The Ghost of Napoleon: Thoughts After Reading 'War and Peace'

I

NOT long ago, as this is written, the London Sunday Graphic printed a striking cartoon showing Hitler and Göring saluting an army of men and a swarm of planes all moving eastward. Hitler is saying, ‘Do you ever get that feeling that it has all happened before, Hermann?’ Behind the pair rises the ghost of Napoleon.

It. is impossible to reread Tolstoy’s War and Peace in this Year of Death 1942 (as I have lately been doing) without being constantly reminded of the fact that history can at times be sensationally repetitious. If Hitler, as the cartoon suggests, is filled with that odd sense we all have had of déjà vu, the reader of War and Peace is similarly filled with a sense of encore vu.

I happen to be writing these words in the spring of 1942. It is understood, therefore, that the obvious parallels any amateur can draw between the Napoleonic campaigns of 1805 and 1812 as described by Tolstoy and the Nazi campaign of 1941-1942 are good only as of today. I have no competence as a military theorist, nor any ability to pierce the future, preferring to leave this profession to Nostradamus and the radio commentators. It is interesting, however, to indicate as of this date the curious, the almost thrilling similarities between the history of Hitler and the history of Napoleon, the link being furnished by what seems to be a constant in European history — the character and geographical setting of the Russian people.

At this writing, the titanic battle of Russia, a part of the general battle for the soul of man, is far from a decision. Hitler’s retreat, while obviously not strategic in the sense he planned, is, on the other hand, far from being the rout that, a short while ago, some wishful thinkers made it out. But it represents a physical and moral defeat, the proportions of which probably no one knows except the German General Staff. Certainly the back of Fascism is not broken, as Napoleon’s back was broken after Moscow. Napoleon’s dream died with his dying legions in the snow. Hitler’s dream — the same vision, dreamed by a people instead of a single tyrant — is by no means dead. We do not yet know (unless faith is knowledge) whether Hitler will retrace completely the mighty Napoleonic parabola or whether he will succeed temporarily in his nightmare design of covering our planet with an Egyptian night. If he should fail, a new Tolstoy may arise fifty years hence to chronicle the vast drama of his rise and fall. If he should succeed, that new Tolstoy will not arise. For there will be no novelists and no poets. The humane and philosophic view of life from which supreme works of art spring will have been blotted out.

II

If we glance first at the general situation obtaining just before the start of the two invasions, we find Napoleon in 1812 military master of Europe, as Hitler is today. We see Napoleon endeavoring to express that military mastery in a politico-economic pattern — the Continental System. We see Hitler endeavoring to do the same: he calls it the New Order. Napoleon’s Continental System is a semi-failure; Hitler’s New Order is a semi-failure. In both cases Russia refuses to fit into the system. This refusal is one of the factors impelling the two conquerors eastward. It is apparent to both Napoleon and Hitler that effective (rather than nominal) domination of the Continent is impossible as long as one other great power, Russia, exists as a standing threat.

We note, however, that Hitler’s invasion starts only after he has made the same three moves tried by Napoleon.

The first of these is the attempted invasion of England. Napoleon goes no farther than the preparation of a navy of flatboats at Boulogne. Hitler not only readies his barge fleet at the Channel ports but actually achieves the first part of his plan through the use of bombers. But no true invasion is effected in either case. (There are curious minor echoes and parallels. Almost a century and a half ago the British erected against the threat of Napoleon a system of seacoast fortresses known as Martello towers. Today these towers are being repaired against the threat of invasion by Hitler.)

Before invading Russia, Hitler and Napoleon both make another move. In 1807 Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I meet on a raft at Tilsit in the Niemen River and in effect divide up Europe. It takes five years for that agreement to sour. The analogy with the Nazi-Soviet pact is clear. But in our time events move faster. Hitler does not take five years to realize that he must advance toward the east.

There is still a third move. Before invading Russia, Napoleon tries to persuade Alexander to join him in an alliance against England. He fails. Hitler duplicates this move but with what may be called reverse English; that is, Hess (if we are to believe the most credible of the explanations) tries to persuade certain people — by courtesy called Englishmen — to join Hitler in an alliance against Russia. He fails. In both cases Russia and England, despite their radical difference in political outlook, ally themselves against a common enemy.

But Napoleon and Hitler have their allies too. Napoleon, ever anxious to conserve the blood of Frenchmen, manipulates Austria and Prussia. Today Hitler too has his puppets — Finland, Rumania, Italy, others. But both Napoleon and Hitler have allies more important than these. Today such allies are called appeasement groups. War and Peace offers an excellent picture of the 1805 appeasement group (analogous to the men of Munich) in St. Petersburg. This consists mainly of spiritually diseased nobles and cowards of all stripes, including a few romantic intellectuals — for a while Pierre Bezukhov himself is one of them — who are taken in by the ‘glory’ of Napoleon. In 1812 the same group is headed by the Tsarevitch. At this writing there seems to be no appeasement group in Russia, but the reader of Tolstoy cannot help thinking of the Cliveden set and of the French upper classes who succeeded in betraying their country. Nor are Nazappeasers lacking in our own nation.

In War and Peace the representative of the superficially hard-boiled but basically sentimental Napoleon-worship is the diplomat Bilibin with his admiration for the tricky intelligence of the French. His is the aristocratic form defeatism takes. His unconscious desire to be a traitor disguises itself as worldly cynicism. Today the same unconscious desire manifests itself as admiration for Nazi technical efficiency, as ‘realism,’ as advance agenting for the wave of the future.

Pierre is not a traitor, but even he is taken in early in the book by the Napoleon myth. ‘The English will come off badly, you know, if Napoleon gets across the Channel. I think the expedition is quite feasible.’ Anna Scherer, the salon gossiper, says, ‘Prussia has always declared that Bonaparte is invincible and that all Europe is powerless before him.’ We too (before Pearl Harbor and, if the truth were known, after Pearl Harbor, too) have our Pierres and our Anna Scherers, our café-table and boardroom cynics, who take a special pleasure in their conviction that Hitler is invincible. If heroism is a permanent in human history, so are baseness and degeneracy.

Before Napoleon starts his campaign, he is warned against it by Caulaincourt, formerly his Ambassador to Russia. Caulaincourt is pessimistic over Napoleon’s chances, but Napoleon, by this time an obsessed man, does not heed him. Not only does Napoleon pay no attention to Caulaincourt but he goes further. He prophesies, ‘In less than two months’ time Russia will be suing for peace.’ Similarly it is now the general belief that a certain group of Nazi generals, possibly including Göring, warned Hitler against the Russian campaign. Napoleon tweaked Caulaincourt’s ear with good-natured contempt. Hitler, no ear-tweaker, purged and perhaps murdered his Cassandras. Hitler’s selfconfidence is equal to Napoleon’s. This excess of self-confidence seems to mark both men at somewhat the same point in their careers. The ancient Greeks called it hubris. We know it as the sin of pride. By it Satan fell.

There we have the general situation just before the campaigns begin. The analogy so far has been easy, perhaps too easy, to make. Does it break down as we continue the story? Let us see.

As Napoleon starts his eastward march, he of course disguises his rapacity and lust for power under the cloak of idealistic slogans, maxims that have caused many good people really to believe that Napoleon is in the European tradition. Thus the invasion of Russia becomes not a war but a crusade against Asiatic barbarism. Similarly Hitler’s invasion of Russia is not a war of aggression but a ‘crusade’ against Bolshevism. Hitler’s crusade may still succeed, but the world will never accept his moral evaluation of it any more than it accepted Napoleon’s evaluation of his own reasons for invading Russia.

On June 23, 1812, Napoleon crosses the Niemen into Russian territory. On June 22, 1941, following Napoleon’s timetable almost to the day, Hitler strikes at Russia. Napoleon’s initial successes are great, as are Hitler’s. During the opening stages of the campaigns the names that crop up in War and Peace reoccur in our morning newspaper: Vilna, Riga, Smolensk, Vitebsk, the Berezina, the Dnieper. There is nothing noteworthy about this. Only one road leads to Moscow.

Now, we know that Napoleon, on the way to Moscow, fought the Russians at Borodino, and achieved what the French histories call a Napoleonic victory. It opened the gates to Moscow, he entered the city, it was burned, he remained there for a few weeks — and retreated.

Napoleon failed. The reasons for that failure and the drama that attended it have never been more effectively presented anywhere than in the pages of War and Peace. Tolstoy seizes on its essentials. He knows, for example, that Borodino, technically a French victory inasmuch as the French army is left in possession of the field, was really a Russian victory because the Russian army, though undergoing severe losses, retreated in good order. After Borodino Napoleon’s army, as Tolstoy describes it in a magnificent image, was like a wounded beast — still capable of sporadic vicious efforts but inevitably fated to bleed to death. Its morale was disrupted because it had not achieved its object, for the whole purpose of the campaign was not to invest Moscow, which Napoleon succeeded in doing, but to annihilate the Russian army, which he did not succeed in doing.

Hitler did not invest Moscow but he got within ten miles of it before being repulsed. That repulse was not his Borodino, for it was but part of a general defeat. His Borodino was no single battle but rather a series of bloody encounters along a two-thousand-mile front. This particular battle he has lost, despite initial victories, despite the fact that he still holds thousands of square miles of Russian territory. Part of his object (which was Napoleon’s) has certainly not been gained — the destruction of the Russian armies. Another part of his object he probably has gained—the reduction of Russian industrial capacity. But the effort has, unless all signs are meaningless, taxed him greatly. His Eastern forces must be reorganized, probably for a new Russian offensive this spring, possibly for an invasion of Spain and North Africa, possibly for an assault through Turkey. But the first battle of Russia has been lost. Napoleon lost his, and could never attempt a second. We have yet to see whether Hitler’s second try will be successful.

III

Analogies drawn from a detailed study of tactics and strategy have but a limited value. What is more important are certain more general considerations that occur to us as we read War and Peace. Tolstoy, with his somewhat mystical and determinist view of history, does not ascribe Napoleon’s failure to his ineptitude any more than he ascribes his previous successes to his so-called genius. In fact, he does not try to explain Napoleon’s collapse as due to any one factor or even any combination of factors. Among other things, however, he points out one element as present in our own time as it was in the day of Napoleon — the character of the Russian people, once it is convinced that it is defending its homeland rather than engaging in a purely military war.

The military tradition of the Russian peoples is based on the character of their land. That character — the same is true of China — makes it possible to use slow retreat as a weapon. This weapon is particularly suitable to countries with a preponderantly peasant population and which are industrially backward, with few fatally important nerve centres. The defenders take advantage of a combination of time and space — a combination which can be utilized only in countries that are really continents. Along with the technique of slow retreat goes the technique of guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla warfare plus slow retreat helped to beat Napoleon, who apparently did not understand the immense force the proper use of these techniques can generate.

It is probable, to go on with our analogy, that Hitler, who must have studied Napoleon’s campaigns carefully, understands the Russian character better than did his predecessor. Yet it would seem that he has already been harassed by the same kind of withdrawal and guerrilla fighting that harassed Napoleon; and that today the harassment has gone so far that the Russians can afford to take the offensive.

But, as Tolstoy points out, the Russians have an even more deeply based weapon. This is what military theorists unimaginatively call morale. Essentially it is the soul of a people, the peculiar and unique national spirit which underlies all training and all conditioning and which rises to the surface only in the most extreme of emergencies. In the case of the Russians in 1812 this national spirit meant a kind of near-mystical attachment to ‘Mother Russia,’ a passionate, blind, and, if necessary, suicidal devotion to the land, a devotion which Napoleon’s army, with all its talk of gloire, lacked. This national spirit is crescent today. It underlies the thin veneer of Communist doctrine and lives a life apart from it. It helped to defeat Napoleon. It will probably yet defeat Hitler.

Essentially non-military, it takes certain forms — both in 1812 and in 1942 — which are incomprehensible to the strictly military mind. Recently the Germans, with characteristic lack of humor, objected to what they called the ‘unsportsmanlike’ tactics of the Russians. That is to say, the Nazis were enraged because the Russians refused to die in the manner prescribed by the protocols of their would-be conquerors.

Beneath this national spirit there is something even deeper, a force very hard to describe and whose value in offense it is almost impossible to determine. That force may be called the messianic spirit in the Russian people — the same spirit which Hitler, realizing its value, tries to graft on to the soul of his own folk. In other words, the Russian in 1812 felt not only that he was defending his own country, which he was, but defending Europe, which is questionable. Whether what he felt was true or not, however, he felt it, and it gave to his determination an extra dimension and strength. Scratch a Russian and you find a martyr. Remember Anna Scherer’s outburst in War and Peace: ‘Russia alone must save Europe.’ This sense of being the bringers of salvation seems to be the deepest thing in the Russian character. All the Soviet leaders have tried to do is to divert its force in a particular revolutionary direction. Tolstoy is aware of that force and he feels that it is in part the reason for the destruction of Napoleon. It is something Napoleon — with his cheap notions of la gloire, his essentially vulgarian and non-religious conception of power — cannot be expected to understand or properly evaluate, and it may be that Hitler will make the same grand psychological error. For it is a special talent of the German mind to make no errors except the very biggest. Ribbentrop’s complete miscomprehension of England as well as the Nazis’ general miscomprehension of America are examples of this supreme lack of psychological sensitivity.

I am aware that military historians make light of phrases like ‘national spirit’ and ‘messianic conscience.’ They are much more inclined to lay Napoleon’s defeat to factors that can be mathematically demonstrated. The two factors most commonly adduced are, as Walter Millis in an excellent analysis reminds us, ‘the failure of Napoleon’s supply system to stand up under the terrific strain imposed upon it, and the successes of the Russians in avoiding encirclement and maintaining their armies “in being.”’ So far, Hitler’s supply system — far vaster and more complex than Napoleon’s — has stood up under the strain, though at this writing it may be beginning to crack. It cracks much more slowly than did Napoleon’s, for the Russian ‘scorched earth’ policy of 1941 could not in the nature of things be as successful as the same policy was in 1812.

As for the second factor, — the success of the Russians in avoiding encirclement, — it is at this writing impossible to make any final prognosis. So far the Russians seem not only to have avoided encirclement but to have partially encircled the Nazis. But, even if a new German offensive should at first be successful, the Russians could withdraw to the Urals, where no doubt fresh armies are being held in reserve. In this case Hitler would have to face the problem of a ten or twenty years’ war — or abandon the idea of conquering Russia.

There is still a third military factor that operated against Napoleon in 1812 and which is operating against Hitler in 1942 — and that is pressure on the rear. In 1812 the rear was Spain: Napoleon’s retreat was in part necessitated by his desire to protect himself in the Peninsula. Today the geography has changed slightly but the force is the same. Again it is the English who are pressing on Hitler’s rear, only they are now the fighters and bombers of the RAF, and Spain is changed to the Ruhr Valley, the Channel ports, and (though at this moment the issue is doubtful) Libya. If Italy should be knocked out of the war and become a real handicap to Hitler, the analogy will be even more forcible.

It is necessary to remind the reader at this point that the one factor which did not defeat the French was General Winter. It is true that on their retreat Napoleon’s armies suffered untold horrors because of the cold. But it is Tolstoy’s point, and it seems to me a valid one, that the French army was lost long before it started its retreat in October, that it was lost even before it entered Moscow, that it was lost at Borodino, and, Tolstoy might even add, that it was lost from the moment it crossed the Niemen. No, winter did not defeat Napoleon. Caulaincourt tells us, as a matter of fact, that the cold weather did not begin till November 5, 1812. Remember, however, that the French were already withdrawn from Moscow on October 16. Caulaincourt had warned Napoleon in advance about the weather: ‘Winter will come like a bombshell.’ But it was a bombshell that exploded too late to do more than intensify already irreparable damage.

To continue with our analogy, it is probable that, though winter has hindered the operations of Hitler’s panzer divisions and regular infantry, it will not be the determining factor in his defeat that some wishful thinkers imagine.

Is there any way by which Napoleon could have won? Tolstoy thinks that had Napoleon turned southwestward into the Ukraine he might have wintered there successfully and reattacked in the spring. Instead, he made the error of retreating, and so lost Europe. But to Tolstoy the question of whether Napoleon might have done otherwise than he did is meaningless. He did what he did because — given his character, the character of the Russian people, the character of the war, and the whole sweep of events of the time — he could have done only what he did.

Some authorities think that Hitler committed the same error. He concentrated on Moscow and Leningrad whereas many of his generals wanted the main effort to be directed against the Ukraine. Hitler’s defeat at Rostov may have been the turning point of the campaign, with Timoshenko occupying a position similar to that of Kutuzov in 1812.

Other authorities think that Hitler could have succeeded had he pushed on eastward directly after the vanquishing of Poland, at a time when Russia was psychologically and militarily unprepared. He withdrew his armies, as Napoleon did, and so lost his grand chance. This makes a very neat parallel but is based, of course, on a supposition.

IV

One of the causes of the defeat of Napoleon was Napoleon. Note, however, that Tolstoy does not exaggerate the importance of Napoleon’s character either in victory or in defeat. One of the chief purposes of his book is to show us how relatively helpless the ‘great man’ is in the hands of the historical forces that control him, even though the uniqueness of his position and the egotism of his temperament combine to make him believe that he controls them. When you read Tolstoy, so overpowering is his imagination that you are convinced of the truth of his view of history and begin to look upon Napoleon very much as Tolstoy does, with a kind of tolerant interest punctuated by spasms of revulsion.

When one begins to apply the antigreat-man theory of Tolstoy to the world of today, one is at first bewildered. Superficially, the horizon seems to be filled with a few overpowering figures leading a great mass of anonymous human beings. We say Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Chiang Kai-shek, Stalin, Nehru, thinking that we are naming men of power and wisdom, whether for good or evil. Tolstoy would tell us that we are not naming men in that sense at all, but that each of these personalities is himself riding a mount he cannot control. In the midst of events this may not seem clear. But fifty years later it may seem somewhat clearer, as it did to Tolstoy when he sat down to write the first part of War and Peace.

The simplest of the ways by which Tolstoy makes us feel the littleness, the mere humanity of Napoleon, is by presenting him as a fallible man and not as the demigod of the French tradition. Perhaps Tolstoy may be considered the first of the debunkers. Yet there is nothing cheap or malicious about his portrait. One feels it to be true — unless one is a worshiper of the values Napoleon himself worshiped.

The similarities between the character of Napoleon as Tolstoy limns him and the character of Hitler as it has been portrayed for us by Rauschning, Strasser, and a dozen other formerly intimate friends of the Führer are so striking that they lead to the question: Is it possible that the desire to enslave the world and the seeming capacity to do so reappear century after century in only one type of man?

The base of Napoleon’s character in 1812, its motive power, is a kind of low vengefulness, a pervasive resentment manifesting itself in strange outbursts of fury, savage threats, loss of temper. One recollects the interview that Tolstoy describes between Tsar Alexander’s envoy Balashev and Napoleon: ‘Balashev continually made the gesture of a man wishing to say something, but Napoleon always interrupted him. . . . But Napoleon did not let him speak. He evidently wanted to do all the talking himself and continued to talk with the sort of eloquence and unrestrained irritability to which spoilt people are so prone. . . . The more he talked the less he could control his words.’

Is this not an amazingly exact picture of the way in which Hitler is reported to have talked to Henderson, Schuschnigg, Chamberlain, and others? We cannot explain this by saying that it is the natural impatience of a great man with men who are inferior to him. Washington did not talk thus, nor Lincoln. Rather must we ask ourselves whether this frenzied irritability, this refusal to allow others to speak, is not the mark always of a certain type of dictatorial temperament, a temperament totally immured in its own egotism.

It is hard to understand the mental processes of men like Hitler and Napoleon, who are at times so incomparably shrewder and more perceptive than their fellow men and at times so incomparably purblind. The true explanation is doubtless inordinately complex, but part of it, I think, is contained in a trenchant comment that Tolstoy makes about Napoleon, again in connection with Balashev’s interview: ‘It was plain that Balashev’s personality did not interest him at all. Evidently only what took place within his own mind interested him. Nothing outside himself had any significance for him, because everything in the world, it seemed, depended entirely on his will.’ This is the psychological trap that God sets for tyrants. It is the trap into which Hitler will yet fall.

In Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon there is a long conversation between Miss West and her husband concerning the character of one of their companions — whom they do not like — in their travels through Yugoslavia. Gerda is a German woman married to a Serb. Though politically no Nazi, she is one spiritually. I should like to quote briefly from the long analysis Miss West’s husband makes of the character of Gerda, because I think it throws light on the character of Hitler and of the Nazi type generally, and reinforces the analysis Tolstoy makes of the character of Napoleon.

‘Gerda has no sense of process. That is what is the matter with Gerda. She wants the result without doing any of the work that goes to make it. . . . She is angry because we have some money. She feels that it might just as well belong to her. . . For her, the money might

as easily have been attached to her as to us by a movement as simple as that which pastes a label on a trunk. . . . As she has no sense of what goes to bring people love, or friendship, or distinction, or wealth, it seems to her that the whole world is enjoying undeserved benefits; and in a universe where all is arbitrary, it might just as well happen that the injustice was pushed a little further and that all these benefits were taken from other people, leaving them nothing, and transferred to her, giving her everything. Given the premise that the universe is purely arbitrary, that there is no causality at work anywhere, there is nothing absurd in that proposal. This is the conqueror’s point of view. . . . Let us admit it, for a little while the whole of our world may belong to Gerda. She will snatch it out of hands too well bred and compassionate and astonished to defend it. What we must remember is that she will not be able to keep it. For her contempt for the process makes her unable to conduct any process. . . . To go up in an aeroplane and drop bombs is a simple use of an elaborate process that has already been developed. But you cannot administer a country on this principle. . . . Gerda’s empire . . . will be an object of fear and nothing else. For this reason, I believe that Gerda’s empire cannot last long. But while it lasts it will be terrible. And what it leaves when it passes will also be terrible. For we cannot hope for anything but a succession of struggles for leadership among men whose minds will have been unfitted for leadership by the existence of tyranny and the rupture of European tradition, until, slowly and painfully, the nations reëmerge, civilization reemerges.’

Now Tolstoy’s depiction of Napoleon is the depiction of a man who has lost his ‘sense of process.’ Though he speaks of himself as a Man of Destiny, he does not believe in destiny, does not believe that human history is continuous. He believes, instead, that he can arrest its course or divert its direction because he wishes to do so.

Tolstoy himself, on the other hand, wrote War and Peace in part to express his sense of the thick continuity of human events, the multitudinous linkages which even a Napoleon cannot break. It is those characters who have an awareness of this continuity, like Prince Andrew, that he admires. It is those characters who have no such awareness that he scorns. The Tolstoyan viewpoint is evidenced even in the creation of such minor personages as the fatuous Berg who, simply because he is himself, is convinced that everything he does is right. A more significant example is the aristocratic waster, Anatole Kuragin, ‘who regarded his whole life as a continual round of amusement which someone for some reason had to provide for him.’ It is this inability to conceive reality which is to ruin the class Anatole represents. It is this lack of a sense of process on the part of an insulated class which is to lead straight to 1917 in Russia. Someday it may be shown that it led also to Pearl Harbor.

Now, from time to time, as Miss West reminds us, a group of powerful people deficient in a sense of process arises and for a time dominates the world or a part of it. They are able to effect such domination because this lack of a sense of process is a great strength. The Nazi is automatically insulated from the doubts, hesitations, and fears of those of us who possess such a sense. And, if the world were so simple that fanatical courage and superhuman energy could control it, Hitler, the man with no sense of process, would succeed permanently.

But, as Tolstoy reminds us, the world is not so simple. History is far more complicated than even the most widevisioned conqueror — and Hitler’s perspectives, one must admit, are enormous — can understand. In the end the Hitler type is defeated by his inability to judge his own limitations.

Is there not something supremely childlike about both Napoleon and Hitler? Just as the child in the dawn of his life cannot make a distinction between an object and himself, so the conqueror cannot understand why there should be any disjunction between himself and what he wants. When a disjunction appears, both the child and the conqueror express their frustration by fits of temper. Such fits are described by Tolstoy as characteristic of Napoleon and are described by contemporaries as characteristic of Hitler.

There are a large number of minor parallels that might be drawn between the characters of Hitler and Napoleon, unimportant but interesting parallels. It is odd, for example, that just as Napoleon, so Tolstoy tells us, resorted with apparent gullibility to soothsayers, so Hitler, according to report, consults an astrologer.

It is notable that, in periods of enormous stress and strain, the irrational, the savage, hidden deep in man, raises its Stone Age head and asks again its mumbling questions of the dark gods it has itself invented. Pierre Bezukhov becomes interested in the mystic numbers of the Revelation of Saint John. He and many others like him feverishly manipulate the symbols so that they may foretell the end of Napoleon. Freemasonry makes its occult appeal to him. The Napoleonic period was one of omens and prophecies and dark stirrings in the minds of men.

Today, too, in our own country, there are ample evidences of this curious ferment. It is no accident that the medicine-man cults which have long flourished on our West Coast should be enjoying greater popularity today than ever before. It is no accident that the gibberings of Nostradamus should be republished and become something like a minor best-seller, and even reach the screen. A conqueror like Hitler not only forces the weaker among us to lose faith in everything we have believed in: he forces some of us to seek faith in things that our savage forefathers believed in. It is ironical that Hitler, who proclaims himself the apostle of science, control, order, and rationality, should cause such an access of frenzy, superstition, and irrationality.

The prime example of this irrationality is the tyrant’s own conception of himself as God. The mania may clothe itself in varying forms. Tolstoy shows us the confused Pierre, who in 1805 is a Napoleon-worshiper, reflecting that ‘the execution of the Duc d’Enghien was a political necessity and it seems to me that Napoleon showed greatness of soul by not fearing to take on himself the whole responsibility of that deed.’ To take on himself the whole responsibility of that deed. And just as Napoleon had his Duc d’Enghien and horrified the world with the murder, so Hitler had his Röhm and announced, ‘For twenty-four hours I was the Supreme Court of Germany.’

V

So much for the parallels, which could be extended much further at the risk of trying the reader’s patience. Now for the differences, which at first glance seem to be far more striking than the similarities.

In the days of Kutuzov and Napoleon there was no blitzkrieg, there were no planes, tanks, railroads, radio communications, land mines — one could extend the list easily. In 1812 oil was not a war weapon. Today it is the war weapon without which Hitler cannot win and possessing which he may win — for a time. Strategically the situations present enormous differences. Napoleon attacked on one narrow front whereas Hitler is attacking (or retreating) on what amounts to a line drawn along the breadth of a continent. From the angle of international relations too the line-up is different. Napoleon had no ally like Japan to rely on, nor any adversary like the United States to fear.

There was much dissatisfaction in Napoleon’s conquered territory as he marched into Russia. Cut it is entirely out of relation to the giant wave of disaffection and rebellion now rising, which may yet engulf Hitler’s New Order.

Furthermore, readers will object, does not the whole analogy begin to seem a little strained when we focus our attention upon the difference in scale between the two wars? For Tolstoy the movement. back and forth of Napoleon’s army is a vast process. Its battles are vast. Its consequences are vast. And when we keep our eyes riveted only upon the pages of War and Peace we catch completely the Tolstoyan sense of the size of the forces involved. But when we raise our eyes from the page and compare these forces with those that are now shaking the world we are at once affrighted by the enormous increase in their intensity since the time of Napoleon.

For it is true that Napoleon’s war was a continental one. Hitler’s is planetary. Napoleon’s war was largely an affair of foot soldiers, cavalry, and simple artillery. Hitler’s war, while utilizing all these elements of battle, is conceived in three dimensions and in terms, if necessary, of total destruction — which was not Napoleon’s aim at all. This disparity in scale is so overpowering and so manifest that it may be that the analogies we have drawn will seem of but minor interest.

Yet, though the bombing plane is new and the radio transmitter is new, the man in the plane and the man behind the transmitter are not much different from the men of the time of Napoleon. Just as there are constants in geography that cannot change, so, too, there are constants in human nature. For a time, these constants in human nature may seemingly be clouded over by the force of such men as Napoleon and Hitler and the great historical waves they ride. But in the end these constants will rise above the surface and reëstablish themselves as the determining motives of history.