War and Peace
army also suffered from the severity of the season; so that by the time
it reached Vílna it numbered only fifty thousand, and at Kálisch less
than eighteen thousand.”
He imagined that the war with Russia came about by his will, and the
horrors that occurred did not stagger his soul. He boldly took the
whole responsibility for what happened, and his darkened mind found
justification in the belief that among the hundreds of thousands who
perished there were fewer Frenchmen than Hessians and Bavarians.
CHAPTER XXXIX
Several tens of thousands of the slain lay in diverse postures and
various uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the Davýdov
family and to the crown serfs—those fields and meadows where for
hundreds of years the peasants of Borodinó, Górki, Shevárdino, and
Semënovsk had reaped their harvests and pastured their cattle. At the
dressing stations the grass and earth were soaked with blood for a space
of some three acres around. Crowds of men of various arms, wounded and
unwounded, with frightened faces, dragged themselves back to Mozháysk
from the one army and back to Valúevo from the other. Other crowds,
exhausted and hungry, went forward led by their officers. Others held
their ground and continued to fire.
Over the whole field, previously so gaily beautiful with the glitter of
bayonets and cloudlets of smoke in the morning sun, there now spread a
mist of damp and smoke and a strange acid smell of saltpeter and blood.
Clouds gathered and drops of rain began to fall on the dead and wounded,
on the frightened, exhausted, and hesitating men, as if to say: “Enough,
men! Enough! Cease... bethink yourselves! What are you doing?”
To the men of both sides alike, worn out by want of food and rest,
it began equally to appear doubtful whether they should continue to
slaughter one another; all the faces expressed hesitation, and the
question arose in every soul: “For what, for whom, must I kill and be
killed?... You may go and kill whom you please, but I don’t want to do
so any more!” By evening this thought had ripened in every soul. At any
moment these men might have been seized with horror at what they were
doing and might have thrown up everything and run away anywhere.
But though toward the end of the battle the men felt all the horror of
what they were doing, though they would have been glad to leave off,
some incomprehensible, mysterious power continued to control them, and
they still brought up the charges, loaded, aimed, and applied the match,
though only one artilleryman survived out of every three, and though
they stumbled and panted with fatigue, perspiring and stained with blood
and powder. The cannon balls flew just as swiftly and cruelly from both
sides, crushing human bodies, and that terrible work which was not done
by the will of a man but at the will of Him who governs men and worlds
continued.
Anyone looking at the disorganized rear of the Russian army would have
said that, if only the French made one more slight effort, it would
disappear; and anyone looking at the rear of the French army would have
said that the Russians need only make one more slight effort and the
French would be destroyed. But neither the French nor the Russians made
that effort, and the flame of battle burned slowly out.
The Russians did not make that effort because they were not attacking
the French. At the beginning of the battle they stood blocking the
way to Moscow and they still did so at the end of the battle as at the
beginning. But even had the aim of the Russians been to drive the French
from their positions, they could not have made this last effort, for all
the Russian troops had been broken up, there was no part of the Russian
army that had not suffered in the battle, and though still holding their
positions they had lost ONE HALF of their army.
The French, with the memory of all their former victories during
fifteen years, with the assurance of Napoleon’s invincibility, with the
consciousness that they had captured part of the battlefield and had
lost only a quarter of their men and still had their Guards intact,
twenty thousand strong, might easily have made that effort. The French
who had attacked the Russian army in order to drive it from its position
ought to have made that effort, for as long as the Russians continued to
block the road to Moscow as before, the aim of the French had not been
attained and all their efforts and losses were in vain. But the French
did not make that effort. Some historians say that Napoleon need only
have used his Old Guards, who were intact, and the battle would have
been won. To speak of what would have happened had Napoleon sent his
Guards is like talking of what would happen if autumn became spring. It
could not be. Napoleon did not give his Guards, not because he did not
want to, but because it could not be done. All the generals, officers,
and soldiers of the French army knew it could not be done, because the
flagging spirit of the troops would not permit it.
It was not Napoleon alone who had experienced that nightmare feeling
of the mighty arm being stricken powerless, but all the generals and
soldiers of his army whether they had taken part in the battle or not,
after all their experience of previous battles—when after one tenth of
such efforts the enemy had fled—experienced a similar feeling of terror
before an enemy who, after losing HALF his men, stood as threateningly
at the end as at the beginning of the battle. The moral force of the
attacking French army was exhausted. Not that sort of victory which is
defined by the capture of pieces of material fastened to sticks, called
standards, and of the ground on which the troops had stood and were
standing, but a moral victory that convinces the enemy of the moral
superiority of his opponent and of his own impotence was gained by the
Russians at Borodinó. The French invaders, like an infuriated animal
that has in its onslaught received a mortal wound, felt that they were
perishing, but could not stop, any more than the Russian army, weaker
by one half, could help swerving. By impetus gained, the French army was
still able to roll forward to Moscow, but there, without further effort
on the part of the Russians, it had to perish, bleeding from the mortal
wound it had received at Borodinó. The direct consequence of the battle
of Borodinó was Napoleon’s senseless flight from Moscow, his retreat
along the old Smolénsk road, the destruction of the invading army of
five hundred thousand men, and the downfall of Napoleonic France, on
which at Borodinó for the first time the hand of an opponent of stronger
spirit had been laid.
BOOK ELEVEN: 1812
CHAPTER I
Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human mind.
Laws of motion of any kind become comprehensible to man only when he
examines arbitrarily selected elements of that motion; but at the
same time, a large proportion of human error comes from the arbitrary
division of continuous motion into discontinuous elements. There is a
well-known, so-called sophism of the ancients consisting in this, that
Achilles could never catch up with a tortoise he was following, in spite
of the fact that he traveled ten times as fast as the tortoise. By
the time Achilles has covered the distance that separated him from the
tortoise, the tortoise has covered one tenth of that distance ahead
of him: when Achilles has covered that tenth, the tortoise has covered
another one hundredth, and so on forever. This problem seemed to
the ancients insoluble. The absurd answer (that Achilles could never
overtake the tortoise) resulted from this: that motion was arbitrarily
divided into discontinuous elements, whereas the motion both of Achilles
and of the tortoise was continuous.
By adopting smaller and smaller elements of motion we only approach a
solution of the problem, but never reach it. Only when we have admitted
the conception of the infinitely small, and the resulting geometrical
progression with a common ratio of one tenth, and have found the sum of
this progression to infinity, do we reach a solution of the problem.
A modern branch of mathematics having achieved the art of dealing with
the infinitely small can now yield solutions in other more complex
problems of motion which used to appear insoluble.
This modern branch of mathematics, unknown to the ancients, when dealing
with problems of motion admits the conception of the infinitely small,
and so conforms to the chief condition of motion (absolute continuity)
and thereby corrects the inevitable error which the human mind cannot
avoid when it deals with separate elements of motion instead of
examining continuous motion.
In seeking the laws of historical movement just the same thing happens.
The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable arbitrary
human wills, is continuous.
To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of
history. But to arrive at these laws, resulting from the sum of all
those human wills, man’s mind postulates arbitrary and disconnected
units. The first method of history is to take an arbitrarily selected
series of continuous events and examine it apart from others, though
there is and can be no beginning to any event, for one event always
flows uninterruptedly from another.
The second method is to consider the actions of some one man—a king or a
commander—as equivalent to the sum of many individual wills; whereas the
sum of individual wills is never expressed by the activity of a single
historic personage.
Historical science in its endeavor to draw nearer to truth continually
takes smaller and smaller units for examination. But however small the
units it takes, we feel that to take any unit disconnected from others,
or to assume a beginning of any phenomenon, or to say that the will of
many men is expressed by the actions of any one historic personage, is
in itself false.
It needs no critical exertion to reduce utterly to dust any deductions
drawn from history. It is merely necessary to select some larger or
smaller unit as the subject of observation—as criticism has every
right to do, seeing that whatever unit history observes must always be
arbitrarily selected.
Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the
differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and
attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of
these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.
The first fifteen years of the nineteenth century in Europe present an
extraordinary movement of millions of people. Men leave their customary
pursuits, hasten from one side of Europe to the other, plunder and
slaughter one another, triumph and are plunged in despair, and for some
years the whole course of life is altered and presents an intensive
movement which first increases and then slackens. What was the cause of
this movement, by what laws was it governed? asks the mind of man.
The historians, replying to this question, lay before us the sayings and
doings of a few dozen men in a building in the city of Paris, calling
these sayings and doings “the Revolution”; then they give a detailed
biography of Napoleon and of certain people favorable or hostile to him;
tell of the influence some of these people had on others, and say: that
is why this movement took place and those are its laws.
But the mind of man not only refuses to believe this explanation, but
plainly says that this method of explanation is fallacious, because in
it a weaker phenomenon is taken as the cause of a stronger. The sum of
human wills produced the Revolution and Napoleon, and only the sum of
those wills first tolerated and then destroyed them.