War and Peace (225 page)

Even less explanatory of the life of the peoples is the history of the lives of writers and reformers.

The history of culture offers us as the impelling motives of the life of the people the circumstances of the lives or the ideas of a writer or a reformer. We learn that Luther had a hasty temper and uttered certain speeches; we learn that Rousseau was distrustful and wrote certain books; but we do not learn what made the nations cut each other to pieces after the Reformation, or why men guillotined each other during the French Revolution.

If we unite both these kinds of history together, as do the most modern historians, then we shall get histories of monarchs and of writers, but not a history of the life of nations.

The life of nations is not contained in the life of a few men, since the connection between those few men and the nations has not been found. The theory that this connection is based on the delegation of the combined will of a people to its historical leaders is an hypothesis, not supported by the testimony of history.

The theory of the delegation of the combined will of the masses to historical personages may perhaps explain a great deal in the domain of the science of law, and is possibly essential for its purposes. But in its application to history, as soon as revolutions, wars, civil disturbances arise, as soon as history begins in fact—this theory explains nothing.

This theory appears irrefutable, just because the act of delegating the will of the people can never be verified, since it has never existed.

Whatever event might take place, and whoever might be taking the lead in such an event, the theory can always say that such a person took the lead in bringing about that event because the combined will was vested in him.

The answers given by this theory to historical questions are like the answers of a man who, watching the movements of a flock, should pay
no attention to the varying quality of the pasturage in different parts of the field, nor to the actions of the shepherd, but should look for the causes of the flock taking this or that direction simply in the animal that happened to be foremost in it.

“The flock moves in this direction because the animal in front leads it, and the combined will of all the other animals is delegated to the leader of the flock.” Such is the answer given by the first class of historians, who suppose an unconditional delegation of will to the authority.

“If the animals leading the flock are changed for others, it is due to the fact that the combined will of all the beasts is transferred from one leader to another owing to the fact that the first leader did not follow the direction chosen by all the flock.” Such is the reply of those historians who assume that the combined will of the masses is vested in their rulers on conditions which they regard as unknown. (With this method of observation it very often happens that the observer, judging from the direction chosen by him, reckons as leaders those who, when the direction of the masses is changed, are not in front, but on one side, and even sometimes the hindmost.)

“If the beasts that are foremost are constantly being changed, and the direction taken by the flock too is continually changing, that is due to the fact that to attain a certain direction known to us the beasts delegate their wills to those beasts which attract our attention, and to study the movements of the flock we ought to observe all the noticeable animals that are moving on all sides of the flock.” So say the third class of historians, who accept all historical characters as the expression of their age from monarchs to journalists.

The theory of the transference of the will of the masses to historical characters is only a paraphrase—only a restatement of the question in other words.

What is the cause of historical events? Power.

What is Power? Power is the combined will of the masses vested in one person.

On what conditions are the wills of the masses vested in one person? On condition of that person’s expressing the will of all men. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which is beyond our comprehension.

If the domain of human knowledge were confined to abstract reasoning alone, then, after subjecting the explanation of power given by science to criticism, humanity would come to the conclusion that power
is only a word, and that it has no existence in reality. But for the knowledge of phenomena, man has besides abstract reasoning another instrument—experience—by which he verifies the results of reasoning. And experience tells him that power is not merely a word, but an actually existing phenomenon.

To say nothing of the fact that not a single account of the combined action of men can omit the conception of power, the reality of power is shown us, not only by history, but by observation of contemporary events.

Whenever an event takes place, a man or men appear by whose will the event is conceived to have been accomplished. Napoleon
III
. gives an order, and the French go to Mexico. The Prussian King and Bismarck give certain orders, and troops go to Bohemia. Napoleon
I
. gives a command, and soldiers march into Russia. Alexander
I
. gives a command, and the French submit to the Bourbons. Experience shows us that whatever takes place, it is always connected with the will of one or of several men, who decreed it should be so.

Historians, from the old habit of recognising divine intervention in the affairs of humanity, are inclined to look for the cause of events in the exercise of the will of the person endowed with power; but this conclusion is not confirmed either by reason or by experience.

On one side reason shows that the expression of the will of a man—his words, in fact, are only a part of the general activity expressed in an event, such as a revolution or a war, and therefore without the assumption of an incomprehensible, supernatural force—a miracle—it cannot be admitted that these words can be the immediate cause of the movements of millions of men.

On the other side, even if one admits that words may be the cause of an event, history shows us that the expression of the will of historical personages in the great majority of cases does not lead to any effect at all—that is, that their commands are often not carried out, and, in fact, sometimes the very opposite of what they have commanded is done.

Without admitting divine intervention in the affairs of humanity, we cannot accept power as a cause of events.

Power, from the point of view of experience, is only the dependence existing between the expression of the will of a person and the carrying out of that will by others.

To explain the conditions of that dependence, we have, first of all, to reinstate the conception of the expression of will, referring it to man, and not to the Deity.

If the Deity gives a command, expresses His will, as the history of the ancients tell us, the expression of that will is independent of time, and is not called forth by anything, as the Deity is not connected with the event. But when we speak of commands that are the expression of the will of men, acting in time and connected with one another, we must, if we are to understand the connection of the command with the event, restore (1) the conditions of all the circumstances that took place, the dynamic continuity in time both of the event and of the person commanding it; and (2) the condition of the inevitable connection in which the person commanding stands with those who carry out his command.

Only the expression of the will of the Deity, not depending on time, can relate to a whole series of events that have to take place during several years or centuries; and only the Deity, acting by His will alone, not affected by any cause, can determine the direction of the movement of humanity. Man acts in time, and himself takes part in the event.

Restoring the first condition that was omitted, the condition of time, we perceive that no single command can be carried out apart from preceding commands that have made the execution of the last command possible.

Never is a single command given quite independently and arbitrarily, nor does it cover a whole series of events. Every command is the sequel to some other; and it never relates to a whole course of events, but only to one moment in those events.

When we say, for instance, that Napoleon commanded the army to go to fight, we sum up in one single expression a series of consecutive commands, depending one upon another. Napoleon could not command a campaign against Russia, and never did command it. He commanded one day certain papers to be written to Vienna, to Berlin, and to Petersburg; next day certain decrees and instructions to the army, the fleet, and the commissariat, and so on and so on—millions of separate commands, making up a whole series of commands, corresponding to a series of events leading the French soldiers to Russia.

Napoleon was giving commands all through his reign for an expedition to England. On no one of his undertakings did he waste so much time and so much effort, and yet not once during his reign was an
attempt made to carry out his design. Yet he made an expedition against Russia, with which, according to his repeatedly expressed conviction, it was to his advantage to be in alliance; and this is due to the fact that his commands in the first case did not, and in the second did, correspond with the course of events.

In order that a command should certainly be carried out, it is necessary that the man should give a command that can be carried out. To know what can and what cannot be carried out is impossible, not only in the case of Napoleon’s campaign against Russia, in which millions took part, but even in the case of the simplest event, since millions of obstacles may always arise to prevent its being carried out. Every command that is carried out is always one out of a mass of commands that are not carried out. All the impossible commands are inconsistent with the course of events and are not carried out. Only those which are possible are connected with consecutive series of commands, consistent with series of events, and they are carried out.

Our false conception that the command that precedes an event is the cause of an event is due to the fact that when the event has taken place and those few out of thousands of commands, which happen to be consistent with the course of events, are carried out, we forget those which were not, because they could not be carried out. Apart from that, the chief source of our error arises from the fact that in the historical account a whole series of innumerable, various, and most minute events, as, for instance, all that led the French soldiers to Russia, are generalised into a single event, in accordance with the result produced by that series of events; and by a corresponding generalisation a whole series of commands too is summed up into a single expression of will.

We say: Napoleon chose to invade Russia and he did so. In reality we never find in all Napoleon’s doings anything like an expression of that design: what we find is a series of commands or expressions of his will of the most various and undefined tendency. Out of many series of innumerable commands of Napoleon not carried out, one series of commands for the campaign of 1812 was carried out; not from any essential difference between the commands carried out and those not carried out, but simply because the former coincided with the course of events that led the French soldiers into Russia; just as in stencil-work one figure or another is sketched, not because the colours are laid on this side or in that way, but because on the figure cut out in stencil, colours are laid on all sides.

So that examining in time the relation of commands to events, we find that the command can never in any case be the cause of the event, but that a certain definite dependence exists between them. To understand of what this dependence consists, it is essential to restore the other circumstance lost sight of, a condition accompanying any command issuing not from the Deity, but from man. That circumstance is that the man giving the command is himself taking part in the event.

That relation of the commanding person to those he commands is indeed precisely what is called power. That relation may be analysed as follows.

For common action, men always unite in certain combinations, in which, in spite of the difference of the objects aimed at by common action, the relation between the men taking a part in the action always remains the same.

Uniting in these combinations, men always stand in such a relation to one another that the largest number of men take a greater direct share, and a smaller number of men a less direct share in the combined action for which they are united. Of all such combinations in which men are organised for the performance of common action, one of the most striking and definite examples is the army.

Every army is composed of members of lower military standing—the private soldiers, who are always the largest proportion of the whole, of members of a slightly higher military standing—corporals and noncommissioned officers, who are fewer in number than the privates; of still higher officers, whose numbers are even less; and so on, up to the chief military command of all, which is concentrated in one person.

The military organisation may be with perfect accuracy compared to the figure of a cone, the base of which, with the largest diameter, consists of privates; the next higher and smaller plane, of the lower officers; and so on up to the apex of the cone, which will be the commander-in-chief.

The soldiers, who are the largest number, form the lowest plane and the base of the cone. The soldier himself does the stabbing and hacking, and burning and pillaging, and always receives commands to perform these acts from the persons in the plane next above. He himself never gives a command. The non-commissioned officer (these are fewer in number) more rarely performs the immediate act than the soldier; but he gives commands. The officer next above him still more rarely acts directly himself, and still more frequently commands. The general does
nothing but command the army, and hardly ever makes use of a weapon. The commander-in-chief never takes direct part in the action itself, and simply makes general arrangements as to the movements of the masses. A similar relation exists in every combination of persons for common action—in agriculture, commerce, and in every department of activity.