind the others.
Murat approached the interpreter and told him to ask where the
Russian army was. One of the Russians understood what was asked and
several voices at once began answering the interpreter. A French
officer, returning from the advanced detachment, rode up to Murat
and reported that the gates of the citadel had been barricaded and
that there was probably an ambuscade there.
"Good!" said Murat and, turning to one of the gentlemen in his
suite, ordered four light guns to be moved forward to fire at the
gates.
The guns emerged at a trot from the column following Murat and
advanced up the Arbat. When they reached the end of the Vozdvizhenka
Street they halted and drew in the Square. Several French officers
superintended the placing of the guns and looked at the Kremlin
through field glasses.
The bells in the Kremlin were ringing for vespers, and this sound
troubled the French. They imagined it to be a call to arms. A few
infantrymen ran to the Kutafyev Gate. Beams and wooden screens had
been put there, and two musket shots rang out from under the gate as
soon as an officer and men began to run toward it. A general who was
standing by the guns shouted some words of command to the officer, and
the latter ran back again with his men.
The sound of three more shots came from the gate.
One shot struck a French soldier's foot, and from behind the screens
came the strange sound of a few voices shouting. Instantly as at a
word of command the expression of cheerful serenity on the faces of
the French general, officers, and men changed to one of determined
concentrated readiness for strife and suffering. To all of them from
the marshal to the least soldier, that place was not the Vozdvizhenka,
Mokhavaya, or Kutafyev Street, nor the Troitsa Gate (places familiar
in Moscow), but a new battlefield which would probably prove
sanguinary. And all made ready for that battle. The cries from the
gates ceased. The guns were advanced, the artillerymen blew the ash
off their linstocks, and an officer gave the word "Fire!" This was
followed by two whistling sounds of canister shot, one after
another. The shot rattled against the stone of the gate and upon the
wooden beams and screens, and two wavering clouds of smoke rose over
the Square.
A few instants after the echo of the reports resounding over the
stone-built Kremlin had died away the French heard a strange sound
above their head. Thousands of crows rose above the walls and
circled in the air, cawing and noisily flapping their wings.
Together with that sound came a solitary human cry from the gateway
and amid the smoke appeared the figure of a bareheaded man in a
peasant's coat. He grasped a musket and took aim at the French.
"Fire!" repeated the officer once more, and the reports of a musket
and of two cannon shots were heard simultaneously. The gate again
hidden by smoke.
Nothing more stirred behind the screens and the French infantry
soldiers and officers advanced to the gate. In the gateway lay three
wounded and four dead. Two men in peasant coats ran away at the foot
of the wall, toward the Znamenka.
"Clear that away!" said the officer, pointing to the beams and the
corpses, and the French soldiers, after dispatching the wounded, threw
the corpses over the parapet.
Who these men were nobody knew. "Clear that away!" was all that
was said of them, and they were thrown over the parapet and removed
later on that they might not stink. Thiers alone dedicates a few
eloquent lines to their memory: "These wretches had occupied the
sacred citadel, having supplied themselves with guns from the arsenal,
and fired" (the wretches) "at the French. Some of them were sabered
and the Kremlin was purged of their presence."
Murat was informed that the way had been cleared. The French entered
the gates and began pitching their camp in the Senate Square. Out of
the windows of the Senate House the soldiers threw chairs into the
Square for fuel and kindled fires there.
Other detachments passed through the Kremlin and encamped along
the Moroseyka, the Lubyanka, and Pokrovka Streets. Others quartered
themselves along the Vozdvizhenka, the Nikolski, and the Tverskoy
Streets. No masters of the houses being found anywhere, the French
were not billeted on the inhabitants as is usual in towns but lived in
it as in a camp.
Though tattered, hungry, worn out, and reduced to a third of their
original number, the French entered Moscow in good marching order.
It was a weary and famished, but still a fighting and menacing army.
But it remained an army only until its soldiers had dispersed into
their different lodgings. 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. Ten minutes after each regiment
had entered a Moscow district, not a soldier or officer was left.
Men in military uniforms and Hessian boots could be seen through the
windows, laughing and walking through the rooms. In cellars and
storerooms similar men were busy among the provisions, and in the
yards unlocking or breaking open coach house and stable doors,
lighting fires in kitchens and kneading and baking bread with
rolled-up sleeves, and cooking; or frightening, amusing, or
caressing women and children. There were many such men both in the
shops and houses- but there was no army.
Order after order was issued by the French commanders that day
forbidding the men to disperse about the town, sternly forbidding
any violence to the inhabitants or any looting, and announcing a
roll call for that very evening. But despite all these measures the
men, who had till then constituted an army, flowed all over the
wealthy, deserted city with its comforts and plentiful supplies. As
a hungry herd of cattle keeps well together when crossing a barren
field, but gets out of hand and at once disperses uncontrollably as
soon as it reaches rich pastures, so did the army disperse all over
the wealthy city.
No residents were left in Moscow, and the soldiers- like water
percolating through sand- spread irresistibly through the city in
all directions from the Kremlin into which they had first marched. The
cavalry, on entering a merchant's house that had been abandoned and
finding there stabling more than sufficient for their horses, went on,
all the same, to the next house which seemed to them better. Many of
them appropriated several houses, chalked their names on them, and
quarreled and even fought with other companies for them. Before they
had had time to secure quarters the soldiers ran out into the
streets to see the city and, hearing that everything had been
abandoned, rushed to places where valuables were to be had for the
taking. The officers followed to check the soldiers and were
involuntarily drawn into doing the same. In Carriage Row carriages had
been left in the shops, and generals flocked there to select
caleches and coaches for themselves. The few inhabitants who had
remained invited commanding officers to their houses, hoping thereby
to secure themselves from being plundered. There were masses of wealth
and there seemed no end to it. All around the quarters occupied by the
French were other regions still unexplored and unoccupied where,
they thought, yet greater riches might be found. And Moscow engulfed
the army ever deeper and deeper. When water is spilled on dry ground
both the dry ground and the water disappear and mud results; and in
the same way the entry of the famished army into the rich and deserted
city resulted in fires and looting and the destruction of both the
army and the wealthy city.
The French attributed the Fire of Moscow au patriotisme feroce de
Rostopchine,* the Russians to the barbarity of the French. In reality,
however, it was not, and could not be, possible to explain the burning
of Moscow by making any individual, or any group of people,
responsible for it. Moscow was burned because it found itself in a
position in which any town built of wood was bound to burn, quite
apart from whether it had, or had not, a hundred and thirty inferior
fire engines. Deserted Moscow had to burn as inevitably as a heap of
shavings has to burn on which sparks continually fall for several
days. A town built of wood, where scarcely a day passes without
conflagrations when the house owners are in residence and a police
force is present, cannot help burning when its inhabitants have left
it and it is occupied by soldiers who smoke pipes, make campfires of
the Senate chairs in the Senate Square, and cook themselves meals
twice a day. In peacetime it is only necessary to billet troops in the
villages of any district and the number of fires in that district
immediately increases. How much then must the probability of fire be
increased in an abandoned, wooden town where foreign troops are
quartered. "Le patriotisme feroce de Rostopchine" and the barbarity of
the French were not to blame in the matter. Moscow was set on fire
by the soldiers' pipes, kitchens, and campfires, and by the
carelessness of enemy soldiers occupying houses they did not own. Even
if there was any arson (which is very doubtful, for no one had any
reason to burn the houses- in any case a troublesome and dangerous
thing to do), arson cannot be regarded as the cause, for the same
thing would have happened without any incendiarism.
*To Rostopchin's ferocious patriotism.
However tempting it might be for the French to blame Rostopchin's
ferocity and for Russians to blame the scoundrel Bonaparte, or later
on to place an heroic torch in the hands of their own people, it is
impossible not to see that there could be no such direct cause of
the fire, for Moscow had to burn as every village, factory, or house
must burn which is left by its owners and in which strangers are
allowed to live and cook their porridge. Moscow was burned by its
inhabitants, it is true, but by those who had abandoned it and not
by those who remained in it. Moscow when occupied by the enemy did not
remain intact like Berlin, Vienna, and other towns, simply because its
inhabitants abandoned it and did not welcome the French with bread and
salt, nor bring them the keys of the city. _
Read next: Book Eleven: 1812: Chapter 27
Read previous: Book Eleven: 1812: Chapter 25
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