الفصل الفصل 168 · 第168章

From the close of the year 1811 an intensified arming and concentrating of

the forces of Western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces—millions

of men, reckoning those transporting and feeding the army—moved from the

west eastwards to the Russian frontier, toward which since 1811 Russian

forces had been similarly drawn. On the twelfth of June, 1812, the

forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began,

that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human

nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable

crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money,

burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not

recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which

those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.

What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? The

historians tell us with naïve assurance that its causes were the wrongs

inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of the Continental

System, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Alexander, the

mistakes of the diplomatists, and so on.

Consequently, it would only have been necessary for Metternich,

Rumyántsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and an evening party, to have

taken proper pains and written a more adroit note, or for Napoleon to

have written to Alexander: “My respected Brother, I consent to restore

the duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg”—and there would have been no war.

We can understand that the matter seemed like that to contemporaries.

It naturally seemed to Napoleon that the war was caused by England’s

intrigues (as in fact he said on the island of St. Helena). It naturally

seemed to members of the English Parliament that the cause of the war

was Napoleon’s ambition; to the Duke of Oldenburg, that the cause of the

war was the violence done to him; to businessmen that the cause of the

war was the Continental System which was ruining Europe; to the generals

and old soldiers that the chief reason for the war was the necessity of

giving them employment; to the legitimists of that day that it was the

need of re-establishing les bons principes, and to the diplomatists of

that time that it all resulted from the fact that the alliance between

Russia and Austria in 1809 had not been sufficiently well concealed

from Napoleon, and from the awkward wording of Memorandum No. 178. It

is natural that these and a countless and infinite quantity of other

reasons, the number depending on the endless diversity of points

of view, presented themselves to the men of that day; but to us, to

posterity who view the thing that happened in all its magnitude and

perceive its plain and terrible meaning, these causes seem insufficient.

To us it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and

tortured each other either because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander

was firm, or because England’s policy was astute or the Duke of

Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances

have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the

Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed

and ruined the people of Smolénsk and Moscow and were killed by them.

To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried

away by the process of research and can therefore regard the event

with unclouded common sense, an incalculable number of causes present

themselves. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of

them we find; and each separate cause or whole series of causes appears

to us equally valid in itself and equally false by its insignificance

compared to the magnitude of the events, and by its impotence—apart

from the cooperation of all the other coincident causes—to occasion the

event. To us, the wish or objection of this or that French corporal to

serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon’s refusal to

withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the duchy of

Oldenburg; for had he not wished to serve, and had a second, a third,

and a thousandth corporal and private also refused, there would have

been so many less men in Napoleon’s army and the war could not have

occurred.

Had Napoleon not taken offense at the demand that he should withdraw

beyond the Vistula, and not ordered his troops to advance, there would

have been no war; but had all his sergeants objected to serving a second

term then also there could have been no war. Nor could there have been

a war had there been no English intrigues and no Duke of Oldenburg, and

had Alexander not felt insulted, and had there not been an autocratic

government in Russia, or a Revolution in France and a subsequent

dictatorship and Empire, or all the things that produced the French

Revolution, and so on. Without each of these causes nothing could have

happened. So all these causes—myriads of causes—coincided to bring it

about. And so there was no one cause for that occurrence, but it had

to occur because it had to. Millions of men, renouncing their human

feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows,

just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east

to the west, slaying their fellows.

The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the event seemed

to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was

drawn into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This could not be

otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom

the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of

innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event

could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in

whose hands lay the real power—the soldiers who fired, or transported

provisions and guns—should consent to carry out the will of these weak

individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number

of diverse and complex causes.

We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational

events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do

not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history

reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to

us.

Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal

aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from

doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action

performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to

history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.

There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which

is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive

life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in

the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity. A deed done

is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of

millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man

stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with

and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the

predestination and inevitability of his every action.

“The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord.”

A king is history’s slave.

History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses

every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes.

Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than ever that

it depended on him, verser (ou ne pas verser) le sang de ses peuples

*—as Alexander expressed it in the last letter he wrote him—he had never

been so much in the grip of inevitable laws, which compelled him, while

thinking that he was acting on his own volition, to perform for the hive

life—that is to say, for history—whatever had to be performed.

* “To shed (or not to shed) the blood of his peoples.”

The people of the west moved eastwards to slay their fellow men, and

by the law of coincidence thousands of minute causes fitted in and

co-ordinated to produce that movement and war: reproaches for the

nonobservance of the Continental System, the Duke of Oldenburg’s

wrongs, the movement of troops into Prussia—undertaken (as it seemed to

Napoleon) only for the purpose of securing an armed peace, the

French Emperor’s love and habit of war coinciding with his people’s

inclinations, allurement by the grandeur of the preparations, and the

expenditure on those preparations and the need of obtaining advantages

to compensate for that expenditure, the intoxicating honors he received

in Dresden, the diplomatic negotiations which, in the opinion of

contemporaries, were carried on with a sincere desire to attain peace,

but which only wounded the self-love of both sides, and millions of

other causes that adapted themselves to the event that was happening or

coincided with it.

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its

attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried

by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or

because the boy standing below wants to eat it?

Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in

which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist

who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so

forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says

the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. Equally

right or wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he

wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and

he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because

the last navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock. In historic

events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and

like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.

Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is

in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of

history and predestined from eternity.