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<h2> CHAPTER XIV </h2>
<p>It would be difficult to explain why and whither ants whose heap has been
destroyed are hurrying: some from the heap dragging bits of rubbish,
larvae, and corpses, others back to the heap, or why they jostle, overtake
one another, and fight, and it would be equally difficult to explain what
caused the Russians after the departure of the French to throng to the
place that had formerly been Moscow. But when we watch the ants round
their ruined heap, the tenacity, energy, and immense number of the delving
insects prove that despite the destruction of the heap, something
indestructible, which though intangible is the real strength of the
colony, still exists; and similarly, though in Moscow in the month of
October there was no government and no churches, shrines, riches, or
houses—it was still the Moscow it had been in August. All was
destroyed, except something intangible yet powerful and indestructible.</p>
<p>The motives of those who thronged from all sides to Moscow after it had
been cleared of the enemy were most diverse and personal, and at first for
the most part savage and brutal. One motive only they all had in common: a
desire to get to the place that had been called Moscow, to apply their
activities there.</p>
<p>Within a week Moscow already had fifteen thousand inhabitants, in a
fortnight twenty-five thousand, and so on. By the autumn of 1813 the
number, ever increasing and increasing, exceeded what it had been in 1812.</p>
<p>The first Russians to enter Moscow were the Cossacks of Wintzingerode's
detachment, peasants from the adjacent villages, and residents who had
fled from Moscow and had been hiding in its vicinity. The Russians who
entered Moscow, finding it plundered, plundered it in their turn. They
continued what the French had begun. Trains of peasant carts came to
Moscow to carry off to the villages what had been abandoned in the ruined
houses and the streets. The Cossacks carried off what they could to their
camps, and the householders seized all they could find in other houses and
moved it to their own, pretending that it was their property.</p>
<p>But the first plunderers were followed by a second and a third contingent,
and with increasing numbers plundering became more and more difficult and
assumed more definite forms.</p>
<p>The French found Moscow abandoned but with all the organizations of
regular life, with diverse branches of commerce and craftsmanship, with
luxury, and governmental and religious institutions. These forms were
lifeless but still existed. There were bazaars, shops, warehouses, market
stalls, granaries—for the most part still stocked with goods—and
there were factories and workshops, palaces and wealthy houses filled with
luxuries, hospitals, prisons, government offices, churches, and
cathedrals. The longer the French remained the more these forms of town
life perished, until finally all was merged into one confused, lifeless
scene of plunder.</p>
<p>The more the plundering by the French continued, the more both the wealth
of Moscow and the strength of its plunderers was destroyed. But plundering
by the Russians, with which the reoccupation of the city began, had an
opposite effect: the longer it continued and the greater the number of
people taking part in it the more rapidly was the wealth of the city and
its regular life restored.</p>
<p>Besides the plunderers, very various people, some drawn by curiosity, some
by official duties, some by self-interest—house owners, clergy,
officials of all kinds, tradesmen, artisans, and peasants—streamed
into Moscow as blood flows to the heart.</p>
<p>Within a week the peasants who came with empty carts to carry off plunder
were stopped by the authorities and made to cart the corpses out of the
town. Other peasants, having heard of their comrades' discomfiture, came
to town bringing rye, oats, and hay, and beat down one another's prices to
below what they had been in former days. Gangs of carpenters hoping for
high pay arrived in Moscow every day, and on all sides logs were being
hewn, new houses built, and old, charred ones repaired. Tradesmen began
trading in booths. Cookshops and taverns were opened in partially burned
houses. The clergy resumed the services in many churches that had not been
burned. Donors contributed Church property that had been stolen.
Government clerks set up their baize-covered tables and their pigeonholes
of documents in small rooms. The higher authorities and the police
organized the distribution of goods left behind by the French. The owners
of houses in which much property had been left, brought there from other
houses, complained of the injustice of taking everything to the Faceted
Palace in the Kremlin; others insisted that as the French had gathered
things from different houses into this or that house, it would be unfair
to allow its owner to keep all that was found there. They abused the
police and bribed them, made out estimates at ten times their value for
government stores that had perished in the fire, and demanded relief. And
Count Rostopchin wrote proclamations.</p>
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