War And Peace

To a flock of sheep the sheep who gets driven into a special pen by the shepherd every evening for a good feed, and becomes twice as fat as the rest, must seem like a genius. And the fact that every evening this sheep doesn’t come into the common fold, but goes into a special pen where there are lots of oats, and this same sheep fattens up nicely and then gets killed for mutton must look like a curious combination of genius and a series of unusual coincidences.

But all the sheep have to do is drop the assumption that everything that happens to them comes about solely for the furtherance of their sheepish interests; once they assume that the events occurring to them might have aims beyond their comprehension they will immediately perceive a unity and coherence in what is happening to the sheep that is being fattened up. Even if they will never quite understand why it is being fattened up, at least they will know that chance played no part in anything that happened to it, and they will have no need for concepts like chance or genius.

Only by renouncing any claim to knowledge of an immediate, intelligible purpose, and acknowledging the ultimate aim to be beyond our comprehension, shall we see any coherence or expediency in the lives of historical persons. The reason behind the effect that they produce, which does not accord with the general run of human capabilities, will then be revealed to us, and we shall have no further need for words like chance or genius.

All we have to do is admit that far from knowing the purpose of the convulsions that shook the European nations we know only the facts – a series of murders committed first in France, then in Italy, then in Africa, Prussia, Austria, Spain and Russia – and also that movements from west to east and from east to west constitute the essence and the aim of those events, and we shall not need to see anything very exceptional like genius in the character of Napoleon or Alexander, indeed we shall be unable to conceive of these figures as being at all different from anybody else. And not only shall we be able to dispense with chance as an explanation of the sequence of trivial events that made those men what they were, it will be clear to us that all these trivialities were inevitable.

Once we have renounced all knowledge of an ultimate purpose, we shall clearly perceive that just as we cannot invent for any plant a more characteristic blossom or seed than the ones it produces itself, so we cannot imagine any two persons, with all their past behind them, better attuned to their calling, even down to the smallest details, than Napoleon and Alexander.

CHAPTER 3

The essential feature underlying the events that occurred in Europe at the beginning of the present century is the mass movement of European peoples for military purposes first from west to east, then from east to west. The movement that started it all was from west to east. For the peoples of the west to carry out their military advance on Moscow, which they did complete, it was necessary for them to (1) come together in a military grouping large enough to be able to survive conflict with the military group of the east, (2) give up all their long-established traditions and customs, and (3) ensure that their military incursion was headed by a man capable of justifying, in his own name and in theirs, all the duplicity, robbery and murder that ensued.

So, beginning with the French Revolution, an old group falls apart because it is not large enough, old customs and traditions are done away with, a new group comes together bit by bit with different proportions, different customs and different traditions, and a man is groomed to stand at the head of the coming movement and assume full responsibility for what has to be done.

Along comes a man with no convictions, no customs, no traditions, no name, not even a Frenchman, and he works his way – seemingly by a series of curious chances – through the ferment of party conflict in France, and ends up in a prominent position without attaching himself to any particular party.

He finds himself in charge of the army, thanks to the incompetence of his colleagues, the spinelessness of his piffling opponents and his own bare-faced duplicity, bravura and narrow-minded over-confidence. The brilliance of the Italian soldiers, the reluctance of his opponents to take up arms, together with his boyish cockiness and over-confidence, win him military glory. Everywhere he is assisted by a string of what you might call chance contingencies. When he falls into disfavour with the French government this soon becomes an advantage. Every effort of his to change the course of his destiny comes to nothing; he is rejected for service in Russia, and he cannot get himself posted to Turkey.⁹