War and Peace
have been no war; but had all his sergeants objected to serving a second
term then also there 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 Alexander not felt insulted, and had there not been an autocratic
government in Russia, or a Revolution in France and a subsequent
dictatorship and Empire, or all the things that produced the French
Revolution, and so on. Without each of these causes nothing could have
happened. So all these causes—myriads of causes—coincided to bring it
about. And so there was no one cause for that occurrence, but it had
to occur because it had to. Millions of men, renouncing their human
feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows,
just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east
to the west, slaying their fellows.
The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, 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 by conscription. This could not be
otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom
the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of
innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event
could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in
whose hands lay the real power—the soldiers who fired, or transported
provisions and guns—should consent to carry out the will of these weak
individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number
of diverse and complex causes.
We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational
events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do
not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history
reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to
us.
Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal
aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from
doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action
performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to
history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.
There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which
is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive
life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.
Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in
the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity. A deed done
is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of
millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man
stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with
and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the
predestination and inevitability of his every action.
“The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord.”
A king is history’s slave.
History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses
every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes.
Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than ever that
it depended on him, verser (ou ne pas verser) le sang de ses peuples
*—as Alexander expressed it in the last letter he wrote him—he had never
been so much in the grip of inevitable laws, which compelled him, while
thinking that he was acting on his own volition, to perform for the hive
life—that is to say, for history—whatever had to be performed.
* “To shed (or not to shed) the blood of his peoples.”
The people of the west moved eastwards to slay their fellow men, and
by the law of coincidence thousands of minute causes fitted in and
co-ordinated to produce that movement and 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) only for the purpose of securing an armed peace, the
French Emperor’s love and habit of war coinciding with his people’s
inclinations, allurement by the grandeur of the preparations, and the
expenditure on those preparations and the need of obtaining advantages
to compensate for that expenditure, the intoxicating 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-love of both sides, and millions of
other causes that adapted themselves to the event that was happening or
coincided with it.
When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its
attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried
by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or
because the boy standing below wants to eat it?
Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in
which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist
who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so
forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says
the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. Equally
right or wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he
wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and
he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because
the last navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock. In historic
events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and
like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.
Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is
in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of
history and predestined from eternity.
CHAPTER II
On the twenty-ninth of May Napoleon left Dresden, where he had spent
three weeks surrounded by a court that included princes, dukes, kings,
and even an emperor. Before leaving, Napoleon showed favor to the
emperor, kings, and princes who had deserved it, reprimanded the kings
and princes with whom he was dissatisfied, presented pearls and diamonds
of his own—that is, which he had taken from other kings—to the Empress
of Austria, and having, as his historian tells us, tenderly embraced the
Empress Marie Louise—who regarded him as her husband, though he had left
another wife in Paris—left her grieved by the parting which she seemed
hardly able to bear. Though the diplomatists still firmly believed in
the possibility of peace and worked zealously to that end, and though
the Emperor Napoleon himself wrote a letter to Alexander, calling him
Monsieur mon frère, and sincerely assured him that he did not want war
and would always love and honor him—yet he set off to join his army,
and at every station gave fresh orders to accelerate the movement of his
troops from west to east. He went in a traveling coach with six horses,
surrounded by pages, aides-de-camp, and an escort, along the road to
Posen, Thorn, Danzig, and Königsberg. At each of these towns thousands
of people met him with excitement and enthusiasm.
The army was moving from west to east, and relays of six horses carried
him in the same direction. On the tenth of June, * coming up with the
army, he spent the night in apartments prepared for him on the estate of
a Polish count in the Vilkavisski forest.
* Old style.
Next day, overtaking the army, he went in a carriage to the Niemen, and,
changing into a Polish uniform, he drove to the riverbank in order to
select a place for the crossing.
Seeing, on the other side, some Cossacks (les Cosaques) and the
wide-spreading steppes in the midst of which lay the holy city of Moscow
(Moscou, la ville sainte), the capital of a realm such as the Scythia
into which Alexander the Great had marched—Napoleon unexpectedly, and
contrary alike to strategic and diplomatic considerations, ordered an
advance, and the next day his army began to cross the Niemen.
Early in the morning of the twelfth of June he came out of his tent,
which was pitched that day on the steep left bank of the Niemen, and
looked through a spyglass at the streams of his troops pouring out of
the Vilkavisski forest and flowing over the three bridges thrown across
the river. The troops, knowing of the Emperor’s presence, were on the
lookout for him, and when they caught sight of a figure in an overcoat
and a cocked hat standing apart from his suite in front of his tent on
the hill, they threw up their caps and shouted: “Vive l’Empereur!” and
one after another poured in a ceaseless stream out of the vast forest
that had concealed them and, separating, flowed on and on by the three
bridges to the other side.
“Now we’ll go into action. Oh, when he takes it in hand himself, things
get hot... by heaven!... There he is!... Vive l’Empereur! So these
are the steppes of Asia! It’s a nasty country all the same. Au revoir,
Beauché; I’ll keep the best palace in Moscow for you! Au revoir. Good
luck!... Did you see the Emperor? Vive l’Empereur!... preur!—If
they make me Governor of India, Gérard, I’ll make you Minister of
Kashmir—that’s settled. Vive l’Empereur! Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah! The
Cossacks—those rascals—see how they run! Vive l’Empereur! There he
is, do you see him? I’ve seen him twice, as I see you now. The little
corporal... I saw him give the cross to one of the veterans.... Vive
l’Empereur!” came the voices of men, old and young, of most diverse
characters and social positions. On the faces of all was one common
expression of joy at the commencement of the long-expected campaign and
of rapture and devotion to the man in the gray coat who was standing on
the hill.
On the thirteenth of June a rather small, thoroughbred Arab horse was
brought to Napoleon. He mounted it and rode at a gallop to one of the
bridges over the Niemen, deafened continually by incessant and rapturous
acclamations which he evidently endured only because it was impossible
to forbid the soldiers to express their love of him by such shouting,
but the shouting which accompanied him everywhere disturbed him and
distracted him from the military cares that had occupied him from the
time he joined the army. He rode across one of the swaying pontoon
bridges to the farther side, turned sharply to the left, and galloped in
the direction of Kóvno, preceded by enraptured, mounted chasseurs of the
Guard who, breathless with delight, galloped ahead to clear a path for
him through the troops. On reaching the broad river Víliya, he stopped
near a regiment of Polish Uhlans stationed by the river.
“Vivat!” shouted the Poles, ecstatically, breaking their ranks and
pressing against one another to see him.
Napoleon looked up and down the river, dismounted, and sat down on a log
that lay on the bank. At a mute sign from him, a telescope was handed
him which he rested on the back of a happy page who had run up to him,
and he gazed at the opposite bank. Then he became absorbed in a map laid
out on the logs. Without lifting his head he said something, and two of
his aides-de-camp galloped off to the Polish Uhlans.
“What? What did he say?” was heard in the ranks of the Polish Uhlans
when one of the aides-de-camp rode up to them.
The order was to find a ford and to cross the river. The colonel of the
Polish Uhlans, a handsome old man, flushed and, fumbling in his speech
from excitement, asked the aide-de-camp whether he would be permitted
to swim the river with his Uhlans instead of seeking a ford. In evident
fear of refusal, like a boy asking for permission to get on a horse, he
begged to be allowed to swim across the river before the Emperor’s
eyes. The aide-de-camp replied that probably the Emperor would not be