illustrated by his intention of invading India and telling European heads of state that to resolve the Napoleonic Wars, they should engage in personal combat. Paul challenged the other European rulers to individual duels early in 1801, saying that they should be "accompanied as equerries, arbiters, and heralds by their most enlightened ministers and most able generals, such as Messieurs Thugut, Pitt, [and] Bernstorff, himself proposing to be accompanied by Generals Pahlen and Kutuzov".
He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting. (3.42)
He's also the first to notice the unjust hierarchy: at Kemmerich's hospital intervention, he points out how the nurses and attendants quickly respond to officers' pain, but are slow to take care of enlisted men. Kropp bonded with Paul under Himmelstoss's boot camp regime
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