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By Root 3965 0

the same effect where it is a matter of life and death. Anyone who has been to war knows how incorrect that is;*759 and yet official reports are based on this supposition, and military descriptions on them. Make the rounds of a whole army right after a battle, even on the second or third day, before the reports have been written, and ask all the soldiers, the senior and junior officers, how it went; they will tell you what all these men experienced and saw, and you will form a majestic, complex, infinitely diverse, oppressive, and vague impression; and from no one, least of all the commander in chief, will you learn how it all went. But after two or three days, the reports begin to be submitted, talkers begin telling how what they did not see happened; finally, a general account is put together, and the general opinion of the army is put together from this account. It is a relief to everyone to exchange his doubts and questions for this false but clear and always flattering picture. After a month or two, question a man who took part in the battle—you no longer feel in his story that raw material of life which had been there before; his account follows the report. So I was told about the battle of Borodino by many living, intelligent participants in that affair. They all told me the same thing, and all following the incorrect descriptions of Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky, Glinka, and others; even the details they recounted were the same, though the narrators had been several miles from each other.

After the loss of Sevastopol, the artillery commander Kryzhanovsky sent me the reports of the artillery officers from all the bastions and asked me to put those more than twenty accounts together into one. I am sorry I did not make copies of those reports. It was the best example of that naïve and necessary military falsehood from which descriptions are put together. I suppose that many of my comrades who put together those accounts then will laugh, having read these lines, at the recollection of how, on orders from their superiors, they wrote something they could not have known. Everyone who has had the experience of war knows how capable Russians are of doing their duty in war and how little capable they are of describing it with the boastful falsity necessary to the task. Everyone knows that, in our armies, this duty of writing reports and accounts is for the most part carried out by our non-Russians.

I say all this in order to show the inevitability of falsehood in the military descriptions which serve as material for military historians, and therefore to show the inevitability of frequent disagreements between artists and historians in understanding historical events. But, besides the inevitability of untruths in their setting forth of historical events, I encountered in the historians of the epoch that interested me (probably as a result of the habit of grouping events, expressing them briefly, and conforming to the tragic tone of the events) a particular inclination to high-flown speech, in which falsehood and distortion often touch not only the events, but also the understanding of the meaning of an event. Often, in studying the two main historical productions of that epoch, Thiers and Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky, I would become perplexed at how these books could be printed and read. Not to speak of the setting forth of the same events in the most serious, significant tone, with references to the materials, and yet diametrically opposed to each other, I encountered in these historians such descriptions that I did not know whether to laugh or weep when I remembered that these two books are the sole memorials of that epoch and have millions of readers. I will give only one example from the book of the famous historian Thiers. Having told how Napoleon brought counterfeit money with him, he says: “Relevant l’emploi de ces moyens par un acte de bienfaisance digne de lui et de l’armée française, il fit distribuer des secours aux incendiés. Mais les vivres étant trop précieux pour être donnés longtemps à des étrangers, la plupart ennemis,