SNORING AS A FINE ART

And the Claims of General M. I. Kutusov

As an Artist

I

WHAT COLOSSAL irony!” I said to myself as I closed Caulaincourt’s memoirs of the Russian campaign of 1812. “It seems that Napoleon was utterly ruined and Napoleonic France was utterly destroyed, all by a man who actually did nothing about it but snore through staff meetings, write sprightly letters to Madame de Staël, read French novels, and hold his army back as tight as he could from aggressive military operations of any kind. What a distressing thought to carry to St. Helena!”

The rationale of the Russian campaign seems to have been a standing puzzle to historians on both sides. Some seventy years ago Count Tolstoy published a book called War and Peace, in which he undertook to show that both the Russian and the French historians were equally all wrong, and that the real rationale of the campaign was something quite different. Later historians, with the usual fine professional contempt for secular learning, paid little attention to Count Tolstoy’s views, and, as far as I know, have never thought them worth discussing.

But now comes Caulaincourt’s journal, which backs up Count Tolstoy’s conclusions with astonishing particularity, and makes it pretty clear that the old Count was right. I was so struck by this that I got out my dog-eared copy of War and Peace and penciled cross-references between it and Caulaincourt’s journal, with results which convinced me that in all essential respects the old man had a large edge on the historians. If any reader has curiosity enough to put the two books side by side and read from one to the other, as I did, I believe he will come away with the same opinion.

This Caulaincourt was Napoleon’s right-hand man in the campaign. They saw it through together, and when at last Napoleon deserted the pitiful remnant of his soldiery and ran away to Paris, Caulaincourt went with him and loyally stuck by him to the last; he was about the only one who did. Throughout the campaign, Caulaincourt kept a full journal of each day’s doings; it is one of the most fascinating books I ever read. This journal did not see daylight for a century; it was supposed to be lost. It was discovered, I believe by accident, five or six years ago; it was then published, and has lately been translated into English.

The one thing which perhaps has been most bothersome to historians, especially Russian historians, is that if the Russian commander had done everything that they all assume a good general should have done, he could have made a most spectacular military success. He did none of those things, however, though everyone expected them. The Tsar expected them; so did the court and all Russian officialdom, and the entire Russian staff; and so, above all, did the French. Nothing in Caulaincourt’s whole story is more interesting than his naïve disclosure of French bewilderment at Kutu-sov’s¹ actions.

Early in the campaign, when Kutusov took up an impregnable position at Maley-Yaroslavetz and then most unaccountably and unreasonably abandoned it overnight, Caulaincourt reports Napoleon’s saying, “That devil Kutu-sov will never make a fight of it.” Nor did he. On the great retreat from Moscow, he could have captured Napoleon, Murat, Davoût, Ney, anyone he liked, a dozen times over. He could have cut off the retreat, devastated the French army, slaughtered thousands, taken prisoners wholesale and raised the devil generally, all to the praise and glory of holy Russia. At the campaign’s end, Napoleon walked straight into a nutcracker at the Berezina; he had Wittgenstein’s army closing in on his right, Kutusov’s own army on his left, and waiting for him in front, on both ends of the Berezina bridge, was Tchitchagov; but Kutusov did not close the nutcracker. Instead, he ordered Wittgenstein to slow up a little, slowed up his own march, and sent word to Tchitchagov to keep his eyes open and take it easy.

Nobody understood these tactics. After Maley-Yaro-slavetz, Napoleon said to Caulaincourt, “I beat the Russians every time, but that does not get me anywhere.” From then on, Caulaincourt reveals the amazement of the French at almost every step. Why abandon one good position after another? Why not follow up the advantage at Tarutino, Kras-noe, Vyazma? Why not cut off the retreat at this, that, or the other point? Why above all, since Tchitchagov had kept the French under close observation at the Berezina for thirty-six hours, did he not send out a stand of cannon and blow them to Jericho while they were crossing the river on their improvised bridges?

The Petersburg court and the official set were equally mystified, and also disgusted; no more so than the Tsar, who never liked Kutusov, and had repeatedly blistered him for his inaction. Kutusov’s own staff had given him up as hopeless. They would meet, discuss aggressive strategy, urge attacks, plan battles, suggest forays, and all that sort of thing, while the old man’s nose sent forth loud trumpeting sounds which betokened a complete lack of interest; and when at last they had it all out of their systems, he would wake up and mutter something to the effect that the supplies had not come up yet, or the soldiers’ boots were worn out, or the troops did not know how to execute such complicated manœuvres; and that would be that.

So some historians put it that Kutusov was no better than an “old dowager,” as Napoleon called him, an incompetent and crafty courtier, not worth his salt as a soldier. The trouble with that theory is that he had a gilt-edged record all the way down from Suvorov’s time to his conclusive windup of the Turkish war in 1811, only a few months before Napoleon crossed the frontier. Others put it that he was a weak and dissolute old man, too far gone in his dotage to know what he was about; but that will hardly wash either, for, hang it all, he got results. When his lackadaisical campaign was over, Napoleon was finally and completely done in; done in for good and all—Waterloo was only a coup de grâce. Napoleonic France was also permanently done in; and when the Grande Armée straggled across the border there was not enough of it left to be worth counting.

What more could one ask? Even the Tsar had to bottle up his chagrin in face of the fact that, even if his old general’s management had not been exactly what one would call stylish, it had nevertheless somehow turned the trick in the cheapest and most effective way.

II

Two things revealed by the composite Tolstoy-Caulain-court narrative struck me with peculiar force. The first is that from the moment Moscow was captured and occupied Kutusov seems to have known exactly what Napoleon was going to do. Moreover, it is clear that he was the only one who did know. Caulaincourt shows beyond peradventure that through the whole month spent in Moscow Napoleon himself had not the faintest idea of what his own next move would be; nor, naturally, had anyone on the French side, and of course no one but Kutusov on the Russian side had any idea of it, especially in view of circumstances which I shall presently mention.

Something like this had happened once before. Kutusov commanded the Russian forces at Austerlitz; and there too he knew exactly what Napoleon was going to do. He warned the Russian and Austrian emperors that if they took the offensive, as they and the Austrian strategists were keen for doing, the battle would be a total loss because Napoleon was not going to do anything like what they were expecting, but something quite different. If his advice had been taken, it is anybody’s guess what might have been the outcome. He was overruled, however, and the thing turned out precisely as he had said it would. He presided at the staff meeting held the evening before the attack, and throughout the two hours consumed by the Austrian general Weyrother in reading the disposition of the troops he was sound asleep and snoring manfully. In the battle next day he acted with great energy and ability, but he knew that no matter how the troops were disposed the battle would be lost by reason of contingencies which he, and no one else, foresaw.

After the occupation of Moscow, however, the case was different. Kutusov could not tell the Tsar or anyone else what he knew, because it was something so fantastically improbable that he would instantly have been deprived of his command, if not certified to an asylum as a hopeless lunatic. Napoleon was a good officer; he was supposed to be the best general in Europe. He had already conquered a large slice of Russia and had taken Moscow. After that, there were several courses equally open to him, any one of which a good officer might creditably choose. The course which he actually did choose, however, and which Kutusov apparently knew he would choose, was one that no kind of officer, even a shavetail lieutenant just out of West Point, would ever dream of taking.

Napoleon could have wintered in Moscow, where, as the French historians admit, he had six months’ supplies available, despite the fire. He could have rested and refitted his army there for a week or so, and then pushed on to threaten Petersburg (which Alexander I thought he would do) and negotiated an advantageous peace. He could have moved over to Nizhni-Novgorod, or, if he wished to shorten up his communications, he could have fallen back on Smolensk or Vilna for the winter. The road into the rich southern provinces was open to him; so was practically any road anywhere, in fact, for Kutusov was encamped in front of Kaluga, offering him no obstruction, but merely lying low and waiting for the outcome which he had foreseen as inevitable, and on which he was confidently risking the whole fate of Russia. Again, if Napoleon had decided to retreat, he might have retreated through a region well furnished with supplies, by the road along which Kutusov subsequently pursued him; or, as one might better say, chaperoned him.

With all these choices before him, what Napoleon actually did was to remain idle in Moscow for a month; then march out, ill-prepared and at the very worst: time of year, in a half-hearted search for the Russian army; and then, after the indecisive collisions at Maley-Yaroslavetz and Tarutino, which Kutusov did his best to avoid, he broke into a headlong stampede for the frontier by the worst route he could have chosen—the road by Mozhaisk towards Smolensk, which led through utterly devastated regions. Who could possibly have predicted anything like that from the greatest military genius of Europe? Yet, as I say, apparently Kutusov knew Napoleon would do just that, and knew it so well that with Tsar and court and his own staff all against him he staked the future, not only of Russia but of Europe, on his knowledge.

Kutusov seems to have been one of those peculiarly and mysteriously gifted persons of whom one can say only, as we so often do say in our common speech, that they “had something.” Such people appear in history all the way from Balaam the son of Beor down to contemporary examples which I shall presently cite; there are more of them, perhaps, than one would think. They “have something,” but nobody knows what it is or how they got it; and investigation of it is always distinctly unrewarding. In the late J. A. Mitchell’s story called Amos Judd—one of those sweet and unpretentious little narratives of the last century which I suppose no one nowadays could be hired to read—Deacon White says, “There’s something between Amos and the Almighty that the rest of us ain’t into”; and that is about as far as scientific inquiry into these matters has ever carried us, or probably ever will.

Yet the something is there. We can all cite instances of it in our most commonplace experience, without troubling to look up impressive historical examples. A friend who was wading through the Barchester series last winter remarked to me that it had an inordinate number of dull pages, “but the odd thing is that one doesn’t skip them.” Another friend not long ago asked me what makes Edward FitzGerald a great letter-writer. The answer is, of course, that nothing does; he simply isn’t. Yet if you start reading his letters, trivial and actually uninteresting as they are, you keep on reading and rereading; and I do not believe Oxford’s whole Faculty of Literature, in council assembled, could account for your doing it in terms which would boil down to anything more scientifically respectable than “because you do.” What makes Madame Mertens, contralto at the Brussels opera, a great artist? Again, nothing; she isn’t; not voice, not method, beauty, grace of movement, sex attraction, dramatic power, nor any combination of them. Like Trollope and FitzGerald, she simply has something; some fascinating endowment which keeps your recollection of her fresh and clear long after the memory of this-or-that really great artist has faded.

The peculiar something which Kutusov had, the “something between Amos and the Almighty” which made him so confidently aware that the unlikeliest thing in the world was the thing which was going to happen, seems to be entirely dissociated from intellect and personal will. Count Tolstoy says that young Prince Bolkonsky went away from an interview with Kutusov feeling greatly reassured about the old general’s conduct of the campaign, because “he will put nothing of himself into it. He will contrive nothing, will undertake nothing.... He knows that there is something stronger and more important than his will; that is, the inevitable march of events; and he can see them and grasp their significance; and seeing their significance, he can abstain from meddling, from following his own will and aiming at something else.”

The whole passage in War and Peace which describes this interview is worth a great deal of close meditation; it is the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of Part X.

I shall return to this aspect of the matter in a moment. Before doing so I wish to remark that the gift (I call it a gift only for convenience, to save words) which we are discussing is not only dissociated from intellect, but also from conventional morals. Certain Old Testament characters who unquestionably had it, and on occasion let it put itself to good use, were nevertheless what by our conventional ethical standards we would call pretty tough citizens; our old friend Balaam, for instance, and Elisha. It has been said, and I believe it is accepted in some quarters—of course there is no knowing—that Joan of Arc was not in all respects a model of sound peasant character; but granting it be so, she still most conspicuously “had the goods.”

Kutusov himself, like Lieutenant-General Bangs in Kipling’s amusing ballad, had the reputation of being “a most immoral man.” At sixty-three, very big, very fat, with one eye blinded and his face scarred by a bullet in one of Suvo-rov’s wars, he seems somehow to have kept his attractiveness to the ladies, for his friendships with them—some of high degree, some not so high—were many and close. Even during his fourteen months’ stay in Bucharest while he was starving out the Turks, he passed his enforced idleness in dalliance with a handsome and spirited Wallachian gal; rumors whereof got back to Petersburg, to the great scandal and discomposure of Alexander’s court, for which he seems to have cared not a button. “The Spirit breathes where it will,” said the Santissimo Salvatore; and oftentimes the breath of its most intimate inspiration blows upon persons whom we, in our modesty, would at once put down as morally disqualified.

The other striking impression which I got from the Caulaincourt-Tolstoy narrative was of Kutusov’s attitude of complete quiescence towards the something which he had. Not only is that something, as I said, dissociated from intellect, but also if the intellect be applied to it in any attempt at rationalization, however cautious and tentative, it refuses to turn its game for you and leaves you in the lurch.

The case of the poet Wordsworth, for example, strongly suggests that this is so. Wordsworth unquestionably had something; and when he was content to leave that something in full charge of his poetical operations—when he resolutely bottled up the conscious and intellectual Wordsworth, and corked it down—he was a truly great poet. When he summoned up the conscious Wordsworth, however, and put it in charge, as unfortunately he too often did, the conscious Wordsworth was such a dreadful old foo-foo that the poetry churned out under its direction was simply appalling.

Kutusov seems to have done everything he could to keep his consciousness from playing upon the sequence of events which he alone knew was going to take place. In the chapters I have referred to (and I repeat, they are a great study) Count Tolstoy says, “All Denisov had said was practical and sensible; what the general was saying was even more practical and sensible; but apparently Kutusov despised both knowledge and intellect, and was aware of something else which would settle things—something different, quite apart from intellect and knowledge.” In view of this, he took every means to keep himself as nearly as possible in a state of complete selflessness. He attended to routine, watching everything, putting everything in its place, holding everything up to the mark; but beyond that he kept his mind as far off the actual course of the campaign as he could. He read French novels, corresponded with his lady-friends, meditated on all sorts of non-military matters; and, most effective and rewarding of all conceivable relaxations, he snored. Like nearly all old persons, he dropped off to sleep easily, almost at will; and being big and fat, he snored; and when a person is snoring he is about as inaccessible and unsuggestible and selfless as a living human being can become.

I once had an acquaintance whom I shall call Smith, for that is not his name; he is still alive and flourishing, I believe, and would presumably boggle at this kind of publicity. It was he who really completed my understanding of Kutusov’s elaborately purposeful quiescence; not consciously, however, because, as I found out later, he had never even heard of Kutusov. Smith’s career was unusual. He had great intelligence, ability, energy, determination, and in his earlier years he had thrown the whole sum of these into various enterprises, all of which went wrong. He wanted money, quite disinterestedly too, for he had some highly commendable semi-public purposes in view; but money ran like a scared dog whenever it saw him coming. Rather late in middle life (this is his own account of it) he discovered that he “had something,” or that something had him; something, as Tolstoy says, quite apart from intellect and knowledge, which—provided he kept his conscious self in complete abeyance towards it—would really settle things. After that, everything he touched went right. I do not know how his affairs came out in the long run, this being some time ago, but at the period I speak of he appeared to be raking in money with both hands.

Smith told me most extraordinary stories of his prescience concerning the course of certain business operations; and since, like Kutusov, he had the goods to show for it, there seems no reasonable doubt that the stories were true. One which I remember particularly, since it brought Kutusov to my mind at once, was that he had just come from an important conference where the one thing most unlikely to happen had happened, precisely as he knew it would. “I was so sure of it,” he said, “that when I went in I merely took my seat, said nothing, kept my mind as much as possible off the discussion, and waited for things to turn out as I expected; and so they did. If I had told anybody they would turn out that way, I should have been laughed at, but they did.”

What most interested me about Smith was this attitude of studied quiescence. He had somehow, quite independently and off his own bat, formed the idea that the effort to do any examining or analyzing or rationalizing would be ruinous. I never saw a man who had such a nervous horror and hatred of “psychical research,” or any kind of experimentation with spiritism, clairvoyance, telepathy, and the like. Rather to my surprise, since I did not suspect him of knowing our American classics, he cited Mr. Jefferson’s remark about the virtue of resting one’s head contentedly on the pillow of ignorance which the Creator has made so soft for us because He knew we should have so much use for it. Smith’s philosophical position, as I understood it, was that of an intensively ignorant and incurious pragmatism. There the thing is, and it works; that is all one knows, and for all practical purposes it is all one needs to know. The attempt to discover anything about what it is, or how or why it works, is unfruitful, and apparently will always be so; and it seems also to be invariably damaging. Besides, Smith asked pointedly, if you should conceivably get anywhere with this sort of research, or even supposing you got as far as you can possibly imagine yourself getting, what good would it do?

Association with Smith kept continually bringing to my mind the profound saying of Joubert, that “it is not hard to know God, provided you do not trouble yourself to define Him.” Smith carried his diffidence even to the point of having a great dread of verbal symbols; he never used them. They might be all right, he said, if it were clearly understood that they had no definite significance, but it was hard to keep up that clear understanding even with oneself, because, as Goethe says, man never knows how anthropomorphic he is; therefore one had best steer clear of them. The old prophet spoke of “the word which the Lord hath put in my mouth”; Socrates and Marcus Aurelius spoke of “the intimations of the dæmon.” Such symbols might be all well enough, Smith said, as long as one were sure they were not being made to mean something; but it is hard to be always sure of that, and anyway they are unnecessary, so why not give them a wide berth? Organized Christianity, for example, had put a good many such symbols into currency and had attached definite meanings to them, or tried to, and see what a terrific lot of damage it has done!

With one exception, I am sure that Smith is the only man who ever discussed this subject with me. The other one was a retired gambler; it is really quite embarrassing that both my prize exhibits should be such as the righteous would at once frown upon as men of sin, for Smith also was no great shakes at either conventional piety or conventional morals. The ex-gambler told me he perfectly understood what I was driving at. Quite often in his career of skinning the unwary, he said—not always, but fairly often—he had sat into a game with a clear presentiment of how it would turn out.

If he knew he would lose, he lost in spite of all the skill and brainwork he could put into the effort to beat his presentiment; but he had discovered that if he were due to win he could do so only if he resolutely kept all brainwork off the game and played it out mechanically, simply “going along.” If he did that, he said, he never failed to win.

III

And now I ask myself why I have burdened the printing press with this rather rambling and inconsequent recital. I hardly know. What I have written is not at all the kind of essay for which editors believe our “reading public,” whatever that is, to be always thirsting. As the good and great John Bright said of Artemus Ward’s lecture, “its information is meagre, and presented in a desultory, disconnected manner.” As I rake over the débris of my thoughts, the only semblance of a purpose I can discover is to suggest that possibly, under certain circumstances, snoring should be regarded as a fine art and respected accordingly. If this be admitted, I might suggest further that our civilization does not so regard it, as it should, and gives the practice no encouragement, but rather the contrary.

Consequently one might with reason think that there is too little snoring done—snoring with a purpose to guide it, snoring deliberately directed towards a salutary end which is otherwise unattainable—and that our society would doubtless be better off if the value of the practice were more fully recognized. In our public affairs, for instance, I have of late been much struck by the number of persons who professedly had something. The starry-eyed energumens of the New Deal were perhaps the most conspicuous examples; each and all, they were quite sure they had something. They had a clear premonition of the More Abundant Life into which we were all immediately to enter by the way of a Planned Economy. It now seems, however, that the New Deal is rapidly sinking in the same Slough of Despond which closed over poor Mr. Hoover’s head, and that the More Abundant Life is, if anything, a little more remote than ever before.

I do not disparage their premonition or question it; I simply suggest that the More Abundant Life might now be appreciably nearer if they had put enough confidence in their premonition to do a great deal less thinking, planning, legislating, organizing, and a great deal—oh yes, a very great deal—more snoring.

“Counselors and counselors!” said Kutusov to Prince Bolkonsky. “If we had listened to all of them, we should be in Turkey now. We should not have made peace, and the war would never have been over.... Kamensky would have come to grief there if he hadn’t died. He went storming fortresses with thirty thousand men. It’s easy enough to take fortresses, but it’s hard to finish off a campaign successfully. Storms and attacks are not what’s wanted, but time and patience. Kamensky sent his soldiers to attack Rustchuk, but I trusted to them alone—time and patience—and I took more fortresses than Kamensky, and I made the Turks eat horseflesh.”

He shook his head. “And the French shall, too. Take my word for it,” cried Kutusov, growing warmer, and slapping himself on the chest, “I’ll make them eat horseflesh!”

What in any case it all boils down to, I suppose, is the rather trite fact that merely “to have something” is by no means enough. If one is sure one has something, the next thing is to know what to do about it; and in most circumstances—in more, at any rate, than is commonly supposed—snoring is a sovereign procedure. It is presumable that many persons who have something, and know they have it, lose out on it by a futile effort to coordinate “the intimations of the dæmon” with suggestions of desire, curiosities of intellect, impulses of will. Thus they come to disbelieve in the something which they actually have, and to regard it as mere fantasy; and from this most unfortunate disability a resolute devotion to snoring would have saved them.

But I did not intend to moralize, knowing myself to be uncommonly puny at that sort of thing; so, in fear of being led further, I shall end my prosaic disquisition here.

¹Field Marshal Prince Mihail Ilarionovitch Kutusov-Smolensky (1745-1813); served under Suvorov, gaining a great military reputation; twice governor of Vilna; commanded the Russian forces against Napoleon at Austerlitz; commanded against the Turks, 1810-1811; commander in chief against Napoleon, 1812.1812.—AUTHOR