areness that Providence was intervening in her private life, made Sonya feel happy.
It was at the Troitsa monastery that the Rostovs made the first break in their journey.
In the monastery hostel three large rooms were assigned to the Rostov family, one exclusively for Prince Andrey. On that first day there the wounded man was feeling much better. Natasha was sitting with him. In the next room the count and countess were in polite conversation with the father superior, who had called in to see his old acquaintances and benefactors. Sonya was sitting there with them, dying to know what Prince Andrey and Natasha were talking about. She could hear their voices through the door. The door of Prince Andrey's room opened. Natasha came out looking all excited and didn't see the monk getting to his feet to greet her and pulling a baggy sleeve up to free his right hand. She went straight over to Sonya and took her by the arm.
'Natasha, what do you think you're doing? Come over here,' said the countess.
Natasha walked across to receive a blessing, and the old monk counselled her to turn to God, and also their patron saint, whenever she needed help. As soon as the father superior had gone, Natasha took her friend by the hand, and walked out with her into the empty third room.
'Sonya, he is going to live, isn't he? Do say yes,' she said. 'Sonya, I'm so happy, and so miserable too! Sonya, darling, everything's back to where it was. I want him alive. He just can't . . . because . . . be . . . cause . . .' And Natasha collapsed in tears.
'Yes! I knew it! Thank God,' said Sonya. 'He is going live.' Sonya was just as excited as her friend, experiencing the same mixture of anguish and dread, as well as one or two personal reflections that she was keeping to herself. She sobbed as she kissed and comforted Natasha. 'I want him alive!' she kept thinking. After shedding their tears and chatting together as they wiped them away, the two friends went over to Prince Andrey's door. Natasha opened it carefully and glanced in. Sonya stood next to her by the half-open door.
Prince Andrey was lying there, raised up on three pillows. His pale face looked peaceful, his eyes were closed, and they could see his steady breathing.
'Oh, Natasha!' Sonya cried suddenly, stifling a shriek as she grabbed her cousin by the arm, and backed away from the door.
'What is it? What's wrong?' asked Natasha.
'It's that thing . . . You know . . .' said Sonya, with a white face and quivering lips.
Natasha gently closed the door and walked over to the window with Sonya, not yet understanding what she was saying.
'You remember,' said Sonya, looking scared and serious. 'You remember. That time when I looked in the mirror instead of you . . . at Otradnoye. At Christmas time . . . Do you remember what I saw?'
'Yes, I do,' said Natasha, goggling. She had a vague recollection of Sonya telling her something about seeing Prince Andrey lying down.
'You remember!' Sonya went on. 'I saw him. I told you, all of you, you and Dunyasha. I saw him lying on a bed,' she said, emphasizing every detail by gesturing with a lifted finger, 'and he had his eyes shut, and he was covered with a pink quilt, and he had his hands folded,' said Sonya, with growing certainty, as she ran through the details they had just set eyes on, that she had actually seen them before. At the time she hadn't seen anything at all; she had blurted out the first thing that came into her head. But what she had invented then now seemed as real as any other actual memory. What she had said at the time - that he had looked round and smiled at her, and he was covered with something red - she remembered clearly now, and she was absolutely certain about what she had seen and said: he had been covered with a pink quilt - yes, it was pink - and his eyes had been closed.
'Yes, it was pink,' said Natasha, who also seemed to have an inkling that it had been a pink quilt, and this little detail was the oddest thing, the real mystery behind the prophetic vision.
'What does it mean?' said Natasha, thinking about it.
'I don't know! It's all so weird!' said Sonya, clutching at her head.
A few minutes later Prince Andrey rang his bell, and Natasha went in to see him while Sonya, in a rare state of excitement and emotion, stayed behind by the window, contemplating the weirdness of the way things had turned out.
That day there was an opportunity of sending letters to the army, and the countess was writing to her son.
'Sonya,' she said, looking up from her letter as her niece walked past. 'Sonya, you will write to Nikolay, won't you?' She spoke in a gentle voice with a tremor in it. Sonya could read her meaning in the weary eyes that peered out over her spectacles. It was a look that contained a strong plea, a dread of refusal, shame at having to beg and a capacity for implacable hatred if there was a refusal.
Sonya went to the countess, knelt by her and kissed her hand.
'Yes, Mamma, I will,' she said.
Sonya was feeling chastened, excited and deeply moved by all that had happened that day, especially the mysterious way in which her prophetic vision had come true. Now, knowing that the rapprochement between Natasha and Prince Andrey meant that Nikolay wouldn't be able to marry Princess Marya, she welcomed a resurgence of the self-sacrificing spirit she was used to, and liked to live by. She sat down with a gratifying sense of doing something truly magnanimous, and although her velvet-black eyes were blinded with tears so that she had to keep breaking off, she managed to write the poignant letter that was to have such a strong impact on Nikolay when he received it.
CHAPTER 9
In the guardroom where Pierre had been taken the officer and soldiers who had arrested him treated him with hostility but not without a certain respect. Their attitude was one of doubt about his identity - could he possibly be someone of importance? - mixed with hostility inspired by their recent struggle with him.
But when the guard changed next morning Pierre could sense that the new detail - officers and men - did not find him as interesting as he had been to the soldiers who had brought him in. And, indeed, the next day's guard, looking at this big, stout man in a peasant's coat, saw nothing of the beefy character who had fought so desperately with the pillaging soldier and the convoy, and had uttered those solemn words about saving a child; he was nothing more than prisoner No. 17 in a group of Russians who were being detained for some reason at the pleasure of the higher authorities. If there was anything odd about Pierre it was his gritty air of deep concentration, together with his excellent French, which greatly surprised his captors. Nevertheless, during the day Pierre was put in with all the other suspicious characters who had been arrested, because his room was wanted for an officer.
All the Russians detained with Pierre were the dregs of society. And without exception, once they knew he was a gentleman and a French-speaker to boot, they kept away from him. Pierre listened gloomily as they joked about him.
The following evening Pierre learnt that all the prisoners (probably including him) were to be tried for arson. On the third day Pierre was taken into a house along with the others to be confronted by a French general with white moustaches sitting there with two colonels, and some other Frenchmen with scarves on their sleeves. They put a series of questions to Pierre and the others with the correctness and scrupulous care that is used with all defendants and is supposed to eliminate human fallibility: they wanted to know who he was, where he had been, what he had been doing there, and so on.
These questions were like all questions posed in a courtroom: they ignored any essence of living truth - in fact, they made it impossible for any such essence ever to be discovered - and their sole purpose was to provide a conduit down which the court officials wanted to channel any answers from a defendant so as to bring him straight to the end of the inquiry - conviction. The moment he began to say anything not conducive to this end they would simply remove the conduit and let the flow go anywhere. Besides that, Pierre felt what all defendants feel in court, a sense of bafflement that left him wondering why he was being asked all these questions. He had a distinct feeling they were patronizing him, and just going through the motions of civility by providing a conduit that was nothing more than a subterfuge. He knew he was in their power; their power and that alone had brought him here, their power and that alone gave them the right to make him answer their questions, and the only purpose of the proceedings was to convict him. It followed, then, since they had all the power and a strong desire to convict him, there was no need for the subterfuge of questions and answers in a courtroom. It was perfectly obvious that the questioning was bound to lead to a guilty verdict. When asked what he had been doing when he was arrested Pierre assumed what tragic dignity he could and replied that he was taking a child he had rescued from the flames back to its parents. Why had he been fighting with a looter? Pierre said he had been defending a woman, the defence of a woman under attack being every man's duty, and so on . . . They stopped him; this was out of order. Why had he been in the courtyard of a burning house, where he had been seen by several witnesses? He said he had gone out for a walk to see what was happening in Moscow. They stopped him again. The question wasn't where was he going, but what was he doing so near to the fire. Who was he? They were repeating the first question put to him, which he had refused to answer. Again he replied that he couldn't give them an answer.
'Make a note of that. That's bad. Very bad,' came the stern comment from the general with the white whiskers and the purple-red face.
On the fourth day fire broke out in several places along the Zubovsky rampart.
Pierre was transferred with thirteen of the others to a coach-house belonging to a merchant's mansion near the Crimean Ford. As he walked down the streets Pierre could hardly breathe for the smoke that seemed to hang over the whole city. Fires were raging on all sides. Until then Pierre had not grasped the significance of the burning of Moscow, and he was horrified as he gazed at the fires.
Pierre spent four more days in the coach-house of the mansion near the Crimean Ford, and in the course of them he learnt by listening to a conversation between the French soldiers that any day now the prisoners detained here could expect to hear their sentences handed down by a marshal. Which marshal, Pierre couldn't find out from the soldiers. As far as the soldiers were concerned this marshal clearly represented power at its highest and most esoteric.
For Pierre these first days, ending on the 8th of September when the prisoners were arraigned and interrogated for the second time, were the hardest to bear.
CHAPTER 10
On the 8th of September into the prisoners' coach-house walked an officer of some considerable standing, if the deference shown to him by the guards was anything to go by. This man, probably a staff-officer, held out a piece of paper and read through a list of all the Russian names. He had Pierre down as 'the one who won't give his name'. Almost too lazy even to glance at the prisoners, he told the officer on guard to have them tidied up and decently dressed before bringing them before the marshal. An hour later a squad of soldiers turned up, and Pierre was taken out with another thirteen men and marched over to the Virgin's Field. It was a lovely day, sunny after rain, and the air was exceptionally clear. There was no pall of smoke as there had been on the day when Pierre had been taken out from the guardroom in the Zubovsky rampart; any smoke rose straight up in a column through the pure air. There were no flames anywhere, but columns of smoke rose up on all sides, and the whole of Moscow, as far as Pierre could tell, had burnt down in one huge conflagration. All over the place he could see empty spaces with nothing but stoves and pipes still standing, interspersed in a few places with the blackened walls of stone-built houses. Pierre stared at the ruins without recognizing parts of the town he knew well. Odd churches seemed to have survived here and there. The Kremlin had escaped; its towers and the belfry of Ivan the Great shone white in the distance. They could see the gleaming dome of the Novodevichy convent not far away, and the chiming of the bells was extraordinarily clear. The bells reminded Pierre that it was Sunday, and a special one: the Nativity of the Virgin. But there seemed to be no one there to celebrate. On every side there was nothing but charred ruins, and the only Russians they came across were a few ragged, scared-looking people, who scuttled away the moment they spotted the French.
Clearly the Russian nest had been ruined and destroyed, but Pierre felt instinctively that Russian order, thus annihilated, had been superseded in its nest by another, different kind of order, the rigorous order of the French. He could sense this in the serried ranks of marching soldiers stepping out boldly and breezily as they escorted him and the other prisoners. He could sense it in the sudden appearance of an important French official coming towards them, driven by a soldier in a carriage and pair. He could sense it in the merry strains of military music floating across the meadow from over on the left. And he had sensed it, too, with a sudden insight into what it was all about, when the list of names had been read out to them that morning by the newly arrived French officer. Pierre had been arrested by one set of soldiers, taken to one place and transferred to another along with dozens of different people. He could so easily have been forgotten or mixed up with other people, but no, his own answers under interrogation came back to him in the form of a new title: 'the one who won't give his name'. And under this title, which filled Pierre with dread, they were taking him somewhere, with absolute certainty on their faces that he and the other prisoners were the right ones, going to the right place. Pierre felt like a meaningless speck trapped in the wheels of some well-oiled machinery working away in a manner that he didn't understand.
He and the other prisoners were escorted across to the right-hand side of the Virgin's Field, not far from the convent, and taken up to a big white house with a huge garden. It was Prince Shcherbatov's house; Pierre had often been there in former days as a guest of its owner. Now, he gathered from what the soldiers said, it was occupied by a marshal, the Duke of Eckmuhl.
They were brought to the entrance and taken in one by one. Pierre was the sixth to be led in. Through the glass gallery they went, through the ante-room and the hall, all of them familiar to Pierre, until they came to the long, low study, where an adjutant stood waiting by the door.
Davout was sitting at a desk at the far end of the room with his spectacles on his nose. Pierre walked over to him. Davout was too busy with a document in front of him to look up. So, without looking up, he asked in the gentlest of tones, 'Who are you?'
Pierre didn't respond; he couldn't have said a word. Davout was more than a French general to Pierre; to Pierre Davout was a man renowned for his cruelty. Looking into Davout's icy features - he was behaving like a martinet of a teacher with limited patience who was waiting for an answer - Pierre sensed that a second's delay could cost him his life, but he had no idea what to say. He couldn't bring himself to say what he had said at the first interrogation, but to reveal his identity and social standing might be humiliating and even dangerous.
Pierre was speechless. Before he had time to decide on a course of action, Davout looked up, pushed his spectacles up on his forehead, screwed up his eyes and stared closely at Pierre.
'I know this man,' he said, in an icy, even tone, clearly calculated to put the fear of death into Pierre. The chill that had been running down Pierre's spine now seemed to crush his head in a vice-like grip.
'You cannot know me, General, I have never seen you.'
'He's a Russian spy,' Davout interrupted, speaking to another general whom Pierre had not noticed. Davout turned away. With an unexpected tremor in his voice Pierre launched forth and was soon in full flow.
'No, monseigneur,' he said, suddenly remembering that Davout was a duke. 'You couldn't know me. I'm a militia officer, and I haven't been out of Moscow.'
'Your name?' Davout repeated.
'Bezukhov.'
'What proof is there that you're not lying?'
'Monseigneur!' cried Pierre more in supplication than annoyance.
Davout looked up again and stared closely at Pierre. For several seconds they looked at one another, and it was this look that saved Pierre. The business of staring at each other took them beyond the realm of warfare and courtrooms; they were two human beings and there was a bond between them. There was a single instant that involved an infinite sharing of experience in which they knew they were both children of humanity, and they were brothers.
When Davout had first glanced up from the document that had the lives and actions of men numbered off in columns, Pierre was nothing more than a chance occurrence, and Davout could have had him shot without the slightest qualm of conscience, but now he recognized him as a man. He thought for a moment.
'How will you prove the truth of what you say?' asked Davout icily.
Pierre thought of Ramballe, and gave his name, his regiment and the street and house where he was staying.
'You are not what you say,' Davout said again.
Pierre's voice shook and trembled as he struggled to find proof that his testimony was true.
But at that moment an adjutant came in and said something to Davout.
Davout beamed at the adjutant's news and began buttoning up his jacket. He seemed to have completely forgotten about Pierre. When the adjutant reminded him about the prisoner, he scowled, nodded in Pierre's direction, and told them to take him away. But where they were taking him Pierre couldn't tell: was it back to the shed or over to the place of execution that his companions had pointed to on their way past the Virgin's Field?
He looked round and saw that the adjutant was checking something. 'Yes, of course,' said Davout. But Pierre had no idea what the 'yes' meant.
Pierre would never remember where he went, how they got there or how long it took. In a state of total stupefaction and bemusement, taking nothing in, he made his legs move in step with the others until they all stopped, and he stopped. And all this time Pierre's head was obsessed with a single thought, a simple question: who had condemned him to death? Who was it?
It wasn't the men who had interrogated him at the first session; clearly, none of them had wanted to, or had the authority. It couldn't have been Davout, who had put such huma