I should preface this review by saying that I have read the Anthony Briggs translation. I don’t know a lick of Russian and only a tiny bit of French, so I can only judge the quality of the translation by the translator’s notes in the beginning of the book. It sounds to me like Briggs has done an excellent and well-researched job. In this review, I will speak of the author as “Tolstoy”, but obviously I can’t speak for anything but “Briggs”.

Of relevance is also my knowledge about this period of history in general, and the Napoleonic campaigns specifically: I didn’t know much before I started reading War and Peace. It piqued my interest to the point where I have read other sources on the period (e.g. The Fox of the North by Parkinson), but in general, my knowledge should be considered limited to that which is described by Tolstoy. Our collective understanding of things may well have evolved since, which would make some of the historical remarks in this review outdated.

War and Peace is three things:

• a novel about some people in early 19th century Russia;
• an historical accounting of critical events during the Napoleonic wars between 1805 and 1813; and
• most important of all, a treatise on causality, chance, authority, and cognitive biases.

It seems to me Tolstoy was unhappy with the disconnect between history as it is told and reality as it is experienced. For an example, take this very moment, as it plays out across the world in an instant. Think especially of the trends in movements of people, both near to you, and in countries far from you. The moment is now part of history, much like the kings or revolutions or emigrations from the books, but it doesn’t feel like it, because when we write history down after the fact, it comes out different to how it was at the time. Written history tends to flow according to some logical progression, in a way the moment-to-moment experience of our lives do not. When we speak of the past, we assume there is some sort of cohesive plan according to which people do things, with one thing being a clear consequence of another, whereas in the moment, we experience a bombardment of opinions, random events, and desires that pull us in so many directions it’s surprising we get anything done at all.

Tolstoy is in good company. These observations have been made more recently by e.g. statisticians (de Finetti in Theory of Probability) and systems safety analysts (Leveson in Engineering a Safer World), to name just two examples. In systems safety, we see accident reports that say things like “the operator inserted the probe in the secondary channel, which caused a backflow of chemicals, and that led to spontaneous combustion. If the operator had inserted the probe in the primary channel as per instructions, this wouldn’t have been a problem.” True as that might be, is it the interesting bit? Shouldn’t we at least try to figure out why the operator thought insertion into the secondary channel was a good idea at the time? And is probe insertion into the secondary channel a guarantee for backflow? Is there nothing else that causes backflow? Why was the system designed to allow unsafe backflow in the first place? These are questions a systems safety analyst has to ask, because most people won’t. Most people will accept the idea that the operator should have done things one way and through some fault of character, perhaps, decided to do things another way.

Or, as the problem is reflected in the book: “Why did 600,000 men collectively decide to walk from France to Russia, eat all the food there was to be had along the way, only to starve and freeze to death on the way home?”

They should have not done that.

Historians in Tolstoy’s time had an answer: they did it because their Emperor, Napoleon, ordered them to. Or because great men had written books that created a political climate in which it was the right thing to do. Tolstoy thinks these are insufficient explanations, although the latter certainly seem closer to the truth than the former. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

while their elders began talking about Bonaparte, Julie, Madame Karagin’s daughter, turned to young Rostov, and said, ’I missed you at the Arkharovs on Thursday. It was very dull without you,’ she said, giving him a sweet smile. Feeling flattered, he flashed a flirtatious young man’s smile and moved closer to her. They started a private conversation, blissfully unaware that his spontaneous smile had pierced a jealous Sonya to the heart; she was left with a forced expression of pretended enjoyment on her blushing face.

War and Peace opens up with highly detailed glimpses into the lives of Russian aristocrats in the early 19th century. I didn’t know anything about aristocratic life in early 19th century Russia (or anywhere else, at any other time, for that matter) before reading this book. I have since gathered from other sources that these people were fairly disconnected from reality, in the “let them eat cake” sense. Tolstoy doesn’t go into that. Himself being an aristocrat in 19th century Russia, he looks at the other aristocrats as fellow humans. With unique and sometimes strange personalities, yes, but otherwise much like you and me.

If you have read a novel about humans before, you won’t find anything earth-shattering about this theme in War and Peace.

There are two reasons these glimpses matter: first, we get to know the protagonists through whose eyes we suffer the madness of humanity. More importantly, they provide a civilian perspective on an eventful decade of history. Tolstoy did a lot of research, including talking to people who lived through these years. He shares with us what it looked like to people at the time, as it happened. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people had more important matters in their lives than some war a French emperor dragged their army into: love, finances, reputation, work, religion, to name a few. Put simply, life at the time didn’t totally circle around the wars, in contrast to the historic recollections. War and other grand gestures of violence leave very obvious scars for historians to study, which means it occupies a lot of space in the literature. But humans then were very much like humans now, and they had real lives outside of what ended up in history books.

The wars were, of course, on people’s lips. You gossiped about them for signaling value, e.g. to show that you are politically well connected, and you know Count so-and-so whose nephew was in the front with Prince Fancy Pants. But people weren’t concerned about the war – until they were. But it happened first gradually, then suddenly. As with any big change, it took people by surprise, no matter how obvious it seems in hindsight. Why do big changes happen that way? We’ll get to that.

One of the common threads throughout the book is the – actual and perceived – influence of chance on outcomes.

the officer grinned through his whiskers at the orderly’s tone, dismounted, gave his horse to a servant, and walked over to Bolkonsky with a slight bow. Bolkonsky made room for him on the bench. The hussar sat down beside him. […]

’Oh, you must be Prince Bolkonsky! Delighted to meet you. Lieutenant–Colonel Denisov, better known as Vaska,’ said Denisov, shaking hands with Prince Andrey and looking him in the face with warm friendliness. […] Prince Andrey knew about Denisov from Natasha’s stories of when she was first wooed. The bitter-sweet memory brought back the heart ache he hadn’t even thought about in recent days, though it still lay buried in his soul.

For example, people the reader has been acquainted with just happen to stumble over each other in odd situations. At first glance this struck me as unrealistic – I even stopped suspending my disbelief at one point – but then I realised it’s all an effect of selection. There were in the order of thousands of hypothetical aristocrats the book could have been about, but Tolstoy focuses from the beginning on the specific combination of people that happen to encounter each other by chance later, because that makes for a more interesting novel. It also happens to foreshadow Tolstoy’s idea of causality.

Once chance has had us end up in a situation, as much as we feel free, we often find that we have limited ability to get ourselves into a different situation. For all the talk about free will, in any given moment, we are bound to a small set of reasonable alternatives. Sometimes due to physical laws, sometimes biological necessities, and sometimes social expectations.

kutuzov woke up, cleared his throat hoarsely and scanned the generals. ’Gentlemen,’ he said, ’the disposition for tomorrow, no, for today – it’s past midnight – cannot now be changed. You have heard it, and we shall all do our duty.’

This is straight out of the history books; the real-life Kutuzov made this remark, after a long lecture by the war theorist Weyrother about how the Russo-Austrian alliance were sure to win the battle of Austerlitz (which they subsequently lost). Kutuzov had been of the firm opinion that the battle of Austerlitz was lost even before it was fought, and the plan presented by Weyrother would make things worse. For political reasons, Kutuzov did not have the ability to question the plan on short notice; his previous strategic retreats had gotten him a reputation as a person who is too intimidated by violence to go to battle, and any objection to this plan would be seen as confirming evidence of that reputation, rather than taken as a serious concern.

By the time the plan was presented, Kutuzov had two reasonable choices: submit to the plan as written, or resign in protest. Kutuzov chose to submit to the plan, because as much as he didn’t believe in it, he felt duty-bound to the soldiers he commanded and his country, and wanted an opportunity to make the execution slightly less catastrophic than the plan indicated.

For a further lesson in how chance affects things, Tsar Alexander himself happened to pass by Kutuzov’s units as they were holding back, and the Tsar assumed command over Kutuzov’s units, sending them into the lost battle.

ahead of the troops a row had broken out between an Austrian column leader and a Russian general. The Russian general shouted for the cavalry to stop. The Austrian tried to explain that it wasn’t his fault – the top brass were to blame. Meanwhile the troops stood there, getting more and more bored and dispirited. After an hour’s delay they moved on at last, and began to march downhill. The fog that had thinned out on the hilltop lay thicker than ever down below where the troops were going. Ahead in the fog they heard a shot, then another, random firing at first, at irregular intervals; rat-a-tat-tat, then growing more regular and frequent. The battle of Holdbach had begun.

Not expecting to confront the enemy down there at the stream, stumbling across them unexpectedly in the fog and hearing no word of encouragement from their commanding officers, frustrated to the last man by arriving too late, and with nothing visible ahead of them or on either side in the fog, the Russians loosed off a few desultory shots at the enemy, moved forward a little and then stopped again in the absence of any orders from the officers or adjutants, who were themselves blundering about in the fog on unfamiliar territory not knowing where their own divisions were.

Aside from the historical research Tolstoy did, he personally participated in the Crimean War, and his experiences colour the depiction of the field of battle. If chance plays a large part in civilian life, any influence by chance is amplified during war. Tolstoy brings up principally two reasons for this:

• Uncertainty is greater. When people’s lives are at stake, they do irrational things, and this makes everything harder to predict. Add to this deliberate concealment of intentions, feigning of movement, darkness, and the smoke produced by gunpowder.
• People in large groups amplify the effects of chance. The example Tolstoy repeats a few times is how, in the heat of battle, it takes just one man to shout “They’re running! Forward!” or “We’re done for!” to affect the will to fight of many people on both sides.

These two hold the key to generalisation of the idea. The situations in which we can expect random perturbations to have an especially large effect on outcomes is when uncertainty is great, and/or when people are doing things in groups. (Kahneman similarly describes the human desire to reach consensus in groups as a variance-amplifying mechanism.)

My understanding of modern, effective military organisations is that they are decentralised and with a low power gradient. The boots on the ground need to understand the commander’s intent to adapt to unforeseen circumstances, and they also need to feel the psychological safety to raise concerns about a suggested approach. This was not generally the case in the armies of the 19th century.

On their way to Russia, the French needed to seize the Tabor bridge to continue their pursuit of the defending Russo-Austrian army on the other side of the Donau. The Tabor bridge had been prepared by the Austrians with explosives, and the detachments guarding it had strict orders to blow it up the second the French started advancing on it. The French commander Murat tried a ruse: pretending there were pending peace talks between the Emperors, so it would be in the interest of both sides to lay down arms temporarily. (Contrary to my experience from reading the news, the book portrays it as fairly easy to agree on temporary ceasefires. It would make sense, though, because it is in both sides’ interest not to get killed and earn time to improve their positions and set up logistics, and there’s not a great advantage to breaking a ceasefire because the other side sort of expects you to, eventually.) While the French commander talked to the Austrian commander, Auersperg, the French army approached the bridge despite the prentended ceasefire. The sergeant in charge of blowing the bridge up spotted the ruse.

this sergeant, seeing the french troops running on to the bridge, wanted to open fire, but Lannes stayed his hand. The sergeant, obviously brighter than his general, goes up to Auersperg and he says, “Prince, it’s a trick. Look, the French are coming!”

Murat sees that all is lost if he lets the sergeant have his say. With pretended amazement he addresses Auersperg: “Is this Austrian discipline, famed the world over?” he asks. “How can you let a man of low rank address you like that?” This was a stroke of genius. Prince Auersperg preserves his honour by having the sergeant arrested.

The French quickly de-mine the bridge and force the Austrian army to retreat further.

But going back to what happened, when addressing Auersperg directly, the sergeant had realised that the Austrian discipline he was supposed to be bound by is not a physical constraint. The sergeant is practically able to speak to his commander directly and straightforwardly. Austrian discipline is more of a social convention, albeit seemingly backed up by the threat of violence.

The irony of the situation is that the sergeant, perhaps, didn’t go far enough. At the outset of the situation, the sergeant was the person with actual power to blow up the bridge. The charges were laid and the guns were trained. At that point, the destruction of the bridge would have been a physical inevitability if the sergeant opened fire. By choosing to talk to Auersperg first, the sergeant opened up the alternative course of events where Auersperg was allowed influence over the power wielded by the sergeant by physically restraining him before he was able to act.

This is something Tolstoy does not make clear, but I think implies. When we talk about power over affecting the outcome of things, we need to separate two different types of power: logical consequences and imprecise influence. If you can do something with a strictly logical, certain consequence, something that is physically inevitable from your action, then you have power over that thing in a very strong sense. But most things don’t fall into that category; in most things, we are not able to directly control an outcome – all we can do is imprecisely influence in which direction the situation is likely to turn. We can predispose the situation to be more inclined to go one way, but not dictate that it will do so. This is a much weaker form of power, but the one that governs most of our lives. This is where we’ll focus our analysis in the next section on causality.

For all our intentions to predispose situations this way or that way, often enough, things don’t go the way we would have liked them to.

It was common in Tolstoy’s time to explain the Russian successes at the battle of Borodino through the ingenuity of the command: they selected a good field of battle, fortified it strategically, and lured Napoleon to attack where they were strongest. Tolstoy argues that this view is not at all supported by evidence. If we examine the smaller events leading up to the battle, there were a lot of mistakes that resulted in the Russian line of defense. In particular, he mentions that the day before battle, Napoleon couldn’t even spot the Russian position when he surveyed the field, because it was not yet constructed: two days before battle, the Russians had lost ground on one of their flanks and the entire field of battle was swinging around, forcing the Russians to improvise new fortifications and transfer troops mid-battle to reinforce the weaker flank. Any success at Borodino had little to do with the ingenuity of the command, because by the time battle started, their plan no longer conformed to reality, and it was not possible to update them on the present situation rapidly enough for their commands to be meaningful.

napoleon’s marshals and generals issued their own instructions without consulting Napoleon, telling people where to stand and what to fire at, where the cavalry should ride and the infantry run. But even these instructions, just like Napoleon’s, were almost never followed, and if they were it was only to a tiny extent. More often than not, what happened was the opposite of what had been ordered. Soldiers told to advance would suddenly find themselves under a hail of grapeshot, and come running back. Soldiers told to stand still would suddenly see the Russians right in front of them, and either run away or surge forward, and the cavalry would charge off unbidden to catch up with any running Russians.

Although historians after the fact write about the Russian ingenuity at Borodino, at the time, the battle was widely considered a Russian loss, for several reasons. Most immediate was that nearly half of the entire Russian army died that day. (That’s a lot of families to start grieving at the same time.) Second, the Russian army decided to retreat. Third, in the retreat they yielded a lot of territory – including Moscow, second capital of the Russian Empire. Death, retreat, and ceding territory must be a loss, surely.

But then something happened. The French Emperor walked into Moscow and the French army stayed there for a month. Then they were fleeing head over heels out of Russia.

So what, then, caused the change in demeanor of the French during the battle of Borodino?

napoleon wasn’t alone in his nightmare sensation of a mighty arm losing its power; every general, every soldier in the French army, combatants and non-combatants, with all their experience of previous battles, was equally horrified to encounter an enemy that could lose one half of its strength and still stand its ground with undiminished ferocity. The morale of the attacking French army had been sapped. The victory that was won was not marked by the capture of a few tattered rags on sticks called colours, or by measuring the ground where the troops stood before and after; it was a moral victory – the kind that forces the enemy to acknowledge the moral superiority of his opponent, and his own impotence – and at Borodino that victory was won by the Russians. […]

The French army still had just enough impetus to struggle on to Moscow, but there, with no new challenge from the Russian army, it was bound to perish, bleeding to death from the wound sustained at Borodino

Tolstoy says three things at the same time.

The first really mirrors lessons from the real-life Kutuzov (and his mentor, Suvorov): it’s never as simple as claiming one side has won a battle and the other has lost it. Men die on both sides. Usually, one side gains control over territory and the other loses it. It’s common sense that gaining control over territory means one has won the battle. But as long as the ceding army is alive and willing to fight, just in a different location, are they really defeated? What if the army that gains territory has suddenly lost all will to fight? Are they really victorious?

This was the fate that met the French army – for the first time – at Borodino: they gained territory, but at such a high cost that each individual soldier lost a significant chunk of his will to fight further. They ended up staying in Moscow to avoid pursuing the weak and retreating Russian army beyond.

But Tolstoy also talks about a second thing, perhaps more important: for all the yelling and whipping of an officer, the people with the real power are the ones holding muskets and charging with bayonets. If they lack the will to fight, the fight is not happening. If they go home, the conquest is over. If they believe in another approach, the other approach will be taken. It might seem like the yelling and whipping of the officers have gotten the soldiers this far, but maybe the soldiers got themselves this far, and the fact that the yelling and whipping called for the same outcome is more of a coincidence, or a political game.

Tolstoy alludes to the third thing at the end, by “enough impetus”. Borodino was not when the French went from infinite morale to none at all. The entire campaign had run a course such that morale was slowly decreasing from the start. The battle of Borodino was just another blow in the same direction. Why did the French choose to run a campaign that depleted the morale of their comrades? Certainly, we won’t find an official memo saying “we will sacrifice morale in Russia!” But neither did they hunker down and set up strong supply lines after each territorial gain. Nor did they invest significantly in local support, or wait for fresh reinforcements from France. They acted as though they intended to sacrifice morale, but they never specifically decided to do so. For all we can tell, the French soldiers thought, in any given moment, that it was the strategically correct choice to focus on surprise, speed, and territorial gain, even at a small cost of morale. They thought, due to innumerable small factors they considered, most lost to time, it wise to seize the warm season, feed the army by looting, and go through just one more march, to end up in an even more prestigious position, having conquered even more of Russia. And it worked! Until it didn’t anymore.

Humans have a small view on what they are doing. From outer space, or when taking a historic perspective, it is an innately human trait to make small decisions and optimise locally. The end result is unknown to all of us. In fact, the very idea of an end result is a bit of a mirage, and only shows up when we are looking at a well-delimited time span after the fact. We are living in a continuous flow of events, and any single event is no more an end result than the middle of something else or the beginning of a third thing.

Tolstoy focuses on what we might call anthropocentric causality, in that he looks specifically at humans causing behaviour in other humans. This might seem like a narrow view, but it is a logical starting point. Even if our interest in causality is limited to an apparently self-contained model like a block on an inclined plane – someone (a human!) must have put the block there in response to something done by someone else (another human!). In that case, the other human is the one causing the behaviour in the first. Even if we believe that humans can be an ultimate cause, i.e. do things entirely uninfluenced by anything else, we may agree that most of what humans do, especially in joint efforts, depends on the opinions of other people.

As in the case of the sergeant and Auersperg at the Tabor bridge, what we are concerned about, even more specifically, is not the power stemming from logical reasoning or physical inevitability (we can simply take that for granted), but the more fickle and common kind, our ability to influence the actions of humans beyond what’s in our direct control. We will also speak as if we are discussing people giving direct orders to other people, because that is a case that usually leaves fairly obvious traces in history, but the same reasoning applies also to more subtle forms of influencing other people’s behaviour.

This review, despite its length, just scratches the surface of War and Peace. I realised when re-reading portions of it for this review that it’s the kind of work that seems to expand and deepen when you go back to it. However, I have to wrap the review up somewhere, and this is as good a place as any.

We started with a question that we are now ready to answer with more sophistication: why did 600,000 men collectively decide to walk from France to Russia, eat all the food there was to be had along the way, only to starve and freeze to death on the way home?

The short answer is they did not. Elaborating on that, each person decided, for their own personal and diverse reasons, to join the army. Then each person decided to march toward Russia for one more day. Circumstances and chance resulted in this happening a large number of days, for a large number of people. The same people, due to their shared situation, happened to lose this desire to walk in Russia around the same time, and turned around toward what they felt was the safest road home. They had other concerns they thought more important than the fact that along that road, they had already consumed everything the landscape had to offer on their way in.

Nobody in particular made it this way. It was just one of the many possible courses of action that happened to materialise. Some high-ranking officials condoned this activity, and helped provide justification for it, and thus it seems like they ordered it.

Like any other outcome, this specific outcome was incredibly unlikely before it materialised. Once it did, it became part of our frame of reference and it’s hard to imagine the same causes leading to some other course of action – but maybe they might have. This is the mission Tolstoy sets out to historians: what are the laws that would allow us to tell?