War and Peace

n 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.”