To Moscow And Back

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 121, 17 October 1941, Unnumbered Page

To Moscow And Back

HE article we print on pp. 20-21 is not meant to be prophetic. We do not expect that Napoleon’s story will be repeated by Hitler. Napoleon’s army marched on its feet and carried its baggage and guns on horse-drawn vehicles. It lived on the country while it advanced and did not expect to turn back in thirty days. The journey to Moscow was as badly organised as it was ill-conceived; Napoleon’s single unqualified blunder, as he afterwards admitted in the plainest language. But Sergeant Bourgogne is still a portent. If he had not recorded his experiences only scholars would now know what happened on the retreat, and even they would see it through a glass darkly. Now everyone can get the facts for two or three shillings, and having them begin to understand what winter fighting in Russia means. We say again that the story will not be repeated whatever happens to the German advance; but winter will come again; and winter in Russia to armies in the open is something that neither science nor planning nor victory nor hope can rob of horrors that it would be almost impossible to magnify. The worst horrors that Sergeant Bourgogne describes, or recordsfor he attempts no fine writing-came out of the north wind; and the north wind still blows and will blow; it still travels over the forests bringing snow and 27 degrees of frost; and it still blows from October till March almost everywhere north of Moscow. And after the wind and the snow nothing exhausted the French so much, or terrified them so much, as the fact that the enemy were seldom within reach and never more than a few miles away. Those who fell behind were seldom seen again. It was death to get isolated on the flanks, to move too far ahead, to get lost in the forest or crowded into a burnt-out village. The crossing of the Beresina was so horrible that even Sergeant Bourgogne was sickened, though he had thought himself already beyond feeling. For as Napoleon himself said, Russia "overflows on you if you lose; she retires into the snow if you win; and Suddenly comes out again like the head of the Hydra." And Russia is just as big to-day as in his day, just as cold, just as persistent, and a hundred times more united.