Book Fourteen (1812) — Chapter 16

The statistical dissolution of the Grande Armée. From Moscow to Vyázma: seventy-three thousand men reduced to thirty-six thousand, with fewer than five thousand actual battle deaths — the rest are cold, starvation, desertion, disease. A marshal's report to Napoleon reads as a litany of units that no longer exist. At Smolénsk, which the French had told themselves for a thousand miles would be the promised land of food and rest, they found nothing, sacked their own stores, killed each other, and moved on. Napoleon is still being addressed as 'Sire.' He is still issuing orders of the day. The form of command continues while the army ceases to exist.

The chapter is one of the novel's most harrowing in its simplicity. Tolstoy does not describe suffering; he describes numbers, and lets the arithmetic be the horror. A corps that was sixty thousand men is four thousand. Another is twelve hundred. The marshal's letter quoted in the middle of the chapter is written in the formal language of official military correspondence — the language of a functioning army — and its content is the description of an institution that has ceased to function. The gap between the form of the letter and its content is the whole of Tolstoy's satirical argument about Napoleon's command.

The chapter closes on Napoleon and his staff continuing 'their old habits: wrote commands, letters, reports, and orders of the day; called one another sire, mon cousin.' This is the image of institutional momentum outlasting institutional substance. The Grande Armée is gone; its paperwork continues. Tolstoy has always been interested in the way human beings maintain social forms in conditions that have made those forms meaningless, and this is his darkest example of the phenomenon.