ust smiling thoughtfully to himself and staring at the offcuts. 'Nice set of leg-bands these'll be, me dear,' he said, walking off back into the shed.
CHAPTER 12
Four weeks had passed since Pierre had been taken prisoner. Although the French had offered to transfer him so he could be with the officers, he had stayed on in the same shed they had first put him in.
In the burnt-out ruins of Moscow Pierre had passed through degrees of hardship and deprivation that tested a man to the limit, but, because of his strong constitution and good health, which he had taken for granted until now, and especially because the privations had come upon him so gradually he couldn't have said when they had started, he was able to stand the strain not only with something to spare, but with real pleasure. And it was now that he attained the peace of mind, the feeling of being at ease with himself, that he had been struggling vainly to achieve for so long. He had spent so much of his life casting around in all directions for the kind of tranquillity and self-certainty that had impressed him so much in the soldiers at Borodino. He had sought for it in philanthropy, freemasonry, a dissipated life in high society, wine, heroic deeds of self-sacrifice, and romantic love for Natasha. He had sought it through the power of thought, and all his struggles and various experiments had ended in frustration. And now without noticing it he had gained that inner peace and harmony simply through the horror of death and hardship together with what he had observed in Karatayev. Those ghastly moments he had lived through during the execution seemed to have blotted out of his imagination and his memory once and for all a whole series of worrying thoughts and anxious feelings that had once seemed so important. No thoughts now about Russia, the war, politics or Napoleon. None of this seemed to matter any more; it was not his responsibility, and his was not to sit in judgement. 'Russia, warm weather - they don't go together,' he would say to himself, repeating Karatayev's words, which he found strangely reassuring. His plans for killing Napoleon, all his cabbalistic calculations and his ideas about the beast of the Apocalypse now seemed senseless and positively ludicrous. His bitterness towards his wife, and the fear of having his name dragged through the mud, now seemed not just petty - they were hilarious. What did it matter to him if that woman chose to go away somewhere and lead the kind of life that appealed to her? What did it matter to anybody - least of all him - whether or not they found out that this prisoner's name was Count Bezukhov?
Nowadays he often remembered his conversation with Prince Andrey, and he completely agreed with his friend, though with some slight distortion of his meaning. Prince Andrey had thought, and said, that happiness exists only in a negative sense, and he had said so with more than a touch of bitterness and irony, as if he was saying something else besides: that all our instinctive strivings towards positive happiness were implanted only for us to be let down and tormented by them. But Pierre recognized the truth of the basic idea without having to qualify it. Pierre now saw the absence of suffering and the satisfaction of our basic needs, followed up by freedom to choose an occupation, or lifestyle, as the highest and most dependable form of human happiness. It was only here and now that Pierre had fully appreciated for the first time in his life the enjoyment of eating when you are hungry, drinking when you are thirsty, sleeping when you are tired, keeping warm when it is cold and talking to a fellow creature when you feel like talking and you want to hear men's voices. Through deprivation Pierre now saw the satisfaction of his basic needs - good food, cleanliness and freedom - as the ultimate happiness, and the choice of an occupation or lifestyle, now that this choice was so restricted, seemed such a simple matter that he forgot that a surfeit of luxury takes all the pleasure out of satisfying our basic needs, and maximum freedom in the choice of occupation, which had been provided for him through education, wealth and his position in society, makes the actual choice of an occupation extraordinarily difficult, because it destroys the need and desire for any such thing.
Pierre now dreamt of nothing but his coming freedom, though in years to come he would think and talk about that month of incarceration with much enthusiasm, recalling all the intensely pleasurable sensations that were now gone for ever, and especially the complete peace of mind and inner freedom that he had known only at that time.
On that first morning, when he had got up at first light, come out of the shed and seen the dark domes and crosses on the Novodevichy Convent, then the grass with its dusting of hoar-frost, then the slopes of the Sparrow hills and the wooded river-banks meandering away into the purple distance, when he had felt the chill touch of the morning air and heard the cawing of jackdaws flying across the fields away from Moscow, and then seen a sudden glint of light in the east followed by the sun's rim rising majestically from behind a cloud, and the domes and crosses, the hoar-frost, the horizon and the river all merrily sparkling in the new light - Pierre had felt a new surge of strength and vitality, the like of which he had never known before.
And that feeling had never left him during the whole period of his incarceration; on the contrary, it had expanded within him as the hardships of his plight had gone on increasing.
This feeling that Pierre had of being ready for anything, of moral alertness, was reinforced by the high esteem in which he came to be held by his companions very soon after he entered the shed. His knowledge of foreign languages, the courtesy shown to him by the French, his readiness to give away anything he was asked for (as an officer he was given three roubles a week), the physical strength he showed by hammering nails into the hut wall, his gentle attitude towards them all, and his incredible ability to sit there for ages doing nothing but think, made him seem like a superior being enveloped in mystery. The very qualities that had proved inhibiting, if not actually destructive, in the society he had lived in before - his physical strength, disdain for luxury, absent-mindedness, open-heartedness - gave him virtually heroic status here among these men. And Pierre felt that this view of him imposed its own obligations.
CHAPTER 13
In the early hours of the 7th of October the exodus of the French army began. Kitchens and sheds were taken down, wagons were loaded, and off went the troops and the baggage-trains.
At seven in the morning a convoy of French soldiers stood in marching order outside the sheds wearing their shakos and waiting with knapsacks, muskets and huge sacks, and the whole line was abuzz with the chatter of Frenchmen, which included a lot of colourful language.
In the shed they stood ready, dressed, belted and shod, waiting for the word to move. The sick man, Sokolov, looking pale and thin, with blue rings round his eyes, sat in his place all on his own, the only one not wearing boots or outdoor clothing. His eyes protruded from an emaciated face as he stared round quizzically at his mates, who were all ignoring him, and he moaned quietly at regular intervals. Clearly, it wasn't so much the pain of his dysentery as the fear and worry of being left behind that was making him moan.
Pierre was wearing a piece of string round his waist and a pair of light shoes that Karatayev had cobbled up from the covering of a tea-chest that a Frenchman had brought in to have his boots soled with. He went over to the sick man and squatted down beside him.
'Come on, Sokolov, they're not all going at the same time, you know. They've got a hospital here. As like as not you'll be better off than the rest of us,' said Pierre.
'Oh God! I'm a dead man! Oh God!' The soldier redoubled his moaning.
'Hang on, I'll ask them again. Give me a minute,' said Pierre. He got to his feet and went over to the shed door. While he was making his way across, the corporal who had offered Pierre a pipe the day before came up outside with two soldiers. All three, corporal and privates, were in marching order, with shakos and knapsacks in place and chinstraps buttoned, which altered their familiar faces.
The corporal was on his way to lock the door in accordance with orders received. The prisoners had to be counted before they could be let out.
'Corporal, what's going to happen to the sick man?' Pierre launched forth, but at the moment of doing so he began to have doubts. Was this the same corporal that he knew so well or another person? He looked totally different at that moment. To make matters worse, Pierre found himself speaking against a sudden drum-roll that rattled out on two sides. The corporal scowled at Pierre's words, uttered a few meaningless oaths and slammed the door. Left in semi-darkness inside the shed, they could hear the crisp drum-roll coming from two sides and drowning out the sick man's moans.
'This is it! . . . It's back again!' Pierre said to himself, and an involuntary shiver ran down his spine. In the change that had come over the corporal's face, the sound of his voice and the rousing, deafening drum-tattoo Pierre recognized the mysterious, inhuman force that drove people against their will to murder their fellow men, the force he had seen working to full effect during the execution. There was no point in panicking, or trying to avoid this force, or appealing on bended knee to the men who were acting as its implements. This much Pierre had learnt. You just had to wait and stick it out. Pierre didn't go anywhere near the sick man and didn't look round at him. He stood there in silence by the shed door, scowling.
When the doors of the shed were flung open, and the prisoners crammed the doorway, scrambling over one another like a flock of sheep, Pierre elbowed his way to the front, and got through to the captain, the man who was ready to do anything for him, if the corporal's words were anything to go by. The captain was also in marching order, and his icy features betrayed the thing Pierre had recognized in the corporal's words and the drum-roll.
'Come on! Get a move on!' the captain was saying, grim-faced and scowling, as he watched the prisoners scramble past.
Pierre knew it wasn't worth trying, but he still went up to him.
'Well, what is it?' said the officer, scanning him coldly, as if he didn't recognize him. Pierre mentioned the sick prisoner.
'He can walk, damn him!' said the captain.
'Come on! Get a move on!' he kept on calling out, ignoring Pierre.
'Well, no, he's in terrible pain!' Pierre was trying to say.
'Get out of the way!' shouted the captain with a vicious scowl.
Trum-ti-ti-tum-tum-tum went the rattling drums. Pierre could see that the mysterious force now had total control over these men, and there was no point in saying anything more.
The officers among the prisoners were split off from the men and ordered to march in front.
There were about thirty officers, including Pierre, and a good three hundred men.
The officers, who had emerged from the other sheds, were all strangers to Pierre, and much better dressed than he was. They looked at him in his funny foot-gear with cold eyes full of suspicion. Not far from Pierre walked a portly major with a bloated, sallow, irritable-looking face. He was wearing a Kazan dressing-gown, with a towel for a belt, and he was obviously looked up to by his fellow prisoners. He had one hand thrust inside his dressing-gown, clutching a tobacco-pouch, while the other gripped his pipe by its stem. Puffing and panting, he growled at them all and rounded on them angrily for shoving against him, as he saw it, and for rushing on when there was nowhere to rush to, and gawping in amazement when there was nothing to gawp at. Another officer, a thin little man, spoke to all and sundry, holding forth about where he thought they were being taken, and how far they would get that day. A commissariat official wearing his uniform and a pair of high felt boots kept running from side to side to have a good look at what was left after the burning of Moscow, opining in a loud voice on what had been burnt and telling them what district of the town they were in as it hove into view. A third officer, of Polish extraction to judge by his accent, took issue with the commissariat official, pointing out that he was getting things wrong as he identified the various districts of Moscow.
'Why bother?' said the major testily. 'Makes no difference whether it's St Nikolay or St Vlas. Look, it's all burnt down, and that's it . . . And will you stop shoving? There's plenty of road,' he said, turning furiously on a man walking behind him who certainly hadn't pushed him.
'Oh, no, no, no. Look what they've done!' came the prisoners' voices from every side, despite the major, as they stared at the charred ruins. 'Look over there across the river. Zubovo. Inside the Kremlin . . . Look, half of it's gone! I told you it was like that across the river, and I was damn well right.'
'All right, so it's all burnt down. No point in going on about it,' said the major.
On their way through Khamovniki (one of the few Moscow districts that had survived the fire), walking past the church, the whole throng of prisoners suddenly surged to one side, calling out in shock and horror.
'Absolute swine!'
'Heathen lot!'
'Yes he's dead. It's a dead man . . . And they've wiped something all over him.'
Pierre, too, moved over towards the church to get nearer the thing that was causing the outcry, and he could just make out something leaning on the church fence. Some of his companions had a better view, and from what they said he learnt it was a dead body propped up against the fence in a standing position, with its face smeared with soot.
'Come on, damn you, get going! Move, you devils, all thirty thousand of you!' They could hear the escort swearing, and the French soldiers flailed the flat of their swords with a new viciousness to disperse the prisoners who had stopped to stare at the dead man.
CHAPTER 14
The prisoners and their guards were on their own as they marched through the back-streets of Khamovniki, with the soldiers' carts and wagons straggling on behind, but as they emerged near the provision shops they found themselves caught up in a huge, lumbering train of artillery intermingled with private vehicles.
At the bridge they ground to a halt, waiting for those in front to get across. Once on the bridge the prisoners got a good view of the endless trains of baggage-wagons stretching out in front and coming on behind. To their right, where the Kaluga road loops round by the Neskuchny gardens, endless lines of troops and wagons disappeared into the distance. These were the troops of Beauharnais's corps, who had been the first to leave. Behind them came Marshal Ney's troops and transport, stretching back down the embankment and right across the Stone Bridge.
Davout's troops, which included the prisoners, were crossing by the Crimean Ford, and some of them were already out on the Kaluga road. But the baggage-trains straggled back so far that Ney's leading troops came streaming out of Bolshaya Ordynka before the last carts of Beauharnais's corps had got through to the Kaluga road on their way out of Moscow.
Once over the Crimean Ford the prisoners found themselves moving only a few steps at a time before they ground to a halt, and then they would move on again, while masses of vehicles and men thickened on all sides. It took them more than an hour to cover the few hundred yards that separate the bridge from the Kaluga road and when they got to the square where the outlying streets converge on the Kaluga road, the prisoners were squashed in and kept standing for several hours at the crossroads. On all sides there was a constant roar that sounded like the sea, coming from rumbling wheels and marching men, with angry voices calling out and plenty of swearing. Pierre stood there crushed against the wall of a charred house, listening to this noise as it blurred in his imagination with the roll of drums.
Some of the Russian officers scrambled up on to the wall of the burnt house where Pierre was standing so they could get a better view.
'Hey, the crowds! Huge crowds everywhere! . . . They've even got stuff stacked up on the cannons! Look at them furs!' came the voices. 'Look what they've been pinching, the swine . . . See what he's got on the back of that cart? . . . a mounting from an icon that is, by God! . . . They must be Germans. Hey, there's one of our peasants! . . . Vile scum! Look at him. He can hardly move! My God, those little carriages, they've even got hold of them! . . . He's all right, perched up there on those trunks. Good God, they're at it hammer and tongs. It's a fight! . . . Go on, give him one in his face! We'll be here all night at this rate. Look at that lot! . . . Must be Napoleon's! Can you see those horses! Monograms and a crown! It's like a house on wheels. Hey look, he's dropped a bag, and he hasn't seen it. Another fight over there . . . Woman here with a baby. Not bad looking either! Go on, love, they'll let you through like that! Goes on for ever, this does! Hey, there's some Russian wenches! They are, you know. Nice and cosy in them carriages!'
And what had happened at the church in Khamovniki happened again: a wave of eager curiosity swept all the prisoners forward towards the road, and because of his height Pierre was able to peer across over the heads and see what the prisoners were so keen to look at. Three carriages had come to halt, stuck between some ammunition carts, and they were carrying a number of women who were heavily made up and decked out in garish colours, sitting there all squashed together, yelling something in shrill voices.
From the moment Pierre had recognized the return of that mysterious force nothing had seemed strange or terrible any more, not even a corpse with its face smeared with soot for a joke, or these women who seemed to be in such a hurry to get somewhere, or the burnt ruins of Moscow. Pierre was now impervious to virtually anything he saw. It was as if his spirit, girding itself up for a hard struggle, was refusing to take in any impressions that might sap its strength.
The carriages of women drove on. Then the rest trundled off, carts, soldiers, baggage-wagons, soldiers, carriages, soldiers, caissons, more soldiers and a few women here and there.
Pierre could not see these people as individuals; he saw them all together and in movement.
All these men and horses seemed to be pressing on, impelled by some invisible force. During the hour Pierre spent watching them they kept on streaming out of the various streets all with a single idea in mind: to get through as fast as they could. They were all the same, crashing into each other, getting angry, spoiling for a fight. White teeth snarled, faces scowled, the same curses flew back and forth, and all these men had the same look of gallant determination and c