War And Peace

The convoy of prisoners was melting away faster than the other two. Three hundred and thirty men had started from Moscow, and less than a hundred were left. The prisoners were an even more irksome burden to the escorting soldiers than the cavalry equipment and Junot’s baggage. They could see that saddles for the cavalry and Junot’s spoons might conceivably be of some use, but why cold and starving soldiers should have to serve as sentries, guarding cold and starving Russians who were continually freezing to death or falling by the wayside, in which case they were supposed to be shot – all this was beyond them and quite disgusting. And the escorting soldiers in their miserable plight seemed to be scared of giving way to the pity they felt for the prisoners and thus worsening their own situation, so they were particularly nasty and brutal towards them.

At Dorogobuzh the escorting soldiers had gone off to loot their own stores, leaving the prisoners locked in a stable, and several prisoners had escaped by tunnelling under the wall, only to be caught by the French and shot.

The arrangement made when they were leaving Moscow, whereby any officers among the prisoners were to march apart from the men, had long since been abandoned. All who could walk marched together, and at the third stage Pierre had rejoined Karatayev and the bandy-legged, lavender-grey dog that had chosen Karatayev as her master.

On the third day after leaving Moscow Karatayev had had another bout of the fever that had kept him in the Moscow hospital, and as Karatayev became weaker and weaker Pierre had kept further and further away from him. From the time Karatayev fell ill Pierre, without knowing why, had had to force himself to go anywhere near him. And when he did go near and listened to the subdued moans coming from Karatayev as he lay down to sleep at the halting-places, and noticed the smell given off by the sick man getting worse, Pierre distanced himself and stopped thinking about him.

In his prison shed Pierre had learnt, through his whole being rather than his intellect, through the process of living itself, that man was created for happiness, and happiness lies within, in the satisfaction of natural human needs, and any unhappiness arises from excess rather than deficiency. But now, during the last three weeks of the march, he had learnt another new truth that brought great consolation – he had learnt that there is nothing in the world to be frightened of. He had learnt that just as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, neither is there any situation in which he should be unhappy and not free. He had learnt that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and those limits are never far away; that a man who has felt discomfort from a crumpled petal in his bed of roses has suffered just as much as he was suffering now, sleeping on the bare, damp earth, with one side freezing while the other side warmed up; that when in former days he had squeezed into a pair of tight dancing-shoes he had suffered just as much as he was suffering now, walking barefoot, his footwear having disintegrated long ago, with his feet covered with sores. He learnt that when he had married his wife by his own free will (so he had thought), he had been no freer than he was now when they locked him up in a stable for the night. Of all the things he later identified as painful, though at the time he was hardly conscious of them, the worst thing was the state of his bare feet, which were blistered and scabby. (Horse-meat had a nice taste and did you good, the flavour of saltpetre from the gun-powder used as a salt-substitute was really rather nice, the weather was never very cold, it was always warm when they were marching during the daytime, and at night they had camp-fires, and the lice that made a meal of him gave him a pleasant feeling of being kept warm.) His feet were the only things that hurt during those early days.

On the second day of the march, when he examined his blisters by the camp-fire Pierre thought he would never be able to walk on them, but when everybody was up, he limped along with the rest, and later on, when he warmed up, it didn’t hurt to go on walking, though his feet looked even more terrible that evening. But he ignored them and thought about something else.

It was now that Pierre understood the full power of human vitality, and the effectiveness of our inbuilt safety device, distraction, which works like a safety-valve in steam-engines, letting off excess steam as soon as the pressure reaches a certain point.