Page 2260 - war-and-peace

sia.
If throughout his reign Napoleon gave commands con-
cerning an invasion of England and expended on no other
undertaking so much time and effort, and yet during his
whole reign never once attempted to execute that design
but undertook an expedition into Russia, with which coun-
try he considered it desirable to be in alliance (a conviction
he repeatedly expressed)this came about because his com-
mands did not correspond to the course of events in the first
case, but did so correspond in the latter.
For an order to be certainly executed, it is necessary that
a man should order what can be executed. But to know what
can and what cannot be executed is impossible, not only in
the case of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in which millions
participated, but even in the simplest event, for in either
case millions of obstacles may arise to prevent its execution.
Every order executed is always one of an immense number
unexecuted. All the impossible orders inconsistent with the
course of events remain unexecuted. Only the possible ones
get linked up with a consecutive series of commands corre-
sponding to a series of events, and are executed.
Our false conception that an event is caused by a com-
mand which precedes it is due to the fact that when the
event has taken place and out of thousands of others those
few commands which were consistent with that event have
been executed, we forget about the others that were not
executed because they could not be. Apart from that, the
chief source of our error in this matter is due to the fact
that in the historical accounts a whole series of innumer-

2260 War and Peace