It was fought for a great cause, the end of uncertainty and the beginning of security. A new horizon, new labours were to unfold, bringing nothing but welfare and prosperity for all. The European system had already been established; all that remained was to organize it.
Satisfied on these great points and at peace on all sides, I too might have had my Congress and Holy Alliance - ideas that were stolen from me. In this assembly of great sovereigns we would have been able to talk over our interests like members of one family and make ourselves accountable to our peoples like clerks reporting to their masters.
In this way Europe would soon have come to be truly a single people, and everyone who travelled around would always have found himself in one common fatherland. They would have insisted that all rivers be open to everyone, and the seas common to all, and the great standing armies reduced henceforth simply to the role of royal bodyguards.
Back in France, in the bosom of the great, strong, magnificent, peaceful and glorious fatherland, I would have declared its frontiers immutable, any future war purely defensive, and any further aggrandizement antinational . I would have involved my son in the Empire, my dictatorship would have been at an end, and his constitutional reign would have begun . . .
Paris would have been the capital of the world, and the French the envy of the nations! . . .
My leisure and my declining years would then have been devoted, in company with the Empress and during the royal apprenticeship of my son, to taking our own horses, like a real couple from the country, on a leisurely tour of every corner of the Empire, receiving complaints, redressing wrongs and scattering monuments and great works on every side.
This man, predestined by Providence for the unhappy, involuntary role of butcher of nations, actually convinced himself that the motivation behind his deeds had been the welfare of nations, and that he could control the destinies of millions, and bring them benefits by the exercise of power. Subsequently he wrote as follows about the Russian war: Of the four hundred thousand men who crossed the Vistula, half were Austrians, Prussians, Saxons, Poles, Bavarians, Wurttembergers, Mecklenburgers, Spaniards, Italians, Neapolitans. The Imperial Army, which lived up to its name, was one-third composed of Dutch, Belgians, inhabitants of the Rhineland, Piedmontese, Swiss, Genevese, Tuscans, Romans, inhabitants of the Thirty-second military division, of Bremen, Hamburg, etc. It included barely a hundred and forty thousand French-speakers. The Russian expedition cost France itself less than fifty thousand men. In the various battles during the retreat from Vilna to Moscow the Russian army lost four times as many men as the French army. The burning of Moscow cost the lives of one hundred thousand Russians, who died of cold and hunger in the forests; and finally, in its march from Moscow to the Oder, the Russian army also suffered the inclemency of the season: it numbered no more than fifty thousand men on reaching Vilna, and less than eighteen thousand at Kalisch.
He really imagined that the war with Russia had come about by his will, and the horror of what was done left no impression on his soul. He boldly assumed full responsibility for what had occurred, and 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.
CHAPTER 39
Tens of thousands of men lay dead in various attitudes and different uniforms all over the fields and meadows belonging to the Davydov family and a few crown serfs, fields and meadows where for hundreds of years the peasants of Borodino, Gorki, Shevardino and Semyonovsk had harvested their crops and grazed their cattle. For a couple of acres around the dressing-stations the grass and earth were soaked with blood. Hordes of scared-looking men of various allegiances, wounded and unwounded, were shambling away from the scene, back to Mozhaysk on one side, on the other back to Valuyevo. Other hordes, weary and famished, were being led forward by their officers. There were others too who still stood their ground and had not stopped firing.
The whole plain, which had looked so lovely and bright earlier in the day with all those puffs of smoke and the bayonets glinting in the morning sunshine, was now shrouded in a cloud of dark, damp mist and smoke reeking with the strange, pungent smell of saltpetre and blood. One or two dark clouds had come up, and a fine drizzle was sprinkling the dead, the wounded, the fearful, the weary and the wavering. 'Good people, that's enough,' it seemed to say. 'Stop and think. What are you doing?'
The men on both sides, exhausted and in need of food and rest, began to have the same kind of doubts about whether they should go on slaughtering each other; hesitation was written on every face, and in every soul the same question asked itself: 'Why - for whose benefit - should I kill and be killed? Go on, kill who you want, do what you want - I've had enough!' By late afternoon this same thought had dawned on every spirit there. Any minute now all of these men might suddenly see the horror of what they were doing, pack it in and run off anywhere.
But even though the battle was nearing its end and the men could sense all the horror of their actions, even though they would have been glad to stop, they were still in the grip of an inexplicable, mysterious force which kept the surviving gunners - they were down to one in three - running with sweat, filthy with powder and blood, stumbling about and gasping with exhaustion, as they went on bringing up charges, loading the guns, taking aim and lighting the fuses, so that the cannonballs, as fast and as vicious as ever, flew across from both sides to splatter human flesh, keeping the whole ghastly business going - not by the will of man, but by the will of the one who governs men and worlds.
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.
The Russians never made the push because they were not attacking the French. At the start of hostilities all they had done was stand across the Moscow road, blocking it off to the French; and here they were at the end of the battle standing their ground just as they had done at the beginning. But even if it had been the aim of the Russians to drive the French back, they could never have mounted this final push, because the Russian troops were shattered, no part of the army had avoided losses during the battle, and the Russians, by standing their ground, had lost one half of their entire army.
As for the French - with fifteen years of military success behind them, confident of Napoleon's invincibility, happy in the knowledge that they had taken part of the battlefield without losing more than a quarter of their men, and still with a reserve of twenty thousand untouched guardsmen - they could have made this last push with something to spare. The French had attacked the Russian army with the aim of displacing it, and they ought to have made this last push, because, while ever the Russians continued to bar the way to Moscow, their aim had not been achieved, and all their efforts and losses had been in vain. But they did not. Some historians claim that all Napoleon had to do was send in the old guard, and victory would have been assured. To talk about what might have happened if Napoleon had sent his guard in is to talk about spring coming in autumn. It could never have happened. It wasn't a case of Napoleon choosing not to send the guards in; he could not possibly have done so. Every general, officer and man in the French army knew it could not be done, because the spirit of the army had failed and wouldn't allow it.
Napoleon wasn't alone in his nightmare sensation of a mighty arm losing its power; every general, every soldier in the French army, combatants and non-combatants, with all their experience of previous battles (when they had made only one-tenth of the present effort but the enemy had always run away), was equally horrified to encounter an enemy that could lose one half of its strength and still stand its ground with undiminished ferocity. The morale of the attacking French army had been sapped. The victory that was won
was not marked by the capture of a few tattered rags on sticks called colours, or by measuring the ground where the troops stood before and after; it was a moral victory - the kind that forces the enemy to acknowledge the moral superiority of his opponent, and his own impotence - and at Borodino that victory was won by the Russians. The French invaders were like a mortally wounded ravening beast that knew its end was near, though it couldn't stop, any more than the Russian army, half as strong, could have helped giving way. The French army still had just enough impetus to struggle on to Moscow, but there, with no new challenge from the Russian army, it was bound to perish, bleeding to death from the wound sustained at Borodino. The direct consequences of the battle of Borodino were these: Napoleon's unprovoked flight from Moscow, his return down the old Smolensk road, the destruction of his five-hundred-thousand-strong invading force, and the collapse of Napoleonic rule in France, a country on which, at Borodino, for the very first time, the hand of an opponent stronger in spirit had been laid.
PART III
CHAPTER 1
For the human mind absolute continuity of motion is inconceivable. The laws behind any motion become comprehensible to man only when he breaks that motion down into arbitrarily selected units and subjects these to examination. But at the same time this arbitrary sub-division of continuous motion into discontinuous units is the cause of much human error.
We all know the fallacy (a 'sophism' to the ancients) whereby a tortoise that has a start on Achilles will never be caught up by him, even though Achilles is walking ten times faster than the tortoise. While Achilles is busy covering a certain distance between him and the tortoise, the tortoise leading the way will have covered another one-tenth of that distance. Achilles covers that tenth, by which time the tortoise has covered another hundredth, and so on ad infinitum. This problem was considered by the ancients to have no solution. The absurdity of the conclusion (that Achilles will never overtake the tortoise) arises from the arbitrary decision to sub-divide the motion into discrete units, whereas the motion of both Achilles and the tortoise was continuous.
By adopting smaller and smaller units of motion all we do is get closer and closer to a solution to the problem without ever reaching it. Only by allowing for an infinitely small quantity and a progression rising from it up to a tenth, and by taking the sum of that geometrical progression, can we arrive at a solution of this problem. 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.
In the search for laws of historical movement exactly the same thing occurs.
The movement of humanity, arising from a countless series of actions arbitrarily performed by many individuals, is a continuous phenomenon.
The aim of history is to work out what laws lie behind this movement. But in its attempt to establish the laws behind the continuous movement that arises from all those arbitrary individual actions taken together, the human mind accepts a sub-division into arbitrarily determined discrete units. The first thing history does is to take an arbitrary series of continuous events and examine it separately, whereas in fact no event can ever have a beginning, because an individual event flows without any break in continuity from another. The second thing history does is to treat the actions of a single person, king or commander, as the sum total of everybody else's individual will, whereas in fact the sum of individual wills never expresses itself in the actions of a single historical personage.
In the development of historical science, smaller and smaller units are selected for analysis, as if this is the path that leads to truth. But however small the units determined by history, we feel that the acceptance of any discrete unit, or of a beginning to any phenomenon, or the idea that multiple individual wills express themselves in the actions of any one historical personage, is intrinsically wrong.
Criticism can effortlessly ensure that every conclusion of history gets blown away like dust, leaving no trace behind, simply by selecting a greater or smaller discrete unit for analysis - and criticism has every right to do this, because the selection of historical units is always an arbitrary business.
Only by adopting an infinitely small unit for observation, the differential in history otherwise known as human homogeneity, and perfecting the art of integration (the adding up of infinitesimals) can we have any hope of determining the laws of history.
The first fifteen years of the nineteenth century in Europe present an extraordinary spectacle - millions of men in movement. Men drop their normal occupations and rush from one end of Europe to the other, plundering, slaughtering one another, experiencing triumph and despair, and the whole business of life is disrupted for years to come as the movement accelerates and builds up before tailing off again. What was it that caused all this movement? By what laws did it develop? This is what human intelligence wants to know.
When historians reply to these questions they present the sayings and doings of a few dozen men in one building in the city of Paris, and sum up these doings and sayings in a single word - revolution. Then they launch into detailed biographies of Napoleon and one or two persons for and against him; they also tell us how some of these persons were influenced by others, and they conclude by saying this is what caused all the movement, and these are the laws that governed it.
But human intelligence not only balks at this explanation, it declares categorically that the whole method is faulty because in the course of this explanation a very slight phenomenon is taken as the cause of a much greater one. It was the sum total of men's individual wills that caused both the revolution and Napoleon, and nothing but this sum total of wills went on to suffer them and ultimately destroy them.
'But whenever there have been conquests there have always been great conquerors; whenever states have been rocked by revolution there have always been great politicians,' says history. 'Yes, indeed, whenever there have been great conquerors there have been wars,' replies human intelligence, 'but this doesn't prove that the conquerors actually caused the wars, or that the laws behind wars can be discovered in the personal doings of a single man.'
Whenever I look at my clock and see the little hand get to the number ten, bells start ringing in the church next door and I hear them, but the fact that the bell-ringing always starts when the hands get to ten o'clock doesn't give me the right to assume that the position of the hands on my clock actually causes the movement of the bells.
Whenever I see a steam-engine move, I hear the whistle, and see the valves opening and the wheels turning, but I have no right to assume that the blowing of the whistle and the turning of the wheels actually cause the movement of the engine.
Peasants say that in late spring a cold wind blows because the oak-buds are coming out, and it is certainly true that every spring there is a cold wind blowing just as the oak-tree puts out its shoots. But even though I don't know what causes a cold wind to blow just when the oaks are bursting forth, I cannot agree with the peasants that the cause of the cold wind is the budding of the tree, because wind power is not affected by buds. All I am seeing here is a coincidental series of events common enough in all walks of life. What I can see is this: however often and however closely I scrutinize the hands on the clock, or the valves and the wheels on the engine, or the oak-buds, I shall never discover what makes bells ring, the engine move, or the wind blow in springtime. In order to do that I shall have to change my angle of approach completely and study the laws that govern the motion of steam, the ringing of bells, and the blowing of the wind. History must do the same thing. And some efforts have already been made in this direction.
In order to study the laws of history we must change the subject completely, forget all about kings, ministers and generals, and turn to the homogeneous, infinitesimal elements that move the masses to action. No one can say how far it is within man's grasp to arrive at the laws of history in this way, but it is obvious that this is the only possible way of discovering any historical laws, and human intelligence has hitherto not devoted to this way of thinking a millionth part of the effort that historians have put into describing the doings of various kings, ministers and generals, and expounding their own opinions of those doings.
CHAPTER 2
An armed force speaking a dozen different European tongues has invaded Russia. The Russian army and population pull back to avoid a confrontation, first to Smolensk, then from Smolensk to Borodino. The French army moves on towards Moscow, its goal, accelerating all the time. The advance gathers momentum as the army nears its goal, just as the speed of a falling body increases as it nears the ground. Behind them lie hundreds of miles of hunger and hostility; ahead, only a few dozen miles separate them from their goal. This is sensed by every soldier in Napoleon's army, and the invading force, propelled by its own momentum, needs no driving.
Among the retreating Russian troops bitter hostility and hatred of the enemy flare up more and more furiously as they go; every step back concentrates the mind and builds determination. At Borodino the armies come together. Neither is destroyed, but immediately after the conflict the Russian army pulls back; this is inevitable, just as a billiard-ball automatically recoils when hit by another ball travelling faster towards it. And just as inevitably, even though the ball of the invading army has discharged its energy in the collision, there is just enough left for it to go trundling on a short distance further.