At that time, in the year 1812, Napoleon believed more strongly than ever that it was for him ‘to shed or not to shed the blood of his peoples’ (as Alexander had put it in his most recent letter), though he was in fact more subject than ever to those laws which forced him, for all his apparent and self-styled freedom of action, to do what had to be done for the world in general, for the sake of history.
The men of the west went east to kill each other. And the law of causal coincidence determined that thousands of minor causes colluded and coincided to produce this movement and the coming war: an angry reaction to non-observance of the Continental System; the Duke of Oldenburg; the advance into Prussia, undertaken, as Napoleon saw it, solely in the interests of securing an armed peace; the French Emperor’s taste and passion for going to war, which caught the mood of his people; the excitement of preparing things on a grandiose scale; the vast expenditure on such preparations, and the necessity of getting something back for one’s money; the dizzying effect of honours given and received in Dresden; all those diplomatic negotiations which were then seen as directed by a genuine desire for peace, though all they did was wound people’s self-esteem on both sides; along with millions and millions of other causes, colluding and coinciding with each other to produce the impending events.
When a ripe apple falls, what makes it fall? Is it gravity, pulling it down to earth? A withered stalk? The drying action of the sun? Increased weight? A breath of wind? Or the boy under the tree who wants to eat it?
Nothing is the cause of it. It is just the coming together of various conditions necessary for any living, organic, elemental event to take place. And the botanist who finds that the apple has fallen because of the onset of decay in its cellular structure, and all the rest of it, will be no more right or wrong than the boy under the tree who says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it to fall. Anyone who claims that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and eventually lost because Alexander wanted him to lose, will be no more right or wrong than the man who claims that thousands of tons of earth in an undermined hill collapsed because of the last blow from the last pick-axe of the last workman. When it comes to events in history, so-called ‘great men’ are nothing but labels attached to events; like real labels, they have the least possible connection with events themselves.
Every action they perform, which they take to be self-determined and independent, is in a historical sense quite the opposite; it is interconnected with the whole course of history, and predetermined from eternity.
CHAPTER 2
On the 29th of May Napoleon left Dresden, where he had spent three weeks surrounded by a court made up of princes, dukes, kings and even an emperor. Before leaving, Napoleon spoke pleasantly to the princes, kings and emperor who had earned his favour, and unpleasantly to the kings and princes who had not quite come up to scratch. He presented the Empress of Austria with some diamonds and pearls of his own (which means stolen from other kings). He warmly embraced his Empress, Marie-Louise, who thought of herself as his wife despite the existence of another one back in Paris, and left her behind, as his historian tells us, deeply distressed by the almost unendurable separation. With the diplomats still believing firmly in the possibility of peace and working strenuously towards it, and even though the Emperor Napoleon had just written a personal letter to the Emperor Alexander calling him his ‘esteemed brother’ and assuring him in good faith that he had no wish to go to war and would always treat him with affection and respect, he set off to join the army, stopping from time to time to issue further instructions guaranteed to speed up the eastward march of his men. Surrounded by pages, adjutants and an armed escort, he was travelling in a comfortable carriage drawn by six horses along the Posen – Thorn – Danzig – Königsberg road. In each of these towns he was welcomed by thousands of people with a mixture of enthusiasm and anxiety.
The army was moving from west to east, and he was driven in the same direction by continual relays of six horses. On the 10th of June he caught up with the army and spent the night in specially prepared quarters in the Wilkowiski forest, which belonged to a Polish count.
Next day Napoleon drove on ahead of the army as far as the river Niemen, where he put on a Polish uniform and rode out on to the river bank to find a good place for the crossing of the river.
