War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [673]
And yet one need only renounce the false view, established to please the heroes, of the validity of orders from the higher powers in time of war, in order to find this unknown x.
This x is the spirit of the army, that is, the greater or lesser desire to fight and subject themselves to danger on the part of all the men who make up the army, regardless of whether they are fighting under the command of geniuses or not, in three lines or in two, with clubs or with guns that fire thirty rounds a minute. Men who have the greatest desire to fight will always put themselves in the most advantageous conditions for fighting.
The spirit of an army is the multiplier of the mass that yields the product of force. To determine and express the value of that unknown multiplier, the spirit of an army, is the task of science.
This task is possible only if we stop arbitrarily substituting for the value of the whole unknown x the conditions under which force is manifested—to wit: the orders of the commander, armaments, and so on—taking them for the value of the multiplier, and recognize this unknown in its entirety, that is, as the greater or lesser desire to fight and subject oneself to danger. Only then, expressing known historical facts in equations, may we hope, by comparing the relative values of this unknown, to define the unknown itself.
Ten men, battalions, or divisions, fighting against fifteen men, battalions, or divisions, defeated the fifteen, that is, killed or captured them all to a man, and lost four themselves; thus, on one side four and on the other side fifteen were cancelled. Therefore, four were equal to fifteen, and therefore: 4x = 15y. Therefore, x : y = 15: 4. This equation does not give us the value of the unknown, but it gives the ratio between two unknowns. And by bringing various historical units (battles, campaigns, periods of war) into such equations, we will obtain a series of numbers in which laws should exist and may be discovered.
The tactical rule that there should be massed action in attack and dispersed action in retreat only confirms unwittingly the truth that the strength of an army depends on its spirit. To lead men under cannonballs, there is a need for greater discipline, achieved only by mass action, than to repulse the attackers. But this rule, which loses sight of the spirit of the army, always proves wrong, and is in especially flagrant contradiction to reality wherever there exists a strong rise or fall in the spirit of the army—as in all national wars.
The French, retreating in 1812, though according to tactics they should defend themselves separately, press together in a mass, because the spirit of the army has fallen, and only its mass holds the army together. The Russians, on the contrary, should, according to tactics, be attacking in mass, but in fact they break up, because the spirit has risen so much that separate persons beat the French without any orders and need not be forced to subject themselves to difficulties and dangers.
III
The so-called partisan war began with the entrance of the enemy into Smolensk.
Before the partisan war was officially accepted by our government, thousands of men of the enemy army—lingering marauders, foragers—were exterminated by the Cossacks and muzhiks, who killed these men off as unconsciously as dogs bite to death a rabid stray dog. Denis Davydov, with his Russian intuition, was the first to understand the meaning of that terrible club which, without inquiring into the rules of military art, was destroying the French, and to him belongs the glory of the first step towards legitimizing this method of warfare.
On the twenty-fourth of August, Davydov’s first partisan detachment was formed, and after that others began to be formed. The further the campaign moved, the greater the number of these detachments grew.
The partisans were destroying the Grand Army piecemeal. They gathered up the dry leaves that fell by themselves from the withered tree of the French army, and occasionally shook