On Planning
I’ve been reading War and Peace, and one of the (many) thoughts it prompted was about planning. Should you?
There’s plenty of other literature telling us what to do:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men. Gang aft agley
No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces
If you fail to prepare, you’re preparing to fail
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face
In the course of the novel, which runs from Austerlitz in 1805 to the invasion of Russia in 1812, Tolstoy gives us five character sketches about planning: the young tyro Nikolai Rostov, the inimitable socialite Prince Vasili, the dry-as-dust German Pfuhl, the decrepit field-marshal Kutuzov, and finally Napoleon himself. The irony of all of this, unfortunately, is that Tolstoy doesn’t have a lesson for us. In his theory of history, which I wrote about here, everything is determined by chance and Providence, because there are infinitely many necessary conditions to any event. So when Tolstoy think about the cause of the French invasion of Russia, "the willingness or unwillingness of this or that French corporal to serve a second term has as much weight as Napoleon's refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula”.
But let’s dive in anyway.
Nikolai Rostov
Nikolai Rostov is one of the minor heroes of the novel; aged 20 in 1805, he’s a young officer in the Hussars. After suffering a minor wound, he embellishes the story to his friends, because:
To tell everything exactly as it had been would have meant the exercise of considerable self-control to confine himself to the facts. It is very difficult to tell the truth and young people are rarely capable of it.
Book I Part III Chapter 7
But in 1812, after Napoleon’s invasion, Rostov is retreating past Smolensk with the army when he comes across the country estate of another character - Princess Maria. The Princess is alone, her father dead and brother with the army, and she’s lost control of the peasants. In a moment of generosity, Princess Maria offered the hungry peasants her own corn - thereby breaking the unwritten rules of hierarchy that govern this sort of feudal society. There’s actually a very similar moment in The Leopard: Don Fabrizio, the prince of Salina and lord of Donnafugata, invited some of the townspeople to see him after dinner:
For a long time Donnafugata commented on these last words. And the Prince, who had found Donnafugata unchanged, was found very much changed himself; for never before would he have issued so cordial an invitation; and from that moment, invisibly, began the decline of his prestige.
In the same way, Maria’s generosity broke the spell; the peasants started questioning their place in the social hierarchy. That is, until the arrival of the young count Rostov, full of aristocratic bravado. Apprehending the princess’s plight, he storms out to meet the peasants:
'I’ll give them armed force... I'll "contrary" them!' growled Rostov mechanically, choking with irrational animal fury and the need to vent it. With no definite plan of action, without considering, he strode impetuously to the crowd. And the nearer he drew to it the more Alpatych felt that this rashness might lead to good results. The peasants in the crowd were similarly impressed when they saw Rostov's swift, unswerving steps and resolute, scowling face.
Book III Part II Chapter 14
Bravado was the only thing that could have worked with the peasants; they’d seen a weakness in the social hierarchy, and only force could stem the burgeoning revolt. Persuasion was pointless, and overwhelming military force was too far away. But as Tolstoy makes clear, Rostov didn’t plan his intervention - it was instinctive, irrational. And despite that, because of that, he was successful.
Prince Vasili
Prince Vasili is a wealthy aristocrat - but not wealthy enough. And so he successfully contrives to marry his daughter Hélène to Count Pierre, whose fabulously wealth father had just died. I think the passage that explains his strategy is masterful.
Prince Vasili was not a man to plan and look ahead. Still less did he ever plot evil with a view to his own advantage. He was merely a man of the world who had got on and to whom success had become a matter of habit. Circumstances and the people he encountered were allowed to shape his various schemes and devices, which he never examined very closely though they constituted his whole interest in life. Of such plans he had not just one or two but dozens in train at once, some at their initial stage, others nearing achievement, still others in course of disintegration. He never said to himself, for instance: 'So-and-so now has influence, I must gain his confidence and friendship and through him secure a special grant'; or 'There's Pierre, a rich fellow: I must entice him to marry my daughter and lend me the forty thousand I need.' But when he came across a man of position instinct immediately whispered to him that this person might be useful, and Prince Vasili would strike up an acquaintance and at the first opportunity, without any premeditation, led by instinct, would flatter him, treat him with easy familiarity, and finally make his request.
He had Pierre ready at hand in Moscow and procured for him an appointment as gentleman of the bedchamber, which at that time conferred the same status as the rank of privy councillor, and insisted on the young man's travelling with him to Petersburg and staying at his house. With an absent-minded air, yet at the same time taking it absolutely for granted that it was the right thing, Prince Vasili was doing everything to get Pierre to marry his daughter. Had he thought out his ideas beforehand he could not have been so natural in his behaviour, and so simple and unaffected in his relations with everybody, both above and below him in social standing. Something always drew him to men richer or more powerful than himself, and he was endowed the rare art of being able to hit on exactly the right moment for making use of people.
Book I Part III Chapter 1
(side note - this passage has a certain personal valence for me these days)
Not only does Vasili not plan, he would be less effective if he did. Vasili is systematically and consistently successful, without any consistent system. Success may have been a matter of habit, but it was entirely instinctive. Tolstoy doesn’t like Vasili - he and his whole family are shown in a pretty negative light throughout the book - but he recognises that his style is effective. But although neither Vasili nor Nikolai are consciously planning, their styles are quite different; Vasili has a system, an approach to life that is quite calm and relaxed; Rostov, by contrast, is fuelled by testosterone and adrenaline. He doesn’t live his whole life in this way - but in the moment, that reaction is exactly what’s called for.
Pfuhl
The German general Pfuhl, one of the commanders in the Russian army, couldn’t be more different.
Pfuhl was one of those hopelessly, immutably conceited men, obstinately sure of themselves as only Germans are, because only Germans could base their self-confidence on an abstract idea - on science, that is, the supposed possession of absolute truth.
…
He had his science - the theory of movements deduced by him from the history of Frederick the Great's wars, and everything he came across in more recent military history seemed to him preposterous and barbarous - crude struggles in which so many blunders were committed on both sides that such wars could not be called wars: they did not fit with the theory, and therefore could not serve as material for science.
…
In 1806 Pfuhl had been one of those responsible for the plan of campaign that culminated in Jena and Auerstadt; but in the outcome of that war he did not see the slightest evidence of the fallibility of his theory. On the contrary, to his mind the disaster was entirely due to the deviations that were made from his theory.Book III Part I Chapter 10
Pfuhl alone among the Russian generals was unafraid of Napoleon; and alone among the Russian generals was he immune from the temptation of self-interest. And yet while that deserves respect, Tolstoy makes it clear that Pfuhl is a loser, and should be pitied as such. He’s losing his debate with the other generals, and he’s going to lose his war with Napoleon.
Vasili’s approach worked so well partially because one assumes that in Russian society it would be bad to be known as a schemer; if people think that you’re using them, that you’re making EV calculations while you decide, then your EV goes down. In contrast, in Pfuhl’s councils it paid to have a plan and make calculations. The generals, including the Russian generals, are always coming up with schemes. But Tolstoy just doesn’t think that works. For instance, talking about decisive troop movement at Borodino, he says:
The manoeuvre was, in reality, never conceived of as a whole but came about step by step, incident by incident, moment by moment, as the result of an infinite number of most diverse conditions, and was only seen in its entirety when it was a fait accompli and belonged to the past.
Book IV Part II Chapter 1
Again we get Tolstoy’s fatalism: since everything has infinitely many cases, no individual cause matters. All that matters is that you get fate on your side.
Kutuzov
Kutuzov is the ancient Russian field-marshal, the commander-in-chief both at Austerlitz and during the invasion of 1812. And he’s Tolstoy’s military genius, despite barely doing anything at all. That’s because the irony of 1812 was that neither the French nor the Russians actually intended what happened. Both the French and the Russians wanted to fight a set-piece battle; but instead, both armies retreated, and the French were sucked deep into Russia, isolated from their supplies and tempted into disarray by the opportunities for plunder.
Kutuzov let events take their course. He fought at Borodino, bled the French, and got out of their way once they occupied Moscow. As Tolstoy has it,
Kutuzov's merit did not lie in any strategic manoeuvre of genius, as it is called, but in the fact that he alone appreciated the significance of what had happened. He was the only one at the time to understand the meaning of the French army's inactivity; he alone persisted in maintaining that the battle of Borodino was a victory; he alone - who as commander-in-chief might have been expected to favour aggressive measures - did everything in his power to hold the Russian army back from useless fighting.
Book IV Part II Chapter 1
Because [the other Russian generals] could not understand him it was accepted as the recognized thing by all these people that it was useless to talk to the old man, that he could never grasp the profundity of their plans and would only reply with one of his phrases (it seemed to them they were nothing but phrases) about a golden bridge or that crossing the frontier with a troop of vagabonds was not to be thought of, and so forth. They had heard all that before.
And everything he said - that it was necessary to wait for provisions, for instance, or that the men had no boots - was so simple, whereas what they proposed was so complicated and clever, that it was obvious to them that he was an old dotard, while they were commanders of genius, without authority to take the lead.
Book IV Part IV Chapter 10
So Kutuzov’s genius was to do nothing. He’s a hedgehog - he doesn’t have many small plans, he has one big plan, and his job is to restrain the testosterone-fuelled energy of the other generals.
But how came that old man, alone, in opposition to universal opinion, so accurately to appreciate the import of events for the nation that never once throughout his career was he untrue to it?
This extraordinary power of insight into the significance of contemporary events sprang from the purity and fervour of his identification with the people.
…
Such is the lot, not of great men - grands hommes - whom the Russian mind does not acknowledge - but of those rare and always solitary individuals who, divining the will of Providence, subordinate their personal will to it. The hatred and contempt of the multitude is their punishment for discerning the higher laws.Book IV Part IV Chapter 5
This brings us back to Tolstoy’s fatalism. Even though Kutuzov did have a plan, and stuck to it, he was merely acting as an avatar for the Russian Volksgeist. His genius, such as it was, was merely to recognise the way things had to be in Russia. That’s a reasonable conclusion for Tolstoy the spiritualist and novelist, but he’s not a historian. Having washed his hands of the possibility of a causal explanation, Tolstoy leaves us with metaphysics.
Napoleon
Tolstoy doesn’t really rate Napoleon. He certainly doesn’t think he plans. In Tolstoy’s telling, Napoleon just bounces from event to event and rationalises things post hoc. In the (slightly weird) Epilogue, Tolstoy provides a potted summary of Napoleon’s entire career to make the point that he got unreasonably lucky until 1812, and then everything started going wrong. For instance, in 1798 Napoleon lost the battle of Nile and fled Egypt; but “again so-called chance accompanies him. Malta the impregnable surrenders without a shot; his most reckless schemes are crowned with success.” And then:
Completely intoxicated by the success of his crimes and ready for his new rôle, though without any plan, he arrives in Paris just when the disintegration of the Republican government, which a year before might have made an end of him, has reached its utmost limit and his presence there now, as a newcomer free from party entanglements, can only lift him to the heights. He has no plan of any kind; he is afraid of everything; but the parties hold out their hands to him and insist on his participation. He alone - with the ideal of glory and grandeur built up in Italy and Egypt, his insane self-adulation, his insolence in crime and frankness in lying - he alone can justify what has to be done. He is needed for the place that awaits him and so, almost apart from his own volition and in spite of his indecision, his lack of a plan and all the blunders he makes, he is drawn into a conspiracy that aims at seizing power, and the conspiracy is crowned with success."
Epilogue, Part I Chapter 3
When Napoleon crossed the Niemen to invade Russia in 1812, he did so “unexpectedly, and contrary alike to strategic as well as diplomatic considerations”. When Tsar Alexander sent an ambassador to negotiate peace, Napoleon insulted him, ruining an opportunity for de-escalation.
He had plainly entered on his speech with the intention of pointing out the advantages of his position and indicating that he was nevertheless willing to negotiate. But he had begun talking, and the more he talked the less able was he to control the tenor of his words.
The whole purport of his remarks now was clearly to exalt himself and insult Alexander - precisely what he had least intended to do at the outset of the interview.
Book III Part I Chapter 6
The Germans have an expression for this:
Woher soll ich wissen was ich gedacht habe, bevor ich gehört habe, was ich gesagt habe?
How can I know what I think, before I've heard what I said?
In short, “Chance, millions of chances, invest him with authority, and all men everywhere, as if by agreement together, co-operate to confirm that power.”
So where did it all go wrong? Why did Napoleon lose the Battle of Borodino, and destroy his army in the retreat from Moscow? It’d be ironic if it was the case that Napoleon finally started to plan, only for his plans to be dashed. But it actually turns out, Napoleon had been planning this whole time; it’s just that none of it mattered. Ahead of the battle, he wrote orders for his men: "These dispositions - which are seen to be exceedingly obscure and confused if one ventures to discard superstitious awe for Napoleon's genius and analyse them - contain four points, four different orders, not one of which could be, or was, carried out."
And at Borodino, finally, Providence abandoned him. Sitting on a stool watching the battle,
Napoleon was in the grip of the depression which descends on the gambler who, after a long run of luck during which he recklessly flung his money about and won every time, suddenly finds, just when he has carefully calculated all the chances of the game, that the more he considers his play the more surely he loses.
His troops were the same, his generals the same, there had been the same preparations, the same dispositions, the same proclamations court et énergique, he himself was the same - he knew that and knew that he was vastly more experienced and skilful even than he had been before. The enemy too was the same as at Austerlitz and Friedland - yet the crushing weight of his arm fell impotent as though spellbound.
Again - why did Napoleon lose? Because Fate said so. Throughout his career, he gambled and won, probability multiplying probability in a random walk which should have - must have - led to gambler’s ruin. Yet in Russia, Providence turned against him. This isn’t a story about Napoleon’s decision-making. It’s King Lear:
As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;
They kill us for their sport.
I actually think the story of Kutuzov and Napoleon is less interesting than the micro-dramas that play out around Tolstoy’s real heroes, Prince Andrei (Maria’s brother) and Pierre (Prince Vasili’s son-in-law). In these cases, Tolstoy doesn’t pretend that everything is down to fate; private individuals have agency, even if the rulers of the states don’t.
I think my biggest issue with Kutuzov and Napoleon isn’t that Tolstoy’s position is, by virtue of his appeal to Providence, unfalsifiable; it’s actually that it’s not performative. I mean that word in the sense J.L. Austin used it: constantive statements are meaningful because they can be assessed as true or false, but performative statements do something in the world. There’s no takeaway here - just get in tune with the will of the Russian people, bro!
It reminds me a bit of when Petrarch went to visit a scholastic lecture on Aristotle’s ethics; afterwards, he wrote that “having learned this, I know slightly more than I did before. But my mind is the same as it was; my will is the same; and I am the same... what good is there knowing what virtue is, if this knowledge doesn't make us love it?" So Petrarch complained that scholastic lectures on ethics didn’t make him want to act ethically; my issue with Tolstoy’s reading of Kutuzov and Napoleon is that it makes you barely want to act at all. Why bother! It’s all up to Fate anyway.
So what should we do? Should we plan? Do you want to be Vasili, Rostov, or Pfuhl? I’ll stay on brand by finishing with a Cicero quote:
Quae contemplantes expendere oportebit, quid quisque habeat sui, eaque moderari nee velle experiri, quam se aliena deceant; id enim maxime quemque decet, quod est cuiusque maxime suum.
If we take this into consideration, we shall see that it is each man's duty to weigh well what are his own peculiar traits of character, to regulate these properly, and not to wish to try how another man's would suit him. For the more peculiarly his own a man's character is, the better it fits him.
M. Tullius Cicero, De Officiis, Book I, Section 113