War and Peace
matter to the commander in chief.
CHAPTER XXIV
On that bright evening of August 25, Prince Andrew lay leaning on his
elbow in a broken-down shed in the village of Knyazkóvo at the further
end of his regiment’s encampment. Through a gap in the broken wall he
could see, beside the wooden fence, a row of thirty-year-old birches
with their lower branches lopped off, a field on which shocks of
oats were standing, and some bushes near which rose the smoke of
campfires—the soldiers’ kitchens.
Narrow and burdensome and useless to anyone as his life now seemed to
him, Prince Andrew on the eve of battle felt agitated and irritable as
he had done seven years before at Austerlitz.
He had received and given the orders for next day’s battle and had
nothing more to do. But his thoughts—the simplest, clearest, and
therefore most terrible thoughts—would give him no peace. He knew that
tomorrow’s battle would be the most terrible of all he had taken
part in, and for the first time in his life the possibility of death
presented itself to him—not in relation to any worldly matter or with
reference to its effect on others, but simply in relation to himself, to
his own soul—vividly, plainly, terribly, and almost as a certainty. And
from the height of this perception all that had previously tormented and
preoccupied him suddenly became illumined by a cold white light without
shadows, without perspective, without distinction of outline. All life
appeared to him like magic-lantern pictures at which he had long been
gazing by artificial light through a glass. Now he suddenly saw those
badly daubed pictures in clear daylight and without a glass. “Yes,
yes! There they are, those false images that agitated, enraptured,
and tormented me,” said he to himself, passing in review the principal
pictures of the magic lantern of life and regarding them now in the cold
white daylight of his clear perception of death. “There they are, those
rudely painted figures that once seemed splendid and mysterious.
Glory, the good of society, love of a woman, the Fatherland itself—how
important these pictures appeared to me, with what profound meaning they
seemed to be filled! And it is all so simple, pale, and crude in the
cold white light of this morning which I feel is dawning for me.” The
three great sorrows of his life held his attention in particular: his
love for a woman, his father’s death, and the French invasion which had
overrun half Russia. “Love... that little girl who seemed to me brimming
over with mystic forces! Yes, indeed, I loved her. I made romantic plans
of love and happiness with her! Oh, what a boy I was!” he said aloud
bitterly. “Ah me! I believed in some ideal love which was to keep her
faithful to me for the whole year of my absence! Like the gentle dove
in the fable she was to pine apart from me.... But it was much simpler
really.... It was all very simple and horrible.”
“When my father built Bald Hills he thought the place was his: his
land, his air, his peasants. But Napoleon came and swept him aside,
unconscious of his existence, as he might brush a chip from his path,
and his Bald Hills and his whole life fell to pieces. Princess Mary says
it is a trial sent from above. What is the trial for, when he is not
here and will never return? He is not here! For whom then is the trial
intended? The Fatherland, the destruction of Moscow! And tomorrow I
shall be killed, perhaps not even by a Frenchman but by one of our own
men, by a soldier discharging a musket close to my ear as one of them
did yesterday, and the French will come and take me by head and heels
and fling me into a hole that I may not stink under their noses, and new
conditions of life will arise, which will seem quite ordinary to others
and about which I shall know nothing. I shall not exist....”
He looked at the row of birches shining in the sunshine, with their
motionless green and yellow foliage and white bark. “To die... to be
killed tomorrow... That I should not exist... That all this should still
be, but no me....”
And the birches with their light and shade, the curly clouds, the
smoke of the campfires, and all that was around him changed and seemed
terrible and menacing. A cold shiver ran down his spine. He rose
quickly, went out of the shed, and began to walk about.
After he had returned, voices were heard outside the shed. “Who’s that?”
he cried.
The red-nosed Captain Timókhin, formerly Dólokhov’s squadron commander,
but now from lack of officers a battalion commander, shyly entered the
shed followed by an adjutant and the regimental paymaster.
Prince Andrew rose hastily, listened to the business they had come
about, gave them some further instructions, and was about to dismiss
them when he heard a familiar, lisping, voice behind the shed.
“Devil take it!” said the voice of a man stumbling over something.
Prince Andrew looked out of the shed and saw Pierre, who had tripped
over a pole on the ground and had nearly fallen, coming his way. It was
unpleasant to Prince Andrew to meet people of his own set in general,
and Pierre especially, for he reminded him of all the painful moments of
his last visit to Moscow.
“You? What a surprise!” said he. “What brings you here? This is
unexpected!”
As he said this his eyes and face expressed more than coldness—they
expressed hostility, which Pierre noticed at once. He had approached
the shed full of animation, but on seeing Prince Andrew’s face he felt
constrained and ill at ease.
“I have come... simply... you know... come... it interests me,” said
Pierre, who had so often that day senselessly repeated that word
“interesting.” “I wish to see the battle.”
“Oh yes, and what do the Masonic brothers say about war? How would they
stop it?” said Prince Andrew sarcastically. “Well, and how’s Moscow? And
my people? Have they reached Moscow at last?” he asked seriously.
“Yes, they have. Julie Drubetskáya told me so. I went to see them, but
missed them. They have gone to your estate near Moscow.”
CHAPTER XXV
The officers were about to take leave, but Prince Andrew, apparently
reluctant to be left alone with his friend, asked them to stay and have
tea. Seats were brought in and so was the tea. The officers gazed with
surprise at Pierre’s huge stout figure and listened to his talk of
Moscow and the position of our army, round which he had ridden. Prince
Andrew remained silent, and his expression was so forbidding that Pierre
addressed his remarks chiefly to the good-natured battalion commander.
“So you understand the whole position of our troops?” Prince Andrew
interrupted him.
“Yes—that is, how do you mean?” said Pierre. “Not being a military man
I can’t say I have understood it fully, but I understand the general
position.”
“Well, then, you know more than anyone else, be it who it may,” said
Prince Andrew.
“Oh!” said Pierre, looking over his spectacles in perplexity at Prince
Andrew. “Well, and what do you think of Kutúzov’s appointment?” he
asked.
“I was very glad of his appointment, that’s all I know,” replied Prince
Andrew.
“And tell me your opinion of Barclay de Tolly. In Moscow they are saying
heaven knows what about him.... What do you think of him?”
“Ask them,” replied Prince Andrew, indicating the officers.
Pierre looked at Timókhin with the condescendingly interrogative smile
with which everybody involuntarily addressed that officer.
“We see light again, since his Serenity has been appointed, your
excellency,” said Timókhin timidly, and continually turning to glance at
his colonel.
“Why so?” asked Pierre.
“Well, to mention only firewood and fodder, let me inform you. Why, when
we were retreating from Sventsyáni we dare not touch a stick or a wisp
of hay or anything. You see, we were going away, so he would get it all;
wasn’t it so, your excellency?” and again Timókhin turned to the prince.
“But we daren’t. In our regiment two officers were court-martialed for
that kind of thing. But when his Serenity took command everything became
straightforward. Now we see light....”
“Then why was it forbidden?”
Timókhin looked about in confusion, not knowing what or how to answer
such a question. Pierre put the same question to Prince Andrew.
“Why, so as not to lay waste the country we were abandoning to the
enemy,” said Prince Andrew with venomous irony. “It is very sound:
one can’t permit the land to be pillaged and accustom the troops to
marauding. At Smolénsk too he judged correctly that the French might
outflank us, as they had larger forces. But he could not understand
this,” cried Prince Andrew in a shrill voice that seemed to escape him
involuntarily: “he could not understand that there, for the first time,
we were fighting for Russian soil, and that there was a spirit in the
men such as I had never seen before, that we had held the French for
two days, and that that success had increased our strength tenfold. He
ordered us to retreat, and all our efforts and losses went for nothing.
He had no thought of betraying us, he tried to do the best he could,
he thought out everything, and that is why he is unsuitable. He is
unsuitable now, just because he plans out everything very thoroughly and
accurately as every German has to. How can I explain?... Well, say your
father has a German valet, and he is a splendid valet and satisfies your
father’s requirements better than you could, then it’s all right to let
him serve. But if your father is mortally sick you’ll send the valet
away and attend to your father with your own unpracticed, awkward hands,
and will soothe him better than a skilled man who is a stranger could.
So it has been with Barclay. While Russia was well, a foreigner could
serve her and be a splendid minister; but as soon as she is in danger
she needs one of her own kin. But in your Club they have been making him
out a traitor! They slander him as a traitor, and the only result will
be that afterwards, ashamed of their false accusations, they will make
him out a hero or a genius instead of a traitor, and that will be still
more unjust. He is an honest and very punctilious German.”
“And they say he’s a skillful commander,” rejoined Pierre.
“I don’t understand what is meant by ‘a skillful commander,’” replied
Prince Andrew ironically.
“A skillful commander?” replied Pierre. “Why, one who foresees all
contingencies... and foresees the adversary’s intentions.”
“But that’s impossible,” said Prince Andrew as if it were a matter
settled long ago.
Pierre looked at him in surprise.
“And yet they say that war is like a game of chess?” he remarked.
“Yes,” replied Prince Andrew, “but with this little difference, that
in chess you may think over each move as long as you please and are not
limited for time, and with this difference too, that a knight is always
stronger than a pawn, and two pawns are always stronger than one, while
in war a battalion is sometimes stronger than a division and sometimes
weaker than a company. The relative strength of bodies of troops can
never be known to anyone. Believe me,” he went on, “if things
depended on arrangements made by the staff, I should be there making
arrangements, but instead of that I have the honor to serve here in
the regiment with these gentlemen, and I consider that on us tomorrow’s
battle will depend and not on those others.... Success never depends,
and never will depend, on position, or equipment, or even on numbers,
and least of all on position.”
“But on what then?”
“On the feeling that is in me and in him,” he pointed to Timókhin, “and
in each soldier.”
Prince Andrew glanced at Timókhin, who looked at his commander in alarm
and bewilderment. In contrast to his former reticent taciturnity
Prince Andrew now seemed excited. He could apparently not refrain from