Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE Armies as Arbitrary

 

                                                                How Armies Operate

Having recently stepped, or crawled, into the start of my ninth decade on earth, I’m reading (re-reading) War and Peace. Reading it all the way through (hopefully) for the first time in Russian. Getting to the first installment of the “war” part at the beginning of Part Two, I notice a lot of familiar things. I was in the U.S. Army for three years, and armies historically always have certain things in common. In Tolstoy’s novel the year is 1805, and the Russian army, under Kutuzov, is allied with the Austrians against the French. As we begin Part Two the commander, Kutuzov, in the company of an Austrian general is on his way to inspect the troops.

 The exhausted Russian soldiers, now bivouacked in a foreign country, must clean themselves and everything up in anticipation of the visit of the commander-in-chief. Though exhausted, they must work like bees for two days to put on a good show. Finally, they are all lined up in formation, in their parade uniforms, when a new order comes down: we don’t want you in your parade uniforms; we’ll do the inspection in your field, fatigue uniforms. So everybody go get changed.

 Does this make any sense? Absolutely none, but the men go off and get changed. In any army, anywhere historically, this kind of thing happens all the time. Sometimes the commander-in-chief never shows up, sometimes he’s there for a total of two minutes. Doesn’t even bother to look at your spic-and-span barracks. Almost always there is some kind of arbitrary change of the rules, as here, in the case of the uniforms. Most of the time there is no explanation for the change. It’s all “just because.”

 In this case there really is a reason why Kutuzov wants to inspect his men in their fatigue outfits. He has along with him an Austrian general, and he wants to impress upon that general the state of disarray amongst his troops. They have just completed a long march and he does not want to throw them immediately into battle, so he, in effect, does not want them looking good for the inspection. So get out of those parade uniforms. Of course, the troops themselves are never informed about any of this, so they are left thinking that the changes are simply arbitrary. Which, as military operations usually go, they usually are arbitrary.

                                                                    Tolstoy, 1862