A topic under examination that runs through War and Peace is the analysis of warfare. What were the keys to Napoleon’s success? The size of the army, or the genius of the man? Or something else.
In Part 15, chapter II Tolstoys starts us we thinking in terms of individual agents.
ONE OF THE MOSt conspicuous and advantageous departures from the so-called rules of warfare is the independent action of men acting separately against men huddled together in a mass. Such independent activity is always seen in a war that assumes a national character.
The author then tells us the accepted view is that it is about counting soldiers, guns, and supplies.
Military science assumes that the relative strength of forces is identical with their numerical proportions. Military science maintains that the greater the number of soldiers, the greater their strength.
But…
Military science, seeing in history an immense number of examples in which the mass of an army does not correspond with its force.
And thus Tolstoy suggests there is something else. He wants to be scientific about this thing. He calls it X.
One has but to renounce the false view that glorifies the effect of the activity of the heroes of history in warfare in order to discover this unknown quantity, x.
X is the spirit of the army, the greater or less desire to fight and to face dangers on the part of all the men composing the army, which is quite apart from the question whether they are fighting under leaders of genius or not, with cudgel or with guns that fire thirty times a minute.
It seems that what is important here is that soldiering with X is something different than soldiering in general. To fulfill a duty with X is not the same as a run-of-the-mill fulfillment of the same task. It does not quantify in the same way or lead to the same results. Labor with a purpose or a shared ambition deserves a subscript of x.
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