War & Peace

Thinking about leadership and history and Mississippi, and trying to balance hopefulness and cynicism, and thumbing back through some Tolstoy; and goddamn why am I not reading more of these things these days?

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Excerpt:

Toward the end of the year 1811, an intensified arming and concentration of the forces of western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces -- millions of men, reckoning those that transported and victualed the army -- moved from the west eastward to the Russian frontier, where in exactly the same way the Russian forces had been massing during that year. On the twelfth of June the forces of western Europe crossed the Russian border and war began, that is, an event took place counter to human reason and human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such an infinite number of crimes, frauds, treacheries, robberies, forgeries, issues of counterfeit money, depredations, incendiarisms, and murders, as are not recorded in the annals of all the courts of justice in the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as crimes.

What brought about this extraordinary event? What were its causes? The historians, with naive certainty, tell us that its causes were the wrongs inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of the Continental system, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Aleksandr, the mistakes of diplomats, and so on.

Consequently it would only have been necessary for Napoleon, Rumyantsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and a reception, to have taken the pains to write a more adroit note, or for Napoleon to have written to Aleksandr: "Monsieur, mon frère, I consent to restore the Duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg," and there would have been no war.

We can understand these views being held at the time. We can understand how to Napoleon it seemed that the war was caused by England's intrigues (as in fact he said on the island of St. Helena). We can understand that to the members of the English Parliament the cause of the war seemed to be Napoleon's love of power; that to the Duke of Oldenburg its cause seemed to be the violence done to him; that to the merchants the cause seemed to be the Continental system, which was ruining Europe; that to the generals and old soldiers it seemed that the chief cause was the necessity of giving them employment; that to the legitimists of the day it was the need for reestablishing les bons principes; and to the diplomats of that time it all seemed to result from the fact that the alliance between Russia and Austria in 1809 had not been sufficiently well concealed from Napoleon, and from the awkward wording of Memorandum No. 178. It is natural that these and a countless, an infinite number of other reasons -- the number depending on the multiplicity of points of view -- presented themselves to the men of that day, but to us, to posterity contemplating the accomplished fact in all its magnitude, and seeking to penetrate its plain and terrible meaning, these causes seem insufficient. To us it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men killed and tortured one another either because Napoleon was ambitious, or Aleksandr firm, or because England's policy was astute, or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp the connection between these circumstances and the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why, because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe pillaged and slaughtered the inhabitants of Smolensk and Moscow and were slaughtered by them.

To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away by the process of research and can therefore regard the event with unclouded common sense, the causes that suggest themselves are legion. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we discover, and each single cause or series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself, and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the event and by its impotence (unless in conjunction with all the other concurring causes) to occasion the event. To us the willingness or unwillingness of this or that French corporal to serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon's refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the Duchy of Oldenburg, for had the corporal refused to serve, and had a second, a third, a thousand corporals and privates, also refused, Napoleon's army would have been so greatly reduced that the war could not have taken place.

If Napoleon had not taken offense at the demand that he withdraw beyond the Vistula, and had he not ordered his troops to advance, there would have been no war. But if all his sergeants had refused to serve a second term there also could have been no war. Nor could there have been a war had there been no English intrigues and no Duke of Oldenburg, and had Aleksandr not felt insulted, and had there not been an autocratic government in Russia, or a French Revolution and the ensuing dictatorship and Empire, or all the other things that produced the French Revolution, and so on. Without any one of these causes nothing could have happened. Accordingly all of them -- myriads of causes -- coincided to bring about what occurred. And so there was no single cause for the war, but it happened simply because it had to happen. Millions of men, renouncing human feelings and reason, had to move from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries earlier hordes of men had moved from east to west slaying their fellows.

The actions of Napoleon and Aleksandr, on whose words the event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by lot or conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Aleksandr (on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was required, without any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands the real power lay -- the soldiers who fired the guns, transported provisions and cannons -- should consent to carry out the will of those weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes.

We inevitably resort to fatalism to explain the irrational phenomena of history (that is to say, phenomena the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to account for such phenomena rationally, the more irrational and incomprehensible do they become to us.

Every man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his own ends, and feels in his whole being that he can at any moment perform or abstain from performing this or that action, but as soon as he has performed it, that action executed at a given moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predetermined significance.

There are two sides to the life of every man: the personal life, which is free to the degree that its interests are abstract, and the elemental life of the swarm, in which he ineluctably follows the laws decreed for him.

Consciously man lives for himself, but unconsciously he serves as an instrument for the accomplishment of the historical, social ends of mankind. An act committed is irrevocable, and that action coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men acquires historical significance. The higher a man stands in the social scale, the more connections he has with people and the more power he has over them, the more manifest is the predetermination and inevitability of his every act.

"The hearts of kings are in the hand of God."

A king is the slave of history.

History, that is, the unconscious, common, swarm life of mankind uses every moment of the life of kings as an instrument for its own ends.


Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than ever that it depended on him to shed or not to shed the blood of his people -- as Aleksandr expressed it in the last letter he wrote him -- he had never been so subject to inevitable laws, which compelled him (while thinking that he was acting of his own volition) to do for the world in general, for history, what had to be done.

The people of the west moved east to slay their fellow man. And by the law of coincidence, thousands of minute causes fitted together and combined to produce the movement and the war: reproaches for the nonobservance of the Continental system, the Duke of Oldenburg's wrongs, the movement of troops into Prussia -- undertaken (as it seemed to Napoleon) for the sole purpose of obtaining an armed peace -- the French Emperor's love of war and habit of waging it coinciding with the inclinations of his people, the passion for grandiose preparations, the expenditures on those preparations and the necessity of obtaining advantages to compensate for them, the intoxicating effect of the honors he received in Dresden, the diplomatic negotiations which in the opinion of contemporaries were carried on with a sincere desire to attain peace but which only wounded the self-esteem of both sides, and millions upon millions of other causes that adapted themselves to the fated event and coincided with it.

When an apple has ripened and falls -- why does it fall? Is it because of the force of gravity, because its stem withers, 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?

None of these is the cause. All this is only the conjunction of conditions in which every vital, organic, elemental event occurs. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decomposes, and so forth, is just as right and as wrong as the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it to fall. In the same way the historian who says that Napoleon went to Moscow and was destroyed because Aleksandr desired his destruction is just as right and as wrong as the man who says that an undermined hill weighing thousands of tons fell because of the last blow of a workman's mattock. In historic events the so-called great men are but labels giving names to events, and like labels they have only the slightest connection with the event itself.

Every act of theirs that seems to them an act of their own free will is, in the historical sense, not free at all, but is connected with the whole course of history and determined from eternity.

-War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Ann Dunnigan, Book III, Part One, Chapter One