《War And Peace》 Book9 CHAPTER I
by Leo Tolstoy
TOWARDS THE END of the year 1811, there began to be GREater activity in
levying troops and in concentrating the forces of Western Europe, and in 1812
these forces—millions of men, reckoning those engaged in the transport and
feeding of the army— moved from the west eastward, towards the frontiers of
Russia, where, since 1811, the Russian forces were being in like manner
concentrated.
On the 12th of June the forces of Western Europe crossed the frontier, and
the war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and all
human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another so GREat a mass of
crime—fraud, swindling, robbery, forgery, issue of counterfeit money, plunder,
incendiarism, and murder—that the annals of all the criminal courts of the world
could not muster such a sum of wickedness in whole centuries, though the men who
committed those deeds did not at that time look on them as crimes.
What led to this extraordinary event? What were its causes? Historians, with
simple-hearted conviction, tell us that the causes of this event were the insult
offered to the Duke of Oldenburg, the failure to maintain the continental
system, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Alexander, the mistakes of the
diplomatists, and so on.
According to them, if only Metternich, Rumyantsev, or Talleyrand had, in the
interval between a levée and a court ball, really taken pains and written a more
judicious diplomatic note, or if only Napoleon had written to Alexander, “I
consent to restore the duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg,” there would have been no
war.
We can readily understand that being the conception of the war that presented
itself to contemporaries. We can understand Napoleon's supposing the cause of
the war to be the intrigues of England (as he said, indeed, in St. Helena); we
can understand how to the members of the English House of Commons the cause of
the war seemed to be Napoleon's ambition; how to the Duke of Oldenburg the war
seemed due to the outrage done him; how to the trading class the war seemed due
to the continental system that was ruining Europe; to the old soldiers and
generals the chief reason for it seemed their need of active service; to the
regiments of the period, the necessity of re-establishing les bons
principes; while the diplomatists of the time set it down to the alliance of
Russia with Austria in 1809 not having been with sufficient care concealed from
Napoleon, and the memorandum, No. 178, having been awkwardly worded. We may well
understand contemporaries believing in those causes, and in a countless, endless
number more, the multiplicity of which is due to the infinite variety of men's
points of view. But to us of a later generation, contemplating in all its
vastness the immensity of the accomplished fact, and seeking to penetrate its
simple and fearful significance, those explanations must appear insufficient. To
us it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men should have killed and
tortured each other, because Napoleon was ambitious, Alexander firm, English
policy crafty, and the Duke of Oldenburg hardly treated. We cannot grasp the
connection between these circumstances and the bare fact of murder and violence,
nor why the duke's wrongs should induce thousands of men from the other side of
Europe to pillage and murder the inhabitants of the Smolensk and Moscow
provinces and to be slaughtered by them.
For us of a later generation, who are not historians led away by the process
of research, and so can look at the facts with common-sense unobscured, the
causes of this war appear innumerable in their multiplicity. The more deeply we
search out the causes the more of them we discover; and every cause, and even a
whole class of causes taken separately, strikes us as being equally true in
itself, and equally deceptive through its insignificance in comparison with the
immensity of the result, and its inability to produce (without all the other
causes that concurred with it) the effect that followed. Such a cause, for
instance, occurs to us as Napoleon's refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the
Vistula, and to restore the duchy of Oldenburg; and then again we remember the
readiness or the reluctance of the first chance French corporal to serve on a
second campaign; for had he been unwilling to serve, and a second and a third,
and thousands of corporals and soldiers had shared that reluctance, Napoleon's
army would have been short of so many men, and the war could not have taken
place.
If Napoleon had not taken offence at the request to withdraw beyond the
Vistula, and had not commanded his troops to advance, there would have been no
war. But if all the sergeants had been unwilling to serve on another campaign,
there could have been no war either.
And the war would not have been had there been no intrigues on the part of
England, no Duke of Oldenburg, no resentment on the part of Alexander; nor had
there been no autocracy in Russia, no French Revolution and consequent
dictatorship and empire, nor all that led to the French Revolution, and so on
further back: without any one of those causes, nothing could have happened. And
so all those causes—myriads of causes—coincided to bring about what happened.
And consequently nothing was exclusively the cause of the war, and the war was
bound to happen, simply because it was bound to happen. Millions of men,
repudiating their common-sense and their human feelings, were bound to move from
west to east, and to slaughter their fellows, just as some centuries before
hordes of men had moved from east to west to slaughter their fellows.
The acts of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words it seemed to depend
whether this should be done or not, were as little voluntary as the act of each
soldier, forced to march out by the drawing of a lot or by conscription. This
could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on
whom the whole decision appeared to rest) should be effective, a combination of
innumerable circumstances was essential, without any one of which the effect
could not have followed. It was essential that the millions of men in whose
hands the real power lay—the soldiers who fired guns and transported provisions
and cannons—should consent to carry out the will of those feeble and isolated
persons, and that they should have been brought to this acquiescence by an
infinite number of varied and complicated causes.
We are forced to fall back upon fatalism in history to explain irrational
events (that is those of which we cannot comprehend the reason). The more we try
to explain those events in history rationally, the more irrational and
incomprehensible they seem to us. Every man lives for himself, making use of his
free-will for attainment of his own objects, and feels in his whole being that
he can do or not do any action. But as soon as he does anything, that act,
committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irrevocable and is the property
of history, in which it has a significance, predestined and not subject to free
choice.
There are two aspects to the life of every man: the personal life, which is
free in proportion as its interests are abstract, and the elemental life of the
swarm, in which a man must inevitably follow the laws laid down for him.
Consciously a man lives on his own account in freedom of will, but he serves
as an unconscious instrument in bringing about the historical ends of humanity.
An act he has once committed is irrevocable, and that act of his, coinciding in
time with millions of acts of others, has an historical value. The higher a
man's place in the social scale, the more connections he has with others, and
the more power he has over them, the more conspicuous is the inevitability and
predestination of every act he commits. “The hearts of kings are in the hand of
God.” The king is the slave of history.
History—that is the unconscious life of humanity in the swarm, in the
community—makes every minute of the life of kings its own, as an instrument for
attaining its ends.
Although in that year, 1812, Napoleon believed more than ever that to shed or
not to shed the blood of his peoples depended entirely on his will (as Alexander
said in his last letter to him), yet then, and more than at any time, he was in
bondage to those laws which forced him, while to himself he seemed to be acting
freely, to do what was bound to be his share in the common edifice of humanity,
in history.
The people of the west moved to the east for men to kill one another. And by
the law of the coincidence of causes, thousands of petty causes backed one
another up and coincided with that event to bring about that movement and that
war: resentment at the non-observance of the continental system, and the Duke of
Oldenburg, and the massing of troops in Prussia—a measure undertaken, as
Napoleon supposed, with the object of securing armed peace—and the French
Emperor's love of war, to which he had grown accustomed, in conjunction with the
inclinations of his people, who were carried away by the grandiose scale of the
preparations, and the expenditure on those preparations, and the necessity of
recouping that expenditure. Then there was the intoxicating effect of the
honours paid to the French Emperor in Dresden, and the negotiations too of the
diplomatists, who were supposed by contemporaries to be guided by a genuine
desire to secure peace, though they only inflamed the amour-propre of
both sides; and millions upon millions of other causes, chiming in with the
fated event and coincident with it.
When the apple is ripe and falls—why does it fall? Is it because it is drawn
by gravitation to the earth, because its stalk is withered, because it is dried
by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the
boy standing under the tree wants to eat it?
Not one of those is the cause. All that simply makes up the conjunction of
conditions under which every living, organic, elemental event takes place. And
the botanist who says that the apple has fallen because the cells are
decomposing, and so on, will be just as right as the boy standing under the tree
who says the apple has fallen because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it to
fall. The historian, who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to,
and was ruined because Alexander desired his ruin, will be just as right and as
wrong as the man who says that the mountain of millions of tons, tottering and
undermined, has been felled by the last stroke of the last workingman's
pick-axe. In historical events GREat men—so called—are but the labels that serve
to give a name to an event, and like labels, they have the least possible
connection with the event itself.
Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free-will, is
in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of
previous history, and predestined from all eternity.
