War and Peace
The young man in his clattering chains stepped clumsily to the spot
indicated, holding away with one finger the coat collar which chafed
his neck, turned his long neck twice this way and that, sighed, and
submissively folded before him his thin hands, unused to work.
For several seconds while the young man was taking his place on the step
the silence continued. Only among the back rows of the people, who were
all pressing toward the one spot, could sighs, groans, and the shuffling
of feet be heard.
While waiting for the young man to take his place on the step Rostopchín
stood frowning and rubbing his face with his hand.
“Lads!” said he, with a metallic ring in his voice. “This man,
Vereshchágin, is the scoundrel by whose doing Moscow is perishing.”
The young man in the fur-lined coat, stooping a little, stood in a
submissive attitude, his fingers clasped before him. His emaciated young
face, disfigured by the half-shaven head, hung down hopelessly. At
the count’s first words he raised it slowly and looked up at him as if
wishing to say something or at least to meet his eye. But Rostopchín did
not look at him. A vein in the young man’s long thin neck swelled like a
cord and went blue behind the ear, and suddenly his face flushed.
All eyes were fixed on him. He looked at the crowd, and rendered more
hopeful by the expression he read on the faces there, he smiled sadly
and timidly, and lowering his head shifted his feet on the step.
“He has betrayed his Tsar and his country, he has gone over to
Bonaparte. He alone of all the Russians has disgraced the Russian name,
he has caused Moscow to perish,” said Rostopchín in a sharp, even voice,
but suddenly he glanced down at Vereshchágin who continued to stand in
the same submissive attitude. As if inflamed by the sight, he raised his
arm and addressed the people, almost shouting:
“Deal with him as you think fit! I hand him over to you.”
The crowd remained silent and only pressed closer and closer to
one another. To keep one another back, to breathe in that stifling
atmosphere, to be unable to stir, and to await something unknown,
uncomprehended, and terrible, was becoming unbearable. Those standing
in front, who had seen and heard what had taken place before them, all
stood with wide-open eyes and mouths, straining with all their strength,
and held back the crowd that was pushing behind them.
“Beat him!... Let the traitor perish and not disgrace the Russian name!”
shouted Rostopchín. “Cut him down. I command it.”
Hearing not so much the words as the angry tone of Rostopchín’s voice,
the crowd moaned and heaved forward, but again paused.
“Count!” exclaimed the timid yet theatrical voice of Vereshchágin in the
midst of the momentary silence that ensued, “Count! One God is above us
both....” He lifted his head and again the thick vein in his thin neck
filled with blood and the color rapidly came and went in his face.
He did not finish what he wished to say.
“Cut him down! I command it...” shouted Rostopchín, suddenly growing
pale like Vereshchágin.
“Draw sabers!” cried the dragoon officer, drawing his own.
Another still stronger wave flowed through the crowd and reaching the
front ranks carried it swaying to the very steps of the porch. The tall
youth, with a stony look on his face, and rigid and uplifted arm, stood
beside Vereshchágin.
“Saber him!” the dragoon officer almost whispered.
And one of the soldiers, his face all at once distorted with fury,
struck Vereshchágin on the head with the blunt side of his saber.
“Ah!” cried Vereshchágin in meek surprise, looking round with a
frightened glance as if not understanding why this was done to him. A
similar moan of surprise and horror ran through the crowd. “O Lord!”
exclaimed a sorrowful voice.
But after the exclamation of surprise that had escaped from Vereshchágin
he uttered a plaintive cry of pain, and that cry was fatal. The barrier
of human feeling, strained to the utmost, that had held the crowd in
check suddenly broke. The crime had begun and must now be completed. The
plaintive moan of reproach was drowned by the threatening and angry roar
of the crowd. Like the seventh and last wave that shatters a ship, that
last irresistible wave burst from the rear and reached the front ranks,
carrying them off their feet and engulfing them all. The dragoon was
about to repeat his blow. Vereshchágin with a cry of horror, covering
his head with his hands, rushed toward the crowd. The tall youth,
against whom he stumbled, seized his thin neck with his hands and,
yelling wildly, fell with him under the feet of the pressing, struggling
crowd.
Some beat and tore at Vereshchágin, others at the tall youth. And the
screams of those that were being trampled on and of those who tried to
rescue the tall lad only increased the fury of the crowd. It was a long
time before the dragoons could extricate the bleeding youth, beaten
almost to death. And for a long time, despite the feverish haste with
which the mob tried to end the work that had been begun, those who were
hitting, throttling, and tearing at Vereshchágin were unable to kill
him, for the crowd pressed from all sides, swaying as one mass with them
in the center and rendering it impossible for them either to kill him or
let him go.
“Hit him with an ax, eh!... Crushed?... Traitor, he sold Christ....
Still alive... tenacious... serves him right! Torture serves a thief
right. Use the hatchet!... What—still alive?”
Only when the victim ceased to struggle and his cries changed to a
long-drawn, measured death rattle did the crowd around his prostrate,
bleeding corpse begin rapidly to change places. Each one came
up, glanced at what had been done, and with horror, reproach, and
astonishment pushed back again.
“O Lord! The people are like wild beasts! How could he be alive?” voices
in the crowd could be heard saying. “Quite a young fellow too... must
have been a merchant’s son. What men!... and they say he’s not the right
one.... How not the right one?... O Lord! And there’s another has been
beaten too—they say he’s nearly done for.... Oh, the people... Aren’t
they afraid of sinning?...” said the same mob now, looking with pained
distress at the dead body with its long, thin, half-severed neck and its
livid face stained with blood and dust.
A painstaking police officer, considering the presence of a corpse in
his excellency’s courtyard unseemly, told the dragoons to take it away.
Two dragoons took it by its distorted legs and dragged it along the
ground. The gory, dust-stained, half-shaven head with its long neck
trailed twisting along the ground. The crowd shrank back from it.
At the moment when Vereshchágin fell and the crowd closed in with savage
yells and swayed about him, Rostopchín suddenly turned pale and, instead
of going to the back entrance where his carriage awaited him, went
with hurried steps and bent head, not knowing where and why, along the
passage leading to the rooms on the ground floor. The count’s face was
white and he could not control the feverish twitching of his lower jaw.
“This way, your excellency... Where are you going?... This way,
please...” said a trembling, frightened voice behind him.
Count Rostopchín was unable to reply and, turning obediently, went in
the direction indicated. At the back entrance stood his calèche. The
distant roar of the yelling crowd was audible even there. He hastily
took his seat and told the coachman to drive him to his country house in
Sokólniki.
When they reached the Myasnítski Street and could no longer hear
the shouts of the mob, the count began to repent. He remembered with
dissatisfaction the agitation and fear he had betrayed before his
subordinates. “The mob is terrible—disgusting,” he said to himself
in French. “They are like wolves whom nothing but flesh can appease.”
“Count! One God is above us both!”—Vereshchágin’s words suddenly
recurred to him, and a disagreeable shiver ran down his back. But this
was only a momentary feeling and Count Rostopchín smiled disdainfully
at himself. “I had other duties,” thought he. “The people had to be
appeased. Many other victims have perished and are perishing for the
public good”—and he began thinking of his social duties to his family
and to the city entrusted to him, and of himself—not himself as Theodore
Vasílyevich Rostopchín (he fancied that Theodore Vasílyevich Rostopchín
was sacrificing himself for the public good) but himself as governor,
the representative of authority and of the Tsar. “Had I been simply
Theodore Vasílyevich my course of action would have been quite
different, but it was my duty to safeguard my life and dignity as
commander in chief.”
Lightly swaying on the flexible springs of his carriage and no longer
hearing the terrible sounds of the crowd, Rostopchín grew physically
calm and, as always happens, as soon as he became physically tranquil
his mind devised reasons why he should be mentally tranquil too. The
thought which tranquillized Rostopchín was not a new one. Since the
world began and men have killed one another no one has ever committed
such a crime against his fellow man without comforting himself with
this same idea. This idea is le bien public, the hypothetical welfare of
other people.
To a man not swayed by passion that welfare is never certain, but he
who commits such a crime always knows just where that welfare lies. And
Rostopchín now knew it.
Not only did his reason not reproach him for what he had done, but
he even found cause for self-satisfaction in having so successfully
contrived to avail himself of a convenient opportunity to punish a
criminal and at the same time pacify the mob.
“Vereshchágin was tried and condemned to death,” thought Rostopchín
(though the Senate had only condemned Vereshchágin to hard labor), “he
was a traitor and a spy. I could not let him go unpunished and so I have
killed two birds with one stone: to appease the mob I gave them a victim
and at the same time punished a miscreant.”
Having reached his country house and begun to give orders about domestic
arrangements, the count grew quite tranquil.
Half an hour later he was driving with his fast horses across the
Sokólniki field, no longer thinking of what had occurred but considering
what was to come. He was driving to the Yaúza bridge where he had heard
that Kutúzov was. Count Rostopchín was mentally preparing the angry and
stinging reproaches he meant to address to Kutúzov for his deception. He
would make that foxy old courtier feel that the responsibility for all
the calamities that would follow the abandonment of the city and the
ruin of Russia (as Rostopchín regarded it) would fall upon his doting
old head. Planning beforehand what he would say to Kutúzov, Rostopchín
turned angrily in his calèche and gazed sternly from side to side.
The Sokólniki field was deserted. Only at the end of it, in front of the
almshouse and the lunatic asylum, could be seen some people in white
and others like them walking singly across the field shouting and
gesticulating.
One of these was running to cross the path of Count Rostopchín’s
carriage, and the count himself, his coachman, and his dragoons
looked with vague horror and curiosity at these released lunatics and
especially at the one running toward them.
Swaying from side to side on his long, thin legs in his fluttering
dressing gown, this lunatic was running impetuously, his gaze fixed on
Rostopchín, shouting something in a hoarse voice and making signs to him
to stop. The lunatic’s solemn, gloomy face was thin and yellow, with
its beard growing in uneven tufts. His black, agate pupils with
saffron-yellow whites moved restlessly near the lower eyelids.
“Stop! Pull up, I tell you!” he cried in a piercing voice, and again