Battle of wills

Majority is generally believed to be the authority. It has remained an accepted principle in both the brutish and civilised societies. Those who possess the greater numbers possess the strength to subjugate and rule over the minority. In other words, the greater the numbers, the stronger the power. The strength of the numbers can be overwhelming: hundreds are nothing against thousands and thousands are nothing against millions; however, a study of ancient and modern history reveals that it is not always so. There is something else greater and more powerful than numbers. And it is the will of a few or one particular individual. In fact, it is the human will that is the real source of all power.
Some may disagree by arguing that will is guided by intellect. What they overlook is the fact that intellect itself is dictated by the human desire which in turn springs forth from ‘I will’, therefore, it is. It is true that at times intellect does lead the will but only as a guide that leads its master. Will, in the words of Schopenhauer, is just like that “strong blind man who carries on his shoulders the lame man who can see.” All that man thinks and acts is subject to the will which not only “is the only permanent and unchangeable element in the mind” but is also the glue that binds together all ideas in a harmonious manner.
If man has been able to perform great deeds, it has been possible solely because of the strength of his will. And the biggest challenge to human will lay in the struggle for power. This can be understood in the words of Nietzsche, who elaborated that “I felt for the first time that the strongest and highest will to life does not find expression in a miserable struggle for existence, but in a will to war, a will to power, a will to overpower.”
Most people struggle for mere existence. A few make a conscious use of their will to invent new things and discover yet unexplored worlds. Some others command even greater reserves of will to create masterpieces in arts and literature. However, the greatest testing field for the battle of the wills remains reserved for the domain of power where soldiers, statesmen and revolutionaries test their mettle from time to time to make and unmake history. It is here that the overwhelming power of numbers is pitted against the indomitable force of will.
In the ancient world, one such test took place in 331 BC between Alexander of Macedonia and Darius, the King of Kings of Persia. Alexander’s army of fewer than fifty thousand was no match to a million soldiers of Darius yet the Macedonian won because of the strength of his will. In such critical tests, the will needs a driver or a motivating factor to spur great deeds. Alexander had nursed a passion for a great kingdom because his father Philip had said to him, “My son! Look thee out a kingdom worthy of thyself, for Macedonia is too small for thee.” Within few years, Prince Alexander traversed about twelve thousand miles to set up a vast empire in the east to be remembered in history as Alexander, the Great.
A millennium later, the wandering Mughal prince Babur driven by the passion to set up a kingdom in the subcontinent won the contest between the will and numbers by defeating a hundred thousand soldiers of the Indian monarch Ibrahim Lodhi by fewer than twenty-five thousand men in 1526.
The exhibition of strength of will is not only restricted to empire building, it can be the manifestation of an individual’s desire to show his courage or to uphold the prestige of his country. Two centuries after Babur, Robert Clive of the British East India Company, despite his several personal flaws, braved floods, thunderstorms and diminishing supplies to fight the battle of Arcot in Carnatic in 1751 for fifty days with just five hundred soldiers against an enemy which was twenty times stronger than him. Six years down in 1757, he, again, successfully led a British force against the twenty-nine thousand troops of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula at the battle of Plassey: a battle in which Clive was outnumbered by a ratio of one to ten. It was the sterling courage of just one man that added the most precious jewel to the British Crown.
The victory of will over numbers is not an exclusive phenomenon of the East. There have been people in the West as well such as George Washington, who showed remarkable willpower despite many handicaps. His unswerving will was driven by the desire to liberate the American people from the clutches of the British colonists. He assumed the command of the resistance forces in 1775. Against the well-equipped and the adequately supplied opponents, his army was ill-armed, unpaid, ragged and badly fed, so much so that Washington complained, “We eat every kind of horse food but hay.”
Against all odds, he was determined to stand up. This determination was rooted in the justness of his cause. It was this unflinching determination that enabled him to cross the ice-filled Delaware River on the memorable Christmas night in 1776 to defeat the British garrison at Trenton. Although he was able to muster a force of three thousand, still, it was heavily outnumbered by the thirty-four thousand British troops. In 1777, the British augmented their military by sending Lord Cornwallis at the head of eight thousand troops but Washington’s will humbled the grater British numerical strength when Cornwallis was made to surrender at Yorktown in 1781. Today’s America owes its foundation to the will of one person- George Washington.
Another test of will against numbers was Gibraltar in Spain in 711, when a Muslim general Tariq bin Ziyad’s will defied death by defeating one hundred thousand soldiers of the Gothic King Roderick with a small force of twelve thousand.
Yet another case in which the will triumphed over the numerical superiority was the October 1917 Russian Revolution. The odds were too heavy against the Bolsheviks and could have humbled any person but Lenin, who was driven by the conviction that ‘history will not forgive us if we do not assume power.’ His twenty-five thousand Bolsheviks scattered throughout the country were a tiny fraction of the 180 million Russian populations and no match for the bloated Russian state that was spending about eighty million pounds per year to maintain a military force of fifteen million. Yet, the will of one person triumphed over the might of the giant Russian state. Such can be the wonders of will. Nothing remains impossible if one has a strong will spurred by an insatiable desire.

The writer is an academic and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]