War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [642]
Natasha and Princess Marya also wept now, but they did not weep from their own personal grief; they wept from a reverent emotion that came over their souls before the awareness of the simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished before them.
Part Two
I
The totality of causes of phenomena is inaccessible to the human mind. But the need to seek causes has been put into the soul of man. And the human mind, without grasping in their countlessness and complexity the conditions of phenomena, of which each separately may appear as a cause, takes hold of the first, most comprehensible approximation and says: here is the cause. In historical events (where the subject of observation is the actions of people), the most primordial approximation appears as the will of the gods, then as the will of those people who stand in the most conspicuous historical place—the historical heroes. But we need only inquire into the essence of any historical event, that is, into the activity of the entire mass of people who took part in the event, to become convinced that the will of the historical hero not only does not guide the actions of the masses, but is itself constantly guided. It would seem to make no difference whether we understand the meaning of historical events this way or that. But between a man who says that the people of the west went to the east because Napoleon wanted it, and the man who says that it happened because it had to happen, there is the same difference as between the people who maintained that the earth stood still and the planets moved around it and those who said that they did not know what upheld the earth, but knew that there were laws governing its movement and that of the other planets. There are not and cannot be any causes of a historical event, except for the one cause of all causes. But there are laws that govern events, which are partly unknown, partly groped for by us. The discovery of these laws is possible only when we wholly give up looking for causes in the will of one man, just as discovering the laws of planetary movement became possible only when people gave up the notion that the earth stands still.
After the battle of Borodino, the occupation of Moscow by the enemy and its burning, historians recognize as the most important episode of the war of 1812 the movement of the Russian army from the Ryazan to the Kaluga road and towards the Tarutino camp—the so-called flanking march beyond Krasnaya Pakhra.1 Historians ascribe the glory of this feat of genius to various persons and argue over whom it essentially belongs to. Even foreign, even French historians acknowledge the genius of the Russian generals, when they speak of this flanking march. But why military writers, and everyone else after them, suppose this flanking march, which saved Russia and destroyed Napoleon, to be the most profound invention of some one person—is very hard to understand. First of all, it is hard to understand what the profundity and genius of this movement consisted in; for it takes no great mental effort to figure out that the best position for an army (when it is not under attack) is where there are most provisions. And anyone, even a stupid thirteen-year-old boy, would have no difficulty figuring out that the most advantageous position for the army in 1812, after the retreat from Moscow, was on the Kaluga road. And so it is impossible to understand, first, by what reasonings historians come to see anything profound in this maneuver. Second, it is still harder to understand precisely why historians see this maneuver as salutary for the Russians and destructive for the French; for this flanking march, under other preceding, accompanying, or following circumstances, could have been destructive for the Russian troops and salutary for the French. If, from the time this movement was accomplished, the position of the Russian army began to improve, it by no means follows that this movement