War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

As a way of announcing their intentions to Kutuzov instead of a proper message they sent him a blank piece of paper in an envelope.

After the French victory at Borodino there were no more general engagements, not even a skirmish of any significance, yet the French army ceased to exist.

(As if rules existed for the killing of people!)

This x factor is army morale, a greater or lesser willingness to fight and face danger on the part of all the men who make up the army, whether or not they are fighting under leaders of genius, with clubs or guns that fire thirty rounds a minute. Men with the greatest desire to fight always steal the advantage when it comes to fighting. Morale is the factor which, when multiplied by mass, gives you the strength of the force. The intellectual problem is to define and express the significance of this unknown factor, morale.

And by expressing a whole range of historical data (battles, campaigns, periods of war) in equations like these, we can obtain sets of figures that must contain laws, and these laws should be discoverable.

Denisov and Dolokhov (who was also a leader of a small band operating in the same area) were not the only ones who knew about this convoy.

He wrote the same thing to the Pole, informing him that he was already serving under the German.

While Denisov was talking to the hetman Petya felt embarrassed by Denisov’s sudden coldness, and since the only explanation seemed to be the state of his trousers, he started working them down furtively underneath his greatcoat, trying to manage it without being seen and look as warlike as he could.

He called him Karabakh, a name that suggested the Caucasus, though in fact he came from Ukraine.

He was far away in a land of magic where nothing bore any resemblance to real life.

His horse stepped on the ashes of a camp-fire still smouldering in the early-morning light and reared back. Petya fell heavily to the wet ground. The Cossacks could see his arms and legs twitching, but his head didn’t move. A bullet had gone right through his head. After

Pierre Bezukhov was one of the Russian prisoners rescued by Denisov and Dolokhov.

The convoy of prisoners was melting away faster than the other two. Three hundred and thirty men had started from Moscow, and less than a hundred were left.

He had learnt that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and those limits are never far away; that a man who has felt discomfort from a crumpled petal in his bed of roses has suffered just as much as he was suffering now, sleeping on the bare, damp earth, with one side freezing while the other side warmed up;

He learnt that when he had married his wife by his own free will (so he had thought), he had been no freer than he was now when they locked him up in a stable for the night.

All at once, a host of memories rose up in Pierre’s mind, all of them instantly interlinked – the look that Platon had given him as he sat there under the tree, the shot they had heard from that very spot, the dog howling, the soldiers’ guilty faces as they ran past, the smoking musket, Karatayev’s absence when they got to the halting-place – and it was just beginning to sink in that Karatayev had been killed

Between Moscow and Vyazma the French army of seventy-three thousand men (not including the guardsmen, who had spent the whole war doing nothing but pillage) had been reduced to a mere thirty-six thousand, even though only five thousand had been killed in battle. This is the first term in a progressive sequence; it can be used to calculate the remaining terms with mathematical exactitude.

When the elastic of historical argument is stretched to breaking point, when an action flagrantly infringes anything humanity can agree to call by the name of goodness and justice, these historians take refuge in the concept of greatness. ‘Greatness’ seems to exclude all quantification of right and wrong. A great man knows no wrong.

And Napoleon, as he wraps himself up in his warm fur-coat and scurries home, leaving behind dying men who were not only his comrades, but (by his own admission) people he brought there himself, feels ‘he’s a great man’ and his soul is at peace.

And it never enters anybody’s head that to acknowledge greatness as something existing beyond the rule of right and wrong is to acknowledge one’s own nothingness and infinite smallness.

Fourth, it would have made no sense to capture the Emperor, the kings and the dukes, since their imprisonment would have made life difficult for the Russians, as was acknowledged by the more sensitive diplomats of the day (Joseph de Maistre among others).

You can cut off a slice of bread, but not an army.

This curious lack of correspondence, which we now find incomprehensible, between the facts as they were and the way they have gone down in history, arises purely and simply from the tendency of historians writing about this event to describe the history of various generals, with their noble sentiments and splendid words, rather than the history of the events themselves.

And this was how Natasha’s wound was healing. She had believed her life was over. But suddenly love for her mother had shown her that the essence of her life – love – was still alive within her. When love reawakened, life reawakened.

That day marked the beginning of a new friendship between Princess Marya and Natasha, one of those tender and passionate friendships that can exist only between women. They never stopped kissing each other and saying nice things to each other, and they spent most of their time together.

No man is great to his valet because the valet has his own special concept of greatness.

‘But when all’s said and done, who told them to come? They asked for it, the fucking bastards!’

Despite their treatment – with blood-letting and various medicines – he recovered.

He could seek no purpose now, because now he had faith – not faith in principles, words or ideas, but faith in a living God of feeling and experience. In days gone by he had sought Him by setting purposes for himself. That search for a purpose had really been a seeking after God, and suddenly during his captivity he had come to know, not through words or arguments, but from direct personal experience, something that his old nurse had told him long ago: God is here, here with us now, here and everywhere.

And Pierre decided that the steward’s plan, despite its great appeal, was not the right one, and he must travel to Petersburg to wind up his wife’s affairs and see to the rebuilding in Moscow. Why this was so, he couldn’t have said, but he knew beyond a shadow of doubt that this was what he had to do. His income would be down by three-quarters as a result of this decision. But it had to be. He could feel it in his bones.

those seen by Pierre as understanding the real meaning of life (his feelings),

In days to come Pierre would often recall this period of mindless bliss. Any judgements of people and circumstances made by him at this time remained forever true.

‘Can she have loved my brother so little that she can forget him so quickly?’ Princess Marya wondered, alone with her thoughts.

Princess Marya felt she had no right to blame her even in her heart of hearts.

‘It won’t happen straightaway … One day soon. But think how happy we’ll be when I’m his wife and you get married to Nikolay!’ ‘Natasha, I asked you not to talk about that. Let’s talk about you.’ Neither of them said anything.

But even if we assume that Alexander I, fifty years ago,8 was mistaken in his view of what was good for the various peoples, we must also assume that the historian censuring Alexander will with the passage of time also prove to be wrong in his view of what constitutes the good of humanity. Such a claim seems normal and inescapable when we look at the course of history and note that with each passing year and each new writer the view of what constitutes the good of humanity tends to change, and something that seemed good ten years ago now seems bad, and vice versa.

Once you allow that human life is subject to reason you extinguish any possibility of life.

Sometimes in an effort to understand him she would talk about all the good he was doing in looking after the welfare of his subjects, but he would round on her and say, ‘Oh no, not that. I never even think about it. I wouldn’t go out of my way for their benefit. It’s all airy-fairy nonsense, women’s talk, all this doing good to your neighbour. I don’t want our children to go short. I’ve got to build up our fortunes in my lifetime, and that’s all there is to it. And to do that you have to have discipline. You have to be hard!’ he would declare, clenching his fist with great passion. ‘And of course you have to be fair as well,’ he would add, ‘because if the peasant is naked and starving and he’s down to his last scraggy horse he’s no good to man or beast.’

And it was probably because Nikolay would not entertain any idea that he was doing things for other people, or being virtuous, that everything he attempted bore fruit. His wealth increased by leaps and bounds, serfs from nearby estates came and asked him to buy them in, and long after he was dead and gone his rule was reverently preserved in folk memory.

‘I never get a minute’s peace. Is that you Marie? Why did you bring him here?’

‘I don’t know why you think I’m in a bad mood,’ said Nikolay in response to the question he knew was in his wife’s mind. ‘You’ve no idea how sad and lonely I am when you go like that. I always think …’ ‘Marie, shush. You’re being silly. Shame on you,’ he said merrily. ‘I think you don’t love me any more, I’m so ugly … all the time … but especially in this condi …’ ‘Oh, you’re so funny! We’re not loved because we look good – we look good because we’re loved. It is only the likes of Malvina who are loved for being beautiful. So the question is: do I love my wife? No, it’s not love, it’s … I don’t know how to put it. When you’re away, or there’s a bit of trouble between us like today, I feel lost, I can’t do anything. Put it another way – do I love my finger? No, I don’t, but you try cutting it off …’

Natasha did the very opposite: she immediately dropped all the things that had charmed everybody else, including the one thing she was really good at – her singing. She gave it up precisely because of its charming effect on people. In the words of the popular phrase, she let herself go.

We all know that people are capable of absorbing themselves in one single subject, however trivial it may seem to be. We also know there is no subject so trivial that it won’t go on infinitely expanding once people have become absorbed in it.

Then as now much time was spent arguing about the rights of women, husband-and-wife relationships and freedom and rights within marriage (though these things were not called ‘serious issues’, as they now are), but Natasha had no interest in any such questions and no knowledge of them. Questions like these, then as now, existed exclusively for people who see marriage only in terms of satisfaction given and received by the married couple, though this is only one principle of married life rather than its overall meaning, which lies in the family. All the latest issues and debates, such as the problem of getting maximum pleasure out of eating your dinner, did not exist then and do not exist now for people who see dinner as a source of nourishment, and family life as the aim of marriage.

‘Well, I think you were absolutely right. I said as much to Natasha. Pierre says there’s nothing but suffering, torment and corruption, and it’s our duty to help our neighbour. He’s right, of course,’ said Countess Marya, ‘but he forgets that charity begins at home, and God Himself has shown us where our duty lies. We can run risks for ourselves, but not for our children.’

Modern history has replaced the ‘divinely ordained’ aims of various peoples – the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans – which ancient historians saw as the progressive aims of humanity as a whole, by new aims of its own – the well-being of the French people, the German or the English, or, in the most abstract terms, the single, noble aim of civilizing all of humanity, by which is usually meant the inhabitants of a small north-western corner of a large continent.

But at that time a few men started scribbling in books. At the end of the eighteenth century a couple of dozen men in Paris began to hold forth about men being equal and free. This led to murder and mayhem all over France. These men killed the King and a lot of other people. But at that time there lived in France a genius by the name of Napoleon. He conquered everybody everywhere, or at least he killed a lot of people because he was a great genius.

precisely how Rousseau’s book The Social Contract could have made the French people go out and slaughter each other must be beyond comprehension unless some causal connection can be established between this new force and the event.

history is written by educated people who find it natural and agreeable to believe that the activity of their social group is a source of movement for the whole of humanity,

This power cannot be the straightforward power deriving from the physical superiority of a strong creature over a weak one, a superiority based on the application or threat of physical force – like the power of Hercules. Nor can it be based on the moral superiority, as several simple-minded historians seem to think, since they keep setting certain historical figures up as heroes, men imbued with a special quality of mind and spirit which goes by the name of genius. This power cannot be based on moral superiority, because, even if we forget about historical heroes like Napoleon, opinions of whose moral stature differ widely, history shows that none of your Louis XIs or Metternichs, who governed men in millions, showed any special propensity for spiritual strength; quite the reverse, in most cases they were morally weaker than every last one of the millions they governed. If the source of power lies not in the physical or moral qualities of the possessor, it is obvious that the source of this power must be found outside the particular person – in the relationship which the possessor enjoys with the masses.