War And Peace

‘This is great!’ say the historians, and at a stroke good and bad have ceased to exist; there is only ‘greatness’ and ‘non-greatness’. ‘Great’ means good; ‘not great’ means bad. Greatness is, by their standards, a quality enjoyed by certain exceptional creatures that go by the name of ‘hero’. 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.

‘There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous,’ he says (and he sees something of the sublime in himself). And for fifty years the whole world has parroted the words, ‘Sublime! Great! Napoleon the Great!’

‘There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.’

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.

For us, with Jesus Christ’s rule of right and wrong to go by, there is nothing that cannot be measured by it. And greatness cannot exist without simplicity, goodness and truth.

CHAPTER 19

What Russian reader has not experienced a depressing feeling of annoyance, frustration and bewilderment on reading accounts of the last phase of the 1812 campaign? Who has not asked himself questions about it? How could they have failed to capture the French or finish them off, when they had all three Russian armies surrounding them in superior numbers, when the French were a disorderly rabble starving and freezing to death, and the one aim of the Russians (according to history) was to stop them in their tracks, cut them off from each other and capture them all?

How did it come about that the same Russian army that had fought the battle of Borodino with a numerical disadvantage failed to achieve its avowed aim of capturing the French when the French were surrounded on three sides? Can it be that the French are so superior that we couldn’t beat them even when we had them surrounded by numerically stronger forces? How could that have happened?

History (or what passes for history) answers these questions by saying that it all came about because Kutuzov, Tormasov, Chichagov, this general and that general, failed to execute this or that manœuvre.

But why did they fail to execute these manœuvres? And if they really were responsible for the aim not being achieved why were they not tried and punished? But even if we admit that Kutuzov and Chichagov and the others were responsible for the Russian ‘failure’, it is still not clear why, given the situation of the Russian troops at Krasnoye and the Berezina (numerical superiority in both cases), the French army and marshals were not taken prisoner, when that was the ostensible aim of the Russians.

The explanation of this strange phenomenon provided by Russian military historians – that Kutuzov stopped them attacking – won’t wash, because we know Kutuzov couldn’t stop the troops going on the attack at Vyazma or Tarutino. Why was it that an under-strength Russian army won the battle of Borodino against a full-strength enemy, whereas they lost at Krasnoye and the Berezina when they had greater numbers and the French were an undisciplined rabble?

If the aim of the Russians was to isolate Napoleon and his marshals and take them prisoner, and if that aim was not only frustrated, but all attempts to achieve it were defeated time after time in the most shameful way, then the French are quite right to claim the last phase of the campaign as a series of victories, and Russian historians are wrong to claim it as a success story.

Russian military historians, whenever they are forced to think logically, are bound to admit the validity of this conclusion; for all their lyrical outpourings on the subject of Russian courage, loyalty and so forth, they are bound to admit that the retreat of the French from Moscow was a series of victories for Napoleon and defeats for Kutuzov.

But disregarding all questions of national self-esteem one is left with the feeling that this conclusion contains an inherent contradiction, in that the series of French victories led to nothing less than total destruction, and the series of Russian defeats led to the complete destruction of the enemy and the deliverance of their country.

This contradiction arises from the fact that historians, studying events in the light of letters penned by sovereigns and generals, memoirs, reports, projects and so on, have jumped to the wrong conclusion based on a non-existent Russian aim during that last phase of the 1812 campaign, the aim of isolating and capturing Napoleon and his marshals and his army. There never was any such aim, because it didn’t make sense and it would have been impossible to achieve.