War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

‘Who are they? Why are they running? They’re not after me! They can’t be after me! Why? They can’t want to kill me! Me. Everybody loves me!’

Feeling as he did that at a single word from this man the entire vast mass of them (including him, no more than a grain of sand) would go through fire and water, commit any crime, face death or fight on to glory, he could not suppress a shivering thrill at the immanency of that word.

Boris felt all the more determined that from now on he was going to follow not the written code laid down in the regulations, but the unwritten one.

‘he’s the kind of man who decides the fates of nations.’

‘There we have it. No one to fall in love with in the field, so Wostov falls in love with the Tsar,’ he said.

‘He’s a man in a grey overcoat who wants to be called “Your Majesty”, but I disappointed him.

Kutuzov looked sternly at his adjutant, paused for a moment and said, ‘I think we shall lose. That’s what I said to Count Tolstoy and I asked him to tell the Tsar. And do you know what he said? “My dear General, I like dabbling in cutlets and rice – warfare I leave to you.” Yes … That was all he said!’

‘A fine death this one!’ said Napoleon, looking down at Bolkonsky. Prince Andrey knew they were talking about him,

Looking Napoleon straight in the eye, Prince Andrey mused on the insignificance of greatness, on the insignificance of human life, the meaning of which no one could understand, and most of all the insignificance of death, which no living person could make sense of or explain.

‘The enemy of the human race’, as you know, is attacking the Prussians. The Prussians are our faithful allies, who have let us down no more than three times in three years.

When nobody looks after people dying of disease while it’s so easy to give them some real practical help, what harm and error can there be in my providing doctors, and a hospital and a home for old people?

‘No, life isn’t over at thirty-one,’ was his instant, final and irrevocable conclusion.

‘Yes, Prince, you’re quite right. In this day and age,’ Vera persisted (talking of ‘this day and age’ in the way that persons of limited intelligence generally love to do, all too certain they have discovered and carefully considered what is special about their day and age, and that human characteristics change with the times),

What horror he would have felt if he had been told on his return from abroad seven years ago that there was no point in searching or taxing his brains because the way forward was set for him, marked out in advance for all eternity, and it was no use fighting against it because he was bound to turn out exactly like every other man in his position.

Sometimes he consoled himself with the idea that it didn’t matter – this was only a passing phase – only to be struck by the horrifying thought that plenty of others had gone through the same ‘passing phase’, embarking on this kind of life and joining this club with all their teeth and hair and leaving when they were toothless and bald.

‘I understand this tangled mess of hypocrisy,’ he thought, ‘but how can I tell people everything I understand?

But those same visitors never stopped to think that in addition to the couple of hours when they saw their hosts there were another twenty-two in the daily cycle during which the hidden private life of the household continued.

‘Our fashions are French, our ideas are French, our feelings are French! Look here, you sent Métivier packing because he’s a Frenchman and a scoundrel, but our ladies go down on their knees and crawl after him.

Mademoiselle George came out with a red scarf flung over one shoulder and her bare, fat, dimpled arms on show.

Anatole asked Natasha for a waltz, and while they were dancing he squeezed her waist and her hand and told her she was enchanting and he was in love with her.

Natasha doubted herself – could she have dreamt what he had said to her during the waltz?

Burning lips were pressed against hers, then she was instantly free again

‘If I could still smile at him as he smiled at me when we were saying goodbye, if I could let things go that far, surely I must have fallen in love with him at first sight.

‘Why couldn’t that happen too?’ she kept wondering in her fog of bewilderment. ‘That’s the only way I could be completely happy. With things as they are I have to choose, and I can’t be happy unless I have both of them.

She asked her to forget everything and forgive her if she had anything to apologize for, but she couldn’t be his wife.

You’ve shamed yourself like a common little slut.

He could sense that his feelings towards her were stronger than they ought to be between a married man and a young girl engaged to one of his friends.

Pierre now recognized in his friend something he knew only too well, a need to get involved in a heated dispute about some neutral topic, purely to drown out thoughts that were too near the heart and too painful.

And there in the middle, high above Prechistensky Boulevard, amidst a scattering of stars on every side but catching the eye through its closeness to the earth, its pure white light and the long uplift of its tail, shone the comet, the huge, brilliant comet of 1812, that popular harbinger of untold horrors and the end of the world.

Millions of men set out to inflict on one another untold evils – deception, treachery, robbery, forgery, counterfeiting, theft, arson and murder – on a scale unheard of in the annals of law-courts down the centuries and all over the world, though at the time the men responsible did not think of these deeds as crimes.

It is beyond our comprehension that millions of Christian men should have killed and tortured each other just because Napoleon was a megalomaniac, Alexander was obstinate, the English were devious and the Duke of Oldenburg was badly done by.

the willingness or unwillingness of any old French corporal to serve a second term, for had he refused to serve, and a second and a third and a thousand corporals and soldiers along with him, Napoleon’s army would have been reduced by that number and there could have been no war.

But if every last sergeant had refused to go back into the army there could have been no war either.

It follows therefore that all of these causes, billions of them, came together to bring about subsequent events, and these events had no single cause, being bound to happen simply because they were bound to happen.

There are two sides to life for every individual: a personal life, in which his freedom exists in proportion to the abstract nature of his interests, and an elemental life within the swarm of humanity, in which a man inevitably follows laws laid down for him.

And the botanist who finds that the apple has fallen because of the onset of decay in its cellular structure, and all the rest of it, will be no more right or wrong than the boy under the tree who says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it to fall.

When it comes to events in history, so-called ‘great men’ are nothing but labels attached to events; like real labels, they have the least possible connection with events themselves. Every action they perform, which they take to be self-determined and independent, is in a historical sense quite the opposite; it is interconnected with the whole course of history, and predetermined from eternity.

Napoleon issued a third instruction: the colonel who had charged into the river for no good reason was to be enrolled in the Legion of Honour, of which Napoleon himself was the head. As Euripides once said, ‘Those whom God wishes to destroy he first drives mad.’

It was beyond all understanding how he could have become the King of Naples, but that was what they had called him and he, far from entertaining any doubts, behaved with more stateliness and gravity than ever before. He was so convinced of his standing

Pfuel was clearly this kind of man. He had his science – the theory of oblique movement – which he had deduced from the wars of Frederick the Great, and everything he came across in today’s military history seemed to him the most preposterous barbarity, a series of ugly confrontations with so many blunders on both sides that these wars were not worthy of the name of war because they didn’t conform to his theory, did not lend themselves to scientific study. In 1806 Pfuel had been one of those behind the plan of campaign that ended in Jena and Auerstadt, but he failed to see in the outcome of that war the slightest indication that his theory might be flawed. On the contrary, by his reckoning the entire debacle was due to infringements of his theory, and he used to say with typical relish and sarcasm, ‘I told you the whole damn thing would go wrong.’ Pfuel was one of those theorists who love their theory so dearly they lose sight of the aim of all theory, which is to work out in practice. He was so much in love with theory that he hated all practice and didn’t want to know about it. He positively rejoiced in failure, because failure was due to practical infringements of his theory, which went to show how right the theory was.

they were useful, necessary, you might say indispensable (in the same way that the world has always been full of mountebanks, miracle-men, homoeopaths and allopaths, and always will be), because they satisfied the psychological yearnings of the patient and those who loved her. They satisfied the eternal human need to go on hoping for relief, the need for sympathy and for someone to do something that is felt by any suffering individual. They satisfied the eternal human need – seen at its simplest in a little child – to be rubbed where it hurts.

‘And have you heard the latest?’ said Shinshin. ‘Prince Golitsyn’s hired a Russian teacher – he’s learning Russian.’ ‘It’s getting dangerous to speak French in the streets,’ he added – in French.

Moved ostensibly by fear or vanity, pleasure, indignation or reason, and acting on the assumption they knew what they were doing and were doing it for themselves, they were actually nothing more than unwitting tools in the hands of history, performing a function hidden from themselves but comprehensible to us.

the higher they stand in the social hierarchy the less freedom they have.

on the Russian side every last effort was made to prevent the only thing that could have saved Russia,

If the events had not occurred these hints would have been forgotten like the thousands, nay millions, of other contradictory hints and speculative ideas prevalent at the time that turned out to be wrong and were soon forgotten.

The outcome of any event is always accompanied by such a range of speculative ideas about its cause that irrespective of the outcome there will always be somebody who can say, ‘Look, I told you that’s how it would turn out,’

conveniently forgetting the vast number of other speculative ideas, many of which pre...

The Tsar had left the army so as not to cramp the style of the overall commander-in-chief,

Pierre echoed his word at some cost to the truth.