War and Peace

s generally happens, Pierre did not feel the full effects of the
physical privation and strain he had suffered as prisoner until after
they were over. After his liberation he reached Orël, and on the third
day there, when preparing to go to Kiev, he fell ill and was laid up
for three months. He had what the doctors termed “bilious fever.” But
despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him
medicines to drink, he recovered.

Scarcely any impression was left on Pierre’s mind by all that happened
to him from the time of his rescue till his illness. He remembered
only the dull gray weather now rainy and now snowy, internal physical
distress, and pains in his feet and side. He remembered a general
impression of the misfortunes and sufferings of people and of being
worried by the curiosity of officers and generals who questioned him, he
also remembered his difficulty in procuring a conveyance and horses, and
above all he remembered his incapacity to think and feel all that time.
On the day of his rescue he had seen the body of Pétya Rostóv. That same
day he had learned that Prince Andrew, after surviving the battle of
Borodinó for more than a month had recently died in the Rostóvs’ house
at Yaroslávl, and Denísov who told him this news also mentioned Hélène’s
death, supposing that Pierre had heard of it long before. All this at
the time seemed merely strange to Pierre: he felt he could not grasp its
significance. Just then he was only anxious to get away as quickly as
possible from places where people were killing one another, to some
peaceful refuge where he could recover himself, rest, and think over
all the strange new facts he had learned; but on reaching Orël he
immediately fell ill. When he came to himself after his illness he saw
in attendance on him two of his servants, Terénty and Váska, who had
come from Moscow; and also his cousin the eldest princess, who had been
living on his estate at Eléts and hearing of his rescue and illness had
come to look after him.

It was only gradually during his convalescence that Pierre lost the
impressions he had become accustomed to during the last few months
and got used to the idea that no one would oblige him to go anywhere
tomorrow, that no one would deprive him of his warm bed, and that he
would be sure to get his dinner, tea, and supper. But for a long time in
his dreams he still saw himself in the conditions of captivity. In the
same way little by little he came to understand the news he had been
told after his rescue, about the death of Prince Andrew, the death of
his wife, and the destruction of the French.

A joyous feeling of freedom—that complete inalienable freedom natural
to man which he had first experienced at the first halt outside
Moscow—filled Pierre’s soul during his convalescence. He was surprised
to find that this inner freedom, which was independent of external
conditions, now had as it were an additional setting of external
liberty. He was alone in a strange town, without acquaintances. No one
demanded anything of him or sent him anywhere. He had all he wanted:
the thought of his wife which had been a continual torment to him was no
longer there, since she was no more.

“Oh, how good! How splendid!” said he to himself when a cleanly laid
table was moved up to him with savory beef tea, or when he lay down for
the night on a soft clean bed, or when he remembered that the French had
gone and that his wife was no more. “Oh, how good, how splendid!”

And by old habit he asked himself the question: “Well, and what then?
What am I going to do?” And he immediately gave himself the answer:
“Well, I shall live. Ah, how splendid!”

The very question that had formerly tormented him, the thing he had
continually sought to find—the aim of life—no longer existed for
him now. That search for the aim of life had not merely disappeared
temporarily—he felt that it no longer existed for him and could not
present itself again. And this very absence of an aim gave him the
complete, joyous sense of freedom which constituted his happiness at
this time.

He could not see an aim, for he now had faith—not faith in any kind of
rule, or words, or ideas, but faith in an ever-living, ever-manifest
God. Formerly he had sought Him in aims he set himself. That search for
an aim had been simply a search for God, and suddenly in his captivity
he had learned not by words or reasoning but by direct feeling what his
nurse had told him long ago: that God is here and everywhere. In his
captivity he had learned that in Karatáev God was greater, more infinite
and unfathomable than in the Architect of the Universe recognized by the
Freemasons. He felt like a man who after straining his eyes to see into
the far distance finds what he sought at his very feet. All his life
he had looked over the heads of the men around him, when he should have
merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes.

In the past he had never been able to find that great inscrutable
infinite something. He had only felt that it must exist somewhere and
had looked for it. In everything near and comprehensible he had seen
only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and senseless. He had
equipped himself with a mental telescope and looked into remote space,
where petty worldliness hiding itself in misty distance had seemed to
him great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen. And such
had European life, politics, Freemasonry, philosophy, and philanthropy
seemed to him. But even then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted
them, his mind had penetrated to those distances and he had there seen
the same pettiness, worldliness, and senselessness. Now, however, he
had learned to see the great, eternal, and infinite in everything, and
therefore—to see it and enjoy its contemplation—he naturally threw away
the telescope through which he had till now gazed over men’s heads, and
gladly regarded the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and
infinite life around him. And the closer he looked the more tranquil and
happy he became. That dreadful question, “What for?” which had formerly
destroyed all his mental edifices, no longer existed for him. To that
question, “What for?” a simple answer was now always ready in his soul:
“Because there is a God, that God without whose will not one hair falls
from a man’s head.”