War And Peace: Book 9 - CHAPTER I

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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.

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1. Ebooks list page : 84
2. War And Peace: Book 4 - CHAPTER V
3. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER III
4. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER II
5. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER I
6. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER IV
7. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XIX
8. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XVI
9. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XV
10. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XIV
11. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER V
12. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER VI
13. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XIX
14. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XVI
15. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XIV
16. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XV