The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

  The enunciation of these theories by Saint-Loup was cheering. They gave me to hope that perhaps I was not being led astray, in my life at Doncières, with regard to these officers whom I heard being discussed as I sat sipping a Sauterne which bathed them in its charming golden glint, by the same magnifying power that had blown up to such huge dimensions in my eyes, while I was at Balbec, the King and Queen of the South Seas, the little group of the four gastronomes, the young gambler, and Legrandin’s brother-in-law, who were now so shrunken as to appear non-existent. What gave me pleasure today would not perhaps leave me indifferent tomorrow, as had always happened hitherto; the person that I still was at this moment was not perhaps doomed to imminent destruction, since to the ardent and fugitive passion which I felt on these few evenings for everything that concerned the military life, Saint-Loup, by what he had just been saying to me about the art of war, added an intellectual foundation, of a permanent character, capable of gripping me so strongly that I could believe, without any attempt at self-deception, that after I had left Doncières I should continue to take an interest in the work of my friends there, and should not be long in coming to pay them another visit. However, in order to be quite sure that this art of war was indeed an art in the artistic sense of the word, I said to Saint-Loup:

  “You interest me enormously. But tell me, there’s one point that puzzles me. I feel that I could become passionately involved in the art of war, but first I should want to be sure that it is not so very different from the other arts, that knowing the rules is not everything. You tell me that battles are reproduced. I do find something aesthetic, just as you said, in seeing beneath a modern battle the plan of an older one; I can’t tell you how attractive the idea sounds. But then, does the genius of the commander count for nothing? Does he really do no more than apply the rules? Or, granted equal knowledge, are there great generals as there are great surgeons, who, when the symptoms exhibited by two cases of illness are identical to the outward eye, nevertheless feel, for some infinitesimal reason, founded perhaps on their experience, but interpreted afresh, that in one case they ought to do this, in another case that; that in one case it is better to operate, in another to wait?”

  “But of course! You’ll find Napoleon not attacking when all the rules demanded that he should attack, but some obscure divination warned him not to. For instance, look at Austerlitz, or, in 1806, his instructions to Lannes. But you will find certain generals slavishly imitating one of Napoleon’s manoeuvres and arriving at a diametrically opposite result. There are a dozen examples of that in 1870. But even as regards the interpretation of what the enemy may do, what he actually does is only a symptom which may mean any number of different things. Each of them has an equal chance of being the right one, if you confine yourself to logic and science, just as in certain difficult cases all the medical science in the world will be powerless to decide whether the invisible tumour is malignant or not, whether or not the operation ought to be performed. It is his flair, his divination, his crystal-gazing (if you know what I mean) which decides, in the case of the great general as of the great doctor. Thus I explained to you, to take one instance, what a reconnaissance on the eve of a battle might signify. But it may mean a dozen other things, such as making the enemy think you’re going to attack him at one point whereas you intend to attack him at another, putting up a screen which will prevent him from seeing the preparations for your real operation, forcing him to bring up fresh troops, to fix them there, to immobilise them in a different place from where they are needed, forming an estimate of the forces at his disposal, sounding him out, forcing him to show his hand. Sometimes, even, the fact that you deploy an immense number of troops in an operation is by no means a proof that that is your true objective; for you may carry it out in earnest, even if it is only a feint, so that the feint may have a better chance of deceiving the enemy. If I had time now to go through the Napoleonic wars from this point of view, I assure you that these simple classic movements which we study here, and which you’ll come and see us practising in the field, just for the pleasure of an outing, you young rotter (no, I know you’re not well, I’m sorry!), well, in a war, when you feel behind you the vigilance, the judgment, the profound study of the High Command, you’re as moved by them as by the beam of a lighthouse, a purely physical light but none the less an emanation of the mind, sweeping through space to warn ships of danger. In fact I may perhaps be wrong in speaking to you only of the literature of war. In reality, as the formation of the soil, the direction of wind and light tell us which way a tree will grow, so the conditions in which a campaign is fought, the features of the country through which you manoeuvre, prescribe, to a certain extent, and limit the number of the plans among which the general has to choose. Which means that along a mountain range, through a system of valleys, over certain plains, it’s almost with the inevitability and the grandiose beauty of an avalanche that you can predict the line of an army on the march.”

  “Now you deny me that freedom of choice in the commander, that power of divination in the enemy who is trying to read his intentions, which you allowed me a moment ago.”

  “Not at all. You remember that book of philosophy we read together at Balbec, the richness of the world of possibilities compared with the real world. Well, it’s exactly the same with the art of war. In a given situation there will be four plans that apply and among which the general may choose, as a disease may take various courses for which the doctor has to be prepared. And there again human weakness and human greatness are fresh causes of uncertainty. For of these four plans let us assume that contingent reasons (such as the attainment of minor objectives, or the time factor, or numerical inferiority and inadequate supplies) lead the general to prefer the first, which is less perfect but less costly and swifter to execute, and has for its terrain a richer country for feeding his troops. He may, after having begun with this plan, which the enemy, uncertain at first, will soon detect, find that success lies beyond his grasp, the difficulties being too great (that is what I call the element of human weakness), abandon it and try the second or third or fourth. But it may equally be that he has tried the first plan (and this is what I call human greatness) merely as a feint to pin down the enemy, so as to surprise him later at a point where he has not been expecting an attack. Thus at Ulm, Mack, who expected the enemy to attack from the west, was encircled from the north where he thought he was perfectly safe. My example is not a very good one, as a matter of fact. Actually Ulm is a better example of the battle of encirclement, which the future will see reproduced because it is not only a classic example from which generals will draw inspiration, but a form that is to some extent logically necessary (like several others, thus leaving room for choice and variety) like a type of crystallisation. But it doesn’t much matter really, because these conditions are after all artificial. To go back to our philosophy book; it’s like the rules of logic or scientific laws, reality conforms to them more or less, but remember the great mathematician Poincaré: he’s by no means certain that mathematics is a rigorously exact science. As to the rules themselves, which I mentioned to you, they are of secondary importance really, and besides they’re altered from time to time. We cavalrymen, for instance, live by the Field Service of 1895, which may be said to be out of date since it is based on the old and obsolete doctrine which maintains that cavalry action has little more than a psychological effect by creating panic in the enemy ranks. Whereas the more intelligent of our teachers, all the best brains in the cavalry, and particularly the major I was telling you about, consider on the contrary that the issue will be decided in a real free-for-all with sabre and lance and the side that can hold out longer will be the winner, not merely psychologically, by creating panic, but physically.”

  “Saint-Loup is quite right, and it’s likely that the next Field Service will reflect this new school of thought,” my neighbour observed.

  “I’m glad to have your support, since your opinions seem to make more impression upon my f
riend than mine,” said Saint-Loup with a smile, whether because the growing liking between his comrade and myself annoyed him slightly or because he thought it graceful to solemnise it with this official acknowledgement. “Perhaps I may have underestimated the importance of the rules. They do change, that must be admitted. But in the meantime they control the military situation, the plans of campaign and troop concentration. If they reflect a false conception of strategy they may be the initial cause of defeat. All this is a little too technical for you,” he remarked to me. “Always remember that, when all’s said and done, what does most to accelerate the evolution of the art of war is wars themselves. In the course of a campaign, if it is at all long, you will see one belligerent profiting by the lessons provided by the enemy’s successes and mistakes, perfecting the methods of the latter, who will improve on them in turn. But all that is a thing of the past. With the terrible advance of artillery, the wars of the future, if there are to be any more wars, will be so short that, before we have had time to think of putting our lessons into practice, peace will have been signed.”

  “Don’t be so touchy,” I told Saint-Loup, reverting to the first words of this speech. “I was listening to you quite avidly!”

  “If you will kindly not take offence, and will allow me to speak,” his friend went on, “I shall add to what you’ve just been saying that if battles reproduce themselves indistinguishably it isn’t merely due to the mind of the commander. It may happen that a mistake on his part (for instance, his failure to appreciate the strength of the enemy) will lead him to call upon his men for extravagant sacrifices, sacrifices which certain units will make with an abnegation so sublime that the part they play will be analogous to that of some other unit in some other battle, and they’ll be quoted in history as interchangeable examples: to stick to 1870, we have the Prussian Guard at Saint-Privat, and the Turcos at Froeschviller and Wissembourg.”

  “Ah, interchangeable; precisely! Excellent! The lad has brains,” was Saint-Loup’s comment.

  I was not insensible to these last examples, as always when, beneath the particular instance, I was afforded a glimpse of the general law. What really interested me, however, was the genius of the commander; I was anxious to discover in what it consisted, how, in given circumstances, when the commander who lacked genius could not withstand the enemy, the inspired commander would set about restoring his jeopardised position, which, according to Saint-Loup, was quite possible and had been done several times by Napoleon. And to understand what good generalship meant I asked for comparisons between the various commanders whom I knew by name, which of them had most markedly the character of a leader, the gifts of a tactician—at the risk of boring my new friends, who however showed no signs of boredom, but continued to answer me with an inexhaustible good-nature.

  I felt cut off—not only from the great icy darkness which stretched out into the distance and in which we could hear from time to time the whistle of a train which only accentuated the pleasure of being there, or the chimes of an hour still happily distant from that at which these young men would have to buckle on their sabres and go—but also from all external preoccupations, almost from the memory of Mme de Guermantes, by the kindness of Saint-Loup, to which that of his friends, reinforcing it, gave, so to speak, a greater solidity; by the warmth, too, of that little dining-room, by the savour of the exquisite dishes that were set before us. These gave as much pleasure to my imagination as to my palate; sometimes the little piece of nature from which they had been extracted, the rugged holy-water stoup of the oyster in which lingered a few drops of brackish water, or the gnarled stem, the yellowed branches of a bunch of grapes, still enveloped them, inedible, poetic and distant as a landscape, evoking as we dined successive images of a siesta in the shade of a vine or of an excursion on the sea; on other evenings it was the cook alone who brought out these original properties of the viands, presenting them in their natural setting, like works of art, and a fish cooked in a court-bouillon was brought in on a long earthenware platter, on which, standing out in relief on a bed of bluish herbs, intact but still contorted from having been dropped alive into boiling water, surrounded by a ring of satellite shell-fish, of animalcules, crabs, shrimps and mussels, it had the appearance of a ceramic dish by Bernard Palissy.