When a person is in motion, he always thinks of the purpose of this movement. In order to go a thousand versts, a person needs to think that something good is beyond these thousand versts. You need to have an idea of the promised land in order to have the strength to move.
The promised land was Moscow when the French invaded, and the retreat was the homeland. But the homeland was too far away, and for a person going a thousand miles, it is necessary to say to himself, forgetting about the final goal: "Now I will come for forty miles to the place of rest and accommodation", and in the first transition, this place of rest obscures the final goal and focuses on himself all the wishes and hopes. Those aspirations, which are expressed in the individual person, always increase in the crowd.
For the French who went back along the old Smolensk road, the ultimate goal of the homeland was too distant, and the nearest goal, the one to which, in a huge proportion increasing in the crowd, sought all the wishes and hopes - was Smolensk. Not because people knew that there was a lot of food and fresh troops in Smolensk, not because they were told that (on the contrary, the top ranks of the army and Napoleon himself knew that there was not enough food), but because it was one thing that could give them strength to move and endure real hardship. They, and those who knew, and those who did not know, equally deceiving themselves as to the promised land, aspired to Smolensk.
Come out on the big road, the French with amazing energy, with the speed of unheard of, ran towards their fictional goal. In addition to this reason for the general aspiration that united the French crowds and gave them some energy, there was another reason that linked them. This was because of their number. The very mass of them, as in the physical law of attraction, attracted separate atoms of people. They moved their one hundred thousandths of the masses as a whole state.
Each of them wanted only one thing - to surrender to captivity, to get rid of all horrors and misfortunes. But, on the one hand, the power of the general aspiration to the goal of Smolensk drew everyone in the same direction; on the other hand - it was impossible for the corps to surrender to the captivity of the company, and, despite the fact that the French used every opportunity to get rid of each other and at the slightest decent offer to surrender to the captivity, these pretexts did not always happen. The very number of them and their close, fast movement deprived them of this possibility and made it not only difficult, but also impossible for the Russians to stop this movement, which was aimed at all the energy of the French masses. Mechanical rupture of the body could not speed up the decomposition process beyond the known limit. The snowball cannot be melted instantly. There is a known limit to the time before which no heat forces can melt the snow. On the contrary, the more heat, the stronger the remaining snow.
None of the Russian military leaders, except Kutuzov, understood this. When the direction of the French army's flight along the Smolensk road was determined, then what Konovnitsyn had foreseen on the night of October 11 began to come true. All the top ranks of the army wanted to distinguish themselves, cut off, intercept, polonitely, overturn the French, and everyone demanded an offensive.
Kutuzov alone used all his strength (these forces are very small in each commander-in-chief) to counteract the attack.
He couldn't tell them what we're saying now: why the battle, the blocking of the road, the loss of their people, and the inhumane pursuit of the poor? Why all this when one third of this army melted from Moscow to Vyazma without a battle? But he was telling them, drawing out of his old wisdom what they could have understood - he was telling them about the golden bridge, and they were laughing at it, slandering it, and tearing it up, and throwing it, and mocking the killed beast.
Under Vyazma Yermolov, Miloradovich, Platov and others, being in the vicinity of the French, could not refrain from the desire to cut off and overturn the two French corps. They sent Kutuzov a sheet of white paper in an envelope instead of a report, notifying him of their intention.
And no matter how hard Kutuzov tried to keep the troops, our troops attacked, trying to block the road. Infantry regiments are said to have attacked with music and drumming and to have beaten and lost thousands of people.
But they didn't cut anyone off and overturned them. And the French army, being tightened up from danger, continued, evenly melting, all the same fatal way to Smolensk.