out every night in the snow month after month when the temperature stood at fifteen below, there were only seven or eight hours of daylight, and the rest was night-time, when discipline goes by the board, and men went in fear of death (which again put them beyond discipline) not for a few hours, as in battle, but for months on end, struggling every moment against cold and starvation. And it is this phase of the campaign, when half the army perished in a single month, that historians refer to when they claim that Miloradovich ought to have executed a flanking manoeuvre in one direction, and Tormasov in another, while Chichagov ought to have transferred his forces to such-and-such a place (knee-deep in snow, of course), and so-and-so 'destroyed the French opposition', somebody else 'cut them off', and so on and so forth.
The Russian soldiers did everything they could or should have done to achieve an aim worthy of the people, and half of them died in the attempt. It is hardly their fault if other Russians, at home in the warmth, kept coming out with proposals for them to achieve the impossible.
This curious lack of correspondence, which we now find incomprehensible, between the facts as they were and the way they have gone down in history, arises purely and simply from the tendency of historians writing about this event to describe the history of various generals, with their noble sentiments and splendid words, rather than the history of the events themselves.
They set great store by things said by Miloradovich, honours conferred on this or that general and the propositions they all put forward, but they completely ignore the question of fifty thousand men left behind in hospitals and graves, claiming that this issue is beyond the scope of their research.
Meanwhile, all we have to do is take a break from researching the reports and plans of the generals and look into the movements of those hundred thousand men who were directly involved in the events themselves, and all the apparently insoluble questions can be resolved once and for all with extraordinary ease and simplicity.
The plan of isolating Napoleon and his army never existed outside the imagination of a dozen men. It couldn't have existed because it was absurd and impracticable.
The people had only one aim: to rid their country of the invading army. This aim was in the process of being achieved quite independently, since the French were running away, and all they had to do was not get in the way of the retreat. That was the first point. Secondly, this aim was in the process of being achieved because of the action of the guerrilla forces that were gradually destroying the French, and thirdly, a big Russian army was following close behind the French, ready to resort to force if anything held up their retreat.
The Russian army had to act like a whip used against an animal in full flight. Any driver worth his salt knew it was better to keep the whip in the air and use it as a threat than to lash the running animal about the head.
PART IV
CHAPTER 1
When a man sees an animal dying he is seized with horror. What he himself consists of, his own substance, is being visibly destroyed, ceasing to exist before his very eyes. But when the dying creature is a man, and a man deeply loved, there is more to it than the horror experienced at the extinction of life: it feels like a laceration, a spiritual wound, which, like a physical wound, may heal up or may prove fatal, but it always hurts and it shrinks away from any abrasive external contact.
After Prince Andrey's death Natasha and Princess Marya both felt like this. Feeling totally demoralized, they winced and shrank away from the menacing cloud of death that hovered above them, and they could not bring themselves to look life in the face. They shielded their open wounds with great care from any rough and painful contact. Everything - a carriage driving quickly down the street, a summons to dinner, a maid asking which dress to put out; worse still, any perfunctory and obviously insincere expression of sympathy - would set the wound hurting again; it would seem like an affront, an intrusion into that silence which both of them needed as they strove to listen to the harsh and terrible chorus still ringing in their minds. It would set up a barrier between them and the deep mysteries and endless vistas that had briefly opened before them.
The only time they felt safe from such outrage and pain was when they were alone together. Not that they said much. When they did speak, it was about the most trivial things. And both of them in equal measure avoided any reference to the future.
To admit the possibility of a future seemed like an affront to his memory. They were even more cautious about mentioning anything to do with the dead man. What they had gone through and felt so deeply seemed to defy expression in words. Any reference in words to the details of his life seemed to offend against the grandeur and sanctity of the mystery that had been accomplished before their eyes.
This constant holding back and studious avoidance of anything that might lead to a mention of him, this stopping short on both sides of the barrier that determined what could and couldn't be said, left both their minds with a clearer and purer sense of what they were feeling.
But complete and unalloyed sorrow is as impossible as complete and unalloyed joy. Princess Marya, conscious of her position as the independent mistress of her own fate, and her nephew's guardian and tutor, was the first to respond to the demands of everyday life and emerge from the world of mourning she had been living in throughout those first two weeks. She had received letters from relatives that needed answering, there was damp in the room where little Nikolay had been put, and he now had a cough. Alpatych came to Yaroslavl with reports on the state of their affairs and various proposals. He s advised Princess Marya to move back to Moscow and take up residence in their house on Vozdvizhenka Street, which had survived intact and needed nothing more than a few minor repairs. Life had to go on; there was no stopping it. Painful as it was for Princess Marya to emerge from the world of solitary contemplation she had so far been living in, regrettable, almost shameful, as it was to have to leave Natasha to manage on her own, the duties of everyday life were calling for attention, and she had to give in to them, however reluctantly. She went through the accounts with Alpatych, consulted Dessalles about her nephew, and then got down to the arrangements and preparations for moving back to Moscow.
Natasha was now on her own, and from the moment Princess Marya became busy with the preparations for leaving she avoided even her company.
Princess Marya asked the countess to let Natasha come and stay with her in Moscow, a suggestion that met with the immediate approval of both mother and father, who had been watching their daughter's physical decline getting worse by the day and now hoped that a change of scene and some help from the doctors in Moscow might do her good.
'I'm not going anywhere,' answered Natasha, when the suggestion was put to her. 'Please, just leave me alone.' And she ran out of the room, hardly able to hold back tears that had more to do with exasperation and anger than sorrow.
Feeling abandoned by Princess Marya and alone in her grief, Natasha now spent most of the time alone in her room sitting in a corner of the sofa with her feet tucked up under her. Her narrow, nervous fingers were continually twisting or tearing at something, and she would sit there staring fixedly at the first object that met her eyes. This solitude was wearisome, pure torture, but it was just what she needed. The moment someone came in to see her she got quickly to her feet, changed her attitude and expression, and picked up a book or some needlework, but she was obviously anxious for the intruder to go away.
She always felt herself to be on the very brink of understanding, of focusing her spiritual vision and answering questions too terrible to contemplate.
One day towards the end of December Natasha, looking thin and pale, dressed in a black woollen gown, with her hair plaited up in a hasty coil, was sitting in the corner of the sofa with her feet tucked up under her, nervously crumpling and smoothing out the ends of her sash with her fingers while she gazed at the corner of the door.
She was looking out towards the place on the other side of life where she knew he had gone to. And that other side of life, which she had never given a thought to in days gone by because it had always seemed so remote and unbelievable, was now closer, more natural to her and more understandable than this side of life, where there was nothing but emptiness and desolation or pain and humiliation.
She was looking out towards the place where she knew he had gone to, but she could only see him as he had been here on earth. She was seeing him again as he had been at Mytishchi, Troitsa and Yaroslavl.
She could see his face, hear his voice, repeat his words to her and her words to him. Sometimes she dreamt up new phrases for herself and for him, things that might have been said at that earlier time.
There he is now, lying on a low chair in his velvet, fur-lined cloak, with his head propped up on a thin, pale hand. His chest looks terribly hollow, and his shoulders are hunched. His lips are compressed, his eyes are gleaming, and on his pale forehead a line keeps coming and going. There is a rapid tremor just noticeable in one of his legs. Natasha knows he is fighting against unbearable pain. 'What kind of pain is it? What's it all about? What can he feel? Oh the agony!' Natasha is thinking.
He had become aware of her watching him, looked up and started speaking with no smile on his face.
'The only awful thing,' he had said to her, 'would be to bind yourself for ever to a suffering invalid. It would be an everlasting torment.' And he had given her the most searching look - a look she could still remember. Natasha had replied, as always, without giving herself time to think of a proper response. She had said, 'It can't go on like this. Things will be different. You're going to get better. You'll be completely well again.'
She was seeing him now as she had seen him then, and reliving all she had felt at the time. She remembered the long, sad, severe look he had levelled at her when he heard those words, and she took in all the reproach and the despair contained in his long stare.
'I agreed with him,' Natasha told herself now, 'that it would be awful if he never recovered from his suffering. I only said it because it would have been so awful for him, but he took it the wrong way. He thought it would be awful for me. At that time he wanted to go on living. He was afraid of dying. And I was so clumsy and stupid in the way I said it. That wasn't what I was thinking. I was thinking something quite different. If I had told him what I was thinking about I would have said, "Even if he stayed like that, dying, dying away before my eyes, I'd have been much happier than I am now." Now I have nothing . . . nobody . . . Did he know? No, he didn't, and he never will. And now it will never, never be possible to put things right.'
And there he was saying the same words again, but this time Natasha imagined herself coming out with a different answer. She stopped him, and said, 'Awful for you, but not for me. You must know that without you there is nothing left in my life, and suffering with you is the greatest possible happiness.' And now he was taking her hand and squeezing it, just as he had done on that terrible evening four days before his death. And in her imagination she was pouring out other words of tenderness and love, which might have been said at the time and were coming out now . . . 'I love you! . . . Darling . . . I do love you!' she was saying, wringing her hands convulsively, and gritting her teeth with bitter ferocity . . .
And then she was swept by a wave of bitter-sweet sorrow, and her eyes were filling with tears, but all at once she asked herself who she was talking to. Where was he, and what was he now?
And again her whole mind was clouded with an arid and harsh uncertainty. Again, with an anxious furrowing of her brow she stared fixedly ahead, searching for where he was. And for a moment she seemed to be on the brink of penetrating the mystery . . . But at the very instant when the unfathomable depths seemed to be clearing, she was shocked out of her reverie by a painfully loud rattling of the door-handle. Her maid, Dunyasha, rushed straight in with panic in her eyes, showing no concern for Natasha.
'Please miss, come quickly and see your father,' said Dunyasha, looking unusually agitated. 'Something terrible has happened . . . It's young Count Petya . . . a letter,' she gasped out, choking and sobbing.
CHAPTER 2
This was a time when Natasha's general feeling of alienation was at its worst with her own family members, from whom she felt particularly estranged. All her own family, her father and mother and Sonya, were so close to her, so normal and ordinary, that their every word and feeling seemed like a desecration of the world she had been living in of late. It was worse than indifference; she looked on them with outright hostility. She could hear what Dunyasha was saying about little Petya, and something terrible that had happened, but she wasn't taking it in.
'Terrible? Nothing terrible could have happened to them, surely. It's easy for them . . . all the old routine. Everything goes on in the same old way,' Natasha was saying to herself.
Just as she got to the drawing-room door her father came hurrying out of the countess's room. His face was crumpled and wet with tears. He had clearly rushed out to give vent to the sobs that were choking him. He took one look at Natasha, waved his arms in despair, and broke down in a bout of violent, convulsive sobbing that completely distorted his soft, round face.
'It's Pe . . . Petya . . . Gug-gug-go on in . . . She's c-calling . . .' And sobbing like a child, he tottered over to a chair on his feeble legs, and all but collapsed on to it, burying his face in his hands.
This acted like a sudden electric shock running right through Natasha's body. Her heart lurched with a terrible searing pain. She was struck by a feeling of terrible anguish; something seemed to give way inside her, leaving her for dead. But the pain was immediately followed by a feeling of release from the repressive forces that had taken over her life. One look at her father, one ghastly, raucous scream from her mother heard through the door, and she instantly forgot herself and her own sorrows.
She ran over to her father, but with a feeble hand he motioned her towards her mother's door. Princess Marya came out, ashen-faced, jaw trembling, and said something as she took Natasha by the hand. Natasha saw nothing and heard nothing. She hurried through the doorway, stopped for a moment as if she was fighting something down and then ran over to her mother.
The countess was sprawling stiffly and awkwardly across a low chair, beating her head against the wall. Sonya and some of the maids were holding her by the arms.
'Natasha, Natasha!' the countess was screaming. 'It's not true, not true . . . it's all lies . . . Natasha!' she screamed, pushing the maids away. 'Go away, the lot of you. It's not true! Dead? . . . ha, ha, ha! . . . It's not true! . . .'
Natasha knelt down in front of the chair, bent over her mother, gave her a hug, lifted her up with a remarkable display of strength, turned her face up, and held her close.
'Mamma! . . . Sweetheart! . . . I'm here, darling Mamma . . .' she whispered on and on, without stopping.
She wouldn't let her mother go. Gently she struggled with her, asked for a cushion and a drink of water, unfastening her mother's dress and tearing it looser. 'Listen, my sweet darling . . . my dear, lovely mamma . . .' she whispered on and on, kissing her head, her hands, her face. She could feel floods of helpless tears streaming down her face, tickling her nose and cheeks.
The countess squeezed her daughter's hand, closed her eyes, and calmed down for a moment. Then suddenly she sat up in one rapid, unnatural movement, stared round blankly, caught sight of Natasha and hugged her head with all the strength she could muster. Natasha's face winced with pain as her mother turned it towards her, and gave her a long, searching look.
'Natasha, you do love me, don't you?' she said confidingly in a gentle whisper. 'Natasha, you won't let me down, will you? You'll tell me the truth?'
Natasha was looking at her with tears in her eyes, and the expression on her face was a simple plea for forgiveness and love.
'My dear lovely mamma . . .' she repeated over and over again, concentrating all the strength of her love to find some way to relieve her mother of some of the grief that was crushing her.
And once again her mother, caught up in a hopeless struggle with reality, refused to believe that she could still be alive while her beloved little boy had been killed just as he was blossoming into life, ran away from reality and took refuge in irrationality.
Natasha would never remember how she spent that day and night, and the following day and the following night. She never went to sleep or left her mother's side. Natasha's love, patient and persistent as it was, brought no explanation or consolation, but as it enfolded the countess on all sides, with every passing second it lured her back to the land of the living.
On the third night the countess calmed down a little, and Natasha closed her eyes, propping her head up on the arm of the chair. The bed creaked. Natasha opened her eyes. The countess was sitting up in bed, talking softly.
'I'm so glad you've come back. You must be tired. Would you like some tea?' Natasha went over to her. 'You're a handsome boy now, quite the young man,' the countess went on, taking her daughter's hand.
'Mamma, what are you talking about?'
'Natasha, he's gone. He's not coming back.'
And now, hugging her daughter, the countess at last gave way to tears.
CHAPTER 3
Princess Marya delayed her departure. Sonya and the count tried to take over from Natasha, but it was beyond them. They could see that she was the only person who could keep her mother from maniacal despair. For three weeks Natasha never left her mother's side. She stayed in her room and slept in a chair, saw that she ate and drank, and talked to her continually. She kept on talking because her tender, loving voice was the only thing that could soothe the countess.
The wound in her mother's heart was beyond healing. Petya's death had torn her life in two. When the news came she had been a hale and hearty woman of fifty; now, a month later, she came out of her room an old woman, more dead than alive, and with no zest for life. But the wound that had half-killed the countess was a new wound for Natasha, and it brought her back to life.