SCENE IX
THE ROAD FROM SMOLENSKO INTO LITHUANIA
[The season is far advanced towards winter. The point of observation
is high amongst the clouds, which, opening and shutting fitfully to
the wind, reveal the earth as a confused expanse merely.]
SPIRIT OF THE PITIES
Where are we? And why are we where we are?
SHADE OF THE EARTH
Above a wild waste garden-plot of mine
Nigh bare in this late age, and now grown chill,
Lithuania called by some. I gather not
Why we haunt here, where I can work no charm
Either upon the ground or over it.
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
The wherefore will unfold. The rolling brume
That parts, and joins, and parts again below us
In ragged restlessness, unscreens by fits
The quality of the scene.
SPIRIT OF THE PITIES
I notice now
Primeval woods, pine, birch—the skinny growths
That can sustain life well where earth affords
But sustenance elsewhere yclept starvation.
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
And what see you on the far land-verge there,
Labouring from eastward towards our longitude?
SPIRIT OF THE PITIES
An object like a dun-piled caterpillar,
Shuffling its length in painful heaves along,
Hitherward.... Yea, what is this Thing we see
Which, moving as a single monster might,
Is yet not one but many?
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
Even the Army
Which once was called the Grand; now in retreat
From Moscow’s muteness, urged by That within it;
Together with its train of followers—
Men, matrons, babes, in brabbling multitudes.
SPIRIT OF THE PITIES
And why such flight?
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
Recording Angels, say.
RECORDING ANGEL I [in minor plain-song]
The host has turned from Moscow where it lay,
And Israel-like, moved by some master-sway,
Is made to wander on and waste away!
ANGEL II
By track of Tarutino first it flits;
Thence swerving, strikes at old Jaroslawitz;
The which, accurst by slaughtering swords, it quits.
ANGEL I
Harassed, it treads the trail by which it came,
To Borodino, field of bloodshot fame,
Whence stare unburied horrors beyond name!
ANGEL II
And so and thus it nears Smolensko’s walls,
And, stayed its hunger, starts anew its crawls,
Till floats down one white morsel, which appals.
[What has floated down from the sky upon the Army is a flake of
snow. Then come another and another, till natural features,
hitherto varied with the tints of autumn, are confounded, and all
is phantasmal grey and white.
The caterpillar shape still creeps laboriously nearer, but instead,
increasing in size by the rules of perspective, it gets more
attenuated, and there are left upon the ground behind it minute
parts of itself, which are speedily flaked over, and remain as
white pimples by the wayside.]
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
These atoms that drop off are snuffed-out souls
Who are enghosted by the caressing snow.
[Pines rise mournfully on each side of the nearing object; ravens
in flocks advance with it overhead, waiting to pick out the eyes
of strays who fall. The snowstorm increases, descending in tufts
which can hardly be shaken off. The sky seems to join itself to
the land. The marching figures drop rapidly, and almost immediately
become white grave-mounds.
Endowed with enlarged powers of audition as of vision, we are struck
by the mournful taciturnity that prevails. Nature is mute. Save
for the incessant flogging of the wind-broken and lacerated horses
there are no sounds.
With growing nearness more is revealed. In the glades of the forest,
parallel to the French columns, columns of Russians are seen to be
moving. And when the French presently reach Krasnoye they are
surrounded by packs of cloaked Cossacks, bearing lances like huge
needles a dozen feet long. The fore-part of the French army gets
through the town; the rear is assaulted by infantry and artillery.]
SPIRIT OF THE PITIES
The strange, one-eyed, white-shakoed, scarred old man,
Ruthlessly heading every onset made,
I seem to recognize.
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
Kutúzof he:
The ceaselessly-attacked one, Michael Ney;
A pair as stout as thou, Earth, ever hast twinned!
Kutúzof, ten years younger, would extirp
The invaders, and our drama finish here,
With Bonaparte a captive or a corpse.
But he is old; death even has beckoned him;
And thus the so near-seeming happens not.
[NAPOLÉON himself can be discerned amid the rest, marching on foot
through the snowflakes, in a fur coat and with a stout staff in his
hand. Further back NEY is visible with the remains of the rear.
There is something behind the regular columns like an articulated
tail, and as they draw on, it shows itself to be a disorderly rabble
of followers of both sexes. So the whole miscellany arrives at the
foreground, where it is checked by a large river across the track.
The soldiers themselves, like the rabble, are in motley raiment,
some wearing rugs for warmth, some quilts and curtains, some even
petticoats and other women’s clothing. Many are delirious from
hunger and cold.
But they set about doing what is a necessity for the least hope of
salvation, and throw a bridge across the stream.
The point of vision descends to earth, close to the scene of action.]