Second Epilogue: 1813-20 - Chapter VI

by Leo Tolstoy

　　Only the expression of the will of the Deity, not dependent on time,can relate to a whole series of events occurring over a period ofyears or centuries, and only the Deity, independent of everything, canby His sole will determine the direction of humanity's movement; butman acts in time and himself takes part in what occurs.

　　Reinstating the first condition omitted, that of time, we see thatno command can be executed without some preceding order having beengiven rendering the execution of the last command possible.

　　No command ever appears spontaneously, or itself covers a wholeseries of occurrences; but each command follows from another, andnever refers to a whole series of events but always to one moment onlyof an event.

　　When, for instance, we say that Napoleon ordered armies to go towar, we combine in one simultaneous expression a whole series ofconsecutive commands dependent one on another. Napoleon could not havecommanded an invasion of Russia and never did so. Today he orderedsuch and such papers to be written to Vienna, to Berlin, and toPetersburg; tomorrow such and such decrees and orders to the army, thefleet, the commissariat, and so on and so on- millions of commands,which formed a whole series corresponding to a series of eventswhich brought the French armies into Russia.

　　If throughout his reign Napoleon gave commands concerning aninvasion of England and expended on no other undertaking so muchtime and effort, and yet during his whole reign never once attemptedto execute that design but undertook an expedition into Russia, withwhich country he considered it desirable to be in alliance (aconviction he repeatedly expressed)- this came about because hiscommands did not correspond to the course of events in the first case,but did so correspond in the latter.

　　For an order to be certainly executed, it is necessary that a manshould order what can be executed. But to know what can and whatcannot be executed is impossible, not only in the case of Napoleon'sinvasion of Russia in which millions participated, but even in thesimplest event, for in either case millions of obstacles may ariseto prevent its execution. Every order executed is always one of animmense number unexecuted. All the impossible orders inconsistent withthe course of events remain unexecuted. Only the possible ones getlinked up with a consecutive series of commands corresponding to aseries of events, and are executed.

　　Our false conception that an event is caused by a command whichprecedes it is due to the fact that when the event has taken place andout of thousands of others those few commands which were consistentwith that event have been executed, we forget about the others thatwere not executed because they could not be. Apart from that, thechief source of our error in this matter is due to the fact that inthe historical accounts a whole series of innumerable, diverse, andpetty events, such for instance as all those which led the Frencharmies to Russia, is generalized into one event in accord with theresult produced by that series of events, and corresponding withthis generalization the whole series of commands is also generalizedinto a single expression of will.

　　We say that Napoleon wished to invade Russia and invaded it. Inreality in all Napoleon's activity we never find anything resemblingan expression of that wish, but find a series of orders, orexpressions of his will, very variously and indefinitely directed.Amid a long series of unexecuted orders of Napoleon's one series,for the campaign of 1812, was carried out- not because those ordersdiffered in any way from the other, unexecuted orders but because theycoincided with the course of events that led the French army intoRussia; just as in stencil work this or that figure comes out notbecause the color was laid on from this side or in that way, butbecause it was laid on from all sides over the figure cut in thestencil.

　　So that examining the relation in time of the commands to theevents, we find that a command can never be the cause of the event,but that a certain definite dependence exists between the two.

　　To understand in what this dependence consists it is necessary toreinstate another omitted condition of every command proceeding notfrom the Deity but from a man, which is, that the man who gives thecommand himself takes part in

　　This relation of the commander to those he commands is just whatis called power. This relation consists in the following:

　　For common action people always unite in certain combinations, inwhich regardless of the difference of the aims set for the commonaction, the relation between those taking part in it is always thesame.

　　Men uniting in these combinations always assume such relationstoward one another that the larger number take a more direct share,and the smaller number a less direct share, in the collective actionfor which they have combined.

　　Of all the combinations in which men unite for collective action oneof the most striking and definite examples is an army.

　　Every army is composed of lower grades of the service- the rankand file- of whom there are always the greatest number; of the nexthigher military rank- corporals and noncommissioned officers of whomthere are fewer, and of still-higher officers of whom there arestill fewer, and so on to the highest military command which isconcentrated in one person.

　　A military organization may be quite correctly compared to a cone,of which the base with the largest diameter consists of the rank andfile; the next higher and smaller section of the cone consists ofthe next higher grades of the army, and so on to the apex, the pointof which will represent the commander in chief.

　　The soldiers, of whom there are the most, form the lower sectionof the cone and its base. The soldier himself does the stabbing,hacking, burning, and pillaging, and always receives orders forthese actions from men above him; he himself never gives an order. Thenoncommissioned officers (of whom there are fewer) perform theaction itself less frequently than the soldiers, but they already givecommands. An officer still less often acts directly himself, butcommands still more frequently. A general does nothing but command thetroops, indicates the objective, and hardly ever uses a weaponhimself. The commander in chief never takes direct part in theaction itself, but only gives general orders concerning the movementof the mass of the troops. A similar relation of people to one anotheris seen in every combination of men for common activity- inagriculture, trade, and every administration.

　　And so without particularly analyzing all the contiguous sections ofa cone and of the ranks of an army, or the ranks and positions inany administrative or public business whatever from the lowest tothe highest, we see a law by which men, to take associated action,combine in such relations that the more directly they participate inperforming the action the less they can command and the morenumerous they are, while the less their direct participation in theaction itself, the more they command and the fewer of them thereare; rising in this way from the lowest ranks to the man at the top,who takes the least direct share in the action and directs hisactivity chiefly to commanding.

　　This relation of the men who command to those they command is whatconstitutes the essence of the conception called power.

　　Having restored the condition of time under which all eventsoccur, find that a command is executed only when it is related to acorresponding series of events. Restoring the essential condition ofrelation between those who command and those who execute, we find thatby the very nature of the case those who command take the smallestpart in the action itself and that their activity is exclusivelydirected to commanding.