War And Peace

While the marshal had been driving past the prisoners had been hustled together in a bunch, and Pierre had caught sight of Karatayev for the first time that morning. He was sitting wrapped up in his little greatcoat, leaning back against a birch-tree. His face still wore the same look of joyous emotion as yesterday, when he had been telling the story of the merchant and his innocent suffering, but now it had another expression too, a look of quiet solemnity.

Karatayev was looking across at Pierre, and his kindly, round eyes, brimming with tears, held an unmistakable appeal, as if he had something to say to him. But Pierre feared for his own skin. He pretended he hadn’t seen that look and hurried away.

When the prisoners set off again Pierre looked back. Karatayev was still sitting there under the birch-tree at the side of the road, and there were two Frenchmen standing over him, talking to each other. Pierre didn’t look round again. He limped on up the hill.

A shot rang out from behind, back where Karatayev had been sitting. Pierre heard the shot distinctly, but the moment he heard it he suddenly remembered he hadn’t finished calculating how many stages were left to Smolensk, the problem he had been working on before the marshal rode past. He started counting again. Two French soldiers ran past Pierre, one of them holding a musket that was still smoking. They both looked pale, and in the expression on their faces – one of them glanced timidly at Pierre – there was something similar to what he had seen in the young soldier at the execution in Moscow. Pierre looked at the soldier and remembered an occasion, only a couple of days ago, when that man had scorched his shirt while drying it in front of the fire and they had all laughed at him.

Back where Karatayev was sitting the dog started howling. ‘Silly creature! What’s she got to howl about?’ thought Pierre.

Pierre’s fellow prisoners, marching along at his side, were, like him, refusing to look back at the place where they had heard the shot come from and then the howling of the dog. But there was a grim look on every face.

CHAPTER 15

The cavalry wagons, the prisoners and Marshal Junot’s baggage-train halted for the night in the village of Shamshevo. They all crowded round the camp-fires. Pierre went over to a fire, ate some roast horse-meat, lay down with his back to the fire and fell fast asleep. He slept as he had done at Mozhaysk after the battle of Borodino.

Once again real events mingled with his dreams; once again a voice, either his own or someone else’s, was murmuring thoughts in his ear, some of the same thoughts he had heard in his dream at Mozhaysk.

Life is everything. Life is God. Everything is in flux and movement, and this movement is God. And while there is life there is pleasure in being conscious of the Godhead. To love life is to love God. The hardest and the most blessed thing is to love this life even in suffering, innocent suffering.

‘Karatayev!’ The memory flashed into Pierre’s mind. And suddenly Pierre had a vision, like reality itself, of someone long forgotten, a gentle old teacher who had taught him geography in Switzerland. ‘Wait a minute,’ said the little old man. And he showed Pierre a globe. This globe was a living thing, a shimmering ball with no fixed dimensions. The entire surface of the ball consisted of drops closely compressed. And the drops were in constant movement and flux, sometimes dissolving from many into one, sometimes breaking down from one into many. Each drop was trying to spread out and take up as much space as possible, but all the others, wanting to do the same, squeezed it back, absorbing it or merging into it.

‘This is life,’ said the little old teacher.

‘It’s so simple and clear,’ thought Pierre. ‘How could I have not known that before? God is in the middle, and each drop tries to expand and reflect Him on the largest possible scale. And it grows, gets absorbed and compressed, disappears from the surface, sinks down into the depths and bubbles up again. That’s what has happened to him, Karatayev: he has been absorbed and he’s disappeared.’

‘Now you understand, my child,’ said the teacher.

‘Don’t you understand, damn your eyes?’ shouted a voice, and Pierre woke up.

He raised his head and sat up. A French soldier was squatting by the fire, having shoved a Russian soldier to one side, and he was roasting a piece of meat on the end of a ramrod. His sleeves were rolled up, and his sinewy, hairy red hands, with their stubby fingers, were expertly rotating the ramrod. The glowing embers lit up his scowling brown face with its sullen brows.

‘Makes no difference to him,’ he muttered, glancing back quickly at a soldier standing behind him. ‘Brigand! Get away from here!’