When Power Confronts Its Own Horror — War and Peace

The terrible spectacle of the battlefield, covered with dead and wounded, together with the heaviness of Napoleon's head, the news that some twenty generals he knew personally have been killed or wounded, and the consciousness of the impotence of his once mighty arm, produce an unexpected impression on a man who usually liked to look at the killed and wounded as a test of his strength of mind. This day that strength fails him. He rides hurriedly from the field back to the Shevardino knoll, sits on his campstool with sallow, swollen face, dim eyes, red nose, and hoarse voice, and listens with downcast eyes to the firing. With painful dejection he awaits the end of an action he regards himself as joining and cannot arrest. For a brief moment a personal, human feeling gets the better of the artificial phantasm of life he has served so long. He feels in his own person the sufferings and death he has witnessed. The heaviness of his head and chest reminds him that he too might suffer and die. At that moment he does not desire Moscow, or victory, or glory. The one thing he wishes for is rest, tranquillity, and freedom.

Yet when he was on the Semenovsk heights the artillery commander proposed bringing several batteries up to strengthen the fire on the Russian troops crowded in front of Knyazkovo, and Napoleon assented, ordering that news of the effect be brought to him. An adjutant now reports that the fire of two hundred guns has been concentrated as ordered, but the Russians still hold their ground. Our fire is mowing them down by rows, the adjutant says, but still they hold on. They want more, Napoleon croaks, frowning. Let them have it. Even before he gives that order, the thing he does not desire, and for which he gives the order only because he thinks it is expected of him, is already being done. He falls back into that artificial realm of imaginary greatness and, like a horse walking a treadmill that thinks it is doing something for itself, submissively fulfils the cruel, sad, gloomy, and inhuman role predestined for him.

Tolstoy says that not for that day and hour alone were this man's mind and conscience darkened. Never to the end of his life could he understand goodness, beauty, or truth, or the significance of actions too contrary to goodness and too remote from everything human. He could not disavow deeds belauded by half the world, and so he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity. On the field he reckoned how many Russians there were for each Frenchman and found reason for rejoicing in the calculation of five to one. He wrote to Paris that the battlefield was superb because fifty thousand corpses lay there. Even on the island of St Helena, in peaceful solitude, he wrote that the Russian war should have been the most popular of modern times: a war of good sense, purely pacific and conservative, founding a European system. He claimed the Imperial army was barely a third French-speaking, that the expedition cost France fewer than fifty thousand men, and that among the hundreds of thousands who perished there were fewer Frenchmen than Hessians and Bavarians. He imagined that the war came about by his will. The horrors did not stagger his soul.