The mighty drama of the Napoleonic advance from 1805 to 1812 comes into the novel, in so far as it affects the members of those two families. But Tolstoy is not content merely to tell us of historic events. He introduces a whole philosophy of history, which is sound at bottom though no doubt he somewhat overstates his case, as is his habit. The theory is that the 'great' men of history count for very little. They are the figureheads of forces that are beyond their control. They do most good and least harm when, like Koutoúzof, they are aware of the true direction of the great human forces and adapt themselves to them; but then they are modest, and the world does not esteem them great. The typical case of the impotent 'great' man is Napoleon in 1812, at the time of his invasion of Russia. He posed before the world as a man of destiny whose will and intellect decided the fate of empires. Yet from first to last, during that campaign, he never in the least knew what was about to happen. The result was decided by the spirit of the Russian nation, and by its steadfast endurance. Every common Russian soldier who understood that the Russian people dreaded and detested the thought of a foreign yoke, and who therefore co-operated with the natural course of events, did more to further the result than Napoleon, that 'most insignificant tool of history,' as Tolstoy calls him, who even in St. Helena was never able to understand what had caused his overthrow.
The main theme of the novel, if it be permissible to select a main theme out of the many latent in the story, is Tolstoy's favourite thesis. He tacitly asks: What is good and what is bad? With what must we sympathise and what must we reject? And the reply is that the predatory, artificial and insincere types, exemplified historically by the invading French, as well as by such characters among the Russians as Ellen, Anatole and Dólohof, are repugnant to him, while he loves the humble, the meek and the sincere: Marie and Platon Karatáef, Natásha (so impulsive and charming in her youth, so absorbed in her family later on), and Pierre (who is often humble and always sincere, and loves ideas and ideals).
It is impossible to do justice to this wonderful book in any brief summary. It is not a work to be summed up in a few pages. It has many characters, all of them so distinctly drawn that we know them better than we know our personal acquaintances. It treats of life's deepest experiences from the cradle to the grave; and to read it with the care it deserves is to know life better and see it more sanely and seriously than one ever did before. Some foolish people think that reading novels is a waste of time; but there are hardly any books—at any rate hardly any big books—that are better worth reading than Tolstoy's novels.
He is probably justified in claiming that his history is truer than the historians' history of the battles of Schöngraben, Austerlitz, and Borodinó. The historians, from mendacious military reports drawn up after the action, try to discover what the Commanders-in-Chief meant to do; and to tell their story within moderate limits they have to systematise what was really a huge disorder; thereby giving their readers a completely wrong impression of what a battle is like.
N. N. Mouravyóf, a Commander-in-Chief who distinguished himself in more than one war, declared he had never read a better description of a battle than Tolstoy's account of Schöngraben; and added that he was convinced from his own experience that during a battle it is impossible to carry out a Commander-in-Chief's orders.
Tolstoy, when he wrote the book, was convinced that war is inevitable. The idea that it is man's duty to resist war and to refuse to take part in it, came to him later.
In an article entitled 'Some Words about War and Peace,' which he wrote in 1868 for one of the periodicals, he says:
'Why did millions of people kill one another, when since the foundation of the world it has been known that this is both physically and morally bad?
'Because it was so inevitably necessary, that when doing it they fulfilled the elemental zoological law bees fulfil when they kill one another in autumn, and male animals fulfil when they destroy one another. No other reply can be given to that dreadful question.'
Yet his inveterate truthfulness, and his personal knowledge of war, caused him to describe it so exactly, that the result is tantamount to a condemnation. As Kropótkin says, War and Peace is a powerful indictment of war. The effect which the great writer has exercised in this direction upon his generation can be actually seen in Russia. It was already apparent during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8, when it was impossible to find in Russia a correspondent who would have described how 'we peppered the enemy with grape-shot,' or how 'we knocked them down like ninepins.' If any one could have been found to use in his letters such survivals of barbarism, no paper would have dared to print them. The general character of the Russian war-correspondent had totally changed; and during that war there appeared Gárshin the novelist, and Verestchágin the painter, 'with whom to combat war became a life work.'