ot because of their own
personal grief; they wept with a reverent and softening emotion which
had taken possession of their souls at the consciousness of the
simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished in their
presence.

BOOK THIRTEEN: 1812

CHAPTER I

Man's mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but
the desire to find those causes is implanted in man's soul. And without
considering the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions any one
of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, he snatches at the
first approximation to a cause that seems to him intelligible and says:
"This is the cause!" In historical events (where the actions of men are
the subject of observation) the first and most primitive approximation
to present itself was the will of the gods and, after that, the will of
those who stood in the most prominent position--the heroes of history.
But we need only penetrate to the essence of any historic event--which
lies in the activity of the general mass of men who take part in it--to
be convinced that the will of the historic hero does not control the
actions of the mass but is itself continually controlled. It may seem
to be a matter of indifference whether we understand the meaning of
historical events this way or that; yet there is the same difference
between a man who says that the people of the West moved on the East
because Napoleon wished it and a man who says that this happened because
it had to happen, as there is between those who declared that the
earth was stationary and that the planets moved round it and those who
admitted that they did not know what upheld the earth, but knew there
were laws directing its movement and that of the other planets. There
is, and can be, no cause of an historical event except the one cause of
all causes. But there are laws directing events, and some of these laws
are known to us while we are conscious of others we cannot comprehend.
The discovery of these laws is only possible when we have quite
abandoned the attempt to find the cause in the will of some one man,
just as the discovery of the laws of the motion of the planets was
possible only when men abandoned the conception of the fixity of the
earth.

The historians consider that, next to the battle of Borodino and the
occupation of Moscow by the enemy and its destruction by fire, the most
important episode of the war of 1812 was the movement