War and Peace
Lázarev sat in the place of honor. Russian and French officers embraced
him, congratulated him, and pressed his hands. Crowds of officers and
civilians drew near merely to see him. A rumble of Russian and French
voices and laughter filled the air round the tables in the square.
Two officers with flushed faces, looking cheerful and happy, passed by
Rostóv.
“What d’you think of the treat? All on silver plate,” one of them
was saying. “Have you seen Lázarev?”
“I have.”
“Tomorrow, I hear, the Preobrazhénskis will give them a dinner.”
“Yes, but what luck for Lázarev! Twelve hundred francs’ pension for
life.”
“Here’s a cap, lads!” shouted a Preobrazhénsk soldier, donning a
shaggy French cap.
“It’s a fine thing! First-rate!”
“Have you heard the password?” asked one Guards’ officer of
another. “The day before yesterday it was ‘Napoléon, France,
bravoure’; yesterday, ‘Alexandre, Russie, grandeur.’ One day our
Emperor gives it and next day Napoleon. Tomorrow our Emperor will send
a St. George’s Cross to the bravest of the French Guards. It has to be
done. He must respond in kind.”
Borís, too, with his friend Zhilínski, came to see the Preobrazhénsk
banquet. On his way back, he noticed Rostóv standing by the corner of a
house.
“Rostóv! How d’you do? We missed one another,” he said, and could
not refrain from asking what was the matter, so strangely dismal and
troubled was Rostóv’s face.
“Nothing, nothing,” replied Rostóv.
“You’ll call round?”
“Yes, I will.”
Rostóv stood at that corner for a long time, watching the feast from a
distance. In his mind, a painful process was going on which he could
not bring to a conclusion. Terrible doubts rose in his soul. Now he
remembered Denísov with his changed expression, his submission, and the
whole hospital, with arms and legs torn off and its dirt and disease. So
vividly did he recall that hospital stench of dead flesh that he
looked round to see where the smell came from. Next he thought of that
self-satisfied Bonaparte, with his small white hand, who was now an
Emperor, liked and respected by Alexander. Then why those severed
arms and legs and those dead men?... Then again he thought of Lázarev
rewarded and Denísov punished and unpardoned. He caught himself
harboring such strange thoughts that he was frightened.
The smell of the food the Preobrazhénskis were eating and a sense of
hunger recalled him from these reflections; he had to get something to
eat before going away. He went to a hotel he had noticed that morning.
There he found so many people, among them officers who, like himself,
had come in civilian clothes, that he had difficulty in getting a
dinner. Two officers of his own division joined him. The conversation
naturally turned on the peace. The officers, his comrades, like most of
the army, were dissatisfied with the peace concluded after the battle of
Friedland. They said that had we held out a little longer Napoleon would
have been done for, as his troops had neither provisions nor ammunition.
Nicholas ate and drank (chiefly the latter) in silence. He finished a
couple of bottles of wine by himself. The process in his mind went on
tormenting him without reaching a conclusion. He feared to give way to
his thoughts, yet could not get rid of them. Suddenly, on one of the
officers’ saying that it was humiliating to look at the French,
Rostóv began shouting with uncalled-for wrath, and therefore much to
the surprise of the officers:
“How can you judge what’s best?” he cried, the blood suddenly
rushing to his face. “How can you judge the Emperor’s actions? What
right have we to argue? We cannot comprehend either the Emperor’s aims
or his actions!”
“But I never said a word about the Emperor!” said the officer,
justifying himself, and unable to understand Rostóv’s outburst,
except on the supposition that he was drunk.
But Rostóv did not listen to him.
“We are not diplomatic officials, we are soldiers and nothing more,”
he went on. “If we are ordered to die, we must die. If we’re
punished, it means that we have deserved it, it’s not for us to judge.
If the Emperor pleases to recognize Bonaparte as Emperor and to conclude
an alliance with him, it means that that is the right thing to do. If
once we begin judging and arguing about everything, nothing sacred
will be left! That way we shall be saying there is no God—nothing!”
shouted Nicholas, banging the table—very little to the point as it
seemed to his listeners, but quite relevantly to the course of his own
thoughts.
“Our business is to do our duty, to fight and not to think! That’s
all....” said he.
“And to drink,” said one of the officers, not wishing to quarrel.
“Yes, and to drink,” assented Nicholas. “Hullo there! Another
bottle!” he shouted.
In 1808 the Emperor Alexander went to Erfurt for a fresh interview with
the Emperor Napoleon, and in the upper circles of Petersburg there was
much talk of the grandeur of this important meeting.
CHAPTER XXII
In 1809 the intimacy between “the world’s two arbiters,” as
Napoleon and Alexander were called, was such that when Napoleon declared
war on Austria a Russian corps crossed the frontier to co-operate with
our old enemy Bonaparte against our old ally the Emperor of Austria, and
in court circles the possibility of marriage between Napoleon and one
of Alexander’s sisters was spoken of. But besides considerations of
foreign policy, the attention of Russian society was at that time keenly
directed on the internal changes that were being undertaken in all the
departments of government.
Life meanwhile—real life, with its essential interests of health and
sickness, toil and rest, and its intellectual interests in thought,
science, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, and passions—went on
as usual, independently of and apart from political friendship or enmity
with Napoleon Bonaparte and from all the schemes of reconstruction.
BOOK SIX: 1808 - 10
CHAPTER I
Prince Andrew had spent two years continuously in the country.
All the plans Pierre had attempted on his estates—and constantly
changing from one thing to another had never accomplished—were carried
out by Prince Andrew without display and without perceptible difficulty.
He had in the highest degree a practical tenacity which Pierre lacked,
and without fuss or strain on his part this set things going.
On one of his estates the three hundred serfs were liberated and became
free agricultural laborers—this being one of the first examples of
the kind in Russia. On other estates the serfs’ compulsory labor was
commuted for a quitrent. A trained midwife was engaged for Boguchárovo
at his expense, and a priest was paid to teach reading and writing to
the children of the peasants and household serfs.
Prince Andrew spent half his time at Bald Hills with his father and his
son, who was still in the care of nurses. The other half he spent in
“Boguchárovo Cloister,” as his father called Prince Andrew’s
estate. Despite the indifference to the affairs of the world he had
expressed to Pierre, he diligently followed all that went on, received
many books, and to his surprise noticed that when he or his father had
visitors from Petersburg, the very vortex of life, these people lagged
behind himself—who never left the country—in knowledge of what was
happening in home and foreign affairs.
Besides being occupied with his estates and reading a great variety of
books, Prince Andrew was at this time busy with a critical survey of
our last two unfortunate campaigns, and with drawing up a proposal for a
reform of the army rules and regulations.
In the spring of 1809 he went to visit the Ryazán estates which had
been inherited by his son, whose guardian he was.
Warmed by the spring sunshine he sat in the calèche looking at the new
grass, the first leaves on the birches, and the first puffs of white
spring clouds floating across the clear blue sky. He was not thinking of
anything, but looked absent-mindedly and cheerfully from side to side.
They crossed the ferry where he had talked with Pierre the year before.
They went through the muddy village, past threshing floors and green
fields of winter rye, downhill where snow still lodged near the bridge,
uphill where the clay had been liquefied by the rain, past strips of
stubble land and bushes touched with green here and there, and into a
birch forest growing on both sides of the road. In the forest it was
almost hot, no wind could be felt. The birches with their sticky green
leaves were motionless, and lilac-colored flowers and the first blades
of green grass were pushing up and lifting last year’s leaves. The
coarse evergreen color of the small fir trees scattered here and there
among the birches was an unpleasant reminder of winter. On entering the
forest the horses began to snort and sweated visibly.
Peter the footman made some remark to the coachman; the latter assented.
But apparently the coachman’s sympathy was not enough for Peter, and
he turned on the box toward his master.
“How pleasant it is, your excellency!” he said with a respectful
smile.
“What?”
“It’s pleasant, your excellency!”
“What is he talking about?” thought Prince Andrew. “Oh, the
spring, I suppose,” he thought as he turned round. “Yes, really
everything is green already.... How early! The birches and cherry and
alders too are coming out.... But the oaks show no sign yet. Ah, here is
one oak!”
At the edge of the road stood an oak. Probably ten times the age of the
birches that formed the forest, it was ten times as thick and twice as
tall as they. It was an enormous tree, its girth twice as great as a
man could embrace, and evidently long ago some of its branches had been
broken off and its bark scarred. With its huge ungainly limbs sprawling
unsymmetrically, and its gnarled hands and fingers, it stood an aged,
stern, and scornful monster among the smiling birch trees. Only the
dead-looking evergreen firs dotted about in the forest, and this oak,
refused to yield to the charm of spring or notice either the spring or
the sunshine.
“Spring, love, happiness!” this oak seemed to say. “Are you not
weary of that stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud? Always the
same and always a fraud? There is no spring, no sun, no happiness! Look
at those cramped dead firs, ever the same, and at me too, sticking out
my broken and barked fingers just where they have grown, whether from my
back or my sides: as they have grown so I stand, and I do not believe in
your hopes and your lies.”
As he passed through the forest Prince Andrew turned several times to
look at that oak, as if expecting something from it. Under the oak,
too, were flowers and grass, but it stood among them scowling, rigid,
misshapen, and grim as ever.
“Yes, the oak is right, a thousand times right,” thought Prince
Andrew. “Let others—the young—yield afresh to that fraud, but we
know life, our life is finished!”
A whole sequence of new thoughts, hopeless but mournfully pleasant, rose
in his soul in connection with that tree. During this journey he, as
it were, considered his life afresh and arrived at his old conclusion,
restful in its hopelessness: that it was not for him to begin anything
anew—but that he must live out his life, content to do no harm, and
not disturbing himself or desiring anything.
CHAPTER II
Prince Andrew had to see the Marshal of the Nobility for the district
in connection with the affairs of the Ryazán estate of which he was
trustee. This Marshal was Count Ilyá Rostóv, and in the middle of May
Prince Andrew went to visit him.
It was now hot spring weather. The whole forest was already clothed in
green. It was dusty and so hot that on passing near water one longed to
bathe.