War and Peace

n his return to Moscow from the army, Nicholas Rostóv was welcomed
by his home circle as the best of sons, a hero, and their darling
Nikólenka; by his relations as a charming, attractive, and polite young
man; by his acquaintances as a handsome lieutenant of hussars, a good
dancer, and one of the best matches in the city.

The Rostóvs knew everybody in Moscow. The old count had money enough
that year, as all his estates had been remortgaged, and so Nicholas,
acquiring a trotter of his own, very stylish riding breeches of the
latest cut, such as no one else yet had in Moscow, and boots of the
latest fashion, with extremely pointed toes and small silver spurs,
passed his time very gaily. After a short period of adapting himself
to the old conditions of life, Nicholas found it very pleasant to be
at home again. He felt that he had grown up and matured very much. His
despair at failing in a Scripture examination, his borrowing money from
Gavríl to pay a sleigh driver, his kissing Sónya on the sly—he now
recalled all this as childishness he had left immeasurably behind.
Now he was a lieutenant of hussars, in a jacket laced with silver, and
wearing the Cross of St. George, awarded to soldiers for bravery in
action, and in the company of well-known, elderly, and respected racing
men was training a trotter of his own for a race. He knew a lady on one
of the boulevards whom he visited of an evening. He led the mazurka
at the Arkhárovs’ ball, talked about the war with Field Marshal
Kámenski, visited the English Club, and was on intimate terms with a
colonel of forty to whom Denísov had introduced him.

His passion for the Emperor had cooled somewhat in Moscow. But still, as
he did not see him and had no opportunity of seeing him, he often spoke
about him and about his love for him, letting it be understood that he
had not told all and that there was something in his feelings for the
Emperor not everyone could understand, and with his whole soul he shared
the adoration then common in Moscow for the Emperor, who was spoken of
as the “angel incarnate.”

During Rostóv’s short stay in Moscow, before rejoining the army, he
did not draw closer to Sónya, but rather drifted away from her. She was
very pretty and sweet, and evidently deeply in love with him, but he was
at the period of youth when there seems so much to do that there is no
time for that sort of thing and a young man fears to bind himself and
prizes his freedom which he needs for so many other things. When he
thought of Sónya, during this stay in Moscow, he said to himself,
“Ah, there will be, and there are, many more such girls somewhere whom
I do not yet know. There will be time enough to think about love when I
want to, but now I have no time.” Besides, it seemed to him that the
society of women was rather derogatory to his manhood. He went to balls
and into ladies’ society with an affectation of doing so against his
will. The races, the English Club, sprees with Denísov, and visits to
a certain house—that was another matter and quite the thing for a
dashing young hussar!

At the beginning of March, old Count Ilyá Rostóv was very busy
arranging a dinner in honor of Prince Bagratión at the English Club.

The count walked up and down the hall in his dressing gown, giving
orders to the club steward and to the famous Feoktíst, the club’s
head cook, about asparagus, fresh cucumbers, strawberries, veal, and
fish for this dinner. The count had been a member and on the committee
of the club from the day it was founded. To him the club entrusted the
arrangement of the festival in honor of Bagratión, for few men knew
so well how to arrange a feast on an open-handed, hospitable scale,
and still fewer men would be so well able and willing to make up out of
their own resources what might be needed for the success of the fete.
The club cook and the steward listened to the count’s orders with
pleased faces, for they knew that under no other management could they
so easily extract a good profit for themselves from a dinner costing
several thousand rubles.

“Well then, mind and have cocks’ comb in the turtle soup, you
know!”

“Shall we have three cold dishes then?” asked the cook.

The count considered.

“We can’t have less—yes, three... the mayonnaise, that’s one,”
said he, bending down a finger.

“Then am I to order those large sterlets?” asked the steward.

“Yes, it can’t be helped if they won’t take less. Ah, dear me! I
was forgetting. We must have another entrée. Ah, goodness gracious!”
he clutched at his head. “Who is going to get me the flowers? Dmítri!
Eh, Dmítri! Gallop off to our Moscow estate,” he said to the factotum
who appeared at his call. “Hurry off and tell Maksím, the gardener,
to set the serfs to work. Say that everything out of the hothouses must
be brought here well wrapped up in felt. I must have two hundred pots
here on Friday.”

Having given several more orders, he was about to go to his “little
countess” to have a rest, but remembering something else of
importance, he returned again, called back the cook and the club
steward, and again began giving orders. A light footstep and the
clinking of spurs were heard at the door, and the young count, handsome,
rosy, with a dark little mustache, evidently rested and made sleeker by
his easy life in Moscow, entered the room.

“Ah, my boy, my head’s in a whirl!” said the old man with a smile,
as if he felt a little confused before his son. “Now, if you would
only help a bit! I must have singers too. I shall have my own orchestra,
but shouldn’t we get the gypsy singers as well? You military men like
that sort of thing.”

“Really, Papa, I believe Prince Bagratión worried himself less before
the battle of Schön Grabern than you do now,” said his son with a
smile.

The old count pretended to be angry.

“Yes, you talk, but try it yourself!”

And the count turned to the cook, who, with a shrewd and respectful
expression, looked observantly and sympathetically at the father and
son.

“What have the young people come to nowadays, eh, Feoktíst?” said
he. “Laughing at us old fellows!”

“That’s so, your excellency, all they have to do is to eat a good
dinner, but providing it and serving it all up, that’s not their
business!”

“That’s it, that’s it!” exclaimed the count, and gaily seizing
his son by both hands, he cried, “Now I’ve got you, so take the
sleigh and pair at once, and go to Bezúkhov’s, and tell him ‘Count
Ilyá has sent you to ask for strawberries and fresh pineapples.’ We
can’t get them from anyone else. He’s not there himself, so you’ll
have to go in and ask the princesses; and from there go on to the
Rasgulyáy—the coachman Ipátka knows—and look up the gypsy
Ilyúshka, the one who danced at Count Orlóv’s, you remember, in a
white Cossack coat, and bring him along to me.”

“And am I to bring the gypsy girls along with him?” asked Nicholas,
laughing. “Dear, dear!...”

At that moment, with noiseless footsteps and with the businesslike,
preoccupied, yet meekly Christian look which never left her face, Anna
Mikháylovna entered the hall. Though she came upon the count in his
dressing gown every day, he invariably became confused and begged her to
excuse his costume.

“No matter at all, my dear count,” she said, meekly closing her
eyes. “But I’ll go to Bezúkhov’s myself. Pierre has arrived, and
now we shall get anything we want from his hothouses. I have to see him
in any case. He has forwarded me a letter from Borís. Thank God, Borís
is now on the staff.”

The count was delighted at Anna Mikháylovna’s taking upon herself one
of his commissions and ordered the small closed carriage for her.

“Tell Bezúkhov to come. I’ll put his name down. Is his wife with
him?” he asked.

Anna Mikháylovna turned up her eyes, and profound sadness was depicted
on her face.

“Ah, my dear friend, he is very unfortunate,” she said. “If what
we hear is true, it is dreadful. How little we dreamed of such a thing
when we were rejoicing at his happiness! And such a lofty angelic soul
as young Bezúkhov! Yes, I pity him from my heart, and shall try to give
him what consolation I can.”

“Wh-what is the matter?” asked both the young and old Rostóv.

Anna Mikháylovna sighed deeply.

“Dólokhov, Mary Ivánovna’s son,” she said in a mysterious
whisper, “has compromised her completely, they say. Pierre took him
up, invited him to his house in Petersburg, and now... she has come here
and that daredevil after her!” said Anna Mikháylovna, wishing to show
her sympathy for Pierre, but by involuntary intonations and a half smile
betraying her sympathy for the “daredevil,” as she called Dólokhov.
“They say Pierre is quite broken by his misfortune.”

“Dear, dear! But still tell him to come to the club—it will all blow
over. It will be a tremendous banquet.”

Next day, the third of March, soon after one o’clock, two hundred and
fifty members of the English Club and fifty guests were awaiting the
guest of honor and hero of the Austrian campaign, Prince Bagratión, to
dinner.

On the first arrival of the news of the battle of Austerlitz, Moscow had
been bewildered. At that time, the Russians were so used to victories
that on receiving news of the defeat some would simply not believe it,
while others sought some extraordinary explanation of so strange an
event. In the English Club, where all who were distinguished, important,
and well informed foregathered when the news began to arrive in
December, nothing was said about the war and the last battle, as
though all were in a conspiracy of silence. The men who set the tone
in conversation—Count Rostopchín, Prince Yúri Dolgorúkov, Valúev,
Count Markóv, and Prince Vyázemski—did not show themselves at the
club, but met in private houses in intimate circles, and the
Moscovites who took their opinions from others—Ilyá Rostóv among
them—remained for a while without any definite opinion on the subject
of the war and without leaders. The Moscovites felt that something was
wrong and that to discuss the bad news was difficult, and so it was best
to be silent. But after a while, just as a jury comes out of its room,
the bigwigs who guided the club’s opinion reappeared, and everybody
began speaking clearly and definitely. Reasons were found for the
incredible, unheard-of, and impossible event of a Russian defeat,
everything became clear, and in all corners of Moscow the same things
began to be said. These reasons were the treachery of the Austrians, a
defective commissariat, the treachery of the Pole Przebyszéwski and of
the Frenchman Langeron, Kutúzov’s incapacity, and (it was whispered)
the youth and inexperience of the sovereign, who had trusted worthless
and insignificant people. But the army, the Russian army, everyone
declared, was extraordinary and had achieved miracles of valor. The
soldiers, officers, and generals were heroes. But the hero of heroes was
Prince Bagratión, distinguished by his Schön Grabern affair and by
the retreat from Austerlitz, where he alone had withdrawn his column
unbroken and had all day beaten back an enemy force twice as numerous
as his own. What also conduced to Bagratión’s being selected as
Moscow’s hero was the fact that he had no connections in the city
and was a stranger there. In his person, honor was shown to a simple
fighting Russian soldier without connections and intrigues, and to one
who was associated by memories of the Italian campaign with the name of
Suvórov. Moreover, paying such honor to Bagratión was the best way of
expressing disapproval and dislike of Kutúzov.

“Had there been no Bagratión, it would have been necessary to
invent him,” said the wit Shinshín, parodying the words of Voltaire.
Kutúzov no one spoke of, except some who abused him in whispers,
calling him a court weathercock and an old satyr.

All Moscow repeated Prince Dolgorúkov’s saying: “If you go on
modeling and modeling you must get smeared with clay,” suggesting
consolation for our defeat by the memory of former victories; and the
words of Rostopchín, that French soldiers have to be incited to battle
by highfalutin words, and Germans by logical arguments to show them
that it is more dangerous to run away than to advance, but that Russian
soldiers only need to be restrained and held back! On all sides, new and
fresh anecdotes were heard of individual examples of heroism shown by
our officers and men at Austerlitz. One had saved a standard, another
had killed five Frenchmen, a third had loaded five cannon singlehanded.
Berg was mentioned, by those who did not know him, as having, when
wounded in the right hand, taken his sword in the left, and gone
forward. Of Bolkónski, nothing was said, and only those who knew him
intimately regretted that he had died so young, leaving a pregnant wife
with his eccentric father.