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Making sense of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history is no easy task. Indeed the erudition deployed by Isaiah Berlin in his attempt to do so was considered a small masterpiece in itself.
Tolstoy appeared to distrust all theories that attempted to put the study of human affairs on a quasi-scientific basis by imposing abstract categories and assuming an inner rationality.
One clear difficulty with this thesis, even when Tolstoy was telling the story, was that the leading actors on the political stage
did make a difference, and their decisions had consequences.
conceptualization. It was also odd to use Napoleon’s performance at Borodino to debunk the great man theory of history. This was, as Gallie notes, “one of the strangest, least typical, of campaigns known to history,” yet Tolstoy uses it to make points of universal validity to be applied to matters far less strange and atypical.
By contrast, Tolstoy was kind to Kutuzov, who was portrayed as having an inner wisdom despite his apparent stupidity, because he grasped the logic of the situation.
In Tolstoy’s account, the French offensive floundered because they lacked the moral force to press on, while the Russians had the moral force to resist.
In this regard, Russia’s fate was determined by strategy as much as any elemental forces beyond human comprehension. As Lieven notes, Tolstoy failed to credit the clarity of the Tsar’s strategy and the extent to which events unfolded according to plan, as the Tsar anticipated.
“By denying any rational direction of events in 1812 by human actors and implying that military professionalism was a German disease Tolstoy feeds rather easily into Western interpretations of 1812 which blame snow or chance for French defeat.”
As Berlin put it, “No theories can possibly fit the immense variety of possible human behavior, the vast multiplicity of minute, undiscoverable causes and effects which form that interplay of men and nature which history purports to record.”
One sympathetic interpreter has sought to show how Tolstoy effectively punctured the pretensions of not only the philosophers of his time but also subsequent social scientists who took advantage of hindsight by seeking only evidence or a singular factor that supported their theories and ignoring anything contradictory.
On this basis, Gary Morson identified with Tolstoy’s belief that true understanding only existed in the present and events were decided “on the instant.”
Historians looked to the past, while strategists addressed the future.
With the benefit of hindsight, the historian might see how it all might have been different. But choices had to be made at the time in the face of unknowns.
The occasion was the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, and the commanding figure was Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke. Von Moltke was a self-proclaimed follower of Clausewitz and one of his most effective promoters.
Cultured and well read, he would have been classed as a liberal humanist until the revolutions of 1848 caused him to move abruptly to the right and become a tough patriot and uncompromising anti-socialist.
Gunther Rothenberg describes him as a “grammarian” who “engaged in very little abstract speculation.”
Yet in two critical respects he moved beyond Clausewitz and the Napoleonic model.
He also recognized the potential for deadlock if both sides mobilized large human reserves and a war carried on without either side quite being able to bring it to a conclusion.
The second factor influencing von Moltke’s approach was that he internalized Clausewitz’s dictum about war being a continuation of politics.
While, à la Clausewitz, he believed the object of war was to “implement the government’s policy by force,” he grumbled that politicians (read Bismarck) might demand more from war than it could realistically deliver.
This was evident in von Moltke’s definition of victory: “the highest goal attainable with available means.”
Neither the occupation of territory nor the capturing of fortified places, but only the destruction of the enemy fighting-power will, as a rule, decide. This is thus the primary objective of operations.
He told his commanders that war could not be “conducted on a green table” and was prepared to delegate authority
The important thing was to keep the objective in view while accepting the need for “practical adaptation.” He was wary of abstractions and attempts to establish general principles.
For von Moltke, strategy was instead a “free, practical, artistic activity”
The choice of strategy might be based on common sense: the test of character was to find this in ...
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As with Napoleon and Clausewitz before him, von Moltke was in no doubt about the importance of numbers.
Von Moltke’s most radical innovation as a commander, which went against the textbooks of the time, was to divide his army so that both parts could be kept supplied until they would combine for the battle (“march divided; strike united”).
In the 1866 war with Austria he used the railways to get his troops into position first, even though Austria had been the first to mobilize.
This victory set up a war with France for which von Moltke prepared carefully. This time he divided his army into three, giving him maximum flexibility so he could react quickly as the French plan became apparent.
In the critical war with France in 1870, von Moltke’s victory was complete, at least in terms of the conventional phase of the war.
There was an argument with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck over whether to bombard Paris. Von Moltke was worried this would only stiffen French resistance and preferred a siege. Bismarck worried that a slow conclusion to the campaign might prompt Britain and Austria to enter the war on France’s side. The Kaiser agreed with his chancellor and the bombardment began in January 1871. The French government lacked the stomach for a fight and began to negotiate. It was still not over, for then there was a popular revolt, in the form of the Paris Commune. An improvised, irregular army animated by popular
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Von Moltke accepted that the aims of war were determined by policy. Once fighting began, however, the military must be given a free hand: “strategy” must be “fully independent of policy.”
Surround a commander in the field with “independent and negative counselors” and nothing would ever get done. “They will present every difficulty, they will have foreseen all eventualities; they will always be right; they will defeat every positive idea because they have none of their own. These counselors are the spoilers; they negate the Army leader.”
The episode over Paris might have just demonstrated the fantasy of this political exclusion, but for commanders in the field this became an article of faith, essential to the proper and successful implementation of strategy.
Git thar fustest with the mostest. —General Nathan B. Forrest, quoted (probably incorrectly) on strategy
AT THE START of the twentieth century, the military historian Hans Delbrück argued that all military strategy could be divided into two basic forms. The first, conforming to the majority view of the day was Niederwerfungsstrategie, the strategy of annihilation, which demanded a decisive battle to eliminate the enemy’s army. The second drew on Clausewitz’s note of 1827 which recognized the possibility for another type of war when the available military means could not deliver a decisive battle.
Exhaustion was not about a single decisive battle but about an extended campaign that would wear the enemy out. He mocked the idea of a “pure maneuver strategy that allows war to be conducted without bloodshed.” There was always a possibility of battle. His view of a strategy of exhaustion was more operational than an anticipation of the later concept of attritional war.
Delbrück’s analysis led him into furious arguments with the historians of the German general staff, especially when Delbrück argued that Frederick the Great had practiced limited war rather than decisive battle.
The challenge for Delbrück at this time, however, was to get German generals to contemplate anything other than a swift offensive leading to the annihilation of the enemy army in a decisive battle.
The complex relationship between theory and practice in strategy was revealed by the American Civil War (1861–1865). At one level, the outcome of the war was the result of the North enjoying twice the population and far greater industrial strength than the South.
President Lincoln saw clearly that the Union’s strategy required an offensive, but to his exasperation his generals seemed to be unable to mount one successfully until quite late in the war.
Clausewitz had no discernible influence on these events. That was not so with Jomini. The leading teacher at West Point, Dennis Mahan, had spent time in France studying the Napoleonic Wars and was an avowed Jominian, while his star pupil, Henry “Old Brains” Halleck, who became President Lincoln’s general-in-chief, had gone so far as to translate Jomini’s Life of Napoleon into English.
Jomini’s influence among the generals is evident in their focus on lines of communication and their opposition to Lincoln’s proposals to mount a series of concurrent attacks against the South, including coastal operations.
The generals were wary of the defense’s potential and were so enamored with the idea of a decisive battle that they were reluctant to risk their forces in anything else.
“That’s the word—strategy!” he exclaimed in 1862, “General McClellan thinks he is going to whip the rebels by strategy.”
When the South was eventually penetrated, exposing the limits of the Confederacy’s defenses, Lincoln was prepared to accept the benefits: “Now, gentleman, that was true strategy because the enemy was diverted from his purpose.”
Ulysses Grant saw the logic clearly and brutally. The terrible loss of life in both armies had achieved little, observed Grant, but he understood that the North could survive the losses better than the South and so he decided to embark on “as desperate fighting as the world has ever witnessed,” locking Lee’s forces in constant combat until he barely had an army left.
Lincoln’s own contribution was to press ahead in January 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves in the areas under rebellion, a move described as a “necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion.” This not only further unsettled the South but reinforced the Union army. By 1865, former slaves counted for 10 percent of its army. In the end this was a war of exhaustion.
