CHAPTER ONE

The Warning


Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy went to war in 1851, at age twenty-two. The young aristocrat dropped out of university, entered the army, then spent three years in the Caucasus Mountains. As a junior officer, he was mobilized west with the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854, nearly dying in a blizzard on the transfer by horse-drawn sleigh. After a stint on the Romanian front, where the strife had broken out after Western powers opposed Tsar Nicholas I’s designs over Ottoman lands, Tolstoy was sent to the war-torn peninsula that gave the conflict its name. There Tolstoy, who had been born in 1828, acquired a skepticism of making war humane that matters even today. Especially today.

It would last his whole life long—but it would take a radically different shape in his youth and his old age. Revisiting the origins of the laws of war with Tolstoy, whatever his idiosyncratic and objectionable conclusions, is of enormous value today. He offered the most eloquent and thought-provoking reservations ever leveled against the attempt to “humanize” war, highlighting the moral risk of failing to combine the desire for less brutal war with skepticism toward war itself—since war routinely makes the world worse, no matter how humanely fought, and almost never better.

While a soldier, Tolstoy passed almost a year in and around Sevastopol, where the Crimean War would end in an eleven-month siege of the picturesque Russian town on the Black Sea by a multinational alliance of armies. Arriving in its midst, Tolstoy manned one of Sevastopol’s fortified high bastions during the climactic ten-day bombardment of the town. Tolstoy wrote three short stories about the siege, culminating in an account of that final battle for the city. These stories first crystallized his belief that war itself is the moral evil to be concerned about, not the niceties of how it is fought.

The sketches, which established Tolstoy’s national fame, begin with his introduction to Sevastopol under siege in December 1854, in a moment of quiet when he is rudely led into the amputation room for wounded soldiers. “You will see ghastly sights that will rend your soul,” he writes, “you will see war not with its orderly beautiful and brilliant ranks, its music and beating drums, its waving banners, its generals on prancing horses, but war in its real aspect of blood, suffering, and death.” The sketch concludes with nationalist hopes for Russian victory, but its concern for wounded soldiers already led in a different direction: not to aspirations for better treatment but to grim reflections on the propriety of the enterprise of killing.

Then everything changed. In the second sketch, set six months later, in May 1855, brief concern evolved into barbed criticism. After six months of siege, the reports of bullets and the shriek of cannon fire rang in his ears as they were traded from ramparts to trenches daily. And the “angel of death hovered unceasingly,” for in a stalemated confrontation “the question the diplomats did not settle still remains unsettled by powder and blood.”

But Tolstoy did not conclude his sketch with powder and blood. Rather, he chose a truce that had been established for humane purposes. And he found the morality of caring for soldiers’ bodies during a pause in the fracas wanting. Beneath the incongruously resplendent sun, the officers of both sides manage to agree to a truce during which each would take responsibility for its dead and wounded. “Yes, there are white flags on the bastions and the trenches but the flowery valley is covered with dead bodies.” The scene was certainly sickening: “Hundreds of men, with curses and prayers on parched lips, tossed and groaned,” among “the corpses in the flowering valley,” “the bodies of men who two hours earlier had been filled with all manner of hopes and desires.” While the officers chat across lines about tobacco, the caregiving takes place before the engagement resumes.

About the ability of warring armies to agree to a moment of humanity during hostilities, the sketch is caustic. The humane treatment of the wounded does not interfere with the greater evil of war, Tolstoy reflects, let alone lead to peace. “Thousands of people crowd together, look at, speak to, and smile at one another. And these people—Christians professing the one great law of love and self-sacrifice—on seeing what they have done do not at once fall repentant on their knees.” Instead, they pick up where they left off: “The white flags are lowered, the engines of death and suffering are sounding again, innocent blood is flowing and the air is filled with moans and curses.”

The exhibition of humanity was little more than a pause amid death-dealing. Humanity might even make it worse. What Tolstoy could not yet know was that a decade hence another battle would prompt the invention of international law for humane war. Rafts of new treaties covering more topics have since followed, protecting soldiers in more situations along with more kinds of people—civilians, especially—and regulating means and methods of warfare, too. As for Tolstoy, he went a different way, refining and elaborating his suspicion that making war humane only allowed it to break out more often or drag on endlessly.

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Americans only recently have come to face a binary choice between two forms of interminable war: intense or humane, dirty or clean. Some time ago, Americans were at the forefront of another possibility: pacification. The ambitions of those Americans exerted an enormous influence on Tolstoy and on twentieth-century politics before almost disappearing in the twenty-first.

The transatlantic peace movement was one of the most extraordinary novelties of the nineteenth century, the more so since it was genuinely unprecedented. The idea of making war more humane had roots in practices of restraint in warfare deep in the mists of history. The idea that peace was available in human affairs, by contrast, was a genuine novelty. One Quaker complained that because people could not envision a world without war, they acquiesced in it as “in the rising of the sun, without any other idea than that it is part of the ordinary processes of the world.” Yet Enlightenment theorists and nineteenth-century movements arose convinced that there was no need to wait for the end of days when, as the biblical prophets had promised, nation would not lift up their swords against nation, nor learn war anymore.

Now modernity afforded a new sense of possibility. Other plagues, such as hierarchy, poverty, and slavery, also came to seem, especially after the French Revolution, eliminable rather than eternal. It was suddenly credible that, even if animal aggression was eternal, human beings could transcend it through self-reform and finally put the scourge of war in the past. The evil that pacifists condemned had to be reimagined as a practice that could be brought to an end. “All history is the decline of war,” Ralph Waldo Emerson explained in 1838. The trouble was that “the right of war remains.”

To spread the word that war ought not to be tolerated as ordinary, Americans founded the first nongovernmental associations aiming at pacifying international relations in 1815. Soon, their fledgling activism was dwarfed by British movements, thanks especially to the Peace Society, formed in 1816. By the later nineteenth century, Continental Europe was awash in peace mobilization, too.

For a long time, it was Christians, citing the example of Jesus himself, who most frequently dreamed the dream of an end to war. For many proponents of a peace mobilization—Tolstoy not least—pacifism followed simply from taking Christianity seriously. A few transatlantic sects, such as Anabaptists, Mennonites, and Quakers, had for centuries understood refusal to take up arms as part of their faith. They were right to think that Jesus’s message had less to do with making war humane than with turning the other cheek.


Copyright © 2021 by Samuel MoynAll rights reservedFirst edition, 2021