War and Peace

he terrible spectacle of the battlefield covered with dead and wounded,
together with the heaviness of his head and the news that some twenty
generals he knew personally had been killed or wounded, and the
consciousness of the impotence of his once mighty arm, produced an
unexpected impression on Napoleon who usually liked to look at the
killed and wounded, thereby, he considered, testing his strength of
mind. This day the horrible appearance of the battlefield overcame
that strength of mind which he thought constituted his merit and his
greatness. He rode hurriedly from the battlefield and returned to the
Shevárdino knoll, where he sat on his campstool, his sallow face
swollen and heavy, his eyes dim, his nose red, and his voice hoarse,
involuntarily listening, with downcast eyes, to the sounds of firing.
With painful dejection he awaited the end of this action, in which he
regarded himself as a participant and which he was unable to arrest.
A personal, human feeling for a brief moment got the better of the
artificial phantasm of life he had served so long. He felt in his own
person the sufferings and death he had witnessed on the battlefield.
The heaviness of his head and chest reminded him of the possibility
of suffering and death for himself. At that moment he did not desire
Moscow, or victory, or glory (what need had he for any more glory?). The
one thing he wished for was rest, tranquillity, and freedom. But when he
had been on the Semënovsk heights the artillery commander had proposed
to him to bring several batteries of artillery up to those heights to
strengthen the fire on the Russian troops crowded in front of Knyazkóvo.
Napoleon had assented and had given orders that news should be brought
to him of the effect those batteries produced.

An adjutant came now to inform him that the fire of two hundred guns
had been concentrated on the Russians, as he had ordered, but that they
still held their ground.

“Our fire is mowing them down by rows, but still they hold on,” said the
adjutant.

“They want more!...” said Napoleon in a hoarse voice.

“Sire?” asked the adjutant who had not heard the remark.

“They want more!” croaked Napoleon frowning. “Let them have it!”

Even before he gave that order the thing he did not desire, and for
which he gave the order only because he thought it was expected of him,
was being done. And he fell back into that artificial realm of imaginary
greatness, and again—as a horse walking a treadmill thinks it is doing
something for itself—he submissively fulfilled the cruel, sad, gloomy,
and inhuman role predestined for him.

And not for that day and hour alone were the mind and conscience
darkened of this man on whom the responsibility for what was happening
lay more than on all the others who took part in it. Never to the end
of his life could he understand goodness, beauty, or truth, or the
significance of his actions which were too contrary to goodness and
truth, too remote from everything human, for him ever to be able to
grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded as they
were by half the world, and so he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and
all humanity.

Not only on that day, as he rode over the battlefield strewn with men
killed and maimed (by his will as he believed), did he reckon as he
looked at them how many Russians there were for each Frenchman and,
deceiving himself, find reason for rejoicing in the calculation that
there were five Russians for every Frenchman. Not on that day alone
did he write in a letter to Paris that “the battle field was superb,”
because fifty thousand corpses lay there, but even on the island of St.
Helena in the peaceful solitude where he said he intended to devote his
leisure to an account of the great deeds he had done, he wrote:

The Russian war should have been the most popular war of modern times:
it was a war of good sense, for real interests, for the tranquillity and
security of all; it was purely pacific and conservative.

It was a war for a great cause, the end of uncertainties and the
beginning of security. A new horizon and new labors were opening out,
full of well-being and prosperity for all. The European system was
already founded; all that remained was to organize it.

Satisfied on these great points and with tranquility everywhere, I
too should have had my Congress and my Holy Alliance. Those ideas were
stolen from me. In that reunion of great sovereigns we should have
discussed our interests like one family, and have rendered account to
the peoples as clerk to master.

Europe would in this way soon have been, in fact, but one people, and
anyone who traveled anywhere would have found himself always in the
common fatherland. I should have demanded the freedom of all navigable
rivers for everybody, that the seas should be common to all, and that
the great standing armies should be reduced henceforth to mere guards
for the sovereigns.

On returning to France, to the bosom of the great, strong, magnificent,
peaceful, and glorious fatherland, I should have proclaimed
her frontiers immutable; all future wars purely defensive, all
aggrandizement antinational. I should have associated my son in the
Empire; my dictatorship would have been finished, 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 then, and my old age, would have been devoted, in company
with the Empress and during the royal apprenticeship of my son, to
leisurely visiting, with our own horses and like a true country couple,
every corner of the Empire, receiving complaints, redressing wrongs,
and scattering public buildings and benefactions on all sides and
everywhere.

Napoleon, predestined by Providence for the gloomy role of executioner
of the peoples, assured himself that the aim of his actions had been the
peoples’ welfare and that he could control the fate of millions and by
the employment of power confer benefactions.

“Of four hundred thousand who crossed the Vistula,” he wrote further
of the Russian war, “half were Austrians, Prussians, Saxons, Poles,
Bavarians, Württembergers, Mecklenburgers, Spaniards, Italians, and
Neapolitans. The Imperial army, strictly speaking, was one third
composed of Dutch, Belgians, men from the borders of the Rhine,
Piedmontese, Swiss, Genevese, Tuscans, Romans, inhabitants of the
Thirty-second Military Division, of Bremen, of Hamburg, and so on: it
included scarcely a hundred and forty thousand who spoke French. The
Russian expedition actually cost France less than fifty thousand men;
the Russian army in its retreat from Vílna to Moscow lost in the various
battles four times more men than the French army; the burning of Moscow
cost the lives of a hundred thousand Russians who died of cold and want
in the woods; finally, in its march from Moscow to the Oder the Russian
army also suffered from the severity of the season; so that by the time
it reached Vílna it numbered only fifty thousand, and at Kálisch less
than eighteen thousand.”

He imagined that the war with Russia came about by his will, and the
horrors that occurred did not stagger his soul. He boldly took the
whole responsibility for what happened, and his darkened mind found
justification in the belief that among the hundreds of thousands who
perished there were fewer Frenchmen than Hessians and Bavarians.