1 Why war and revolution occur we do not know.
2 Napoleon ordered an army to be raised and go to war.
3 During the national war he was inactive because he was not needed.
4 The Austro-Prussian war appears to us undoubtedly the result of the crafty conduct of Bismarck, and so on.
5 The Napoleonic wars still seem to us, though already questionably, to be the outcome of their heroes' will.
6 During the war in Italy he is several times on the verge of destruction and each time is saved in an unexpected manner.
7 That city is taken; the Russian army suffers heavier losses than the opposing armies had suffered in the former war from Austerlitz to Wagram.
8 But as soon as the necessity for a general European war presented itself he appeared in his place at the given moment and, uniting the nations of Europe, led them to the goal.
9 When, for instance, we say that Napoleon ordered armies to go to war, we combine in one simultaneous expression a whole series of consecutive commands dependent one on another.
10 The diplomatists think that their disagreements are the cause of this fresh pressure of natural forces; they anticipate war between their sovereigns; the position seems to them insoluble.
11 In describing a war or the subjugation of a people, a general historian looks for the cause of the event not in the power of one man, but in the interaction of many persons connected with the event.
12 They spoke of the countess' health, of their mutual friends, of the latest war news, and when the ten minutes required by propriety had elapsed after which a visitor may rise, Nicholas got up to say good-by.
13 If the aim of the European wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century had been the aggrandizement of Russia, that aim might have been accomplished without all the preceding wars and without the invasion.
14 The historical figures at the head of armies, who formerly reflected the movement of the masses by ordering wars, campaigns, and battles, now reflected the restless movement by political and diplomatic combinations, laws, and treaties.