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PRINCE ANDREY was on that bright August evening lying propped on his elbow in
a broken-down barn in the village of Knyazkovo, at the further end of the
encampment of his regiment. Through a gap in the broken wall he was looking at
the line of thirty-year-old pollard birches in the hedge, at the field with
sheaves of oats lying about it, and at the bushes where he saw the smoke of
camp-fires, at which the soldiers were doing their cooking.
Cramped and useless and burdensome as his life seemed now to Prince Andrey,
he felt nervously excited and irritable on the eve of battle, just as he had
felt seven years earlier before Austerlitz.
He had received and given all orders for the next day's battle. He had
nothing more to do. But thoughts—the simplest, most obvious, and therefore most
awful—would not leave him in peace. He knew that the battle next day would be
the most awful of all he had taken part in, and death, for the first time,
presented itself to him, not in relation to his actual manner of life, or to the
effect of it on others, but simply in relation to himself, to his soul, and rose
before him simply and awfully with a vividness that made it like a concrete
reality. And from the height of this vision everything that had once occupied
him seemed suddenly illumined by a cold, white light, without shade, without
perspective or outline. His whole life seemed to him like a magic lantern, at
which he had been looking through the glass and by artificial light. Now he saw
suddenly, without the glass, in the clear light of day, those badly daubed
pictures. “Yes, yes, there are they; there are the cheating forms that excited
torments and ecstasies in me,” he said to himself, going over in imagination the
chief pictures of the magic lantern of his life, looking at them now in the
cold, white daylight of a clear view of death. “These are they, these coarsely
sketched figures which seemed something splendid and mysterious. Glory, the good
society, love for a woman, the fatherland—what grand pictures they used to seem
to me, with what deep meaning they seemed to be filled! And it is all so simple,
so colourless and coarse in the cold light of the day that I feel is dawning for
me.” The three chief sorrows of his life held his attention especially. His love
for a woman, his father's death, and the invasion of the French—now in
possession of half of Russia. “Love! … That little girl, who seemed to me
brimming over with mysterious forces. How I loved her! I made romantic plans of
love, of happiness with her! O simple-hearted youth!” he said aloud bitterly.
“Why, I believed in some ideal love which was to keep her faithful to me for the
whole year of my absence! Like the faithful dove in the fable, she was to pine
away in my absence from her! And it was all so much simpler. … It is all so
horribly simple and loathsome!
“My father, too, laid out Bleak Hills, and thought it was his place, his
land, his air, his peasants. But Napoleon came along, and without even knowing
of his existence, swept him away like a chip out of his path, and his Bleak
Hills laid in the dust, and all his life with it brought to nought. Princess
Marya says that it is a trial sent from above. What is the trial for, since he
is not and never will be? He will never come back again! He is not! So for whom
is it a trial? Fatherland, the spoiling of Moscow! But to-morrow I shall be
killed; and not by a Frenchman even, maybe, but by one of our own men, like the
soldier who let off his gun close to my ear yesterday; and the French will come
and pick me up by my head and my heels and pitch me into a hole that I may not
stink under their noses; and new conditions of life will arise, and I shall know
nothing of them, and I shall not be at all.”
He gazed at the row of birch-trees with their motionless yellows and greens,
and the white bark shining in the sun. “To die then, let them kill me to-morrow,
let me be no more … let it all go on, and let me be at an end.” He vividly
pictured his own absence from that life. And those birch-trees, with their light
and shade, and the curling clouds and the smoke of the fires, everything around
seemed suddenly transformed into something weird and menacing. A shiver ran down
his back. Rising quickly to his feet, he went out of the barn, and began to walk
about.
He heard voices behind the barn.
“Who's there?” called Prince Andrey.
The red-nosed Captain Timohin, once the officer in command of Dolohov's
company, now in the lack of officers promoted to the command of a battalion,
came shyly into the barn. He was followed by an adjutant and the paymaster of
the regiment.
Prince Andrey got up hurriedly, listened to the matters relating to their
duties that the officers had come to him about, gave a few instructions, and was
about to dismiss them, when he heard a familiar, lisping voice behind the
barn.
“Que diable!” said the voice of some one stumbling over
something.
Prince Andrey, peeping out of the barn, saw Pierre, who had just hit against
a post lying on the ground, and had almost fallen over. Prince Andrey always
disliked seeing people from his own circle, especially Pierre, who reminded him
of all the painful moments he had passed through on his last stay at
Moscow.
“Well!” he cried. “What fate has brought you? I didn't expect to see
you.”
While he said this there was in his eyes and his whole face more than
coldness, positive hostility, which Pierre noticed at once. He had approached
the barn with the greatest eagerness, but now, on seeing Prince Andrey's face,
he felt constrained and ill at ease.
“I have come … you know … simply … I have come … it's interesting,” said
Pierre, who had so many times already that day repeated that word “interesting”
without meaning it. “I wanted to see the battle!”
“Yes, yes; but your mason brethren, what do they say of war? How would they
avert it?” said Prince Andrey sarcastically. “Well, tell me about Moscow. And my
people? Have they reached Moscow at last?” he asked seriously.
“Yes. Julie Drubetskoy told me so. I went to call, but missed them. They had
started for your Moscow estate.”
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