The Machinery of History — War and Peace

From the close of 1811, Western Europe arms and concentrates, and in 1812 millions of men, counting those who transport and feed the army, move east toward the Russian frontier, where Russian forces have likewise been drawn since 1811. On the twelfth of June 1812 those western forces cross the frontier and war begins: an event opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions perpetrate against one another crimes, frauds, forgeries, false money, incendiarism, and murders such as centuries of law courts do not record, yet those who commit them do not at the time regard them as crimes.

Historians tell us with naïve assurance that the causes were the wrongs done to the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of the Continental System, Napoleon's ambition, Alexander's firmness, the mistakes of diplomatists. It would then have been enough for Metternich, Rumyántsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and an evening party, to write a more adroit note, or for Napoleon to restore the duchy, and there would have been no war. Contemporaries naturally saw it so: Napoleon blamed England's intrigues; the English Parliament blamed his ambition; businessmen the Continental System; soldiers the need of employment; diplomatists Memorandum No. 178 and an alliance insufficiently concealed. To posterity these reasons seem insufficient. We cannot grasp why, because a duke was wronged, thousands from the other side of Europe killed the people of Smolénsk and Moscow and were killed by them.

The deeper we delve, the more causes we find, each equally valid and equally false by its insignificance beside the event. A French corporal's wish not to serve a second term is as much a cause as Napoleon's refusal to withdraw beyond the Vistula; without a thousand such refusals there would have been so many fewer men. Without the Revolution, the Empire, autocracy in Russia, English policy, the Duke's wrongs, none of it could have happened. So there was no one cause; it had to occur because it had to. The actions of Napoleon and Alexander were as little voluntary as those of a conscript. Millions of soldiers had to consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals. Each man lives for himself and feels free; once done, the act belongs to history, where it has a predestined significance. There are two sides to every life: the individual, and the elemental hive life that obeys laws laid down for it. The higher a man stands, the more evident the inevitability of his every action. A king is history's slave. When an apple falls, attraction, a withered stalk, sun, wind, and a boy who wanted to eat it all coincide; nothing is the cause. So-called great men are labels. Every act that appears their own will is, in the historical sense, involuntary and predestined from eternity.