War And Peace: Book 12 - CHAPTER X

作者: Leo Tolstoy

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Author: Leo Tolstoy

ON THE 8TH of September, there came into the prisoners' coach-house an

officer of very great consequence, judging by the respectfulness with which he

was addressed by the soldiers on guard. This officer, probably some one on the

staff, held a memorandum in his hand, and called over all the Russians' names,

giving Pierre the title of “the one who will not give his name.” And with an

indolent and indifferent glance at all the prisoners, he gave the officer on

guard orders to have them decently dressed and in good order before bringing

them before the marshal. In an hour a company of soldiers arrived, and Pierre

with the thirteen others was taken to the Virgin's Meadow. It was a fine day,

sunny after rain, and the air was exceptionally clear. The smoke did not hang

low over the town as on the day when Pierre had been taken from the guard-room

of the Zubovsky rampart; the smoke rose up in columns into the pure air. Flames

were nowhere to be seen; but columns of smoke were rising up on all sides, and

all Moscow, all that Pierre could see, was one conflagration. On all sides he

saw places laid waste, with stoves and pipes left standing in them, and now and

then the charred walls of a stone house.

Pierre stared at the fires, and did not recognise parts of the town that he

knew well. Here and there could be seen churches that had not been touched by

the fire. The Kremlin uninjured, rose white in the distance, with towers and

Ivan the Great. Close at hand, the cupola of the Monastery of the New Virgin

shone brightly, and the bells for service rang out gaily from it. Those bells

reminded Pierre that it was Sunday and the festival of the birth of the Virgin

Mother. But there seemed to be no one to keep this holiday; on all sides they

saw the ruin wrought by the fires, and the only Russians they met were a few

tattered and frightened-looking people, who hid themselves on seeing the

French.

It was evident that the Russian nest was in ruins and destroyed; but with

this annihilation of the old Russian order of life, Pierre was unconsciously

aware that the French had raised up over this ruined nest an utterly different

but strong order of their own. He felt this at the sight of the regular ranks of

the boldly and gaily marching soldiers who were escorting him and the other

prisoners; he felt it at the sight of some important French official in a

carriage and pair, driven by a soldier, whom they met on their way. He felt it

at the gay sounds of regimental music, which floated across from the left of the

meadow; and he had felt it and realised it particularly strongly from the

memorandum the French officer had read in the morning when he called over the

prisoners' names. Pierre was taken by one set of soldiers, led off to one place,

and thence to another, with dozens of different people. It seemed to him that

they might have forgotten him, have mixed him up with other people. But no; his

answers given at the examination came back to him in the form of the

designation, “the one who will not give his name.” And under this designation,

which filled Pierre with dread, they led him away somewhere, with unhesitating

conviction written on their faces that he and the other prisoners with him were

the right ones, and that they were being taken to the proper place. Pierre felt

himself an insignificant chip that had fallen under the wheel of a machine that

worked without a hitch, though he did not understand it.

Pierre was led with the other prisoners to the right side of the Virgin's

Meadow, not far from the monastery, and taken up to a big, white house with an

immense garden. It was the house of Prince Shtcherbatov, and Pierre had often

been inside it in former days to see its owner. Now, as he learnt from the talk

of the soldiers, it was occupied by the marshal, the Duke of Eckmühl.

They were led up to the entrance, and taken into the house, one at a time.

Pierre was the sixth to be led in. Through a glass-roofed gallery, a vestibule,

and a hall, all familiar to Pierre, he was led to the long, low-pitched study,

at the door of which stood an adjutant.

Davoust was sitting at a table at the end of the room, his spectacles on his

nose. Pierre came close up to him. Davoust, without raising his eyes, was

apparently engaged in looking up something in a document that lay before him.

Without raising his eyes, he asked softly: “Who are you?”

Pierre was mute because he was incapable of articulating a word. Davoust was

not to Pierre simply a French general; to Pierre, Davoust was a man notorious

for his cruelty. Looking at the cold face of Davoust, which, like a stern

teacher, seemed to consent for a time to have patience and await a reply, Pierre

felt that every second of delay might cost him his life. But he did not know

what to say. To say the same as he had said at the first examination he did not

dare; to disclose his name and his position would be both dangerous and

shameful. Pierre stood mute. But before he had time to come to any decision,

Davoust raised his head, thrust his spectacles up on his forehead, screwed up

his eyes, and looked intently at Pierre.

“I know this man,” he said, in a frigid, measured tone, obviously reckoning

on frightening Pierre. The chill that had been running down Pierre's back seemed

to clutch his head in a vice.

“General, you cannot know me, I have never seen you.”

“It is a Russian spy,” Davoust interrupted, addressing another general in the

room, whom Pierre had not noticed. And Davoust turned away. With an unexpected

thrill in his voice, Pierre began speaking with sudden rapidity.

“Non, monseigneur,” he said, suddenly recalling that Davoust was a

duke, “you could not know me. I am a militia officer, and I have not quitted

Moscow.”

“Your name?” repeated Davoust.

“Bezuhov.”

“What proof is there that you are not lying?”

“Monseigneur!” cried Pierre in a voice not of offence but of

supplication.

Davoust lifted his eyes and looked intently at Pierre. For several seconds

they looked at one another, and that look saved Pierre. In that glance, apart

from all circumstances of warfare and of judgment, human relations arose between

these two men. Both of them in that one instant were vaguely aware of an immense

number of different things, and knew that they were both children of humanity,

that they were brothers.

At the first glance when Davoust raised his head from his memorandum, where

men's lives and doings were marked off by numbers, Pierre was only a

circumstance, and Davoust could have shot him with no sense of an evil deed on

his conscience; but now he saw in him a man. He pondered an instant.

“How will you prove to me the truth of what you say?” said Davoust

coldly.

Pierre thought of Ramballe, and mentioned his name and regiment and the

street and house where he could be found.

“You are not what you say,” Davoust said again.

In a trembling, breaking voice, Pierre began to bring forward proofs of the

truth of his testimony.

But at that moment an adjutant came in and said something to Davoust.

Davoust beamed at the news the adjutant brought him, and began buttoning up

his uniform. Apparently he had completely forgotten about Pierre. When an

adjutant reminded him of the prisoner, he nodded in Pierre's direction with a

frown, and told them to take him away. But where were they to take him—Pierre

did not know: whether back to the shed or the place prepared for their execution

which his companions had pointed out to him as they passed through the Virgin's

Meadow.

He turned his head and saw that the adjutant was repeating some

question.

“Yes, of course!” said Davoust. But what that “yes” meant, Pierre could not

tell.

Pierre did not remember how or where he went, and how long he was going. In a

condition of complete stupefaction and bewilderment, seeing nothing around him,

he moved his legs in company with the others till they all stopped, and he

stopped.

There was one idea all this time in Pierre's head. It was the question: Who,

who was it really that was condemning him to death? It was not the men who had

questioned him at the first examination; of them not one would or obviously

could do so. It was not Davoust, who had looked at him in such a human fashion.

In another minute Davoust would have understood that they were doing wrong, but

the adjutant who had come in at that moment had prevented it. And that adjutant

had obviously had no evil intent, but he might have stayed away. Who was it,

after all, who was punishing him, killing him, taking his life—his, Pierre's,

with all his memories, his strivings, his hopes, and his ideas? Who was doing

it? And Pierre felt that it was no one's doing. It was discipline, and the

concatenation of circumstances. Some sort of discipline was killing him, Pierre,

robbing him of life, of all, annihilating him.