War and Peace (200 page)

Getting chilled by the dying fire on the previous night’s halt, Pierre had got up and moved to the next fire, which was burning better. There Platon was sitting, with a coat put over his head, like a priest’s chasuble. In his flexible, pleasant voice, feeble now from illness, he was telling the soldiers a story Pierre had heard already. It was past midnight, the time when Karataev’s fever usually abated, and he was particularly lively. As he drew near the fire and heard Platon’s weak, sickly voice, and saw his piteous mien in the bright firelight, Pierre felt a pang at heart. He was frightened at his own pity for this man, and would have gone away, but there was no other fire to go to, and trying not to look at Platon, he sat down by it.

“Well, how is your fever?” he asked.

“How is my fever? Weep over sickness, and God won’t give you
death,” said Karataev, and he went back at once to the story he had begun.

“And so, brother,” he went on with a smile on his thin, white face, and a peculiar, joyful light in his eyes, “And so, brother …”

Pierre had heard the story long before. Karataev had told it to him, about six times already, and always with special joyful emotion. But well as Pierre knew the story, he listened to it now as though it were something new, and the subdued ecstasy, which Karataev evidently felt in telling it, infected Pierre too.

It was the story of an old merchant, who had lived in good works and in the fear of God with his family, and had made a journey one day with a companion, a rich merchant, to Makary.

Both the merchants had put up at an inn and gone to sleep; and next day the rich merchant had been found robbed, and with his throat cut. A knife, stained with blood, was found under the old merchant’s pillow. The merchant was tried, sentenced to be flogged, and to have his nostrils slit—all according to the law in due course, as Karataev said—and sent to hard labour.

“And so, brother” (it was at this point in the story that Pierre found Karataev) “ten years or more passed by after that. The old man lives on in prison. He submits, as is fitting; he does nothing wrong. Only he prays to God for death. Very well. And so at night-time they are gathered together, the convicts, just as we are here, and the old man with them. And so they fall to talking of what each is suffering for, and how he has sinned against God. One tells how he took a man’s life, another two, another had set fire to something, and another was a runaway just for no reason. So they began asking the old man, ‘What,’ they say, ‘are you suffering for, grandfather?’ ‘I am suffering, dear brethren,’ says he, ‘for my own sins, and for other men’s sins. I have not taken a life, nor taken other men’s goods, save what I have bestowed on poorer brethren. I was a merchant, dear brethren, and I had great wealth.’ And he tells them this and that, and how the whole thing had happened. ‘For myself,’ says he, ‘I do not grieve. God has chastened me. The only thing,’ says he, ‘I am sorry for my old wife and my children.’ And so the old man fell a-weeping. And it so happened that in that company there was the very man, you know, who had killed the merchant. ‘Where did it happen, grandfather?’ says he. ‘When and in what month?’ and so he asked him all about it. His heart began to ache. He goes up to the old man like this—and falls down at his feet. ‘You are suffering for me, old man,’
says he. ‘It’s the holy truth; this man is tormented innocently, for nothing, lads,’ says he. ‘I did that deed,’ says he, ‘and put the knife under his head when he was asleep. Forgive me, grandfather, for Christ’s sake!’ says he.”

Karataev paused, smiling blissfully, and gazing at the fire, as he rearranged the logs.

“The old man, he says, ‘God forgive you,’ says he, ‘but we are all sinners before God,’ says he. ‘I am suffering for my own sins.’ And he wept with bitter tears. What do you think, darling?” said Karataev, his ecstatic smile growing more and more radiant, as though the great charm and whole point of his story lay in what he was going to tell now, “what do you think, darling, that murderer confessed of himself to the police. ‘I have killed six men,’ says he (for he was a great criminal), ‘but what I am most sorry for is this old man. Let him not weep through my fault.’ He confessed. It was written down, and a paper sent off to the right place. The place was far away. Then came a trial. Then all the reports were written in due course, by the authorities, I mean. It was brought to the Tsar. Then a decree comes from the Tsar to let the merchant go free; to give him the recompense they had awarded him. The paper comes; they fall to looking for the old man. Where was that old man who had suffered innocently? The paper had come from the Tsar, and they fell to looking for him.” Karataev’s lower jaw quivered. “But God had pardoned him already—he was dead! So it happened, darling!” Karataev concluded, and he gazed a long while straight before him, smiling silently.

Not the story itself, but its mysterious import, the ecstatic gladness that beamed in Karataev’s face as he told it, the mysterious significance of that gladness vaguely filled and rejoiced Pierre’s soul now.

“To your places!” a voice shouted suddenly.

There was a cheerful stir among the prisoners and convoy soldiers, and an air of expecting something festive and solemn. Shouted commands could be heard on all sides, and a party of well-dressed cavalry soldiers on good horses came trotting up from the left, making a circuit round the prisoners. Every face wore the look of nervousness commonly seen at the approach of men in authority. The prisoners huddled
together and were shoved out of the way. The convoy soldiers formed in ranks.

“The Emperor! The Emperor! The marshal! The duke!…” and the sleek cavalry soldiers had hardly ridden by when a carriage rattled up drawn by grey horses. Pierre had a passing glimpse of the serene, handsome, fat, white face of a man in a three-cornered hat. It was one of the marshals. The marshal’s eye was caught by Pierre’s big, striking figure; and in the expression with which he frowned and looked away Pierre fancied he saw pity and the desire to conceal it.

The general in charge of the transport whipped up his lean horse, and galloped after the carriage with a red, panic-stricken face. Several officers met in a group; the soldiers came round them. All had excited and uneasy faces.

“What did he say? What was it he said?…” Pierre heard.

While the marshal was driving by, the prisoners had been hustled together into one group, and Pierre caught sight of Karataev, whom he had not yet seen that morning. He was sitting, wrapped in his little military coat, leaning against a birch-tree. His face still wore the same look of joyous emotion as when he had been telling the story of the merchant, but it had another expression too, a look of subdued solemnity.

Karataev looked at Pierre with his kindly, round eyes, that were bright now with tears, and there was an unmistakable appeal in them. He evidently wanted to say something to him. But Pierre was in too great dread for himself. He made as though he had not seen that look, and hastily walked away.

When the prisoners set off again Pierre looked back. Karataev was sitting under the birch-tree by the edge of the road, and two Frenchmen were bending over him in conversation. Pierre did not look again. He went on limping up the hill.

There was the sound of a shot behind, at the spot where Karataev was sitting. Pierre heard that shot distinctly, but at the moment that he heard it, he recalled that he had not finished reckoning up how many stages were left to Smolensk, the calculation he had begun before the marshal rode by. And he began to reckon. Two French soldiers ran by Pierre, one holding a still smoking gun. They were both pale, and in the expression of their faces—one of them glanced timidly at Pierre—there was something like what he had seen in the young soldier at the execution in Moscow. Pierre looked at the soldier and remembered
how, the day before yesterday, the man had burnt his shirt in drying it before the fire, and how the others had laughed at him.

The dog began to howl behind at the spot where Karataev was sitting. “Silly creature! what is she howling for?” thought Pierre

The prisoners, his companions marching at his side, like him, refrained from looking back to the place whence came the sound of the shot and the dog’s howl. There was a set look on all their faces.

The cavalry transport, and the prisoners, and the marshal’s baggage-train, halted at the village of Shamshevo. All crowded together round the campfire. Pierre went up to a fire, ate some roast horse-flesh, lay down with his back to the fire, and at once fell asleep. He fell into the same sort of sleep that he had slept at Mozhaisk, after the battle of Borodino.

Again the facts of real life mingled with his dreams; and again some one, himself or some one else, was uttering thoughts in his ear, and the same thoughts, indeed, as had come in his dream at Mozhaisk.

Life is everything. Life is God. All is changing and moving, and that motion is God. And while there is life, there is the joy of the consciousness of the Godhead. To love life is to love God. The hardest and the most blessed thing is to love this life in one’s sufferings, in undeserved suffering.

“Karataev!” flashed into Pierre’s mind. And all at once there rose up, as vivid as though alive, the image, long forgotten, of the gentle old teacher, who had given Pierre geography lessons in Switzerland. “Wait a minute,” the old man was saying. And he was showing Pierre a globe. This globe was a living, quivering ball, with no definite limits. Its whole surface consisted of drops, closely cohering together. And those drops were all in motion, and changing, several passing into one, and then one splitting up again into many. Every drop seemed striving to spread, to take up more space, but the others, pressing upon it, sometimes absorbed it, sometimes melted into it.

“This is life,” the old teacher was saying.

“How simple it is and how clear,” thought Pierre. “How was it I did not know that before? God is in the midst, and each drop strives to expand, to reflect Him on the largest scale possible. And it grows, and
is absorbed and crowded out, and on the surface it disappears, goes back into the depths, and falls not to the surface again. That is how it is with him, with Karataev; he is absorbed and has disappeared.”

“You understand, my child,” said the teacher.

“You understand, damn you!” shouted a voice, and Pierre woke up.

He raised his head and sat up. A French soldier was squatting on his heels by the fire. He had just shoved away a Russian soldier, and was roasting a piece of meat on the end of a ramrod. His sinewy, lean, hairy, red hands, with short fingers, were deftly turning the ramrod. His brown, morose face, with its sullen brows, could be clearly seen in the light of the glowing embers.

“It’s just the same to him,” he muttered, quickly addressing a soldier standing behind him. “Brigand! go!”

And the soldier, turning the ramrod, glanced gloomily at Pierre. The latter turned away, gazing into the shadows. A Russian soldier, the one who had been pushed away, was sitting near the fire, patting something with his hand. Looking more closely, Pierre saw the grey dog, who was sitting by the soldier, wagging her tail.

“Ah, she has come …” said Pierre. “And Plat …” he was beginning, but he did not go on. All at once, instantly in close connection, there rose up the memory of the look Platon had fixed upon him, as he sat under the tree, of the shot heard at that spot, of the dog’s howl, of the guilty faces of the soldiers as they ran by, of the smoking gun, of Karataev’s absence at that halting-place; and he was on the point of fully realising that Karataev had been killed, but at the same instant, at some mysterious summons, there rose up the memory of a summer evening he had spent with a beautiful Polish lady on the verandah of his house at Kiev. And nevertheless, making no effort to connect the impressions of the day, and to deduce anything from them, Pierre closed his eyes, and the picture of the summer night in the country mingled with the thought of bathing and of that fluid, quivering globe, and he seemed to sink deep down into water, so that the waters closed over his head.

Before sunrise he was wakened by loud and rapid shots and outcries. The French were flying by him.

“The Cossacks!” one of them shouted, and a minute later a crowd of Russians were surrounding Pierre. For a long while Pierre could not understand what had happened to him. He heard all about him his comrades’ wails of joy.

“Mates! our own folk! brothers!” the old soldiers cried, weeping, as
they embraced the Cossacks and the hussars. The hussars and the Cossacks crowded round the prisoners, pressing on them clothes, and boots, and bread. Pierre sat sobbing in their midst, and could not utter one word; he hugged the first soldier who went up to him, and kissed him, weeping.

Dolohov was standing at the gates of a dilapidated house, letting the crowd of unarmed Frenchmen pass by him. The French, excited by all that had happened, were talking loudly among themselves; but as they passed before Dolohov, who stood switching his boots with his riding-whip, and watching them with his cold, glassy eyes, that boded nothing good, their talk died away. One of Dolohov’s Cossacks stood on the other side, counting the prisoners, and marking off the hundreds with a chalk mark on the gate.

“How many?” Dolohov asked him.

“The second hundred,” answered the Cossack.

“
Filez, filez
,” said Dolohov, who had picked up the expression from the French; and when he met the eyes of the passing prisoners, his eyes gleamed with a cruel light.

With a gloomy face Denisov, holding his high Cossack hat in his hand, was walking behind the Cossacks, who were bearing to a hole freshly dug in the garden the body of Petya Rostov.

From the 28th of October, when the frosts began, the flight of the French assumed a more tragic aspect, from the men being frozen or roasted to death by the camp-fires, while the Emperor, and kings, and dukes, still drove on with their stolen booty in fur cloaks and closed carriages. But in its essentials, the process of the flight and disintegration of the French army went on unchanged.

From Moscow to Vyazma of the seventy-three thousands of the French army (not reckoning the Guards, who had done nothing but pillage all through the war), only thirty-six thousand were left, though only five thousand had been killed in battle. Here we have the first term of a progression, by which the remaining terms are determined with mathematical exactness. The French army went on melting away and disappearing in the same ratio from Moscow to Vyazma, from Vyazma to
Smolensk, from Smolensk to the Berezina, from the Berezina to Vilna, apart from the greater or less degree of cold, the pursuit and barring of the way, and all other conditions taken separately. After Vyazma, instead of three columns, the French troops formed a single mass, and so they marched on to the end. This is how Berthier wrote to the Emperor (and we know that generals feel it permissible to depart rather widely from the truth in describing the condition of their armies):—