Tolstoy lost his house playing cards then found his senses in war and peace

Much of what I have learned about sport and betting was already known 150 years ago by Leo Tolstoy. He wrote it in the second epilogue to his novel War and Peace. In 70 pages he explained why he had written the story that graced the preceding 2,000 pages. Tolstoy did not mention sport or betting. His concern was history. But he asked a question that is relevant to all three: why do things happen?

Tolstoy thought that history as it was normally taught was nonsense.

“If the purpose of history be to give a description of the movement of humanity and of the peoples, the first question – in the absence of a reply to which all the rest will be incomprehensible – is: what is the power that moves peoples?”

Tolstoy considered every explanation he had heard for what that power might be and found them all wanting.

The most popular explanation was that history was made by the will of great men and women. Nearly always men. Tolstoy could not agree.

War and Peace is set in the early years of the nineteenth century when at times Russia was at war with France.

Tolstoy asked: why did a French army invade Russia in 1812? Historians had told him that the French army invaded because Napoleon ordered them to. But Tolstoy had studied Napoleon. He knew that Napoleon had issued lots of other orders. Some of them had been implemented and some had not.

You should not say that something happened on Napoleon’s orders, Tolstoy declared, when you knew that Napoleon ordering something did not mean it would happen.

Tolstoy concluded that Napoleon’s orders were implemented when they were compatible with the course of events, and not implemented when they were incompatible with the course of events – and who knew in advance what the course of events would be?

“History shows that the expression of the will of historical personages does not in most cases produce any effect, that is to say, their commands are not executed, and sometimes the very opposite of what they order occurs.”

It was a mistake always to assume that something happened because somebody – one identifiable person – wanted it to happen.

Six months ago, for a slightly different reason, I quoted from Tolstoy’s fictionalised version in War and Peace of the Battle of Schongrabern in Austria. It was fought in 1805 between French and Russian armies.

While researching that article I read some conventional military accounts of the battle. The contrast was striking. In the conventional military accounts, the leader of one army issued an order, which was implemented, then the leader of the other army issued a counter order, which was also implemented, and so on. Everything happened at the direction of the leaders. In Tolstoy’s version nobody has a clue what is going on. The senior officers think they do, or want others to think they do, but they do not.

“The commander… reported that his regiment had been attacked by French cavalry and that, though the attack had been repulsed, he had lost more than half his men.

“He said the attack had been repulsed, employing this military term to describe what had occurred to his regiment, but in reality he did not himself know what had happened during that half-hour to the troops entrusted to him, and could not say with certainty whether the attack had been repulsed or his regiment had been broken up.

“All he knew was that at the commencement of the action balls and shells began flying all over his regiment and hitting men and that afterwards someone had shouted ‘Cavalry!’ and our men had begun firing.”

I am lucky enough never to have been in or anywhere near a battle. The conventional military historians might be right. But I have spent quarter of a century trying to understand how and why things happen in this world. Tolstoy’s descriptions, to my ears, have a ring of truth.

Tolstoy had been a soldier in the Russian army during the Crimean War. He was in Sevastopol in 1854 when it was besieged by British and French navies. He was at the Battle of Chernaya in 1855.

Tolstoy came to believe that any violence is always wrong. He had not reached that point when he wrote War and Peace but he was close to it. Tolstoy would influence Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Gandhi corresponded with Tolstoy. But Gandhi and King might have reached the same conclusions anyway. They were open to peaceful ideas, which is why they read Tolstoy.

Football, thank goodness, is not war. Many people liken it to war but they are wrong to. Except in one sense they never realise. In a game, as in a battle, things can happen by accident as well as by design.

Some footballers are better than others, some teams are better than others. After many games we will be able to form an idea of which are which. One game can be decided by a mishap.

At the end of most Premier League seasons the team at the top have scored one goal for every 50 times they got the ball, and the team at the bottom have scored one goal for every 100 times they got the ball. The best team are twice as efficient as the worst. But both of those ratios are tiny: one in 50 and one in 100. Watching a single match you could easily mistake a side who were more like one for a side who were more like the other.

By the time Tolstoy wrote War and Peace in the 1860s he could have been a good gambler. By then he had given up gambling. As a young man he had bet recklessly in search of thrills. Football commentators often say you would put your house on a player scoring. As a young man Tolstoy lost his house playing cards.

I have come to believe that whether someone’s betting on sport is profitable over time depends heavily on how well they are able to recognise and make allowance for all of the stuff and nonsense that goes on day by day.

Often there should be a great deal of uncertainty about what has happened and why. After the Battle of Schongrabern, in Tolstoy's version, a general addressed his commanding officer.

“‘When I saw, Your Excellency, that their first battalion was disorganised, I stopped in the road and thought I’ll let them come on and will meet them with the fire of the whole battalion and that’s what I did.’

“The general had so wished to do this and was so sorry he had not managed to do it that it seemed to him as if it had really happened. Perhaps it might really have been so? Could one possibly make out amid all that confusion what did or did not happen?”

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