Big Book 2019

Right now, I am still not sure about what I want to write about. Based on the different prompts, I am leaning more towards the fifth prompt. Throughout our past few months with Tolstoy, I have really enjoyed relating Tolstoy’s work to my own life. Although the characters in the book are living in Russia in the 1800s, a completely different world from the one I currently live in, I still feel that many of the themes touched on are still relatable.

One theme that resonated with me was familial pressures. Throughout the book, different families, including the Rostovs, Prince Vassily, and Boris’s mother, have pressured characters to pursue a certain life path. Whether it was regarding arranged marriages or pressures about the characters’ careers, familial pressure has been a recurring theme. I think this is especially relatable right now because we are currently in a transitional period. This is the first time I have really began to seriously think about my life after high-school, pertaining to college and even beyond that. Especially around the college process, I have experienced my fair share of familial pressure. Additionally, I have had more serious conversations with my family about what I want to do in life, and although they are not explicitly pressuring me like Countess Rostov, I still understand, to some extent, what some of the characters are going through.

Similarly, another idea that has resonated with me is the search for your purpose. Andrei and Pierre primarily struggle with this. Many other characters grapple with this problem as well, but the book is more focused on Andrei and Pierre’s journey. As I continue to think about what life will be in the next year or the next five years, I am amazed by how long and windy Andrei and Pierre’s paths were. It was not without severe obstacles or changes in their perspectives. It showed me that I will not be interested or engaged in the same things for my whole life. There will be change, and I am going to need to embrace it.

I feel that Tolstoy dedicates alot of the book to the idea of finding your purpose and future, also including how different factors could pressure you to go in certain directions. This seems incredibly applicable to my life right now.

“A man without convictions, without customs, without traditions, without a name, not even a Frenchman, seemingly by the strangest chances, moves among all the parties stirring up France, and, without attaching himself to any of them, is borne up to a conspicuous place.” (1133)

Without further ado, I give you Tolstoy’s Napoleon! War and Peace, written in 1965 by a Russian, it is very unsurprising that Napoleon is the ultimate archenemy of Tolstoy the author at the very least, if not the archenemy of the entire book.  From his first physical entrance into the book after the battle of Austerlitz, when he is described by Andrei as “a small, insignificant man,” (291), Tolstoy starts his crusade against Napoleon and his status (by few Europeans at the time) as a great man. Over the course of the book, Napoleon is depicted as fat, tactless, childlike, obese, cold, manipulative, husky, short (of course), and ultimately useless to the actions of the French. And while some of these are true, Tolstoy goes a bit overboard with his depiction of Napoleon, and Tolstoy also warps more than a few historical details to further his denouncement of Napoleon.

Tolstoy describes Napoleon as fat four times in two paragraphs (619), and goes on later that page to describe him as exceedingly shallow and self-obsessed: “It was very clear that only was went on in his soul was of interest to him. Everything that was outside him had no meaning for him, because everything in the world, as it seemed to him, depended only upon him” (619). This is obviously untrue, as Napoleon was quite an effective statesman as well as general, and even during campaigns, Napoleon would have correspondence with Paris to make sure things were managed well, and often some were trivial. [More on Tolstoy’s semi-ridiculous description of Napoleon]

As far as history goes, Tolstoy is far too biased a person in this subject to be taken at face value. Not once in the 1138 pages I have read thus far have I seen the slightest mention of Typhus fever, which took roughly 20% of Napoleon’s army out of commission from the crossing of the Neiman to Moscow. Additionally, Tolstoy never gives the burning of Moscow a proper allotment as a death-blow to the French army, until he came to the fire itself, he completely ignored its presence in history, skipping right from the Battle of Borodino (which, granted was a somewhat Pyrrhic victory…) to the retreat from Moscow. Nobody can argue that Napoleon wasn’t reckless in his 1812 campaign. He is quoted as saying, “1813 will see us in Moscow, 1814 at Petersburg. The Russian war is a war of three years” (Roberts, 595). Another interesting fact that Tolstoy doesn’t mention is that on average “1,000 horses were to die for every day of the 175 days the Grand Armée spent in Russia”. (Roberts, 587). [More historical inaccuracies]

[Tolstoy’s potential reasonings for denouncing Napoleon: Russian patriotism, patronage, pacifism]

[Comments on how much Tolstoy’s Napoleon can be trusted]

[Final conclusions?]

I find the opera scene to be fascinating and I thought it warranted another look. Previously, I looked into how Tolstoy’s description of the fabricated nature of opera was not too different from his descriptions of the overly planned strategies of war. I think there is actually more to be discovered in terms of connections between this opera scene and war. If we think about the opera scene as a whole, we begin to notice that the scene hardly focuses on the opera itself at all. Besides Natasha’s confused commentary on what the whole production is about, the opera itself is hardly mentioned. Rather, the main focus revolves around the social arena surrounding the opera.

Among the social buzz in the audience of the opera, Anatole’s presence is the most disruptive and noteworthy in our case. Just prior to going to the opera, Natasha can not stop thinking about Andrei and her love for him. She is completely enamored with Andrei, fantasizing about if he were with her at that moment before the opera, she “wouldn’t do it like before, with such stupid shyness at something, [she would] embrace him in a new way, simply, [she would] press [herself] to him, make him look at [her] with those searching, curious eyes,” (557) and so on. The entire carriage ride on the way to the opera, Natasha won’t stop thinking about Andrei and how much she loves and wants to be with him at that moment. However, the tables dramatically turn when Anatole enters the scene. Rather than Natasha being enraptured by her thoughts on Andrei, her attention shifts to Anatole. From the moment Anatole enters the opera box, not a single thought of Andrei populates Natasha’s mind for the rest of the evening. In fact, during one act of the opera,“Natasha, each time she glanced at the parterre, saw Anatole Kuragin… looking at her. She was pleased to see that he was so captivated by her, and it never entered her head that there was anything bad in it” (563). Natasha is basking in Anatole’s attention, not even considering how this might be wrong in relation to Andrei. Anatole proceeds to be even more disruptive to Natasha’s emotional state as the opera goes on; by the fourth act, Natasha barely is paying attention to the actual production and instead “something excited and tormented her, and the cause of it was Kuragin, whom she involuntarily followed with her eyes” (566). We know from the following sections that indeed Anatole’s influence ends up overturning Natasha’s life and her relationship with Andrei. Here, we see that the unpredictable element that capsizes Natasha’s life, Anatole, is actually not part of the opera itself but a part of the surrounding social scene of the opera.

Similarly, in war, we see that many of the unpredictable and unplannable elements that influence the battle outcomes are not necessarily in the battles themselves, but rather a part of the surrounding social events. For one, an unplanned element of the battle of Borodino is that Napoleon caught a cold. While there is ambiguity as to how much of a role Napoleon’s cold played in the ultimate end result of the battle, it seems quite likely that Napoleon’s battle strategies and his influence in crafting a different plan would have varied greatly had he not had a cold and been more involved.

Beyond the social aspect, we clearly know from the many repeated iterations from Tolstoy, that the outcome of battle is not at all due to military strategy, and has everything to do with the unplanned events that take place in the heat of the moment. Natasha planned to marry Andrei after he returned from a year abroad. While this was the plan, Anatole, the unplanned element, is really the determining factor that alters this plan. Because of unpredictable Anatole, the predicted outcome for Natasha’s love life is nearly the opposite of what was anticipated. This is the same in war, where the plans and strategies are useless when spontaneously introduced to a previously unforeseen obstacle.

Throughout War and Peace, I have been consistently interested in Tolstoy’s understanding of physics. In specific, I find his use of physical analogies to describe historical or crowd behavior compelling when compared to his lack of physical analogies in dealing with questions of free will. In my final essay, I want to explore Tolstoy’s scientific and spiritual background as a way to understand why he seems to affirm or deny the existence of free will in different contexts.

In the 1860s, when Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, the existing models of physics were Newton’s classical mechanics and Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism (however, Tolstoy would probably know little about it; furthermore, it does not appear in the novel). This means that he missed quantum mechanics, modern neuroscience, general relativity, and most of cosmology. Therefore, Tolstoy’s scientific analogies are usually aligned with classical mechanics. For example, when the French army flees Russia, Tolstoy writes that the force (he meant momentum) of the army increases in direct proportion to its velocity. Therefore, by the law of conservation of momentum, he argues that the Russian army, which has a dispersed and small mass, would not be physically capable of inflicting a stopping force on the French army. Additionally, when he describes the crowd at Rastopchin’s lynching of Vereshchagin, he indirectly invokes the ideal gas law of chemistry (PV=nRT), which says that the volume of an ideal gas increases in proportion to its pressure and temperature. This explains why the crowd suddenly swells and bursts out of its restraints when agitated, before trampling Vereshchagin like a horde of animals. Finally, one of Tolstoy’s most important theses throughout the book is that we must examine historical movements not from the viewpoint of a single person or the vantage points of discrete events in time, but with respect to all of humanity and every single infinitesimal time interval. This, of course, is in line with problems of Newtonian mechanics, which often require integration to solve.

On the other hand, Tolstoy did not understand the neuroscience of individual thought, nor did he know about future physics (such as quantum mechanics) that laid out precise rules for predicting the states of discrete, point-like particles. In War and Peace, Tolstoy consistently shows that individual lives, massive and unpredictable changes are common (unlike in history as a whole). After Tolstoy creates a highly developed plot concerning the marriage of Pierre and Heléne, Heléne suddenly and inexplicably dies, and we are informed of her death indirectly. Meanwhile, when Natasha and Andrei seem to be headed for marriage, Anatole arrives out of the blue and throws everything out of balance. Therefore, Tolstoy is much less adept at predicting the outcomes of these individual circumstances, and prefers to rely on more spiritual explanation.

One of the points I like comparing the most through these blog posts is the connection between the natural world and the events of this book. When I arrived at the start of Chapter 20 I realized almost immediately a connection to another interest of mine: Latin. The whole chapter essentially is a giant extended metaphor about how Moscow’s current state was akin to that of a queen-less beehive. What struck me about this passage is it offers a really noteworthy mirror of a passage in the Aeneid. In this passage, Aeneas and his crew have just barely made it to the shores of North Africa. After some wandering through mysterious landscapes they come upon a city. This city is so impressive to Aeneas that Vergil proceeds to relate Carthage to a thriving beehive, with Dido acting as its queen.

And here is the English translation of Lines 418-440 from Book 1 of The Aeneid (courtesy of John Dryden)

“They climb the next ascent, and, looking down,

Now at a nearer distance view the town.

The prince with wonder sees the stately tow’rs,

Which late were huts and shepherds’ homely bow’rs,

The gates and streets; and hears, from ev’ry part,

The noise and busy concourse of the mart.

The toiling Tyrians on each other call

To ply their labor: some extend the wall;

Some build the citadel; the brawny throng

Or dig, or push unwieldly stones along.

Some for their dwellings choose a spot of ground,

Which, first design’d, with ditches they surround.

Some laws ordain; and some attend the choice

Of holy senates, and elect by voice.

Here some design a mole, while others there

Lay deep foundations for a theater;

From marble quarries mighty columns hew,

For ornaments of scenes, and future view.

Such is their toil, and such their busy pains,

As exercise the bees in flow’ry plains,

When winter past, and summer scarce begun,

Invites them forth to labor in the sun;

Some lead their youth abroad, while some condense

Their liquid store, and some in cells dispense;

Some at the gate stand ready to receive

The golden burthen, and their friends relieve;

All with united force, combine to drive

The lazy drones from the laborious hive:

With envy stung, they view each other’s deeds;

The fragrant work with diligence proceeds.

“Thrice happy you, whose walls already rise!”

Aeneas said, and view’d, with lifted eyes,

Their lofty tow’rs; then, entiring at the gate,

Conceal’d in clouds (prodigious to relate)

He mix’d, unmark’d, among the busy throng,

Borne by the tide, and pass’d unseen along.”

I found the contrast so striking: Both cities were vital to the regions wellbeing, they are historically significant, metropolises of their own time for their people, not unlike a beehive. In The Aeneid, we see what that an ideal city is like a beehive, filled with energy, orderliness, and hierarchy. Tolstoy shows us what happens when the beehive falls. “ There is no longer that measured and quiet sound, the sound of work, like the sound of seething water, but one hears the discordant, scattered noise of disorder…. The native bees, dried-up, shrunken, sluggish, as if old, wander about slowly, hindering nothing, desiring nothing, having lost the awareness of life” (874-875). I found this passage so powerful because bees are a creature of boundless energy and vitality. To paint this bleak picture of a hive where the bees “smell of decay and death”  instead of their normal vibrancy reveals just how wretched Moscow is now. The city that should be the heart of the nation, alive and pulsing like a hive, is drained of all its life force from this war.

Returning to the comparison to Virgil, I am still curious to know if that passage influenced Tolstoy at all, or whether he read the Aeneid.

Attached to war is the desire to defend one’s honor.  Both the honor associated with a war-experienced nation and the honor earned by the individual who participates in the fight.  The competition for honor on the battlefield means that when one entity succeeds, the other must fall. This is where injustice comes into play.  When those with power make a mistake and feel pressured to prove themselves, they force others, especially less “significant” people, to take responsibility.  This behavior is evident in the scene where Rastopchin is addressing a crowd of angry Russian townspeople and he offers them a victim upon which to aim their displeasure.  The incident that follows only adds to Rastopchin’s already unsettled demeanor, as just a few pages earlier he “suddenly felt himself alone, weak, and ridiculous” when he is forced to take blame for not completely evacuating Moscow (885).  It begins when Rastopchin claims that the political prisoner Vereshchagin is a traitor to Russia and should therefore be punished. The crowd is hesitant, as if sensing that Rastopchin himself is not so sure about this request. Rastopchin insists that the crowd follow his directions, clearly trying to convince both the audience and himself that this act will assuage their collective frustration with his own inaction: “He has betrayed his tsar and his fatherland… and he has brought ruin on Moscow” (889).  Rastopchin, all the while, is mainly betting on the assumption that this deflection of blame will draw attention away from him and clear his name. Mob mentality takes over the crowd, and they eventually move in on Vereshchagin, though some continue to express their uneasiness.

Once on his way to Sokolniki, Rastopchin takes time to reflect on the scene that just unfolded and of which he was in command.  Obviously faced with a sense of guilt for his demand that a man be killed, Rastopchin comes up with a justification in order to put his mind at ease: “pour le bien publique,”  he thinks, claiming that everything he did was for the good of the people (891). This second attempt to recover his honor, in the form of deflection, should not be seen as a complete reversal of the earlier events, but it sure seems to fool Rastopchin.  Although his intention of giving the people an enemy to attack was theoretically helpful to the war effort, Rastopchin’s command only ended up becoming a mental and emotional burden to himself, futher deteriorating his state of mind. It requires him to spend time reassuring himself that the decisions he made in the heat of the moment had a purpose and will ultimately benefit the people.  Initially, the attack of Vereshchagin was meant to alleviate Rastopchin’s guilt for neglecting his duty to evacuate Moscow by placing blame onto a third party individual, specifically one who seems like a plausible enough villain. The result, however, was an increase of guilt and presumably a decrease in honor on Rastopchin’s part.

Time and again we have heard from Tolstoy and his opinion on the nature of war and chance. We have heard Tolstoy voice over and over that there is no true reason for the events that happen during war or even life, they simply were meant to happen. Issues resolve themselves in the end. After reading almost 1000 pages of War and Peace, I find it interesting the extent to which Tolstoy employs his own logic in the story of the book. Although I have come to dislike the way Tolstoy presents certain historical characters in his story, I must admit I admire his consistency. Just like Tolstoy consistently bashes Napoleon and the French, he also shows consistency with his employment of the inevitable and random nature of life in his plot. In just the last 150 pages (as of page 950) there have been four major events of coincidence or random occurrence that stand out as almost too perfect for the plot. They begin with the Battle of Borodino.

During the Battle of Borodino both Andrei and Anatole are both severely wounded. Andrei had been looking for Anatole for months after the ordeal between Anatole and Natasha and, having failed to find him, settled back into command of a regiment. Yet, during the most gruesome battle of the war, Anatole and Andrei both end up wounded and brought to the same medical tent to be treated. Upon seeing Anatole injured in the tent with him, Andrei “remembered everything, and a rapturous pity and love for this man filled his happy heart” (814). And just like that, the conflict between Andrei and Anatole is resolved. Forty pages later, Andrei ends up at the Rostov’s house and Natasha brings the wounded in and then with them out of Moscow. Again, just like that, the unresolved nature of Natasha and Andrei’s relationship is set up perfectly to be resolved soon. However, very briefly, the resolution hits a roadblock. Sonya and the countess find out about Andrei before Natasha can and decide not to tell her, as “they knew their Natasha, and the dread of what would happen to her at this news stifled in them any sympathy for the man, whom they both liked” (864). But again, this roadblock is swiftly demolished when “Sonya, to the countess’s astonishment and vexation, had found it necessary, no one knew why, to tell Natasha about Prince Andrei’s wound and his presence with them in the train” (915). For seemingly no reason, Sonya sets up the reunion of Natasha and Andrei, and thus furthers the plot of the book perfectly.

These “coincidences” don’t just follow Andrei either. Very recently, after being sent away from the battlefront, Nikolai gets assigned to a small village where Marya has taken residence. They are immediately matched up by the governor’s wife and their love story begins again. How could all these seemingly random events match up so perfectly in order to further the plot? Well, this is a fiction book after all, and Tolstoy loves the idea of chance. However, I think he took it too far. To put all these events consecutively is quite bold. It almost seems like, as we’re nearing the end of the book, every single storyline needs to be resolved so he’s just throwing in “coincidences”. But I remain optimistic. Tolstoy has never failed to surprise me, and I’m sure there will be quite a few more plot twists before this big book comes to a close.

For 1000 pages, I have read Tolstoy’s writing, wondering here and there (most often whenever his book turned to Napoleon or to military science/genius) how I was to reconcile his ideas with my own. Tolstoy gives very convincing arguments for why military genius doesn’t exist; his descriptions of battlefield chaos are very realistic, no doubt heavily influenced by his own experience in the Crimean War. While I have no doubt much of his battlefield descriptions are well researched and represent the truth fairly accurately, I hesitate to fully trust Tolstoy’s viewpoint on basically everything now. My hesitation comes from a pet-peeve of mine that I find ridiculous in the majority of people and unforgivable in any historian or historical work: the inability to qualify legitimate counterpoints.

On page 1000, Tolstoy, when talking about a skirmish between the French and Russians during Napoleon’s wintering (which Tolstoy names “the French army’s inactivity” that signifies its impending doom (990)), Tolstoy goes into a rant on his laws of history (which he always compares to the laws of science or mathematics): “If in the descriptions of historians, French historians in particular, we find that their wars and battles were carried out according to a predetermined plan, the only conclusion we can draw from that is that these descriptions are not correct.” Tolstoy demonstrates the all-too infuriating quality of absolutely rejecting any points or evidence counter to their own beliefs found in the worst of conversation partners.

Nevermind the fact that Napoleon was involved in sixty some-odd major battles and lost fewer than ten (if my memory serves me right, he waged 63 major battles and lost 8), and took over the largest portion of Europe since Charlemagne almost 1000 years before him. All of Napoleon’s victories and triumphs had nothing to do with him, and clearly Napoleon was not the true orchestrator of the wars, campaigns, and battles, but it was just an inevitable result of the will of the people. (If it is not clear, this paragraph is highly sarcastic…)

Tolstoy has had a fair few ideas which I have always wanted to question, such as the inevitable doom of the French army after the Battle of Borodino, the inexinstance of military science, or the hindrance of leadership. I am sure that Tolstoy’s ideas all have elements of truth in them, perhaps more than I accredit them, but without qualifications in his points (“… under these circumstances…” or “… an exception to the rule…”), Tolstoy the historian has lost my trust, and I have come to see his “history” as more Russian propaganda hogwash than historical fact.

A certain setup that has continued to repeatedly come up in War and Peace is where an outsider to a type of event is used to both analyze and explain an event to to the reader, often highlighting the flaws in the original concept. Through this Tolstoy is able to comment on topics which may have been out of the reach of an average reader, while not resorting to the plain essays we encounter on such topics as the outcome of the Battle of Borodino. Two fairly important occurrences of this setup were when Natasha visits the opera, and when Pierre explores the Battle of Borodino. I will be looking at the former.

Natasha is perfectly set up as an outsider through which we can watch the opera. She is very interested in all the city has to offer, and thus does not shrink away from attending the opera. However, as soon as it starts, it becomes very clear that she is out of her depth.

“The stage consisted of flat boards in the middle, with painted pieces of cardboard on the sides representing trees, and canvas stretched boards at the back. In the middle of the stage sat girls in red bodices and white skirts. One, very fat, in a white silk dress, sat apart on a low stool with a piece of green cardboard glued to the back of it. They were all singing something…The man in tight breeches sang alone, then she sang. Then they both fell silent, music began to play, and the man began to touch the hand of the girl in the white dress with his fingers…They sang together, and everybody in the theater clapped and shouted, and the man and the women on stage, who represented lovers, began to bow, smiling and spreading their arms. After the country, and with the serious mood she was in, Natasha found all this wild and astonishing” (560-561).

Natasha’s narration reads like someone’s first attempt at a novel: while technically the details of the scene are there, it feels more like a textbook, blandly narrating the scene. However, there is more subtlety than the emotionless narration. For example, only by the very end is it noted that they represent lovers, even though such a detail is normally critical to a story. But if we take this narration as what Natasha sees, it becomes apparent that the delay in this information is actually due to her only realizing they are lovers right at the end, driving home her lack of knowledge.

Overall, this description serves two purposes. The first is that it forces the reader to reassess the opera. When one reads this description, nothing is incorrect, and therefore has to be acknowledged as a valid view. Because of this, the reader then, at least for a brief moment, sees the opera from an outside perspective, noticing the various details that would be glossed over in order to have a good story. For example, the fake scenery. Everyone knows it’s fake, but we pretend it’s real in order to better enjoy the story. In reading this passage we are forced to re-acknowledge this. The other purpose it serves is to introduce the idea of an opera. I personally had no idea what a nineteenth century opera would look like, and I have barely more knowledge about modern day opera. After this description I now have a far better framework upon which to build my image of the scene. While one could take this as just a way to build the character of Natasha, I think this could also be viewed as Tolstoy critiquing the opera, and reminding the reader of its falseness.

The idea of Tolstoy using an outsider to examine a specific event should also take into account the immense change that Natasha has undergone by the conclusion of the opera scene. At the end, she is clapping just as much as anyone else, a stark contrast to her initial confusion. This conversion from an outsider to someone that has formed an opinion about the topic is not unique to this scene. Pierre, when viewing the Battle of Borodino, also starts out naive, but by the time he leaves the field of battle he believes quite strongly that after all the savagery of the fighting he has witnessed that they will stop soon. As we know, they do not. The similarities show that the conversion aspect is most likely intended, and thus important. One interpretation could be that Tolstoy believes it is impossible to stay truly impartial to a topic once one truly begins to learn about it.

Overall, Tolstoy uses this technique of an outsider looking in to both great analytical, and in the case of Natasha, comedic effect.

Throughout the whole book, Pierre has been a naive and clueless person that is always getting in the way or making irrational decisions. When Pierre was on the battlefield, he managed to get himself to one of the most important locations in the Battle of Borodino and got in the way. When the French officer barges into the place where Pierre is staying, he knows that he shouldn’t speak French, but due to his lack of self control, he still ends up speaking French. Although most of the decisions Pierre have made are objectively the worst one, he always seems to end up fine. His luck finally caught up to him during the burning down of Moscow.

    When Pierre wakes up after a long night of talking and drinking with the French officer, he is still caught up with the idea of assassinating Napoleon. This shows that at this point in time, Pierre hasn’t fully grown out of his naivety. If he had, he should know that there was no point trying to assassinate Napoleon since his gun had no bullets, Napoleon would have a lot of guards, and all Pierre had was a dagger that he thinks Napoleon would expect. Despite all of these shortcomings in his plan, Pierre still endeavors in his quest. The first sign of Pierre’s growth is when he helps the random woman he finds in the streets of Moscow while it is burning. The woman’s youngest daughter was trapped in a house which was burning down, so Pierre steps up to the job and puts himself in harm’s way. By doing this, Pierre has finally made a decision that proves to have actual value. After saving the child, Pierre sees a foreign woman being attacked by a French soldier and doesn’t think about the consequences, so he attacks the soldier. This action shows both his growth and his lack of forward thinking. It shows his growth because he is protecting a defenseless person against the French. It shows his lack of forward thinking because if Moscow is taken over by the French, there ought to be French soldiers everywhere and if they see some of their own being attacked they would capture the attacker. If Pierre got captured, he wouldn’t be able to execute his plan of assassinating Napoleon, which is probably a hidden fortune. Pierre’s luck most likely helped him in this situation because if he hadn’t been captured and actually tried to kill Napoleon, he would have had more harm come his way.