After the retreat, Tolstoy was given the task of collating the twenty or more reports of the action from the Artillery Commanders. This experience of how war is recorded produced in him that supreme contempt for detailed military histories which he so often expressed in later years. He says:
I regret that I did not keep a copy of those reports. They were an excellent example of that naïve, inevitable kind of military falsehood, out of which descriptions are compiled. I think many of those comrades of mine who drew up those reports, will laugh on reading these lines, remembering how, by order of their Commander, they wrote what they could not know.
Carrying among other despatches the report he had himself compiled, Tolstoy was sent as Courier to Petersburg; and this terminated his personal experience of war. He was still only Sub-Lieutenant, his hopes of promotion had come to nothing in consequence of a suspicion that he was the author of some soldiers' songs which were sung throughout the army at this time. No translation can do justice to these slangy, topical satires; but that the reader may have some idea of them, my wife has put into English the following stanzas:
In September, the eighth day,[22]
From the French we ran away,
For our Faith and Tsar!
For our Faith and Tsar!
Admiral Alexander,[23] he
Sank our vessels in the sea
In the waters deep,