The Peace Movements throughout the 19th century were strong and critical. They understood that weapons created conflict and were pushed by capitalists wanting profits from wars. The Napoleonic Wars had been horrific, but then in the 1830s and 1840s industrial iron and steel weapons got underway. The age of horses and swords was coming to an end, as the Charge of the Light Brigade showed. Tolstoy was, of course, the great chronicler of the Crimean War. War and Peace, often seen as the world’s greatest novel, is set in it. But Tolstoy also wrote directly of it. The correspondent’s direct reporting of war is devastating. He opens up the vanity of soldiering against the reality of what happened – men lying around dying. He described a soldier facing cannon who looked down at his leg, and suddenly it was not, taken off by a cannon ball. The failure of the Crimean War was written on all sides. Florence Nightingale tended the sick, often dying of gangrene and injuries, a basic fight against inhumanity. Into the Valley of Death. War was unheroic.

Tolstoy personally was converted to Christ. He understood Christ’s teaching and turned his life around. He quit elite Moscow society where he was the lauded, and went to live with the peasants. He became a pacifist, realising what the others were saying. He lampooned the military arrogance of the Kaiser. He rejected the world’s greatest novels – War and Peace and Anna Karenina – as belonging to immaturity, and he saw in depth Christ’s message of peace. “Those who take the sword perish by the sword.” There is this vast, self-defeating system. Murder is the most serious crime, but we teach our soldiers mass murder and say it is their highest calling. The Tsar is under pressure to call the 1899 Hague Peace Conference. Tolstoy, the follower of Christ, backs the Doukobors, a pacifist group which when called up into the Tsar’s army had a party and made a bonfire of their rifles. They were imprisoned in Siberia, but Tolstoy fought for their freedom and that they were right. Eventually, old and with TB, he wrote perhaps his greatest novel, Resurrection, and the royalties went to help the Doukobors migrate to Canada. This painting is of Tolstoy writing Resurrection. He held militarism to deep account in “How should We then Live?” and other writings and was part of 19th century pacifism. This was not just a withdrawal from fighting, but saw the whole system as a waste, immoral, destructive, impractical and a false religion of power. We have partly lost that clear, obvious conclusion, because the militarists have scared us. Tolstoy is for all of us, before World War One made the point even more obvious.