War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

they had been hidden away out of sight to catch the enemy unawares,

Bennigsen had no knowledge of this, and he moved the men up for his own reasons, without informing the commander-in-chief.

He was well aware that tomorrow’s engagement would be the most ghastly battle he had ever taken part in, and for the first time in his life the possibility of death presented itself, not in relation to the living world, or any effect it might have on other people, but purely in relation to himself and his own soul,

There were three main regrets in his life that had a special claim on his attention: his love for a woman, the death of his father, and the invasion of the French, who now held half of Russia.

Anyway, tomorrow I’ll get killed, and probably not by a Frenchman, maybe by one of our own men, like that soldier who let his gun go off right next to my ear yesterday, and the French will come along and pick me up by the head and feet and chuck me into a pit so I don’t stink them out, and a whole new way of living will come about, everybody will get used to it, and I shan’t know anything about it because I shall have gone.’

‘he just could not see that for the first time ever we were fighting for Russian soil, and there was a kind of spirit in the men that I’d never seen before, and we had held them off for two whole days, and the success of it had made us ten times stronger.

‘if anything really depended on what gets done at headquarters, I’d be up there with them, doing things, but no, I have the honour of serving here in this regiment along with these gentlemen, and I’m convinced that tomorrow’s outcome depends on us, not on them

glancing in that direction Prince Andrey recognized Wolzogen and Clausewitz, with a Cossack in attendance.

‘It was in that “very wide area” that I had a father, a son and a sister at Bald Hills. He’s not bothered about that.

‘Stop taking prisoners. What’s the sense in taking prisoners? It’s just medieval chivalry. The French have destroyed my home and they’re on their way to destroy Moscow.

That kind of magnanimity and sensitivity reminds me of the magnanimity and sensitivity of a posh lady who feels sick at the sight of a calf being slaughtered – she’s such a nice person she can’t stand the sight of blood, but she does enjoy a nice dish of fricasséed veal.

War is not being nice to each other, it’s the vilest thing in human life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war. It’s a terrible necessity, and we should be strict about it and take it seriously. It comes down to this: no more lying, war means war and it’s not a plaything. Otherwise war will be a nice hobby for idle people and butterfly minds

The aim of war is murder, the weapons of war are spying, treachery and the fostering of further treachery, the destruction of people, looting their property and stealing from them to keep the army on the road, falsehood and deceit, which go by the name of clever tactical ploys, and the moral basis of the military class is the curtailment of freedom through discipline, linked with idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery and drunkenness.

People come together to murder one another, as they will do tomorrow; men get slaughtered and crippled in their tens of thousands, and then services of thanksgiving are held to celebrate the killing of vast numbers of men (they even exaggerate the numbers), and victory is proclaimed, on the basis that the more men slaughtered, the greater the achievement. How can God look down from heaven and listen to it all?’

And it’s not a good thing for man to taste of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil

the little boy known for some reason as the King of Rome.

boil down to four points, four basic instructions, none of which was carried out, or ever could have been.

strange as this proposition may seem, the same human dignity which tells me that each one of us is neither more nor less of a man than the great Napoleon forces us towards this kind of solution to the problem, and historical research provides abundant justification for it.

At the battle of Borodino Napoleon never fired a shot and didn’t kill anyone.

For this reason the question whether Napoleon did or didn’t have a cold that day is of no greater interest to history than whether the humblest soldier in transport command had a cold or not.

Our body is a machine for living, and that’s all there is to it.’

and it was quite some time before he saw any men killed or wounded, though they were dropping all round him.

The mound on which Pierre now stood – afterwards known to the Russians as the mound battery, or the Rayevsky redoubt, and to the French as the great redoubt, fatal redoubt or centre redoubt – was the famous place that the French looked on as the key position, where tens of thousands fell.

The soldiers shook their heads disapprovingly as they looked at Pierre. But once they were satisfied that the man in the white hat wasn’t doing any harm, as he either sat quietly on a slope, or politely got out of the soldiers’ way with a shy smile on his face as he walked about the battery, under full fire, like someone calmly strolling down a boulevard, suspicion and resentment gradually gave way to the kindly spirit of friendly banter that soldiers tend to reserve for their animals: the dogs, cockerels, goats and other creatures who happen to share the fortunes of the regiment.

‘Oh, surely they’ll stop now. They’ll be horrified at what they’ve done!’ he thought, aimlessly following on behind crowds of stretchers moving away from the battlefield.

Adjutants sent out by Napoleon and orderlies dispatched by the marshals were continually galloping in from the field with reports on the progress of the battle, but they were all false, partly because in the heat of battle no one can say what is actually happening at a given moment, partly because many of the adjutants never got to the battlefield as such,

in the time it took for an adjutant to ride the couple of miles that separated him from Napoleon circumstances would have changed, and the news he was bringing was already out of date.

Working on the basis of false reports like these, Napoleon issued a stream of instructions which had either been carried out already, or were not carried out at all, and never could have been.

But, contrary to what had invariably happened in all their previous battles, instead of them duly reporting back that the enemy had been put to flight, the well-ordered masses of troops kept coming back in disorganized, panic-stricken mobs.

Friant’s division vanished like the rest into the smoke of the battlefield.

Napoleon’s heart was sinking, like that of a lucky gambler who has been throwing his money about senselessly and always won, only to find himself more and more certain to lose just at the point when he has carefully calculated all the possibilities and worked out his system.

A general rode up and took the liberty of making a suggestion: Napoleon should send in the old guard.

‘Here we are eight hundred leagues from France, and I’m not having my guard torn to pieces,’ he said at last, wheeling his horse round, and he set off back to Shevardino.

exhausted men whose courage had been faltering felt a sense of relief and new inspiration.

Why did I feel so sorry to let go of life? There’s been something in this life I never understood, and still don’t.’

‘Oh yes, posh people first. Just the same up in heaven,’ said one.

Everything came back to him, and his heart filled with a blissful surge of passionate pity and love for this man.

Yes, the kind of love that God preached on earth, that Marie told me about and I could not understand – that’s why I was so sorry to let go of life, that’s what would have been left for me if I had lived. But now it’s too late. I know it is.’

Unable to renounce his own deeds, which were highly praised by half the world, he was forced to repudiate truth, goodness and everything human.

This would not be the only occasion in his life that he wrote a letter to Paris describing the battlefield as ‘superb’ because there were fifty thousand corpses on it.

in his darkened mind found justification in the fact that of the men who perished in their hundreds of thousands there were fewer Frenchmen than Hessians and Bavarians.

Anyone looking at the disarrayed rear of the Russian army would have said that with one last push from the French the Russian army would have been done for, but anyone looking at the rear of the French army would have said that one last push from the Russians would have finished off the French army. Neither French nor Russians mounted that last push, and the flame of battle burnt slowly down.

A new branch of mathematics taking account of infinitely small quantities can now consider other more complex problems of motion and provide solutions to problems that once seemed insoluble. When applied to these problems of motion, this new branch of mathematics (unknown to the ancients) allows for infinitely small quantities and by doing so creates the basic condition of motion – absolute continuity – thus correcting the inevitable mistake that the human intellect is bound to make when it rejects continuous

motion in favour of discrete units of motion.

True, there were one or two puritans incapable of rising to the occasion who saw this as a desecration of the sacrament of marriage, but they were few in number,

men friends who are never going to change into lovers.

On the way he learnt that his brother-in-law, Anatole, and Prince Andrey had both been killed.

You will find axes useful, and hunting spears are pretty good too, but the three-pronged fork is the best of the lot – Frenchmen weigh no more than a sheaf of rye.

All the horrors of the Reign of Terror in France were based on nothing more than a need to keep the peace.

Moscow was set on fire by men smoking pipes, kitchen stoves and camp-fires, by the careless behaviour of enemy soldiers living in houses they didn’t own.