War and Peace Volume 3 Book 9 Chapter 1

In which the great and momentous descent of armies upon the Russian frontier is pondered with a sober and searching eye, revealing the tangled web of innumerable causes—each insufficient on its own but all necessary—that conspired to bring about a calamity defying reason and human nature. It is shown that the wills of mighty men, while seeming to govern events, are but instruments of a vast and impersonal historical force, wherein individual freedom and destiny intertwine in a manner as inevitable as the falling of a ripened apple.