It was the way of things. A pattern of circumstances.
It was some kind of system that was killing him, killing Pierre, taking his life, taking everything away, destroying him.
CHAPTER 11
From Prince Shcherbatov's house the prisoners were taken straight down to the Virgin's Field, past the convent on the left and into a kitchen garden where a post had been dug into the ground. A big pit had been excavated behind the post, and there was a pile of newly dug earth to one side. A large crowd of people stood round the pit and the post in a semi-circle. The crowd consisted of a small number of Russians and a large number of Napoleon's off-duty soldiers, Germans, Italians and Frenchmen in a variety of uniforms. To the right and left of the post stood rows of French soldiers wearing blue uniforms with red epaulettes, high boots and shakos. The prisoners were lined up in order as listed by name (Pierre was sixth) and led out towards the post. There was a sudden drum-roll on both sides; the sound of it made Pierre feel as if part of his soul had been torn from him. He lost all power of thought and imagination. All he could do was look and listen. And he had only one thought in mind: some dreadful deed had to be accomplished and he wanted it over and done with as soon as possible. Pierre looked round at his companions and studied them.
The two men at the end were convicts with shaven heads, one tall and thin, the other a dark, hairy muscular man with a flat nose. The third was a house serf, a man in his mid-forties with greying hair and a plump, well-fed figure. The fourth man was a big handsome peasant with a full, light-brown beard and black eyes. The fifth was a factory worker, a thin, sallow boy of eighteen or so in a loose coat.
Pierre heard the Frenchmen discussing whether to shoot them one by one or two at a time. 'Two at a time,' answered the senior officer, calm and cool. There was a stirring in the ranks, and everybody seemed to be hurrying things on, not like people making a quick job of something familiar to all, but like men hurrying through some nasty and incomprehensible duty that had to be done.
A French official wearing a scarf came up to the right-hand end of the line of prisoners, and read out the sentence in Russian and in French.
Then two pairs of French soldiers came up to the criminals, and acting on orders from an officer took hold of the two convicts standing at one end. The convicts walked over to the post, stopped in front of it, and, while they were waiting for bags to be brought, they looked round dumbly like wild animals at bay. One of them kept crossing himself, the other scratched his back and worked his lips into something like a smile. The soldiers made a quick job of blindfolding them, putting bags over their heads and tying them to the post.
A dozen marksmen with muskets marched steadily out of the ranks and came to a halt eight paces from the post. Pierre turned away to avoid seeing what was going to happen. There was an ear-splitting bang that seemed louder than any thunderclap, and Pierre looked round. There was a cloud of smoke, and some French soldiers with trembling hands and pallid faces were busy doing something at the side of the pit. The next two were brought forward. It was the same again: these two men looked at everybody in the same way, without a hope, saying nothing, but with eyes begging for protection. Clearly they could neither understand nor believe what was coming to them. It was beyond belief: they were the only ones who knew what life meant to them, so they couldn't understand, or believe, that it could be taken away.
Trying not to look, Pierre turned away again, but again his hearing was shattered by a fearsome bang, and with the sound he saw smoke, blood and the pallid, scared faces of the Frenchmen, busy doing something again at the post, getting in each other's way with their trembling hands. Pierre's breathing was laboured; he looked round as if to ask, 'What's it all about?' The same question was written in all the eyes that met Pierre's. On all the faces, Russian and French, the faces of officers and men, all of them without exception, he could read the same sense of shock, horror and conflict that he felt in his own heart. 'But who is doing it? They're all suffering like me! Who is it? Who?' flashed through Pierre's mind in a split-second.
'Marksmen of the Eighty-sixth, forward march!' someone called. The fifth prisoner standing next to Pierre was led forward - alone. Pierre didn't realize he had been spared; he and all the rest had been brought here just to witness the execution. With mounting horror and no sense of joy or relief he watched what was being done. The fifth prisoner was the factory worker in the loose coat. The moment they laid hands on him he recoiled in terror and grabbed at Pierre. (Pierre shuddered and tore himself away.) The factory hand couldn't walk. They held him under his armpits, and he yelled as they dragged him along. When they got him to the post he suddenly went quiet. He seemed to have realized something. Whether he realized it was no good screaming, or thought these people couldn't possibly kill him, he stood there at the post waiting to be blindfolded just as the others had done, and stared round with the glittering eyes of a wounded animal.
This time Pierre couldn't bring himself to look away and close his eyes. At this fifth murder curiosity and emotion were at fever pitch for him and the whole crowd. Like the others this fifth man seemed calm enough. He pulled his coat tighter, and rubbed one bare foot against the other.
As they were putting his blindfold on he shifted the knot himself because it was digging into the back of his head, then, when they backed him up against the bloodstained post, he half-fell into an awkward position, pulled himself together, squared his feet and settled back comfortably. Pierre never took his eyes off him and didn't miss the slightest movement he made.
There must have been a word of command followed by the sound of eight muskets being fired. But, however hard he tried to remember it afterwards, Pierre never heard the slightest sound of a shot. All he saw was the factory hand slumping down on the ropes for some reason, spurts of blood in two places and the ropes themselves giving way under the weight of the sagging body as the factory hand slid down into a sitting position, his head drooping gawkily and with one leg buckled up underneath him. Pierre ran over to the post. No one stopped him. Frightened men with pallid faces were busy doing something round the factory hand. One old Frenchman with a moustache couldn't stop his jaw trembling as he undid the ropes. The body flopped down. Scrabbling soldiers hurried to heave it past the post and start shoving it down into the pit.
Every last man of them clearly knew beyond doubt they were all criminals, and they had to move quickly to hide all traces of their crime.
Pierre took a glance down into the pit and saw the factory hand lying there with his knees tucked up close to his head, and one shoulder higher than the other. That shoulder was rising and falling rhythmically, and twitching as it did so. But earth was already raining down in shovelfuls all over the body. One soldier roared at Pierre in a voice of savage and feverish fury, ordering him back into line. But Pierre didn't take it in; he just stood there by the post, and no one drove him away.
Once the pit had been filled up an order rang out. Pierre was taken back to his place, and the French troops that were lined up in ranks on both sides of the post performed a half-turn and set off marching in step past the post. The twenty-four marksmen standing in the middle of the circle with their recently fired muskets doubled back into line as their companies marched past.
Pierre stared now with glazed eyes at these marksmen running out of the circle two by two. They had soon rejoined the ranks - all but one of them. A young soldier, his face deathly white, was still there facing the pit, standing on the spot he had fired the shot from; his shako was skewed back, and his musket rested on the ground. He reeled like a drunken man, staggering a few steps forward and a few steps back to keep himself from falling. A veteran NCO ran out, grabbed the young soldier by the shoulder and hauled him back into the ranks. The crowd of Frenchmen and Russians began to disperse. They all walked off in silence, with their heads bowed.
'Teach 'em a thing or two about fire-raising . . .' said one of the Frenchmen. Pierre glanced round at the speaker, and saw it was a soldier try
ing to console himself somehow for what had been done, and not managing to do so. He left his sentence unfinished, waved his hand and marched on.
CHAPTER 12
After the execution Pierre was separated from the other prisoners and left alone in a little church that had been ruined and befouled.
In the late afternoon a patrol sergeant came into the church with two soldiers and informed Pierre he had been pardoned and would now be going to a special barracks set aside for prisoners of war. Without taking in a word of this, Pierre got to his feet and walked off with the soldiers. He was escorted to the top end of the field where some sheds had been knocked together out of charred planks, beams and other bits of wood, and taken into one of them. It was dark inside, and he was suddenly surrounded by a diverse group of men, about twenty of them. He stared at them without the slightest idea who they were, why they were there, or what they wanted from him. He could hear words coming at him, but they seemed inconclusive and irrelevant; he had no idea what they meant. He gave some answers to the questions put to him, but with no clear idea of who was listening or how his answers would go down with them. He was looking at faces and bodies, but they all seemed equally meaningless.
From the moment Pierre had witnessed the grisly murder carried out by men who hadn't wanted to do it he had felt as if the mainspring of his soul that kept everything in him balanced and working and gave him a semblance of life had been torn out, and it all seemed to have collapsed into a pile of meaningless rubbish. Without Pierre fully realizing it, all his faith had been undermined, faith in the good order of the universe, in the souls of men, in his own soul, even in God. This was something Pierre had experienced before, but never with this kind of intensity. Whenever he had been assailed by doubts like these in the past they had arisen from a sense of his own guilt, and at the bottom of his heart Pierre had always known that salvation from this kind of despair and doubt lay in his own hands. But now he felt he wasn't to blame for the world collapsing before his eyes and leaving nothing but meaningless ruins behind. He felt powerless; there was no way back to his old faith in life.
There were men all round him in the darkness. He seemed to be an interesting distraction for them. They were telling him something and asking questions, then they took him away and he ended up in a corner of the shed next to some men who were talking on all sides, and laughing.
'Anyway, me old mates, that same prince who-oo . . .' (with great stress on this word) came a voice from across the shed.
Sitting in the straw with his back against the wall, still and silent, Pierre kept opening and closing his eyes. The moment he closed them he could see the terrible face of the factory hand, terrible because of its sheer simplicity, and the faces of the men forced into murder, and they were even more terrible because of the anguish written all over them. So he would open his eyes again and stare blankly into the surrounding darkness.
Next to him sat a stooping little man who made his presence felt by the stench of sweat that came wafting from him every time he made any movement. This man was fiddling around with his feet in the darkness, and, although Pierre couldn't see his face, he could sense him continually glancing his way. As his eyes grew more used to the dark Pierre realized that this man was unwrapping his footcloths, and the way he was doing it caught Pierre's imagination.
After unwinding the strings from one of his legs he tidied them away and then tackled the other leg, glancing up at Pierre. While one hand was still hanging up the first leg-string, the other hand was busy unwinding the string on the other leg. With this meticulous procedure, in a swift succession of neat and tidy circular movements, the man unrolled his footcloths and hung them up on pegs in the wall overhead, took out a knife, cut off a piece of something, snapped the knife shut, put it away at the head of his sleeping-place, eased himself into a more comfortable position and sat there with his arms clasped round his knees, staring straight at Pierre. Pierre was aware of something rather pleasant, something rounded and reassuring, in those neat, circular movements, the man's nicely tidied corner, even the very smell of him. He couldn't take his eyes off him.
'Seen a lot o' trouble in your time, sir, 'ave you?' said the little man suddenly. And there was so much concern and such simplicity in the sing-song voice that Pierre couldn't get an answer out through the trembling of his jaw and his rising tears. Barely a second later, leaving no time for Pierre to start looking embarrassed, the little man went on in the same pleasant tones:
'There you are, sweetie, don't you worry,' he said, in the gently soothing sing-song voice of an old Russian peasant woman. 'Don't you worry, old pal. Trouble's short, life's long! Oh yes, me dear. And we're gettin' on fine, thank God. No nastiness 'ere. They'm all men same as you an' me, bad and good among 'em,' he said. He was still speaking as he got nimbly to his knees and then to his feet, and walked off somewhere, coughing to clear his throat.
'So that's where you've got to, you little rogue!' Pierre heard the same soothing voice at the other end of the shed. ' 'Ere she be, little devil. She remembers me! Go on with you, that's enough!' Pushing down a dog that was jumping up at him, the soldier came back to his place and sat down. He was holding something wrapped up in a bit of rag.
' 'Ere you are, sir. You taste these,' he said in the same tone of respect he had used before, unwrapping his little bundle and handing Pierre a few baked potatoes. 'We had soup for dinner. But these potatoes is a real treat!'
Pierre had had nothing to eat all day, and the smell of the potatoes was out of this world. He thanked the soldier and set about them.
'No, not like that, sir,' said the soldier with a grin, and he took one of the potatoes from him. 'Try 'em like this.' He got out his clasp-knife again, cut the potato in the palm of his hand into two equal halves, sprinkled them with a pinch of salt from the rag, and gave them back to Pierre.
'Real treat they is,' he repeated. 'You try 'em like that.' Pierre would have sworn he had never eaten better in his life.
'No, I am all right,' said Pierre, 'but why did they have to shoot those poor men? . . . That last boy couldn't have been more than twenty.'
The little man gave a soothing tut-tut. 'Oh yes, the sin of it . . .' he added quickly, and went straight on talking as if he always had a mouthful of words at the ready so they could come flying out by pure chance.
'How d'you come to stay on in Moscow, sir?'
'I didn't think they'd get here quite so quickly. I stayed on by accident,' said Pierre.
'Just come in your house an' got you, did they, old darlin'?'
'No, I went out to see the fire, and they got me then. Tried me for arson.'
'No justice in a courtroom,' put in the little man.
'How long have you been here?' asked Pierre, munching his last potato.
'Me? Took me out of the 'orspital in Moscow last Sunday they did.'
'Are you a soldier then?'
'Yes, we're all from the Apsheron mob. Dyin' of fever I was. Never told us nothin'. Must've been twenty of us layin' there sick. Never 'ad a thought, we didn't, no idea 'ow things was.'
'You've had a bad time in here then?' asked Pierre.
'Not too good, me old darlin'. My name's Platon. Platon Karatayev,' he added, obviously wanting to smooth the path for Pierre to talk to him. 'The boys used to call me their little mate. Bound to get you down a bit, isn't it, matey? Moscow - mother of all cities. Sight like that's bound to get you down a bit. But you know what they says: "A worm be in the cabbage, but 'e dies before 'e's done," ' he added quickly.
'What was that? What did you say?' asked Pierre.
'You what?' said Karatayev. 'What I says is this: we're at large but God's in charge,' he said, quite sure he was repeating what he had just said. And he plunged on. ' 'Ave you got your own family estate then, sir? Your own 'ouse? My goodness, your cup was runnin' over! Little wife, too? Your old mum and dad still alive?' he asked and though Pierre couldn't see it in the dark, he felt sure the soldier's lips were squeezed up in a wincing li
ttle smile of good will as he asked these questions. Karatayev was quite distressed to learn that Pierre had no parents, and especially that he had never had a mother.
'Wives give advice, and their mothers are nice, but there's nobody like your own mother!' said he. 'And have you any little ones?' he continued. Pierre's negative response seemed to come as another disappointment, and he was quick to add, 'Oh well, you're a young man. Please God, you'll 'ave some. One day you will. The great thing is to get on with other people . . .'
'Doesn't make any difference now, does it?' Pierre couldn't help saying.
'Ah, you're a lovely man,' Platon countered. 'The beggar's bowl or the prison hole, you have to take what comes.' He settled down more comfortably, and cleared his throat, obviously ready to launch into a long story. 'Now take me, for instance, my dear friend. When I was still livin' at home,' he began, 'we 'ad a nice family place, lots of land, lovely 'ouse - we was well off, something to thank God for. Seven of us when we went out reapin' with our dad. Nice life. Good Christian peasants we was. Now what d'you think happened? . . .' and Platon Karatayev went into a rambling story about how he had gone into somebody else's copse to get wood, and been caught by the keeper, how he had been flogged and tried, and sent off to join the army. 'And do you know, me old darlin',' said he with a smile in his voice, 'we thought it was the end of the world, but it turned out for the best. My brother would've had to go if I hadn't got into trouble. And my younger brother, he had five little ones, see, and I only 'ad a wife to leave behind. We did 'ave a little girl, but God took her to him before I went in the army. Went home on leave, I did, and I'm tellin' you, they was livin' better than ever. Yard full of beasts, womenfolk at home, two brothers off earnin' good money. Only Mikhaylo, the youngest, still at home. Father says all his kids matters to him; bite any finger, it hurts just the same. And if they hadn't shaved Platon for a soldier that time, Mikhaylo would've had to go. Got us all together he did - would you believe it? - stood us right in front of the holy icons. "Mikhaylo," says he, "come you 'ere and bow down at his feet. You women, you bow down as well. And you grandchildren, you bow down. Understand?" says he. So there we 'ave it, me old dear. Fate picks you out. And 'ere we be, always passing judgement - that's not right, doesn't suit us. Our 'appiness, me dear, be like water in a drag-net. Swells out lovely when you pulls; take it out and it's empty. Yes, that's the way things be.' And Platon shifted position in the straw.