“Christ be with you!” Kutuzov repeated and went to his carriage. “Get in with me,” he said to Bolkonsky.
“Your Excellency, I should like to be of use here. Allow me to stay in Prince Bagration’s detachment.”
“Get in,” said Kutuzov, and noticing that Bolkonsky hung back, said: “I need good officers myself.”
They got into the carriage and rode for several minutes in silence.
“There is still much before us, much of everything,” he said, with an old man’s perceptive expression, as though he understood everything that was going on in Bolkonsky’s soul. “If one tenth of his detachment comes back tomorrow, I’ll thank God,” Kutuzov added, as if speaking to himself.
Prince Andrei looked at Kutuzov and his eyes were involuntarily struck by the carefully washed creases of the scar on Kutuzov’s temple, a foot away from him, where the Izmail bullet had pierced his head and put out his eye. “Yes, he has the right to speak so calmly about the deaths of these people!” thought Bolkonsky.
“That is why I am asking you to send me to that detachment,” he said.
Kutuzov did not reply. He seemed to have forgotten what he had said, and sat deep in thought. After five minutes, rocking smoothly on the soft springs of the carriage, Kutuzov turned to Prince Andrei. There was no trace of emotion on his face. With fine irony he questioned the prince about the details of his meeting with the emperor, about the opinions he had heard at court concerning the action at Krems, and about several women of their mutual acquaintance.
XIV
On the first of November Kutuzov received information through one of his scouts that placed the army he commanded in an almost hopeless position. The scout had reported that the French in enormous force, having crossed the bridge in Vienna, were heading towards Kutuzov’s line of communications with the troops coming from Russia. If Kutuzov decided to stay in Krems, the one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-man army of Napoleon would cut him off from all communications, surround his exhausted forty-thousand-man army, and he would find himself in the position of Mack at Ulm. If Kutuzov decided to abandon the road leading to communications with the troops from Russia, he would have to enter with no road into the unknown territory of the Bohemian Mountains, defending himself from the superior numbers of the enemy, and abandoning any hope of communications with Buxhöwden. If Kutuzov decided to retreat down the road from Krems to Olmütz to unite with the troops from Russia, he would risk being forestalled on that road by the French, who had crossed the bridge in Vienna, and thus being forced to accept battle on the march, with all his heavy baggage and transport, and to deal with an enemy that outnumbered him three to one and surrounded him on both sides.
Kutuzov chose this last course.
The French, as the scout reported, had crossed the bridge in Vienna and by forced marches were making for Znaim, which lay on the path of Kutuzov’s retreat, more than sixty miles ahead of him. To reach Znaim before the French meant to gain great hope of saving the army; to let the French forestall them in Znaim meant certainly to subject the whole army to a disgrace similar to that at Ulm, or to total destruction. To forestall the French with his entire army was impossible. The road from Vienna to Znaim was shorter and better than the Russians’ road from Krems to Znaim.
The night he received this information, Kutuzov sent Bagration’s four-thousand-man vanguard to the right over the hills from the Krems–Znaim to the Vienna–Znaim road. Bagration was to make this march without resting, to stop with his face to Vienna and his back to Znaim, and, if he managed to forestall the French, to detain them there as long as he could. Kutuzov himself started out for Znaim with all the heavy baggage.
Having gone thirty miles across the hills with hungry, ill-shod soldiers, with no road, on a stormy night, losing a third of his men as stragglers, Bagration came out in Hollabrunn, on the Vienna–Znaim road, several hours ahead of the French, who were approaching Hollabrunn from Vienna. Kutuzov still needed to go a whole twenty-four hours with his baggage train to reach Znaim, and therefore, to save the army, Bagration, with four thousand hungry, exhausted soldiers, had to hold off for twenty-four hours the entire enemy army coming to meet him at Hollabrunn, which was obviously impossible. But a freak of fate made the impossible possible. The success of the trick which gave the Vienna bridge into the hands of the French without a fight prompted Murat to try to trick Kutuzov in the same way. Murat, meeting Bagration’s weak detachment on the Znaim road, thought it was the whole of Kutuzov’s army. In order to crush this army indubitably, he awaited the troops that lagged behind on the road from Vienna, and with that aim suggested a three-day truce, on condition that neither army change its position or stir from its place. Murat assured them that peace negotiations were already under way and that therefore, to avoid useless bloodshed, he was suggesting a truce. The Austrian general, Count Nostitz, who occupied the advance posts, believed the words of Murat’s envoy and fell back, exposing Bagration’s detachment. Another envoy rode to the Russian line to announce the same news of peace negotiations and offer the Russian army a three-day truce. Bagration replied that he could neither accept nor reject a truce and sent his adjutant to Kutuzov with a report of the offer made to him.
For Kutuzov the truce was the sole means of gaining time, giving Bagration’s exhausted detachment some rest, and allowing the train and heavy baggage (whose movement was concealed from the French) to make at least one extra march towards Znaim. The offer of a truce gave the sole and unexpected possibility of saving the army. On receiving this news, Kutuzov immediately sent the adjutant general Wintzingerode, who was attached to him, to the enemy camp. Wintzingerode was not only to accept the truce, but also to offer conditions for capitulation, and meanwhile Kutuzov sent his adjutants back to speed up as much as possible the movement of the whole army’s baggage trains along the Krems–Znaim road. Bagration’s exhausted, hungry detachment, covering this movement of the baggage trains and the whole army, had alone to remain unmoving before an enemy eight times its strength.
Kutuzov’s expectations came true both with regard to the fact that the offer of capitulation, without committing them to anything, might gain time for some portion of the baggage train to pass, and with regard to the fact that Murat’s mistake was bound to be discovered very quickly. As soon as Bonaparte, who was in Schönbrunn, some fifteen miles from Hollabrunn, received Murat’s communication with the project of a truce and capitulation, he saw through the deception and wrote the following letter to Murat.
Au Prince Murat.
Schoenbrunn, 25 brumaire en 1805
à huit heures du matin.
Il m’est impossible de trouver des termes pour vous exprimer mon mécontentement. Vous ne commandez que mon avant-garde et vous n’avez pas le droit de faire d’armistice sans mon ordre. Vous me faites perdre le fruit d’une campagne. Rompez l’armistice sur-le-champ et marchez à l’ennemi. Vous lui ferez déclarer, que le général qui a signé cette capitulation, n’avait pas le droit de le faire, qu’il n’y a que l’Empereur de Russie qui ait ce droit.
Toutes les fois cependant que l’Empereur de Russie ratifierait la dite convention, je la ratifierai; mais ce n’est q’une ruse. Marchez, détruisez l’armée russe…vous êtes en position de prendre son bagage et son artillerie.
L’aide-de-camp de l’Empereur de Russie est un…Les officiers ne sont rien quand ils n’ont pas de pouvoirs: celui-ci n’en avait point…Les Autrichiens se sont laissé jouer pour le passage du pont de Vienne, vous vous laissez jouer par un aide-de-camp de l’Empereur.