Book Ten: 1812 - Chapter XXXVIII

by Leo Tolstoy

　　The terrible spectacle of the battlefield covered with dead andwounded, together with the heaviness of his head and the news thatsome twenty generals he knew personally had been killed or wounded,and the consciousness of the impotence of his once mighty arm,produced an unexpected impression on Napoleon who usually liked tolook at the killed and wounded, thereby, he considered, testing hisstrength of mind. This day the horrible appearance of thebattlefield overcame that strength of mind which he thoughtconstituted his merit and his greatness. He rode hurriedly from thebattlefield and returned to the Shevardino knoll, where he sat onhis campstool, his sallow face swollen and heavy, his eyes dim, hisnose red, and his voice hoarse, involuntarily listening, with downcasteyes, to the sounds of firing. With painful dejection he awaited theend of this action, in which he regarded himself as a participantand which he was unable to arrest. A personal, human feeling for abrief moment got the better of the artificial phantasm of life hehad served so long. He felt in his own person the sufferings and deathhe had witnessed on the battlefield. The heaviness of his head andchest reminded him of the possibility of suffering and death forhimself. At that moment he did not desire Moscow, or victory, or glory(what need had he for any more glory?). The one thing he wished forwas rest, tranquillity, and freedom. But when he had been on theSemenovsk heights the artillery commander had proposed to him to bringseveral batteries of artillery up to those heights to strengthen thefire on the Russian troops crowded in front of Knyazkovo. Napoleon hadassented and had given orders that news should be brought to him ofthe effect those batteries produced.

　　An adjutant came now to inform him that the fire of two hundred gunshad been concentrated on the Russians, as he had ordered, but thatthey still held their ground.

　　"Our fire is mowing them down by rows, but still they hold on," saidthe adjutant.

　　"They want more!..." said Napoleon in a hoarse voice.

　　"Sire?" asked the adjutant who had not heard the remark.

　　"They want more!" croaked Napoleon frowning. "Let them have it!"

　　Even before he gave that order the thing he did not desire, andfor which he gave the order only because he thought it was expected ofhim, was being done. And he fell back into that artificial realm ofimaginary greatness, and again- as a horse walking a treadmillthinks it is doing something for itself- he submissively fulfilled thecruel, sad, gloomy, and inhuman role predestined for him.

　　And not for that day and hour alone were the mind and consciencedarkened of this man on whom the responsibility for what was happeninglay more than on all the others who took part in it. Never to theend of his life could he understand goodness, beauty, or truth, or thesignificance of his actions which were too contrary to goodness andtruth, too remote from everything human, for him ever to be able tograsp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded asthey were by half the world, and so he had to repudiate truth,goodness, and all humanity.

　　Not only on that day, as he rode over the battlefield strewn withmen killed and maimed (by his will as he believed), did he reckon ashe looked at them how many Russians there were for each Frenchman and,deceiving himself, find reason for rejoicing in the calculation thatthere were five Russians for every Frenchman. Not on that day alonedid he write in a letter to Paris that "the battle field wassuperb," because fifty thousand corpses lay there, but even on theisland of St. Helena in the peaceful solitude where he said heintended to devote his leisure to an account of the great deeds he haddone, he wrote:

　　The Russian war should have been the most popular war of moderntimes: it was a war of good sense, for real interests, for thetranquillity and security of all; it was purely pacific andconservative.

　　It was a war for a great cause, the end of uncertainties and thebeginning of security. A new horizon and new labors were openingout, full of well-being and prosperity for all. The European systemwas already founded; all that remained was to organize it.

　　Satisfied on these great points and with tranquility everywhere, Itoo should have had my Congress and my Holy Alliance. Those ideas werestolen from me. In that reunion of great sovereigns we should havediscussed our interests like one family, and have rendered accountto the peoples as clerk to master.

　　Europe would in this way soon have been, in fact, but one people,and anyone who traveled anywhere would have found himself always inthe common fatherland. I should have demanded the freedom of allnavigable rivers for everybody, that the seas should be common to all,and that the great standing armies should be reduced henceforth tomere guards for the sovereigns.

　　On returning to France, to the bosom of the great, strong,magnificent, peaceful, and glorious fatherland, I should haveproclaimed her frontiers immutable; all future wars purelydefensive, all aggrandizement antinational. I should have associatedmy son in the Empire; my dictatorship would have been finished, andhis constitutional reign would have begun.

　　Paris would have been the capital of the world, and the French theenvy of the nations!

　　My leisure then, and my old age, would have been devoted, in companywith the Empress and during the royal apprenticeship of my son, toleisurely visiting, with our own horses and like a true countrycouple, every corner of the Empire, receiving complaints, redressingwrongs, and scattering public buildings and benefactions on allsides and everywhere.

　　Napoleon, predestined by Providence for the gloomy role ofexecutioner of the peoples, assured himself that the aim of hisactions had been the peoples' welfare and that he could control thefate of millions and by the employment of power confer benefactions.

　　"Of four hundred thousand who crossed the Vistula," he wrote furtherof the Russian war, "half were Austrians, Prussians, Saxons, Poles,Bavarians, Wurttembergers, Mecklenburgers, Spaniards, Italians, andNeapolitans. The Imperial army, strictly speaking, was one thirdcomposed of Dutch, Belgians, men from the borders of the Rhine,Piedmontese, Swiss, Genevese, Tuscans, Romans, inhabitants of theThirty-second Military Division, of Bremen, of Hamburg, and so on:it included scarcely a hundred and forty thousand who spoke French.The Russian expedition actually cost France less than fifty thousandmen; the Russian army in its retreat from Vilna to Moscow lost inthe various battles four times more men than the French army; theburning of Moscow cost the lives of a hundred thousand Russians whodied of cold and want in the woods; finally, in its march fromMoscow to the Oder the Russian army also suffered from the severity ofthe season; so that by the the time it reached Vilna it numberedonly fifty thousand, and at Kalisch less than eighteen thousand."

　　He imagined that the war with Russia came about by his will, and thehorrors that occurred did not stagger his soul. He boldly took thewhole responsibility for what happened, and his darkened mind foundjustification in the belief that among the hundreds of thousands whoperished there were fewer Frenchmen than Hessians and Bavarians.