Book Nine: 1812 - Chapter I

by Leo Tolstoy

　　From the close of the year 1811 intensified arming and concentratingof the forces of Western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces-millions of men, reckoning those transporting and feeding the army-moved from the west eastwards to the Russian frontier, toward whichsince 1811 Russian forces had been similarly drawn. On the twelfthof June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russianfrontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed tohuman reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetratedagainst one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries,thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms,and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals ofall the law courts of the world, but which those who committed themdid not at the time regard as being crimes.

　　What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes?The historians tell us with naive assurance that its causes were thewrongs inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of theContinental System, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness ofAlexander, the mistakes of the diplomatists, and so on.

　　Consequently, it would only have been necessary for Metternich,Rumyantsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and an evening party, tohave taken proper pains and written a more adroit note, or forNapoleon to have written to Alexander: "My respected Brother, Iconsent to restore the duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg"- and therewould have been no war.

　　We can understand that the matter seemed like that tocontemporaries. It naturally seemed to Napoleon that the war wascaused by England's intrigues (as in fact he said on the island of St.Helena). It naturally seemed to members of the English Parliament thatthe cause of the war was Napoleon's ambition; to the Duke ofOldenburg, that the cause of the war was the violence done to him;to businessmen that the cause of the way was the Continental Systemwhich was ruining Europe; to the generals and old soldiers that thechief reason for the war was the necessity of giving thememployment; to the legitimists of that day that it was the need ofre-establishing les bons principes, and to the diplomatists of thattime that it all resulted from the fact that the alliance betweenRussia and Austria in 1809 had not been sufficiently well concealedfrom Napoleon, and from the awkward wording of Memorandum No. 178.It is natural that these and a countless and infinite quantity ofother reasons, the number depending on the endless diversity of pointsof view, presented themselves to the men of that day; but to us, toposterity who view the thing that happened in all its magnitude andperceive its plain and terrible meaning, these causes seeminsufficient. To us it is incomprehensible that millions ofChristian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleonwas ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy wasastute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp whatconnection such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughterand violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of menfrom the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolenskand Moscow and were killed by them.

　　To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carriedaway by the process of research and can therefore regard the eventwith unclouded common sense, an incalculable number of causespresent themselves. The deeper we delve in search of these causesthe more of them we find; and each separate cause or whole series ofcauses appears to us equally valid in itself and equally false byits insignificance compared to the magnitude of the events, and by itsimpotence- apart from the cooperation of all the other coincidentcauses- to occasion the event. To us, the wish or objection of this orthat French corporal to serve a second term appears as much a cause asNapoleon's refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and torestore the duchy of Oldenburg; for had he not wished to serve, andhad a second, a third, and a thousandth corporal and private alsorefused, there would have been so many less men in Napoleon's army andthe war could not have occurred.

　　Had Napoleon not taken offense at the demand that he should withdrawbeyond the Vistula, and not ordered his troops to advance, there wouldhave been no war; but had all his sergeants objected to serving asecond term then also there could have been no war. Nor could therehave been a war had there been no English intrigues and no Duke ofOldenburg, and had Alexander not felt insulted, and had there not beenan autocratic government in Russia, or a Revolution in France and asubsequent dictatorship and Empire, or all the things that producedthe French Revolution, and so on. Without each of these causes nothingcould have happened. So all these causes- myriads of causes- coincidedto bring it about. And so there was no one cause for thatoccurrence, but it had to occur because it had to. Millions of men,renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west toeast to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordesof men had come from the east to the west, slaying their fellows.

　　The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the eventseemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldierwho was drawn into the campaign by lot or by conscription. Thiscould not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon andAlexander (on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carriedout, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed withoutany one of which the event could not have taken place. It wasnecessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power-the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns- shouldconsent to carry out the will of these weak individuals, and shouldhave been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse andcomplex causes.

　　We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation ofirrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness ofwhich we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events inhistory reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do theybecome to us.

　　Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personalaims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstainfrom doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, thataction performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable andbelongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestinedsignificance.

　　There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life,which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and hiselemental hive life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down forhim.

　　Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconsciousinstrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims ofhumanity. A deed done is irrevocable, and its result coinciding intime with the actions of millions of other men assumes an historicsignificance. The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the morepeople he is connected with and the more power he has over others, themore evident is the predestination and inevitability of his everyaction.

　　"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 thanever that it depended on him, verser (ou ne pas verser) le sang de sespeuples*- as Alexander expressed it in the last letter he wrote him-he had never been so much in the grip of inevitable laws, whichcompelled him, while thinking that he was acting on his ownvolition, 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, andby the law of coincidence thousands of minute causes fitted in andco-ordinated to produce that movement and war: reproaches for thenonobservance of the Continental System, the Duke of Oldenburg'swrongs, the movement of troops into Prussia- undertaken (as itseemed to Napoleon) only for the purpose of securing an armed peace,the French Emperor's love and habit of war coinciding with hispeople's inclinations, allurement by the grandeur of the preparations,and the expenditure on those preparations and the need of obtainingadvantages to compensate for that expenditure, the intoxicating honorshe received in Dresden, the diplomatic negotiations which, in theopinion of contemporaries, were carried on with a sincere desire toattain peace, but which only wounded the self-love of both sides,and millions and millions of other causes that adapted themselves tothe event that was happening or coincided with it.

　　When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because ofits attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because itis dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakesit, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it?

　　Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditionsin which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And thebotanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissuedecays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands underthe tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it andprayed for it. Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napoleonwent to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexanderdesired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hillweighing a million tons fell because the last navvy struck it forthe last time with his mattock. In historic events the so-called greatmen are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have butthe 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 wholecourse of history and predestined from eternity.