If it was a matter of Napoleon’s will determining whether or not there was to be a battle at Borodino, a matter of his will determining that such-and-such orders were given, then clearly the cold that had an effect on the manifestation of his will might have been the saving of Russia, though that means that the valet who forgot to give Napoleon his waterproof boots on the 24th must have been the saviour of Russia. By that reckoning the conclusion is inescapable, as inescapable as the conclusion arrived at jokingly by Voltaire (without knowing who the joke was on) that the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Night was due to Charles IX suffering a touch of indigestion. But to anyone who cannot accept that Russia was formed by the will of a single man, Peter the Great, and the French empire was created, and the war with Russia set up, by the will of a single man, Napoleon, this kind of argument will seem not just weak and unreasonable, but contrary to all human experience. The question of what causes historical events will call for a very different answer, that the course of worldly events is determined on high and it depends on the complex combined will of all the participants, Napoleon’s influence on these particular events being no more than peripheral and fictitious.
Strange as it may seem on the face of it, this proposition that the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Night, for which the order was given by Charles IX, was not the result of his will – he only thought he was ordering it to happen – and that the slaughter of eighty thousand men at Borodino was not the result of Napoleon’s will (even though he gave the order for battle to commence and other orders for it to continue), and he only thought he was ordering it to happen – strange as this proposition may seem, the same human dignity which tells me that each one of us is neither more nor less of a man than the great Napoleon forces us towards this kind of solution to the problem, and historical research provides abundant justification for it.
At the battle of Borodino Napoleon never fired a shot and didn’t kill anyone. All of that was done by the soldiers; hence he did no killing of his own.
The soldiers of the French army set out to slay Russian soldiers at Borodino not because of Napoleon’s orders, but because they wanted to. The whole army, Frenchmen, Italians, Germans and Poles, hungry men dressed in rags and weary from the long campaign, took one look at the army that barred the way to Moscow and came to one conclusion: if the wine was uncorked it had to be drunk. If at that point Napoleon had told them not to fight the Russians they would have killed him and gone on to fight the Russians, because by now it had become inevitable.
When they heard Napoleon’s proclamation offering consolation for getting themselves maimed or killed in the knowledge that posterity would say they had been at the battle before Moscow, they shouted, ‘Long live the Emperor!’ in the same way that they had shouted, ‘Long live the Emperor!’ at the sight of the picture with the little boy skewering the earth on a stick, and would have shouted, ‘Long live the Emperor!’ at any bit of nonsense he might care to pronounce. They had nothing left to do but shout, ‘Long live the Emperor!’ and go off to fight in order to get themselves the victor’s food and rest in Moscow. It was not as a result of orders from Napoleon, therefore, that they set about the business of killing their fellow men.
And it was not Napoleon who determined the course of the battle, because none of his instructions were carried out, and during the battle he had no knowledge of what was happening out in front of him. This is to say that the manner in which these men slaughtered one another was not the result of Napoleon’s will; the killing went on independently, resulting from the will of all the participants in their hundreds of thousands. It only
