The Myth of Great Men — War and Peace

A mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, yet the desire to find those causes is planted in the soul. People snatch the first intelligible approximation and call it the cause. In history that first guess was the will of the gods, then the will of heroes. Penetrate to the essence of any historic event, Tolstoy says, and it lies in the activity of the general mass. The hero's will does not control the mass; it is itself continually controlled. To say the West moved on the East because Napoleon wished it, rather than because it had to happen, is like insisting the earth stands still. There is, and can be, no cause of an historical event except the one cause of all causes. There are laws directing events. Some we know; others we cannot comprehend. Those laws become visible only when we abandon the attempt to find the cause in the will of one man.

Historians rank the Russian army's movement from the Ryazan to the Kaluga road and the Tarutino camp, the so-called flank march across the Krasnaya Pakhra, next after Borodino and the burning of Moscow. They dispute which genius deserves the honour, and even French writers concede it. Tolstoy finds little profundity there. A dull boy of thirteen could see that an unattacked army belongs where provisions are most abundant, and that after Moscow that place was the Kaluga road. Nor did the march by itself save Russia. Had Moscow not burned, had Murat not lost the Russians, had Napoleon not stayed inactive, had the army fought at Krasnaya Pakhra as Bennigsen and Barclay advised, or had the French attacked with even a tenth of the energy shown at Smolensk, the same movement might have proved ruinous.

The third puzzle is that students of history avoid seeing that no one foresaw the march in its entirety. Like the retreat from Fili, it resulted moment by moment from diverse circumstances and was recognised only when it belonged to the past. At Fili the natural thought was a direct retreat by the Nizhni road, and the majority voted for it. Then Lanskoy warned that supplies lay along the Oka in Tula and Ryazan, so a Nizhni retreat would cut the army off by a river that cannot be crossed early in winter. French inactivity, concern for the Tula arsenal, and the pull of Kaluga provisions turned the army still further south. Only when the troops were at Tarutino did people begin to assure themselves that they had long desired and foreseen that result.