en, reckoning those transporting and feeding the army--moved from
the west eastwards to the Russian frontier, toward which since 1811
Russian forces had been similarly drawn. On the twelfth of June, 1812,
the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war
began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human
nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable
crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money,
burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not
recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which
those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.

What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? The
historians tell us with naive assurance that its causes were the wrongs
inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of the Continental
System, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Alexander, the
mistakes of the diplomatists, and so on.

Consequently, it would only have been necessary for Metternich,
Rumyantsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and an evening party, to have
taken proper pains and written a more adroit note, or for Napoleon to
have written to Alexander: "My respected Brother, I consent to restore
the duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg"--and there would have been no war.

We can understand that the matter seemed like that to contemporaries.
It naturally seemed to Napoleon that the war was caused by England's
intrigues (as in fact he said on the island of St. Helena). It naturally
seemed to members of the English Parliament that the cause of the war
was Napoleon's ambition; to the Duke of Oldenburg, that the cause of the
war was the violence done to him; to businessmen that the cause of the
war was the Continental System which was ruining Europe; to the generals
and old soldiers that the chief reason for the war was the necessity of
giving them employment; to the legitimists of that day that it was the
need of re-establishing les bons principes, and to the diplomatists of
that time that it all resulted from the fact that the alliance between
Russia and Austria in 1809 had not been sufficiently well concealed
from Napoleon, and from the awkward wording of Memorandum No. 178. It
is natural that these and a countless and infinite quantity of other
reasons, the number depending on the endless diversity of points
of view, presented themselves to the