War and Peace

nly the expression of the will of the Deity, not dependent on time, can
relate to a whole series of events occurring over a period of years or
centuries, and only the Deity, independent of everything, can by His
sole will determine the direction of humanity’s movement; but man acts
in time and himself takes part in what occurs.

Reinstating the first condition omitted, that of time, we see that no
command can be executed without some preceding order having been given
rendering the execution of the last command possible.

No command ever appears spontaneously, or itself covers a whole series
of occurrences; but each command follows from another, and never refers
to a whole series of events but always to one moment only of an event.

When, for instance, we say that Napoleon ordered armies to go to war,
we combine in one simultaneous expression a whole series of consecutive
commands dependent one on another. Napoleon could not have commanded
an invasion of Russia and never did so. Today he ordered such and such
papers to be written to Vienna, to Berlin, and to Petersburg;
tomorrow such and such decrees and orders to the army, the fleet, the
commissariat, and so on and so on—millions of commands, which formed
a whole series corresponding to a series of events which brought the
French armies into Russia.

If throughout his reign Napoleon gave commands concerning an invasion
of England and expended on no other undertaking so much time and effort,
and yet during his whole reign never once attempted to execute that
design but undertook an expedition into Russia, with which country he
considered it desirable to be in alliance (a conviction he repeatedly
expressed)—this came about because his commands did not correspond to
the course of events in the first case, but did so correspond in the
latter.

For an order to be certainly executed, it is necessary that a man should
order what can be executed. But to know what can and what cannot be
executed is impossible, not only in the case of Napoleon’s invasion of
Russia in which millions participated, but even in the simplest event,
for in either case millions of obstacles may arise to prevent its
execution. Every order executed is always one of an immense number
unexecuted. All the impossible orders inconsistent with the course of
events remain unexecuted. Only the possible ones get linked up with a
consecutive series of commands corresponding to a series of events, and
are executed.

Our false conception that an event is caused by a command which precedes
it is due to the fact that when the event has taken place and out of
thousands of others those few commands which were consistent with that
event have been executed, we forget about the others that were not
executed because they could not be. Apart from that, the chief source
of our error in this matter is due to the fact that in the historical
accounts a whole series of innumerable, diverse, and petty events, such
for instance as all those which led the French armies to Russia, is
generalized into one event in accord with the result produced by that
series of events, and corresponding with this generalization the whole
series of commands is also generalized into a single expression of will.

We say that Napoleon wished to invade Russia and invaded it. In
reality in all Napoleon’s activity we never find anything resembling an
expression of that wish, but find a series of orders, or expressions of
his will, very variously and indefinitely directed. Amid a long series
of unexecuted orders of Napoleon’s one series, for the campaign of 1812,
was carried out—not because those orders differed in any way from the
other, unexecuted orders but because they coincided with the course of
events that led the French army into Russia; just as in stencil work
this or that figure comes out not because the color was laid on from
this side or in that way, but because it was laid on from all sides over
the figure cut in the stencil.

So that examining the relation in time of the commands to the events,
we find that a command can never be the cause of the event, but that a
certain definite dependence exists between the two.

To understand in what this dependence consists it is necessary to
reinstate another omitted condition of every command proceeding not from
the Deity but from a man, which is, that the man who gives the command
himself takes part in the event.

This relation of the commander to those he commands is just what is
called power. This relation consists in the following:

For common action people always unite in certain combinations, in which
regardless of the difference of the aims set for the common action, the
relation between those taking part in it is always the same.

Men uniting in these combinations always assume such relations toward
one another that the larger number take a more direct share, and the
smaller number a less direct share, in the collective action for which
they have combined.

Of all the combinations in which men unite for collective action one of
the most striking and definite examples is an army.

Every army is composed of lower grades of the service—the rank and
file—of whom there are always the greatest number; of the next higher
military rank—corporals and noncommissioned officers of whom there are
fewer, and of still-higher officers of whom there are still fewer,
and so on to the highest military command which is concentrated in one
person.

A military organization may be quite correctly compared to a cone, of
which the base with the largest diameter consists of the rank and file;
the next higher and smaller section of the cone consists of the next
higher grades of the army, and so on to the apex, the point of which
will represent the commander in chief.

The soldiers, of whom there are the most, form the lower section of
the cone and its base. The soldier himself does the stabbing, hacking,
burning, and pillaging, and always receives orders for these actions
from men above him; he himself never gives an order. The noncommissioned
officers (of whom there are fewer) perform the action itself less
frequently than the soldiers, but they already give commands. An
officer still less often acts directly himself, but commands still more
frequently. A general does nothing but command the troops, indicates the
objective, and hardly ever uses a weapon himself. The commander in chief
never takes direct part in the action itself, but only gives general
orders concerning the movement of the mass of the troops. A similar
relation of people to one another is seen in every combination of men
for common activity—in agriculture, trade, and every administration.

And so without particularly analyzing all the contiguous sections of
a cone and of the ranks of an army, or the ranks and positions in
any administrative or public business whatever from the lowest to the
highest, we see a law by which men, to take associated action, combine
in such relations that the more directly they participate in performing
the action the less they can command and the more numerous they are,
while the less their direct participation in the action itself, the more
they command and the fewer of them there are; rising in this way from
the lowest ranks to the man at the top, who takes the least direct share
in the action and directs his activity chiefly to commanding.

This relation of the men who command to those they command is what
constitutes the essence of the conception called power.

Having restored the condition of time under which all events occur,
we find that a command is executed only when it is related to a
corresponding series of events. Restoring the essential condition of
relation between those who command and those who execute, we find that
by the very nature of the case those who command take the smallest part
in the action itself and that their activity is exclusively directed to
commanding.